Loida Maritza Pérez's Geographies of Home is a complicated, sometimes abrupt, novel that deals with the psychological, physical, and spiritual traumas seemingly inherent to the Caribbean immigrant experience in the United States. The work affords a glimpse into the lives of a Dominican family of mixed race living in New York City. The family, as immigrants, must deal with poverty and discrimination within their new environment, but the novel's main focus is the nuclear family and how family dynamics shift and break when faced not only with the onslaught of a new culture, but also with the legacy of the old. Marina, the next-to-youngest daughter, is mad, perhaps because of latent schizophrenia, perhaps because of her recent rape. Most critics believe Marina's madness is caused by her uncertainty about her gender, race, or place in society and read her as a cypher for how immigrants can or cannot deal with such issues. I argue, however, that to fully understand the implications of Marina's madness, one must see her as a paradoxical embodiment of Trujillo's regime, displaced yet not quite disenfranchised on American soil. Marina is not just a victim of diaspora, machismo, or class; her madness, instead, questions archetypal iterations of Latino/a identity even as it reinforces national and transnational stereotypes. A close reading of Marina's madness therefore adds to the larger conversation surrounding what it means to be Latino/a, reconfiguring not just ideas of race or displacement, but hyphenation itself.

The question of hyphenation in Latino/a communities is not a new concept and is particularly important when discussing Dominican culture. José Itzigsohn and Carlos Dore-Cabral examine this in “The Manifold Character of Panethnicity,” which highlights the idea that Latinos, and specifically Dominican Latinos, are both multiethnic and multiracial.Footnote ¹ Members of this community are thus ruled by myriad hyphens, for they can define themselves by any combination of multiple words: Dominican, American, African, Latino/a, Spanish. Identity therefore depends on which heritage one wants to embrace and which side of the hyphen one wants to emphasize more. This idea of hyphenation is further compounded by what Gustavo Pérez Firmat notices in Life on the Hyphen – those who are part of the one-and-a-half generation, who grow up in both the Caribbean and the United States, are “sufficiently immersed in each culture to give both ends of the hyphen their due.”Footnote ² Pérez Firmat sees this as mostly positive, as he notes, “While one-and-a-halfers may never feel entirely at ease in either one, they are capable of availing themselves of the resources – linguistic, artistic, commercial – that both cultures have to offer.”Footnote ³

These views of hyphenation, which take into account the multiplicity of Latino/a identity on several levels, also reveal a tendency to idealize such groups. Because of this idealization, Dominican-Americans with African blood will have to deal with racial issues; those of the one-and-a-half generation will never fit into society the way first- or second-generation immigrants can, yet they will also be able to take advantage of multiple cultural traditions. These labels, because they are labels, allow popular culture and literature to transform the hyphen into a trope. An immigrant, because she is hyphenated, has to ask questions about identity in a certain way, depending on how her hyphenation is presented within a text. Like the Middle Child or the Prodigal Son, the Latino becomes a universally recognized character, with requisite sub-tropes belonging to each country of origin. Juan Flores, in “Nueva York, Diaspora City,” encounters this issue when he mentions the idea of “consumer ethnicities,” wherein “tidy, nationally constricted views of cultural identity” permeate popular conceptions of what it means to be Latino/a.Footnote ⁴ By defining the trend to understand Latino/a multiplicity in such a way, Flores highlights the cultural need to simplify. One flattens in order to understand, making archetypes and stereotypes out of complicated identities.

Geographies of Home, as a text that focusses on the lives of multiple generations of a Dominican-American family, gives readers an intriguing entry point into reassessing how one encounters the archetypes and stereotypes seemingly inherent in hyphenated realities. The text presents its story through the perspective of its female characters, mirroring many other Latina novels, yet these characters, in their abundance and difference, allow the reader to see the wide variety of options open to the immigrant Latina in the United States. This richness of characters and Pérez's emphasis on distinguishing mothers and daughters from each other in oppositional ways makes the novel especially illustrative of how contemporary narratives present hyphenation as a social as well as a personal construct. As Pérez herself has stated in an interview included in the Penguin Readers Guide to her novel, “There is no ‘typical experience’ either for Dominicans living in this country or for those remaining in the Dominican Republic, just as there is none for Americans who have lived in the United States since their ancestors arrived on the Mayflower.”Footnote ⁵ Pérez, by trying to present stories unique to each individual's experience, by giving the novel multiple narrative voices, each with its own authority and perspective, invites the reader to question what a social construct really is. She creates a text that encourages a conscious reevaluation of how we create, use, and abuse the cultural tropes that make up hyphenation and Latino/a identity.

The hyphen as a trope – hyphenation as archetype – affects the way many critics perceive Geographies of Home. Reactions to Pérez's novel have been mostly positive, though some critics note a lack of sophistication in her prose. Jim Hannan, in his review of the book, believes it is worth reading because of its discussion of displacement, but does not believe it well written.Footnote ⁶ Others, however, including Mónica G. Ayuso, call for the canonization of the text.Footnote ⁷ Aside from aesthetic criticisms, most critics focus on the novel's considerations of family, identity, religion, and spirituality. Lyn Di Iorio Sandín, in Killing Spanish, discusses the use of magical realism and the uncanny in Pérez's work,Footnote ⁸ while Dolores Alcaide Ramírez, in “I'm Hispanic, Not Black,” looks at how race, culture, and gender influence the identities of several of the protagonists.Footnote ⁹ These readings of the novel are important and intriguing, but focus mainly on issues central to any archetypal Latino/a text.

When critics focus their discussions on Marina (which does not often happen), they tend to consider how she represents the internal struggles typical of a hyphenated Dominican woman. Alcaide Ramírez concludes that Marina's insanity is a representation of the violence inherent in the colonization of the Caribbean and the racism and violation of women that occurred during this period.Footnote ¹⁰ Most other reactions to Marina focus on her self-hatred, especially her negation of her African heritage. In “Subversive Sexualities,” Myriam J. A. Chancy notes Pérez's use of both sexual and racial tensions as the foundations for her characters' internal struggles.Footnote ¹¹ Jill Toliver Richardson, in “Migratory Experience in Loida Maritza Pérez's Geographies of Home,” believes Marina's schizophrenia occurs because she cannot fit into an American society that does not accept her black skin or relative poverty, yet she does not have enough of a true connection to the Dominican Republic to find solace there, either.Footnote ¹² These readings also discuss how Pérez presents Marina as an exemplar of the immigrant woman; as Richardson remarks, she “fails at navigating the American landscape” and is “confined by Dominican gender expectations.”Footnote ¹³

Such interpretations present Marina as a mostly symbolic character, flattened by her adherence to specific tropes of immigration, femininity, and hyphenation. Yet, by focussing more closely on Marina's madness and its causes and symptoms, one can come to a greater understanding of Latino/a identity not just as the incarnation of a hyphenated archetype or stereotype, but instead as a more fluid, paradoxical existence dependent on the individual's reaction to the world around her. Marina's conception of self is defined by her hyphenated experiences, but her life cannot be completely reduced by that hyphenation to one particular trope or another. Her character, then, stands in contrast to easy categorization. In order to fully understand how this works within Geographies of Home, one must not forget the impact the Dominican Republic's legacy of political violence has in Pérez's novel. From 1930 to 1961, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, known as El Jefe or simply Trujillo, ruled the Dominican Republic with an iron fist. The cultural trauma of Trujillo's regime, specifically in how it affects Marina, calls into question how cultural archetypes and stereotypes play out over the course of the text. I am not arguing that Marina has no symbolic significance – instead, I argue that the way she internalizes Trujillo's reign of terror complicates and calls into question the tropes one wants to see and expects to see from this kind of character.

To begin a discussion of Marina from this perspective, one must first consider where and when Marina's madness began to grow. Most of her family believe its inception is a recent event, brought on by her rape or a breakdown. Iliana ponders this when first faced with her sister's behavior. She thinks, “Her sister's madness had not been diagnosed as schizophrenic. At least not definitely. Her doctors had mentioned it only as a possibility, which meant that Marina might instead have suffered, simply, a nervous breakdown.”Footnote ¹⁴ Marina has seen a doctor; her madness has been scrutinized by “science,” yet logic cannot pin down the cause of her insanity. She is unknowable, or, at least right now, beyond categorization. Iliana, however, does not see Marina as a confused woman in need of help. Iliana's reference to a “simple” nervous breakdown reveals her disdain for such a thing. She cannot have sympathy for someone who has simply given up. Pérez continues, “This possibility made Iliana angry. It meant that her sister had allowed herself to collapse under life's weight.”Footnote ¹⁵ Iliana recognizes that life is hard, but espouses her own way of dealing with the pain – endure, “brace for whatever [comes] and [make] the best of it.”Footnote ¹⁶ Iliana's vision of Marina's madness places the blame squarely on Marina, on her inability to withstand what life has thrown at her. It implies a sudden breaking point – one day she just finally snapped. This reading of Marina, seen through Iliana's eyes, reduces Marina to an archetype: the immigrant who could not learn to live in her new world.

If one looks deeper into Marina's history, however, one can see signs of her madness developing not recently, but in the far past, during her days in the Dominican Republic. In her reading of the text, Richardson notes, “For the female family members, the domestic space of the house holds the comforts of their homeland while perpetuating the sexism and constraints placed on women in the Dominican Republic.”Footnote ¹⁷ Richardson's reading highlights a connection between the past and enforced gender roles – the domestic space, usually a feminine domain, is also where one can relive or repeat the past. Yet this past, as Richardson notes, does not always bring comfort. Marina reacts to the constraints the past places on all the women in the text, her weight a direct reaction to issues that began in the Dominican Republic. Towards the middle of the novel, when she sits down to eat breakfast, she eats half a box of cereal drowning in milk, spooning it in like a cow at the trough. The reader is told,

Marina's attack on the mangos and grapes reveals a need not only for sweetness, but also for a complete experience. She must devour everything, to the last morsel. Here, one can clearly see that Marina's search for something more, her need to fill the emptiness inside her, is a gradual process. The first stirrings of the need appeared in the Dominican Republic, were carried over to the United States, and as the years passed became more and more evident. In the Dominican Republic Marina left the skin and pit of the mango, while in the United States she leaves no evidence of the fruit's existence behind. She did not become this way overnight, but instead grew into her obsessions over the course of time, under a constant pressure she could not leave behind on her island home. Marina is therefore another woman haunted by the life she lived in the motherland, though her case is (literally) writ large.

One could therefore consider Marina's madness as just another recollection of the past. Like many other Latinas, especially those of the one-and-a-half generation, she appears to be defined by her early life in the Dominican Republic, a role that places her at odds with how Iliana sees her. In her fits of vulgarity and senselessness, Marina reenacts moments from her life in the island. At one point in the novel,

Chancy believes that this scene depicts Marina imagining what Judith Butler calls the “lesbian phallus,” Footnote ²⁰ though I think the act is simpler than that. This scene recalls a memory that Aurelia, Marina's mother, later relates to the reader. When Aurelia immigrated to the United States, she had to leave several of her children behind, including Marina. When the children finally arrived in the US they were plagued with hunger and parasites. Aurelia “remembered the parasites which had grown snake-size in their intestines to later wriggle free as each child strained to defecate.”Footnote ²¹ Marina's pantomime is thus a reenactment of her childhood worms, a silent reminder of what she and her siblings endured while abandoned in their homeland.

Here, Marina cannot explain her pain to her mother in words – her family would not tolerate the remembrance of the event. Marina can only present the memory and its accompanying emotion to her family by reenacting the moment in a fit of madness. Otherwise it would remain unspoken, lost to the recesses of Marina's mind and Aurelia's guilty conscience. This reenactment reveals the true underpinnings of Marina's state. Her madness goes hand in hand with her youth in the Dominican Republic and has ties to her own personal history there. Yet the act is also a condemnation of her mother and, by extension, the motherland; it is a reflection and a rejection of the political and cultural history of the time. This legacy, subsequently brought to the United States just as Marina's own voracious hunger was carried over, complicates Marina's role as a symbolic, one-dimensional cypher. Marina is caught by both the present and the past; she is a hyphenated character, but one who does not fall into the accustomed roles ascribed to most Latinas in her position.

One must consider Dominican history, then, if one is to understand Marina's actions and the madness she faces. Trujillo's influence on his people, at least in a psychological sense, comes ultimately from his use of terror to control his country. Andrés L. Mateo writes in Mito y cultura en la era de Trujillo that the tyrant's power stemmed from a ubiquitous violence that became mythological in scope.Footnote ²² Countless stories of obscure and horrific tortures and complicated assassination plots fill the histories of Trujillo's thirty-one years in government. One of Trujillo's most effective terrorizing tactics involved observation and spying. No one was safe from his heavy-handed justice because his gaze was everywhere. As Howard Wiarda outlines in Dictatorship and Development, “a vigilant and unremitting surveillance was maintained over every aspect of Dominican existence.”Footnote ²³ Trujillo knew everything – you could speak to no one because everyone was a spy or there were hidden microphones in the walls.Footnote ²⁴ Trujillo's regime, like the plot of a detective novel, took incredible, unbelievable acts of espionage and made them everyday occurrences.

Marina's own fear of surveillance is integral to understanding her place in the text, especially in light of Trujillo's use of espionage throughout her homeland. At first glance, this fear of being watched reduces Marina to little more than a paranoid madwoman, someone who never truly left the island. Throughout the novel, Marina fears something coming out at her from the dark. She knows something or someone is always watching her, waiting for her to speak the wrong word or do the wrong thing. Whenever Marina tries to flee her family or goes against her father's rules, other characters – people on a train, bystanders, pedestrians – watch her. She can feel their eyes following her, eyes that are always foreign: someone from outside the family, not a Dominican. The specter of her rapist appears after she sets fire to her parents' kitchen. A black man watches her as she leaves her house to wander the streets of New York. Several commuters on an elevated train eye her as she rides throughout the city. Their gazes cow her; they frighten her into fleeing back to her family once again. Pérez writes, “Her humiliation was complete. The knowledge gathered from the eyes of others had carved a path into her brain to become a part of her very being.”Footnote ²⁵ These eyes know; they can see beyond her appearance and bore into the depths of her consciousness. She can hide nothing from the eyes, from gazes that reach into her very being. She is violated not simply by her rape, the more evident impetus of her terror, but also by the judgment that the eyes imply.

At one point in the novel, even Marina's family become spies. After her suicide attempt, Marina returns home from the hospital drugged and unsure of where she is. She does not appear to know the people who surround her:

These individuals are not her family because of the hostility in their eyes – they judge her through their gazes and thus set themselves apart, outside her recollections of home and the family unit. The judging eyes confine her, try to break her will and force her to see the world in a different way. This brainwashing, from her point of view, is the ultimate goal of such hostile eyes.

The condemnation that these eyes foist onto Marina mirror forms of oppression that the family, and most Dominicans, have brought with them from their homeland. Marina, as Richardson reminds us, is supposed to follow the rules and remain true to her typical gender role, as laid down by patriarchy, Church, and state.Footnote ²⁷ Yet, by admitting she was raped, by eating too much, by trying to commit suicide, Marina eschews the gender roles she lauds earlier in the novel. And the eyes that watch her, the gazes that see her as Other, notice these lapses. The surveillance she endures reinforces her madness; as Alcaide Ramírez, notes, “whichever woman takes herself from the role forced on her by the patriarchal society will be categorized as ‘mad’ and institutionalized in a madhouse.”Footnote ²⁸ By taking herself out of the patriarchy, Marina opens herself up to categorization, her madness not an illness but a label. This reading of Marina allows one to see her as a victim, not only of her fragile mental state, but also of society – and even of the state itself. These watchful figures, like the spies employed by Trujillo, observe, condemn, and imprison, terrorizing Marina in a manner that leaves her no safer or more secure than if she had remained in the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo era. If the book were to stop with this, Marina would be a clear, if a bit simplistic, representation of a certain kind of immigrant who cannot escape the past. She would be reduced to an archetype, a creature stuck on one side of the hyphen.

The most powerful specter that haunts Marina, however, the one that physically lays hands on her and forcefully enacts her rape over and over, complicates this one-dimensional view. This figure appears to the reader for the first time in the second chapter, soon after Marina has set fire to her parents' kitchen: “Marina immediately made him out: a tall, lean figure absorbing the room's darkness so that he appeared only as a blacker silhouette standing still beside her bed … Now there it stood: the embodiment of her worst fears.”Footnote ²⁹ A representation of fear, the figure watches Marina from her bedside, an accuser and attacker who has crossed the borders from the outside world into the insular and familiar, into Marina's own room. As a ghost (or a memory, real or imagined), the figure epitomizes a revived personal past that haunts Marina wherever she goes. As a black man, the figure invokes a cultural past in which the Trujillo government has set up an antithesis to Dominican culture – the Haitian.

For Trujillo, the Haitian and Haiti represented everything he wished to erase from his own country. According to Mateo, the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic was more than just a line in the soil – it was also a line that divided race, class, ideology, and even the spirit of the people.Footnote ³⁰ Chancy sees this aspect of the Trujillo regime as central to Pérez's novel, noting that the author “purposefully” includes references to Trujillo in order reveal that “the subtext of the family's dysfunction is a discomfort with admitting its mixed racial heritage.”Footnote ³¹ This hatred of the black/Haitian Other is very evident in Marina's reaction to the man who raped her. Though her rape gives Marina a different view of herself – one that, as many critics note, allows her to see her own African heritage for the first time – it does not make her accept that heritage in any way. This reaction makes Marina at least two-dimensional and complicates her role as an easy-to-understand symbol; she is now a victim of Trujillo's surveillance and a perpetrator of his racial stereotypes. Her hyphenated existence is thus complicated by paradox – she is not a simplified character that allows us to understand certain events or cultural phenomena; instead, her madness, driven by her Dominican past, reveals the sometimes nefarious multiplicity inherent in a life on the hyphen.

One can see this in Marina's response to her constant remembrance of her rape. She tells herself, as she relives her attack in the form of the dark figure in her basement, “No flat-nosed, wide-lipped nigger would claim her soul. No savage with beads dangling from his neck. She would survive all this. There was nothing else to lose. Nothing else to fear.”Footnote ³² The features she condemns when she rejects her fear of the black man are the same features – “her sprawling nose, her wide, long lips” – she finally recognizes on her own face a page later.Footnote ³³ Her defiance of her rape and her subsequent hauntings, her insistence on survival in the face of racial and cultural intermingling, complicate her seeming acceptance, or at least acknowledgment, of her racial heritage. Is she, as Richardson believes, finally able to see her own features “clearly?”Footnote ³⁴ Is she, instead, plagued by the ambiguity that Alcaide Ramírez sees in this scene, wherein Marina is neither black nor white, both a racist and an Other?Footnote ³⁵ Or is this not a recognition of self, but instead a vicious circle that constantly repeats, trapping Marina in a self-replicating web of defiance, fear, and loathing? Whatever the outcome, this specter, a legacy of Trujillo's Dominican Republic, forces Marina to re-create several versions of the past, haunted not just by her rape, but by the historical and cultural implications of what or who raped her. The combination of these forces reveals a more complex and nuanced definition of hyphenation, affected not only by how one views a character, but also by how that character views herself.

Marina's madness, then, is both a reaction to and a reiteration of Trujillo's legacy of distrust and hatred. In one sense, she is the victim of Trujillo-like violence and surveillance, the embodiment of a subordinated, terrorized society. The terror she feels places her outside the regime – if she is the victim of surveillance, she must be a subversive; if she feels guilty or afraid, then she must have something to hide. Her reactions to the scrutiny, however, her need to survive all this by scraping clean the marks of the black man on her body, reaffirm Trujillo maxims. Like the Dominican people during the Trujillo era, she is trapped between a fear of being watched, caught, and punished, and an acceptance of the teachings that stem from the ruling class. And by embodying such paradoxes, she becomes a much more complicated, multidimensional character, a character who calls into question easy definitions of what it means to be Latino/a and the tropes created for and by hyphenated characters.

There is, however, another side to Marina's interaction with her constant surveillance. When one first meets Marina in the flesh, at the beginning of the second chapter, she presents herself as the last bulwark against an encroaching menace, a menace no one else seems to notice. The reader is told,

Marina, in this selection, is the heroine of her own detective story. Her senses are trained; she is vigilant and aware of her surroundings, unlike her parents, who have failed in their roles as protectors. The threats she encounters, the bugs in the walls, are no match for her watchfulness, for her calculated surveillance of the house. Now, she is the one who will save the family, the only one who can control the situation. Marina is, here, the author of espionage, the enactor of violence instead of the victim of such acts – she sets fire to the kitchen in order to divest the house of the spiders she hears crawling the walls.

Later, she also wishes to exterminate those who dare to spy on her. When confronted with a child who looks at her over a mother's shoulder, Marina reacts violently. Pérez writes,

Here, Marina does not even acknowledge the subjectivity of the child. It is an it, not a boy or girl: a thing. Though it has innocence, this trait is not a saving grace or a freedom from sin, but a symbol of what Marina does not have. Instead of pining for her lost purity, Marina wants to strip the child of its own. Marina's uncontrolled need to take some kind of revenge on her environment, to have some kind of power over her tormentors, stems from the helplessness of her situation. She feels the need to repay violence with violence, surveillance with surveillance, because there is no other way for her to react. All she knows are these two things – her only role models (her mother, her father, Trujillo's government) allow no other response. Marina, then, by way of her own violent acts, tries to evade the legacy of Trujillo's domination by using his own tactics against her tormentors. This adds another layer to her already multidimensional characterization – her form of hyphenation is not just a balancing act between old and new, Dominican and American; she also must also come to terms with how she repurposes and reuses pieces of her past.

Marina cannot, however, fully overcome her subjugation through her recycling of Trujillo's tactics. She is instead left caught in the middle, trapped between two ways of living, both a victim and a tormentor, a rebel and an apologist. She cannot even express her hopelessness or her violent urges to any of her family members – opening herself to another would only lead to more oppression. As Wiarda states, in Trujillo's Dominican Republic one could not discuss anything with anyone, especially neighbors who might say something inappropriate about the regime. The one who listened to such remarks was just as guilty as the one who spoke them.Footnote ³⁸ Thus to speak of pain, to try and relate one's suffering to anyone else, even to family, was to invite further suffering. In fact, Trujillo maintained that the recognition of the past was not an option. Mateo remarks, “In the semiological system of Trujillo-ism, ‘The Peace’ is constructed by a sort of ubiquity … deny the past.”Footnote ³⁹ If Marina were to recount her rape to her mother or express her anger to her father, she would break the peace, violate the order so carefully constructed by Trujillo and maintained unknowingly by her parents.

Since she cannot speak her pain out loud, Marina tries to express her emotional turmoil through other means. Her first drastic attempt at calling attention to her plight leads her to lash out at herself, to attempt suicide. This deed runs counter to Marina's victimization – it instead gives her a fleeting taste of her own personal power and, for a moment, a way out of the trap of a Dominican past. Marina's decision to commit suicide stems from her rejection of her violent ways. Her need to kill the child who stares at her shocks her into a reconsideration of her own sanity. Pérez writes, “That God was also requiring blood from her filled her with righteous indignation. She suspected that, were she to obey, she would succumb to madness and possibly hurt a loved one as Cain had inadvertently slain his brother Abel.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Her decision to kill herself reflects a need to break away from an inheritance of violence, even if it means violence against herself. She wants to stop hurting (in every sense of the word) and the only way she sees to do this is by eliminating herself from the situation.

This decision gives her a type of agency – instead of playing the victim who dies at the hands of the jailor, she will take her life into her own hands. Yet the failure of her suicide also tells the reader that running from violence is not an option. Marina cannot leave her life peacefully and is, in the end, returned once more to her torment – she is not committed to a mental institution, away from her family, but is instead brought back to the house, to the same room where she ingested so many pills. As Richardson remarks, “By the novel's end, there is still no glimmer of hope for Marina … Marina remains stagnant having succumbed to her unstable mental state and not having reclaimed the missing pieces of her past needed to forge a more complete identity and exercise agency in her life.”Footnote ⁴¹ Marina simply keeps returning to her beginnings, be they the Dominican Republic, her home, or her own self-loathing. This vicious circle of constant return, one that never moves forward or spirals outward, but instead remains constantly trapped by Marina's paradoxical relationship with her past, creates a character too volatile to be constrained by archetypal iterations of hyphenation.

Marina's second attempt to relate her plight to others, her rape of Iliana, reflects the lessons she has learned from her attempted suicide and reveals the disturbing outcome of a life haunted by her brand of hyphenation. She cannot run from violence, so she must instead employ it to her own ends. Because Marina rapes her sister, steals her virginity, and breaches her trust, the madwoman, on one level, perpetuates Trujillo's brand of violence and domination. Pérez presents the entire rape scene through Iliana's eyes, forcing the reader, and Iliana, into the role of the victim. The reader never gets to witness Marina's version of the rape, the convoluted rationale behind the violence one sees in all her other scenes. Before this point, readers have read Marina's side of the story, shared in her pain and suffering – but now that she has actually enacted violence upon her own people, her own family, readers can no longer empathize with her victimization. By trying to share her horror, Marina has made herself into the specter she has tried to avoid throughout the narrative. She even shares several of the black man's traits as she violates Iliana: “it was as if Marina had merged with the darkness.”Footnote ⁴² Like the ghost who once stood by her bed, she blends into the evil around her. This transformation, from victim to violator, places Marina, for a moment, outside her narrow, proscribed societal role. Iliana, and not Marina, is now the woman no one can look at, who cannot relate her story to anyone else. Though this act, Marina reiterates the oscillation that defines her identity in the text, once again eschewing a simplified or archetypal characterization.

Yet Marina's violation of Iliana is, at the other extreme, a cry for help, a way to call attention to the oppression and subjugation Marina faces. During her outing with Iliana and Ed before the rape, Marina notices that her sister tries to subdue her behavior, to diminish the embarrassment it engenders. The scene reveals Marina's anxieties: “As Iliana spoke, she avoided facing [Marina] as if to will her to disappear. But Marina would do no such thing. Instead, she intended to reveal to others what her sister did not wish for them to see.”Footnote ⁴³ Although the secret to which Marina refers is overtly Iliana's (supposedly) ambiguous sexuality, it also implicitly refers to Marina herself and her own liminality. Iliana, by not looking at Marina, tries to avoid not only the revelation of her own secret, but also the acknowledgment of Marina's fate. Because these lines adhere to Marina's point of view, one may not believe her claim that Iliana is actually a hermaphrodite, but one can believe her frustration and dejection at her sister's avoidance. Iliana's rape is, at least on one level, a rebellion against rejection and avoidance. Marina needs to be seen, needs to act out against the forces that confine her, against her family's suppression of her madness and their failure to acknowledge her need for care. In this way, her violent act is, too, a revolt against Trujillo's legacy and a need for conformity, against the repression of the past and the negation of the violence done by his hand and through his name.

It is this vacillation in Marina, the combination of violence and subjugation, her rebellion against Trujillo's tactics and her continuation of them, which sets her apart from her sisters and her mother. The paradox within the composition of her personality allows her to represent the complexity of the Dominican experience under the pall of Trujillo's legacy better than any of the other women in the novel. Aurelia, Marina's mother, though she too suffers the effects of the Trujillo regime, represents a Dominican legacy that pre-dates the dictatorship. Her link with magical practices allows her a way to combat terror that does not involve reusing the terrorist's own tactics. She meets Trujillo's brand of violence with an alternate method, through spirituality and her own mother's legacy (though this, too, has been touched by Trujillo's negation of the past, for the true relics of Aurelia's family heritage are thrown away on the side of the road). Rebeca, Marina's older sister and the woman who helped bring the family over to the United States, also encounters Trujillo-like violence, perhaps to the most disturbing degree within the novel. Unlike Marina, however, she does not even think of rebelling. Each times she flees her abusive husband, she returns in the end, living out an unending cycle of coming and going. Her lack of response, her submission and acceptance of her fate, set her apart from Marina and from her mother and sister Iliana. Rebeca's lack of initiative, her need for the violence, set her up as a perpetual victim. She represents, then, a Dominican heritage that cannot come to terms with the past. What she has been through characterizes a specific immigrant experience, one in which the émigré cannot escape the past and does not have the will to even try. These Dominican-Americans embrace violence and suffering in order to remain close to the land they have left behind.

Iliana suffers as well, as shown earlier, but she does not react to the violence in the same way as Marina. She leaves the family, the first daughter to do so outside the bonds of matrimony. Her connection with a wider world allows her some leeway in her answer to her violation. Instead of fighting back, Iliana first tries to forget Marina's attack, suppressing the emotions and even the memory of the incident itself. As she tells herself, “In order to stay sane she needed to proceed as if nothing significant had occurred.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Her first reaction is that of the majority of Dominicans (and Dominican-Americans) when faced with Trujillo's brand of violence – to stay quiet, to remain unobtrusive and unnoticed. This type of reaction perpetuates the violence, however, allowing it to continue. In the novel, because Iliana returns to her bed, to the same room in which she has been attacked, she is attacked once more. Her reaction to this second violation separates her even further from Marina's own response to rape – she runs upstairs, away from her family, and finally leaves the house in order to find her friend Ed.

This flight, this exodus from home and the violence it engenders, allows Iliana to represent a different aspect of the Dominican immigrant psyche. Although she returns home again in order to say goodbye and put her own thoughts in order, she knows she will never be able to remain in a place where she has been so violated. Iliana therefore symbolizes, in the end, the Dominican immigrants who are able to come to grips with Trujillo's legacy by immersing themselves in a new world, by allowing the United States and all it offers to have a dominant role in their lives. Thus Iliana represents an internalization of the past, not a confrontation with it – this reaction gives both her Dominican heritage (including all the violence it entails) and her North American future equal weight in her new life.

One can conclude, therefore, that Marina, within Geographies of Home, presents the complex and paradoxical situation of the Dominican immigrant in its most self-perpetuating form. Her presence within the novel complicates more optimistic, or at least less violent, presentations of the Latino/a experience. As Fatima Mujcinovik notes in her article “Multiple Articulations of Exile in US Latina Literature,” “The threat of erasure experienced in political displacements begets a desire to recuperate the loss, to regain presence and visibility, and to reclaim the originary place.”Footnote ⁴⁵ While this statement can apply to Geographies, the originary place in this case is a violent, turbulent, horrific situation ruled by a messianic, terrifying dictator. It is, in fact, the birthplace of madness, the only reaction one can have to the vicious circle of reenactment and revulsion that Marina keeps replaying, over and over. This madness complicates the search to regain or at least (re)present the homeland.

Marina, within this context, provides Pérez's most complex picture of the immigrant's struggle with a legacy of violence and tyranny. Richardson claims that by the end of Geographies of Home, Marina is hopeless and “remains stagnant … not having reclaimed the missing pieces of her past needed to forge a more complete identity and exercise agency in her life.”Footnote ⁴⁶ This reading emphasizes a complete knowledge of the past as a force for good, a way to reclaim a rooted, holistic sense of place and identity. Yet I believe that because Marina does reclaim the violence inherent in her cultural past, because she remains both an aggressor and a victim throughout the text, she will never be able to find the agency she seeks. There will be no movement, forward or back. The past will not be able to help her – at least not her past. And though Marina remains stagnant at the end of the novel, her stagnancy is not the result of an incomplete identity. Because of the complexity of her situation, her paradoxical relationship with her past, her madness is her identity.

This calls into question how hyphenation works within both this text and Latino/a culture in general. The hyphenation Marina represents – not the Dominican-American kind, but the manic depressive or dominant–submissive kind – cancels itself out, leading to a distinct reorganization of self, defined by entropy. Marina is the embodiment of an isolated system trying to maintain a kind of thermodynamic equilibrium. She tries to sustain some sort of balance by matching the surroundings she finds herself in. This goes nowhere, however, because she is stuck within an isolated system (hyphenation), and her energy is wasted because it cannot move beyond paradox. Yet her entropy, the measure of her disorder, could provide a new way to look at what it means to be Latino/a, especially in terms of life on the hyphen. Marina's madness does not simply reflect the and/or both/neither dichotomies that hyphenation usually implies, nor does it embrace the tropes or archetypes usually associated with the hyphenated status. Instead, her condition asks one to consider hyphenation as multiplicity or paradox, not a trope; it is not one choice, but a multitude of ever-changing choices. This representation of Latino/a identity as madness does not negate other iterations of the idea. After all, it is better to look to the past, like Aurelia, or to the future, like Iliana, than to remain stuck in the present, repeating and reliving Trujillo's legacy, like Marina. Yet what Pérez presents in Geographies of Home reveals the infinite layers of meaning within the idea of Latino/a as an isolated system – as we know, entropy can only increase.