I. Tracing Trans-American Connections

In recent years, the field of American studies has been broadening its focus to include scholarship that explores the literary and cultural productions in the United States within a framework that transcends the nation-state as a category of analysis. As a means to better understand the cultural products of migrant and minority ethnic communities living in the US, scholars have turned towards comparative literary and cultural studies to establish links and commonalities among the often diverging sociocultural spheres that migrant and so-called “ethnic” artists portray in their works. Trans-American or inter-American studies have emerged in this context as a valuable framework for the examination of Latino/a cultural productions in the Americas. Adopting a transnational comparative optic, this paradigm seeks to unearth connections between North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, thus contributing to the establishment of unrealized conversations among cultural productions in the Americas.

For Edna Acosta-Belén, in a moment in which “more rapidly than ever before, the Latino/a worlds of the North and the South are transcending spurious geographic, cultural, and linguistic borders,” it is of the utmost importance to transgress those “artificial boundaries that traditionally have separated the study of Latin America and Caribbean regions from their counterpart (im)migrant populations in the United States.”Footnote ¹ Along the same lines, Agustín Laó-Montes argues that, in order to fully understand Latino/a cultural productions and identities in the Americas, it is necessary to adopt a “transcultural, transnational and translocal”Footnote ² perspective to account for the multiplicity of locations where “latinidad” is produced.Footnote ³ As he puts it,

Drawing from this understanding of the history and cultures of the Americas as inextricably linked in myriad ways, this paper develops a comparative analysis of the works of two Dominican American authors, Josefina Báez and Sherezada Vicioso, who illustrate diasporic experiences from two differing but necessarily interconnected locales: New York and the Dominican Republic.

The theatrical works of Josefina Báez, a Dominican American performer living in New York, and Sherezada (Chiqui) Vicioso, a Dominican poet and playwright who lived and worked in the city for decades before moving back to the Dominican Republic, lyrically explore issues of diaspora, identity and migration in the lives of migrant Dominican women. Offering two complementary views on the ways in which ethnicity, race, social class, age and geopolitical location interact in the formation of transcultural identities, a critical comparison of Báez's Dominicanish and Vicioso's Nuyor/Islas thus contributes to the development of a hemispheric approach to the study of identity formation in the Americas.Footnote ⁵ By comparing these works, this article seeks to highlight the inextricable relationship that links the Caribbean with its diaspora communities, arguing for a transcultural understanding of the analysis of diasporic subjectivities and cultural productions.

II. Ciguapas in New York

As the excerpt above illustrates, in her poem “A 123 Portrait of a Legend,” Dominican American poet and performer Josefina Báez successfully captures in just a few lines the various ways in which the subjectivities of transnational migrants change in the process of adapting to different sociocultural environments. In Báez's poem, the story of the mythical Ciguapa is not different to that of many other Dominican migrants who move to New York City in search of a better life. In the process of adapting to the hectic urban life, Ciguapa undergoes a sociocultural metamorphosis that involves a radical change not only in her looks but also in the nature of her divinity. No longer a goddess, and pulled by what the narrative voice identifies as an inescapable assimilation force, her feet take human form, signaling the beginning of a steady transformation into a transcultural subject.Footnote ⁷

For Ciguapa, this process implies gradually losing some of her most distinctive features, especially those that distinguish her from human beings. In Dominican folklore, Ciguapas are described as having female human form with very long hair covering their brown (or blue) naked bodies, and they look like women except for their backward feet, whose footprints they use to disorient potential stalkers.Footnote ⁸ These fierce women are believed to live in the mountains of Hispaniola, and their legend is somehow reminiscent of that of Greek sirens in that they utter a penetrating call to attract unwary travellers.Footnote ⁹ Even though the origins of this myth are uncertain, it is important to note that, in popular culture, they have been attributed to the indigenous Taino cosmogony and their presence in oral and written literary traditions usually points to a precapitalist legendary past.Footnote ¹⁰

Báez's poem is not, however, a nostalgic look at a mythical past but rather a critical examination of a discouraging present in which Ciguapas and the world they represent can no longer exist. In “A 123 Portrait of Legend,” the Ciguapa at the beginning of the poem is a postcolonial subject who is forced to migrate to the metropolis and confront the harsh realities of a globalized world. Therefore the change of direction in her feet from backward to forward can be interpreted as a break with the past both on a personal as well as a collective level. If for her this turn represents the beginning of her life as a transnational migrant who looks towards the future, the seeming humanization of her anatomy is, paradoxically at the same time, a critical look at a dehumanized postindustrial world system that is forcing millions of Caribbean peoples to abandon their traditional ways of living and systems of beliefs in the name of progress.

This painful metamorphosis is perhaps more clearly exposed by the fact that the only thing that Ciguapa keeps from her earlier life in the mountains of the Dominican Republic is her characteristic cry. However, in New York, her penetrating call is also transformed, and she utters it not to attract men, as the legend goes, but to express her feelings of alienation and despair:

The creative adaptation of her bawl points again to a process of transculturation, which, in this case, brings to light the suffering she experiences in her daily life as a factory worker “earning less than the minimum.”Footnote ¹² Even though there is little room for celebration in the poem, and the image it portrays is not very optimistic, the last line of the quote above seems to suggest that there is also hope and expectation in migrants’ lives. This mixed sensation that is characteristic of experiences of displacement is one of the topics that both Josefina Báez and Sherezada Vicioso explore in depth in their theatrical works. Taking on stage the struggles of female characters as they come to terms with their dislocated sense of identity, Vicioso's Nuyor/Islas and Báez's Dominicanish offer a thorough insight into the transculturation processes that affect migrant subjects. As contemporary Ciguapas, the narrative voices in these plays strive to adjust to their new realities adopting elements from the various sociocultural systems that coexist in New York City.

On the one hand, in Dominicanish, Báez creatively fuses and mixes a wide variety of cultural forms to craft a performance text in which she gives form to her particular understanding of what it means growing up Dominican in New York. Based on her own experiences, she freely combines her own poems with popular-culture slogans, song lyrics, allusions to Hindu philosophy and many other references to the multiethnic cultures of New York City, creating a collage through which an autobiographical narrative voice chronicles the steady development of a transcultural identity. As Claudio Mir explains in the foreword to the printed edition of Dominicanish, the play is “Josefina's journey through the past and future. The beginning of her formative years, her long trips to India through Washington Heights and La Romana. It is the fragments of a story of a little migrant girl, a dancerwriteractressyogateaching-artistwoman who writes everyday.”Footnote ¹³ Therefore, from the first pages in which the voice of a twelve-year-old recently arrived migrant verbalizes her struggle with learning English, to the final verses in which an adult narrator celebrates a transcultural ever-evolving subjectivity, cultural blends are articulated as powerful tools to resist homogenizing narratives.

Also in the form of a monologue but following a more traditional structure, Nuyor/Islas is Ramona's conversation with her past and present experiences as a returned Dominicanyork in the Dominican Republic. Her reflections will become an exploration of her progressive distancing from Dominican hegemonic discourses along with an increasing awareness of the transcultural subjectivity that her migrant experience has brought about.

If it is certainly true that the situations the characters in these plays undergo are somehow different due to disparity in age, class, race, and geographical location, the fact that they share the experience of living in the city of New York as Dominican migrants bonds them beyond physical and social borders. Their experiences in the metropolitan contact zone engender a transnational connection that speaks of the elusive nature of boundaries in the study of cultural productions in the Americas.

III. “Almost Dominican But Not Quite”: Transnational Diaspora Spaces

In order to fully understand how the city of New York becomes in the plays a transcultural diaspora space that enables the formation of transcultural Latino/a subjectivities,Footnote ¹⁴ it is important to take a look at the iconic role that the city plays in Caribbean imaginaries. In this regard, Miguel D. Mena states in his article “Y con ustedes, Josefina Báez, de La Romana al infinito” that in order to get to know the Dominican Republic “in its most intense borders,”Footnote ¹⁵ one must travel to the city of New York. This idea is also present in Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel's Caribe Two Ways: Cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico, in which she argues that, “given the intensity and continuity of migrations between the Caribbean and New York, it is not surprising that [many] have identified this city as one more island in the Caribbean archipelago.”Footnote ¹⁶ In her view, the city represents “a geographic, economic and symbolic extension of the Hispanic Caribbean that reconfigures classic definitions of insular experience in order to incorporate it to an alternative cartography delimited by culture and its displacements”;Footnote ¹⁷ consequently the Big Apple can be seen as one more Caribbean island where “a transnational and multiethnic culture is constituted.”Footnote ¹⁸ For Martínez-San Miguel, these transcultural groups establish “a problematic dialog with both US multicultural discourses and celebratory definitions of Caribbeanness,”Footnote ¹⁹ questioning the validity of the overarching assumptions in those ideological frameworks. From this perspective, the city itself becomes an enormous transcultural enclave in which Caribbean and North American national discourses are being redefined and articulated.

The city of New York, as the second-largest city in Dominican population after Santo Domingo, and the Dominicanyork community in particular, have become a benchmark in the definition of Dominicanness through the establishment of an intense transnational sociocultural system that undermines traditional ethnic and national frontiers. In the opinion of Torres-Saillant, the migratory experience of Dominicans from the 1960s has enabled the creation of an alternative epistemic and cultural community which, distanced from the dominant ontological discourses on Dominicanness, challenges traditional notions of nationalism, territoriality, and ethnicity.Footnote ²⁰ Arguing in a similar vein, Néstor Rodríguez affirms that Dominican diaspora populations have come to understand Dominicanness as contingency, conceptualizing ethnic identity as a dynamic condition determined by the geopolitical space in which it is articulated rather than as an ethnodemographic reality.Footnote ²¹

This idea of ethnicity as geopolitically motivated is clearly exposed in the chosen settings for Báez's and Vicioso's plays. The first one, shared by the protagonists in both plays, is geographically located in the migrant neighborhoods of New York City. Besides, Nuyor/Islas incorporates the suburban areas of the cities in the Dominican Republic to which many Dominicanyorks return in retirement. Both locations are marked by intense transnational and transcultural contacts, and are not therefore traditional centers for hegemonic articulations of Dominican national identity, allowing for the creation of alternative definitions of Dominicanness.

In this context, the titles of the two plays can be interpreted as metaphorical names for spaces in which their transcultural identities come into play. On the one hand, in Nuyor/Islas, Vicioso situates the development of Ramona's migrant identity in the contact zones represented by the slash dividing the word in the title of the play, i.e. New York and the Caribbean Islands.Footnote ²² Ramona is thus articulating her transcultural identity from an interstitial location situated in between those geopolitical locales. In this sense, “Nuyor/Islas” is similar to other terms such as “Nuyorican” or “Dominicanyork,” which, for Norma Alarcon, offer a critical space to articulate divergences and convergences between the two components of the dyad. In her view, the hyphen or slash that frequently divides these terms implies “a conscious cultural and political intervention in which the territories on either side of the slash play a role of transformation on the subject posed on the slash itself.”Footnote ²³

In Báez's work, this issue is further complicated as she moves away from a dyadic model, seeking to de-essentialize any notion of a coherent ethnic identity by incorporating elements from multiple cultural backgrounds. “Dominicanish” is the coinage through which Báez is able to name her own subjectivity-in-process and the transnational enclave where the action of the play takes place. By appending the suffix -ish to the adjective “Dominican,” Báez is able to create a witty wordplay that combines the different meanings the suffix -ish conveys to nouns and adjectives in English. As the Online Oxford Dictionary explains, adjectives resulting from adding -ish to nouns indicate the origin or language of the community denoted by the noun, as is the case with English or Spanish. Thus the multiethnic neighborhoods of New York City are the place of origin of “Dominicanish” subjectivities.Footnote ²⁴ In this regard, it is also interesting to note that, since the resulting adjective also provides the meaning of “in a certain way, approximately,”Footnote ²⁵ as in greenish, or “having the qualities or characteristics of” (AskOxford), as in childish, being Dominicanish implies being – to misquote Homi K. Bhabha – “almost [Dominican] but not quite,”Footnote ²⁶ since her subjectivity is developed not in the Dominican Republic but in Washington Heights, New York's Dominican enclave par excellence.

From these two differing but interconnected geopolitical locales, the protagonists in Báez's and Vicioso's works experience the transformation Alarcon refers to, critically reexamining their ethnic identity. Furthermore, both texts’ reliance on the authors’ personal experiences also suggests that their art can be seen as the means to articulate the intersections of all their concerns as women and artists, so that, as Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez and Nancy Saporta-Sternbarch explain in relation to other Latina playwrights, their works illustrate “a poetics where politics of identity and representation intersect with the politics of location.”Footnote ²⁷ The creative outcome of this fusion results in a critical revision of the system of ethnicization and racialization in Dominican national identity that I explore in depth in the following section.

IV. Transcultural Ethnicity and Transracialization onStage

In their Stages of Life: Transcultural Performance and Identity in U. S. Latina Theater, Sandoval-Sánchez and Saporta-Sternbach argue that, in Latina theater and performance art, transculturation processes manifest themselves in various forms: as bilingualism, material culture (including the body), dramatic action, physical and geographical space, and discursive location. Even though these authors reach their conclusions after a careful examination of the works of several Latina authors living in the US (mainly Mexican American, Cuban American, and Nuyorican), I contend that this same model can be productively applied to the study of transcultural works in a trans-American framework, as my analysis of the plays by Báez and Vicioso suggests.

Language is one of the most debated and controversial issues in the definition of national identities, and the renegotiation of linguistic identity is perhaps one of the most traumatic aspects in migrant experiences. The initial contacts of the Spanish native-speaking narrators with English as the hegemonic language in the metropolis can be considered as the “non-English-speaking immigrant's first trauma,”Footnote ²⁸ as it is through language that they first face dislocation in the host country. The painful experience is reflected at the very beginning of Dominicanish, when the twelve-year-old narrative voice expresses her struggle with adapting to the demands of her new home, as can be seen in the following excerpt:

Her reluctance to learn English is based on an awareness of the “forced dislocation that result [sic] from the imposition of the new (immigrant) identity.”Footnote ³⁰ This new transcultural identity, which is articulated through language and language difference, among other ethnicity markers, begins to take shape at this first moment of cultural clash. However, as time goes by, what was perceived as irreconcilable systems gives way to a complex and hybrid language resulting from the creative mixture of African American vernacular, Dominican Spanish and American English.Footnote ³¹ This particular transcultural linguistic system is called “Dominicanish,” thus adding yet another dimension to the meaning of the title of the performance, this time referring to the language in which the text is codified.

In Nuyor/Islas, while written mostly in Spanish, the presence in Ramona's speech of elements of “Spanglish,” a transcultural linguistic code in itself, also reveals the effects of extended exposure to language contact in the protagonist's idiolect. For instance, when she is recounting her experiences as a factory worker, and reports what her supervisor used to tell her, she says, “Sam me decía: ‘You are a lady,’ pero no me pagaba más que a los otros, aunque yo fuera la ‘Forelady’” (“Sam would tell me: ‘You are a lady,’ but he didn't pay me more than the others, although I was the ‘forelady’”).Footnote ³²

These episodes of code-switching do not only occur at the morphosyntactic or linguistic level, but are one of the means through which the narrative voices articulate their transcultural ethnic identity. Alternating among differing sociocultural systems, the bodies of the protagonists become sites for renegotiating their racialized identities through a process that I refer to as transracialization.Footnote ³³ As a result of being exposed to different systems of racial categorization in the diaspora, the narrative voices reconfigure their racial identities, challenging the assumptions of hegemonic racial discourses both in their Dominican and host North American societies.

The existence of processes of transracialization in Dominicanish is represented by the narrator's identification with African American cultures. As she explains, it is in the lyrics and music of soul and jazz singers that she finds the tools she needs to come to terms with her alienated linguistic and racial identity. As she repeats throughout the text, it is by listening to the music of black jazz and soul groups that she will gain confidence in performing her new transcultural and transracial identity:

Her identification with African American musical culture functions in this context therefore not only as a linguistic marker but also as an act of resistance to the various processes of racialization that interact in the formation of ethnic identities in the USA context. The presence of jazz and blues lyrics in the text – as well as the musical pieces in the live performance of the playFootnote ³⁵ – links her with the broader African diaspora tradition, thus contributing to establishing unrealized conversations among black diasporic communities. By doing so, she is contesting not only the North American racial system in which whiteness is presented as the norm, but also one of the main racial ideologies in the construction of “latinidad,” which, based on the notion of mestizaje, “defines Latinos as a third race, as it were, in between black and white.”Footnote ³⁶ However, despite the fact that this approach stems from an attempt to overcome the black/white hierarchy prevalent in Western racial ideology, since “Latinos/as” as “mestizos/as” are located in a subordinate position in relation to “whiteness” and above the category of “blackness,” the colonial hierarchy is in fact being reproduced.

As Marta I. Cruz-Janzen points out, “the concept of mestizaje sheds light on the historical rejection of Latinegros within most Latino cultures.”Footnote ³⁷ In her article “Latinegras: Desired Women – Undesirable Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, and Wives,” this author argues that Latinas of African ancestry have become a “minority within a minority” as they “represent the mirrors that most Latinos would like to shatter because they reflect the blackness Latinos don't want to see in themselves.”Footnote ³⁸ In her view, in the context of the United States,

Yet in Dominicanish the narrator challenges this prevailing discursive framework by overtly embracing her African heritage and identifying herself as part of the broader African American community, as she states when she declares, “Con afro black is beautiful. Black is a color. Black is my color.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The insertion in her narrative of the slogan of the civil rights movement points both to her solidarity with black peoples in the US and to a process of transracialization as she is defining her identity outside the hegemonic racial discourses in the communities she inhabits. As Lorgia García-Peña rightfully argues, “being black and being Dominican appear, at the moment of girl Josefina's arrival to the US, as contradictions,”Footnote ⁴¹ and this is the case not only in the Latino/a communities of New York, but also in her native Dominican Republic.

Thus her embracement of a black identity openly challenges the notion of a fictive national ethnicity rooted in the idea of a racial mestizaje between the white Spanish colonizers and the Taino natives of the Dominican Republic, a discursive construction that obliterates the African roots of the majority of the country's population.Footnote ⁴² In this respect, Néstor E. Rodríguez argues that the Dominican Republic continues to suffer from a process of internal colonization resulting from the persistence of the nationalist discursive framework that originated in the creation of the Dominican nation in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴³ In his opinion, this is evident in many instances in Dominican public life, and he cites as an example the fact that, still today, most of the population in the island think of themselves as “Indian” in spite of the majority of the population's black and mulatto origins.Footnote ⁴⁴ One of the most important strategies for overcoming this internal colonization is precisely to migrate, as Aida Heredia explains, since Dominicans’ contact with a different system of racial categorization usually leads them to (re)discover their African heritage. Under these conditions, “emigration, principally to the United States, acquires a high value in the context of the official ideology; it implies a reconfiguration of our memory, our consciousness, our identity.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This was the case for Chiqui Vicioso, who explains in her “An Oral History (Testimonio)” that it was not until she traveled to the United States for the first time that she was able to challenge Dominican racial categories:

The process of transracialization described by Vicioso is articulated under two different discursive formations in Nuyor/Islas, as Ramona counterpoises her own view on the performance of racial identity with that of her daughter. While Ramona, as a woman who moved to New York as an adult, does not completely abandon the ideological framework she grew up in, her daughter, a second-generation migrant raised in New York City, shares with the narrator in Dominicanish her engagement in black political thought and, as Báez's character, adopts black looks and hairstyle in solidarity with other African American communities in the USA. For Ramona, however, her daughter's behavior is completely unacceptable, and at odds with the system of beliefs she had learnt in her native country, as she expresses in the following passage:

This initial rejection of her daughter's identification with African American politics will be transformed throughout the play and, after a critical reevaluation of her previous values, she starts to redefine her own racial identity, incorporating into her discourse some of the ideas held by her daughter. Therefore, if when she arrives in New York she struggles to maintain her Dominican values intact as a way of resisting the processes of transculturation, and imagines herself as “Indian,” by the end of the play Ramona is ready to articulate her transracial identity as exemplified in the following quote, in which she refers to the conversations she used to have with her daughter:

This challenge of the racial discourse against Haitian migrants that is still prevalent in the Dominican imaginary, by which Haitians are considered the “other” and represented as “black” in contraposition to the alleged mestizo origins of Dominican nationals, is, in the opinion of Daisy Cocco de Filippis, characteristic of the Dominican experience in the United States. In her view, “the admission of a shared African heritage as well as [an] understanding of their position as marginalized members of North American society, has brought about another level of consciousness to be shared with other Dominicans who in the past had accepted anti-Haitian sentiment in the island.”Footnote ⁴⁹ This idea that, as discussed above, is shared by Vicioso, Báez, and the characters in their plays, presents migration and diaspora spaces as powerful locations for surmounting constraining racial stereotypes and ethnic definitions. In this sense, it can be argued that transcultural interactions in the global environment of New York City work to promote a redefinition in the characters’ ethnic identity that transcends traditional racial categorizations. By adopting a transracial identity, these women are able to establish links with other minorized ethnic communities, a move that allows them to overcome, at least partially, some of the effects of displacement they undergo as migrants.

As contemporary Ciguapas, the narrative voices in Báez's and Vicioso's plays fiercely struggle to survive in hostile environments by creatively adapting to the new circumstances. These empowered female characters prove that Dominicanyorks and the transcultural and transnational networking they bring about are changing the ways Dominicans imagine themselves inside and outside the island. Finally, as has been argued throughout this paper, the myriad processes that affect the identity reconfigurations of those communities and individuals who live their lives “laughing in Dominicanish,”Footnote ⁵⁰ be it in the US or in the Dominican Republic, can only be brought to light by adopting transcultural approaches to the study of the Americas.