The Dominican Republic, and its significant New York-based diaspora, have produced a myriad of influential literary writers and stellar music performers; from poets Salomé Ureña and Pedro Mir to Aída Cartagena Portalatín and Mateo Morrison, from musicians and singers Antonio Mesa and Mercedes Sagredo de Sánchez to Juan Luis Guerra and Milly Quezada. To different degrees, many of those mentioned here have become cultural symbols used by the Dominican nation-state to design the contours of what Dominicanidad should be; a set of cultural avatars, identifiers, and values Dominicans are expected to embody and cherish in order to be legitimately included within the cultural borders of the nation-state. In the meantime, other Dominican writers and musicians have stayed in the shadows, outside of the state-sponsored cultural borders of Dominicanidad, because their cultural production is deemed too alternative or, in the worst-case scenario, undesirable because of its defiant nature towards the Eurocentricity and Hispanophilia of hegemonic Dominicanidad.

Bridging Sonic Borders centres those cultural productions from musicians and writers who have been outcast by hegemonic Dominicanidad. Specifically, Sharina Maíllo-Pozo analyses post-1980s literature produced by Dominican Latinx and transnational authors marked by the traumatic footprints of post-dictatorship life and exponential emigration to New York City, and for whom Dominican and U.S. popular music are central. In addition to cultural production analysis, the author did archival research in the United States, Spain, and the Dominican Republic, and relied on oral histories developed from interviews conducted with some of the writers she analyses. By critically analysing the works of Dominican and Dominicanyork – Dominicans either born or raised in New York – writers in a constant transnational vaivén (coming and going), the author ‘looks at the interstitial cultural spaces creating multiple forms of knowledge and possibilities for human agency’ (p. 4) with the intention to recognise and visiblise the cultural heterogeneity inherent to ‘una Dominicanidad otra’ (other Dominicanness), ‘de abajo’ (from below), ‘anónima’ (anonymous) in official discourse (p. 1). Maíllo-Pozo does so by wittingly foregrounding feminist thought. She devotes her study to a majority of women while positioning herself and her work in important discussions on gender theory and women’s scholarship.

The book features four chapters. The first three are case studies. The first chapter highlights what Maíllo-Pozo calls ‘merengue de ruptura’ (p. 9), a set of alternative merengue productions that break away from the historical use of merengue as a tool for enforced Eurocentric nation-building by Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. The second chapter describes the transnational life of Luis ‘Terror’ Dias and the Dominican alternative music scene. The third chapter features the novels of two New York Afro-Latinas to discuss hip-hop music in the New York diaspora. Eventually, the fourth chapter is entirely dedicated to both the creative life and artivism of Josefina Báez and her three oeuvres, in which Maíllo-Pozo reasserts her central arguments on Dominicanidad’s relationship with notions of fluidity, transnationalism, race, blackness, and Dominican women’s writing.

Theoretically, Bridging Sonic Borders advances different scholarly conversations that are well suited to the book’s framing and overall argument. Indeed, Maíllo-Pozo diligently puts her interdisciplinary training in cultural studies and literature to draw from the works of writers and musicians she covers in furtherance of ‘alternative scripts of dominicanidad’ (p. 3). With great relevance, Maíllo-Pozo takes Gloria Anzaldúa’s long-standing concept of the borderlands (1987) to theorise the transnational space of cultural production she dissects. This is what she calls ‘bridging’, the act of foregrounding the interconnectedness of diaspora and homeland to highlight their unity while also showing, with timely nuance, their dissonances. ‘Bridging’ further feeds on theoretical contributions from cultural studies and ethnic studies scholars, including Lorgia Garcia-Peña’s El Nié (a nor here nor there hybrid transnational space), Juan Flores’ cultural remittances, and Luis Guarnizo and Michael Smith’s transnationalism from below.

The book’s main theoretical contribution is what Maíllo-Pozo coins as ‘sonic literary texts’, in which stories are fundamentally woven by sonic elements. She draws from Luis Rafael Sanchez’s vanguard writing in La Guaracha del Macho Camacho (1976), one of the first ‘to incorporate popular music in literature as a tool to critique and reframe national identity’ (p. 3) in the form of allusions to Puerto Rican popular radio broadcast soundscapes. Maíllo-Pozo argues that the fusion between literary texts, popular music, and other sounds critically questions the historical role of literature – as a Hispanophile and heteronormative realm in the Dominican context – and enables her to examine individual and collective identities that are more outspoken. Sonic literary texts, then, are characterised by ‘verbal creativity in which sound is central’ and their capacity to ‘appeal to and interpellate the sonic memories of readers and audiences’ (p. 7). Through various short autoethnographic accounts often used to introduce her chapters, Maíllo-Pozo makes the reader feel the great impact these sonic literary texts have had on her personal and academic journeys.

Bridging Sonic Borders critically attends to race and Dominicans’ relationship to blackness in both the Caribbean and the diasporic contexts. For instance, in Chapter 3, Maíllo-Pozo introduces the complexities for Afro-Latinas of Dominican descent to belong to a hip-hop culture whose blackness is still predominantly understood in non-diasporic U.S. African-American terms. Maíllo-Pozo takes the life experiences of Raquel Cepeda, a hip-hop journalist, and Elizabeth Acevedo, a poet and former emcee, to timely put forward the overlooked presence of Dominicans in hip-hop history. However, she does not research Dominican hip-hop figures beyond those mentioned in the works of Cepeda and Avecedo, leaving us with a majority of references to African-American hip-hop icons such as Notorious B.I.G. and N.W.A, and some Anglo-Caribbean Americans like Nicki Minaj. There exists a significant archive of Dominican participation in New York hip-hop history, mainly attainable through oral histories (Vallée Reference Vallée2023). Building on this archive might have given even more substance to Maíllo-Pozo’s third chapter, in its vital goal to draw attention to ‘the erasure of Black Latinx in US Black cultural archives, especially with the absence of Latinx of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean in the historicization of the incipient years of hip-hop culture’ (pp. 107-8).