Novelist Angie Cruz’s Writing Celebrates the Dominican Diaspora
Her 20-year career is studded with complex characters
Dominican novelist Angie Cruz does not come from a family of talkers, and yet, for 20 years, her novels have offered an intimate look into the experiences and complexities of a community known for its silence.
It was early February, and we met in Uptown Garrison, a cocktail bar in Washington Heights—the northern Manhattan neighborhood where Cruz was born in 1972 after her parents migrated from the Dominican Republic. When she first began writing, she told me that she was attempting to write about the unknown parts of Dominican history. “I was trying to write into what I didn’t know. And I would ask questions and I would always feel like I was hitting a wall because people were like, ‘Why do you want to talk about that?’”
She added that, within the Dominican community, it is often difficult to talk about things like what it was like to live under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo or about the tense, often violent, relationship between the country and its neighbor Haiti.
“I practiced sitting and listening to people and trying to piece together, through the gaps and silences, a truth,” she told me. Her works, all novels set in the Heights and the Dominican Republic, are…
