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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 Cruz’s attempts to grapple with Dominican history and identity.
Growing up, Cruz traveled often between the islands of Manhattan and the Dominican Republic. “I was able to see the United States from another point of view,” she told me. “It also allowed me to see the complexity of our community and demythologize the American dream and what it means to climb socially.”
Her novels are set in the epicenter of Dominican American life, the Heights, and they deal with Dominican migration to America. The first migratory wave began in the 1960s, eventually peaking during the 1980s, when more than 200,000 Dominicans arrived. The majority of these individuals settled in New York City, where almost 40% of the U.S. Dominican population resides today.
“The women in my life have always been resisting the status quo. Even though they had a lot of challenges and…
