This video can potentially be helpful for my paper because Junot Diaz is very well-known for his bluntness towards admitting issues he faced as a Dominican immigrant and that is exactly what I want to write about. I am trying to see different ways people who migrated from the Dominican Republic vs. kids born in the US to immigrant Dominican parents. Diaz falls under the first category and in this video he discusses authenticity in terms of who you are. This is something that many people who I have spoken to while gathering research for this paper have mentioned. The first generation Dominican-Americans in the US said they don’t exactly fit in because of the stigma that comes with being Latino and when they go to DR to visit family they don’t really fit in there either because they are not “Dominican enough” whereas in the US they are not “American enough” but what does it really mean to be American when this is a country of immigrants? It’s a sort of loss of identity that happens in the process of migrating and for the first generation Americans, it starts from childhood where they learn Spanish first rather than English. Diaz does not talk about assimilation per se but you can’t begin a project like this without tackling the feelings of the people, that is to say without asking where they feel they belong the most.
*I will soon be posting up my gatherings from a first generation Dominican-American Hilda Fournier who is currently a student at SUNY New Paltz.
from an interview with*