Drown

According to the version of the American Dream Drown provides, immigrants come to America to participate in a meritocracy which allows those who work the hardest to ascend the class ladder and secure a prosperous life. Díaz’s characters, most saliently Ramón and the narrator of “Edison, New Jersey,” bump up against this ideal with a set of difficulties that expose the American Dream as a narrow, unrealistic, and unattainable myth.

For one, virulent racism sharply limits both characters’ upward mobility. The narrator of “Edison, New Jersey” acutely endures the racist suspicion of his rich, presumably white customers, as they put newspapers on the ground ahead of his deliveries, presumably to catch the dirt they’ll track in. Regard for the narrator’s safety is not the thing that motivates these customers to pick the paper up; instead, it’s concern over damage to their own property that a slip on the newspapers may produce. The customers also linger in or around their homes, hesitant to leave, lest the narrator and his black coworker steal from them. The narrator, acutely aware of these micro aggressions, exorcises his resentment by periodically committing petty theft within these homes, or flinging dead animals into their garages. These small acts of vandalism and theft can be read as the narrator’s attempts at revenge against a system—and its gatekeepers—that are arrayed against him. Through his working-class job and his embodied racial identity, he becomes acutely aware that the American Dream, as it is haughtily lived out by his white clientele, is inaccessible to him.

In “Negocios,” Ramón is hassled and openly mocked by a Eulalio, a fellow man of color who believes he has the right to act superior to Ramón because of his comparative mastery of the English language. Through this dynamic, we come to understand that cultural and linguistic assimilation is a mandate of the American Dream. The violent stripping away and rejection of the native language and its attendant culture is one vehicle through which integration into American culture can be produced. This can be seen as a racist conceit. The native identity, rendered as obsolete, backward, and inferior, must be shed in favor of an Anglicized American tongue and identity. Ramón’s heartbreakingly vulnerable encounter with a racist U.S. marshal who unabashedly calls him a “spik” and has the gall to assume that all people who play the accordion are playing polkas is one of the first people who initiates Ramon into the brutality and dangerousness of being an illegal immigrant in America. Once Ramon starts working at an aluminum factory, he has no recourse for the racist abuse that his co-workers heap onto him, and when he is injured, it becomes abundantly clear that his bosses value him only as a labor unit, and not a human being. Through these details, Díaz reveals that the on-the-ground reality for non-English speaking immigrants of color is worlds away from the glossy mythology of the American Dream, which does not acknowledge nor account for both the economic hardships attendant to the reality of coming to the country penniless, nor the brute reality of cultural and interpersonal racism. 

This theme is most powerfully explored by “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie”, and “Negocios.”

In “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie,” Yunior self-consciously counsels himself to hide aspects of both his ethnic/racial identity and socioeconomic background that come into conflict with what he has come to know as the ideal masculine identity in America. As a young man of color, growing up in urban New Jersey, he has absorbed the signals of the society around him. By metabolizing these sociocultural messages, he has come to understand that his own phenotypic presentation as a Dominican male with Afro-Latino heritage is inferior to the phenotype of the Anglo male. This is why he counsels himself to adopt the mannerisms of white boys: he has so deeply internalized this white supremacist belief that he sees securing a white girl as the crowning achievement of ideal masculinity. Clearly, in his world, whiteness is at the top of the food chain, and whiteness is the thing to aspire to both within his own identity and in who he seeks as a sexual partner.

This necessitates that he disciplines and/or hides and represses both the physical characteristics that come into conflict with white standards of desirability, and the concrete and material familial and personal histories that would brand him as a racial and economic “Other” to whiteness. These things include the summers spent in the Dominican countryside, the literal physical evidence of his impoverished cousins, the Afro he used to sport, and the government aid that his family receives. Through this depiction, Díaz carefully and precisely parses the effect that white supremacy has on Yunior’s psyche. Specifically, it profoundly assaults his sense of self-worth, causing him to seek recompense by disciplining himself to try to meet up with its own stringent dictums which will never sanction his full acceptance.

In “Negocios, Ramón sets out into a racist America that he is wholly unprepared for. The reality of America’s brutality against immigrants of color is quickly brought into sharp relief by his encounter with federal marshals and the stories that he hears within his immigrant community about police brutality against immigrants of color, and the terrifying and pervasive threat of la migra. More subtly, the effects of the assimilation mandate that an Anglo-controlled cultural system exerts is demonstrated by the way that Ramón feels isolated and alienated from his own native culture when he returns to Santo Domingo after having spent years in the U.S. The trial by fire that Eulalio initiates through his ridicule of Ramón’s accent, and Ramón’s subsequent quest to master English, which he dutifully undertakes, combined with years of survivalist adaptation to the mores, norms, and mandates of American society, has shaped Ramón into a fundamentally different person. Essentially, the mandate to assimilate, foisted upon him by America, has rendered him both an alien and an alien to his own roots: he acutely feels that he no longer belongs in his hometown when he returns to it. Through this depiction, Díaz illustrates the way in which the American mandate to assimilate pushes immigrants of color into a limbo in which they are forced to deny themselves in order to attempt to gain acceptance into a culture and society that will never fully embrace them.