Rabecca Hoffman
LIS 652-2
December 1st, 2009
Term Paper
Fact Checking: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
2 Summary:
Oscar is an overweight Dominican teenage nerd and sci-fi freak from New Jersey, who is
ostracized by his peers and just can’t seem to get laid. What’s his problem? Fukú. “Fukú
americanus….the Curse and the Doom of the New World”; the curse unleashed on Hispaniola by
the arrival of the Europeans (Díaz, 2007, p. 1). It’s destined to doom all of its children, because
when it comes to superstitions, “no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you” (Díaz, 2007,
p. 5).
Luckily for those readers who “missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican
history,” Díaz fills us in on the details of the fukú’d nation of the Dominican Republic, from the
brutal regime of Rafael Trujillo to the Diaspora that followed (2007, p. 2). Central to this history
lesson is the story of Oscar’s mother, Beli, who was orphaned by Trujillo’s doing, and spends
her early years beaten and mistreated as a servant. Life gives her another chance when a distant
relative saves her, but fukú has other ideas. Beli has her own run in with Trujillo’s minions,
which ends in her running for the safety of New York. The curse can’t be shaken so easily,
though; it lives on through the lives of her two children, most notably Oscar. Oscar, the
voracious writer, the aspiring “Dominican Tolkien,” didn’t know his own sci-fi/fantasy story was
being written about him.
Since Díaz sets up this book as a fukú story, a story dependent on superstition, fantasy
and sci-fi, it begs the question of what can be believed. I chose an array of quotes from different
places in the book to reflect the wide range of information Díaz gives the reader as fact, and also
with the idea in mind that I could use a wide range of sources to verify or refute these claims.
3 1. “…fukú—generally a curse or a doom of some kind...” (p. 1)
The first thing that I knew I wanted to investigate was fukú. Obviously I can’t prove the
existence of a curse, but I can investigate whether there is belief among the people of the
Dominican Republic in such a curse. The first thing I did was to search the NYPL catalog for
books on Dominican folklore and superstitions. I looked at both Folklore from the Dominican
Republic (Andrade, 1930/1969) and Lengua y Folklore de Santo Domingo (Rodriguez Demorizi,
1975) but found no reference to fukú. At the same time I was searching for this word, I was also
searching the etymology of another Dominican word, so while I was looking at several Spanish
dictionaries on the reference shelf at the Schwarzman Building of NYPL, I looked for the word
“fukú” but again found nothing. At this point I was doubting Junot Diaz. He relies heavily on
Spanglish in the book and fukú is oddly similar to the American term “fuck you.” I wasn’t
giving up so easily, though.
Since the Spanish dictionaries didn’t have fukú, I needed to shift gears and concentrate
on specifically Spanish from the Dominican Republic, since there can be a lot of colloquialisms
unique to different Spanish speaking countries. I did some searching in the catalog and found a
book of “Dominicanismos” called Obras Lexicograficas. This book included an entry for fukú
but with an alternate spelling (fucú). The definition translates as bad luck or misfortune, and that
once you have a fucú, bad things happen to you. It also said that it is a familiar term among
gamblers (Maceo, 1989). In Del Vocabulario Dominicano, there was an entry for this word,
which was defined as meaning bad luck, or evil eye (Rodriguez Demorizi, 1983). In another
book, I found a larger entry on the word: Notas y Apuntes Lexicograficos Americanismos y
Dominicanismos. According to this book, the word fukú is synonymous with fucú and it is a
word used by superstitious people. Referencing other work that the word has appeared in, Uribe
4 describes the meanings of fukú denoted in these sources as a word used in Santo Domingo that
translates as a taboo that brings bad luck upon being pronounced (Uribe, 1996). Uribe also refers
to a similar word in Puerto Rico, “fufú,” which Junot Diaz also mentions as the Puerto Rican
equivalent to fukú in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007, p. 6). I also found an entry
for fukú in Diccionario de Cultura y Folklore Dominicano. It is defined as a superstition of
Dominican people who believe a person, animal, vegetable or thing can have a fucú, and avoid
them and avoid even saying the name of the cursed person or thing (Ramos & Castro, 2005).
This definition is in line with how fukú is used in the book, because characters believe Trujillo
has a fukú and avoid using his name for fear of getting the curse. Maybe it’s not by chance that
this word resembles our American equivalent: “fuck you,” and conveniently for Diaz it made for
a great literary tool in this Spanglish novel, but I have found several sources that verify the
superstition among the Dominican people.
2. “The pejorative parigüayo…is a corruption of the English neologism “party watcher.”
The word came into common usage during the First American Occupation of the DR,
which ran from 1916 to 1924…During the First Occupation it was reported that members
of the American Occupying Forces would often attend Dominican parties but instead of
joining in the fun the Outlanders would simply stand at the edge of dances and
watch…Thereafter, the Marines were parigüayos - a word that in contemporary usage
describes anybody who stands outside and watches while other people scoop up the girls.”
(p. 19-20)
I chose this quote with the intention of using a Spanish dictionary to find the etymology
of the word, assuming that there would be a source similar to the Oxford English Dictionary for
5 Spanish words. As I mentioned in my search for fukú, I consulted several Spanish dictionaries
on the reference shelf at Schwarzman, which is where I originally thought I would find a
definition and etymology for parigüayo. Unfortunately, the only dictionary that included this
word was Diccionario de la Lengua Española. It defined it as a word from the Dominican
Republic, which means a person who makes oneself ridiculous by not rising to the occasion
(Real Academia Española, 2001).
After I had given up on dictionaries for both fukú and parigüayo, I moved on to books of
Dominicanisms. The only one with an entry for parigüayo was Del Vocabulario Dominicano. It
defined the word as a pejorative term without a fixed meaning that came into use quite recently.
According to the entry, the word came to use during the military intervention of 1965 with the
presence of troops from Paraguay, Brazil and the United States. It said that the nation directed
its ridicule mainly at the Paraguayan soldiers (Rodriguez Demorizi, 1983). Ironically, the word
for a person from Paraguay in Spanish is “paraguayo,” which is very similar to “parigüayo.” Is
this just a coincidence?
Junot Diaz claims the word was specifically referring to Americans during an earlier time
period, so I continued searching. I did a Google search for this word and came up with two
helpful results. First was the Urban Dictionary, which defines parigüayo as a Dominican word
meaning a person who is a chump, bad with the ladies, and “a person who lacks the ability to
accept what is thought by the majority to be good for him” (Pariguayo, n.d.). In this situation, an
online urban dictionary is useful because as I found out, parigüayo is a relatively new word and
is pejorative. Slang is always best described by the people who use it and best understand it,
which can be easily found on the Internet.
6 The second useful Google hit I found was a person asking where the word parigüayo
came from. The answer referred to the book Diccionario de Cultura y Folklore Dominicano,
which I tracked down at the NYU Bobst Library. The entry to the word was the most
comprehensive that I had found thus far. It defined the word similarly to the others I had found,
and explained that it came into use during the days of the war in April of 1965 when North
America invaded. American soldiers would go to parties at family homes, and upon observing
some Dominicans sitting on the sidelines of dances instead of dancing themselves, called these
people “party washers” (Ramos & Castro, 2005, p. 305). From that term then came the
Dominican term “parigüayo” (Ramos & Castro, 2005). So there are several discrepancies
between this entry and Junot Diaz’s book. Diaz claims it was the Dominicans who called the
American parigüayos, while this book says it was the other way around. Also, this was the
second source I came upon that says the word came about during the 1965 U.S. occupation, not
the 1916 occupation that Diaz claims.
3. “…talked about the weddings in the Listín…” (p. 130) “Beli never saw him again except
once in the Listín Diario and by then they were both in their forties.” (p. 101)
I decided to include two quotes as one in this instance for two reasons. First of all, in the
first quote, the name of the newspaper is abbreviated and the second quote it fills in the missing
part of the title. Second of all, it also fills in another tidbit of information about this newspaper,
which is that the book claims the Listín Diario was in publication in about 1960 and in the
1980’s, according to the context of these quotes.
I needed to verify if this was a newspaper in the Dominican Republic, and whether it
would have been in publication during that time period. The first step I took was to look at
7 Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory online. Neither Listín nor Listín Diario resulted in a match for
exact or keyword title searches. A keyword search for “Dominican Republic newspaper” did
yield a partial match, which was Listín Digital. The website link for this newspaper listing lead
me to the online version of Listín Diario, which makes me think it is the same publication.
However, the information on Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory is very limited, and actually lists the
start year as 1998. Does this refer to just the digital version of Listín, though? The combination
of Ulrich’s and the website linked from the entry did at least verify that this is a newspaper in the
Dominican Republic. Unfortunately, I was still not sure what years it has been published.
Several searches in English and Spanish language encyclopedias for this title did not
come up with any results. A Google search for “history of Listín Diario” brought me to a news
article from August 5th, 2009, which was entitled “Listín Diario Celebrates 120th Anniversary”
(Baez Figueroa, 2009). It also brought up an entry from Wikipedia, which details the history,
and one specific piece of information that was relevant to my search. Apparently this newspaper
shut down for 21 years while Trujillo was in office. It was now my goal to find a reputable
source to verify this information.
I first turned to an index, specifically Academic Search Premier. I started with this one
because it is very general in scope, and I thought since it has a broad range of topics, it may
include information on the Dominican Republic’s newspapers. I was not very optimistic,
though. I did a keyword search for “Listín Diario and Trujillo” because I knew the closing of the
paper had to do with Trujillo. There were no exact matches, but there were a few articles about
Listín Diario. In the article “Figueroa Feels the Heat” by Mark Fitzgerald, I found the
information I was looking for. According to this article, Listín Diario is “the Dominican
8 Republic’s oldest and biggest daily newspaper…It shut down in 1942, and stayed closed for the
next 21 years” (Fitzgerald, 2003).
I also came across information about the newspaper by chance when I was searching a
bibliography of the Dominican Republic. It listed all of the publications in the Dominican
Republic, and said that the Listín Diario was abolished for 19 years (1942-1961) during
Trujillo’s dictatorship (Schoenhals, 1990). Although I am approximating the year the character
in the quote was reading Listín Diario, I know for sure that it was 1962 or before because the
chapter in which this quote is located in spans 1955-1962 according to the chapter title. This
would mean that during the entire time-span of this chapter, the Listín Diario was not being
published and it would have been impossible for Beli to be looking at the weddings in it. Of
course it’s not all that surprising, because Beli could dream all she wanted about the wedding she
wanted with her Gangster, but she was under the curse of fukú and was doomed never to find
happiness in love. Beli looking at weddings in Listín Diario in 1960 was about as likely as her
ever getting her fairytale wedding.
4. “María Montez, celebrated Dominican actress, moved to the U.S. and made more than
twenty-five films between 1940 and 1951, including Arabian Nights, Ali Baba and the Forty
thieves, Cobra Woman, and my personal favorite, Siren of Atlantis” (p 87).
This question has two parts, and will require two kinds of sources. First, I knew I would
need a directory to verify the films that Montez acted in, and for this the Internet Movie Database
(IMDB), available online for free, would be perfect. A search for her name brought up a list of
every film that she has been a part of. The list included twenty-seven films that she has acted in,
9 which were all between the years of 1940 and 1951. In this list were the four specific titles this
quote mentions, so the information on the films is correct.
The second part of this question requires a biographical source, to verify that she was a
Dominican who moved to the United States, and was a celebrated actress. For this I turned to
Biography Resource Center, available remotely from the NYPL website. An author search
yielded one result, which was a biography originally from Notable Hispanic American Women.
According to this biography, she was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to Belfast,
London, Paris, and finally New York. Under nationality, she is listed as both Dominican and
American. There is a section of the biography titled “Reaches Stardom” which describes Montez
as having “become a top star.” My conclusion is that the entire information in this quote is true.
(María Móntez, 1998) 5. “…Jesús de Galíndez was…a Columbia University grad student who had written a
rather unsettling doctoral dissertation. The topic? Lamentably, unfortunately, sadly: the
era of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina.” (p. 96-97)
I wanted to find out whether Galíndez had indeed written a dissertation at Columbia
University, and whether it was about Trujillo. I first went to WorldCat, available online from
NYPL. I did an author search for Galíndez and came up with quite a few results. I browsed
through and found a title listed as a dissertation: Trujillo’s Dominican Republic: A Case Study of
Latin American Dictatorship. This title is listed several times, in both English and Spanish.
Additional information garnered from the records of these listings included that this was a Thesis
presented by Galíndez for a PhD at Columbia University in New York.
10 I also verified this quote by searching Proquest Dissertations and Theses available at
from NYPL. I did an author search and limited my results to Columbia University and to the
1950’s. I came up with one result, which was the same entry that I had found in WorldCat.
According to Proquest, this was the dissertation submitted to Columbia University in 1956.
6. “[Trujillo was] famous for changing ALL THE NAMES of ALL THE LANDMARKS in
the Dominican Republic to honor himself (Pico Duarte became Pico Trujillo, and Santo
Domingo de Guzmán, the first and oldest city in the New World, became Ciudad
Trujillo…” (p. 2)
I consulted a number of sources for this quote, including several geographic sources and
an encyclopedia. I first started with the Columbia Gazatteer, searching specifically for the
names mentioned in the quote. Pico Duarte nor its Trujillo name was listed, however Ciudad
Trujillo was mentioned in the entry for Santo Domingo (and cross-referenced with an entry of its
own) (Santo Domingo, 2009). The gazetteer also verified that Santo Domingo is the “oldest
continuously inhabited European settlement in the Western Hemisphere” (Santo Domingo,
2009).
I still needed to know about the rest of the landmarks in the Dominican Republic, so I
next turned to the Times Atlas of World History (Barraclough, 1997) but there was not enough
detail in the few maps of the Caribbean to be of any help. I then searched the NYPL catalog for
“Dominican Republic Atlas” and found Atlas Histórico de la República Dominicana. This
turned out to be a valuable source because it included two full pages on the era of Trujillo, which
detailed many of the name changes of different locations, including the capital Santo Domingo,
and several provinces. These included “Libertador [Liberator],” “Benefactor,” (two of Trujillo’s
11 nicknames), “Trujillo,” and provinces named in honor of each of his parents (Lora, 2002). Only
the changes of city and province were mentioned, though, so I continued my search.
I next visited the map room at NYPL and viewed a tourist road map from 1937 (so during
Trujillo’s era). The only Trujillo-named location was the capital, Ciudad Trujillo (Obsequio de
la Secretaría, 1937). Since many of the name changes came later in the 1940’s (as I found out
from the Atlas), I was not surprised to see only this one Trujillo named landmark. Unfortunately
the map did not help me as much as I had anticipated.
I next went to historical guidebooks: The Standard Guide to the Caribbean (Martin,
1960), Guide to the Caribbean Islands (Wilhelm, 1960), and Caribbean and Central America
and the Bahamas and Bermuda (Butler, 1960). It dawned on me while I was paging through
them to answer a tourist question about Samaná that what better place to find names of
landmarks than in a tourist guide? What I found was a mix of Trujillo named locations and nonTrujillo named locations. For example, there was apparently a Trujillo Stadium, a Ramfis Park
(named for Trujillo’s son), in addition to mention of Ciudad Trujillo, the capital. However,
many more tourist destinations were not named for Trujillo (Puerto del Conde, Calle el Conde,
Biblioteca Publica, Plaza Colon, etc.). I think Junot Díaz was exaggerating when he said that
every landmark was named for Trujillo, even though I did find a fare amount of them. I even
found a passage in an encyclopedia that was coincidently similar to Díaz’s quote above: “Santo
Domingo became Ciudad Trujillo, and Pico Duarte, the highest mountain in the Caribbean (10,
500 ft.) was renamed Monte Trujillo” (Basilio, 1996, p. 273). Not that it is a word for word
match, but perhaps Díaz found that bit of information, stopped there, and exaggerated the rest.
As Basilio also says, Trujillo was on “a campaign of self-glorification,” (p. 273), so Díaz didn’t
exaggerate too far off from reality.
12 7. “Samaná es una chulería [Samaná is a beautiful thing]…For Eden it was, a blessed
meridian where mar [sea] and sol [sun] and green have forged their union…those flawless
resortless beaches…” (p. 132)
Was Samaná beautiful in reality? Was it truly without beach resorts? I thought it might
be useful for this quote to consult a guidebook from the era (about 1960), so I searched the
NYPL catalog for “guidebooks – Dominican Republic” but did not have results from that time
period, so I tried “guidebooks – Caribbean.” From this search, I found three books, which you
will recognize from the previous question: The Standard Guide to the Caribbean (Martin, 1960),
Guide to the Caribbean Islands (Wilhelm, 1960), and Caribbean and Central America and the
Bahamas and Bermuda (Butler, 1960). In all three, there are several destinations to visit in the
Dominican Republic listed, but Samaná was not among them. This indicates to me that Samaná
was not a tourist destination and true to the quote did not have resorts in 1960. In two of the
three books, several destinations outside of the capital are listed, so they were not focused just on
the capital area and could have included Samaná in theory had it been a tourist destination then.
I also thought possibly a book about Samaná would have information about tourism in
the area, and so I searched “history and Samaná” in the NYPL catalog. I found a book called
Breve historia de Samaná but I did not find any useful information there (Vega, 2004). I next
tried the Columbia Gazetteer of the World, and learned that Samaná refers to many things,
including a town, peninsula, and a province (all located in the same geographic location, though).
Looking back at the book, I decided the characters were probably talking about the town.
I next did a Google search for “Samaná history” and ended up on the Lonely Planet
website. Since Lonely Planet is a well-known print travel guide, I felt confident that the website
was reliable. I did some clicking around, jumping from the history article to a description of the
13 city of Samaná. Here it said that Samaná “remained an isolated fishing village until 1985”
(Samaná, 2009). This would be more evidence that the area would not have had beach resorts in
1960.
So was it beautiful? That is a little harder to answer, as it’s subjective. According to an
Encyclopedia entry describing the area, Samaná is now a tourist paradise, especially for
ecotourism because you can take advantage of many natural resources in the province (Samaná,
2003). I think it is highly unlikely that it was anything but beautiful in 1960 if it is beautiful
now, considering tourism ruins natural resources, it doesn’t restore them. I will leave it to you to
decide if Samaná is beautiful.
Then – 1960:
(Photographs of Raifi Genao, 1960 )
14 Now – 2009:
(Photographs of TripAdvisor 2009)
8. “High School was Don Bosco Tech, and since Don Bosco Tech was an urban all-boys
Catholic school packed to the strakes with a couple hundred insecure hyperactive
adolescents, it was, for a fat sci-fi—reading nerd like Oscar, a source of endless anguish.”
(p. 19)
Originally I wanted to research a Catholic high school in the Dominican Republic that is
mentioned in the book, but I settled for this quote when I exhausted all efforts in locating
information about the Dominican school. I found that school directories in the United States are
much easier to find than those for schools in the Dominican Republic.
The context for this quote would be Paterson, NJ in the 1980’s. I searched the NYPL
catalog for “school directory New Jersey” and found a school directory for the state, which went
back to the 1980’s (New Jersey Department of Education 1984/1987). A section on non-public
secondary schools, listed by county, included a listing for Don Bosco Tech, located at 202 Union
15 Ave, Paterson, NJ. This proves that the school existed in the 1980’s, but I still needed to find
additional information on the school. I next referred to the New Jersey volume of MDR’s School
Directory, which is a listing of public and non-public K-12 schools in New Jersey. I found a
listing for Don Bosco Tech under the listings for Passaic Catholic Schools. In addition to the
address (the same one as above), additional information was provided, including grade level (912), and enrollment (260) (Market Data Retrieval, 2003). Unfortunately this directory is from
2003, so this information reflects current data and not that of the 1980’s; NYPL does not own
older editions of the book. I also consulted The Official Catholic Directory (Catholic Church,
2006) and Private School Review (2009), a website linked from the NYPL databases, but I could
not find this school listed in either places.
A Google search for the name of the school came up with a result for the school, but only
included its address (the same listed above), but the school does not have a website. The Google
search also revealed that the school has closed (A sanctuary fights, n.d.), which would explain
why I could not find the school listed in some of the directories. I did find a listing for the school
on a website called schooltree.org. It had information about the school that I already had found
from other sources, and also listed it as an all boys’ school, which verified that part of the quote
(School tree, 2009). I was not sure of the reliability of this website, though. On one hand it
includes public information and information about Don Bosco Tech that was correct that I had
verified using other sources, but I could not verify who runs the website. Another issue was that
although the copyright of the site was listed as 2009, it was obviously not being updated because
the school has closed, yet it is still listed. One of the other listings that came up when doing a
Google search for the school was the website classmates.com, which has an online alumni group
for this school. Listed are 1137 alumni members, all of who are male, and all of these members
16 list the dates they attended Don Bosco Tech, which included the 1980’s (Classmates, 2009).
Therefore, I can safely conclude that this was indeed an all boys’ school.
And finally, to find out if Paterson, NJ was urban in the 1980’s, as the quote claims, I
checked the US census from 1980 (found online via Google) for the state of New Jersey.
Paterson fit into both the census definition of “urban” and “urban fringe” based on its population
then (U.S. Census Bureau, 1980).
My conclusion is that the information in this quote is true. Unfortunately I had to rely on
some current data instead of exclusively on that of the 1980’s which would have been ideal, but I
still feel that the information garnered from the sources give strong evidence to conclude that the
quote is accurate.
9. “It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam,
LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (p. 4)
This quote has two parts: verification of invasion, and verification that it was illegal. The
first part I thought would be a pretty simple ready reference question. I hadn’t used an almanac
yet, so I turned to see if NYPL had any online. Infoplease was listed as a free almanac, so I did a
search there for “the Dominican Republic.” Several entries came up, one of which was the
country profile. In the history section, it said, “Another military coup, on April 24, 1965, led to
violence between military…On April 28, U.S. military forces landed to protect U.S. citizens and
to evacuate U.S. and other foreign nationals” (Dominican Republic, 2007).
Okay, so there was an invasion by U.S. Troops, but was it illegal? I searched Google for
“Lyndon Johnson illegal invasion of Dominican Republic” and came up with an article written
on this very topic. I wanted to verify it as a legitimate source, though, because even though the
17 source was cited, it was on a website I was unfamiliar with and wanted to just be sure I was
looking at the entire text of it. I found out through Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory that Proquest
indexes Presidential Studies Quarterly, the source of the article, so I accessed Proquest from the
NYPL website and found the article, full text. According to this article, 20,000 U.S. troops were
sent in April and May of 1965 and justified to the American people by Johnson as the U.S.
blocking Communism (Rabe, 2006). In sending troops, Johnson violated several things
according to Rabe. First was the 1948 Organization of American States (OAS) charter Article
15, the nonintervention pledge of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, and JFK’s
Alliance for Progress, which had envisioned partnership in the Western Hemisphere (Rabe,
2006).
I used the government document function of Google to search for these charters and
policies. The OAS charter, (since amended), states in article 15: “The right of each State to
protect itself and to live its own life does not authorize it to commit unjust acts against another
State” (Organization of American States, 1948). According to the U.S. Department of State
website, Roosevelt commented about his Good Neighbor Policy of 1933 by saying, “No state has
the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another” (U.S. Department of State,
n.d.). And finally, JFK created the Alliance for Progress for Latin America in 1961 to promote
liberty and progress in the hemisphere according to the Department of Commerce’s website
(Gutierrez, 2007). It does appear that by invading the Dominican Republic, all three of these
things were violated. An official rule of the OAS the charter, for example, was violated,
Roosevelt’s policy was directly defied, and the invasion definitely went against hemispheric
partnership that Kennedy might have envisioned.
18 I remembered from a previous quote I verified about the word parigüayo, however, that
in the 1965 invasion, there were other troops involved besides the American troops (Paraguay,
Brazil, etc.). Were those countries part of the Organization of American States also? I was not
having much luck finding any government documents in the Google search that directly helped
me, so I turned to Academic Search Premier just to see if any articles came up. I did a search for
“Dominican Republic and 1965 and Organization of American States.” I came up with an entry
from the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, which verified that Paraguay and Brazil both are
part of OAS. It also stated that “the OAS did approve (1965) the U.S. intervention in the
Dominican Republic’s civil war” (Organization of American States, 2009). According to Rabe,
however, Johnson justified the military action to OAS after it had already begun (2006). Using
the bibliography from the Rabe article, I located a book called The Dominican Intervention.
According to this book, “the Dominican intervention violated important precepts of U.S. foreign
policy” and “U.S. forces were now sent into Santo Domingo without specific consultation in the
OAS, much less the member’s prior approval” (Lowenthal, 1972).
The information that I found definitely points to the fact that Lyndon B. Johnson did not
have approval of the OAS before the American occupation started, and in doing so defied the
agreement of the organization. However, I also learned that since OAS did get involved
eventually in the conflict, so the situation becomes a little more difficult to assess the legality
issues.
10. “And make the moves she did. Papers were assembled, palms were greased, and
permissions secured. In another time it would have been impossible, but with El Jefe dead
and the Plátano Curtain shattered all manner of escapes were now possible.” (p. 161)
19 This quote refers to the fact that the character Beli was able to leave the Dominican
Republic for the United States after Trujillo died in 1961, which wouldn’t have been possible to
do while he was alive. I needed to find out if there was a restriction on emigrating during the
Trujillo era, which is two parts: exiting the Dominican Republic and entering the U.S.
The first thing I did was check census records in the United States from 1960 and 1970 to
see if there was a jump in immigration after Trujillo died. According to the census, in 1960 there
were 11,883 people from the Dominican Republic living in the United States. In 1970 there
were 61,228, which is an increase of 415% (U.S. Census Bureau, 1999). I knew there could be
many different reasons for this, including immigration rules in the U.S.
I wasn’t sure what to search for and I wasn’t getting many results in Google, so I went to
Wikipedia for ideas. Here I learned that there was a change to U.S. immigration policy in 1965
due to the Hart-Celler Act. I then went back to Google and did a search for that. I came up with
several results that talked about this act, but not the actual text of it. What I found out was that it
abolished the country of origins quota, and opened up immigration from Asia, Africa, and the
Middle East (Diner, 2008). This could be a reason for the huge increase in immigration from the
Dominican Republic if there had been a quota on the number of Dominicans allowed in.
To find out the previous quotas, I searched for the Immigration Act of 1924, which had
established the quotas (again, I used Wikipedia as a jumping off point to find the name of the
act). Searching Google government docs didn’t result in the actual text, so I thought maybe a
regular Google search would help. I found a website that linked to the text of the nationality
quotas in this law on civics-online.org. The Dominican Republic is not listed. I went back to
Google and searched for “Immigration act of 1924 quotas Dominican Republic.” It came up
with a result of the text from the act that describes the definition of a non-quota immigrant.
20 Under section 4, part c, an immigrant born in the Dominican Republic is defined as a non-quota
immigrant (U.S. Government, 1924). Does this mean that citizens of the Dominican Republic
were exempt from the quotas and could come in any numbers? Or does it mean that zero
Dominicans were allowed in?
Since I was a little confused yet over what the immigration rules really were for
Dominicans during this period, I decided to take a trip to SIBL to access more of the government
documents than I had access to at home. A librarian pointed me to the database Congressional
Universe to search for the immigration acts. I read through a couple different congressional
hearings from both 1924-25 and 1965 where they were discussing the immigration law. What I
found out was that any country in the Western Hemisphere was exempt from the quotas, which
included islands in the Caribbean, as long as the person immigrating was born in that country
(Immigration from Latin America, 1925). A congressman in 1965 commented on this policy by
pointing out that it may get out of control if they don’t put quotas on these nations (Immigration
hearings, 1965). So now I know for sure that between 1924 and 1965, there would not have been
a restriction on the number of people from the Dominican Republic entering the United States.
Political upheaval in the Dominican Republic during the 1960’s after Trujillo’s death
would be one explanation for an increase in immigration between 1960 and 1970. But the
brutality of the Trujillo era was well documented (see quote #11), so why weren’t people
escaping in large numbers during that period (1930-1961)? I turned to Google once again and
found reference to a book called Black Behind the Ears, which I located at the Schomburg
Center. It states that “during the Trujillo era, migration out of the Dominican Republic was
severely limited and controlled” (Candelario, 2007). Also through Google Books I found a book
called Immigration and Asylum: From 1900 to the Present, which said, “Trujillo tightly
21 controlled emigration during his reign, and it remained at very low levels” (Castro, 2005).
Having strayed from references sources, I went back to the NYPL databases to see if I could find
a reference source that had this information. I browsed through and found History Resource
Center and did a search there for “immigration from the Dominican Republic.” It produced one
result for an article that had just the information I was looking for. It stated that “because
Trujillo forbade migration during his regime, most Dominicans living in the United States
arrived since 1961….During the 1960’s, political turmoil and repression were the main motives
for migration” (Point of contact, 1999). So the conclusion, then, is that while the United States
did not prohibit Dominicans from entering the United States during this time, the Dominican
Republic did prevent anyone from leaving, which would be why the character in the book was
not able to flee to the U.S. until Trujillo was dead.
11. “Trujillo, one of the twentieth century’s most infamous dictators, ruled the Dominican
Republic between 1930 and 1961 with an implacable ruthless brutality...[a] pig-eyed
mulato who bleached his skin…” (p. 2)
And who could forget Trujillo? Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, also known as El Jefe,
the Failed Cattle Thief, and Fuckface according to Díaz (p. 2). I couldn’t leave out one of the
book’s most important figures! I consulted Biography and Genealogy Master Index first, which
I thought would direct me toward sources that include biographies of Trujillo. Two sources I
pulled from the list there were the Biographical Dictionary of Latin American and Caribbean
Political Leaders (Alexander, 1988) and the Encyclopedia of Latin American History and
Culture (Basilio, 1996). I found both books in the Schwarzman Reading Room. Both of these
books confirmed that Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Trujillo’s
22 dictatorship is cited as “the most absolutist regime in Latin America during the years it was in
power” and had “several secret police forces that kept control over all political activities and
reported directly to Trujillo” (Alexander, 1988, p. 431-432). He ordered the massacre of
Haitians living in the Dominican Republic in 1937 and “converted much of the Dominican
Republic into his private fief by acquiring immense landholding and monopolies over the exportimport trade” (Basilio, 1996, p. 273). Basilio also describes Trujillo as having “established the
most totalitarian control over his people that any Latin American country had theretofore
experienced” (1996, p. 273). According to Historic World Leaders, reproduced in Biography
Resource Center online, the civil rights of people were stripped during the era of Trujillo, and the
media and educational system were censored. “Spying permeated all walks of life. Murder,
kidnapping, and imprisonment were established methods of dealing with dissent” (1994). This
biography also confirmed that Trujillo was mulato: he was a mix of Haitian, Spanish, and
Dominican (Rafael Trujillo, 1994).
The rest of the quote proved a little more difficult to verify. A definition of pig-eyed
from the Free Online Dictionary is “Having small, deep-set eyes.” (Pig-eyed, n.d.). A picture of
Trujillo would be needed to verify this fact. The entry from Historic World Leaders (Rafael
Trujillo, 1994) included this image:
23 Whether or not his eyes fit the definition of “pig-eyed” or not is questionable, but I feel is not
something I can answer; I will leave it up to you to make your own opinion based on the image.
And finally, I wanted to find out if Trujillo bleached his skin. Apparently his campaign
to kill off all of the Haitians in the country was part of his whitening plan for the Dominican
Republic (Basilio, 1996). Did he go so far as to lighten his own skin? I did not find any
evidence of this in the biographies I had already consulted. I paged through several biographies
in book form, in both English and Spanish, but found it too difficult under the time constraints to
read an entire book to find this one small piece of information. At this point, I turned to Google
to see if I could find any evidence whatsoever. I came up with a lot of nonsense regarding
Sammy Sosa bleaching his skin instead. Finally, though, I had a hit from a Google Books entry
that mentioned Trujillo lightening his skin. The book was only an excerpt, but I found a copy of
the entire book at Schwarzman. In Sultanistic Regimes, a chapter by Jonathan Hartlyn on the
Trujillo Regime includes in the notes, “Trujillo’s obsession with race even led him to use face
24 whiteners to lighten his skin (he had Haitian Afro-Caribbean ancestry through his maternal
grandmother)” (1998, p. 258). It also directs the reader to another source, Trujillo, by
Crassweller. I recognized this name from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Díaz had at
one point referred to Crassweller when mentioning a piece of information, and I now put the two
pieces together. It must have been this Crassweller he was referring to. I knew I would need to
get a hold of this book, because obviously Díaz had used a source by Crassweller in his research,
so it was a good chance I would find the information I was looking for there. I located the book
at the Schomburg Center but I could not find any reference to skin bleaching, however I did read
that Trujillo “had recourse to hair-tinting, to face powder, and to the services of beauticians
(Crassweller, 1966, p. 78). While I was reading through this book, I came across quite a bit of
other information that Junot Díaz uses in his book regarding Trujillo. I have no doubt Díaz
consulted this text when doing his own research.
Discussion
Ultimately, the brief wondrous life of Oscar sees its end, coming full circle, back to his
homeland in the Dominican Republic. In the end, his demise is his own doing, unless you
believe in fukú. “It’s the Ancient Powers, Oscar said grimly. They won’t leave me alone”
(Díaz, 2007, p. 315). Oscar’s fukú story, the sci-fi, fantasy story of his life and its curse, is easy
to digest as truth, what with the detailed footnotes the size of Alaska filling you in on the history
of the Dominican Republic. Díaz implies that the history of the island is so unbelievable that it
naturally lends itself to sci-fi fantasy story writing, “What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo?
What more fantasy than the Antilles…What more fukú?” (Díaz, 2007, p. 6). But it begs the
question, what is history, and what is fantasy?
25 There were a number of challenges in fact checking this book, one major one being that
the book is written in Spanglish and many of the historical “facts” are set in the Dominican
Republic. This meant two things. First, many of the sources I used were in Spanish. I do have
some proficiency in the language, but I am not fluent, so I spent a lot of time translating. The
second issue was that I took for granted the amount of documentation and digitization in the
United States that is not present in the Dominican Republic, or at least not accessible to me. I
abandoned several quotes after it became clear to me that a source that is readily available in the
United States would not be available to me from the Dominican Republic. An example of this
would be a school directory. It was very easy for me to find a directory from New Jersey in the
1980’s, but impossible to find one from the Dominican Republic in the 1960’s. I also abandoned
a question regarding driving laws in the Dominican Republic because while it’s easy to use the
Internet to document changes in American regulations, I found it impossible to do the same with
international laws, at least from this particular country.
Another issue I ran into was that sometimes verifying a quote became much more
complicated than just verification of facts from a reference source. The invasion of the
Dominican Republic by the U.S. in 1965 would be an example of this. While I gathered several
pieces of information, the legality issue involves politics, and that is beyond the scope of this
assignment. There was a lot of gray area between whether it was right or wrong, legal or illegal,
for the U.S. to invade the island.
For my research, I used a variety of sources in a variety of formats. I created this table to
illustrate the types of resources I used for each quote I used from the book:
26 Table 1
1
Internet
2
x
Proprietary
Print
3
5
x
xx
xxx
Biographical
x
Bibliography
x
Gov. Docs
Directory
Almanac
8
9
10
11
x
xxxx
xxxx
xxxx
x
xxxx
xxx
xx
x
x
xxxxxxx
xxxx
xxxx
xx
xxx
xxxxxxx
Index
Encyclopedia
7
x
Geographic
Dictionary
6
x
xx
xxxxxx
4
xxxxx
x
x
xxxxx
x
xx
x
x
x
xxxx
x
x
x
x
x
x
xxx
xxxxx
x
xxxxxxx
x
Internet:
As you can see from the table, I used a fairly equal number of Internet, proprietary and
print sources. Although I did not include Google in this table, I did use this search engine often
as a jumping off point in the beginning or when I was stuck. Sometimes it didn’t get me
anywhere, but other times it lead me to a variety of useful sources including scholarly articles,
book references, and government documents. Using Google sort of represents what librarians do
on a daily basis. Google is filled with a massive amount of information that is from every end of
the spectrum of quality, and by weeding through it you can find wonderful gems of resources,
and you can find utter trash. But this is a useful skill to have; as a librarian, it is your job to weed
through the overwhelming amount of information and guide a user to the useful sources. The
27 challenge then with Google was finding reliable information within the millions of search results,
which turned out for me to be a worthwhile venture on several questions.
Besides Google, I used the Internet for online sources that I already knew were reputable,
such as the Lonely Planet website and the Internet Movie Database. Other online sources I had
to determine their reliability, such as some of the online school directories and the online slang
dictionaries. This could be challenging, especially in the case of the school directories. For the
question about the Catholic school, specifically the fact that the one in question was an all boys’
school, I hadn’t been able to verify anywhere else. I would not have turned to schooltree.org or
classmates.com if I had been able to find a more reputable source. I find this often happens in
reference, though, when you exhaust all other options and you have to make your best judgment
on free online websites such as these.
Print:
It actually amazed me how often I turned to books for this paper, and how my attitude has
changed from the previous assignments. On the reference assignments, I much preferred the
online proprietary resources to using books. While I still will prefer the online version of certain
sources to book (Ulrich’s, for example), I’ve re-discovered how wonderful browsing a reference
shelf and browsing a book can be. Often times on this assignment I would find ideas for another
source just by browsing through the Latin American section in the Schwarzman reading room, or
by paging through a bibliography at the end of a book. While it would have been nice to be able
to have an online version of Dominican Spanish dictionaries I used just for ease of search, I
probably never would have come across the word “parAguayo” (meaning person from Paraguay)
because I was only searching for “parIguayo.” Using a book instead of electronic source,
28 though, I found this word by paging through, and noticed the coincidence in context to the quote,
which I may have missed otherwise.
As I mentioned earlier, part of the challenge on this assignment was using Spanish
language sources. I found, though, that using Spanish dictionaries (including the folklore
dictionaries) were the easiest of the Spanish language sources to use, and posed much less
problems for me than the full length history or biographical books.
Proprietary:
On this assignment, my reliance on proprietary sources was much less than in the past,
but was still an integral part of my research. I used proprietary sources for indexes,
bibliographic, biographic, geographic, encyclopedic, and government document resources. Their
major advantage for me was the search function. Sometimes paging through a large reference
book can be difficult; it is hard to read the tiny print and often has confusing symbols and
abbreviations. For example, I would have loved to have used an online version of the MDR
school directory or the Catholic directory. Paging through several sections and continually
referring back to the guide at the beginning of the book was cumbersome. Thus sources like
WorldCat, Academic Search Premier, Biography Resource Center, etc., really have an advantage
when it comes to searching. Another nice feature is being able to link, which was nice to use in
the Columbia Gazetteer. The entries for Ciudad Trujillo and Santo Domingo were linked to each
other, eliminating the need to do an additional search. Also, unlike Internet sources, I did not
need to ascertain whether the source was reliable or not. I could easily count on the proprietary
sources from the New York Public Library to be reputable and of good quality.
What was highlighted most for me during this assignment was the highs and lows of
research, that is the success and failures of it. Unlike the reference assignments earlier this
29 semester, I approached these quotes not knowing whether there would be an answer or not, and
like I mentioned, I ended up abandoning several quotes when I determined that there was not an
answer readily found. But with the uncertainty and frustration and failure came a heightened
sense of accomplishment (and glee!) when I found an answer. It was particularly interesting to
work backwards through Díaz’s research and especially exciting when I came across resources
that I am convinced Junot Díaz used in writing this book. I read somewhere once that Díaz spent
11 years researching for this book, and while there were some minor discrepancies in the “facts”
he presented, I was happy to find out that much of the historical information is true, or is close to
the truth. Overall, it was an enlightening project and I will perhaps never look at a historical
novel the same again.
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