junot díaz the brief wondrous life of oscar wao 2007

During this time, the country was populated by Taino Indians. Christopher Columbus landed in Santo Domingo in 1492, making it the first city to come under Spanish rule.

The country shares its home-and complicated history-on Hispaniola with Haiti. “La Capital” is one of the oldest cities in the Caribbean and home to over three million people. There was a sense that the world that we were inhabiting, the people that we were connected to, the neighborhood that was more or less my entire universe, that all of these things would soon vanish.” Olga Segura with Junot Díaz at his home in Cambridge, Mass.īorn in 1968, Díaz spent the first six years of his life in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. “There was already the shadow of the United States over all of our lives. “From the moment I could remember, it was made very clear to me that I was going to the United States,” he says. Díaz nods in agreement, settling into the chair across from where I am seated. As immigrant children, I begin, we learn at a very young age to view America as a kind of utopia, a place to be lauded. It is a cold Monday afternoon in early January, and I am in Cambridge, Mass., to discuss the novel, which turns 10 this September, with its author, Junot Díaz. It is this dream that is at the center of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

In America, the land of opportunity and democracy, anything is possible. This dream tells us that no matter our circumstances elsewhere, in America we can make it. We leave behind families and careers many of us leave to survive, escaping countries shrouded in violence and death. Terrifying, promising and elusive, it pulls us from our native lands.

Junot díaz the brief wondrous life of oscar wao 2007