Bridging Sonic Borders

How music depicted in literature shapes Dominican and Dominican New Yorkers’ identities and links the homeland to the diaspora.

Music has played a large role in recent Dominican literature, whether of the island or the diaspora. Bridging Sonic Borders explores this sonic connection linking the homeland and far-flung locales—especially New York, the center of Dominican cultural production in the United States. Sharina Maíllo-Pozo argues that literary representations of popular music delineate a shared aesthetic territory for US and Caribbean Dominicans, fostering an inclusive and transnational Dominicanidad.

Examining works written in Spanish, English, and Dominicanish, Maíllo-Pozo focuses on Dominican/Dominicanyork writings that have nurtured a borderless aesthetics through their shared investment in hip-hop, jazz, blues, pop, rock, and merengue. For Dominican writers, popular music has become a way of exploring memory and nostalgia and a means of centering people rejected from hegemonic identity formation—the working class, those of African descent, rural and queer people. For example, many works focused on the life of rocker Luis “Terror” Días have emphasized the in-between identity of being both Dominican and a New Yorker. Collectively, these writings have created a space in which boundaries of nation and diaspora are revealed for their fundamental porosity.

Sharina Maíllo-Pozo is an assistant professor of Latinx studies in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Georgia. She is the coeditor of Embodiment and Representations of Beauty.