6
2013
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Orgu l los, Chicanas and chilangos, Y’all :
number 22
Where are North Carolina’s Latino/a Writers?
On September 20, 2012, a sellout crowd gathered at a Regulator Bookshop event at Motorco Music Hall in Durham, North Carolina,
b y J oa n C o n w e l l
to hear Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Genius grant winner Junot photograph by Joan Conwell
Díaz read from his new short story collection, This is How You Lose Her (2012). Díaz is famous for his ambitious 2007 novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, whose unlikely Dominican American title character – a virginal, comic book-obsessed nerd – flays open the American experience, revealing a vast fabric of ethnic and cultural strands. The brilliance of the novel is that it is so darn funny and engaging that the reader guffaws her way through shocking revelations about the uncanny link between dictatorial tyranny in Latin America, US power and politics, and teenage love in Paterson, New Jersey. After the Motorco reading, Díaz posted on his Facebook page: The Regulator Bookshop reading in Durham was dyn-o-mite! Beautiful mix of folks – a tight Caribbean group, Latinos from all over, all kinds of activists, and of course *Dominicans,* including a 21 year old from the Bronx already in med school at Duke and a flight attendant who claimed to be Wonder Woman. Both were orgullos for our community! And there were so many Chicanas and a couple of straight chilangos too. And the head of the Latino arm of Obama’s re-election campaign. So much energy and positivity I left that reading smiling from ear to ear!1 Orgullos and Chicanas and chilangos?2 This is not Robert Ruark’s North Carolina. Or is it? The state’s population of Latinos has skyrocketed in recent decades, growing more than four hundred percent between 1990 and 2000,3 creating new cultural milieus that transcend the black-white binary that dominated in the past. These days, a crowd packs a music store to connect with one of contemporary literature’s most celebrated writers, an author whose works revolve
Above Duke University’s Latino/a Studies program’s “Days of the Dead,” Durham, NC, 2 Nov. 2012
1
Junot Díaz, “The Regulator Bookshop Reading,” Facebook 20 Sept. 2012: web.
Its tone is slightly pejorative or ironic, having much the same tone as the word ‘gringo,’ referring to someone from the United States” (“Chilango – slang” [Mexico Guru 17 Dec. 2007] web).
2
Orgullo means “pride.” Often but not always considered a slur, chilango refers to, in common usage, a “person from Mexico City or an “unsophisticated [rural or suburban] person now living in Mexico City.” The term “derives from the word ‘chile’; presumably these lesssophisticated transplants ate lots of it. . . .
3
“State and County QuickFacts: North Carolina,” United States Census Bureau (US Dept. of Commerce, 18 Sept. 2012) web; “Voices from the Latino Community in NC,” Spanish Language Department (Duke University, 2005) web.