New Strangers in Paradise by Gilbert H. Muller

Author:Gilbert H. Muller [Muller, Gilbert H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

One can conclude that Guzman’s quest is for a world prior to the European conquest, the liquidation of native peoples, the ascent of plantation economies (a motif in Cofer’s novel), and twentieth-century colonial domination by the United States. Guzman spreads himself across time and space before he retreats from both the colonial and metropolitan world to the frontiers of civilization itself, finding freedom beyond society and submitting only to his newfound Eve, the beautiful and devout daughter of the “witch” of Salud, as they travel back in time and space to their reimagined Eden, the original plantation.

Unlike most protagonists, Guzman both reflects and transcends the historical moment in which immigration narratives are situated. His retreat from both Puerto Rican and urban civilization at the end of the novel, as well as the inversion of patriarchal perspectives inherent in his submissive surrender to the devout daughter of La Cabra, is atypical of those immigrant lives articulated within the context of transnational relations. Thus Guzman’s dream of a transcendent prelapsarian Paradise contrasts with the more secular and provisional yearnings of the heroine in Esmeralda Santiago’s América’s Dream (1996), a novel of Puerto Rican migration whose very title suggests a text designed to explore the construction of personal and national identity. While lacking some of the surreal and enigmatic appeal of The Line of the Sun, Santiago’s novel is a significant contribution to that variety of immigrant fiction that equates sexual subjugation with various forms of neocolonial oppression experienced by immigrants to America.

Santiago, whose memoir When I Was Puerto Rican is a notable contribution to the autobiography of immigration, constructs in her novel a figure named América Gonzalez whose identity and very body are controlled by two systems: the system of masculine oppression that the author asserts is inherent in Puerto Rican culture and the transnational system of labor that sends immigrants to the United States for employment in the service economy. As a hotel maid on the island of Vieques off the Puerto Rican coast, América seems trapped in a complex system of power. On the one hand, she is the servant of tourists, whose rooms she cleans; on the other, she is controlled violently by her married boyfriend Correa, the father of her teenage daughter and a man prone to murderous jealousy. Santiago handles the intersections of colonial and sexual subjugation quite deftly in the novel, enabling readers to understand the ways in which ethnic origins and gender are key determinants in the contemporary immigrant experience. As maid and mistress, América is the “other woman” of so much Western fiction and discourse. As an immigrant escaping provisionally from her oppressive island life to a “new” life as nanny and live-in housekeeper for an American family in Westchester County, an affluent suburb north of New York City, she is also the archetypal Other within the social division of power in the United States. Thus sexual and ethnic differentiation are the twin constituents—a sort of epistemological system—that determine América’s identity and her relation to the world.

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