Juan keeps her shut away in the apartment, where she cleans, cooks, and exists for his pleasure. In New York, Ana pines for her family in Santo Domingo. Ana doesn’t want to marry him but does so out of duty and for the opportunity to become American. Suitable for young and adult readers, Dominicana identifies the immigrant experience in a historical context with themes that ring true to contemporary readers.Īna Canción is a teenager when she marries Juan, an older man who whisks her out of their home country of the Dominican Republic to a new life in New York City. The novel is structured in six parts in which Ana’s first person point of view depicts her loneliness, disenfranchisement, and hopes. Inspired by her mother’s move to America, Cruz wrote her novel as an homage to the strong women who left their home countries for the promise of a better future in the United States. The success of the novel inspired the organization “Dominicanas NYC,” a digital archive of Dominican American life in the 1950s-1990s. Published in 2019, Dominicana was selected as Good Morning America’s Cover to Cover, shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and longlisted for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Awards for Excellence in Fiction.
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