Drown (short story collection)

Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and came with his family to New Jersey when he was a young boy. When asked if he remembers the experience, he says: "If I burn your entire country down, would you remember being six or seven? There is nothing like the trauma of losing one's country and gaining another. It makes recollection very, very sharp." Díaz's father came to the U.S. first, got a job at a Reynolds aluminum warehouse in Elizabeth, N.J., and Díaz, his mother, and four siblings followed five years later in 1974. The people living in his neighborhood, Díaz says, were "colorful, poor, working, and transitional," and the area itself was "no joke," but his family was "already accustomed to a very rough-and-tumble upbringing." Of himself, Díaz says, "I was a child. I didn't speak English, and I experienced the competitiveness of America, and it's a profoundly cruel childhood culture.”[2]

Díaz attended Kean College in Union, New Jersey for one year before transferring and ultimately completing his B.A. at Rutgers University in 1992. Yunior would become central to much of Díaz's work and Díaz would later explain: "My idea, ever since Drown, was to write six or seven books about him that would form one big novel." [3] He earned his MFA from Cornell University in 1995, where he wrote most of his first collection of short stories.

As David Gates wrote in his The New York Times review of Drown: "In five of these ten stories, his narrator is young Ramon de las Casas, called Yunior, whose father abandons his wife and children for years before returning to the Dominican Republic and bringing them back with him to New Jersey. In other stories, the nameless tellers may or may not be Yunior, but they're all young Latino men with the same well-defended sensitivity, uneasy relations with women and obsessive watchfulness."[4]

• Ramon de las Casas or “Yunior”- An immigrant from the Dominican Republic and often the main character and narrator of the stories.
• Rafa- Yunior’s older brother who he has a complicated and sometimes belligerent relationship with.
• Madai- The younger sister of Yunior and Rafa.
• Virta- Yunior’s mother and wife of Ramon. She is seen as very beautiful and works in a chocolate factory to provide for her children while Ramon is living in the U.S.
• Ramón- Father of Yunior, Rafa and Madai. Ramon leaves his family in Santo Domingo to travel to the U.S. and gain citizenship in order for them to join him. Though, once he arrives in U.S., he marries someone else and tries to forget about his family, he eventually brings them over. Ramon is seen often cheating on his wife and abusing his children.
• Nilda- Ramon’s wife whom he marries in the U.S. to gain citizenship.

Drown was nominated for the 1997 Quality Paperback Book "New Voices award and "Ysrael and “Fiesta, 1980” were included in Best American Short Stories 1996 and 1997.[7]

Gates writes of Díaz's characters: "Mainstream American literature from William Bradford to Toni Morrison has always been obsessed with outsiders; its Hucks and Holdens are forever duking it out with the King's English, and writers as different as Ezra Pound, Zora Neale Hurston and Donald Barthelme have delighted in defiling the pure well with highbrow imports, nonstandard vernacular and Rube Goldberg coinages. Despite his professed discomfort, Mr. Díaz is smart enough to play his hand for all it's worth." He also compares Díaz to Raymond Carver, writing: "Mr. Diaz transfigures disorder and disorientation with a rigorous sense of form. He whips story after story into shape by setting up parallel scenes."[8]

The San Francisco Chronicle described Drown: "This stunning collection of stories offers an unsentimental glimpse of life among the immigrants from the Dominican Republic—and other front-line reports on the ambivalent promise of the American dream—by an eloquent and original writer who describes more than physical dislocation in conveying the price that is paid for leaving culture and homeland behind."[9]