Abstract
A Latin Caribbean (forced) migration experience is at the centre of Angie Cruz’s 2005 novel, Let It Rain Coffee, which depicts the life and history of the Colón family in three different time periods (the early 1920s, the 1960s, and the 1990s) in the Dominican Republic as well as in New York City. This article focuses on the early 1990s immigrant experience of Esperanza Colón, whose addiction to the television show Dallas becomes illustrative of a cultural identity formed by the ideal of the American Dream and mass culture. Although Esperanza fails to live up to the impossible standards she has set herself, the novel’s presentation of failure as a creative activity (as envisioned by Halberstam, 2011) challenges the hegemony of capitalism and globalization. Instead of reading the novel in terms of the two extremes of success or failure which typically characterize migrant narratives (Pearce, 2010), we focus on Esperanza’s “middle ranges of agency” (Sedgwick, 2003: 13) to show how the commonplace terms in which migration is often presented fail to capture the nuances of immigrant experience at odds with the promise of the metropolis as negotiated by Cruz in the novel.
In the claymation film Chicken Run (2000), the feminist activist chicken, Ginger, attempts to rouse her sisters in the coop to join the revolt. In the midst of a gripping speech, she declares, “We either die free chickens, or we die trying”. Rather than rising to the allure of such binary thinking, the “stupid” chicken, Babs, asks “Are those the only choices?”. Judith Halberstam (2011) picks up on the potential of Babs’ “stupidity”, of humour, of silliness, and most of all of failure as a creative alternative to binary thinking. For Halberstam, failure is not necessarily a stopping off point on the route to success. Instead failure can enable one to explore what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms “middle ranges of agency” (2003: 13). In this article, we draw on the work of Halberstam and Sedgwick to examine the rejection of the grand narrative of migration in which the impoverished migrant manages to integrate into society and achieve financial security through personal endeavour. By “failing”, that is, by tracing the migrant narrative of Esperanza Colón in Angie Cruz’s Let It Rain Coffee (2005), which does not end in wealth or social integration into American culture as the protagonist envisaged it, we open up the middle ranges of agency occupied by the migrant figure. Our goal is thus not to celebrate evidence that Esperanza is successful, but rather to consider whether opting out of the American Dream might not constitute a different way of being than the crude success–failure yardstick provides.
Those Caribbean women writers who are writing “from the heart of colonial and neocolonial centers” (Mardorossian, 2005: 1) define and negotiate themselves multilaterally in relation to both the imaginary Caribbean and the New World metropolis homes. This paper is concerned with one example of this negotiation between the Caribbean and the metropolis in Dominican American Cruz’s Let It Rain Coffee. Although the protagonist of Cruz’s novel, Esperanza Colón, fails to live up to the impossible standards she has set herself, we argue that the novel’s presentation of failure as a creative activity (see Halberstam, 2011) challenges the hegemony of capitalism and globalization.
As such, Cruz’s novel belongs to a similar corpus of novels discussed by Helen Scott (2006) in her analysis of neoliberal globalization as tackled by Caribbean women writers of the post-independence era in the Caribbean nations of Haiti, Guyana, Grenada, and Antigua. According to Scott, the history of US–Caribbean relations generated a unique condition of globalization: economic, cultural, geopolitical, and military (Scott, 2006: 2). Scott terms Caribbean women’s literary traditions born under this influence as “fictions of independence”, which negotiate gender- and class-based struggles in a neocolonialist setting rendering ideas of true independence fictitious (2006: 2). This setting can be a Caribbean, American, or a transnational one, but ultimately, the globalized female subjectivity is formed in an intimate relationship between the two states, as Donette Francis (2011: 57) notes in her discussion of globalized sex work in Cruz’s first novel, Soledad (2001). The historical tension between the Caribbean and the US also sets some conditions for the fiction discussing that relationship; it is by necessity laden with paradoxes, emotionally charged, and never unproblematic.
Instead of reading Cruz’s novel in terms of the two extremes of success or failure which typically characterize migrant narratives (Pearce, 2010), we focus on Esperanza’s “middle ranges of agency” (Sedgwick, 2003: 13) to show how the commonplace terms in which migration is often presented would fail to capture the nuances of immigrant experience at odds with the promise of the metropolis as negotiated by Cruz in the novel.
Writing about the concepts of sameness and difference, Elspeth Probyn illustrates how instead of viewing them as “opposing and static blocks, we might find it refreshing to think about the varying degrees and hues of similarity and difference that constantly inform human life” (2005: 22). Similarly, we can look beyond the seemingly static differential pair of redemption and oppression in Cruz’s novel by focusing on the subtle ways in which Cruz depicts urban migrant life and its failures. Esperanza’s mundane, everyday life experiences of balancing work (in the form of menial care labour) and family (with its dysfunctions) as a sole provider in a typically Caribbean woman-headed household (see Morrissey, 1998) become powerfully contrasted by her obsession with the television show, Dallas, through which Esperanza’s failed American Dream is played out in the novel. Esperanza’s hopes and dreams of a better life are a prime example of what Lauren Berlant (2011) has termed “cruel optimism”: when that which is desired actually prevents the person from flourishing. In Esperanza’s case, she over-invests in “that moral-intimate-economic thing called ‘the good life’” (Berlant, 2011: 2), but equates “the good life” with the possession of objects sold on TV shopping channels. Despite failing to obtain a life like the Ewings in Dallas, Esperanza, towards the end of the novel, begins to emerge from her delusion which has nevertheless sustained her throughout the hard years in New York City.
Let It Rain Coffee depicts the life and history of the Colón family in three different time periods. Although the main narrative follows the characters through the 1980s to the post-millennium age of the internet, flashbacks to the early 1920s and the 1960s create an intertwined series of narratives in which three generations of the Colón family face analogous problems. Although their responses are more contrasting than similar, each narrative allows the reader insights into negotiations between an imagined home of origin and a home of migration. The mirroring of struggles creates a sense of how history repeats itself and, in portraying the failures of these characters, defies the narrative of progress frequently associated with migration (see Pearce, 2010).
At the heart of each narrative is a story of migration. Rearranged in chronological order, the first migration is that of Don Chan who, following a shipwreck, is washed up on the shores of the Dominican Republic as an infant. He is adopted by the Colón family and, since he cannot remember his life before the shipwreck, becomes Dominican in thought, word, and deed. His “success” in negotiating his identity at the total loss of his ethnic heritage is represented through his intimate connection to the very soil of his island home: he forms a successful agricultural collective which feeds those who are being exploited by the capitalist factories. His success is short-lived, as the gardens are destroyed by Trujillo’s soldiers. The rise of the Trujillo regime (1930–1961), in Cruz’s novel at least, reflects an imposition of Western values — the American Dream, capitalism, and a melting pot view of cultural identity. Don Chan’s failure to withstand the pressures of capitalism is connected to his failure to integrate (he is always referred to as Chinese) and also to his belief in a false narrative. Don Chan believes that he has managed to enter Trujillo’s palace and collect a paper knife engraved with his name, and it is on the basis of this belief that he develops confidence, inspires others, and manages to form the collective.
Using the Trujillo uprising of the 1960s as her setting, Cruz introduces the narrative of Don Chan’s son, Santo, who fails to live up to the expectations that he will be a rebel leader like his father. Santo’s creative failure is manifested through his marriage to Esperanza, the daughter of an official within the Trujillo administration. His migration to New York continues to place heterosexual romance centre stage as he follows Esperanza when she decides to move there in search of a better life. Like his father, Santo initially appears to succeed by the measure of the traditional yardstick of romance: marriage and two children. Also like Don Chan, Santo fails to integrate into life beyond the world of the taxi drivers’ radio calls in his new home town, “Nueva York”. And when the romance in which he has invested so heavily proves to be as false a narrative as Don Chan’s entry into the Trujillo homestead, Santo drives to a nightclub prepared to commit adultery but is stabbed to death by a customer. Esperanza is left alone to raise not only their two children but also to care for his ageing father, Don Chan, who by this time is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and severe memory loss. The novel’s historical settings foreground moments when capitalist endeavours are in states of upheaval. The three masculine narratives are also connected through the sexual agency of Miraluz, who desires and is desired by Don Chan, causes sexual impotency in Santo, which drives him into the arms of Esperanza, and finally forms a sexual and business relationship with Santo’s son, Bobby.
We focus on the immigrant experience of the third protagonist: Esperanza Colón, in New York’s Washington Heights in the 1990s. Like Olivia in Cruz’s Soledad, as read by Francis (2011: 59), Esperanza’s “is the story of an ordinary woman facing the intimate pressures of globalization”, where the story is not one of success but rather of failure. We will illustrate the ways in which the naïve Esperanza Colón’s cultural identity, formed in relation to American mass culture, receives tragicomic meanings as her struggle and emerging awareness of the unattainability of the American Dream becomes painfully and funnily portrayed through her obsession with the 1980s television show Dallas. Our particular focus is on a culmination point in the narrative, where Esperanza’s realization of the evaporation of her American Dream through meeting Patrick Duffy on the subway, results in an eventual cognizance of her sense of self in the world as a diasporic being. We argue that the “antiromantic” novel (see Francis, 2011) goes against the grain of the Western redemption narrative (Pearce, 2010), but in doing so, highlights what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003: 13) has termed “middle ranges of agency”. There, the dualism between emancipation and oppression evaporates and subtle, realistic affective formations and experiences become possible outside extremes. In this way, the novel offers a powerful critique of migration and globalization in the context of the Dominican Republic and the US, domestic work, consumption, and the illusion of the American Dream.
Cruz’s novel uses Dallas, the globally popular primetime soap opera on television that originally ran for 14 seasons (1978−91) in the USA and close to a hundred other countries, as the prototypical narrative of capitalist success. Set in President Reagan’s era of US corporate capitalism, the show highlighted the family feuds and manipulative ways of the excessively wealthy. Cruz’s novel, on the other hand, appeared at a time of another Texas family success story, President George W. Bush’s reign, which, in turn, was highlighted by economic stasis and a collapse of the regime that the Reagan era helped set up. Esperanza’s delusion is heightened by her inability to connect her own life with the show’s constructed nature. Even at its height, the show overtly acknowledged its own constructedness, most famously by dismissing a whole season of shows as a dream. Season Nine did not include the character of Bobby Ewing, as the actor who played this role, Patrick Duffy, wished to leave the series. According to the storyline, Bobby is killed in the season finale and the consequent season showed his widow, Pamela, raising their child alone and successfully taking care of her late husband’s share of the company. The season ended with a new contract being formed with Patrick Duffy; in the storyline, his resurrection was explained by dismissing the entire series as Pamela’s nightmare.
When Esperanza watches Dallas in her apartment in New York she is watching repeats, as the show has finished by the time she begins to watch it obsessively. Watching Dallas forms a bridge between her old home in the Dominican Republic and her home in New York. In her island home, she watched Dallas within a community of women who were caught, literally, behind bars: they were locked into their homes to avoid the uprising against the post-Trujillo regime. The show proffers such an alluring image of life in America that she independently arranges her passage to New York, and initially moves alone. As she watches re-runs of Dallas in New York, her viewings are presented in terms of stasis. Just as the show has ended and she can only watch it in loops of repetition, so her daily life reflects similar patterns of stasis and the repetition of the same acts such as going to work and taking care of the family, acts not existing in her perceived alternate reality of Dallas, the time and place of freedom and success.
Read in terms of Halberstam’s proposition that failure and a refusal of mastery function as critiques of capitalism, the stasis and repetition which characterizes Esperanza’s life can be read as Cruz’s subtle interrogation of the migrant experience. Halberstam poses the deliberately counterintuitive argument, “what kinds of reward can failure offer us?” (2011: 3). Her aim is to show through a careful reading of animated children’s films and a variety of photographic and other art how failure, disappointment, and other negative effects can, in fact, help us see alternatives to the “toxic positivity of contemporary life” in which one’s success is determined by her/his winning attitude, not by socio-economic determiners like race, class, and gender (Halberstam, 2011: 3). While Halberstam operates in a queer setting, we can see how in Cruz’s novel, Esperanza’s failure to realize her American dream by “making it” to Dallas and Southfork, becomes in fact an eye-opening success motivating her to return home. In this way, through her experience of failure, Esperanza manages “to confront the gross inequalities of everyday life in the United States” (Halberstam, 2011: 4). As Halberstam recognizes the inevitable link between failure and capitalism, Esperanza, too, eventually sees her compulsive teleshopping consumption as a symptom of unhappy life in a city that promises much, but delivers very little to someone without the structural means such as education or wealth to actually succeed. In the end, she must return home, neither in a liberating moment of success nor in the despair of misery, but in order to highlight the modesty that characterizes immigrant mobility beyond binarisms such as agency–passivity, liberation–repression, or success–failure.
The myth of the American Dream celebrates the agency of the individual, who determines her own success or failure while investing in capitalism through the production and consumption of mass produced goods. Cruz allows her delusional heroine to become a successful consumer: her home is filled with products she has purchased from the shopping channels to the extent that it is these products (many of which are still in their original wrappings) that makes the rooms in the Colón apartment seem cramped. At the end of novel, Esperanza returns to the Dominican Republic with her suitcases filled with products mass-produced at “below-living wages at American-owned factories in the free-trade zones” (Cruz, 2005: 265)
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such as those employing the relatives in the community to which she has returned. One of the bras she brings as a gift for relatives has been sewn in the Dominican Republic. As she spreads out the products she has brought with her, she feels a sense of pride: Maybe she hadn’t accomplished what she’d set out to do just yet, but when she looked at the things she had bought for her family, the history was there in the clothes, she saw her labor. Every piece of clothing she had earned from her own sweat. Every hour of sweat was inside each garment. (277)
The clothes that were produced in American-owned sweatshops, purchased with Esperanza’s sweat as she labours to care for the elderly, are aptly labelled “shit” by her daughter Dallas as the living room floor resembles a “wasteland”. Worst of all, many of the products have still not been paid for. Esperanza has purchased the majority of these goods using credit cards which have enough interest to keep her in debt for decades. The sweat continues to pour off Esperanza as she passes out packages to her many relatives, and she collapses under the strain leaving Dallas to complete the task of handing out the gifts. The goods do not make Esperanza’s relatives grateful or happy. On the contrary, they leave the recipients feeling resentful that they must work so much harder than those who live in comfort in America. The products do not make them content or even fulfil a need; they represent the cruelty of optimistically investing heavily in items that prevent the women from flourishing.
It would be easy to dismiss Esperanza if she were more obviously a fool. But despite her irrepressible optimism — her name is Spanish for “hope” — and her ability to delude herself, we do see that she is able to make judicious choices about how she spends or saves her money. She manages to save enough “penny by penny” by scrimping on sugar and meat to pay for the boat that will take her to Puerto Rico and thence to New York without anyone, even her husband, realizing that she has done so (17). She manages to support her children and father-in-law after Santo’s death. Her credit card bills come from the purchase of consumer goods, not from the meals she continues to prepare for her extended family regardless of the hours she works.
When Esperanza returns to find that Dallas has finished handing out the goods, she recognizes that her daughter has become a woman and wonders how she failed to notice that before. In her moment of failure, after the cheap products that have cost her so dear, Esperanza is momentarily able to see an alternative model of success: her daughter. Upon their arrival in the Dominican Republic, Esperanza’s children (Dallas and Bobby) both become noticeably more mature and take on greater responsibility.
Watching Dallas in the Dominican Republic and New York City
Esperanza Colón arrives in New York City in the early 1980s after fleeing her native Dominican Republic reeling in the aftermath of the Trujillo regime. Initially, she is so filled with her joy and excitement at being there that she cannot see the problems the narrating voice is keen to point out: Back then she didn’t see the buildings as gray, or the city as grimy … She didn’t think twice about the threat of nuclear war, the stock market crashing, the lack of trees, or the fact that the streets had the smell of an impossible dream. The sidewalks had given her a bounce that lifted her up above everyone else’s head. (9)
Reunited with her husband, Santo, who follows her to establish a new life in New York, Esperanza continues to dream of the kind of life she has only seen on television back home in the village of Los Llanos. In New York, instead of watching the escapist telenovelas that are popular among the other Spanish-language immigrants, Esperanza continues to be obsessed with Dallas to the extent that she names her two children Dallas and Bobby (after the show’s central character, Bobby Ewing), and continuously compares her laborious, poor life with the abundance and glamour of the television characters.
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She hummed the Dallas theme song as she went about her days. Mouthing Pamela’s dialogue when she became discouraged. The important thing is to live each day to the fullest and as long as you do, they’ll be the happiest in your life. But no matter how much Esperanza polished her utensils, mirrors, the glass figurines on the shelves, they never shone for long. The dust was persistent. (14)
Living each day “to the fullest” for Pamela Ewing involves taking on her husband’s role in the family firm after she believes her husband Bobby has been killed. The quotation comes from the season which was later dismissed as being Pamela’s dream: Pam was living in a dream world, but one in which she can focus on her son and her satisfying work whilst Raul and Teresa, the Latino/a house staff, take care of the day-to-day tasks of running a home. For Esperanza, who “imagined herself working for a rich family. Just like Raul or Teresa” (14), living life “to the fullest” does not reach beyond housework and the other tasks performed by the Southfork housekeepers. When, like Pam, Esperanza is widowed, she also takes on the role of financial head of the family. Unlike Pam, her husband’s death is not a dream from which she can recover. Esperanza realizes she “had to move on” (145), not only from Santo’s death but also from the world of daydreams and buying items she hopes will create the lifestyle she has seen on TV.
Daydreaming may seem a harmless activity, but as Berlant (2011) shows, instilling hope in ventures that are self-harming — such as Esperanza’s investment in trying to become like the Ewings — is cruel. Cruz subtly connects the dots between daydreaming, the American Dream, and materialism through Esperanza’s obsession with Dallas. In her now classic study on the pleasures of watching Dallas, Ien Ang observes that the soap opera genre was originally designed to “provide some (surrogate) company for housewives living in isolation” (Ang, 1991: 54). Similarly, in her study of Afro-Caribbean migrant women writers, Myriam Chancy (1997: xi) notes how particularly prevalent the sense of alienation is to the experience of women in exile. While Chancy focuses on writers of African descent, we can see how their stories resonate with the one told by Cruz. Esperanza, too, feels alone and isolated by life in the impersonal metropolis, where she is burdened by the dysfunctions in her family life, which extend far beyond the death of her husband. Her son Bobby is sent to juvenile detention and her father-in-law Don Chan’s increasing senility demands Esperanza’s constant attention. In addition, she is faced with a large credit card debt amassed due to her habit of ordering consumer goods through home shopping catalogues and television shows that she watches in addition to Dallas. Ang describes the pleasures of each Dallas-watching event as the viewer’s moment of freedom “from the prohibitions and demands of society” (Ang, 1991: 22). Esperanza escapes her daily grind by entering into an alternative world. At the same time, however, there is no escaping Dallas’s very Americanness, namely its ability to convey the American Dream in its full materiality: such as the cars, the oil wealth, the hair, and the décor of the Southfork ranch. Ang reminds us that soap operas (first on the radio, later on the television), received their genre name for the commercials, soap manufacturers, who sponsored the shows (Ang, 1991: 54). They thus have intrinsic ties to mass consumption, which in the case of Dallas is further amplified by the conjoined images of Americanness, wealth, and success to the show’s international audience for whom the show may have been one of the few if not the only window to the United States.
In order to illustrate the connections between the television soap and American cultural imperialism we may look at the historical precedent set by soap advertising in colonialism. In her book Imperial Leather (1995), Anne McClintock shows through her reading of Victorian soap advertisements that the imperialist project was inextricably linked to gender and sexuality. Imperialism developed through racialized images of domesticity, also referred to by her as commodity racism (1995: 33). Esperanza is a domestic worker as a personal aide to an ailing old man. She is mesmerized by the American Dream and the consumerism it seems to entail. She becomes the modern-life version of the other side of the colonial cult of domesticity which she imagines is available for her, too.
Waking up from the dream
Esperanza’s disillusionment with the unattainability of her American Dream dawns on her only after a culminating scene in the narrative, where she happens to encounter the actor of Dallas’s Bobby, Patrick Duffy, on the subway in New York. During and after the tragicomic incident, Esperanza’s confusion of fiction for fact comes to lead her illusions to collapse with the realities of her harsh immigrant life. In the scene, Esperanza spots the actor on the subway, mistakes him for Bobby Ewing and approaches him. The ensuing conversation captures Esperanza’s “well-practised” failure, 3 as she experiences a life-changing encounter with her hero, Bobby Ewing of Dallas:
— Excuse me, Bobby, she said.
— My name is Patrick.
— Are you sure? Bobby Ewing from la television, no?
— I did play Bobby, but—
— Yo lo sabía, she said and looked around to show people how right she was. And why didn’t they look excited? (248)
Esperanza goes on to show Patrick Duffy photos of her children and, refusing to believe his insistence on being Patrick Duffy and not Bobby Ewing, she proceeds to advise him on moisturizer use, as the windy Texas weather is bound to chafe his skin when he’s horse-riding. Bobby/Patrick does not respond favourably to Esperanza’s openness, and Esperanza does not understand why he is upset.
Upping the ante, Esperanza pushes on as she is determined to establish meaningful contact with the man she believes to know well after having followed his life for years on television: She wished one of her kids was there to see him. No one would believe her. Maybe she should get the autograph as proof.
— Give me something of yours.
— Are you insane?
— I don’t know that word, she lied.
— Insane, Patrick said and twirled his finger around his ear. (249–50)
Esperanza becomes exasperated and questions Patrick Duffy about riding the train despite his glamorous life on TV. She feels deceived by Bobby and accuses him of lying on television. In this moment of disorientation, Esperanza portrays publicly her lack of awareness of her place in the world.
Sara Ahmed (2006) discusses orientation as the ways in which we come to inhabit the world and form identities: the phenomenology of sexual identity can be seen as the ways in which we are oriented, as a sexual orientation (in other words, the ways in which we reach for objects, become directed, or inhabit space). Cultural identity, too, can be viewed in terms of the idea of orientation. For those displaced, cultural identity is formed in a constant flux of unfixity between several points of reference, which often incites feelings of being lost. “But”, as Ahmed explains, “‘getting lost’ still takes us somewhere; and being lost is a way of inhabiting space by registering what is not familiar” (2006: 7). Bobby Ewing and his life on the Southfork ranch has been a familiar reference point for Esperanza since her adolescence; she has oriented her own migration narrative through the show. Since Patrick Duffy does not confirm her understanding of her place in the world, Esperanza becomes disoriented.
Esperanza unleashes a tirade on Patrick Duffy, where she accuses him of lies and playing tricks on her. Patrick Duffy is confused:
— What do you want from me, lady? Please calm down.
— I want to go to Dallas. Esperanza felt stupid.
— I want to live in a house like yours with horses and chandeliers and crystal glasses.
— I’m sorry, lady.
— Not even Pamela… she doesn’t live in Dallas either?
When the subway doors opened and Patrick Duffy rushed out with the crowds on the train, Esperanza watched his back.
— Bye, Bobby! Thank you for nothing. (250–1, emphasis added)
Esperanza’s feeling that she is “stupid” shows an emerging self-awareness and humiliation at misunderstanding and being misunderstood. Halberstam notes that stupidity is “profoundly gendered” (2011: 55), and generally less tolerated in women than in white men, whose stupidity is often celebrated in comedy films like Dumb and Dumber or Dude, Where’s My Car?, which Halberstam dissects to show how someone’s failure is indeed portrayed as some other’s success. For Esperanza, however, feeling stupid marks the end of her delusions and is thus a tipping point in her own knowledge production and ordering. Esperanza’s thought process reveals how “the naïve or the ignorant may in fact lead to a different set of knowledge practices” (Halberstam, 2011: 12). Everything she has believed or known thus far is no longer the same.
After the conversation is over, Esperanza comes to think of her position in life which, thanks to the encounter with Patrick Duffy, she now sees in a completely different light: Bobby Ewing wasn’t as handsome as Esperanza imagined. Seeing him changed everything. She wasn’t going to Dallas, or California for that matter. Over sixteen years in Nueva York, hoping to live her dream and suddenly someone turned on the lights and she was awake. (253)
Esperanza’s sense of betrayal from the disappointing meeting comes to encompass her whole life in the United States, as the dream of a better life thanks to Dallas had now been destroyed. The meeting on the subway highlights the failure of Esperanza’s American life. The “promise of happiness” (Ahmed, 2010) that the United States represented to her turned out to be illusory and disenchanting.
Esperanza’s emerging self-awareness after the encounter with Patrick Duffy enables her to rediscover herself as a diasporic being cognizant of her orientation in the world. Esperanza recognizes that her dreams have not only been unattainable, but they have also prevented her from flourishing. She now sees herself as having slept through her life in the US until the harsh wake-up call of the subway encounter with Patrick Duffy. Woken from her personal American dream, Esperanza no longer feels disoriented. She leaves the subway to go straight to the credit union to settle a payment plan for her debts. She then goes home to take charge of the family situation, where her father-in-law’s dementia has deteriorated. Furthermore, in a rather unsettling twist of events, Hush, her daughter’s best friend staying with the family, is about to give birth to the baby conceived in rape by her abusive step-father. Not long after Esperanza’s disillusionment, Hush dies in childbirth after having accepted Esperanza’s son Bobby’s proposal of marriage. Next, the old man for whom Esperanza has worked as a caregiver, dies. Fortified by her enlightening encounter with Patrick Duffy on the subway, Esperanza decides it is time to take her family — Dallas, Bobby, the late Hush’s baby Consuelo, and her ailing father-in-law, Don Chan — back to Los Llanos in the Dominican Republic.
The novel thus ends in another type of exodus, one in reverse from the original journey from the Caribbean to the United States. This movement of repatriation is tied to the problems of global capitalism and mass culture, but in a way which has a leftist political denouement. Back in the Dominican Republic, a new type of enterprise is started by the family’s old activist friend Miraluz, whose life appears not to have gone anywhere since she has remained close to Los Llanos her whole life and works in a factory, sewing underwear for Victoria’s Secret. Taking the novel in a full circle back to Don Chan’s establishment of the collective gardens, Miraluz sets up a women’s collective who produce their own brand of underwear. Bobby’s self-learned IT-expertise helps Miraluz market her business over the internet in order to realize a dream that exercises “socially responsible capitalism for the people” (278).
There is no suggestion that Esperanza will invest her labour in Miraluz’s enterprise, or that her life might otherwise improve as a result of rejection of the Dallas dream. In Los Llanos, she expresses the end of her optimistic investment in consumer products by dispensing them to others. She does not find the activity empowering, but she does at least regain the middle ranges of agency that enabled her to save successfully to flee the Dominican Republic in the first place.
Lives that go nowhere
How do we read novels that resist the European redemption narrative (Pearce, 2010: 151)? These are characterized by Lynne Pearce as migrant texts which, contrary to the idea of mobility inherent in the idea of migration, are marked by stasis and immobility. In a word, they seem to be “life stories that don’t go anywhere” (Pearce, 2010: 152). While Pearce focuses on multicultural novels dealing with the migration experience in Manchester, we can detect similar trends in Cruz’s novel, which denotes how the life of a migrant domestic worker in New York is defined by stasis and the condition of being stuck despite seeming activity in working hard. Esperanza invests in “an impossible dream” (9) of American consumer capitalism which ultimately contributes to her utter disappointment with American life. Being a good consuming subject within a consumer–capitalist society in fact sets her up for disappointment in terms of personal happiness.
Pearce contends that three well-established phenomena — the traditional European narrative form, reading as a feminist in the 1980s, and the ideology of migration in a multicultural society — all share common characteristics in that they are all inherently redemptive in nature: they stress agency, moving forwards and progress in a teleological manner. However, sometimes novels dealing with migration, as well as migration itself, seem to go nowhere and grant no life-bettering options for the subjects in question. This poses a new dilemma for feminist readings in the twenty-first century: how to read as a feminist if and when the narrative being read does not seem to grant access to redemption and agency for women? In reading novels that are seemingly “beyond redemption”, on the one hand, we might be tempted to interpret texts according to the Western redemptive impulse (even if they seem to go nowhere), in an effort to celebrate a woman’s agency. In the case of Let it Rain Coffee, this type of reading would exaggerate the importance of Esperanza’s newfound self-awareness. On the other hand, Pearce suggests, one might be tempted to focus on a text’s despair and celebrate its accurate mining of “the complexity of the forces (social and psychological) that continue to oppress women” (Pearce, 2010: 159), a position rejected by Cruz as she contrasts Miraluz’s successful business with Esperanza’s debt.
Instead of taking the routes proffered above, Pearce calls for the reader’s self-aware introspection in making the decision of knowing “when it is useful to resist a redemptive reading of a text, and when it is not” (2010: 163). The question then arises for the purposes of reading Cruz’s novel, whether to “grant” Esperanza redemption by our reading or not, bearing in mind that going with the redemption narrative one runs the risk of wish fulfilment on behalf of Esperanza and her family. While on the other hand, resisting redemption could be a refusal to see the nuances by deeming the novel entirely hopeless, while failing to see middle ranges of agency in the form of “various, subtle and ‘minor’ emotions” (Pearce, 2010: 157), that may in fact shed more light on the experience of a migrant domestic worker in New York.
Pearce suggests that readers are less likely to feel empowered to intervene in the plot by seeing minor redemptions if the novel’s culture is alien to us. Similarly, we may over-interpret a minor redemption as a triumph because of our adopted Eurocentric feminist script of celebrating agency. It is easier to be critical of our own culture than detect its nuances and subtle undertones. While the tendency of Western feminists to generalize and gloss over differences existing between Third World Women has been well-established since Chandra Mohanty’s (1991) influential article “Under Western Eyes”, the recent affective turn of feminism (see, for example, Koivunen, 2010) prompts us to rethink generalizations we might be prone to make based on affective subtlety, which may go undetected when reading texts, such as Cruz’s, offering little in terms of explicit emancipations.
The ability to provide for a family in New York on single wages, like Esperanza does, cannot be considered a life of failure. Yet, from her own perspective, Esperanza fails in the US, as highlighted by the tragic-comic encounter with Patrick Duffy. This public failure of dreams and reality can be seen as a form of refusal, if we follow Halberstam, who notes: “We can also recognize failure as a way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline and as a form of critique” (2011: 88). Esperanza’s experience can be seen as a type of critique of the dominant redemptive model of migration, where the self-made migrant works her way up the social ladder with just her attitude and hard work. Showing the illusory nature of this dream, Esperanza’s failure is a reminder of how antiromantic migrant lives can be in not offering what Francis calls “grand narrative closure, settlement or … reconciliation” (Francis, 2011: 54). The novel’s resistance to a happy ending can be seen, according to Francis in her reading of Cruz’s first novel, as a feminist writing strategy which shuns a romantic climax (Francis, 2011: 51). Rather, the novel is committed to bringing to light the sombre and mundane reality of transnationalism, stripped of the bright side of migration offered by those accounts that stress its possibilities, promises, and redemptions.
In keeping with the modesty that characterizes the Colóns’ life in New York City, the narrative does not offer a triumphant and redemptive return home in the end. Rather, it proposes something more mundane: an understated yet cautiously, no longer cruelly, optimistic return, whose only success is the end to static life that goes nowhere in New York. The escape Esperanza has dreamed about in the form of watching Dallas turns out exactly the opposite; an escape from the prison of metropolis to the place she once could not wait to escape from, home. It is difficult to speculate on the ultimate success of the Colóns’ return migration as the novel ends quite soon after the return. While Esperanza realizes she has not succeeded in her American dream, she feels she can still be satisfied with her contribution: “Maybe she hadn’t accomplished what she had set out to do just yet, but when she looked at all the things she’d brought for her family, the history was there inside the clothes, she saw her labor” (277). In the end, she feels relieved (286) as she spreads her husband’s ashes in the family’s graveyard in Los Llanos, but does not, nevertheless, feel like the rural village is her home (286). Instead, she has dreams of selling most of their land after Don Chan’s passing in order to pay off her debts. Even if the land in Los Llanos is not that important to her, she still wishes to keep a plot of land for the family’s graves in order to be able to bury her relatives there.
Happy at the family’s return migration, the ailing Don Chan finally gets his wish of return as he knows he is dying (266). In a symbolic scene where Don Chan is rejoined with the land he has missed so dearly in the past decade he has been living in New York City, he sees visions of his ancestors and finally feels joy at being home at last. The novel ends in Don Chan’s joyful homecoming scene back in Los Llanos and thus again undoes dualisms in portraying a dying man’s affective mood as one of cautious hope instead of despair.
In the same way that Don Chan arrives at the end of his life on a modestly positive note, the negotiation of Caribbean versus the metropolis in Cruz’s writing is far more nuanced than the conventional vistas of migration narratives as either redemptive or repressive. As Babs, the “stupid” hen in Chicken Run points out with her question, success or failure are not the only choices (see Halberstam, 2011: 128–9). Instead, women like Esperanza and Miraluz are not only active agents of their lives and households despite tragedies and hardships, but they are also migration’s creative failures who demonstrate the inability of conventional terms to portray the subtleties of their lives. The micro-power of Caribbean women in migrant families, in producing counter-hegemonic ways of living through embodying as well as defying failure, thus destabilizes societal structures far too rigid to contain or accommodate them.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. However, Elina Valovirta’s funding is by the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS).