Afro-Dominican American Women Writers: Gender and Race in Angie Cruz’s Soledad and Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints

In the novels by Afro-Dominican American female authors, Angie Cruz’s Soledad 2001 and Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints 2002 , I argue that gender and race intervene in the representation of the Dominican diaspora in the United States through transnational migratory experiences. I suggest that Cruz and Rosario employ a matriarchal lineage to recuperate women’s agency in their novels of the Dominican diaspora, Soledad and Song of the Water Saints, to offer an alternative perspective of transnational experiences. They develop female characters, be it in the Dominican countryside or in Latino urban spaces of New York City, that are often marginalized, exoticized, or forgotten in the official discourse of the history of Hispaniola