The Domestic Worker in Latinx Fiction: The Discursive Formulation of Latinidad

Abstract: The figure of the domestic worker in Latinx and Latin American fiction is a prominent character, permeating multiple genres and geographic locations, spanning time and space alike. As postcolonial and feminist criticism beg us to engage with the positionality of characters in literature, a more thorough consideration of this racialized and gendered character is warranted. Written by authors who migrated to the United States in adolescence, Julia Alvarez's How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones (1998) benefit from readings that localize them in the historical and socio-political context of Hispaniola, while also considering how their Haitian domestic worker characters – Chucha and Amabelle – embody conceptions of race and national belonging and establish symbolic borders between the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the United States. A reading of these texts with a focus on these character's positionality – alongside the authors' narrative strategies – allows us to more closely understand the embodied aspect of nation and the performative, volatile concept of identity and borders within a migratory context of latinidad.