El Otro Lado: Díaz and Saldívar Navigate Transamericanity

Abstract This essay explains how Junot Díaz’s stories show the lasting impact of colonialism and dictatorship on everyday life, especially for immigrants and their children living between cultures. I argue that struggles over belonging, love, and identity are shaped by history and power even when characters do not name those forces directly. I interpret Junot Díaz’s fiction as an account of “the other side”: a peripheral perspective produced by migration, racialization, and the enduring afterlife of colonial violence. Dominican and U.S. histories, especially dictatorship, imperial entanglements, and postindustrial economic restructuring, shape the motives, relationships, and moral horizons of Díaz’s characters. Methodologically, the essay combines close reading with interdisciplinary framing: using diaspora theory to parse displacement, decolonial theory (via the concept of coloniality) to track the persistence of power/knowledge hierarchies, and comparative literary analysis to set Díaz alongside Gloria Anzaldúa and Rudolfo Anaya. Díaz’s “third place,” language, and genre play (fabulism, fantasy/science fiction) render colonial history as lived structure. Díaz shows how coloniality distorts intimacy, masculinity, and community through both material constraint and epistemic domination, and that “decolonial love” names a fragile but real form of resistance and healing. I conclude that colonialism is first a material enterprise whose cultural residues persist, and that reading the “carnality of knowledge” in Díaz clarifies how agency can emerge, even in exile, as a world-making practice.