Junot Díaz, a Dominican-American author and MIT professor, addressed immigration policies, neoliberalism and surviving as a person of color in predominantly white institutions in a lecture to a packed David Saul Smith Union yesterday evening.
The speech was the keynote address for the symposium, “Rendering Dominicans of Haitian Descent Stateless,” led by Roger Howell, Jr. Professor of History Allen Wells and Assistant Professor of Anthropology Greg Beckett.
Díaz began by explaining that he would be giving an “artist talk,” rather than an academic or authoritative lecture. He began the talk by responding to a student’s question that he had been unable to answer during the book signing session before the talk.
“[How] did you make it this far in these predominantly white institutions?” Díaz said the student had asked him. “Like did you lose part of yourself? Did you find a space?”
“I was so busy self-victimizing because I think we all have a lot of survivor’s guilt,” said Díaz. “What does it mean to survive in a culture that did not mean for us to survive?”
Díaz eventually moved on to the “lecture” portion of his speech, where he addressed racial attitudes, immigration policies and neoliberal policies that create the same problems regardless of the political, social or economic context, in both the Dominican Republic and the United States.
“Whether I’m talking about [the Dominican Republic] or the U.S., we’re talking about societies that are so deeply embedded in neoliberal regimes that similarities begin to emerge almost unlooked for,” Díaz said.
He focused on citizenship as an essential form of “psychic capital,” meaning a good or status with no real basis, particularly in an era of restrictive immigration policies.
“Citizenship is a technology for granting people humanity,” he said.
Díaz compared how both the United States and the Dominican Republic sought to blame problems on immigrants.
“You don’t have to look farther than Trump to see that there is this sense in this nation, being circulated by the elites, that the real problem … is that the presence of immigrants is devaluing the psychic capital of what it means to be an American,” he said. “The Dominican Republic has convinced the nation that the biggest problem in the nation is not the most malign, corrupt political administration that we have seen since the dictatorship … the problem is that we have immigrants.”
At the end of the address, students impatiently stood in line to get autographs and pictures with Díaz. Many students felt that, largely because of his casual and non-authoritative style, his stories and his message resonated deeply, regardless of whether or not they’d had those same experiences.
“He didn’t censor his language, not as in not being politically correct, but not censoring his language as in not using academic words all the time and using very colloquial speech,” said Giselle Hernandez ’19. “It resonates more with people who aren’t surrounded by all this academia all the time and I really like how his words were powerful just in his word selection.”
“Even though necessarily I haven’t shared a lot of the experiences that he’s had, I can feel the sort of the pain that he’s went through and all of the experiences and all of the [things] he’s gone through to become the person he is today,” said Ryan Ali-Shaw ’19. “More than anything, I think it gives me hope that everything’s gonna be OK because he turned out OK.”
Though Hannah Berman ’18 enjoyed the talk, she wished a more varied crowd had turned out.
“It was kind of a self-selecting crowd, though, and I would’ve liked to see people from all sides of campus there,” she said.
Wells was pleased with the address.
“I think [Díaz] catered to students and I think he was able to reach students in a way that someone like me, as a professor, couldn’t, and I think that was really powerful,” he said.