From Locus Classicus to Locus Lumpen: Junot Díaz’s “Aurora”

In “Aurora,” a short story published in his 1996 collection Drown, Junot Díaz transforms the mythical character into a contemporary woman. Aurora abandons the unspecified space of myth and is relocated to the barrio. She becomes a drug addict who, like the goddess who salutes the new day, is homeless. She has no permanent home in the barrio, aside from the apartments she and Lucero, the narrator, break into, the juvie [Juvenile Detention] and the Hacienda. In the midst of these non-places, Aurora can only authorize herself through her art, the small-scale dawns she leaves on the walls of the apartments she occupies, and the violent lines she scratches on Lucero. In downgrading and relocating the goddess, Díaz barrioizes high literature and carves this violent clash of cultures and languages on the parchment of American literature.