Ambiguous Seductions: Doppelgängers, Suciogenesis, and the Mask of Tíguerismo in Junot Díaz's "Drown" and "Miss Lora"

In Junot Díaz's fictional cosmos, hegemonic power often takes the form of fukú americanus.¹ In the prologue of Díaz's novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008), Yunior de las Casas, the principle narrator, defines fukú americanus as the European colonization and settlement of the Caribbean and the Americas (1-2). Figuratively embodied in the personage and legacy of Christopher Columbus, fukú americanus is the European rape of the New World, the discourse of white supremacy, and the public silence that continues to sustain and perpetuate these traumatizing realities. In a 2012 interview with Paula M. L. Moya, Díaz implies that the first step in dispelling fukú americanus is to recognize and name it: "How can you change something if you won't even acknowledge its existence, or if you downplay its significance? White supremacy is the great silence of our world, and in it is embedded much of what ails us as a planet." In this interview, Díaz reveals that his fixation with the rapacious fukú americanus conceit appears in his first book, Drown (1996):

I always wrote Yunior as being a survivor of sexual abuse. He has been raped, too. The hint of this sexual abuse is something that's present in Drown and it is one of the great silences in Oscar Wao…. Perhaps it's too great a silence, which is to say, it's probably too small a trace to be read. Only visible, if visible at all, by inference. By asking: what is really bothering Yunior? Why is Yunior such a dog? Just because? Or is there something deeper? Think about it: isn't promiscuity another typical reaction to sexual abuse? Compulsive promiscuity is certainly Yunior's problem. A compulsive promiscuity that is a national masculine ideal in some ways and whose roots I see in the trauma of our raped pasts. Like I said: it's probably not there at all—too subtle. But the fact of Yunior's rape certainly helped me design the thematic economy of the book.

("Search")²

This essay accepts Díaz's challenge to trace the muted inferences of Yunior's sexual traumas in key stories from Drown and This Is How You Lose Her (2012), two short story collections in which Yunior de las Casas is the common protagonist.³ Close textual and cultural analysis of the short stories "Drown" and "Miss Lora" reveal that Díaz uses doppelgängers to suggest that the propensity for social and sexual dominance is not particular to any one gender identity or sexual orientation. In addition, these stories demonstrate that Yunior's sociosexual proclivity for promiscuity and infidelity originate not only from the philandering models of his brother, father, and grandfather but also from his enabling mother and the traumatizing "seductions" of his best friend Beto and his neighbor Miss Lora.⁴ Furthermore, contrasting Díaz's representation of hypermasculinity as a social construct in "Drown" to his view of it as a sociobiological construct in "Miss Lora" confirms how the neuroscientific turn of the 1990s overtly shaped his concept of tíguerismo.⁵

Tíguerismo, a by-product of fukú americanus, is the Dominican vernacular term for the alpha-male practice and culture of hypermasculinity. Shawn Levy notes that in Dominican vernacular culture, a tíguere is a heterosexual alpha-male whose masculine status is dependent on his social dominance over other men and his sexual conquests of women (10). Yunior struggles with taking on the mantle of a tíguere. His cultural socialization as a tíguere is in perpetual strife with his inner pariguayo.⁶ In a 2007 interview with Juleyka Lantigua, Díaz defines what it means to be a pariguayo:

There is a sense among many writers of color that the most invisible figure that was sitting between all of us was the nerd…. And the concept of Oscar, the concept of this poor nerd, the concept of the real version of everything that we're performing against—at least...