Junot Díaz’s “Otravida, Otravez” and Hospitalia: The Workings of Hostile Hospitality

The language of hospitality and its intimate opposite, hostility, reverberates insistently in the current political climate, as countries worry about fortifying their borders against waves of migration. This framework has paved the way for the language of hospitality to return as an apt lens for anatomizing current encounters with the Other. This article argues that the hospitality at the heart of Junot Díaz’s story “Otravida, Otravez” (2012) is one that has turned against itself in a manner reminiscent of Derrida’s concept of “hostipitality.” I analyze the two locations of this hostile hospitality in the story, the hospital and the house, arguing that the hospital is its true locus and represents the guarded health of the American Dream.