Author, MIT professor and Guanabee favorite (teehee) Junot Diaz spoke with NPR about immigration, a topic the Dominican transplant knows a little something about. He mentions, among other things, how being away from his place of birth place lead him to idealize it, saying

“I don’t think that I ever would have thought so fondly of Santo Domingo had I stayed there my whole life.”

Diaz also touches upon the role the cruelty of children had in shaping his childhood experience (despite how popular and good-looking his family was) and how, upon growing older, he came to realize that there are not necessarily two, but multiple Americas - some versions that he can fit snugly into and some that continue to see him as an outcast. Click here to listen to his interview.

So what, according to Junot Diaz, does it mean to be an American? For him, the answer lies in our need to find an answer to that very question.

We come away from listening to this interview thinking of Junot as a family member sitting across from us this Thanksgiving, giving us the side-eye while loudly digesting his turkey and tostones: With a mixture of loving possessiveness and a good-natured disgust bred from familiarity. When he tells the interviewer that immigration is something that’s been constantly talked about while never really being talked about, he gives the impression of owning the subject so much more than anyone else who has ever attempted to partake in it. Rest easy, social scientists and exile communities, politicians and poets, activists and illegal immigrants: Junot is here to tell you what’s what.

Against Cindy’s advice, we just started reading his Pulitzer-winning tome, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and, so far, we’re into it! It’s like… Well. The best way we know how to describe reading Junot Diaz is as such: It’s like getting drunk with the only other Latino on your floor freshman year. You’re away from home and meeting people actually named “Chad” for the first time in your life. You’re desperately trying to make new friends while making an effort to ignore your mother’s predictions that, one day, you’re going to miss eating boliche despite the fact that she served it like twice a week, every week of your childhood. And here he is, this guy whose name ends in “Z,” whose accent seems warm and familiar and whose pockets are brimming over with cultural touchstones for the two of you to talk about and clasp against your palms. He loves to talk about himself when drunk, regaling you with funny stories from his childhood and not allowing you to get a word in edgewise. He’s funny, charming and a little self-absorbed, but it’s ok because you know that eventually the night and this conversation will end and that, in the future, you’ll wave to him when you see him on campus but politely decline his invitations to have lunch together because what he partakes in are not conversations, but monologues. That’s what Junot is like to us.

So we’ll be sure to save him a piece of pumpkin flan this year… but avoid being caught in conversation while waiting in line to use the bathroom.

Junot Diaz On ‘Becoming American’ [NPR]