DIQUE DOMINICAN

Bonifacio tells his immigration story as a Dominican raised in Brooklyn in this updated second edition of his debut memoir.

The author was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Section-8 housing in Brooklyn; he moved from poverty to the ivory towers of academia to become a professor of English at the University of Toledo. While his account is a deeply personal story of survival, brilliance, and grit, he also connects his autobiography to a larger history of immigrants and poor, marginalized Americans. “I was, to most of the people who met me and myself, a punk-ass Dominican immigrant,” he writes of his experiences in high school as a self-described “dique gangsta.” “Dique,” the Dominican Spanish word for “supposedly,” became a defining descriptor for Bonifacio’s life as he grappled with fundamental questions of identity. A major theme of the work is the author’s strained relationship with his father. “Papi’s love was rare,” he writes, describing being physically beaten as a child, and the author notes that the fear of his father’s violence “was [his] teacher for [Bonifacio’s] own budding machismo.” The author is brutally honest about himself, emphasizing the ways in which anger fueled his relationship with his family and defined his view of the world around him. Bonifacio’s memoir was originally published in 2017 while the author was finishing his doctorate degree—this updated and expanded edition covers major events in his life since that time (including the birth of his daughter and a budding academic career) while also commenting on the major escalation of “state repression” against immigrants under the second administration of President Donald Trump. The author of two poetry collections, whose work has appeared in The New York Times and other leading national publications, Bonifacio balances conversational, intimate prose (replete with curse words and Spanish phrases translated in footnotes) with a grounding in literary criticism and theory. The text includes bountiful quotes regarding racism, classism, and intersectionality from a range of authors, including bell hooks, James Baldwin, and Karl Marx.

A brutally raw, poignant, and literary coming-of-age memoir.