"'They Will Invent What They Need to Survive': Narrating Trauma in Contemporary Ethnic American Women's Fiction" analyzes novels by Octavia Butler, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, and Julia Alvarez through the lens of contemporary theories of trauma, tracing the ways in which survivors struggle to construct narratives that contain and make sense of their experiences. Many of the major theorists of trauma studies emphasize the impossibility of re-capturing traumatic events through creating narratives even while recognizing that the survivor's need to tell her story persists. In my project, however, I explore the ways in which the Kindred, Stigmata, Paradise, The Joy Luck Club, Sula, The Temple of My Familiar, and In the Time of the Butterflies extend theories that insist too readily on the survivor's inability to accurately or completely re-member by depicting characters who, despite difficulty, present narrative accounts of their painful memories. In my own readings of the texts, I emphasize that the complexities highlighted by these texts ultimately foster our deeper understanding of the traumatized subject and her attempts to empower herself through testimony.

Background: Compared to non-Latino whites, Latinos in the United States carry a disproportionate burden in mortality due to diabetes, chronic liver disease, and cirrhosis, and there is evidence that immigrants’ health behaviors and outcomes worsen as they become more acculturated. Additionally, the neighborhoods where Latinos live influence their health behaviors and outcomes through availability of retailers and products (such as fast food restaurants, liquor stores), density of advertising and advertisement language, and whether the neighborhood is an ethnic enclave. In this work, I examine the effects of acculturation and these built environment factors on diet, BMI, and alcohol use in Dominican Latinas, with a focus on the potential interaction between individual- and neighborhood-level variables. Methods: Dominican Latinas over 40 were recruited from target neighborhoods in northern Manhattan and western Bronx as part of a larger study, and invited to complete a survey (N=420). I used mapping software (ArcGIS) to merge this survey data with intensive street audit data collected near participants’ residences (N=229 street sides). I supplemented the neighborhood audit with data from a reliable business database (ReferenceUSA). The analytical approach differed based on the structure of each hypothesized model. For moderated mediation models, I used a percentile bootstrap to obtain model estimates and confidence intervals at different percentiles of the moderator. For models without moderated mediation, I used OLS regression, logistic regression, or Poisson GLM, depending on the distribution of the outcome. Results: When analyzing diet and BMI outcomes, I found that negative influences in the built environment (such as fast food retailer density and processed food advertising in English and Spanish) were associated with higher BMI, but only in the least acculturated participants in the sample. There were no significant effects of positive influences in the built environment (such as fresh food retailers and fresh food advertisements) at any level of acculturation. For alcohol outcomes, less acculturated participants were less likely to report drinking, and this effect was strongest among those with greater alcohol retailer density near their residences. Number of Latino owned businesses (a measure of whether an area is an ethnic enclave) was sometimes protective and other times detrimental, depending on participant acculturation and the specific outcome measured. Conclusions: There is evidence that less acculturated Latinas are more susceptible to negative influences of the built environment than their more acculturated counterparts, and have higher BMIs due to these contextual factors. However, lower acculturation may be protective for alcohol outcomes. The effects of ethnic enclave neighborhoods on health are complex and dependent on both individual-level acculturation and the specific outcome investigated. The findings in this work highlight the importance of considering individual and contextual factors concurrently when modeling health behaviors and outcomes in Latinos.

Narratives of resisting the Trujillo regime are so prevalent in Dominican-American literature that it seems Dominican-American authors must write about Trujillo to be deemed authentically Dominican-American. Within these Trujillo narratives there seems to be two main ways to talk about resistance. “The resistance,” an organized entity that actively and consciously opposes the Trujillo regime, can be seen in stories like those told about the Mirabal sisters. The other resistance narrates how characters capitalize on opportunities to disrupt business or political functions, thus disrupting the Trujillo machine. This resistance works much like Ben Highmore's explanation of de Certeau's resistance in that “it limits flows and dissipates energies” (104). Characters from the socio-economic lower-class typically use this type of resistance because they are not recognized by nor allowed direct access to the regime. My thesis focuses on the latter type of resistance through my study of Angie Cruz's Let It Rain Coffee and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Both authors narrate instances of unrecognized resistance against Trujillo, but they also articulate modern resistance to economic, racial, and gender pressures, such as materialism and hyper-masculinity, through Trujillo narratives. While these narratives create a space for Dominican-Americans of different gender, class, and race, they also create Trujillo as a marker of Dominican literature, perpetuating the idea of Trujillo as inextricably connected to Dominican identity and obfuscating more complex issues of race and gender in Dominican culture.