Migration and Identity

The Poet X is at its most basic level a story about what happens when the first-generation female child of immigrants to the United States attempts to forge her own identity. The central conflict of the novel originates from tension between Dominican Altagracia Batista’s aspirations for children and the different aspirations Dominican-American Xiomara Batista has for herself.

For Altagracia, the Dominican Republic is home. It is the place where she was a young woman who was certain about her future with the church. She presents the move to the United States and her marriage, which she describes as a financial arrangement, as falls from grace from which she has never recovered. Trapped in nostalgia for the past in the Dominican Republic, Altagracia sees her life not as the fulfillment of a mythical American dream but rather as the best of a bad bargain...