Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and overall toast of the literary world, has been made a target for archery by the Dominican Republic’s consul in New York for protesting the government’s immigration policies. Consulado General Eduardo Selman accused Díaz of being “anti-Dominican” before stripping him of the Order of Merit he was honored with back in 2009.
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Díaz, who was born in the Dominican Republic, has long protested the Caribbean nation’s “ethnic cleansing” of undocumented Haitian migrants, describing it as a human rights crisis in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. In June of this year, Díaz, along with Edwidge Danticat, spearheaded an event in Miami challenging the Dominican Republic’s efforts to mass deport hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrant workers. Last week, the two authors reportedly met with congressional leaders in hopes that the U.S. would intervene in Haitian-Dominican relations.
Problematic as it might be that two esteemed literary intellects of color are asking a white patriarchal government to help remedy the mistreatment of black people in another country, Diaz and Danticat seem adamant about asking the U.S. to reintroduce the passage of H. Res. 443- 113th Congress (2013-2014), which expressly condemns said human rights abuses, amongst other specifics that can be read here.
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“We declare emphatically that the Dominican Republic has acted with transparency to the world in the implementation of the migratory measures and there has been no case of violation of human rights,” Mr. Selman said in a statement in Spanish late last week.
Díaz did not yet responded to requests for comment.