Junot Diaz Responds To Critic Attacks After Blasting Dominican Citizenship Ruling As Racist

Junot Díaz, the Dominican-American author who netted a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao", struck back this week against a group of Dominican intellectuals and a government official who had attacked him for his earlier criticisms of the Caribbean nation's new citizenship law, which could strip as many as 200,000 individuals of their citizenship. The country's supreme court ruled that all migrants who entered the country after 1929 - a group which is largely Haitian - were in a state of transit, meaning that their descendants had no claim to Dominican citizenship. Díaz had added his voice to an outpouring of protests by human rights groups against what they see as the codification of discrimination against Haitians.

"All these attacks are bulls**t attempts to distract from the real crime - the sentencia itself which has been condemned widely," wrote the novelist on his Facebook page this week. "All of us who are believers need to keep fighting against the sentencia and what it represents and we need to keep organizing and we need to show those clowns in power in the DR that there is another Dominican tradition -based on social justice and human dignity and a true respect for the awesome contributions that our immigrants make everywhere."

Though Díaz named no names in his Facebook post, it was clear that it was in response to two public denunciations of the author, who came to the US as a child and whose work often deals with the hardscrabble lives of Dominican immigrants and their American children. In one, a group of eight Dominican intellectuals published an open letter in a Dominican paper which challenged the author's "Dominican-ness" and accusing him of "not knowing the content and reach of the ruling, destined to organize the situation of immigrants and their descendants."

The other attack came from José Santana, Executive Director for the Dominican Presidency's International Commission on Science and Technology, who in an email published by Latino Rebels, called Díaz a "fake and overrated pseudo intellectual" who "should learn better to speak Spanish before coming to this country to talk nonsense." Santana also threatened to sue the author for defamation for calling many Dominican politicians and government officials "thieves and corrupt". "I am a politician and government official in this country and I can legally challenge you to prove to me your vague and broad generalization of 'thief and corrupt,'" Santana wrote.

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