Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/26/1 (67)/16/1530133/0260016.

pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO user on 20 December 2022

Ghosts in Nelly Rosario’s
Song of the Water Saints
and Angie Cruz’s Soledad
Susan C. Méndez

Although a year separates the publication of the debut novels by Dominican Americans Nelly
Rosario and Angie Cruz, these are two extraordinary texts that deal with the marginalization of
the Dominican people, especially women, through the figure of the ghost. Both novels feature
ghost-figures as the women in these stories try to openly confront and accept the realities of
their pasts for the sake of themselves and their families in the present and future. Sociologist
Avery Gordon states that the ghost is “not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure,
and investigating it can lead to the dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.”1
Ghost-figures are present in lives and stories to demonstrate new, different knowledge and
assert critical points about history, culture, and subjectivity. In Song of the Water Saints and
Soledad, Rosario and Cruz, respectively, use the figure of the ghost as a generous trope that
imaginatively reconnects women in families across vast space, time, and apparent differences.
Such usage acts as a corrective to the corruptive influence of the United States and the West
in the hispanophone Caribbean, specifically the Dominican Republic.2

1 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008), 8.
2 Scholars such as Victoria Chevalier, Marion Rohrleitner, Donette Francis, Cristina Herrera, Elizabeth West, Juanita Heredia,
Omaris Zamora, and Rebeca L. Hey-Colón have all written about race, gender, sex/sex work, spirituality, motherhood,

small axe 67 • March 2022 • DOI 10.1215/07990537-9724023 © Small Axe, Inc.

 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 17

I will clarify this essay’s argument by first explaining the theoretical praxis of the ghost,
its way of haunting, and the experience of cultural hauntings or ghostings as they apply to
literature and extend to other Dominican American cultural texts. Then I will examine how the
ghost of Graciela, the main character in Song of the Water Saints, and the “living ghost” of

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/26/1 (67)/16/1530133/0260016.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO user on 20 December 2022

Olivia in Soledad restore matrilineal bonds in their families in both the Dominican Republic
and the United States. The strengthened bonds are necessary to combat different nations’
machinations, which create the ghosts of these texts. These machinations include the first
US occupation period of the Dominican Republic, from 1916 to 1924, and the exploitative
influence of Western financial organizations and their policies in the Dominican Republic,
starting in the 1960s. By centering these literary works that focus on women’s subjectivities
and identity formations through the figure of the ghost and its haunting in the borderlands
between the Dominican Republic and the United States, this essay elevates the presence of
Dominican American women’s narratives in Caribbean/Latinx literary criticism.
Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints narrates troubled mother-daughter relationships in
multiple generations of the same family as they move from the Dominican Republic to New York
and shows how inadequacies of the past are addressed in the present. The main character,
Graciela, struggles against the societal limitations of her time. Military occupation and a lack
of formal education, economic opportunities, and cultural options all contribute to Graciela’s
death from syphilis in her twenties in the Dominican Republic.3 Years later, Graciela’s ghost
communicates with her great-granddaughter Leila in New York; she makes Leila aware of their
similarities and of the vastly different opportunities available to her. Cruz’s Soledad highlights
Olivia and Soledad’s strained mother-daughter relationship in New York and how this tension
traces back to Olivia’s young womanhood in the Dominican Republic. The novel opens with
Soledad returning to her Washington Heights home from college for the summer in order to care
for her mother, Olivia, who is nearly comatose; Olivia’s state allows her to be read as the “ghost”
of this novel. As their story evolves, Olivia’s secrets about her past and their shared secret
about the death of Soledad’s father, Manolo, are revealed and divide mother and daughter. In
order to heal their relationship and be released from this “ghost” state, Olivia must confess
the secrets about her past, and both must be truthful about Manolo to themselves and each
other. These ghosts and the life stories of their families let the women’s marginalization and
exploitation be known, enabling them to take the first steps toward recovery and healing. So
let us begin with the ghost and its hauntings.

mental illness, the souvenir artifact, Afro-Latina embodied knowledge, and water imagery in one or both of these novels.
No scholarly examination of these novels has addressed the figure of the ghost and its critical work.
3 In Song of the Water Saints, syphilis becomes essential to the narration of plot and character (namely, Graciela), but
detailed analysis in this essay will show how it also works on a conceptual level as a critical metaphor.
18 [ Susan C. Méndez ] Ghosts in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints and Angie Cruz’s Soledad

Theoretical Praxis of the Ghost

Literary scholars María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren trace the use of ghosts as substantial
conceptual metaphors, ways to produce knowledge, back to the end of the twentieth century. 4
By evoking a discourse, ghosts perform theoretical work and engender meaning in cultural

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/26/1 (67)/16/1530133/0260016.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO user on 20 December 2022

texts. Blanco and Peeren discuss how Sigmund Freud and Theodor Adorno rejected the
figure of the ghost and its meaning in their works, but they also focus on Jacques Derrida’s
Spectres of Marx as a pivotal text that rehabilitates the ghost by using ideas endorsed by
Freud (psychoanalysis) and Adorno (Marxism). As Blanco and Peeren observe, Derrida’s claim
that “the ghost should remain, be lived with, as a conceptual metaphor signaling the ultimate
disjointedness of ontology, history, inheritance, materiality, and ideology” has been taken
up by many cultural workers and theorists.5 This “disjointedness” is revealed specifically by
Derrida’s unique definition of the ghost as “always both revenant (invoking what was) and
arrivant (announcing what will come).” The ghost’s operation on multiple temporal planes “may
reveal the insufficiency of the present moment, as well as the disconsolations and erasures of
the past, and a tentative hopefulness for future resolutions.”6 When executed on the national
level, imperial ghosting occurs and it “takes the form of doubleness, whereby administered
forgettings and guarded secrets leave a kind of counter-evidence,” which consists of spectral
traces and disturbances in language, time, sound, vision, and in the physical such as the land
and the human body.7 The play with time and creation of disturbances that reveal critical lacks,
gaps, silences, absences, and erasures in social relations and history is the work of the ghost,
more commonly known as its haunting.
The condition of haunting can be described in both objective and subjective manners.
Objectively, haunting is the “paradigmatic way in which life is more complicated than those
of us who study it have usually granted. Haunting is a constitutive element of modern social
life. It is neither pre-modern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social
phenomenon of great import.”8 To describe haunting in a subjective way may uncover its
“great import” to the reader: “Haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened
or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always
a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold
knowledge, but as a transformative recognition.”9 To recognize and study a haunting is to be
changed by this interface with a ghost and have one’s social relations refashioned as well.

4 María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, “Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities,” in María del Pilar Blanco and
Esther Peeren, eds., The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (New York: Blooms-
bury, 2013), 1.
5 Ibid., 7.
6 Ibid., 13, 16.
7 Anne McClintock, “Imperial Ghosting and National Tragedy: Revenants from Hiroshima and Indian Country in the War on
Terror,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (2014): 821.
8 See Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 7.
9 Ibid., 8.
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 19

Besides the production of new knowledge, examination of the ghost and its haunting can shape
and reconstruct one’s subjectivity. A haunting is not just about reliving a past event, though
“intergenerational trauma [can be seen] as a haunting force.”10 As Gordon points out, “Haunting,
unlike trauma, is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done.”11 This “something-to-be

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/26/1 (67)/16/1530133/0260016.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO user on 20 December 2022

done” is often part of the new knowledge produced or the personal transformations that are
narrated best through the imaginative design offered in literature.
The long history of both British and North American women writing ghost stories paral-
lels the development of the cultural and theoretical significance of ghosts and hauntings.
Lynette Carpenter and Wendy Kolmar observe that “women writers [use] the ghost story
genre to critique mainstream male culture, values, and tradition” and that often “hauntings
are tied to domestic gender politics” in nineteenth-century women’s stories. 12 Communica-
tions achieved through ghostly encounters “warn of the dangers of domesticity.” 13 Images
of haunted houses and madhouses, as well as the theme of maternal legacies, often refer-
ence the specific danger of domestic violence for women and children. Also, the subject of
“maternity is not always presented as unproblematic in women’s ghost stories, which often
record anxiety and ambivalence.” Strong sources of this ambivalence are “conflicts between
mother and daughter,” which can be highly ambiguous.14 Indeed, analyses of Graciela’s
and Olivia’s ghosts enter here. Rosario’s and Cruz’s texts present contentious relationships
between mothers and daughters as these relationships span physical locations and genera-
tions. Each ghost present in the text and the haunting it effects warns that something in
the present is amiss, unduly silent, erased, and absent, and that this can be traced back
to some wrong committed in the past. Rectifying this silence, erasure, and absence that
originates in the past and is still felt in the present ensures a better future for the mothers
and daughters mentioned in the texts and their extended families and communities. These
novels also stress the critical topics of race and ethnicity, not just gender, in the study of
ghosts and hauntings.
Kathleen Brogan examines the meaning of ghosts and their hauntings in several contem-
porary novels by ethnic authors in the United States. Her concepts, definitions, and analytical
points echo what Blanco, Peeren, Gordon, Kolmar, and Carpenter have written about ghosts
and hauntings and go a little further.15 She says of the “cultural haunting” (her coinage): “While
it has nineteenth- and early twentieth-century antecedents, . . . [it] emerged in large numbers

10 See Blanco and Peeren, “Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities,” 8.

11 See Gordon, Ghostly Matters, xvi.
12 Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, introduction to Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, eds., Haunting the
House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1991), 1, 3.
13 Ibid., 14.
14 Ibid., 19.
15 Brogan asserts that the ghosts’ function in contemporary ethnic American literature is to recapture the past and put it anew
into the service of the present so as to redesign ethnic identity. This point becomes part of the definition of cultural haunt-
ing and its explanation of how the individual links to the community.
20 [ Susan C. Méndez ] Ghosts in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints and Angie Cruz’s Soledad

only in the last quarter of [the twentieth] century. . . . Stories of cultural haunting differ from
other twentieth-century ghost stories in exploring the hidden passageways not only of the
individual psyche but also of a people’s historical consciousness.”16 Cultural hauntings are the
latest evolution in the tradition of ghost stories that connect the individual and her community

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/26/1 (67)/16/1530133/0260016.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO user on 20 December 2022

in their understandings of communal memory, cultural transmission, group inheritance, and
the need to integrate the past into the present. When ethnic differences in ghost stories are
studied, one can “attend to the particular histories to which these differences attach, and the
local meanings these histories engender.”17 In the case of the Dominican Republic, “dominant
Western discourses have ghosted Dominican history and culture despite its central place in
the architecture of the Americas not only as the first Spanish colony in the hemisphere but
also, alongside Haiti, as an exemplar of black self-rule.”18 Dixa Ramírez analyzes how some
Dominican cultural practices and entities evidence an erasure of race, such as in the selection
of Salomé Ureña as a national poet, and the evasion of a “history from below” in the erec-
tion of the Columbus Lighthouse Memorial; meanwhile, other cultural and economic actors,
such as musicians and sex workers “attempt to counteract the territory’s ghosting within
larger Western discourses.” Although Ramírez opts intentionally for the word ghosting rather
than haunting to illuminate the processes that create fragments of history and culture, these
fragments repeat continuously in hauntings and point to “several rehearsals of national and
imperial projects.”19 In this way, Ramírez examines cultural hauntings or ghostings in her book,
and analyses of Rosario’s and Cruz’s books continue this work. Both novels implicitly critique
as types of ghostings or cultural hauntings the Roosevelt Corollary (1904–34) of the Monroe
Doctrine (which stated that the United States would intervene on behalf of European nations
pursuing their legitimate claims against Latin American nations) and the West’s prolonged and
detrimental exploitation (a type of economic neoliberalism) in the hispanophone Caribbean,
and specifically in the Dominican Republic, during and after the 1960s. These novels’ ghosts
reveal this criticism by focusing on key female characters, how they and their families are
affected for generations by forces larger than themselves. Specifically, the ghosts of Graciela
and Olivia reveal how impoverished women of color are restricted in their abilities and rendered
invisible; yet they simultaneously model such women’s ability to reconceive their societal roles
and vehemently contest the effects of the prolonged US military occupation and the West’s
general exploitation of their island.

16 Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1998), 4–5.
17 Ibid., 15.
18 Dixa Ramírez, Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the Nineteenth Century to the
Present (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 3.
19 Ibid., 5, 6.
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 21

Ghostly Circuits
The first chapter of Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints begins in 1916 by focusing on
the life story of Graciela, a young girl living in poverty in a rural area of the Dominican Republic
during the first of the two US occupation periods.20 Military occupation means Graciela lives

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/26/1 (67)/16/1530133/0260016.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO user on 20 December 2022

with the daily threat of violence. One day while returning home from the market, Graciela hears
yanqui soldiers shout racist slurs and orders and fire their guns at another woman walking with
her laundry.21 The soldiers most likely rape and kill this woman, a fate that could also befall
Graciela. When Graciela returns home, she finds more yanqui soldiers questioning her mother
about suspected weapons in their house; this search and seizure is part of “the mandatory
disarmament of the city and its outskirts.”22 Graciela tells the soldiers that they only have cane
rum, and the soldiers leave with the alcohol. Later, when her father comes home, he tends to
the pistols that are hidden in his house and beats Graciela, at the mother’s request, for the loss
of the cane rum. Graciela faces the violence of the US military occupation and her patriarchal
household simultaneously. In fact, the occupation by US forces just heightens the tensions
and leads the household patriarch to exert more violence. Marion Rohrleitner further states
about the novel in its entirety, “The trauma of the Trujillo dictatorship is represented as a logi-
cal continuation of Spanish conquest and US occupation, entities that justified colonization
in paternalistic terms as a civilizing mission and allegedly benevolent control over feminized
territory.” It is “this association of colonial domination based on race with patriarchal subjugation
based on gender” that Graciela rails against while alive and dead.23 Most of the novel focuses
on her struggle to find fulfillment in a family and society that lack the means and resources
she needs. Graciela craves stability, security, and opportunity above all else. Her family, an
encounter with the photographer Peter West, romantic relationships with Silvio and Casimiro,
and the birth of daughter Mercedes cannot provide these things. Unable to abide her unhap-
piness, Graciela goes on two long sojourns away from her family. These travels lead her to
contract syphilis but also take her home so she can die at age twenty-seven with her daughter.
Graciela returns as a ghost to her great-granddaughter in order to communicate to her that
she deserves and can have better treatment and opportunities than Graciela did in her life.24
The description of Graciela’s ghost when she returns is just as meaningful as the content
of her discussion with Leila. Graciela’s ghost manifests as “not a shadow, or a statue falling

20 As a consequence of the Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States intervened in the governance of
the Dominican Republic through the occupation period of 1916–24.
21 In Latin America, yanqui is a usually derogatory term referring to things or people from the United States, regardless of their
region of origin within this country.
22 Nelly Rosario, Song of the Water Saints (New York: Vintage, 2002), 15; hereafter cited in the text.
23 Marion Rohrleitner, “Looming Prairies and Blooming Orchids: The Politics of Sex and Race in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the
Water Saints,” Antípodas 20 (2009): 192.
24 In “Looming Prairies and Blooming Orchids,” Marion Rohrleitner examines three time periods in the novel (the US occupa-
tion of 1916, the massacre of 1937, and the Trujillo assassination in 1961) to establish the racism that links the Spanish
Empire, the United States, and the Dominican Republic under Trujillo. For this essay, however, the central historical refer-
ence point will be the US occupation from 1916 to 1924.
22 [ Susan C. Méndez ] Ghosts in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints and Angie Cruz’s Soledad

from an altar. It is not a white sheet with slits for eyes, or a howl in the wind. It is not in the
eerie highlights of a portrait, or in the twitch of a nerve.” In other words, she presents not in
the typical form one thinks of as a ghost. Graciela emerges as no frightful spectacle, no visual
or auditory disturbance, nor inexplicable incident (big or small). Instead, “her ghost is in the

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/26/1 (67)/16/1530133/0260016.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO user on 20 December 2022

fullness of the frog’s underbelly, in a cipher of pigeons, in the river’s rush. It is threaded through
the eggplant-and-salmon braid of birth” (202). Graciela’s ghost becomes associated with
the natural inhabitants and environs of the Dominican Republic in this description. Her pres-
ence here and the connection she forges is something natural and nascent to the Dominican
Republic and its people in diaspora. Furthermore, during their short but cryptic conversation, a
poignant exchange occurs. Graciela tells Leila to take off her skin, to strip down to the bones,
and “shed the troubles of life” (203). Leila does not understand her great-grandmother and
responds insolently. Graciela continues the conversation with Leila:
—Keep your heart. What’s inside?
“Ventricles and the venae cavas . . .”
—No—
“. . . the valves and aorta . . .”
—No, Leila, let’s bleed your heart for truth. (203)

Despite Leila’s intelligence and the many opportunities she has had since her grandparents
emigrated with her to the United States, she cannot grasp her great-grandmother’s nuanced
points. Graciela wants Leila to not be distracted by the superficialities of life, to take off her
skin and “shed the troubles of life.” She wants Leila to strip down to the bones and focus on
what matters: herself, her education, and her family. Leila will find her heart this way and keep
it because it contains truth. This discovery of truth will not be easy, as Graciela tells Leila she
must “bleed [her] heart” for it. Such valuable advice can be hard to decipher. Leila does not
comprehend this exchange with her great-grandmother; she cannot see what unites her with
Graciela besides a familial bond. Graciela, in contrast, does see what unites them, as Leila
is the young woman Graciela once was. Sexual disease and violation unite these women as
Graciela contracts the syphilis that kills her from Eli Cavalier, a German man who exploited her
while she was on her first sojourn away from her family, while Leila survives sexual assault.
Graciela’s infection with syphilis not only advances the plot and her character development
but also serves as a metaphor for the hazards of the colonial experience. A whole chapter in
the novel narrates the aftermath of the US departure from the island. The occupation’s effects
are clear: “In the wake of the Americans’ departure remained a corps of locals well trained in
the tactics of repression. The troops left behind a certain appetite for American goods. . . .
The troops also left a trail of deaths and births: mourning mothers and mothers of fair-haired
children” (122–23). This lingering presence and the consequences of the US occupation parallel
the story of Graciela and Casimiro’s marriage (after she returns from her first sojourn, where
she meets Eli) and how it is affected by past and present decisions and actions, especially
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 23

infidelity. In this chapter, Graciela learns of Casimiro’s infidelity with Flavia, who is married
to El Gordo, and El Gordo has an affair with a woman named Celeste. Jealousy and mental
instability ensue as Graciela follows Casimiro around until he arrives at Flavia’s house, where
Graciela “attack[s] Flavia with her very own hands instead of a meat cleaver” (126). Flavia,

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/26/1 (67)/16/1530133/0260016.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO user on 20 December 2022

wild-eyed, screaming obscenities, and covered with Graciela’s scratches, responds to her
husband’s concern after the attack by asserting that Casimiro had just picked up a special
dough for one of his projects and proclaiming, “Can’t you see he is queerer than a duck?”
(126). The chapter then closes by informing us that “in this manner, Eli Cavalier’s syphilis ate its
way throughout the town” (127). The town’s erratic and harmful behavior is due to the spread
of syphilis, which Graciela brings into the community when she rejoins her husband after
being with Eli. The lasting presence and detrimental effects of the US occupation (the point
at which this chapter opens) parallels the lasting presence and harmful effects of syphilis in
this community (the point at which this chapter closes). Colonialism or prolonged occupation
corrupts a nation’s health and viability, and Graciela’s story (while she is alive) fleshes out this
point. Graciela’s ghost returns to right this wrong of sexual exploitation.
It is no coincidence that Graciela enters Leila’s life for the final time in the novel after a
sexual assault leaves Leila feeling worthless and violated. At this point, Leila has suffered quite
a bit. As a precocious young woman, Leila wants more from life than what her intelligence
and family can give her. She feels trapped by grandparents who are too old and unaware to
be responsive to her needs; abandoned by her mother, Amalfi, who still lives in the Dominican
Republic; and too mature to be with young men her age. Leila becomes infatuated with Miguel,
an older, married man in her building, only to be raped brutally by him on their first official date.
The trauma leaves Leila unable to tell her friends and family the truth about this rape. When Leila
ventures home on the subway after her rape, Graciela’s ghost communicates with her again:

Waited on a long line to get born. Still, life dealt me a shit deal. Don’t listen to whoever invents
magics about me. Always tried to live what I wanted. Never pretended to be a good woman.
Never tried to be a bad one. Just lived what I wanted. That’s all my mystery. Forget dirty tongues.
They’re next door, in the soup, even in your own head. Some weak soul always trying to slip their
tongue inside your mouth, clean as a baby’s pit. You, listen. My life was more salt than goat.
Lived between memory and wishes . . . but how much can a foot do inside a tight shoe? Make
something better of it than me. (242; italics in original)

Notably, Graciela no longer engages in a conversation with Leila; instead, she narrates her
experience of a life filled with limitations and directs Leila to “make something better of it than
[her].” Moreover, Graciela instructs Leila not to believe those who would misrepresent Graciela’s
life; she simply tried to live what she wanted. Graciela wants Leila to realize and seize her
opportunities (such as following her love of biology to medical school), as she has so many
more than Graciela ever did. As Victoria Chevalier writes, “Unlike her great-grandmother, who
suffered from a lack of historical, collective memory, the novel’s ending figures the beginnings of
24 [ Susan C. Méndez ] Ghosts in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints and Angie Cruz’s Soledad

an access to memory that will hopefully gird Leila in her struggles in the United States.”25 When
Leila hears Graciela’s voice again, she gains access to the past, knowledge about Graciela’s
life that allows her to appreciate her own even after having experienced sexual violence.
At this critical point in Leila’s life, Graciela, as a fellow survivor of sexual exploitation,

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/26/1 (67)/16/1530133/0260016.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO user on 20 December 2022

reminds her great-granddaughter of her worth and of her future opportunities. In recognition
and acceptance of her great-grandmother’s ghostly words, Leila “unpinned Mamá Graciela’s
amber crucifix from her bustier and put it in her mouth and was overcome with a desire to love
them, to make their lives happy before they all turned to leather, then ash underground” (242).
Leila heeds the wisdom articulated here, as she ingests the amber crucifix and feelings of
happiness and love for her family overcome her. As Chevalier asserts, “All the souvenirs (visual
and otherwise) collected in the novel by its protagonist Graciela function as metonyms for a
specifically Caribbean encounter with Western ‘History’ ”; in the hands of Leila, the souvenir
of the amber crucifix “produces the possibilities for experiencing alternative histories.”26 The
amber crucifix figures here as an image that connects these women in ways that produce
hopes for a better present and future by integrating the past. Graciela’s ghost functions in
this same way and cements the connection between familial generations by strengthening
maternal bonds so the new generation can live a better life. Leila now has the ability and
knowledge to create meaning that is valuable to her. Carpenter and Kolmar speak to these
critical connections when they name one key theme of women’s ghost stories as “the bonds
between women, living and dead, which help to ensure women’s survival.”27 Leila takes the
exchanges with her great-grandmother and will use them to refashion her identity, family, and
community in New York City.

The “Living” Ghost Condition

Of the three ghost-figures in Angie Cruz’s Soledad, only Olivia’s unifies key female characters in
the narrative for their individual and communal benefit.28 Olivia, Soledad’s mother, is described
as “resolving some things in her sleep,” hence her comatose or ghost-like state.29 Doña Sosa,
Olivia’s mother, further speculates about her daughter’s condition to her granddaughter: “Look
Soledad, I’m not blaming you for leaving, but your mother has been very lonely and we think
it pushed her to live in her dreams. . . . She’s heavy with so many thoughts” (12). All explana-
tions for her state center on Olivia’s taking time out of her life in order to resolve some issue.

25 Victoria A. Chevalier, “Alternative Visions and the Souvenir Collectible in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints,” in Lyn
Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez, eds., Contemporary US Latino/a Literary Criticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007), 54.
26 Ibid., 37.
27 Carpenter and Kolmar, introduction to Haunting the House of Fiction, 10.
28 Manolo’s ghost and the collective of ghosts who once were Olivia’s clients also exist in this text. The “ghost” of Olivia will
be the focus as she is the one whose presence implicitly critiques the influence of the West in the Dominican Republic and
works to reunite the generations in her family.
29 Angie Cruz, Soledad (New York: Scribner, 2001), 9; hereafter cited in the text.
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 25

This “time out of her life” labels her a “living” ghost, which Gorda, Olivia’s sister, only verifies
late in the novel, even though it seems to be understood by all characters throughout. When
Victor, Olivia’s brother, brings his girlfriend home and introduces her to his family members,
Gorda says, “Why don’t you just tell her she’s the family’s living ghost? Except she doesn’t

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/26/1 (67)/16/1530133/0260016.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO user on 20 December 2022

rattle chains or anything like that” (177). Additionally, in one of the first moments where readers
get access to Olivia’s thoughts, she describes her current state and her heightened senses:

Even the quiet things like Flaca’s soft breathing when she lies next to me, or the water evaporat-
ing in the glass my mother puts under the bed to drain away the bad spirits, I can hear them.
. . . I can hear it all. . . . I can even smell the acetone of Flaca’s nail polish hours after it dries,
Soledad’s shampoo, the wilting flowers in the room that smell like dust and sweaty socks. . . .
When I am touched I want to scream. (25)30

Her heightened abilities to hear, smell, and touch place her in a constant state of hyperaware-
ness and perception. Olivia’s enhanced condition supports an understanding of her as a type
of specter. For these reasons, Olivia serves as a ghost in this text, a presence that strengthens
maternal bonds and presents Soledad with the memory and knowledge she needs to remake
how she understands herself and her community.
Olivia’s ghostly state reveals the rift between mother and daughter to be caused by the
persistent corrosive influence of the deceased father-figure, Manolo. Olivia’s unhappiness drives
Soledad out of the house at the age of eighteen. When Soledad returns home to confront her
mother’s ghostly condition, she realizes some nuanced points about her parents’ relationship.
In a memory of a conversation between mother and daughter, Olivia reveals how Manolo
causes his family’s unhappiness: “Soledad, there is nothing worse than a man who doesn’t
get what he wants, my mother said this every time my father, Manolo, slept on the living room
couch, or when he spent nights away from the apartment. She said it when she was beat up,
when she had to go to the hospital with broken bones” (14). The abuse leads Olivia to push
Manolo out of their apartment window while a young Soledad watches, but Manolo’s reign
of terror does not end with his death: “My mother claimed my father used to visit her. That’s
how she used to explain a fuse going out, the loud pounding sound that made the neighbors
downstairs hit their ceiling with a broom stick” (20). Eventually, Soledad realizes how living
with violence, memories of violence, and the consequences of violence for so many years may
have harmed her mother to the point where Olivia now resides in her sleep in order to resolve
her issues. Perhaps Olivia regrets subjecting her daughter to this life of violence and wonders
if she can ever make up for it. The crucial accusation that Manolo’s abuse lies at the heart of
Olivia’s ghostly state provides only one reason for Olivia’s condition.
When Olivia tells Soledad the story about how she and Manolo met, a telling omission
indicates another cause for Olivia’s state. Olivia tells Soledad that she met Manolo in the

30 From this point, all of Olivia’s ghostly thoughts are in italics in the original.
26 [ Susan C. Méndez ] Ghosts in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints and Angie Cruz’s Soledad

Dominican Republic while she was working but he was on vacation. Soledad asks where Olivia
was working, and she responds, “I was doing the kind of work I hope you never have to do”
(19). Olivia becomes a sex worker in order to avoid an arranged marriage to a man named
Pelao, her father’s friend.31 She meets Manolo as a client and believes him to be different since

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/26/1 (67)/16/1530133/0260016.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO user on 20 December 2022

he is originally from the island, treats her nicely, and wants to be with only her. Early in their
relationship, however, Manolo tells Olivia “how to wear her hair, the color to paint her nails, the
way to swing her hips” (50). His control over Olivia serves as a precursor to the violence that
he later inflicts on her. Regardless, Olivia believes Manolo loves her, and when she becomes
pregnant, she tells Manolo that the child is his (even though she is not certain), so that he will
take her out of the sex industry and away from the Dominican Republic to the United States,
which he does. Olivia has no choice but to forge a relationship to ensure another life for her
and her child, despite warning signs of violence.
In many ways, Olivia’s situation reflects the overall situation of the Dominican Republic as
political and economic changes in the hispanophone Caribbean took effect during the 1960s.
Using several critical studies, Cristina Herrera explains the socioeconomic and political context
of Soledad: how the Cuban Revolution left organizations like the World Bank and the Organiza-
tion of American States searching for another Caribbean nation to grow infrastructure through
tourism; this search focused on the Dominican Republic and led to the migration of many
Dominican women to sites where rich European and North American tourists gathered. 32 Olivia
has few options, and those she does have are dictated by economic neoliberalism. The needs
of European and North American nations and organizations shape the Dominican economy and
its opportunities, and such outside influence cannot help but leave the disenfranchised and
marginalized in a worse condition. This external shaping force has a long history in the Carib-
bean. As Dixa Ramírez explains, Dominican female sex workers can be seen as an example
of “how global demands aided by neoliberal free trade policies accommodate centuries-old
colonial fantasies.”33 Oppression sets into motion all the ramifications of dealing with a sex
worker’s history that Olivia endures. The physical and psychological effects of this history,
which include Manolo and his harmful influence, are shown to have helped create Olivia’s
ghost-like condition as Olivia’s mind becomes more accessible.
Family members speculate that the living ghost of Olivia has been endowed with super-
natural powers. The only power she actually uses is her ability to reimagine her relationship
with her mother. In her dreams, Olivia asks Doña Sosa about her relationship with her husband:

31 When an old Swedish man comes to the countryside and tells young women like Olivia that he manages models all over
the world and that she could earn enough money with him to buy a house, Olivia agrees to leave home. When Olivia arrives
at Puerto Plata, she realizes the true nature of the old Swedish man’s business when she begins to sexually service male
tourists.
32 Cristina Herrera, “The Madwoman Speaks: Madness and Motherhood in Angie Cruz’s Soledad,” Journal of Caribbean
Literatures 7, no. 1 (2011): 55.
33 See Ramírez, Colonial Phantoms, 182.
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 27

“Did she ever say no to him? And if she did, did he hit her, like Manolo hit me? And when we
talk she’s not looking away from my bruises. Every time I come to her she receives me with
a first aid kit, licks my wounds, combs my hair and tells me that I don’t ever have to return to
Manolo because I deserve so much better” (120).34 Donette Francis argues that all of Olivia’s

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/26/1 (67)/16/1530133/0260016.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO user on 20 December 2022

family members likely know about his abuse and her sex worker history, but no one offers to
help her deal with these issues.35 Maybe helplessness explains why Olivia takes such extreme
action when she pushes Manolo out of the window in order to resolve one aspect of her
oppression. No other way to end the abuse presents itself. Nevertheless, the fact that Olivia
makes the effort to recreate her relationship with her mother so that Doña Sosa responds to
Olivia’s needs matters greatly. This living-ghost state strengthens Olivia. Although she does
not have powers over others, she has power over herself, and she uses it to heal herself by
reimagining her relationship with her mother. Another large aspect of herself is her daughter.
Olivia wants to help Soledad most of all: “My body fights to get out of bed. I need to see
Soledad. I have to tell her I love her. Tell her about her father. Tell her that she has to get out
of my apartment. She doesn’t have much time before Manolo gets to her too” (154). At this
point, Soledad lives in their old apartment while caring for Olivia, and Manolo’s ghost has made
his presence known there to Gorda. Olivia fears that Manolo will harm Soledad, but Manolo
already harmed Soledad when he sexually abused her as a child (138). Olivia does not know
of this abuse, but she wants to tell Soledad that Manolo is most likely not her father. Making
such a confession will require that she reveal her history as a sex worker to her daughter,
something that until now Olivia has not been strong enough to do. Her living-ghost state has
enabled Olivia to heal herself and the only way to do that is to make (all) her truth known and
accepted by her family, especially Soledad.
As a living ghost, Olivia concludes that she must end her fear and secrecy to act in the
best interests of herself and her daughter. When family members bring Olivia to the Domini-
can Republic in order to perform a cleansing ritual in the hopes that it will end her condition,
Olivia knows the truth must come out: “I’m tired of being afraid. . . . I’m tired of running, I’m
tired of letting what other people think of me, or will discover about me, control my life. I’m
tired” (221). She grows weary of carrying all her fears and secrets because she finally realizes
they have not helped her. In fact, they have pushed her to become this living ghost. Worst of
all, Olivia’s fears and secrets have harmed Soledad, and Olivia realizes this truth: “I reminded
Soledad that her eyes turn green when she cries because her sadness belongs to me. . . .
When I saw the reflection of my face in her eyes, I was sorry for all the sadness I had given
her” (223). Certainly she has given her sadness to her daughter through secrecy. Olivia has

34 Don Fernando, Sosa’s husband and Olivia’s father, is not portrayed as abusive, but the questioning shows Olivia’s deep
desire to be truthful and comforted.
35 Donette Francis, “Novel Insights: Sex Work, Secrets, and Depression in Angie Cruz’s Soledad,” in Faith Smith, ed., Sex and
the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 61.
28 [ Susan C. Méndez ] Ghosts in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints and Angie Cruz’s Soledad

not protected Soledad from psychological or physical harm by keeping her past a secret; she
never could have, no matter what she did. Francis attests to “the impact over time for female
sex workers.” She writes that “one’s choices are never simply about the individual but in fact
impact one’s entire family and future generations,” thus women, like Olivia, embody their pain

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/26/1 (67)/16/1530133/0260016.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO user on 20 December 2022

from the sex work industry in their child-rearing (especially of daughters), spiritual lives, and
romantic partnerships.36 After this recognition, Olivia can awaken herself from her living-ghost
condition and act to save her daughter.
At the conclusion of the cleansing ritual, Olivia takes definitive action and reconnects
with her daughter, thereby strengthening her maternal bond and allowing a redefinition of
identity for herself and Soledad. The ritual entails photos of loved ones being thrown in sacred
waters. If the photo stays on the surface of the water and floats away, all will be well for that
person; if the photo sinks in the water, the person is damned. As the family members throw
photos in the water, they all stay on the surface and float away, except for Soledad’s, which
sinks. Though warned that the sacred waters are dangerous, Soledad dives in to retrieve her
photo and does not come back up again. At this sight, Olivia, still in her living-ghost state,
thinks to herself: “I want to help Soledad find a way out. I want to push Soledad back into the
world, but when I look in the water the woman staring back at me can’t find the strength. She
doesn’t know I am here for her. I tell her she’s an angel, born in my dreams. And when I see
Soledad surrender I scream” (226). Ostensibly, Olivia sees her own reflection in the water; she
is the woman staring back at her who needs strength to act. Olivia provides encouragement
by stating she is an angel, born in her dreams. When Olivia sees Soledad surrender, she can
act and does so by screaming. Soledad hears her mother’s scream while under water. The
scream breaks Soledad out of her reverie, as this experience “is the most wonderful thing [she
has] ever felt and seen” (226). After Olivia’s scream, Soledad awakens to find herself in her
mother’s arms. True communication can happen now: “I want to ask her so many questions
about my father, her past, my birth. But before I even open my mouth, she speaks, as if all
this time, she has been listening, reading my mind, waiting to tell me the things I want to hear”
(227).37 Olivia starts with the story of Soledad’s birth and then explains how she chose a name
that means “loneliness” in Spanish so that her daughter would never be alone. This brief story
already sheds light on Olivia’s worries about her newborn daughter, perhaps more than usual
because of her uncertain paternity. Although Soledad already has paternal doubt, the story
about her name shows her mother’s concern for her and gives Soledad a new perspective on
who she is and can be. Furthermore, by telling Soledad about her and Manolo’s past Olivia will
relieve her secrecy and fears and again give Soledad information she needs. Earlier, Soledad

36 Ibid., 58.
37 When Soledad awakens, she holds her mother’s photo, not the photo of herself that she wanted to retrieve. The question
then becomes, Who saves whom? Moreover, when Olivia stares at the water after Soledad’s dive, it is ambiguous whom
Olivia sees in the water, herself or Soledad. Again, the ambiguity here is crucial as it emphasizes the intimate connection
between mother and daughter.
 SX67 [ 3.2022 ] 29

discovers Olivia’s history as a sex worker through a recovered list that describes her clientele
but hearing her parents’ story from Olivia herself will matter.38 In short, Olivia’s living-ghost
state gave her the time, energy, and respite she needed in order to reflect on her life, decide
what action must be taken, and execute that action. By letting the truth come out and letting

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/26/1 (67)/16/1530133/0260016.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO user on 20 December 2022

go of the fear, Olivia and Soledad strengthen their maternal bond and can become new and
better versions of themselves. Additionally, Olivia’s living-ghost state, caused by her life as
a sex worker, affects her family, especially her daughter, and implicitly critiques the West’s
role in the economic neoliberalism of the hispanophone Caribbean that started in the 1960s.
Perhaps this critical analysis of ghosts shows how the Dominican community in diaspora can
newly envision itself as expansive and reinventing and recovering from a prolonged period
of exploitation.

“Between Memory and Wishes”

In Song of the Water Saints and Soledad, Rosario and Cruz use the figure of a ghost as an
effective trope that imaginatively reconnects communities of women, particularly the mother-
daughter unit but also other matrilineal connections through the generations. From both of these
novels, the Dominican community in diaspora can have new knowledge of itself as it realizes
how it was harmed by policies like the Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, which
allowed for the US occupation of the Dominican Republic, and the Western economic neoliberal
practices in the hispanophone Caribbean since the 1960s, which exploited the people of the
Dominican Republic, especially women. Such knowledge can come from detailed analyses of
the ghosts of Graciela and Olivia. Lastly, the examination of ghosts and haunting elucidates
how individuals are shaped by the gaps, silences, absences, and erasures experienced in
life. These reconfigurations of self and community result when we realize how the material,
historical, affective, and cultural practices between people and the geographies they inhabit
are reflected through the use of ghosts. In the end, ghosts reveal how all people are caught in
limbo (and not just the one between life and death). All people are caught “between memory
and wishes,” meaning people are caught between a memory of individual self or community
and a wish for how the individual self or community was. Neither the memory nor the wish is
true here. Ghosts reveal that the truth about individual self and community often lies in gaps,
silences, absences, and erasures.

38 Soledad pieces her mother’s history together when she discovers three tins with the names Manolo, Soledad, and Olivia
written on them in her mother’s apartment. When she opens the tin with her mother’s name, she finds a list that features
dates and descriptions of men next to the dates. When Soledad reads the list, she conjures the ghost of each man into the
apartment. They appear naked. Then Soledad knows Olivia’s secret.