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Geographies of Home (1999) narrates the lives of Aurelia and Papito's large, working-class Dominican-American family. It focuses on Aurelia's struggle with her mother's African diasporan faith and her daughters, Iliana, Marina, and Rebecca who all suffer from physical abuse and struggle with racial and gender identity. When Aurelia follows her husband to the United States, she dismisses the spiritual legacy of her mother and submits herself and her children to the strict Seventh-Day Adventist faith of her husband, Papito.1 This neglect of her spiritual prowess impacts three of her fourteen children. Rebecca, the eldest daughter, goes from one mentally and physically abusive relationship to the next. Marina refuses to acknowledge her racial heritage, experiences mental breakdowns, and commits violence unto herself and her family. Iliana struggles with her own sense of racial and gender identity and violence while away at an upstate New York college. All of these troubles become too much for Iliana, and she seeks refuge at her home only to confront the immense troubles of her family.
This novel explores how violence is an integral part of the Afro-Caribbean faith of Aurelia, the mother-figure in the novel, and how the implementation of violence can be a method of agency, as it is for Aurelia when it facilitates the elimination of her abusive son-in-law, Pasión.2 However, the employment of an African diasporan faith does not eradicate the violence in Aurelia and her family's lives. Aurelia neither imparts her spiritual knowledge nor its affirmation of racial heritage and the role of women to her daughter Iliana. Moreover, Iliana endures the most violent attacks and struggles with the quandary of racial and gender identification as an Afro-Latina.3 If capable and aware, the Afro-Latina, namely Iliana, can productively use her connection to an Afro-Caribbean spiritual practice such as in the case of Aurelia. Overall, in Geographies of Home, Loida Maritza Pérez demonstrates how African diasporan faiths provide agency to Afro-Latinas in order to negotiate issues of racial and gender identification and combat violence; however, she also demonstrates the losses when these practices are not passed on to the next generation of Afro-Latinas, namely the persistence of troubles in determining racial and gender identity and preventing violence.
Recent scholarship about this novel addresses the topics of the...