Let it Rain Coffee.

• Position: Book review

Let It Rain Coffee, by Angie Cruz New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.

Only four years after her eloquent first novel, Cruz published a second novel at the mere age of thirty-three. This book relates the story of a family that emigrates to New York due to the young mother's fierce desire to do so. Without her husband's knowledge, Esperanza embarks--aboard a flimsy boat with other refugees--on the daring journey across the channel to the island of Puerto Rico. Such an endeavor has become a more frequently occurring phenomenon in the present era for poor Dominicans, who seek to merge into a population that looks and sounds like them in order to find work and the possibility of access to the U.S.

Esperanza is pregnant and has left a two-year-old son behind with her husband, Santo (whose name denotes saintliness but also the first word of the capital, Santo Domingo). While she works in Puerto Rico, Santo arranges the papers for their move. Once in New York, he works long hours as a taxi driver and Esperanza takes on a double-shift at a nursing home. She has named her daughter Dallas and son Bobby because of her dream to live the lives she sees portrayed by characters in the U.S. soap opera "Dallas." The novel describes how their arrival culturally and historically coincides with the transformation of Washington Heights in the early eighties to a neighborhood of freshly painted bodegas, travel agencies, botanicas, and liquor and discount stores, with "crowds of people sitting on the front stoops."

Santo and Esperanza work long hours to provide for their family, but she falls into the lure of consumerism, ordering items from television advertisements to decorate their cramped apartment, charging to the maximum on her first credit card, which she doesn't realize needs to be paid. Life in New York is contrasted with life on the island through the characters' memories, especially through Santo's father, Don Chan, who comes to live with them shortly after his wife's death in 1991. He and Esperanza are the linchpins of the story. Having washed ashore as a child, he was aided by another child--his future wife--whose parents adopted him. They are peasants who live off the land. On one occasion, when little Chart goes to the city with his adoptive father, someone tries to buy the child, stating that he knows he can get a lot of hours of work out of the Chinese. U.S. occupation before and after the Trujillo dictatorship and instability fop lowing Trujillo's...