The kind of colour that such an archive might yield is precisely what’s missing from the narrative. In the acknowledgments of this absorbing if imperfect exploration of the transactional bargains that women are forced to strike is a plea for film and photographic footage of New York’s Dominican community from the 1950s to the 1980s. It helps that the doll, with heavy symbolism, has neither eyes nor mouth. “My sweet, hollow Dominicana will keep all my secrets,” she pledges. César also helps her earn money of her own, which she stashes in a ceramic doll bought in Santo Domingo airport. Together, they eat hotdogs at Coney Island and dance at the Audubon Ballroom. It’s a grim portrait of what it means to be doubly disenfranchised as a female illegal immigrant in an oppressively patriarchal community, but Angie Cruz gives her heroine a glimpse of a different life when Juan has to travel home for two months, leaving his spirited younger brother, César, to look out for her. In the main it could be set almost any time, any place “Bully me, and I transform into an ant,” she confides. Juan, with his polished shoes and “soft, pillowy hands and cheeks”, turns out to be a tight-fisted brute, and Ana finds herself trapped in a squalid sixth-floor apartment in Washington Heights, unable to speak a word of English. The idea was that Ana, once married, would demand money, an education, papers enabling her parents and siblings to join her.
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