By: Staff Writer
October 1, 2021
A Dominican born author is making waves in her first book about the challenges of being an immigrant in New York City.
Cleyvis Natera, an author of Dominican heritage living in New Jersey, told Caribbean Magazine Plus about the buzz her first novel, “Neruda on the Park,” is making. “Neruda on the Park is the name of a luxury building that is being constructed in a fictional neighbourhood in Manhattan, where my novel takes place. The novel is about gentrification and also about how language has the power to transform the world. The poet Pablo Neruda plays an important role in the lives of the women in the novel and that’s part of the reason I chose his name for the book.”
Being of immigrant heritage herself, she sees her struggle in that of the main characters in Neruda. “My heritage plays a big part in my writing. Centring the stories of Black Dominicans is important to me especially since I didn’t see my community reflected outside of my own neighbourhood and family as I was growing up. Paying tribute to our food, our music, and the broader influence we have both in American society and beyond is important to me.”
Cleyvis was born in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to the U.S. when she was ten years old. “I grew up in New York City but have lived abroad. I’m an avid traveller so my influences expand beyond the places where I have lived.” Living now in Montclair, New Jersey, a suburb fifteen miles west of New York City, she is still connected to her New York roots.
She added: “I grew up in an immigrant community in New York City where telling stories was an important part of how we kept home nearby and how we survived what were sometimes very harsh and difficult circumstances. But even before coming to NYC, being Dominican means I grew up in a world filled with the magic of oral storytelling.
“There wasn’t a day that went by where I wasn’t riveted at the edge of my seat by mami or my tias, or my abuelita recounting some fantastic tale as tall as the sky we would one day climb to get to the U.S. By the time I fell in love with reading books as a teenager, it was a very natural progression for me to want to see the influence of my family and of my culture on the page. There still aren’t very many stories that centre Afro-Latinas as protagonists and I aim to change that.”
Neruda on the Park is a novel about an immigrant community in New York City under threat. The story finds the two main characters, Eusebia and her daughter Luz, thrust into a situation that forces each woman to confront what it means to own the direction of her life. While Luz pivots toward love, Eusebia pivots toward violence.
This is Cleyvis’s first book, but she started writing creatively when she was eighteen years old during her first year of college. “It’s been over two decades that I’ve been writing creatively,” she said.
Her inspiration for the book was that it came from her “journey as an immigrant in the United States. I grew up in Harlem and witnessed an incredible amount of change over three decades due to gentrification. I also went to college, graduate school, and worked a corporate job the entire time I was writing this novel so the question of identity and freedom as it intersects with class and race was very much in my mind during the fifteen years it took me to complete the book.
“My hope was to write a book that is heart-warming and expansive, that truly delves deeply into what it means to be an immigrant in the United States but does so in a different way. I wanted to tackle serious issues of injustice, displacement and the concept of home while also wrapping the reader in a world they couldn’t resist that is also funny, sexy, and immersive. Growing up Caribbean has always meant being multi-faceted and that’s what I hope my novel accomplishes – a varied view of the world.”
The main family in the book, the Guerreros, have lived in Nothar Park, a predominantly Dominican part of New York City, for twenty years. When demolition begins on a neighbouring tenement, Eusebia, an elder of the community, takes matters into her own hands by devising an increasingly dangerous series of schemes to stop construction of the luxury condos. Meanwhile Eusebia’s daughter, Luz, a rising associate at a top Manhattan law firm who strives to live the bougie lifestyle her parents worked hard to give her, becomes distracted by a sweltering romance with the handsome white developer of the company her mother so vehemently opposes. As Luz’s father, Vladimir, secretly designs their retirement home in the Dominican Republic, mother and daughter collide, ramping up tensions in Nothar Park, racing towards a near fatal climax. A fierce meditation on race and class and a beautifully layered portrait of family, friendship, and ambition, Neruda on the Park weaves a rich and vivid tapestry of community as well as the sacrifices we make to protect what we love most.
The book is available for pre-sale in all major bookstores and independent bookstores in the U.S. ahead of its May 2022 publication. It costs $27 dollars (US).
You can follow Cleyvis on Facebook @Cleyvis Natera Instagram at @cleyvisnatera and twitter @cleyvisnatera