Learning to Write Stories of Migration: The Journeys of Raul Martinez Rosario

This paper explores the story of two journeys made by one man, Raul Martinez Rosario, who migrated illegally by boat from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico, and then to the United States during the 1980s. While this paper analyzes Martinez’s experience of publishing his migration histories as a “testimony,” it goes beyond considering his narrative merely as a testimony by reflecting upon the migrant’s engagement with the writing process itself and oral histories done with him. Tracing how Martinez “learned” to write in specific ways makes it possible to begin peeling back the layers of social and cultural networks that contributed to the formation of this text. This paper examines how one migrant worked diligently to transform himself from migrant to “author” and how he strove to accumulate the social and political capital that would allow him to authenticate and validate his journey of migration. It reveals the complex sociability of the text Martinez produced, which came out of multiple discourses within the migrant community. Also, this paper suggests how this narrative can methodologically challenge the assumption in migration historical scholarship that “illegal” migrants are invisible in historians’ archives. Migrants’ stories cannot be ascertained only through social scientific data that often misses, while simultaneously producing, “illegal aliens.” This perspective could also help us uncover other written archives by considering the different ways that migrants engaged in cultural exchanges and with the process of writing. This is part of a larger trend in the historiography of migration that seeks to integrate the use of oral and written sources about, and created by, migrants in order to write histories that capture these individuals’ multiple movements between spaces and through various economic, social, and cultural terrains.