Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz has lost an award for speaking out against the Dominican Republic's immigration policies, according to The New York Times.
Eduardo Selman, the Dominican Republic's consul in New York, called Díaz "anitdominicano" Thursday for going to Washington D.C. to urge Congress to take action against the human rights crisis in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, reported The Los Angeles Times.
Selman awarded the acclaimed author the Order of Merit, which is given to esteemed Dominican "citizens," in 2009, The Nation noted. The Order of Merit honors "the talent, creativity, and professional trajectory of our most accomplished Dominicans, who symbolize the most genuine values and principles of la dominincanidad [Dominican-ness]."
Junot Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," reported Fox News.
Díaz and Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat went to Washington D.C. last week to curb the persecution of immigrants after the Dominican government ordered the immediate deportation of undocumented immigrants who failed to register. Díaz has called for protests, travel boycotts and political pressure against the Dominican government.
Díaz and Danticat have been speaking out against human rights violations in the Dominican Republic for years. The two authors wrote a New York Times opinion article in 1999, saying, "the expulsions are violations of the workers' human rights and of the country's own laws," The New York Times reported.
The Dominican Consul general denied Díaz and Danticat's claims.
“We declare emphatically that the Dominican Republic has acted with transparency to the world in the implementation of the migratory measures and there has been no case of violation of human rights or of statelessness with Haitians or any other foreigner, contrary to what the writer Junot Diaz, who has proven to be anti-Dominican,” Selman said.
This is not the first time that a Dominican official criticized the creative writing MIT professor. Jose Santana, the executive director of the Dominican Republic's International Advisory Committee of Science and Technology, warned Díaz in 2013 to be careful about what he says. Santana called Díaz a "fake and overrated pseudo-intellectual [who] should learn to speak Spanish better before coming to this country to talk nonsense," according to Fox News.
Díaz responded to Santana's comments on Facebook at the time. “All these attacks are bulls--t attempts to distract from the real crime – the sentencia (ruling) itself which has been condemned widely," he wrote. "All of us who are believers need to keep fighting against the sentencia and what it represents and we need to keep organizing and we need to show those clowns in power in the DR that there is another Dominican tradition – based on social justice and human dignity and a true respect for the awesome contributions that our immigrants make everywhere.”
Neither Díaz nor Danticat have responded to Selman's statement.
