Cleyvis Natera on community, labor and love
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Set against the backdrop of the luxury tourist industry in the Dominican Republic, “The Grand Paloma Resort,” Cleyvis Natera’s much-anticipated second novel, releasing on August 12, is a story of community, survival, Latinahood and labor.
“The Grand Paloma Resort” began as a collection of short stories that Natera worked on during the Pandemic as a form of escapism. Together, the stories take readers on a weeklong trip in a luxury space as seen through the eyes of the workers who provide the opulent experience, no matter the cost.
Natera knew from the start that she wanted to write about a luxury space. Through her research, she found many stories that revolved around tourism and resorts, but Latine protagonists were rare, and stories written by Latinas even more so. “I just couldn’t believe that there weren’t more of us, because when you think about it, in the Caribbean, in Latin America, that’s where we are,” Natera said. “We’re the majority of workers. We’re the majority of storytellers. Why aren’t there more books by us, you know?”
Natera fills that gap by gifting us with a Dominican cast of characters who are laborers at their core. 27-year-old Laura has worked her way up to management at The Grand Paloma. Elena, Laura’s 17-year-old sister, has had the privilege of a private school education because of her sister’s hard work and babysits the children of rich, white tourists. Pablo caters to the whims of the resort’s high-end clientele, as does Dulce, the owner of the beach bar known as “the Gringo Trap” to locals. The collective labor of The Grand Paloma employees keeps them in constant motion, scrubbing, washing, serving, fetching, laundering, hairstyling, cooking, fish scaling, sweeping, mopping, dusting — anything to ensure the satisfaction of the tourists. So when a white tourist child is injured, each of these characters must grapple with doing what’s right for themselves or doing what’s right for the community.
Natera knew she wanted the story to revolve around community. “I will never thrive. I will never shine. I will never grow unless I’m standing next to my hermanas and hermanos,” Natera said about her own life, adding that community has become an important part of who she is and how she moves through the world. “I’m always thinking about what I am doing for the community. How am I giving back?”
We spoke with Natera to learn more about the origins of this abundant story, her craft decisions and her choices around the front matter of her novel.
The protagonist of The Grand Paloma Resort is the Pico Diablo community, and the story is about survival. Was there a character you started with when you began writing?
I definitely wanted the book to be centrally concerned with survival and the juxtaposition between the individual and community. I had a lot of fun making these really flawed human beings make terrible decisions! From a character’s perspective, I wanted to play with the things we know we care about as people and writers. Desires. How do we become who we are? When somebody has an individual desire that is in conflict with the communal desire, what happens? And where do hopefulness and optimism ultimately land? I usually start with character, but for this story, I started with the place. I was really fixated on this resort, this luxury space.
The point of view in The Grand Paloma is so interesting. You have an omniscient narrator, but there are also chapters titled “US, THE WORKERS,” that are written in first-person plural. Can you talk about that?
I’m a big nerd when it comes to literature, and it was just really important to honor the roots of my own culture when it comes to storytelling. Being Dominican, one of the things I love about my culture and family is that whenever you start telling a story, if you’re not doing a good job, or it’s not very interesting, somebody else grabs it from you. People will interrupt you and be like, “That’s not what happened — let me tell you what happened.” I wanted to use an omniscient narrator that also felt different and fast-paced.
At the beginning of the story, I actually wanted it to feel like labor for the reader. Like, “Oh, it’s my job to pay attention.” I wanted the reader to have this visceral experience of how much work these people are doing and the fact that the work doesn’t stop. I wanted to think about the collective. Because even as I’m telling a story with an omniscient point of view, it is fixed on these central characters. How do we center these kinds of everyday people? It was very important to me that you never find out who the plural perspective is. You’re never going to say, “Oh, it’s la viejita 1the old lady who’s cleaning the floors.” There’s that visceral sense that from time to time it might be one person, it might be two people, it might be all the people, and the reason that the plurality exists is because they’re talking to each other. You’re hearing from the workers because the workers are telling the story to each other.
You have many beautiful metaphors and symbols sprinkled throughout your novel, but the one that really stood out for me was hair. I want to know about hair.
(photo by Beowulf Sheehan)
I think one of the really difficult things that happen when you’re living in a society that values white beauty standards is the farther you are from the standard, the more work it is. So much of what I wanted to do with this book was to talk about labor — unpaid labor, paid labor. But part of what I wanted to also fixate on was womanhood. What does it mean to be a woman? And what are the different facets of that? I really wanted to have hair as a status symbol, because I think that’s what it is in life. If you’re a black woman in the world, and you’ve ever had to look a certain way to be respected, treated with dignity, and be listened to or for your ideas to be taken seriously, you are hyper aware of the way that you look. I just wanted to acknowledge that even as Laura is running around these seven days doing all these kinds of crazy things, she can never stop thinking about her hair. “Is it kinking up? Are my edges okay? It’s itchy. I can’t wash it.” I wanted to be true to the fact that there are some preoccupations that some of us can never put aside, regardless of what’s happening in life.
You have Jamaica Kincaid’s “A Small Place” and then Edwidge Danticat’s “The Farming of Bones” for your epigraphs. You basically let the reader know what they’re getting into with them, right?
I had this idea, which was inspired by Edwidge Danticat’s “The Farming of Bones.” The history of the Dominican Republic is so rich and complicated. It’s really sad and heartbreaking when you think about the massacre that happened in the 1930s to Haitian people. Every time I go to the Dominican Republic, I’m always really conscious of what has happened over the last almost 100 years.
As I started discovering the story of [the resort], I wanted to imbue both the people and the land with a hidden history. I was thinking about how the first time I learned about the Parsley Massacre wasn’t in school, even though I went to school in the Dominican Republic through fifth grade. It wasn’t through anyone in my family, even though so many family members lived through the Trujillo dictatorship. I never learned about the history of my country in my country or through the people in my family — I came to understand it through a fictional account that Edwidge Danticat wrote. One of the things I wanted this book to do was to be very much in conversation with “(The) Farming of Bones.”
Your dedication says, “for my mother, Nicolasa ‘Fragancia’ Lucas, who taught me love is labor and labor should be grounded in love.” This feels like the moral of the whole story. How do you feel about the things your mother taught you? Is your mother in this novel?
I’m going to try hard not to fall apart because I feel like so much of what I’ve learned about love is because of my mom. So much about what I’ve learned about work and having a good work ethic is because of my mom. My mom has been through so much trauma, so much violence in her life, and it never mattered what she’s been through. She just went to work and paid the bills, you know? She was always generous. She was always helping other people. You won’t find her in any given character, but I do think the ethos of this book is my mother. The way my mother has lived her life and worked has always shown me there is no personal liberation without communal liberation. There is no personal happiness without communal happiness. I feel like I have learned that from her.
“Fog,” one of the short stories from Natera’s original collection, is available to listen to and read at Ursa Story Company.
This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
— Story by Lorena Ortiz
— Copy edited by Samantha Gonzalez and Kami Waller
Lorena Ortiz is a Mexican American fiction writer born in California. Her work has been published in PenDust Radio, The Acentos Review, Latino Book Review and Konch Magazine. She has been supported by VONA, Tin House, Macondo and Kenyon, and she is a 2025 Periplus Fellow. Lorena currently lives in Washington, D.C., and shares a home with her husband, her mother, her 10-year-old daughter, an adored black cat and a few young adult children who come and go as they please.
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