The media reception of Drown frames Junot Díaz as a voice of the street that denounces the subjugating violence of internal US colonialism. However, Drown itself suggests that this extra-textual critique displaces the reader’s analytic gaze. The stories in the collection intimate that it is not oppressive socio-economic conditions that constitute the direct obstacle to upward mobility for the diasporic Dominican male subject. Instead, that subject’s own crisis of masculinity, caught between hyper- and hypo-masculinized models, produce the neurotic conditions that interrupt his upwardly mobile trajectory.