Junot Diaz was born in 1968 in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. Early in his life he immigrated to New Jersey. His work shows the influence of this experience on his views on representation and aspects of immigrant culture—issues that are central to “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie).”

Personal experience is an important frame for understanding Diaz’s early work. His first two novels, Drown and the Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, delve into ideas about masculinity in Dominican culture, the realities of immigration, and the struggle for integration—all issues that Diaz confronted during his own childhood and adolescence. Diaz relies on this biographical detail to engage in social critique.

In a 2016 Upstairs at the Strand interview with Hilton Als, Diaz describes the different layers of his work that include race, class and the “unconsciousness of masculinity” (“Junot Diaz & Hilton Als Talk Masculinity, Science Fiction, and Writing as an Act of Defiance.” Literary Hub, 2016). He comments that in the process of writing his first book, and by extension this short story, which appears in edited form in the novel, he incorporated his cultural experience as a young man of color living in a multicultural area of New Jersey.