Is it that catastrophic histories, disguised as stories such as “Nilda,” can only be told through a haunted imaginary, as if they are too tragic to be told without some element of “magic” to them? The answer to this question is not so simple though, for it implicates the global in the most profound way. We can trace this question back to origins – to colonialism, to be more precise. The concept of the haunted, told through the Gothic mode and many other modes as well, establishes its presence in global literature and, more specifically, post-colonial literature, towering over literary texts that are too numerous to discuss. Some worth mentioning are Bram Stoker’s Dracula, when read as a subaltern-type figure’s need to spread his own “blood” or culture in London and who, simultaneously, asks for the acceptance of the English, and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, centering around the tragic hero of the modern African text working through the distress and pain of colonialism. It seems that authors find the haunted to be a space of freedom in which they can work though tragedies that otherwise go unnoticed or unspoken about. The haunted, as discussed, appears and then reappears– sometimes sneakily, sometimes obviously, but always boldly – into the many faucets of the global, and most prominently in the global south. Diaz’s contemporary works speak to this haunting specifically in terms of colonialism, culminating in the immigrant experience. For while Yunior finds himself caught up in a repetitive pattern of historicity, he also finds himself caught up in “newness” – the difficulties experienced by the immigrant, if not sufficiently present in “Nilda,” then very much present in his other various stories. Be it a haunting of origins or newness, there seems to be a resistance, a taboo, an inability to recount stories as they are, and so the real story – this story of origin or newness – makes its way into the characters instead, into their relationships, their motives, their decisions. Because at the heart of these stories is a global history, an unspokenness, a haunting that has the power to be destructive and tormenting. The fact that the characters don’t seem realize they are caught up in this only strengthens this argument, augmenting the power with which the haunted unconsciously grips and moves its fictional characters in a global south setting. It is therefore not surprising that José David Saldívar and other authors suggest Diaz’s short stories unravel a shift in “American” literature toward the hemispheric and the global. Though his stories and novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, primarily speak of the painful past of the Dominican Republic and the tale of the immigrant traveling from the D.R. to the U.S., they require a much sharper eye and taste for the same, prompting readers to think of all of the issues Diaz brings into play – history, decolonization, gender, sexuality, race, the haunted – not as nation-specific, but rather as unavoidably, inescapably, and beautifully global.