TEXT ON SCREEN:

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS OPENED UP NEW WORLDS FOR JUNOT DIAZ AND HIS FRIENDS.

JUNOT DÍAZ: Nothing could have prepared us for what a rabbit hole that could become. We used to play a couple times a week, man, when we were like 13 and 14. We’d all gather in the kind of prototypical basement. In this case it was my family’s apartment. My mother would always cook and feed the entire group. All these kids I grew up with, they are more Dominican food than they ate their own darn food. 

We would kick around, play for four or five hours. I was the game master, the Dungeon Master. My friends all had their different characters and personalities were revealed really quickly. 

I loved the idea of going to new worlds, I was reenacting my immigration, you know, a therapist might say. 

It was almost like a theater troupe within a few years. It really got crazy. Being a bunch of kids of color in a society that tells us we’re nothing, and to be able to play heroes in an organized way, this was a revolution. None of us had been asked to be protagonists of anything. All the media that we consumed, all that we saw in the newspapers, what we saw in our history classes, what the politics was teaching us is that we were basically beside the point. It was profoundly transformative for us. 

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