This article talks about how two American authors of Latin-Caribbean descent, Esmeralda Santiago and Julia Alvarez, inscribe their native language into the discourse of American literature, contributing to a more diverse picture of what American culture is. Thus Alvarez's and Santiago's texts not only renegotiate ethnic immigrant experiences of exile and diaspora, they open up possibilities for the emergence of new discourses on the constituency of American society. Because they are rewriting American democracy by adding diversity to the canon of American literature and by explicitly writing Latin-Caribbean immigrant experiences into American society, Santiago and Alvarez raise issues about the present-day status, constituency, and definition of American society in general. Santiago's and Alvarez's works thus make apparent the fact that the question of "where you're at" concerns not only ethnic immigrants in the United States, but American society at large. (Contains 9 notes.)