Diaspora Dracula

There is something inherently contradictory about a vampire—a creature thirsting for companionship as much as they thirst for blood. I always connected to this tension and loneliness, even when I was young. I was an only child, with working parents who took me around the world. It was an amazing experience, but I was often lonely. I’d be gone from school for months and return feeling out of the loop with my friends. Life moved on, even when I was not there. The vampire as a traveler too experiences this: they are a migrant who must uproot themself time and again. Even Bram Stoker’s Dracula plays into this, with a large swath of his book dedicated to Dracula’s dreaded migration to England. In more recent stories such as The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez,¹ one of the first black lesbian vampire tales, and “Vampirito” by K. Victoria Hernandez, published in khōréō,² we can see how diverse writers have started to reclaim the vampire as a way to tell stories about migrations and diasporic communities.

Firstly, I want to clarify what I mean when I say stories about diasporic communities. This is a general description and does not cover every experience. Diaspora stories capture themes of communities in transition, and the tensions that arise from being an “outsider.” These stories demand that characters redefine themselves, or grapple with their own uneasy definitions. The stories reflect on where characters have come from and where they are going, and the motivations that make people, families, communities leave a place or arrive at another, whether that’s an internal choice or because of external pressures. 

Vampires are well suited to these narratives because their characteristics require them to be constantly moving. Older narratives often equate them to serial killers, who only leave communities to avoid getting caught. However, in the two stories I focus on in this essay, the vampires do not kill, and thus their migrations are rarely motivated by murder. In fact, as we see in The Gilda Stories, Gilda and her kin offer a symbiotic relationship with their human prey, always exchanging something for the blood they take. And in “Vampirito,” the vampires require iron-rich meals such as raw carne tacos, but that doesn’t prevent them from eating regular foods. 

This is a growing change between vampires of old and the newer vampires. Jules Zanger notes in his essay “Metaphor into Metonymy: The Vampire Next Door,” that “the new [vampire] tends to be communal, rather than solitary as was Dracula.”³ Zanger argues that there are several things lost and gained by centering stories around communities of vampires rather than a singular predator. On one part, we lose the metaphorical threat a creature like Dracula brings. When you have a story with one major villain, they become a representation for greater evils. In Dracula, we are presented with a clear dichotomy between Van Helsing and his team as agents of God and Dracula as the Anti-Christ. In contrast, when vampires are communal, “these new vampires gain by the transformation a kind of social space around the bloody central drive that insists on our seeing them as somehow less ‘other.’”⁴ By humanizing the vampire, dichotomies fall away to allow for messier and more complex stories. And by de-emphasizing or altogether defanging the vampire’s bloody urges, we can give room to the tensions and themes that lie in the vampire’s status as an outsider to society.

Both Gilda and Vampirito feature vampires that live within a family unit. For Gilda, this is a found family, with vampires choosing who they will add into the community. For Eli, his family is not that different from a human family, with the distinct differences being their vampiric traits. In both stories, while the vampire communities are humanized, they are not considered the only kind of vampire out there. Gilda is told there are vampires that “enjoy the terror we can bring to others” and “live as much for that as for the blood”⁵ while Eli learns that some Indigenous vampiros were treated “like healers, and advisors, and important people” until European vampires who did feed on blood spread lies about them.⁶ The existence of more stereotypical vampires highlights a continuous tension that can be seen in real communities as well. Because there are some vampires that hunt and prey on humans, and fulfill society’s fears, communities that actively choose to be different face an uphill battle in proving they are different in the eyes of the public. 

Gilda and Eli both struggle with this identity, internally and externally. For Gilda, she and her kin’s compassion, their doctrine to always exchange when taking blood, and their ability to read minds doesn’t just humanize them, but presents a monster whose abilities and identity are centered around a deep empathy and kindness for others. This, however, doesn’t lessen Gilda’s status as an outsider; rather, it only heightens her conflict with it. Time and again, we witness her attachments to humans and the ways she struggles to enter and depart from their lives. For Gilda, each chapter of her story is an act of continuous remaking. She needs to connect with humans, particularly the kinds of women who remind her of the only two places she ever considered home—the first being by her mother’s side and the second being Woodards, the brothel house where she became the vampire Gilda. But time and space only move her farther away from this. She can never settle: as the vampire Effie tells her, “Movement is life for us.”⁷

In “Vampirito,” Eli’s vampire family’s survival depends on fitting in and conforming to Californian expectations. While there is real love, the tensions in the family revolve around Eli’s parents and grandfather’s conflicting understanding of what it means to be a vampire and the societal consequences to vampires. Eli’s father, Jesús, is very conscious of this. “People stared at him more than his friends who were vampires, but not vampiros. Maybe it was because they were already looking for something, some misstep, some validation of their suspicions.”⁸ There are different levels of prejudice, with the Indigenous vampiros being judged to a higher degree compared to the European vampires, despite the European vampires having a more deadly history. We see this in the reactions Eli’s grandpa and father have to the news of Eli’s bite. His father, the vampiro, familiar with the way people scrutinize and judge him, fears what might happen to his son and their family. “You know what they do to biters. Do to all of us.”⁹ Meanwhile his grandpa, the vampire, sees this as an offense that must be reconciled. He pulls Eli out of bed and risks both being burned by sunlight to push Eli into preying on the boy who bullied him. For Eli, this is all very confusing and he struggles with the conflicting expectations of vampiritos from the kids on the playground, to his parents’ compromises, and finally his grandpa’s colonial and archaic expectations of what it means to be a “real” vampirito. 

In both stories, these new vampires capture the thematic tensions that underlie diasporic communities’ experiences with the larger society. All too often, countries view migrants as outsiders, monsters, or a drain on resources, while, in truth, depending on the labor and services these communities provide. We see this in the way that Gilda and her kind feed and how it evokes services sex workers provide. Or in the roles Gilda takes throughout her journey as hair dresser, brothel owner, farmer, romance novelist, stage manager, or jazz singer. In “Vampirito,” we are told that the vampiritos work all the night shifts and unpleasant jobs that regular humans don’t want to do. Even Eli’s dad runs a late-night taco truck, providing food to teenagers, drunks, and vampires getting off shifts. “No longer embodying metaphysical evil, no longer a damned soul, the vampire has become, in our concerned awareness for multiculturalism, merely ethnic, a victim of heredity, like being Sicilian or Jewish. . . . This new, demystified vampire might well be our next door [sic] neighbor, as Dracula, by origin, appearance, caste, and speech, could never pretend to be.” ¹⁰

While Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the many vampire myths around the world still capture our fears and imagination, it’s undeniable that the everlasting presence of the vampire comes from the diaspora of writers who have taken threads that were there from the beginning, and continually push and question our understanding of what the vampire can be. If the modern vampire lives among us, not as a threat but as a member of our community, then it forces us to question our own behaviors and fears. What do we lose in our rejection of the “outsider”? And when the monster is kinder and more human than us, how do we confront our small-minded cruelty? In 2025, it’s clear that the monsters we should fear are not the vampires knocking at our door but the Draculas living in castles far away. 

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1. Jewelle Gomez, The Gilda Stories: 25th Anniversary Edition (City Lights Publishers, 2016). ↩︎
2. K. Victoria Hernandez, “Vampirito,” khōréō, February 15, 2021. ↩︎
3. Jules Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy: The Vampire Next Door,” in Blood Read:
   The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, ed. Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 18. ↩︎
4. Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy”, 22. ↩︎
5. Gomez, 67. ↩︎
6. Hernandez, “Vampirito.” ↩︎
7. Gomez, 214. ↩︎
8. Hernandez, “Vampirito.” ↩︎
9. Hernandez, “Vampirito.” ↩︎
10. Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy,” 19. ↩︎

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