Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s memoir, written in 1909 while in México (but published in its entirety in 1989) may well be claimed as one of the first written accounts by a Dominican intellectual in the United States. In this paper I analyze the cultural implications of what it meant to be Dominican at the beginning of the 20th century for a non-white elite intellectual such as Henríquez Ureña in New York City. Although I view Henríquez Ureña’s memoir as a depiction of travel experiences of modernity, I am also interpreting his memoir as a historically prefiguring attempt at recapturing the Dominican nation he had gradually displaced himself from (for different reasons). I argue that Henríquez Ureña’s memoir is itself the literal site of exposure of a life that had been constantly marked by dislocations and relocations.