“I was five when my neighbor in Santo Domingo bought the first set on our street, the first I’d ever laid eyes on. … Maybe I would have been O.K. if I’d seen anything else: the news, a variety show, a political debate. But my earliest exposure to television was a Spider-Man cartoon … My father’s absence made perfect sense. He couldn’t come back right away because he was busy fighting crime in N.Y.C. . . . as Spider-Man. The diasporic imagination really is its own superpower.”