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The Dominican Racial Imaginary

Critical Caribbean Studies

Focused particularly in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, although at- tentive to the context of earlier eras, this series encourages interdisciplinary approaches and methods and is open to scholarship in a variety of areas, in- cluding anthropology, cultural studies, diaspora and transnational studies, en- vironmental studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, and sociology. This series pays particular attention to the four main research clusters of Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, where the co- editors serve as members of the executive board: Caribbean Critical Studies, Theory, and the Disciplines; Archipelagic Studies and Creolization; Caribbean Aesthetics, Poetics, and Poli- tics; and Caribbean Colonialities.

Series Editors: Yolanda Martínez- San Miguel, Michelle Stephens, and Nelson

Maldonado- Torres

Giselle Anatol, The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the

Circum- Caribbean and African Diaspora

1. What is the African inheritance in Dominican culture?

file:///C:/Users/Kevin/Downloads/(Critical%20Caribbean%20Studies)%20Milagros%20Ricourt%20-%20The%20Dominican%20Racial%20Imaginary_%20Surveying%20the%20Landscape%20of%20Race%20and%20Nation%20in%20Hispaniola-Rutgers%20University%20Press%20(2016)%20(1).pdf

Alaí Reyes- Santos, Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles

Milagros Ricourt, The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race

and Nation in Hispaniola

The Dominican Racial Imaginary

Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola

M I L a g R o S R I c o u R T

RuTgeRS uNIveRSITy PReSS

New BRuNSwIck, New JeRSey, aND LoNDoN

LIBRaRy of coNgReSS caTaLogINg- IN- PuBLIcaTIoN DaTa

Names: Ricourt, Milagros, 1960– author.

Title: The Dominican racial imaginary : surveying the landscape of race and nation in

Hispaniola / Milagros Ricourt.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 2016. | Series:

Critical Caribbean studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016008278| ISBN 9780813584485 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN

9780813584478 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780813584492 (e- book (epub)) | ISBN 9780813584508

(e- book (web pdf))

Subjects: LCSH: Dominican Republic— Race relations— History. | Racism— Dominican

Republic— History. | Ethnicity— Dominican Republic— History. | Nationalism—

Dominican Republic— History. | Blacks— Dominican Republic— History. | Creoles—

Dominican Republic— History. | Cultural pluralism— Dominican Republic— History.

| Anti- racism— Dominican Republic— History. | Dominican Republic— Social life and

customs. | Dominican Republic— Social conditions.

Classification: LCC F1941.A1 R53 2016 | DDC 305.80097293— dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008278

A British Cataloging- in- Publication record for this book is available

from the British Library.

Copyright © 2016 by Milagros Ricourt

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,

electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press,

106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this

prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.

Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

Manufactured in the United States of America

for the women de piel color de azabache who gave me life and knowledge: my great- grandmothers, gregoria Rodriguez

and Quita Diprés; my great- grandaunt, elisa Diprés; my grandmother, esperanza Rodriguez; and my mother, andrea Diprés

coNTeNTS

Preface ix

1 Introduction 3

2 Border at the crossroads 22

3 The creolization of Race 45

4 Cimarrones: The Seeds of Subversion 71

5 Criollismo Religioso 103

6 Race, culture, and National Identity 135

Notes 155

Bibliography 171

Index 183

PReface

Today more than ever, the Dominican Republic is in the eye of the storm of racial relations. The current debate on citizenship denial to Dominicans of Hai-

tian ancestry; the thousands of undocumented Haitians facing deportation; the

spreading of anti- Haitian sentiments; the violence against Haitians throughout

the Dominican territory each poured a drop unleashing a national and inter-

national storm. The storm’s winds blow against the Dominican Republic gov-

ernment, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the oligarchy, and their media.

Rather than receive total acceptance from the Dominican population, the poli-

cies of the government are questioned. An important number of Dominican

women and men from different social backgrounds and organizations abhor

the government, and several international institutions have sanctioned it.

The Dominican diaspora has pronounced against the Dominican government

through a series of articles in newspapers, including the New York Times; dem-

onstrated in front of Dominican embassies and consulates; and sought advo-

cacy with the United States Congress and Black Caucuses. The response of the

Dominican government has been to accuse Dominican protesters of being anti-

Dominican. And because he spoke and wrote against the government, Junot

Díaz, a Dominican American writer and winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize,

received threats that he would be stripped of the honor the Dominican govern-

ment had awarded him back in 2009.

The Dominican Republic has always been in the eye of the storm. Domini-

cans are known for their racism against Haitians and their understanding of

themselves as whites— a burlesque of negrophobia and white supremacy that I

never doubted was totally dominant. But in spite of violence, surveillance, and

a fierce socialization process, many Dominicans battle against the continuity of

white supremacist values, accept their blackness, and consider themselves part

of the Caribbean archipelago.

I was one of them. I remember walking amid ackee trees on the Jamaican

Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies, looking at men and women

wearing dreadlocks and listening to a different language, and not feeling lost in

translation. I felt I belonged. I was connected to the hot weather, to the rhythm,

to the ocean view, to the loud voices, to the drum beatings, to the anguish of

x PReface

poverty, to the bloody sound of violence, and to the ackee tree, transported

along with the people who brought it in slave ships from West Africa.

My experience and the experience of other Dominicans are unknown to

many, and telling about these disparate narratives became an obsession with

me. But how could I explain all this? A long process of reading, traveling to

Haiti and other Caribbean Islands, visits to archives, observation of Dominicans

both in country and throughout the diaspora followed, and through the years I

accumulated hundreds of pages of historical facts, ethnographic observations,

summaries, and quotations from books and chronicles. The result, a chaotic

tome, sat sadly on my desk.

In the middle of my frustration over what to do with all this, I met my men-

tor, Professor Roger Sanjek, during a reunion of our Queens College project

group (the New Immigrants and Old American Project). He asked me about my

research. I told him that I had written this manuscript that was lost in words

and going nowhere, and he told me to mail it to him. I did, and afterward we

started an intense academic dialogue. For two years Professor Sanjek pushed

me to reflect further on the direction of the manuscript and its main ideas, do

some reading here and there, and rewrite. And the professor’s own editing skills

moved the words beautifully, producing, finally, a coherent manuscript. This

book is the result of that working process, and it’s not only mine but Roger’s.

And thanks to Loni Sanjek, Roger’s wife, for her kind words of encouragement.

I’m also thankful to other colleagues who kindly read parts of the manu-

script and provided me with very worthwhile suggestions and criticism. Pro-

fessor Michaeline Crichlow provided many helpful suggestions for chapter 1,

Professor Kathleen López read chapter 2 with a critical eye, and the contribu-

tions of Distinguished Professor Laird Bergad greatly strengthened the historical

argument in chapter 3. Theologian Hector Laporta carefully reviewed chapter 5.

This book states strongly that a more complex Dominican national imagi-

nary exists and that it is advancing in the Dominican Republic. The voices of

Dominicans rejecting racism and xenophobia are louder than ever, and white

supremacists are being subverted by the practices and knowledge of the people.

Africa is nearer.

The Dominican Racial Imaginary

MaP of HISPaNIoLa

Haiti is on the left of the dashed line; the Dominican Republic is on the right side. There are several locations on the Haitian side that are important to highlight. First, all mountain ranges in the Dominican Republic extend into Haiti, including Plaine du Nord (which is a continuation of the Septentrional Mountain Range), Massif du Nord (a continuation of the Central Mountain Range), Montagues Noires (a continuation of the Neiba Mountain Range), and Massif de la Sella (a continuation of the Bahoruco Mountains). These are not labeled on the Haitian side of the map because of space issues, but they do bridge the national divide. And just like the mountain ranges, Maroonage during the Spanish colonial rule of the entire island in sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries extended into what is today Haiti. When the western side of the island was granted to France in 1697, there were maroon villages already established in these mountains. Second, the village of Anse- à- Pitre is in Haiti across from Perdernales on the Dominican side. I walked into Anse- à- Pitre during my research to talk and photograph RaRa assemblies and to visit several Vodou altars. The village of Oaunaminthe, or Juan Mendez in Spanish, is across from Dajabon in Haiti. Oaunaminthe was the place where many Haitians sought refuge when fleeing from the 1937 massacre.

Source: NASA. Map by Michael Siegel, Rutgers Cartography Lab, 2016.

3

1

Introduction

This book starts with a simple question: Why do Dominicans deny the African component of their genetic DNA, culture, and history? This question has been

raised before: authors from myriad disciplines have investigated the meaning

of race in the Dominican Republic, many of them concluding that Dominicans

profess European ancestry, deny their blackness, and, correspondingly, despise

their neighboring Haitians’ African origins.1 It is assumed that all Dominicans

are equally in denial of their racial ancestry and that, although largely a national

populace of mulattos and blacks, they envisage themselves as ancestrally white,

or perhaps as somehow decolorized.2 These assertions locate Dominicans, who

occupy the eastern portion of the island of Hispaniola, as victims of a distorted

history that claims their nation to be Hispanic and Catholic in opposition to

an African and “barbaric” Haiti, which occupies the western part of the island.

This critical perspective on “official” Dominican history, a history in fact

embraced by many Dominicans, remains largely uncontested, even today. Thus,

a racially anomalous, Peau noire, masques blancs country with a deep Fanonian

psychological schism apparently persists; yet at the same time it is one side of a

coin that has its Haitian counterface. Haitians are les damnés in Dominican eyes,

envisaged within an ideology of racial stereotypes, anti- Haitian attitudes, and

historical distortions.

These critical viewpoints, however, are at odds with my experience across

five decades living in and out of the Dominican Republic. Was it I, as I began to

ask myself, who was in denial? Were the people I encountered in the southern

Dominican Republic countryside also in denial? Were my mother, grandmother,

and great- grandmother in denial as well?

I grew up hearing what were understood to be African drums during funer-

als, in celebrations of the Virgen del Carmen (Virgin of Mount Carmel) in the

rural community of Doña Ana, and when taking long walks with my grandmother

4 cHaPTeR 1

from the city of San Cristóbal to visit my great- grandmother in the nearby rural

community of Samangola. Located in what used to be the center of a slave plan-

tation in colonial times, the designation “Samangola” was believed to have been

created by enslaved Africans who arrived on Hispaniola from the Angola region.

As a child, I remember walking behind a bakini, a funeral procession for

an infant, and trying to understand the lyrics, a mixture of African and Span-

ish words, that people were singing. Anthropologists trace this tradition to Cen-

tral Africa, but did those singers, or anyone else involved, ever think about the

connection?

There are other instances of this. Frequently, I recall, I had seen large altars

for San Miguel, or Saint Michael, in my mother’s friends’ houses. Saint Michael,

also known as Belié Belcán, is a mystery (lua), or deity, in Dominican Vodou.3

The term “Dominican Vodou” (or “Vodú,” “Vudú,” “Vudu,” or “Vodun,” but rarely

anymore “voodoo”) has a long genealogy, dating in print at least to the 1970s.

Later in my adult life, between 1980 and 2000, I spent several years in the

Dominican countryside conducting research about one of the largest peasant

organizations in Latin America, Confederación Nacional de Mujeres Campesi-

nas (National Confederation of Peasant Women), which has as its identifying

symbol the black face of Mamá Tingó, or Florinda Soriano, a peasant who fought

for her land when the military seized it illegally but then was arrested and exe-

cuted in 1974, during the regime of Joaquin Balaguer (1966– 1978), after mobiliz-

ing the peasantry of Yamasá, a rural area several kilometers north the capital

city and within the province of Monte Plata. Mamá Tingó was a black woman

whose only photograph shows her with a bandana overing her head and a pipe

between her lips.

Then, in meetings and parades in the Dominican countryside, I heard

members of the organization play palos, African- derived drum ensembles used

in Dominican Vodou, as they sang salves,4 called by Martha Ellen Davis musical

versions of archaic prayers to the Virgin Mary, that are characterized by antiph-

onal verbal and musical repetition, in a strong African rhythm, and are used in

sacred celebrations in Dominican Vodou.5

But it is in the Dominican diaspora to the United States, in which I have lived

and studied since 1984, that I have often heard youngsters say, “I am Domini-

can of African descent,” and I have observed Dominicans wearing dreadlocks in

radical acknowledgment of their supposed historically denied black ancestry.

My experiences have also included ethnographic research between 1989

and 2011, when I spent from one month to four years in villages in the Domini-

can provinces of San Cristóbal and San Juan de la Maguana; in neighborhoods of

the capital city, Santo Domingo; and in towns near the Haitian- Dominican bor-

der. And I have conducted interviews in still other regions of the country and

among Dominicans in New York City.6 My ethnography in communities of the

country’s south has revealed ongoing cultural production with strong African

INTRoDucTIoN 5

components; and my interviews conducted among individuals of varying urban

and rural social backgrounds have illuminated the complicated relationship

between cultural practices and individual identity.

My research also encompasses ethnographic observations on public buses

traveling back and forth from Santo Domingo to the Dominican- Haitian bor-

der towns of Pedernales, Jimaní, and Elias Piña. Both Haitians and Dominicans

ride these buses, which provide an opportune setting for observing Dominican-

Haitian relations at the grassroots level, beyond the “official” discourse of

national essences and African denial.

Finally, I have also spent many months in the Archivo General de Indias

(AGI) in Seville, Spain, and the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Santo

Domingo, Dominican Republic. The AGI is a trove of historical documentation

on the conquest, colonization, and administration of Spain’s possessions in the

Americas, and the AGN is the main historical archival repository in the Domini-

can Republic.

It was my personal experience that first pushed me to ask my initial ques-

tion about African denial. Then, over my extended ethnographic and archival

explorations, I found myself navigating from initial personal curiosity through

history, music, sociology, literature, anthropology, religion, and public health to

synthesize and construct the subject matter of this book— the historical career

of bifurcated notions of race in the anything but racially bifurcated Dominican

Republic. As a result of my research, I now see the formation of the Dominican

nation, not as a single historical trajectory of sociocultural dynamics and racial

identity formation, but rather as a series of overlapping tendencies always in

contradiction. Although what I identify as the “official” history of the Dominican

Republic retains its bifurcated racial fundamentalism, I argue that Dominican

racial self- perception in fact divides into different “imagined communities.”7

Here I use Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined community yet am tak-

ing certain liberties: in my view of a split Dominican nationality, I go beyond

Anderson’s assertion that authenticity in identity is solely conceivable in terms

of nationalism.

Following Edward Said, I use an approach to nationalism that takes into

consideration its overall thematic continuities and at the same time consid-

ers its historically specific cultural particularities and discontinuities. Still fol-

lowing Said’s approach, I argue that there are different national imaginaries

within the same national space- time framework— first, the colonized imaginary,

representing the continuity of the colonial framework of power, and, second, a

subversive imaginary, defined by those who see themselves as black and ready

to fight against slavery— thus exposing shifting discontinuities in the colonial

racial and cultural system.

The imaginary of Criollo/New World– born colonial plantation masters,

rich mulattos, Catholic authorities, and local intelligentsia, all influenced by

6 cHaPTeR 1

intrusive US racialization, was nurtured by the values of the former Spanish

rulers, who intentionally generated an anomalous historical narrative that dis-

torted the on- the- ground essence of Dominican racial and cultural makeup.

This has evolved into the contemporary constructions of the Dominican Repub-

lic as the “most Spanish nation in the Americas”8 and “the oldest Christian

people of the Americas.”9 This imaginary indexes the apparent triumph of the

Dominican elite, who retain colonial values and behaviors encysted within a

modern structure of power and domination. It has erased Africa within the

“official” Dominican racial imaginary through many decades of socialization,

utilizing discursive, print, and visual media and artifacts, as well as reflecting an

assumed Euro- Christian epistemological base.

An underacknowledged and parallel imaginary, however, has resisted the

imposition of these values, which kept ancestral Dominicans in physical slavery

and their descendants in prolonged psychological denial. This second imagi-

nary fed upon the values of ancestors who acted upon their desires for freedom.

Their resistance to colonial rule is exemplified by significant movements: insur-

rections of enslaved Africans in the early sixteenth century; the creation of

alternative maroon societies surviving over centuries; the role of blacks and

poor mulattos in the achievement of independence in 1844; and their leader-

ship in the War of Restoration in 1865. These submerged values survived as well

in religion, aesthetics, and peasant movements and other forms of resistance in

the twentieth century, and they continue today. I unequivocally affirm in this

book that the elite imaginary failed to penetrate the entire Dominican social

tissue. Abhorred and persecuted, Dominicans, from the southern rural areas in

particular, preserved their African- Taino- Spanish religion, sacred music, and

traditional instruments along with other cultural elements and orientations.

In a country with longstanding racial hybridization, the historical move-

ments, assertions, and responses I will examine are too complex “to be captured

in simple equations of domination and resistance,”10 or with a binary black/

white formula. In this sense, race will be understood here within a dialecti-

cal process that throughout history incorporates and accommodates spaces

of resistance. People and their movements redraw the boundaries of principal

contradictions creating new zones of conflict and collective actions. Several

examples illustrate my point.

First, the border dividing the island was the embryo of contradictions both

in colonial and republican times. In spite of governmental policies, ideologies,

violence, and surveillance, the border is space where ordinary people, both

Dominicans and Haitians, engage in the creation of an alternative community

of cultural fusion, cooperation, and achievement of citizenship. People in the

border have developed a counter- logic of shared meaning disrupting the racial

divisions encapsulated in the official ideology. In fact, the social formation of

the Haitian- Dominican border, as we shall see, incorporates the active presence

INTRoDucTIoN 7

of mulattos and blacks in its gestation and maturation processes. Today, when

the Dominican government is stripping the nationality of Dominicans of Hai-

tian ancestry and hate emanates from the hierarchy of the Catholic Church,

the oligarchy, and government- dominated mass media, the Dominicans’ per-

ception of the situation is radically divided. For example, social media discus-

sions reflect struggles of Dominican and Haitians for human rights and mutual

respect, several sectors of the Catholic Church deviated from the racist teaching

of the Church hierarchy, and the Dominican diaspora has expressed its discon-

tent with racist policies.

Second, the slave resistance to colonial rule did not stop the blending of

races. These complexities of race, as Roger Sanjek (referring to Brazil) argues,

encompass transgenerational social and biological melding and its com-

pounded results, which include the blending of blacks into dominant European

cultural groups “frequently at low social status, but occasionally in elite circum-

stances.”11 This array of colonial history, resistance, social transformation, and

biological melding are mutually implicated factors in the social construction of

race. In the Dominican case, one can argue that a hybrid nation of longstand-

ing racial and ethnic complexity generates spaces of accommodation, resis-

tance, and negotiation of racial identity simultaneously, at both individual and

community levels. Rich mulattos, for example, took the political control of the

country at the creation of the Dominican Republic, and in alliance with former

Creole slaveholders, appropriated the elite’s racial discourse of Hispanidad and

Catholicism. On the other hand, ordinary people construct their own way of

thinking, in terms of racial identity, according to their rural/urban background,

social class, and education.

Third, enslaved Africans’ resistance in the early life of the Spanish colony

of Hispaniola is essential to decoding the continuing dynamics of race and cul-

tural production. The lessons of freedom in the sixteenth century did not end

with the comparatively short- lived plantation system created by the Spanish,

and they generated an underground culture perpetuated in maroon commu-

nities that survived for centuries, initially blending with indigenous Tainos

and later with other ethnic components. These maroon spaces re- created

social and self- emancipation, as well as alternative knowledge, through their

counter- colonial histories and practices. Still, ongoing sociocultural processes

manifested in many Dominican settings, and refashioning of Dominican Vodou

emanate from maroonage. Here ordinary people subverted the neat location

of the Catholic Church, and their black bodies dancing to the rhythm of palos

reimagined the national.

Fourth, although insufficiently acknowledged, previous writers, histori-

ans, social scientists, politicians, social and cultural organizations, merengue

singers, and human rights advocates have been instrumental in resisting the

“official” Dominican imagination. Starting in the 1970s, a wave of thinkers and

8 cHaPTeR 1

activists rewrote history searching for Dominican African component. The

works of Carlos Andújar Persinal, Celsa Albert Batista, Franklin Franco, Blass

Jimenez, Fradique Lizardo, Dagoberto Tejada, Hugo Tolentino Dipp, and Rubén

Silié have fiercely challenged the official historical narrative in arguing for the

relevance of Africa in the racial and cultural formation of the Dominican Repub-

lic.12 These Dominican scholars joined the Slave Route of the United Nations

Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). They opened a

new space of dialogue to break the silence about slave trade in the former Span-

ish colony of Hispaniola. Black politicians such as Maximiliano Gómez and José

Francisco Peña Gómez were also instrumental in understanding the acceptance

of regular Dominicans of their African heritage. In the diaspora, the recent work

of Silvio Torres- Saillant and Ginetta Candelario refutes the “official” Dominican

imaginary.13

This book examines each of these spaces of resistance, negotiation, intimacy

between Dominicans and Haitians, cultural production, and academic challenge

to the ruling class’s negrophobia. It is an effort to understand the Dominican

nation both ethnographically and historically along with the struggles of people

against the imposing racial and cultural values of the country’s elite.

The Evolution of “Official” Intellectual Discourse

“If there is something black or African in the Dominican Republic it came

from Haiti.”

“Dominicans are essentially Hispanics and Tainos.”

“Unfortunately, Haitians have to be our next- door neighbor, tainting

Dominican Hispanidad.”

“Haitians are a threat to our sovereignty because Haitians want to impose

what their Constitution says: ‘the island is one and indivisible.’”

“I don’t know why are we waiting to send them all back to Haiti, and if

they resist, kill all of them.” [My translations from the Spanish]14

These Dominican Internet posts reflect the “official” Dominican history in

which Haiti, tragically, is the central point shaping the idea of Hispanidad. The

Spanish colony has been falsely described as a place of harmonious mixing of

Spaniards and Tainos until African slaves fled from the French side to the Span-

ish side of the island, and then, later, repeated invasions by Haitians brought

further black menace to the Hispanidad of Dominicans. What are the deeply

embedded reasons that push one nation to harbor hate, racism, and genocidal

sentiment against a neighbor nation? What factors inspire a nation to construct

its identity by celebrating its racial superiority over another nation? Does the

INTRoDucTIoN 9

Dominican elite have a historically interpretable and understandable reason

to express such a virulent anti- Haitianism, or did Dominican intellectuals just

wake up one morning and decide to build a racist discourse merely for the sake

of being racists? Were there only external forces, such as the United States’

nineteenth- century racialization of Dominicans versus Haitians that provoked

the mentality of these individuals? Are these elite so- called intellectuals the

only island voices regarding the relations between Dominicans and Haitians?

I will argue that the voice of the Dominican elite— formed by slavehold-

ers and educated mulattos in colonial times, and by former slaveholders and

the Catholic Church after independence— arose in the midst of interwoven

cultural, political, and economic forces over the island’s long historical devel-

opment. During these times, the elite developed strong negative sentiment

against France and then against Haiti. The economic success of the eighteenth-

century French colony on the western side of the island was viewed with resent-

ment by the Spanish Criollo elite, a resentment exemplified in the work of the

eighteenth- century educated mulatto Antonio Sánchez Valverde. His book, Idea

del valor de la isla Española y utilidades que de ella puede sacar su monarquia [A Con-

ception of the Value of the Island of Hispaniola and of the Use which the Mon-

archy Could Make of It], published in 1785, urged Spain’s monarch to restore

the splendor of the early Spanish colony. In what Pedro L. San Miguel calls the

tragic narration,15 Sánchez Valverde recounted the prior glory of Hispaniola in

the sixteenth century, deplored the depopulation of the western side of the

island during the early seventeenth century, and requested intervention by the

crown to invest and compete with the island’s French colony. In sum, this Jesuit

author promoted love for the Iberian motherland, idealized the “glorious” days

of the founding of Spain’s first Caribbean island colony, and harshly criticized

the motherland for abandoning it.

Sánchez Valverde both championed the Creole Hispanic class and demanded

new migration of European settlers to further develop the island. Interestingly,

Sánchez Valverde also petitioned the monarch to import enslaved Africans to

boost productivity, as had the more recent neighboring French colony. In the

eyes of Sánchez Valverde, Africans were solely a commodity, not a component

of the racial and social makeup of the colony’s populace. His work consolidated

the intellectual foundation of what would later become the Dominican Repub-

lic as imagined by its national elite: a Hispanic and Catholic nation. The Jesuit

priest’s influence on the Dominican elite was reflected in their unquestioned

patriotic admiration of Spain. Sánchez Valverde, though a mulatto himself, also

promoted the belief of an Indo- Hispanic race and inspired a nostalgic sentiment

about its supposed foundational role in the colony’s past.

Sánchez Valerde’s request to the Spanish crown did not come to fruition,

due to the French Revolution in 1789 and, in 1791, the onset of the Haitian Revo-

lution, which ended with creation of the first black nation, the Republic of Haiti,

10 cHaPTeR 1

in 1804. To Sánchez Valverde’s admirers, the “barbarians” burning fields, killing

whites, and creating their own free nation were a threat to the very foundations

of the slave system. Yet to others the Haitian Revolution became an inspiration

for ending slavery, not only on Hispaniola but also on other Caribbean islands

and the two American continents, and a model for later independence move-

ments. However, the racial fear, the economic threat, and the possibility of a

government and nation ruled by self- liberated slaves mortified both minds in

Europe and slaveholders in the region.

While other colonial rulers did not immediately confront the “barbar-

ians” face to face, the Spanish slaveholders next door did. The island’s elites on

the eastern side actually lived under the authority of Haiti for more than two

decades, from 1822 to 1844. During this period, Haitian policies disfavored plant-

ers, cattle ranchers, and the Catholic clergy: slavery was abolished, land was

confiscated, slaveholders fled the country, and the Catholic clergy was expropri-

ated of land, houses, convents, and hospitals, and their salaries were reduced.

Land was distributed among blacks and poor mulattos. The colonial elite’s

humiliations under the Haitians created a furious resentment, given voice in

the writings of clerics, among the white and rich mulatto intellectuals and own-

ers of cattle ranches who became the post- 1844 Dominican national political

class and intellectual elite.

The resentment fed upon the writings of Sánchez Valverde and their own

twisted understanding of the Haitian Revolution. With historian José Gabriel

García’s three- volume Compendio de la Historia Dominicana [Compendium of

Dominican History], published in 1878, the resentment became word. García

shared Sánchez Valverde’s lament for the lost splendor of the early colonial

period, regret over Spanish neglect of the colony, and call to import Europeans

into the island. García also used “Dominicans” anachronistically, prior to cre-

ation of the Dominican Republic in 1844, to designate the Creole slaveholding

group. This nationality label has since been employed to identify “Dominicans”

as victims of Haitian “barbarism” and to make Toussaint Louverture, Jean-

Jacques Dessalines, and Jean- Pierre Boyer enemies of “Dominican” sovereignty.

School texts, history books, and newspapers to this day use the term “Domini-

can” to refer to the inhabitants of the Spanish colony before the creation of the

Dominican Republic and a “Dominican” nationality in 1844.

Concomitantly with the writings of García, the United States sent a series

of diplomats to investigate conditions in Haiti and in the Dominican Repub-

lic preceding official US recognition of their independence.16 These diplomatic

envoys informed the US president and Congress about how they perceived racial

differences between Haitians and Dominicans. In their writings, they expressed

contempt for the former enslaved Africans who had dared to destroy the slavery

regime and govern themselves. In the eyes of these Americans, Haitians were

African and barbarian, and, in contrast, Dominicans were light skinned and

INTRoDucTIoN 11

white. This US racialization of Haitians and Dominicans became a catalyst in

the evolving “official” Dominican racial discourse, adding ideological ammu-

nition to the resentment harbored by the Dominican elite. The US diplomats’

racialization reinforced the Dominican elites’ virulent contempt for Haitians;

both parties envisioned them as predators and disruptors of the natural order

of white supremacy.

In this shared US and elite Dominican disdain toward Haiti, Sánchez Val-

verde’s conception of an Indo- Hispanic race became the favored origin myth of

Dominican peoplehood. Manuel de Jesús Galván’s novel Enriquillo, published

in 1882, fictionalized the ethnic origins of Dominicans, which he portrayed as

acculturation of the indigenous Taino population to the customs and tradi-

tions of Spain.17 Scholar Doris Sommers contends that “novelas” promoted by

the state, such as Enriquillo, try to nationalize their heterogeneous populations.

In the particular case of the Dominican Republic, Galván’s novel silences the

voices of Africans in the Dominican national discourse. Galván, secretary to the

commander of the 1863 Spanish annexation forces, depicted with emphatic fer-

vor the travails of the Tainos early in the colonial era when, led by Enriquillo,

the indigenous population in the region of Jaragua revolted and escaped to the

mountains of Bahoruco, where they declared war against the Spanish. Eventu-

ally conflict ended, and racial reconciliation then ensued. In fact, this romantic

vision distorted one of the bloodiest episodes in island history, when thousands

of Tainos were massacred in Jaragua and the extermination of the Tainos of

Hispaniola soon followed.18

Sánchez Valverde’s glorification of Spain, García’s anti- Haitian and anti-

black racism, and Galván’s Hispano- indigenous racial romanticism all had tre-

mendous impact on the later thought of Dominicans. The idea of being whites,

with a tinge of Taino, provoked a disjuncture between nationalist ideology and

their black or mulatto bodies. This was reflected, as Frantz Fanon contends,

in the shame over their mixed white and black identity, occasionally acknowl-

edged by Dominican intelligentsia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centu-

ries.19 Several writers indeed advocated incentives for European immigration in

order to lessen Dominican racial inferiority and “whiten the race,” and thus fos-

ter economic development. For example, José Ramón López, in La Alimentación

de las Razas (The Feeding of the Races, 1896), argued that Dominican economic,

political, and social backwardness was due to this biological blemish, resulting

in laziness, violence, and love of gambling, which blocked the path to progress.

Federico García Godoy, in El Derrumbe (The Downfall, 1917), asserted that the

hybrid nature of the Dominican people was a determinant of their country’s

backwardness. And Moscoso Puello, in Cartas a Evelina (Letters to Evelina, 1941),

portrayed an image of the Dominican as a racial mixture and therefore of infe-

rior nature, to the country’s detriment.20 As the contemporary Dominican his-

torian Roberto Cassá observes, “Regarding the racial problem, positivists of the

12 cHaPTeR 1

beginning of the twentieth century had a common factor on which to blame the

country’s misfortunes: the racial composition; or, in other terms, on shortage of

whites and the mixing of blacks and whites.”21

During the early twentieth century, Dominican authors advanced the idea

that there was a racial democracy during and after Spanish colonial times. For

example, the early twentieth- century Dominican writer Américo Lugo extolled

the “sweet manners” of Spanish masters toward slaves.22 Quite probably, Lugo

borrowed his notion of racial democracy from writings emerging and consolidat-

ing in Brazil during these same years.23 The invented notion of racial democracy

operated to obscure the maintenance of white supremacy in that country and

has done the same for the Dominican Republic. To this regard, Francine Wind-

dance Twine argues that Brazilian claims of racial democracy succumb before

the everyday discourses and material practices supporting white supremacy

and demeaning millions of black Brazilians.24 Dominican sociologist Rubén Silié

contends that the function of the racial democracy argument is to conceal the

reality of slavery as a two- class system dependent on violence as the means of

submission and obedience.25

The idea of a racial democracy in Spanish Hispaniola began with the writ-

ings of Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de Saint- Méry, a French chronicler who in

1797 concluded that masters and slaves in the Spanish colony lived in relative

harmony as compared with the brutal system in the island’s French colony.26

Certainly there were fundamental differences between slavery in the Spanish

portion of the island, where cattle raising prevailed, and the sugar, indigo, and

coffee plantation economy in the French portion, based on intensive slave labor.

The work the enslaved did in the two parts of the island vary, but the concept

of master and slave was the same. The conclusion propounded by Moreau de

Saint- Méry has been unexamined until recent times, and historical knowledge

about slavery in the Dominican Republic has relied too much on his interpreta-

tions and prejudices.