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

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.

It is sometimes argued that the numbers of freed slaves and of mulattos

contributed to racial “democracy.” However, the manumission of enslaved per-

sons on the Spanish side of the island did not represent a change in the overall

slavery system. In fact, the freed and mulatto population of the French colony

was larger than in the Spanish colony, where, in spite of the numbers, the fun-

damental contradictions of slavery remained strong. Spaniards, French, and

also Portuguese and English, all developed their own slavery regimes, yet the

basis of the system everywhere was violence, coercion, and virulent discrimina-

tion against free blacks.

Countering the argument of Dominican racial democracy is the fact that,

for over a period of three centuries, significant numbers of enslaved laborers

in the Spanish domain escaped to form or join independent maroon commu-

nities. The first runaways fled the plantations in the early 1500s, and the last

INTRoDucTIoN 13

independent maroon village was described by traveler William Walton in 1810.

Why would enslaved workers prefer to escape the “sweet manners” of their

Spanish masters to live in the mountain wilderness? Clearly, the daily exploita-

tion, lack of freedom, and brutal punishment stipulated in the Caroline Black

Code dissuaded them from even considering any return to their former masters.

A lack of attention to these topics has served the “official” Dominican imag-

inary’s contention of early racial harmony, as well as its claim that disruptions

by blacks in the Spanish colony derived from, first, the French colony, and then

Haiti, downplaying the reality of slavery in the Spanish domain. Blaming Hai-

tians for all traces of African influence in the Dominican Republic, and exalt-

ing a largely fictitious Spanish- Indian race, became pillars of twentieth- century

state policy.27 The exaltation of Tainos is particularly problematic since they

had physically disappeared by the late sixteenth century. Enslaved Africans, on

the other hand, were present in the colony as early as 1503, and they remained

numerically important, producing the interracial mixture visible in today’s

Dominican population. Moreover, what survives of Taino culture as manifested

in religion, language, food, and music has been transmitted until present time

by blacks. Yet, focusing the history of Dominican national origins on Spain, and

on ethnic interaction between Spaniards and Tainos, became a recurrent “offi-

cial” theme.

The strands of elite Dominican thought that included resentment toward

Haiti, praise of the Iberian motherland, disdain and shame for blackness, and

desire to augment the country’s white population were distilled into state policy

during the 1930– 1961 regime of mulatto dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. In tune

with Sánchez Valverde, García, Galván, and Lugo, the intelligentsia of the Tru-

jillo period dedicated their efforts to strengthening the nation by reinforcing its

“Hispanic” attributes: white skin color, European ideals of female pulchritude,

the Spanish language, Catholicism, and intense devotion to motherland Spain.

The two leading exponents of these values among Trujillo supporters were Man-

uel Arturo Peña Batlle (1902– 1954) and Joaquín Balaguer (1906– 2002).

In reviewing the history of the island’s two nations, Peña Batlle concluded

that Haiti “is a society without history, without a tradition or cultural background,

without a point of departure, and without spiritual roots.”28 His reactionary

thinking positioned the Haitian people in opposition to Dominicans: whatever

qualities Haitians did not possess, Dominicans did. This anti- Haitianism was a

deliberate counterweight to Dominicans’ white- Indian “mestizaje,” Hispanidad,

and Catholicism.29 Anti- Haitianism was carefully crafted through distorting his-

torical accounts of Haitian “invasions,” construing Haiti as a threat to Domini-

can sovereignty, assigning blame to Haiti for any African blood in the Dominican

people, and declaring Haitians a racial menace. This racialized scenario was

compounded in rationalizations for the regime’s massacre of thousands of Hai-

tians in Dominican/Haitian border towns in 1937 and subsequent violations of

14 cHaPTeR 1

the human rights of Haitians resident in the Dominican Republic. Instilling both

“Hispanic” national values and anti- Haitianism in the minds of the Dominican

citizenry became pervasive in state policy throughout the Trujillo dictatorship

and during the repressive 1966– 1978 regime of Joaquín Balaguer.

Although intellectuals in other Spanish- speaking Caribbean countries also

defended the values of Spain and the Catholic faith and downplayed the African

presence in the formation of their nations, such ideas never became active state

policy. The viewpoint of José Antonio Saco in the 1830s, envisioning a Cuban

nation based on Spanish culture and without African roots, extended into the

twentieth century in the work of other Cubans. And in Puerto Rico, Antonio

Pedreira’s Insularismo (1934)30 were similar to the ideas of their Dominican con-

temporaries Peña Batlle and Balaguer in claiming that Puerto Rican national

identity was based on the values of Spain and in disdaining their island’s African

cultural roots. In Cuba and Puerto Rico, however, dissident voices also emerged

in opposition to such exclusively Hispanic claims. For Cuba, this included long-

standing collaborations and exchange between Afro- Cubans and African Ameri-

cans, from the era of slavery onward and especially after US intervention into

the Cuban war for independence in 1898, as well as the intellectual and artis-

tic production of Cubans Juan Gualberto Gómez, Rafael Serra, Nicolás Guillén,

Nancy Morejon, Victor Fowler, and Juan René Betancourt, among others, who

created marked resistance to African denial by the Cuban elite. In Puerto Rico,

intellectual resistance to Insularismo in the poetry and writings of Luis Palés

Matos, José Luis González, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Isabelo Zenón, Isar Godreau, and

Magaly Fequiere contributed to alternative ways of conceptualizing Puerto Rico

in racial and cultural terms.

These Cuban and Puerto Rican voices benefited from less politically repres-

sive environments than the Dominican Republic, where parallel dissident voices

were long ignored or suppressed and did not emerge until the later twentieth

century. The writings of Juan Pablo Duarte (1813– 1875), Pedro Francisco Bonó

(1828– 1906), and Gregorio Luperón (1839– 1897), however, do testify to an alter-

native narrative centered on a Dominican nationalism based not on race but

inclusive of the country’s racial diversity and emphasizing the role of its entire

people in the country’s transformation. Duarte’s movement for independence

from Haiti, for example, included whites, mulattos, and blacks and was founded

not on racial hatred but in the widespread desire for an independent nation.31

Pedro Francisco Bonó saw the racially hybrid nature of Dominicans as an asset

for development.32 Gregorio Luperón was the leader of a war considered a racial

war (the masses of blacks and mulattos against the country’s annexation to

Spain in 1863). Moreover, as we shall see, concealed in their daily life practices

and negotiations of identity, ordinary Dominicans, too, have long continued to

resist the “official” dominant ideology.

INTRoDucTIoN 15

The Burlesque Caribbean Other

Presidents, Catholic bishops and archbishops, the oligarchy, the official intel-

lectuals, and its controlled mass media are the best ambassadors of the Domini-

can official imaginary. The discourse and practice of dictator Rafael Leonidas

Trujillo (1930– 1961) showed the world of Dominican whiteness and fidelity to

the Catholic faith and their intolerance of “savage” Haiti. President Joaquín

Balaguer (1966– 1978/1986– 1994) exhibited internationally his loyalty to Spain

and his preoccupation of Haitian blackness infiltrating the white Dominican

Republic. Contemporary Dominican Republic presidents such as Leonel Fernán-

dez and Danilo Medina have enacted laws that violate the human rights of hun-

dreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian ancestry, gaining the rejection and

criticism of the international community.

Most scholars, journalists, and international observers unquestioningly

accept the Dominican/Hispanic versus Haitian/African discourse of Domini-

can elite. For example, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) series Black Latin

America conducted by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has one chapter

on the Dominican Republic titled “Haiti and the Dominican Republic: A Divided

Island.” In this documentary all Dominicans are lumped into the denial of their

blackness and are oblivious of their own history. David Howard affirms that

“Dominican nationalism has been colored by a pervasive racism, centered on

a rejection of African ancestry and blackness.”33 And Michelle Wucker uses the

patriarchal metaphor of the cockfight to characterize the oppression and abuse

Dominicans (all of them, undifferentiated) exercise against Haitians.34 As Silvio

Torres- Saillant puts it, there is a willingness to “pass judgment on the Domini-

can population’s ‘backwardness,’ ‘ignorance,’ or ‘confusion’ on account of their

inaccurate self- definition.”35

I must report that many of these narratives fail to expose the complexi-

ties of Dominican history and national identity formation. Major components

of Dominican sociocultural dynamics remain submerged. Moreover, such out-

sider narratives, written with transnational academic authority, inadvertently

legitimize extant structures of power by uncritically representing the “official”

narrative of the Dominican nation as if it was uncontested and embraced by all

Dominicans. For instance, as I show in this book, a richer historical and contem-

porary panorama of Dominican representations can add layers of complication

and conundrum to Dominican identity, both past and present.

The acceptance of the Dominican Republic as a monolithic nation of

racial retrogrades amounts to the creation of a unique Caribbean other. This

Dominican other both exists beyond and sidesteps the global other constructed

by European power and superiority to embrace the world’s many powerless,

“inferior,” and racialized colonial others. The construction of the Dominican

16 cHaPTeR 1

Republic as a nation of retrogrades is a burlesque otherization, depicting a peo-

ple who believe themselves to be superior by mimicking Europeans’ original

othering. It depends upon academic outsiders accepting the “official” historical

racial discourse as authoritative and authentic and concluding that Domini-

cans, oblivious of the African component of their racial makeup, and universally

contemptuous and abusive to their Haitian neighbors, accept it as well.

The narrative of Dominican denial clearly is very dangerous. Informing

outsiders of the burlesque other paradoxically supports and legitimizes the tor-

tured historical unfolding of the “official” Dominican racial imaginary. Further,

these academic interpretations isolate Dominicans from the rest of the “normal”

Caribbean, obscuring the role of Hispaniola and the Dominican Republic in the

development of dissident identities and cultural struggles in its wider region.

The Centrality of the Plantation

The exceptionalism of the Dominican Republic for many academics is further

indexed by the apparent absence of plantation- system dominance as exhibited

by other Caribbean islands. In fact, Spanish Hispaniola was the first colony in

the “New World” where sugar plantations were established, although the exis-

tence of the plantation there was short lived. During the first quarter of the

sixteenth century, the Spanish colony was the site for the emergence of sugar

plantations, using thousands of enslaved African laborers, and producing and

exporting tons of sugar to Europe. This plantation system did not last for long,

however, due to slave insurrections, the emigration of many Spaniards to the

newly discovered lands of Mexico and Peru, and management failures by Span-

ish royal authorities. A second attempt to revitalize plantations in the Spanish

portion of the island during the eighteenth century was also short lived, ended

by the successful Haitian Revolution.

Lacking an extended plantation society history, the Dominican Republic (but

not Haiti) has been sidelined by scholars who, like Sidney Mintz, saw the rich and

fascinating complexities of the slave trade and plantation production as pivotal

to the emergence of capitalism. The Caribbean plantation system has been widely

discussed by historians and anthropologists, and the most well- known academic

works on the topic are from North American scholars.36 However, a relatively

undeveloped plantation system history does not exclude the Dominican Republic

from the same rich sociocultural dynamics that characterize other people of the

Americas, and particularly the Caribbean. In the case of the Dominican Republic,

slave resistance against the abuses of Spanish masters was the main wellspring

of popular cultural production and identity. Moreover, as Michaeline Crichlow

explains, our view of Caribbean cultural production must be expanded beyond

plantations to include cultural practices in other spaces and locations, inside and

outside the Caribbean.37 Crichlow argues throughout her book, Globalization and

INTRoDucTIoN 17

the Post- Creole Imagination, that Caribbean sociocultural practices must be liber-

ated from the plantation framework in order to explain the production of culture

in the present- day Caribbean and, moreover, to extend the process of cultural

creolization to other vulnerable regions in the world. This argument opens the

possibility to consider cultural production that does not emanate directly from

the macroeconomic relations of plantation social structures.

Many Dominicans themselves are oblivious of the Dominican Republic

position as a gateway of knowledge of the deep and rich processes of Carib-

bean cultural dynamics. Hispaniola’s glorious, and early, movements of free-

dom place the terrain that would later become the Dominican Republic at the

very dawn of modernity. This five- and- a- quarter- century trajectory has been

obscured and distorted by “official” narratives.

The Dominican experience connects to the process of evolving cultures in

the Caribbean. Paraphrasing Edouard Glissant’s “The Open Boat” I can say that

Dominican ancestors were also in the womb/abyss of the boat and in the depth

of the sea, in the apocalyptic eternal debasement, and in the remaking of the

unknown in actual experience of Relation, and Dominican also cry the cry of

poetry.38 Dominican histories are grounded in the Antilles sociocultural dynam-

ics, in creolization processes of cultural production and struggles exploring the

circuits connecting the Antilles across language barriers in an ever- evolving

Antillanité as proposed by Glissant.

Transparency/Opacity

I will argue that the Dominican populace has not lived and survived under totaliz-

ing intellectual bondage to the historic Dominican intelligentsia’s “official” abso-

lute sense of racial superiority, its uncompromising cultural fundamentalism, or

its exclusion of overlapping local subjectivities. There are other stories to tell, not

simply in contraposition to Haiti, but emanating from a longer history beyond the

coloniality of Dominican “official” thought or the representations of foreign intel-

lectuals. To explain my stance in bringing to the surface stories of other Domini-

cans and their contradictory imaginaries, I draw upon Martinican writer Edouard

Glissant’s concepts of transparency and opacity in his Poetics of Relation.

Transparency no longer seems like the bottom of the mirror in which West-

ern humanity reflected the world in its own image. There is opacity now at the

bottom of the mirror, a whole alluvium deposited by populations, silt that is fer-

tile but in actual fact indistinct and unexplored even today, denied or insulted

more often than not, and with an insistent presence that we are incapable of

not experiencing.39

In engaging Glissant’s opacity (the other, the different) and transparency

(the refusal to see difference or dominance of Western values), I propose to

reformulate the fallacy that Dominicans are Hispanic and Catholic and nothing

18 cHaPTeR 1

more. The alluvium deposited by other Dominican stories— of freedom, cultural

creativity, identity formation, and daily life— must be explored. However, opac-

ity and transparency are intricately linked and blended in the hybrid essence

of the Caribbean and, in particular, in the case of the Dominican Republic, its

eldest Creole child. In Cuban writer Antonio Benítez Rojas’s provocative meta-

phor, “the painfully delivered child [of the] Caribbean” combines the “civilized”

West with “savage” Indians and Africans, both genetically and culturally.40 This

painfully delivered Caribbean child, a unique product of elements merged and

fused in the Americas, speaks, in Glissant’s words, with an “African- derived

grammar and European- derived vocabulary,” which is the base for a Black Cre-

ole Caribbean identity.41

For too long, this painfully delivered child of creolization on Hispaniola

has been confined to the bottom of the mirror and silenced, leaving the shad-

owy sociocultural dynamics of resistance, freedom, and Dominican identity in

a limbo of obscurities. To liberate and hear the child, and to give voice to sub-

jectivities redefining the possibilities of the Dominican nation, discussion must

begin at the intersection of power and history. I support Haitian anthropologist

Michel- Rolph Trouillot’s affirmation that “human beings participate in history

both as actors and as narrators.”42

Too many of the dramas of Dominican history have been narrated exclusively

from the perspective of former slaveholders with loyalties to Spain, silencing

other narrators and distorting major historical episodes. The nation, national-

ism, and national identity have been “somehow invented” through exclusion of

marginal groups and actors who remain outside the “official” national discourse.

Truoillot argues that the basis upon which the nation is claimed is always part

fiction and that “nationalism always appears somehow invented.”43

Who are these marginal ones? Where has the painfully delivered child been

socially located and nurtured? What can this child/adult tells us?

Organization of the Book

Chapter 2, “Border at the Crossroads,” explores the roots of Dominican imagi-

naries. The chapter examines the Dominican- Haitian border as a site of con-

flicting national imaginations and the source of contradictory, complicated,

and still ongoing vectors of struggles for freedom, racial separation, violence,

cooperation and cultural blending, and hope and disillusion.

The argument underlying my discussion of the border follows accordingly.

On one hand, the physical border separating Haiti and the Dominican Republic

evolved into a cultural signifier in the Dominican official imaginary, a marker

of the racial separation of African- Haitian and Spanish- Dominican. The border

became the line dividing civilization from barbarism, not only from the official

Dominican point of view but also from that of the United States and leading

INTRoDucTIoN 19

European powers.44 In this sense, the Haitian- Dominican border became a con-

glomerate of factors— power, abuse, survival, and negotiation— mediated by

social actors, both locally and internationally. It has been essential to the for-

mation of national subjectivities.

Following Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the border as a social location, chap-

ter 2 further argues that a psychological border emerged, placing Dominicans here

and Haitians there, divided by a racialized boundary that was reinforced with a

persistent and politically driven anti- Haitianism initiated during the Haitian uni-

fication of island from 1822 to 1844. This reached a climax in what I call Hispaniola

Holocaust, the massacre of thousands of Haitians in 1937. However, notwithstand-

ing the process of creating a national subjectivity reflecting the Dominican elite’s

point of view, alternative developments have contested this “official” imaginary.

In spite of violent confrontation and separation, in spite of genocide and surveil-

lance, the social location of the border also diminishes the opposition of here and

there, unites us and them, and preserves binational community.

Chapter 3, “The Creolization of Race,” provides an overview of slavery in

the Spanish colony and includes a discussion of racial creolization— the birth of

the painfully delivered child and its subsequent racial identification. Yet, as we

shall see, a large segment of Dominican intellectuality has long argued that the

African component of Dominican racial ancestry, and cultural practices as well,

derives from Haiti. For example, Joaquín Balaguer’s book La Isla al reves (Upside

Down Island), published in 1982, asserts: “The erosion of Dominican national

identity, steadily underway for more than a century through dealings with the

worst of the Haitian population, has made worrying advances. Our racial origins

and our tradition as a Spanish people must not stop us from recognizing that

our nationality is in danger of disintegration if we do not take drastic measures

against the threat to it from the proximity of the Haitian people.”45

This “official” twentieth- century Dominican view of blaming Haiti for

blackness and the transmission of uncivilized ways to Dominicans, thus taint-

ing their Spanish roots, resonates with Michel Foucault’s discussion of how

earlier travel narratives of non- Western societies prefigure later knowledge of

these societies.46 Foucault further argues that traveler tales have contributed

to Western knowledge of indigenous people. Edward Said, on the other hand,

draws on Foucault’s intellectual archeology to conclude that knowledge of the

East was based on Western narratives. In the case of the Dominican Republic,

such reports became a centerpiece of a history of racial denial. However, as

Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues, “Indigenous people across the world have other

stories to tell which not only question the assumed nature of those ideals and

the practices that they generate, but also serve to tell an alternative story. . . .

These counter- stories are powerful forms of resistance.”47

Chapter 3 demonstrates that Africans were present from the creation of

the Spanish colony, and from then onward they fused biologically and culturally

20 cHaPTeR 1

with Spaniards and native Caribbean peoples. Thousands of enslaved Africans

were brought to work together with indigenous Tainos in Hispaniola’s mines

and sugar plantations. By the end of the sixteenth century, the racial composi-

tion of the colony was overwhelmingly mulatto and black. Further mixing, and

the arrival of more enslaved Africans, perpetuated this racial composition as

against the “official” Dominican myth of continuous Hispanidad.

Chapter 4, “Cimarrones: The Seeds of Subversion,” traces the movement of

people in search of human dignity, freedom, and security through insurrection

and maroonage and illustrates the continuity of a subversive national imaginary

from colonial times to the present. With documents from the Archivo General

de Sevilla and the Archivo General de la Nación, collections of letters, and the

writings of colonial chroniclers, I reconstruct stories of resistance by enslaved

Africans, confirm the predominantly black and mulatto population profile of

the Spanish colony during and after colonial times, and outline the struggles of

slaves and freed persons to end slavery and preserve freedom in the nineteenth

century. This chapter concludes with the twentieth- century story of Oliborio

Mateo and his resistance movement in the Dominican Republic’s Maguana

Valley and Central Mountains range, for which he was persecuted and killed.

According to his followers, however, he did not die and in 1962 was reincarnated

in Las Matas de Farfán, where his followers were massacred by the national army

led by invading US troops.

Chapter 5, “Criolismo Religioso,” moves to the contemporary rural commu-

nity of Najayo, in San Cristóbal Province to the south of the capital city, Santo

Domingo. The stories I gathered and episodes I witnessed there from 1990 to

2011 concerned things as varied as herbal and root remedies for illnesses rang-

ing from depression to cancer, to men and women serving as prêt- savannes, or

“bush priests,” identified by Maya Deren as those who know “the Catholic lita-

nies so well that [they are] often invited by the hougan . . . to invoke the bene-

diction of the Christian deity.”48 I saw women dancing while possessed by snake

spirits people “mounted” by deities, and I saw wooden three- cross calvarios in

front of houses. I heard the sound of drumming and witnessed visits to the

cemetery at midnight to consult the deities. Najayo’s rich culture reflects a long

history though which indigenous, Spanish, and African elements have blended

“into a common pool of signifiers,”49 and the community, as a dialectical urn,

contains all these traces of a hybrid culture that is constantly forming and trans-

forming, amid local and global dynamics.

It was in the altars, the deities, and the crosses that I grasped the essence

and life of the religion that Dominican social scientists call Dominican Vodou.

It survives today manifest in devotion to luas (mysteries, saints that have both

Christian and African names); in sacred African drums and the singing of salves,

with their mixture of Spanish and African words; in funeral ritual; in the heal-

ing power of herbalists and “servers” of deities; and in the belief in coexisting

INTRoDucTIoN 21

spiritual, natural, and human worlds. Here the cross, saints, symbols, and prayers

of the Spanish conquest and colonization have been historically refashioned,

employing Christianity to empower the oppressed.

Dominican Vodou has never been deeply traced historically or fully stud-

ied ethnographically,50 yet it has been commonly assumed that Vodou practices

in the Dominican Republic derive from Haitian influence. My ethnography in

Najayo and other communities in the country’s south confirmed that Domini-

can Vodou retains a distinctive and lasting heritage of symbols and practices

unique to the eastern side of the island. For example, Taino influence is notice-

able throughout the south. Here water, stones, and the forest are intrinsic to

practices of the Indian Nation and to portions of the three other remaining

Vodou Nations— Rada, Guede, and Petro.

Chapter 6, “Race, Identity, and Nation,” synthesizes points developed

throughout the book, draws upon interviews with Dominicans of different social

backgrounds about their racial self- perceptions, and relates my arguments to

recent political history. The chapter addresses the political and cultural evo-

lution of academic and practical narratives that challenge the officiality and

examines the lives of José Francisco Peña Gómez and Maximiliano Gómez as

examples of Dominican acceptance of their African component. These themes

articulate an intrinsic connection between practice and identity, the historical

dialectic that lies at the heart of a Dominican racial fusion and its contrasting

“official” and subversive imaginaries.

Although most Dominicans in the present identify as white or mixed Indian

and white, a significant and growing number recognize their African roots. I ask

what it is that may cause some Dominicans to acknowledge Africa as an impor-

tant component of racial and cultural dominicanidad and what makes other

Dominicans oblivious of their African roots. I consider why some Dominicans are

still antagonistic to Haitians, and why Haitians continue to be vilified and perse-

cuted within the present- day Dominican Republic. The final chapter dives as well

into the current complexities of racial reconciliation and how it may be possible

to build an alternative nation without excluding Africa. The political and racial

fundamentalism of the Dominican intelligentsia has its base more in myth than

history: it is now threatened with present and future generations of Dominicans

who recognize and appreciate the genesis and beauty of their own hybridity.

This book opens other lines of conversation in which we can finally prove

that the white supremacy of the Spanish Caribbean is not totally predominant.

Although there is a strong official discourse, present as well are the people’s

practices and ways of knowing.

22

for more than five hours, packed with other passengers like sardines and listen- ing to loud music and sharing one another’s sweat and body odors, I traveled in

a public minibus from the capital city Santo Domingo to Pedernales, a town on

the southern end of the Haitian- Dominican border. In the bus were people of all

ages and colors, speaking in both the island’s languages and its several regional

accents. There were Dominicans traveling to the border for the first time;

Dominicans who lived along the border; Haitians returning to Haiti; Haitians

who lived on the Dominican side of the border; members of Dominican- Haitian

families visiting relatives; Haitians with business at the Dominican consulate in

Pedernales— in short, a microcosm of Dominican and Haitian relations.

During these five hours, I heard Dominicans, including soldiers with their

constant racial profiling, insult and demean Haitians, all of them reproduc-

ing the official Dominican discourse of racial and ethnic exclusivity. But to my

surprise I also observed intimacies among the travelers. I met an interethnic

married couple living in Pedernales; heard Haitian Kreyòl spoken both by a

Dominican woman with her Haitian friend and by the bus driver, in greeting

a man on a motorcycle; and saw a Dominican woman watching over a Haitian

woman’s children while the mother bought lunch during one of the bus jour-

ney’s many stops. I also witnessed Haitians defend their rights to soldiers and

bus drivers, similar to what I’d observed on other trips I’d taken from the capital

to different destinations across the border and back.

In chapter 1 I approached Dominican- Haitian relations from the perspec-

tive of the construction of Haitian otherness by the Dominican elite. In this

chapter I document and critically analyze the historical evolution of the Haitian-

Dominican geographical border, as well as the historical and ongoing creation

of national subjectivities and the cultural borders separating Dominicans from

Haitians. I argue that the geographic and sociological Dominican- Haitian border

2

Border at the crossroads

BoRDeR aT THe cRoSSRoaDS 23

is today a key to the history of intersocietal and intergroup exclusion/inclusion

and “difference” between two peoples.

This chapter explains that the Haitian- Dominican physical border was ini-

tially the product of the religious confrontation of Spain and France in Europe

and the contest for territorial control in the Caribbean. However, the colonial

power struggles devolved into an entangled mix of political and economic fac-

tors that eventually produced the border as a physical and symbolic space sepa-

rating two nations in terms of race, culture, and history, as well as one marking

Dominicans as superior and Haitians as inferior. I further argue that the founda-

tion of anti- Haitianism and the creation of a psychological border germinated

during Jean- Pierre Boyer’s 1822– 1844 unification of the island. The resentment

of the colonial and postcolonial elite class arose in the midst of the economic,

political, and social revolution promoted by Boyer. The elites, including slave-

holders, planters, and Catholic clergy, were humiliated and expropriated, while

at the same time slavery was abolished. Rage against Haitians, which began to

grow among the elites, later permeated their academic work, creating rather

than reconciling differences between the two nations.

The elite discourse stressed hostility, antagonism, and conflict. The Domin-

ican state has used violence, genocide, and coercion to destroy interconnections

between Dominicans and Haitians and to control the border. Still, in spite of

many historical interventions and episodes, the border as social location today

remains a confusing liminal space where ordinary people engage in ongoing

sociocultural dynamics, creating an alternative community of cultural fusion

and cooperation.1

I will examine the Haitian- Dominican border from this entire conglomera-

tion of factors, including history, politics, national imaginations, and people’s

daily experience, all with the aim of distinguishing “official” Dominican anti-

Haitian discourse from people’s lived experience of the border as a social location.

The History of the Haitian- Dominican Border

The history of the geographical border dividing the island of Hispaniola begins

in the seventeenth century with disputes between the Spanish and French colo-

nizers over the status of the island. According to Manuel Arturo Peña Batlle, the

rivalry between Spain and France started in Europe, where Spain was defending

Roman Catholicism during the advent of Protestantism and the Enlightenment.2

Peña Batlle further searches for the causes of Spanish colonial decline in His-

paniola and blames Spain for abandoning Tortuga Island. Yet he also praises

Spain as the savior of the Catholic faith.

Over the course of more than two centuries, the two colonial powers would

co- create a border on Hispaniola that separated the French and Spanish por-

tions of the island— the former power occupying the western third and the

24 cHaPTeR 2

latter the eastern two- thirds.3 Here I borrow American geographer Richard Hart-

shorne’s categories of “superimposed” and “natural,” using “superimposed” to

characterize the border demarcated in 1731 as one imposed by colonial powers

on a region under its control, as well as a natural demarcation aligned with the

physical features of the region, in this case two rivers.

This separation of the island involved a zigzag series of events and histori-

cal processes that included repeated conflicts between Spain and France; the

abolition of slavery; the independence of Haiti and struggle by Haitians to main-

tain their freedom; Haitian president Jean Pierre Boyer’s temporary unification

of the island; the creation of an independent Dominican Republic and ensuing

negrophobia advanced by the Dominican ruling class and intellectual elite; the

mass murder of Haitians in 1937 in what I call the Hispaniola Holocaust; the

deplorable conditions of Haitian immigrants working in the Dominican Repub-

lic; ambivalent diplomatic relations between the two countries; and the cre-

ation of distinct cultural boundaries between the two nations.

Each of the two separate states that resulted from this superimposed colo-

nial border emerged with distinct linguistic attributes— Haiti with French and

Kreyòl, the Dominican Republic with Spanish— and each with distinct historical

ties to its former imperial metropole. Over time these differences have been

transformed into internal island inequalities.

Today borders require strict scrutiny. In Europe, in spite of integration and

borderless world,4 the refugee crisis and aggressive migration from poor nations

maintain borders as a site of vivid, living tensions, and in the New World main-

taining a border such as that between the United States and Mexico would

require an investment of millions of dollars in the construction of walls or fences

and the employment of security forces to keep potentially thousands of immi-

grants from poor Latin American nations at bay. Beyond their physical reality as

geographical lines dividing nation- states, borders also create symbolic divisions

“invisible to the human eye” to distinguish “us” from “them.”5 For their part,

the Dominican Republic and Haiti apparently maintain rigorous scrutiny of the

persons and goods that cross their border. And the practices through which this

border is demarcated encode not only a painful colonial past, which still haunts

both nations, but also the ways in which borders are managed and perpetuated

to benefit political and economic elites, to the detriment of nonelite groups.6

The Haitian- Dominican border is a construct of powerful forces, both for-

eign and national. These power relations have been essential in the construc-

tion of Dominican national subjectivity in contraposition to Haiti as the other.

In this sense, through the Dominican official discourse, Haitians have become

the Dominican nemesis in terms of skin color, religion, morality, and condi-

tions of health. This racist colonial discourse officially defines Dominican- ness

in terms of Hispanic roots and Catholicism in opposition to Haitian blackness

and Vodou religious practices.7

BoRDeR aT THe cRoSSRoaDS 25

In spite of this inherited divisiveness, I observed instances of solidarity both

at the border and beyond. To make sense of this, I draw on Gloria Anzaldúa’s con-

cept of borderland, a space where vulnerable, excluded, and marginalized peo-

ple exchange and blend culture, history, geography, identities, memories, and

personal experiences. Borderland, or “frontier,” as defined by David Chidester is

a zone of contact rather than a line or a boundary.8 Chidester envisions a fron-

tier as a region of intercultural relations. The social location of the frontier is

not a static site but rather involves constant economic and cultural movements

of people, thus subverting their separate cultures, their historical locations, and

their politically constituted selves. It is in this transhistorical, and sometimes

incoherent and confusing, liminal space that borders are irreverently crossed

and recrossed, thus diluting the meaning of “here” as a location of racial supe-

riority and civilization and “there” as a location of inferiority and uncivilization,

and constructing “us” as a locus of rich cultural interaction. At the same time,

governmental policies, ideologies, violence, and surveillance, intertwined with

global processes, are constantly sabotaging these liminal transformations, cre-

ating in the mix many crossroads of contradictory encounters.

Frontier and Borderland and the Physical Border, 1697– 1935

The frontier dividing the two nation- states occupying the Caribbean island of

Hispaniola only emerged two centuries after the arrival of Christopher Colum-

bus in 1492. It predated by more than a hundred years the birth of the Haitian

state, in 1804, and by nearly a century and a half the creation of the Dominican

Republic, in 1844. From that early point onward, animosities between Spain and

France, and later between Haitians and Dominicans, have dominated the his-

torical evolution and physical demarcation of this border for more than three

hundred years of animosities that would become central to the eventual emer-

gence of the “official” Dominican national discourse.

Yet also since early colonial times, and at least a century before the earliest

Spanish- French engagements, there were other social agents of change and cul-

tural production on the island that have been largely ignored by scholars. Here I

call attention to the indigenous Tainos and the African maroons who throughout

the sixteenth century, prior to the first French incursions in the late 1500s and

long before the official creation of the French colony in 1697, escaped Spanish

oppression to settle in the wilderness along and in between the three mountain

ranges that run east to west through the western half of the island (see fig. 2.1).

The mountains of the island served maroons as bases from which to both

fight the persecution of the Spanish and serve as refuge zones to create alterna-

tive communities free from abuse and exploitation. Archival data documents

the several insurrections of Tainos and Africans in early 1500s, the constant

escape of slaves, and the creation of maroon communities in the mountains.9

26 cHaPTeR 2

These communities extended into what would become Haiti on the western

side of the island and occupied a vast interior terrain that fostered greater free-

dom and tranquility after the Spanish began to abandon the western portion of

the island in the late 1500s and early 1600s. The French, going first to Tortuga

Island off the western end of Hispaniola’s northern coast, then gradually began

to populate the abandoned lands, producing food and engaging in trade.

Consequently, the history of the frontier and borderland reflects two dis-

similar developments: on one hand, a struggle between contending colonial

empires for control of the island, and on the other, a largely forgotten history of

indigenous and black resistance and the creation of alternative communities in

the island’s interior. I see in these maroon communities the genesis of a border-

land rich in resistance and self- directed cultural creativity. I will examine this

maroon frontier history and its contribution to island cultures more closely in

chapter 4. But, first, in this chapter I will trace the development of the imposed

physical border on a prior frontier and borderlands zone and focus on its role in

cultural production and interaction, in the construction of the official Domini-

can national imaginary and in the trajectory of Haitian- Dominican relations.

Let us examine the most basic historical contradictions that shaped and

reshaped the border dividing the island. The central social imbalances in His-

paniola derived from the conflict between Spain and France in Europe and its

impact on people in both sides of the island.

fIguRe 2-1. 1756 map (archival image)

BoRDeR aT THe cRoSSRoaDS 27

France and Spain were involved in a series of religious wars in Europe for

centuries. In Hispaniola across the Atlantic the first consequence of the conflict

was felt in the early seventeenth century, taking the form of abandonment of

land in the northern and western part of the island. Admitting that illegal settle-

ment by buccaneers on the offshore island of Tortuga constituted a threat to

its colonies, the Spanish crown ordered the depopulation of the imperiled ter-

ritories. In 1603 the island’s governor relocated the populations of the towns of

Montecristi, Puerto Plata, Yaguana, Bayaja, Neiba, and San Juan de la Maguana

to an area near the colony’s capital of Santo Domingo in the southeast. After this

depopulation, the abandoned northern part of the island became an attractive

site for incursions by French and English filibusteros (pirates).

By 1638 these abandoned lands had been resettled by French entrepre-

neurs. Then, in 1697 in Europe, nine years of the War of the League of Augsburg,

between France and Spain, culminated in the Treaty of Ryswick, in which Spain

recognized French control of some Caribbean territory— Tortuga and the west-

ern side of Hispaniola. The French entrepreneurs already on the western side

then inaugurated the colony of Saint- Domingue, for which they imported thou-

sands of enslaved Africans for the development of sugar and coffee plantations,

and they soon created the wealthiest colony in the Americas.

The border dividing both colonies continued to be negotiated in Europe.

The first step in delimiting the border was the Inter- Colonial Protocol of 1731,

which adopted the valleys of the Massacre and Pedernales rivers in the north

and south, respectively, as the accepted line. (The Rio Masacre had received its

macabre name earlier in 1728, when Spanish soldiers killed a number of French

settlers along it.) In 1777, the Treaty of Aranjuez established an official border,

beginning with the Massacre in the north and ending along the Pedernales in

the south, and leaving an interior frontier zone in between. This borderland,

crossed by other rivers and by mountain ranges, was left undermarcated, cre-

ating a constant source of future dispute and conflict. The frontier zone issue

then disappeared for a time in 1795, when Spain ceded its eastern portion of the

island to France in the Treaty of Basel, which ended the Franco- Spanish War

(1793– 1795).

A second threshold, linked to France, was on the horizon. The French Revo-

lution’s commitment to liberty and equality, and the subsequent abolition of

slavery in all French colonies, ignited the longing for freedom in the slave and

mulatto population of the French colony of Saint Domingue, which embodied an

internal contradiction— between slavery and freedom— that was irreconcilable.

During the years after the French Revolution and the ensuing Haitian Revolu-

tion, and through subsequent historical developments, the border was crossed

and recrossed by the French and the Spanish, by slaves moving back and forth

between both territories seeking refuge, and later by Haitians and Dominicans.

For example, General Toussaint Louverture, in his mission to abolish slavery,

28 cHaPTeR 2

crossed the border into the east to reclaim the Spanish- speaking side for France.

In doing so, he encountered little opposition as Spanish troops, fighting with-

out a strong desire to win, actually welcomed his arrival.10 Toussaint reached

the city of Santo Domingo on January 26, 1801, and after receiving honors from

the colony’s governor, he summoned the city’s population and proclaimed a

general abolition of slavery on the Spanish side of the island, which occurred,

according to Emilio Cordero Michel, on January 26 or 27, 1801.11 A new momen-

tum now came to the fight for abolition. After the triumph of the Haitian Revo-

lution, the border was crossed once again. In 1805 the Haitian Army, under the

command of Jean- Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and Alexandre Pétion,

crossed to the eastern territory to stop the French, who had retreated there

after their defeat in the west, from hunting black children in the border area to

sell as slaves, General L. Ferrand, governor of the Spanish side, having decreed

that all male and female children captured from the side of the newly created

Haitian Republic must remain in the Spanish colony and work as slaves.12 Chris-

tophe and Dessalines confronted only weak resistance in Santiago, as did Pétion

in Azua, but arriving in Santo Domingo in March, they had to abandon their

plan of defeating the French on land when a report arrived that a French naval

squadron was near the island’s coast.

Dominican history books assert that on their way back to Haiti, Christophe

and Dessalines attacked and burned the towns of Monte Plata, Cotuí, and La

Vega and killed four hundred in Santiago and the entire population in Moca.

Charles Mackenzie, a British consul in Haiti in 1826, later wrote in his travel

diary during a visit to Santiago, “He [Christophe] violated his pledge, set fire

to the churches and convents, among which there was an ecclesiastical school

for priests, and the best parts of the town, deliberately murdered six priests,

and carried off several wretched people prisoners. His more extensive atrocities

were stopped by his immediate commander.”13 It is not clear, however, how the

targets were chosen: Were they killed without regard to class position and skin

color? Were planters, slaveholders, and Catholic clergy targeted, those whites

who in the Haitians’ eyes were responsible for slavery and its human degrada-

tion? This slaughter of planters and burning of fields by the Haitian generals has

been ingrained in the Dominican “official” imaginary as savage acts of Haitians

against “Dominicans,” although the Dominican Republic was not actually cre-

ated until 1844.

While Haiti lived the aftermath of the war against France and the troubled

initiation as a nation, eastern Hispaniola was involved in its own social and

political predicaments. On one hand, Spanish Creoles had secured control of

the eastern part of Hispaniola from France in 1809. On the other hand, some

Creoles were confronted by rising and contradictory nationalist sentiments.

White and rich mulatto Creoles favored, if not rule by Spain, then independence

as part of “La Gran Colombia” under Simón Bolivar, although he never took

BoRDeR aT THe cRoSSRoaDS 29

them seriously. The black and mulatto masses, however, inspired by the Hai-

tian Revolution, favored unification with Haiti, and the island’s governor, José

Núñez de Cáceres, a Spanish Creole fearing mulatto and black insurrection, on

December 1, 1821, proclaimed the eastern portion of Hispaniola independent, as

the Independent State of Spanish Haiti. This independence, which proved only

short lived, is referred to in Dominican history books as Independenica efimera

(“the ephemeral independence”).

The economic situation in the former Spanish territory was disastrous, and

many, including Núñez de Cáceres, did not believe the new country could survive

on its own. On February 9, 1822, the situation changed yet again when Haitian

president Jean- Pierre Boyer crossed the border, marched into the city of Santo

Domingo, and unified the island by annexing newly independent “Spanish Haiti”

to the Haitian Republic, thus fulfilling the Haitian Revolution’s ideals of human

equality, the abolition of slavery, and the unity and indivisibility of the island.

This unification encountered support and approval throughout most provinces

of the island’s eastern side, as exemplified by the letters, presented in his book

by Jean Price- Mars, that document the desire of several provinces and munici-

palities on the eastern side of the island to be unified under the government of

Boyer.14 Moya Pons states that Núñez de Cáceres welcomed the Haitian president.15

After unification, Boyer abolished slavery for good in the former Spanish

colony and initiated an agrarian reform that involved expropriation of land

from large landowners and the Catholic Church and redistribution of land to

poor and middle peasants.

Let us pause here to consider in more detail the significance of Boyer’s

occupation for the emergence of anti- Haitianism in the Dominican Republic.

The period from 1822 to 1844 is critical in understanding the development of

conservative Dominican intellectual and negrophobic thought.

In 1822 the social formation of the former Spanish colony included a large

mass of blacks and poor mulattos, many of whom were still enslaved, and a

small proportion of white Creoles and rich mulattos. The blacks and poor mulat-

tos, both slave and free, had advocated protection by Haiti during the uncertain

year of weak government under Núñez de Cáceres. As Moya Pons puts it, the

“majority of the population was mulatto and saw with good eyes the unification

with Haiti and the promise of land and abolition of slavery.”16 The other bloc,

including Núñez de Cáceres and the so- called pro- colombianos, had lobbied for

the protection of Simón Bolívar and annexation to La Gran Colombia.17

After Boyer’s arrival in Santo Domingo, his first action was to abolish slav-

ery and promise land to the freedmen. Boyer created a commission to conduct

an inventory of all land and movable and real property abandoned by its own-

ers. These lands passed to the state and were distributed among peasants. As

a further move, the government confiscated all properties belonging to Spain

and the Catholic Church; convents, land, cattle ranches, houses, and hospitals

30 cHaPTeR 2

belonging to the Church thus became state property. Clerical salaries were

suspended, and the government directed the clergy to support themselves on

their ecclesiastical income. The Catholic Church was deprived of its role in the

government, and with this action Boyer created the first lay state in the his-

tory of Latin America and the Caribbean. Boyer also expelled the clergy from

the Universidad Santo Tomás de Aquino as an attempt to secularize education.

Condemned to live in poverty, the Catholic hierarchy began to conspire against

Boyer to return the island to Spain, but this attempt failed.

The portrayal of the period between 1822 and 1844 by several Dominican

historians is tainted with patriotism and allegiances to the Catholic Church’s

point of view; however, reading between lines and going back to the original

sources, one can obtain a better understanding of the period. Emilio Rodriguez

Demorizi, representing the elite, dedicated his life to collecting historical docu-

ments, and in his Invasiones Haitianas one finds letters written by Boyer concern-

ing expropriation of property and land.18

Boyer’s policies hurt deeply the interests of white landholders and the Cath-

olic Church, resentment intensifying among these groups, and the reaction by

landowning elites and the Church to the expropriation of their lands and the

abolition of slavery produced a hatred of Haitians that eventually converted

into a racist negrophobia that permeated the intelligentsia. These sentiments

would solidify into intellectual rhetoric and state policy during the rest of the

nineteenth century, and they persist today.

Boyer came under duress when, in exchange for recognizing Haitian inde-

pendence, France demanded a large monetary indemnification for the loss of

its former colony. This payment created a major economic and political crisis

that led eventually, in 1842, to Boyer’s ouster. On the Spanish- speaking eastern

side of the island, a strong nationalist movement led by liberal Spanish Creoles,

mulattos, and blacks, and known as the Trinitarios, emerged. They were sup-

ported at first by discontented former landowners and the Catholic Church, and

in February 1844 these forces declared the “Dominican Republic” to be a new

independent nation.

After independence, conservative interests turned against the leaders of

the Trinitarios, who had few resources of their own, and many of these were

exiled while others were executed. The conservatives, under the political lead-

ership of rich mulattos and protective of Spanish Creole and Catholic Church

interests, have, with few exceptions, constituted the ruling class for the dura-

tion of the Dominican Republic’s history.

Between 1844 and 1929, both of the island’s nations tried several times to

mutually resolve the border issue, but negotiations succumbed to revolutions,

coups, a short- lived annexation of the Dominican Republic by Spain, and mis-

understandings about where precisely to draw the line. The most disruptive

event was the 1861– 1865 Spanish annexation brokered by Pedro Santana and

BoRDeR aT THe cRoSSRoaDS 31

a group of other conservative mulattos who did not believe the newly created

republic could survive on its own. The annexation was reversed by an army of

mostly black and mulatto Dominicans, who during 1863 to 1865 defeated the

Spanish forces in a popular movement termed the War of Restoration.

In 1867 the Dominican Republic signed what was to be called the Treaty of

Peace, Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation with Haiti, but political struggles

in that nation did not permit ratification. A new treaty signed in 1874 stipulated

that both countries must preserve the sovereignty and integrity of their ter-

ritories and that they should work on the restitution of border commercial tax

collection. An additional agreement for final demarcation of the physical border

was still required, but it did not become reality as internal political struggles in

both nations, and disputes over posesiones actuales, or the effective control of

territories that each nation claimed, impeded agreement.19

In 1896 Pope Leo XII was asked to mediate, but papal intervention never

took place. In 1912, under the auspices of US president William Howard Taft, a

modus vivendi arrangement stipulated a de facto border until the dispute could

be resolved.20 Then, in 1915, the United States occupied Haiti and, a year later,

the Dominican Republic. Although both nations tried to restart negotiations

while under US control, successful border discussions did not occur until 1929,

when President Horacio Vazquez of the Dominican Republic and President Louis

Borno of Haiti signed the Border Treaty of 1929. In its first article this treaty

stipulated that the line between the two nations was the Massacre River and its

outlet in the Atlantic Ocean to the north and the Pedernales River and its outlet

in the Caribbean Sea to the south. An additional provision called for the cre-

ation of a commission of three Dominicans and three Haitians to place markers

along the border, with any disagreement to be appealed before an international

commission of five members representing Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the

United States, Venezuela, and Brazil. This work started immediately, but discor-

dant views soon emerged. According to Dominican historian Franklin Franco

Pichardo, the 1929 border treaty process was not successful because of struggles

between Haitian and Dominican landowners and political turmoil during 1930:

the fall of the Dominican Vasquez presidency and a student revolt that ousted

Haitian president Borno. Economic distress resulting from the Great Depression

then paralyzed further demarcation efforts.21

Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo came to power in 1930, and in

1933 he restarted negotiations with Haiti’s president Sténio Vincent to complete

the 1929 treaty agreement. Signed in 1935, it finally settled physical demarca-

tion of the border. The agreement assigned the disputed internal territory of La

Miel (more than thirty- seven thousand hectares) to Haiti, with an international

highway to be constructed linking the villages of Bánica and Restauración, and

it awarded the territory of Mas Gros- Mare (seven thousand hectares) to the

Dominican Republic.

32 cHaPTeR 2

While the 1935 treaty established a definitive physical demarcation of

the Haitian- Dominican border, a process of cultural and psychological border

demarcation under Trujillo was also set in motion. The climax of this process

was Trujillo’s massacre of thousands of Haitians in 1937.

The Road to a Preconceived Genocide

Scholars have contextualized the Haitian massacre within a complex series

of factors: labor unrest and popular outrage over high unemployment rates

spawned by the Great Depression, with Haitians used as scapegoats to shift

attention from underlying problems facing the Dominican Republic.22 I do not

contest this analysis, but we need to examine the Haitian genocide as well in

the light of polarized notions of Dominican Hispanidad and Catholicism versus

Haitian Africanity and “uncivilized” religious practices. Many have also argued

that the massacre reflected Trujillo’s efforts to whiten the Dominican Repub-

lic.23 This claim has recently been reexamined by historian Richard Turits, who

argues that the massacre resulted less from a desire of the Dominican govern-

ment to whiten its population than from its decision to eliminate Haitians from

the Dominican border zone and to establish a clear political, social, and cultural

boundary between the two nations.24

My argument incorporates these complementary positions. On one hand,

from the nineteenth century onward the Dominican intelligentsia and politi-

cians had certainly been interested in whitening the population, and Trujillo

was clearly a fierce advocate for expanding European migration to the country.

On the other, the establishment of rigid national boundaries, the reinforcement

of political control, and the elimination of bicultural Dominican- Haitian com-

munities were deemed essential to national sovereignty and Dominicanization

of the border, in accord with the “official” Dominican imaginary endorsed by

Trujillo, of Hispanidad and Catholicism as opposed to Haitian blackness and

barbarism.25 In this sense, the process of nation- state control of the border was

guided by racist ideology.

In support of my point, I will argue that the process of border negotiation,

which started in 1933 and ended in 1935, was saturated with political maneuvers

orchestrated by the Dominican dictator. This episode may be interpreted as

part of a preconceived plan for the 1937 genocide. Before Trujillo’s true agenda

regarding Haiti and the border would be unveiled, his political maneuvering

included manipulation of Haiti’s most influential political figures and his gain-

ing the trust of the Haitian populace.

By 1934 Trujillo had established alliances with the three major figures on

Haiti’s political scene: mulatto president Sténio Vincent; mulatto Elie Lescot,

Haiti’s foreign minister in Santo Domingo and a former member of the Hai-

tian cabinet; and black Demostenes Calixte, commander in chief of the Haitian

BoRDeR aT THe cRoSSRoaDS 33

National Guard. Trujillo supported Vincent’s desire to remain in power, largely

in order to prevent the rise of the Dominican dictator’s Haitian opponents. For

his part, Vincent expelled eleven senators and seven representatives from Hai-

ti’s Congress, figures who both opposed his ambition to remain in office and

opposed Trujillo’s antidemocratic policies, and he also deported many Domini-

can dissident exiles who had taken refuge in Haiti.

Trujillo, who paid Lescot to keep a close eye on Vincent, at the same time

was nurturing Lescot’s political ambitions, eventually helping him succeed

Vincent as president of Haiti. Trujillo established a similar close relationship

with Calixte, who took refuge in the Dominican Republic to plot against Vin-

cent. Throughout the border negotiations, and apparently during and after the

massacre, Trujillo maintained the loyalties of each of these three Haitian politi-

cal figures, and his strategy of cooperation would prove beneficial when, after

the Haitian massacre, Lescott testified favorably on Trujillo’s behalf before the

United States Congress and the Dominican dictator received a lenient sentence.

These Haitian and Dominican diplomatic moves during the time of Trujillo

were based on mutual protection.

Concurrently, Trujillo made efforts to gain the support of Haitians at the

popular level. While the border negotiations were in progress, Trujillo and Vin-

cent visited each other’s countries, publicly exhibiting friendship and solidarity.

In October 1933, for example, both presidents met at the border town of Juana

Mendez (Ounaminthe) to sign the border treaties. During this meeting, Trujillo

and Vincent also signed a mutual agreement to avoid attacking each other’s

country.26 In November 1934 Trujillo traveled to Haiti to continue negotiations

and met President Vincent. During their meeting, Trujillo said to Vincent: “This

long awaited visit, for me so longed- for, reached one of my deepest desires, trea-

sured since the moment I shook your hand at the Masacre River.” It was at the

conclusion of the meeting that he ratified the ceding of the La Miel land parcel

to Haiti, and it was on Vincent’s February 1935 visit to the Dominican Republic

that both presidents reached the final border agreement under which the Gros

Mare lands were ceded to the Dominican Republic. In March 1936 Trujillo again

visited Haiti and signed an amended La Miel protocol. In his speech Trujillo

said: “I am very proud to declare before my fellow Haitians, compatriots, and

before the world, that a high proportion of African blood runs in my veins.”27 He

then proceeded to kiss the Haitian flag.

Although Trujillo embraced his African heritage while in Haiti, at home

he also declared himself to be a pure European. He continued his “Dominican-

ization” of the border, which had begun immediately after he seized power in

1930. He announced a new law banning immigration of people of color, and he

encouraged the immigration of white people. He also embraced Nazism and

Spanish Falange ideology, at the same time gratuitously accusing Haitians of

promoting crime in the border region.

34 cHaPTeR 2

The policy of Dominicanization of the border contained five interrelated

aspects: economic, racial, moral, political, and military. Economic Dominican-

ization entailed the development of a local border agricultural economy that did

not rely on Haiti and would orient border production into the general Domini-

can economy. Joaquín Balaguer referred to this economic refocus, based on rice,

peanut, potatoes, corn, and other products, as the economic conquest of the

border.28 By 1932, there were nine new agricultural colonies near the border

towns of Pedernales, Restauración, Capotillo, Hipolito Billini, Mariano Cesteros,

and Trinitaria, all under military supervision.

Trujillo’s Dominicanization policy included a racial component: the new

agricultural farms were owned by European immigrants whose settlement in

the border towns was intended to solve the so- called “problem” of the African-

ization of the country. In this sense, the policy of the Dominican state deliber-

ately fostered “whitening” the Dominican population through the immigration

of white people. The desire of the elite to promote white immigration had

first been put into practice by Dominican president Horacio Vasquez in 1926,

with the clear aim of reducing the number of Haitians entering the country.29

Trujillo continued this effort, conducting negotiations with several European

countries, as well as Japan. Under Trujillo, hundreds of families from Spain,

Italy, Japan, and the Jewish diaspora migrated to the Dominican Republic.

Ironically, Jews fleeing Nazi genocide in Europe arrived immediately after the

Haitian genocide in 1937. Both authors Allan Wells and Marion Kaplan offer

detailed accounts of the arrival of 750 Jewish settlers in Sosúa following the

Haitian massacre of 1937.30

The moral component of the Dominicanization of the border consisted

of a campaign to promulgate the Christian religion by constructing numerous

Catholic churches in the border region and by supporting the Roman Catholic

border mission of San Ignacio Loyola, which was established in 1935. The main

goal of this Christian campaign was to expiate the “evil” practices of Vodou. The

moral component also included the systematic construction during 1932 to 1935

of border- zone schools in which teachers were instructed to cultivate a nation-

alistic spirit among their students.

The political component consisted of renaming towns, villages, and other

sites to commemorate both battles with Haiti during 1844, 1845, 1847, 1855, and

1856 and the names of Dominican heroes who had fought or died in these clashes.

As Balaguer states, “The permanent evocation of these events, along with patri-

otic propaganda in the border schools, contributed without any doubt to for-

tify the national sentiment in the soul of new generations and to return to the

Dominican people of the border towns the consciousness of their personality and

of their Hispanic origin.”31 Finally, the military component of Dominicanization

was pursued through the construction of military posts along the border. These

posts still exist at points along highways and roads crossing the border today.

BoRDeR aT THe cRoSSRoaDS 35

During the first years of Trujillo’s regime, when he cultivated an embrace of

Spanish Falange and Nazi ideology, members of the Falange regularly visited the

Dominican Republic and established a branch in the country. The creation of

the Dominico- German Scientific Institute, a student army modeled on Hitler’s

Brown Shirts, and publication of Fabio A. Mota’s book, New Ideas about the Recon-

struction Work of Trujillo: Neosocialism and Dominicanism, indicated the influence

of Nazi ideas on Trujillo’s regime.32 By 1937 Trujillo had developed strong alli-

ances with the German Nazi government, exemplified by the gift of a copy of

Adolf Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, sent to Trujillo by the author. Today the Museo

de las Casas Reales in Santo Domingo exhibits an iron window grate, also a pres-

ent to Trujillo from Hitler, in which swastikas are visibly featured.

The ideology of Dominican racial superiority was firmly established in

the thinking of Trujillo’s intelligentsia and was central to his regime’s propa-

ganda. The underlying irrationality of racism in the island context could only

be sustained by action, and this would result in violence against Haitians. Once

Dominicanization of the border was in progress, popular mobilization to move

against the Haitian population within the Dominican Republic came next.

There were two groups of such Haitians: the migrant workers, or braceros, in

the country’s sugar plantations, and the residents of the border zone. Trujillo

implemented different policies to deal with each group.

In order to reduce the number of Haitians working in the Dominican Repub-

lic, the government reduced the bracero quotas assigned to each sugar cane

plantation, and thereby created a legal basis for deportation. By 1932 Trujillo

was already seeking the reduction of the braceros quota. The Immigration Law

of 1932 stipulated that in order to enter the country foreigners had to pay US$6

and an additional $US6 each year to stay in the country. However, for people of

African descent the initial amount was US$300 and US$100 payable annually

thereafter, and failure to comply with the law was punishable by imprisonment

and deportation. This law was modified only when the US State Department

and sugar cane plantation owners protested to Trujillo that it harmed business.

The official justification for the deportation of Haitians now was that larger

numbers than permitted under the quota system were crossing the border,

including many Haitians whom the dictator Fulgencio Batista had deported

from Cuba. The Immigration Law of 1937 reduced to 40 percent the proportion

of Haitian workers permitted to be employed on Dominican sugar cane planta-

tions. The law also required all foreigners to register at their consulates within

six months or face deportation, and when thousands of Haitians failed to regis-

ter, they were subsequently deported.

To deal with the Haitians residing in the border towns, Trujillo spent

the month of August 1937 traveling personally on horseback over a consider-

able portion of the border area. He inspected the construction of the interna-

tional highway, witnessed the presence of large number of Haitians living in

36 cHaPTeR 2

Dominican territory, and listened to complaints from peasants about Haitians

stealing cattle, occupying land, and abusing Dominicans.

Trujillo now had his excuse to move against the border zone Haitians. The

official argument was that deportation measures had failed and that repatri-

ated Haitians had found ways to return to the Dominican Republic. In reality,

Haitians in the border areas were not primarily recent immigrants— most of the

Haitian families there had lived in the frontier region for many years33— and the

letters Trujillo brandished denouncing Haitians and complaining about rob-

beries committed by them were forged.34 Nonetheless, massive “violations” of

the border by Haitians, and their supposed ongoing criminal activity, became

justifications for mass murder.

Hispaniola’s Holocaust

The slaughter of Haitians— also known as El Corte (the cutting), La Masacre (the

massacre), or Operación Perejil (operation parsley)— commenced on Septem-

ber 28, 1937, and continued for four days. According to one contemporaneous

eyewitness account, the soldiers tied the hands of the Haitians behinds their

backs and made them walk toward the pier, then hit them with the back of their

rifles or stabbed them. The bodies fell into the sea, where most were eaten by

sharks. Those who were not eaten by the sharks swam back to the beach, where

they could be seen in great numbers. There was a case of torture— a Haitian boy

taken to Montecristi, buried alive, and then killed with machetes.35

The events have been dramatically reconstructed by several Dominican and

Haitian poets and novelists. At one extreme, the Dominican Freddy Prestol Cas-

tillo wrote dismissively that the perpetrators were “drunken soldiers” who could

not have committed these crimes if sober. In contrast, the Haitian Jacques Ste-

phen Alexis describes how his main character Hilarion is hit by a bullet and then

lies dying in the sun as horrors occur around him. Edwige Danticat, also Haitian,

recounts that “groups of Haitians were killed in the night because they could not

manage to trill their ‘r’ and utter a throaty ‘j’ to ask for parsley, to say ‘perejil.’”36

The actual number of Haitians killed has never been established.37 Some

place it as low as twelve thousand and others as high as twenty- five thousand.

The slaughter has produced many interpretations, and most of them place

blame on Trujillo. Yet the Haitian genocide was not the act of an isolated mad-

man. It was also the culmination of an anti- Haitian ideological campaign that

was advanced by Dominican intellectuals for nearly a century, a development of

negrophobic beliefs that “otherized” Haitians and led to the 1937 massacre. As

the Massacre River reddened with Haitian blood, the question of the physical

border was provided a decisive resolution. Moreover, what had been a long-

standing frontier zone, a social location of cultural conjunction and intimacy,

was violently attacked.38 Consolidation of the Dominican nation- state’s racist

BoRDeR aT THe cRoSSRoaDS 37

ideology would emerge from the event, and its sharply demarcated psychologi-

cal and cultural borders have prevailed since.

Otherization of Haitians: The Cultural, Ideological, and Symbolic Border

“Dominicans are constitutionally whites . . . and not like Haitians [from a country] where men eat people, speak patois, and the Luas abound.”

— francisco e. Moscoso Puello, cartas a evelina (my translation)

After the massacre, the process of institutionalizing anti- Haitianism acceler-

ated. The foremost exponents of Trujillo’s anti- Haitianism were the writers and

public figures Manuel Arturo Peña Batlle and Joaquin Balaguer, who champi-

oned the construction of a psychological border dividing the two nations. Both

authors dedicated most of their intellectual work to strengthening Dominican-

ness, emphasizing the Hispanic attributes of light skin color, Roman Catholi-

cism, European images of female pulchritude, devotion to the Spanish language,

and an unquestioned fervor toward the “motherland” of Spain. Both authors’

conclusions might be seen as comical at best had their elaborate set of rac-

ist beliefs not become the justification for state policies. Based on a distorted

account of the island’s history, as we saw in chapter 1 and will examine further

in chapters to come, these beliefs permeated the entire fabric of Dominican

society, with schools, the Church, and mass media the most important vehicles

of their propagation. This institutionalized ideology exemplified what Frantz

Fanon called the “psychopathology of colonization.” Simply stated, Dominicans

in general are socialized as subjugated beings who wear white masks to hide

their negritude, complex feelings of inferiority, and deep self- shame.39

The official construction of the Dominican identity has also created and

intensified complex symbolic borders within the Dominican populace. Skin

color differences create barriers among Dominicans themselves, at the same

time that they produce a morbid component in their relations with their mostly

African- descended island neighbors. Experts commissioned by the United

Nations concluded in 2007 that in the Dominican Republic there remains a

“profound” and “entrenched” problem of racism and discrimination against

Haitians, Dominicans of Haitian descent, and blacks in general.40

The wounds of the border massacre more than seventy years ago have been

constantly reopened, with massive deportations, violations of human and labor

rights, and even killings of Haitians. According to official statistics, among the

country’s population of 10 million, an estimated 800,000 Haitians live in the

Dominican Republic, including 280,000 Dominican- born individuals of Haitian

descent. Harsh economic conditions, political instability in Haiti, and the 2010

earthquake have precipitated massive migration of Haitians to the Dominican

38 cHaPTeR 2

Republic in search of a better life. This Haitian presence creates tensions in a

country with 40 percent of its population living in poverty. In the midst of these

tensions, Haitians for decades have been randomly selected for expulsion.

While many contend that a nation- state has the right to deport undocu-

mented foreigners, the pressing current issue is not the right to repatriate but

how these repatriations occur. According to various international and UN bod-

ies, these expulsions violate the American Convention on Human Rights, the

Protocol of Understanding on the Mechanism of Repatriation, the International

Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Article 13, and the Covenant on the Elim-

ination of Racial Discrimination Articles 4(a), 5(b), 5(d), and 6.41 These con-

ventions, protocols, and covenants prohibit the collective expulsion of foreign

nationals, as well as the expulsion of legal residents who are denied the oppor-

tunity to challenge their expulsion and to have their case reviewed by legiti-

mate authorities. Deportations are often accompanied by extraordinary human

rights violations, and in 2003 the Inter- American Court determined that the

Dominican Republic has used excessive force against Haitian migrants.42

Since 2004 the Dominican state has tried to build a legal foundation to

deny citizenship to children of Haitian parentage born in the country. The gov-

ernment of Leonel Fernández rewrote migration laws in 2004, and in 2007 it

issued directives to expand this legal groundwork. The country’s constitution

was amended in 2010 to provide that children born in the Dominican Republic

have automatic citizenship only if at least one parent is a legal resident. The sit-

uation for Dominicans of Haitian ancestry was further undermined on Septem-

ber 23, 2013, by the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling, 168– 13, which

negated the Dominican nationality of hundreds of thousands of Dominicans

with Haitian ancestry. This ruling stated that all children of undocumented

Haitians parents born since 1929, and their descendants, would be stripped of

Dominican citizenship.43

Despite the record of hatred and abuse of Haitians that led to the recent rul-

ings, right- wing leaders of the Dominican Republic and Haiti historically have

often been allies. As noted, in the early 1930s the dictators Trujillo and Vincent

established an alliance to protect their respective territories from dissidents.

In 1963 a pro- Trujillo Dominican cabal and Haitian dictator François Duvalier

together staged an occupation by the Haitian army of the Dominican Consulate

in Port- au- Prince, meant to destabilize the Dominican government of left- wing

president Juan Bosch. His successor, the conservative Joaquín Balaguer, was

intimate friends with both Duvalier and his son Jean- Claude Duvalier, who took

power after the death of his father. When the younger Duvalier was overthrown

in 1986, and the left- leaning Jean- Bertrand Aristide won election, Balaguer

responded by deporting thousands of Haitians and was widely presumed to be

collaborating with Haitian strongman Raoul Cedras in the coup that ousted

BoRDeR aT THe cRoSSRoaDS 39

Aristide. Later, after Cedras was himself overthrown, he sought refuge in the

Dominican Republic.

In sum, although physical, cultural, political, and symbolic borders divide

the Dominican Republic and Haiti, dictators and antidemocratic forces have

cooperated across it. We now turn to far less exalted or powerful voices that,

within this separation and turmoil, reflect the “us” of cultures intersecting or

fusing at the borderland crossroads.

Breaking Cultural Boundaries: The New Frontier

Traveling in buses with Dominicans and Haitians in both directions between

Santo Domingo and the Haitian- Dominican border, I witnessed two different

narratives performed. One is the official story of elite dominicanidad and hatred

of Haiti “otherness.” The other is a story of the borderland that has evolved since

colonial times to the present. My ethnography testifies to this twofold reality.

On one occasion I was on a bus that left Pedernales at 8:00 a.m. All seats

were occupied. The passengers exhibited all shades of colorfulness, from very

black to very light. I could not distinguish by sight who was Dominican or

Haitian. Only when instead of proceeding straight ahead, the bus turned and

entered the town’s army headquarters entrance and stopped, was it Haitians

alone who were asked to step down. They were told: Morenos afuera con pasa-

portes en mano [“Black people come out with passports in hand”]. More than

fifteen women and men left through the back of the bus and were taken inside a

building, where they stayed for about half an hour. Afterward they returned one

by one and entered the bus, retaking their seats silently. When all were inside,

the bus took off.

The breathtaking beauty of the landscape along the Pedernales to Barahona

Road could not be easily enjoyed. The bus was stopped every ten or fifteen min-

utes by army sergeants, who were as black as most Haitians, demanding that

the morenos identify themselves and show their passports. The American and

Peruvian foreigners on the bus were not molested. The bus was stopped eleven

different times.

This racial profiling climaxed when a black Dominican sergeant forced a

black man, in the middle of the bus, who refused to show his passport to speak in

order to determine his nationality. This recalled to me how dark- skinned people

were forced to pronounce perejil to determine their nationality during the 1937

genocide. People in the bus told the sergeant that if he didn’t want to show his

passport, it was because he was Dominican. The sergeant insisted, but the man

remained silent until the sergeant at last permitted the driver to continue.

I had noticed the driver and his assistant giving money to the soldiers. Later

I found out that Haitian passengers are extorted monetarily by both bus drivers

40 cHaPTeR 2

and soldiers. Even before they could get into the bus they had to give the driver

money in addition to the bus fare.

On another occasion, when I was traveling with my son, Miguel, and my

friend Mireya, the minibus we were in arrived at Jimaní, close to the border,

around five in the afternoon. The three of us and the other thirty- five people,

all wet with perspiration, descended from the bus with suitcases, boxes, and

bags of groceries. Outside we found the temperature to be not less than ninety

degrees. More than a dozen motorcycle- taxi drivers were there, offering their

services to the arriving passengers. I wanted to reach the border before dark,

so we took two motorcycles, one for Miguel and me and another for Mireya.

I pressed against the back of the driver to leave space for Miguel to sit and

we drove for about ten minutes, until we reached the Dominican post at the

border. The post consisted of a long, high wire fence with an entrance in the

middle, two large Dominican flags on each side, an army headquarters building

to the left, and another small building to the right. To the right of the border

post was Lake Azuey, with mountains behind it; due to flooding, it now extends

across the Dominican side of border.

Two soldiers were posted at each side of the entrance, clearing smaller

trucks, SUVs arriving in both directions, and long- haul trailers with food, water,

medicine, and clothing to be taken to Port au Prince for the earthquake victims.

As each vehicle was inspected, money was passed to the soldiers, and in an

undisguised, open manner. The border crossing point for people on foot was

also casual and fluid. A young Haitian young woman had brought food for one

of the soldiers, and a group of Haitians talked laughingly with three Dominican

men outside the small building. People interacted naturally, with familiarity

and intimacy.

After crossing through the Dominican border post, our motorcycle- taxis

took us to the Jimaní Hotel, a 1950s- style one- story building dating to the

time of the dictator Trujillo, our overnight stop on the way to back to Santo

Domingo. Upon our arrival, I spoke a little with our motorcycle- taxi drivers. One

was Dominican and the other was Haitian. Both were bilingual in Spanish and

Kreyòl and had girlfriends of both nationalities. When I asked the Dominican

driver about the difference between Haitians and Dominicans, he said simply

that Haitians were French and we are Spanish. And in speaking to the manager

of the hotel, a slim Dominican woman who seemed to play every staff role in

the hotel except that of chef, I discovered that she was fully bilingual and was

married to a Haitian man.

On another day, the bus I was on left Santo Domingo late in the morning

for the border town Elias Piña. The bus was completely full. I sat on the left side

of a row of five seats— two fixed seats on each side of the bus and one movable,

improvised seat in the center beside a woman who looked Haitian to me. A man

and a woman with a child were on my other side. In the row ahead were two

BoRDeR aT THe cRoSSRoaDS 41

Dominican men and a couple with their ten- or eleven- year- old daughter. In the

row behind me were five Dominican men. Altogether there were five fixed rows,

plus two additional rows behind the driver’s seat, and a seat for two passengers

next to the driver. The heat and sweat and the loud merengue and bachata

music were equally uncomfortable to me and my travel companions.

The bus stopped first in Baní, a southern city about forty miles from Santo

Domingo, the bus driver announcing loudly: “You have fifteen minutes to eat

and go to the bathroom.” Outside I talked with the couple sitting on the right

side of my row. She was Dominican and he was Haitian. Both spoke Spanish

with me and introduced me to their daughter, Ezili. “Beautiful name,” I said,

then asked them, “Why Ezili?” They looked at each other and smiled but gave no

answer. I did not persist.

Ezili is an Iwa (mystery) in the Dominican Republic and can represent love,

lust, and motherhood, for which of these attributes she takes different names:

Ezili Dantò, Ezili Freda, Ezili- je- wouj, or Marinè. In all of her manifestations, Ezili

is considered one of most powerful and arbitrary in Vodou. Ezili, known on the

Dominican side of the island as Anaisa, is identified with the Catholic Saint Clara.

The parents of the girl Ezili lived in Elias Piña and offered to help me find

a place to stay. While walking back to the bus, I overheard them talking to each

other in Kreyòl.

As we continued our journey, I initiated a conversation with the woman

next to me. She told me she was Dominican, although she had a pronounced

Kreyòl accent. She had been born on El Central Barahona, which was one of the

most important sugar cane plantations in the Dominican Republic and located

near the southern city of Barahona. The bateys, the housing for the Haitian

workers, of El Central Barahona were considered to be among the most segre-

gated in the nation. Residents of these bateys had a Haitian priest, but no school

and very little interaction with the outside world. The woman, born to Haitian

parents, had moved to Elias Piña after marrying a Dominican man who sold

used clothing in that town’s market. They had four children, three boys and one

girl, all between the ages of nine and fourteen. We kept talking for a while about

the hot weather and other inconsequential matters.

We had already passed the city of San Juan de la Maguana when the man in

front of me started to talk to the men behind my row, saying that he was very

tired. The man behind me answered, “Don’t worry. As soon as we get there,

we buy a liter of Brugal [a popular Dominican rum considered by some to be

an aphrodisiac] and get a Haitian girl of eight cylinders— with tight muscles,

big breasts and butt— and we forget about tiredness.” The man in front of me

replied, “If it is a Haitian, we must drink kleren [a strong illegal alcoholic bever-

age made from sugarcane and known to be produced at the border]. And you

know what I would do with that Haitian girl— I would rip her clothes off, turn her

upside down, submerge her in a tank of water, and tie her and. . . .”

42 cHaPTeR 2

“Tie her and . . .” were the last words he uttered. The man in my row inter-

rupted him, asking him to show respect. They then began arguing, the second

man accusing the first of being a rapist, to which the first replied, “It’s none of

your business.” Finally the driver’s assistant standing next to the door of the

bus asked everybody to shut up. The men talking about drinking and finding

a Haitian girl were construction workers, hired to repair the sewage system in

Elias Piña. All lived in Santo Domingo and had never been in the border zone

before.

This conversation made me wonder about sexual violence against Haitian

women during the genocide and after. I lack the evidence to demonstrate the

number of women raped during the days of the genocide, but what I can dem-

onstrate is that the anti- Haitian policies are highly gendered. The “maternal

labor” of Haitian women— that is, as mothers producing more Haitians— is the

major danger in the reproduction of more Haitians in the Dominican Republic.

Headlines for newspaper articles frequently read “Haitian Women Cross Border

to Give Birth.” The case Dilcia Yean and Violeta Bosico v. the Dominican Republic,

taken before the Inter- American Court of Human Rights, is illustrative. Violeta

Bosico and Dilcia Yean were two girls born in the Dominican Republic of Haitian

mothers whose birth certificates were denied by local Dominican officials in

1997. The Inter- American Court of Human Rights found in 2005 that theirs was

a case of racial discrimination. Women have also being affected by anti- Haitian

violence. From the testimonies of survivors, Catholic father Emile Robert col-

lected a list of 2,130 names of dead Haitians. The majority of dead people were

wives, mothers- in- law, sisters, nieces, friends, domestic servants of the attested.

I counted the number of women in a summary of Father Robert’s list published

by Jose Israel Cuello, and in the 109 testimonies 79 women were mentioned as

murdered by the Trujillo’s soldiers.44

Border Crossings

Fortunately, the racist colonial construction of Dominican identity continues

to be contested in many disparate arenas, both in the Dominican Republic and

Haiti and in their diaspora communities. Although this “official” ideology has

prevailed in terms of Dominican state policies toward Haitians, new critical

voices and actors have emerged to challenge many of these notions.

Dominican civil society, represented in organizations such as the Mov-

imiento de Mujeres Dominico- Haitiana (Movement of Dominican- Haitian

Women), has taken the plight of Haitian women and their Dominican- born

children to international forums to demand respect for universal human rights.

The work of the late Sonia Pierre, founder of this organization, has had a tre-

mendous international impact. Dominican organizations joined efforts with her

to stop the violations of human rights; feminists worked hand in hand with

BoRDeR aT THe cRoSSRoaDS 43

her, denouncing discrimination and protecting her when the government of

Leonel Fernández attempted to strip her of Dominican citizenship. The Cen-

tro de Investigación y Acción Femenina (Feminist Research and Action Center)

and the Colectivo Mujer y Salud (Women’s Health Collective) have been active

throughout the struggles of Sonia. Other institutions, such as Centro Bonó and

Solidaridad Fronteriza (Border Solidarity), have also worked to ensure respect

for Haitians as fellow human beings.

Dominicans living outside of the country have played an important role in

advancing new ideas and perspectives on the question of Dominican- Haitian

interrelations. From a scholarly perspective, Silvio Torres- Saillant, for example,

offers searching analyses of anti- Haitianism and Dominican negrophobia.45 The

fictional work of Junot Díaz, as in his novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar

Wao (2007), envisions Dominican- Haitian relations through the metaphor of

el cañaveral (the sugar cane field), and engages both Dominican and Haitian

calamities. Today Dominican intellectuals, activists, artists, and others convey

in their writings about identity that they are breaking new paths in the creation

of a new frontier, one of mutual inclusion.

Although Dominicans at the popular level have been socialized within a

negrophobic “official” ideology, it is undeniable that Dominicans and Haitians

can and do cross the island’s cultural and language boundaries. For example, in

the summer of 2007 I visited the Haitian- Dominican market in Dajabón. On that

occasion, this location between Dajabón, Dominican Republic, and Juana Men-

dez (or Ounaminthe), Haiti, was crowded with people, chickens in their arms,

blocks of ice in front of them, and stocks of eggplants, onions, cucumbers, corn,

perfumes, clothes, and cosmetics to be sold. As people interacted in the market,

I asked myself: What is today’s ongoing imaginary of the Massacre River separat-

ing the two cities, and forming the boundary that separates the two countries? Is

it remembered as red with blood or that the wounds are healed, as the characters

in Haitian novelist Edwige Danticat’s Farming of Bones experienced it?

No signs of hatred or disdain were evident on the marketgoers’ faces. The

Dajabón market, open twice a week for Haitians to enter the Dominican Repub-

lic for commercial exchange, is just that, a site of commercial exchange between

the two peoples. Moreover, during visits to the border towns of Elias Piña and

Bánica, I observed a significant number of intermarriages and much bilingual-

ism and codeswitching between the island’s two languages.

This evidence of interaction suggests a lively social space in which the two

nationally differentiated groups interact and blend their cultures in many ways.

The social spaces of the border, such as at Dajabón, exist at the “conjuncture

of two cultures” that “fuse” and “blend.”46 If in the Dominican capital city Hai-

tians are despised, and at the border crossing points the military presence still

represents a bloody past of mass murder and ongoing coercion, in Dajabón

and in other parts of the country a fusion of languages, commercial exchange,

44 cHaPTeR 2

intermarriage, music, everyday cooperation, and religious syncretism challenges

the “othering” efforts of Dominican elites.

Deep questions remain. How does the Dominican- Haitian borderland oper-

ate as part of the ongoing social, cultural, and political negotiation of meaning?

How does the geographic border continue to represent “us” and “them,” “here”

and “there”? In terms of Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of reimagining culture— of

living without frontiers and being at crossroads— contemporary authors and

activists are constructing the new frontier, as also are Dominicans and Haitians

as they interact in daily life. All represent a reality of individuals of differing

languages and ethnicity together creating “intimacy.”

45

3

The creolization of Race

The entrance to the Museo del Hombre Dominicano contains three large statues of figures from the sixteenth century: Enriquillo, the Taino Indian who

revolted against the Spanish colonizers; Fray Bartolome de Las Casas, the Roman

Catholic priest who defended the indigenous people against Spanish abuses; and

Sebastian Lemba, the enslaved African who declared war against the colonial

regime. These three symbolize Dominican society in embryo, with the presence

of Taino, Spaniard, and African as cultural and racial starting points. The figure

of de Las Casas stands between those of Enriquillo and Lemba: is this intended to

symbolize Spain as the central or most important element of the set? And do the

open arms of Lemba signify the promise of freedom for the enslaved?

When I entered the building, I walked through a beautiful exhibition of

carnival dresses and masks representing each region of the country. While it

seemed to me that these colorful gowns had to be linked to Africa, none of the

materials explaining the exhibit indicated that this was so. Since the creation

of the museum in 1978, it is only the former director, Carlos Andújar Persinal,

an anthropologist, who has any track record of research on or publications

about the African element within the Dominican Republic’s syncretic culture.1

Nowhere in the museum did I find acknowledgment of the clamor for freedom

symbolized by Lemba’s open arms. The Museo del Hombre Dominicano is, like

most of the country’s historical markers and texts, a reflection of the official

Dominican imaginary. The carnival exhibition and Lemba’s open arms are there

perhaps only to confuse critics.

Yes, with Lemba Africa is present in the museum, but the center is Spain,

and the historical substrate is Taino, whose heritage is celebrated on the muse-

um’s third floor. The museum recalls what Manuel de Jesús Galván extolled in

his 1882 novel Enriquillo: the island’s foundational Indo- Hispanic race. In analyz-

ing the Museo del Hombre Dominicano, sociologist Ginetta Candelario comes

46 cHaPTeR 3

to the following conclusion: “Through its technologies— its architecture, display

strategies, and ‘narrative machinery’— the Museo del Hombre Dominicano not

only links past to present in a seamlessly progressive continuum from pre-

Columbian to Dominican, but also promotes a ‘simultaneously bodily and men-

tal’ subjectivity that conceptualizes Dominican identity as naturally indigenous

and historically Hispanic.”2 Indeed, the museum substantiates what dictator

Rafael Leonidas Trujillo affirmed: “The Negro in the Dominican Republic . . . has

been absorbed completely, has given up any African atavism and has adjusted

to the system of Dominican culture which has deep Spanish roots.”3

The museum’s symbolism, Trujillo’s pronouncement, and the official imag-

inary are all interlocked in denial of the African component in the Dominican

Republic’s racial and cultural amalgam. A simple look at the faces of people work-

ing in the museum, however, or at the photographs of present and former direc-

tors, or at the daily visitors, does not corroborate the idea of an Indo- Hispanic

race. What skin color I could observe was not that of Indo- Hispanics— as, say, in

Mexico or Peru— but a wide range from the darkest black to the lightest mulatto.

Undeniably, Dominican heritage is a hybrid built upon early genetic and

cultural fusion of Spaniards, Tainos, and blacks. This mixing of races and eth-

nic groups was further complicated by the arrival of other ethnic and racial

groups during the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, adding new

elements to the Dominican racial mosaic: Haitians during the unification of

the island in 1822 and in contemporary migration from Haiti to the Dominican

Republic; African Americans in the nineteenth century; black people from the

English- speaking Caribbean, known as Cocolos, in the late nineteenth century;

and Arabs, Jews, Europeans, Chinese, and Japanese in the twentieth century. All

became integral parts in the racial formation of the Dominican Republic.

The genetic mingling of these groups is represented in the racial rainbow

of Dominican society today. However, the problem is the official Dominican

imaginary: it still informs us that the racial origin and subsequent homogeniza-

tion of the people is Indo- Hispanic, and in refuting it in this chapter I hasten to

say that what I’ve written here is not a roar of suppressed negritude but rather

an attempt to delve into the complexities of Dominican racial DNA and to trace

how Africa became an important component of it. History here becomes a space

of interrogation. When and how did Africa become part of the Dominican racial

mix? When and how did a group of elite Dominicans begin the process of denial?

Answering these questions forces us to confront the limitations of the

archival record of this first Spanish Caribbean colony’s uneven development.

Documentation of the social, economic, and political evolution of the colony

is meager, freeing the imagination of historians to reconstruct the historical

course of the island, even to interpret the presence of Africans capriciously,

according to ideological beliefs. Spanish- Dominican historian Carlos Esteban

Deive, for example, researched the available information in the Archivo General

THe cReoLIzaTIoN of Race 47

de Indias (AGI) in Seville, a repository for all Spanish documentation on the

Americas, and wrote several historical books about slavery, maroonage, and

religion.4 According to his early work, Africans had little lasting impact on cur-

rent Dominican racial or cultural configurations; Spaniards occupied the cen-

ter, dominating all that followed, as exemplified by what is displayed at the

entrance of the museum. Yet the open arms of Lemba, rather than merely being

part of an ornament of the past, may guide us to riches of information not fully

plumbed by Deive, even within the limited archival data.

To accept Lemba’s invitation to reread this limited record, we must also

confront the chaotic and uneven manner in which slavery developed in Hispan-

iola. While during the sixteenth century the colony’s economy initially rested

on enslaved labor, it entered a period of economic stagnation during the seven-

teenth century. The eighteenth century witnessed the recovery of the island’s

economy and the resurgence of the African slave trade. This recovery, however,

was aborted by the Haitian Revolution and the final and total abolition of slav-

ery following unification of the island by the Republic of Haiti in 1822.

From being a slave society in the sixteenth century, the colony devolved

into a society with slaves in the seventeenth century, and then once again it

attempted to reinstitute a full- blown slave plantation economy. This uneven-

ness, plus the limits of the archives, has permitted Dominican historians to

assert that slavery was episodic, blackness came from Haiti, and the Spanish

colony was never a slave- based society. Moreover, relying on the observations of

European chroniclers who compared slavery regimes in the island’s French and

Spanish colonies, these historians have maintained that slavery under Spanish

domain was softer than in the French colony.5

According to this perspective, the benevolent slavery of the Spanish

attracted slaves in the eighteenth- century French colony and caused them to

escape to the Spanish side.6 This contention of Dominican lawyer and writer

Américo Lugo served to advance the belief that blackness came from the French

colony, and that the Spanish colony enjoyed a racial democracy in which both

slaves and masters shared the predicament of poverty, an interpretation also

promoted by the twentieth- century Dominican politician and writer Juan

Bosch.7 The supposed kindliness of Spanish slaveholders, and a constant influx

of slaves from the French colony, form the basis on which the “official” Domini-

can conception of race has been constructed.

In the spaces between archival limitations and historical unevenness, how-

ever, one finds glimpses of Dominican racial hybridity that mirror the present-

day spectrum. This chapter, in looking into these spaces, “pinpoints the precise

point in the present”8 of contemporary “official” Dominican denial concerning

the formative cultural dynamics of skin color, and thus opens a door to the past.

It is essential to acknowledge that by the end of the sixteenth century the island

population already resembled today’s Dominican racial mosaic. Here I argue

48 cHaPTeR 3

that an established social segment of rich mulattos held political power at the

moment of Dominican independence, yet because this sector was not equal in

societal prestige to the former Spanish Creole slaveholders, the mulattos’ sense

of racial ambiguity increased. The mulatto sector seized on this ambiguity to

exalt white values and to ally with white elites, thus bolstering a discourse of

white superiority.

The Spanish Creole exaltation of whiteness, now embraced by racially ambig-

uous Dominican mulattos, encountered an ally in the interventionist colonialism

of the United States, which during the nineteenth century racialized Dominicans

as lighter in color than Haitians.9 This racialization of Dominican national iden-

tity was reinforced following the US invasion of 1916, became an integral part

of further Dominican- US relations, and became state policy under the mulatto

dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo during his 1930– 1961 rule. Through ideology,

violence, and surveillance of people’s behavior, the Indo- Hispanic racial myth

was imposed on the Dominicans, and by publicly acknowledging and expressing

their racial identity and African- derived cultural practices, poor mulattos and

blacks were marginalized.

In opening this door to the past, “refiguring it as a contingent ‘in between’

space that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present,”10 we can

envisage the evolution of racial and ethnic blending on Hispaniola. In follow-

ing the traces of Lemba, as well as those of his two companions, we may move

toward an understanding of the mystifications and injustices of the present. In

renewing the past, rather than the imposed Indo- Hispanic racial homogeniza-

tion narrative, we might see something more: the historical creation of a mul-

tiracial rainbow.

This chapter utilizes both archival resources and materials by Dominican

and Spanish scholars to document the presence of enslaved blacks on the island

from the late fifteenth century until the abolition of slavery in 1822. It examines

racial inequalities and mixing, the social position of different racial groups, the

importance of Africans in the societal structure, and emergent forms of identity.

Slavery

Sometime prior to 1501, an African woman in the newly established Spanish

settlement of Santo Domingo started to offer health remedies to the poor in

front of her hut, located at the later site of the Virgin of Altagracia Church at

the corner of Hostos and Mercedes Streets. We can imagine that she brewed

herbs, prepared baths, and smashed dry coconuts to calm fevers and rid bodies

of parasites and other ailments. Later, at a site not far from the woman’s hut,

Governor Nicolás de Ovando, who was appointed in 1501 and arrived in Hispan-

iola in 1502, began to build the first hospital in the Americas, San Nicolás. The

woman had been brought to Hispaniola directly from Spain, where she lived for

THe cReoLIzaTIoN of Race 49

many years after being sold there by Portuguese merchants.11 Southern Spain

and Portugal were multiethnic and multiracial regions long before the “discov-

ery” of the New World, and many Africans, free and enslaved, participated in the

Iberian Peninsula’s conquest and colonization of the Americas.12

In contrast to the erasure in “official” Dominican history of others like

her, the story of this unnamed African woman epitomizes the experiences of

unknown numbers of enslaved persons who arrived on Hispaniola after living

for years in Spain. These Africans— European- acculturated and frequently bap-

tized Christian— were known as Ladinos in the late fifteenth and sixteenth cen-

turies, while enslaved persons brought directly from Africa were called bozales

(from the word for “muzzled”). Unlike in the Museo del Hombre Dominicano,

where their art is displayed two floors removed from the statute of Lemba, the

indigenous Taino population of the island became the intimate workmates and

companions of enslaved Africans, exchanging both culture and bloodlines.13

It was with the arrival of Christopher Columbus that slavery came to the

island he called Hispaniola. An early sixteenth- century reference to Africans

on Hispaniola is in a letter from the Spanish crown to newly appointed gover-

nor Nicolás de Ovando, advising him to transport only enslaved Ladinos to the

colony in order to avoid heretical influence on the Indians— although Chilean

historian Rolando Mellafe states that Columbus had Africans on his sea voyages

to Hispaniola.14 Slavery lasted for more than three centuries until finally abol-

ished by Haitian president Jean- Pierre Boyer in 1822; abolition was later ratified

in the constitution of the newly created Dominican Republic in 1844. Before the

abolition declared by Boyer in 1822, the Spanish colony enjoyed a brief moment

of freedom during 1801– 1802, after Toussaint Louverture abolished slavery in

the eastern side of the island and before Napoleon reimposed it.

When slavery was imposed in 1492, it was inflicted first on the large popu-

lation of indigenous Taino inhabitants— 600,000 of them, according to Frank

Moya Pons, although Franklin Franco states that Columbus encountered a pop-

ulation of 100,000— who were forced to work in mines and agriculture.15 Soon

they were joined by Africans, and both were subjected to overexploitation and

cruelty in gold mines, on estates, in production of sugar, and in the construc-

tion of cathedrals, palaces, and houses and the colonial port of Santo Domingo.

Many Tainos died in the fields of hunger and abuse; many others contracted

fatal infectious diseases from the Spaniards. Still others committed suicide or

were massacred. The Royal Order of 1511 authorized the seizure of indigenous

peoples in Caribbean islands where no gold was found,16 and this led to the

capture of Caribs in the Lucaya Islands, today the Bahamas, to work in the His-

paniola mines. As the indigenous population diminished, more Africans arrived

to join them, together sharing harsh abuses and cruelties.

The indigenes were distributed among the Spanish colonists to work in

agriculture, construction, and gold mines in a coerced labor regime called

50 cHaPTeR 3

repartimiento, which in the early sixteenth century assigned a number of indi-

genes to each Spaniard. The abuses against Native Americans were criticized

by the priest Fray Bartolome de Las Casas, and competition among the Span-

ish for more land and more Taino labor led the crown to replace the so- called

repartimientos with the supposedly less harsh encomienda system. This regime

awarded Spanish settlers a number of indigenous subjects to work the land and

extract gold from the mines but required the encomendero to instruct them in the

Catholic faith and Spanish language, recognizing that even if treated like slaves

the Tainos were vasallos (subjects) of the crown. The encomiendas did not last

long in Hispaniola, due to the rapid annihilation of the indigenous population

following the establishment of sugar plantations, and by the 1520s the economy

of the colony was centered on sugar production and the labor was mostly Afri-

can. Tainos and Africans, however, had labored together and intermingled from

the time of the conquest. Both subaltern groups, moreover, engaged in insur-

rections, flight, and the creation of pueblos cimarrones, or maroon communities,

which we shall examine more fully in chapter 4.

The earliest enslaved Africans probably came with Columbus during his

second voyage in 1493, and while the initial number of this group is unknown

due to lack of documentation, by the end of the fifteenth century the African

presence on the island undoubtedly was a reality. Archival information reveals

that in 1501 the Spanish crown decreed that as many blacks as needed could be

transported to Hispaniola.17 The gold fever of the late fifteenth and early six-

teenth centuries had led the crown to open the slave trade and to authorize

settlers to buy and import more slaves. Some twenty- five hundred Europeans

arrived in 1503 to join the colony’s new governor, Nicolás de Ovando.18 With

them they brought enslaved workers, who were used to mine gold, expand the

settlement of Santo Domingo, and perform domestic labor in their masters’

homes and in convents. Still other Africans entered the island as free persons,

to work in construction and gold mining.

The first enslaved blacks were purchased in Lisbon, Portugal. Some had

been transported there from the West African Guinea coast, and others had

been born and raised in Portugal or Spain.19 Since the Spanish believed that

Africans worked harder, and better survived the conditions in the mines and

construction, than the indigenous Indians, the influx of these Ladino slaves to

Hispaniola continued through the mid- sixteenth century.

In the sixteenth century, the production of sugar on Hispaniola greatly

expanded the availability of this much- appreciated commodity in Europe. In

the preceding century, sugar had been imported from the European and African

Atlantic coastal islands of Madeira and São Tomé.20 Columbus introduced sug-

arcane to Spain’s new Caribbean island possession in the late fifteenth century,

and almost immediately the plant propagated widely.21 In his chronicles, de Las

Casas wrote that by 1506 a man from La Vega on Hispaniola was cultivating cane

THe cReoLIzaTIoN of Race 51

and producing sugar using an animal- powered grinding mill, or trapiche.22 After

the island’s gold mines were exhausted and new venues of gold production in

other New World regions appeared, sugar production became Hispaniola’s main

economic asset.

One of the first sugar plantations was created, in 1515, in the vicinity of

Yaguate in the south of the island, about thirty miles from Santo Domingo, by

a small landowner named Velloso.23 Velloso obtained the cane seedlings from

the grower, who had already produced melaza, or molasses, in La Vega, the same

person who had introduced the trapiche to process cane into sugar in 1505.

Buoyed by increasing sugar prices in Europe, Velloso made investments to raise

the level of production. To upgrade his operations and technology, he imported

technicians from the Canary Islands. They advised him to move the mill to a

more suitable location, and with assistance from Spanish crown officials, he

relocated to the lower Nigua River near Haina where, just a few miles from

Santo Domingo, there were better transportation facilities. Velloso’s new estate

started sugar production in 1517.24

A year earlier, three priests of the Order of Saint Jerome had been assigned

by the Spanish monarch to govern the colony. The priests noted the falling gold

production, and saw agriculture, specifically sugar, as a profitable replacement.

With the consent of the crown, the priests offered five hundred pesos to plant-

ers who dedicated their land to the production of sugar. Additionally, through

his royal Cedula of August 18, 1518, King Charles V authorized acquisition of

four thousand slaves from Africa.25 In 1519 the priests were succeeded by Gov-

ernor Rodrigo de Figueroa, who provided further incentives: loans, customs

exemptions to import machinery, assistance from specialized technicians, and

imports of even more enslaved Africans.26

These measures proved highly effective. Sugar production was concentrated

near Santo Domingo, the capital and administrative center of the colony, where

the port was located. By 1520 there were as many as forty sugar plantations, four

with trapiches. They were concentrated primarily in the south of the island,

where Santo Domingo, Haina, Nigua, Nizao, Azua, and San Juan accounted for

85 percent of sugar production. The other facilities were located in La Vega,

Bonao, and Puerto Plata in the north and Higüey in the east. African labor now

supported a booming economy. From 1548 to 1555 an average of thirty ships

from Hispaniola arrived annually in Seville, and between 1568 and 1584, some

125 tons of sugar were exported from the island each year.27

Sugar remained the pillar of the colony’s economy until the last quarter

of the sixteenth century. Production of other commodities, however, was also

important during this period, including cattle and ginger, which rivaled sugar.

Ginger began to be produced in large quantities for export to Europe in 1581; by

the beginning of the 1600s, the colony produced more than seventeen hundred

tons of ginger a year. Cattle ranching was facilitated by the large tracts of unused

52 cHaPTeR 3

land on the island. Historian Rubén Silié argues that the abundance of unculti-

vated land had no monetary return other than for cattle grazing, which required

little labor or technology.28 Cattle production, then, emerged as a complement

to the sugar industry, producing the animal power needed to pull carts of sugar

cane and operate trapiches, and it would become the most important compo-

nent of the colonial economy for more than two centuries.29

The Spanish colony of the sixteenth century was a slave society; sugar

production was based on enslaved labor. The enslaved population numbered

between twenty and thirty thousand in the mid- sixteenth century and included

mine, plantation, cattle ranch, and domestic laborers. A small Spanish ruling

class of about twelve hundred monopolized political and economic power,

and it used ordenanzas (laws) and violence to control the population of color.30

According to contemporary documents, the majority of the enslaved group were

black, but significant numbers of free blacks and racially mixed people were also

present. The chroniclers cited by historian Fernández de Oviedo asserted that a

large proportion of the population was of mixed racial and ethnic background,

with Spanish categories used to designate racially mixed individuals, including

mestizo (Indian and Spanish), mulatto (black and Spanish), grifo (mulatto and

black), and cuarterón (mestizo and Spanish).