Professional Documents
Culture Documents
THE BORDERS OF
DOMINICANIDAD
Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction
Y A MIS HOMBRES,
Note on Terminology ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction Dominicanidad in Contradiction 1
The terms I use to label race and ethnicity of groups and individuals are in-
credibly complex given their specific meanings across historical moments
and geographical spaces. The following is a list of some of the main identity
terms I use throughout the book and a short explanation of how I use them:
black: I use black as a global category for naming peoples and cul-
tures of African ancestry, recognizing that different nations and cul-
tural groups utilize a diversity of terms to name their race.
criollo: Descendants of the Spanish colonial caste whose ancestry is
white European.
dominicanidad: I employ the term as a theoretical category that refers
to both the people who embrace the label Dominican whether or
not they are considered Dominican citizens by the state (such as dias-
poric Dominicans and ethnic Haitians) and the history, cultures, and
institutions associated with them. I opt to keep the Spanish-language
spelling to avoid confusion with capitalized Dominicanidad, which
refers to hegemonic and official institutions of state control.
Dominicanyork: Working-class Dominican migrants and their descen-
dants who live in United States urban Dominican enclaves.
ethnic Haitian: A person of Haitian ancestry born in the Dominican
Republic.
Latina/o: A term that describes people of Latin American descent liv-
ing in the United States.
mulato: Refers to a mixed-race Dominican of light, medium, or dark
brown skin. In the nineteenth century mulato was a category of privi-
lege. I opted to keep the Spanish terminology because of its sociohis-
torical specificity.
rayano: A person from the geographical area of the Haitian-Dominican
borderland also known as the Lnea Fronteriza.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is the result of a long, deeply personal and incredibly rewarding
journey. Like many first books, it began long ago as part of my doctoral
training, and it has grown with me. I am thankful to see it mature and go
out into the world, after many years of dedication and work. But of course,
getting to this point required the support of many, including some of the
people whose lives and work inform the chapters. My eternal gratitude and
appreciation go first to Josefina Bez, whose performance work and writing
kindled my curiosity way back when I was a college student at Rutgers Uni-
versity. My interest in her work was the seed that eventually grew into this
book. Her friendship has been the most amazing reward. Gracias, mi her-
mana por tanta luz. The inventiveness of Rita Indiana Hernndez; the ac-
ciones of David Karmadavis Prez; and the literary gifts of Junot Daz, Rey
Andjar, Nelly Rosario, Loida Maritza Prez, and Aurora Arias provided
a road map for translating dominicanidad beyond the island and across a
vast temporal span. The intellectual legacy of Juan Bosch served as a bridge
between the often slippery here and there my book connects. It is my most
sincere hope that the archive I created in this book honors their lives and
the lives of Olivorio Mateo, Dominga Alcntara, the Andjar family, Sonia
Marmolejos, and the many other actors who inform the stories and histories
my book memorializes.
This project began while I was a doctoral student in the American Cul-
ture Program at the University of Michigan. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes
was incredibly supportive. Yolanda Martnez-San Miguel was an instrumen-
tal mentor and advisor. Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof and Richard Turits provided
guidance as I began to explore the tensions between history and literature.
The mentorship of Jossianna Arroyo, Mary Kelley, Carol Smith Rosenberg,
and Julie Ellison and the tireless diligence of Marlene Moore made Michigan
a nurturing place for me to grow intellectually and humanly. My friends Afia
Ofori-Mensa, Brian Chung, Chris Finley, Danny Mndez, Dean Saranillo,
Heijin Lee, Lee Ann Wang, Kelly Sisson, Rachel Afi Queen, Sam Erman,
and Tyler Cornelius gave me feedback and encouragement, pushing me to
think about my project across disciplinary fields. Their love and support car-
ried me during difficult times.
I am forever grateful for the guidance of historians Quisqueya Lora,
Elizabeth Manley, and Raymundo Gonzlez, who shared their knowledge
and passion for Dominican history with me and taught me the nuts and
bolts of conducting research in the Dominican National Archives. Mil gra-
cias por su apoyo, amistad y generosidad.
I had incredible support for the various technical aspects of the manu-
script preparation. Juleyka Lantigua and Megan Bayles cut many long sen-
tences in two, supplied multiple commas, erased extra ones, and gave me
fair doses of what is this? that ultimately made the manuscript more acces-
sible to readers. I am grateful for their editorial support. Kilia Llano made
the maps and illustrations. Pepe Coronado took my argument to heart and
turned it into a beautiful cover image, and Achy Obejas checked many of the
translations. I would simply not have been able to complete this enormous
task without the tireless assistance of Chantell Smith Limerick, whose in-
credible availability, careful edits, diligence, and overall kindness made me
feel accompanied through the often lonesome process of writing. I am sure
she is in tears reading these words as I am while I write them.
A Ford Foundation dissertation fellowship allowed me to spend a year
conducting research at the Dominican National Archive in Santo Domingo.
A Future of Minority Studies postdoctoral fellowship was instrumental in
beginning the revisions for the book. The Willson Center Research Fellow-
ship at the University of Georgia allowed me to have time to complete a first
draft of the manuscript, and the Milton Grant at Harvard University pro-
vided me with financial support to conduct the final research trips to Santo
Domingo, Washington, DC, and New York.
Along the way I have found incredibly generous mentors who have read
the book carefully and provided valuable feedback and guidance. Nicole
Guidotti-Hernndez and Silvio Torres-Saillant went above and beyond
reading several versions of the manuscript, meeting with me on multiple oc-
casions in multiple locations, and providing both intellectual and moral sup-
port every step of the way. To the two of them I am forever indebted. Hay un
poco de ustedes dos en este libro. My friend Dana Bultman was the first to
read a very early draft of the manuscript. She patiently asked important ques-
tions and suggested edits and revisions that really pushed me in the right
xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
direction. Her enthusiasm for my work carried me at a moment when I most
needed it. Laura Gutirrez was instrumental in pushing me to think about
the body as site of intellectual inquiry. Chandra Talpade-Mohanty made a
home for me at Syracuse University during the early stages of writing. Along
with Linda Carty, Myrna Garca Caldern, and Silvio Torres-Saillant, she
provided an intellectually stimulating forum for exchanges and discussions.
It was during those weeks that I was able to draft a blueprint for the book.
My colleagues in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
at the University of Georgia hosted a presentation that generated impor-
tant questions informing chapters 3 and 4. Pam Voekel, Betina Kaplan, Jan
Pendergrass, Kelly Happy, Lesley Feracho, Judith Ortiz-Cofer, and Nicols
Lucero encouraged my writing amidst the life juggles of my first academic
position. I am indebted also to my friends and colleagues at Harvard Uni-
versityGenevieve Clutario, Lauren Kaminsky, Kirsten Weld, Robin
Bernstein, Mariano Siskind, Mayra Rivera Rivera, Alejandro de la Fuente,
Mary Gaylord, Kay Shelemay, Joe Blackmore, Jill Lepore, and Ju Yon Kim.
Thanks to the scholars and staff at the Dominican Studies Institute, particu-
larly Sarah Aponte, Anthony Stevens, Jacqueline Jimnez Polanco, and Ra-
mona Hernndez, and to transnational Hispaniola scholars April Mayes, Raj
Chetty, Maya Horn, Arturo Victoriano, Carlos Decena, Nstor Rodrguez,
and Ginetta Candelario, who all provided key advise and expertise. Special
thanks to the Duke University Press anonymous reviewers for the insightful
comments and to Courtney Berger for believing in this project and seeing
it to fruition.
The support of my Latino/a studies and ethnic studies community across
the United States was crucial throughout the years. Their feedback, ques-
tions, letters, and hugs gave this book and me a home in the field of inquiry
that had nurtured my scholarship. Gracias Irene Mata, Ondine Chavoya, Ar-
lene Dvila, Lourdes Torres, Josie Saldaa, Adriana Zavala, Deborah Pacini
Hernndez, Camila Stevens, Vanessa Prez-Rosario, Marisel Moreno, Ben
Sifuentes-Juregui, Lisa Lowe, Patricia Herrera, George Lipsitz, Christen
Smith, Barbara Ransby, Frances Aparicio and Israel Reyes for being on my
side.
I could have never completed this book without the love and support of
my mujeres: Nuna Marcano, Josefina Bez, Eric Gmez, Daryelin Torres,
Adnaloy Espinosa, Nimsi Guzmn, Indhira Garca, Mara Scharbay, Laura
Catelli, and Afia Ofori-Mensa. And my dear friends and biggest supporters
Junot Daz, David Tbora, Julie Tbora, Alex Guerrero, and the rest of you
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii
who will be angry I forgot to mention your name but will celebrate with me
just the same. Ustedes saben que el resto es la selva.
My family may have not always completely understood what I was doing
or why, but they were supportive just the same in more ways than words can
ever describe. Thank you to my brothers, Albin Garca Pea and Kerwin
Garca Pea, for taking care of me, for working so I could read, for often
carrying a heavier burden so I did not have to. Thank you to my sister, Vashti
Nicolas, por aoarme toda la vida. To my nieces and nephews for their love
and laughter. To my cousins in the Dominican RepublicEliezer, Abel, and
Ivn Dofor chasing after books for me and coming to see my talks, in
often hostile environments. Gracias por nunca juzgarme. To my aunts Dor-
cas and Sarah Pea for the right doses of moros and bachatas, particularly on
those frustrating days of long blackouts that made my research impossible,
and to my dearest uncle, Claudio Do, por quererme tanto.
Thank you to my parents for giving me all they had, for having faith
in me, and for encouraging me, even when our worlds seem opposite and
strange, to keep going forward in a direction that often took me away from
them and closer to myself. Your unconditional, absolute love and support is
all anyone could ever need. My father, Don Tulio Garca, introduced me to
books and taught me to love words and language. My mother, Doa Maritza
Pea, taught me the true meaning of the phrase s se puede. She modeled
how to stand up for what was right and how to talk back, particularly when
everyone is trying to silence us. Gracias por tu valor, mami.
But my deepest and eternal gratitude is for my partner in all adventures,
John Paul Gallagher, and our beautiful son, Sebastin. John made me coffee
every morning, ran out to buy ink, chased away imaginary and real demons,
and clapped in cheer every time I read him a new chapter, a new page, a new
paragraph. Sebastin grounded me and opened a new world of that which is
possible. With him in my arms, I began to write this book. I finished it to the
beat of his bouncing ball in the backyard. I am grateful I sacrificed nothing
of you to write this book. I am grateful I always put you first. John and Se-
bastin, it is because of you two that I am. And this book, as you both know,
I wrote with and for you.
My last words of gratitude are for my students across the multiple insti-
tutions I have been part of over the last ten years, but most important, my
Freedom University students, who challenged me and gave me a home when
I most needed one. Gomabseubnida. Gracias. Thank you.
xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
Dominicanidad in Contradiction
2 INTRODUCTION
the Dominican Republic in their study of the nineteenth-century expansion
that led to the Louisiana Purchase (1803); the Annexation of Texas (1845);
and the colonization of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Guam after the Spanish-
American War (1898). This omission exists despite the fact that the United
States attempted to purchase Dominican territories between 1824 and 1884
and established unofficial military bases in the Dominican southwest region
during the US military occupations of 191624.3
This Dominican footnote condition, which writer Junot Daz allego-
rizes in his acclaimed novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007),
extends well beyond the historical archive of nineteenth-century US ex-
pansionism. In 2000, for instance, Dominicans became the fastest-growing
ethnic group in New York City.4 Yet the media and advertisement indus-
try rarely portrays Dominicans as exemplary of US Latinidad. Dominican
blackness does not fit the colonial fantasy that makes the light-skinned ver-
sion of Latino/a mestizaje marketable in the United States (as exemplified
in actors Salma Hayek, Benicio del Toro, Antonio Banderas, and The Most
Interesting Man in the World). The diversity of Latino/a ethnicities, lan-
guages, and cultures are thus replaced with the repackaged Latino/aa
concoction of stereotypes, fantasies, and historical figures associated with
Spain and Mexico (bullfights and Cinco de Mayo)that fulfills colonial
desire for the foreign and exotic.5 Amidst such abysmal inequalities, my en-
counter with the professor, though incredibly enraging, is not surprising.
The Borders of Dominicanidad brings dominicanidad from the footnote
to the center of the page, insisting on the impact of dictions on the national
and racial identity of a people. The stories and histories upheld by nations
and their dominant archive create marginality through acts of exclusion, vio-
lence, and silencing. Though these official stories of exclusion are influential
in bordering the nation and shaping national identity, this book also shows
they are always contested, negotiated, and even redefined through contra-
dictions.
I see dominicanidad as a category that emerges out of the historical events
that placed the Dominican Republic in a geographic and symbolic border
between the United States and Haiti since its birth in 1844.6 Dominican-
idad is thus inclusive of subjects as well as the dictions that produce them.
It also encompasses multiple territories and ethnoracial identifications: Do-
minicanyork, rayano, dominicano, Afro-Dominican. Those, in turn, make up
Dominican subjectivities across national spaces.7
4 INTRODUCTION
body of the Afro-religious devotee can become a vessel from which the past,
in the form of the dead, can come back offering truths.14 El Ni functions as
an embodiment of past through present knowledge. It bridges Hispaniola
colonial and diasporic experiences through the very body of the Dominican-
york exile subject. Studies about transnationalism and migration typically
look across national borders in order to propose subjects as ethnic minorities
or unwanted foreigners, immigrants or emigrants, defining people through
nations and in so doing, through a nation-bordering chronology. The sym-
bolic space of El Ni expands our understanding of borders; it displaces the
location and polarity of the nation-border, instead proposing the body as
the location that contains and reflects national exclusion (borders) across
history and generations.
The Borders of Dominicanidad investigates how individuals who inhabit
El Ni grapple with the multiplicity of dictions, racial paradigms, and eco-
nomic disparities sustained by the dominant narratives of the nation. This
book asks: How does the Dominican racialized exile subjectthe rayano;
the exoticized, sexualized brown-skinned dominicana; the Dominicanyork;
and the Dominican migrantcontradict the hyphenated histories and sto-
ries that violently continue to silence them from the archives of the two
nations it is charged with bridging? The intellectual impulse guiding my in-
vestigation derives from a preoccupation with the footnote condition that
mutes Dominican plurality, silencing stories and histories from both US and
Dominican archives. In that sense, this book is concerned with how dic-
tionsthat which is written, said, or describedimpact the way people,
particularly those considered ethnic minority, colonial, or racialized sub-
jects, are imagined and produced across national paradigms.
Chicana feminists Gloria Anzalda and Cherre Moraga called for a the-
orization from the flesh in order to contrast the epistemic violence that
perpetually excluded minoritized peoples knowledge and histories from the
archive.15 Following this call, critics Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado-
Torres have urged us to think from the position of suppressed and margin-
alized in order to decolonize knowledge.16 Though skepticism surrounds
intellectual projects that are not solely evidence based, I argue that finding
a more complete version of the truth requires us to read in contradiction,
paying attention to the footnotes and silences left in the dominant archives.
To do so, I follow Elizabeth Groszs groundbreaking proposition of the body
as a central framework for the construction of subjectivity.17
If the body, as Grosz argues, can be a thing through which the domi-
The study of the US-Mexican border has been central in establishing the
growing fields of border studies and Latino/a studies in the United States.
Though the importance of the US-Mexican border is undeniable, my book
invites the reader to think about how other geographical and symbolic bor-
ders have been significant in imagining the national identity of the United
States, particularly as related to race (blackness) and ethnicity (Latinidad).
The United States centrality in the formation of Dominican racial discourse
is key to my analysis of the different ways in which dictions have shaped how
Dominicans negotiate racial identities and national belonging across geo-
graphical and symbolic borders.
The noun border alludes to tangible objects (a sign, a site, or even wall)
that can arbitrate peoples access and belonging to a particular territory. A
border, though often invisible, can be named, crossed, and sometimes even
erased. Bordering, on the other hand, evokes a continuum of actions that
affect human beings. Bordering implies an actor (one who enacts the bor-
dering) and a recipient (they who are bordered). As my experience with the
professor shows, bordering can take place even when geographical markers
are absent; bordering cannot be geographically contained.
This book suggests the border between Haiti and the Dominican Re-
public as a locus for understanding how race and nation intersect in the
bordering of a people. As people and ideas travel back and forth, borders are
reaffirmed, contested, and redefined through official and unofficial actions.
Increased Haitian immigration to the Dominican Republic since the US
intervention in Hispaniola (191434) and the massive Dominican emigra-
tion to the United States that began after the assassination of dictator Rafael
6 INTRODUCTION
Lenidas Trujillo in 1961 largely shaped Dominican understanding of race
and citizenship. The Borders of Dominicanidad insists on the centrality of the
Haiti-DR border as a site that is both historically linked to and symbolically
present in the United States through the body of the Dominican racialized
immigrant/minority subject.
My repositioning of the Haiti-DR border within US history requires two
disruptions of the current temporal and geographical notions guiding our
understanding of race and ethnicity in the United States. The first disrup-
tion requires the reader to sustain the idea that fear of Haitithe over-
whelming concern that overtook slave economies like the United States and
Spain following the slave revolt that began in 1791 and led to Haitian in-
dependence in 1804is foundational to the production of US notions of
race and citizenship. Fear of Haiti dominated the young and robust, slavery-
driven US economy and determined the Empires relationship to the two
Hispaniola republics.19
During the early years of the foundation of the Dominican Republic
(184465), the United States supported the idea of Dominican racial su-
periority over Haiti and disavowed Haiti as racially inferior and thus unfit
for self-government. This dichotomist view of the two Hispaniola nations
shaped the relationship between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. It also
shaped how the two nations and the relationship between them were imag-
ined, and continue to be imagined and produced, across the globe.20 Fear
of Haiti combined with Dominican criollo colonial desire and the threat
of US expansionism impelled nineteenth-century Dominican writers and
patriots such as Flix Mara del Monte and Manuel de Jess Galvn to pro-
duce dominicanidad as a hybrid race that was decidedly other than black,
and therefore different from Haitis blackness. They did so through liter-
ary and historical narratives of mestizaje that substituted notions of race
(mulato, prieto) with nation (dominicano). The foundational myth of the
Dominican hybrid nation has led to the continuous physical and epistemic
violence against Dominican blacks, rayanos (border subjects), and Haitian-
Dominicans. It has also contributed to military violence against rayano and
Afro-Dominican religious groups at the hands of totalitarian and repressive
regimes that dominated the twentieth-century Dominican Republic (US
military: 191624; Trujillo dictatorship: 193061; US military: 1965; and
Balaguer regime: 196678).
The history of US blackness is also largely intertwined with the history of
Hispaniolas independence projects. With the emergence of two black and
8 INTRODUCTION
end the sovereignty of a nation ruled by African descendants. Reconciling
his desire for equality and justice with his idea of a cohesive nation, Dou-
glass got behind the Manifest Destiny of the United States. He believed
that in order for the black race to move forward, it needed the support and
strength of a strong nation and its leaders. Douglass believed Santo Do-
mingo could not survive on its own, but could be great as part of the US
Empire.29 Douglass, an expert on race, believed Santo Domingo would be
a refuge for African American professionals and scholars seeking to escape
the oppression of the postCivil War United States to develop their full
potential as humans: This is a place where the man can simply be man re-
gardless of his skin color. Where he can be free to think, and to lead.30 But
Douglass was not the first American to describe the Dominican Republic as
a form of nonblack racial other. The US commission from 1845 in charge of
assessing Dominicans ability to self-govern found Dominicans to be nei-
ther black nor white.31 Assuaging public anxiety surrounding the potential
emergence of another black nation, both commissions (the 1845 commission
led by white American diplomat John Hogan and the 1871 commission in
which Frederick Douglass served as secretary) insisted on the difference of
Dominican mulataje as an advantage in the future progress of the young na-
tion, in contrast with the disadvantageous blackness of neighboring Haiti.
Though Douglass found Dominican racial mixtures promising, particu-
larly as compared to Haiti, he also found Dominicans to be generally uncivil
and in need of much guidance and teaching. Consciously or not, Douglass,
the voice of black thought in US politics of the late nineteenth century, es-
tablished US blacknesswhich he embodied in the eyes of his nationas
an authority for determining the racial, political, and cultural implications
of blackness in Hispaniola. His legacy of US black intellectual dominance
continues to shape scholarly discussions about Dominican blackness to
date.32 If white Americans, like Hogan, were endowed with the power to
govern and instruct young nations, black AmericansDouglasss actions
seem to suggesthad the burden of teaching other blacks how to be black,
civil, and free. In this framework, which would be expanded to the rest of
the Hispanic Caribbean after the Spanish-American War, we can find that
the roots of the complicated Dominican blackness are deeply intertwined
with the economic and political ambitions of expansionist postCivil War
United States.
My proposed genealogy and geographical triangulation of the US-Haiti-
Dominican borders can shed light on the contemporary prevalence of anti-
Disrupting Latinidad
10 INTRODUCTION
colonial impositions that are projected on the racialized body of subjects
living on the island or the United States.
Borders are often imagined as a locus of migration or as a national land-
mark dividing citizen from immigrant subjects.34 My analysis goes beyond
this dichotomist view by insisting on the border as both a tangible location
where subjects live as well as an embodied locationEl Niwhere the
multiple impositions of the nation-state and the imperial-colonial discourses
coexist. The dictions that produce border subjectivity are thus always his-
torical and translocal.
Foregrounding El Ni does not intend in any way to diminish the im-
portance of the experience of migration in the construction of Latino/a
ethnicity in the United States. Rather, I am bringing attention to an other
way to expand our knowledge of Latinidad by looking at the significance
of nineteenth-century US imperialism over Latin America for present pro-
cesses of bordering, racialization, and exclusion of Latino/as from the United
States and its archive. In this way, my proposed disruptions contribute to
and expand the intellectual labor of US-Mexican border scholars Nicole
Guidotti-Hernndez, Laura Gutirrez, and Ral Coronado in their historical
and geographical repositioning of relationships between US Latino/as and
Latin Americans as shaped by the continuous presence of European and US
American colonial impositions on the bodies of racialized subjects.
Coronados history of textuality, for instance, invites us to imagine
Texas not as we do today, as some behemoth of nationalist independent
feeling, but rather as an interstitial colony shaped by a long history of im-
perial jockeying among New Spain (now Mexico), French Louisiana, and the
expanding United States.35 Similarly, Guidotti-Hernndez urges us to think
beyond the dominant narratives of resistance associated with Chicana his-
tory to uncover the interstices of multiple colonial regimes that operate in
the production of racialized subjects, showing how language is what makes
the subject and the body.36 Coronado and Guidotti-Hernndezs interpel-
lations of US Mexicanidad pose urgent critiques of dominant epistemologi-
cal approaches to Latino/a studies by insisting on the need to historicize the
colonial contradictions that operate to produce the racialized subject. My
proposed genealogy of dominicanidad and the disruptions produced by the
triangulation of US-DR-Haiti further demonstrate how racialized Latino/a
voices, bodies, and dictions are silenced from multiple archives across time
and geographies, but it also simultaneously creates an alternative archive that
allows readers, if they so choose, to read in contradiction.
12 INTRODUCTION
The term contradiction frames my analysis of the ways in which narra-
tives produce nations through the violence, exclusion, and the continuous
control of racialized bodies. Contradiction explains, for instance, how do-
minicanidad became simultaneously a project of the criollo elite and the
US Empire in their common goal of preserving white colonial privilege in
the mid-nineteenth century. Diction refers to the distinctiveness of speech
through which meaning is conveyed and understood. Thus, in its basic im-
plication, diction signifies the performance of language and meaning. The
larger way that diction works throughout the book is through the con-
trapuntal analysis of the historical (documents presumed to be evidence of
fact such as military memos, newspaper articles, decrees, court transcripts)
and the literary (which I broadly define so as to include different forms of
cultural productions such as films, performances, and songs). My interroga-
tions of the texts bring attention to the contradictions that surge within and
between history and literature, showing how literature works, at times, to
sustain hegemony, while at others, it serves to contest it.
The epistemological break between history and literature is always ex-
pressed concretely through the historically situated evaluation of specific
narratives. Yet the very disruption between history and literature offers a
way to challenge what we have come to regard as truth, or as Michel Trouil-
lot put it, the ways in which what happened and that which is said to have
happened are and are not the same may itself be historical.38 My book thus
examines how truths contribute to the violence, silencing, and erasure of
racialized people and their truths.
The five historical episodes that frame my analysis of contradictions dem-
onstrate the lasting effects of dictions on the lives of human beings as narra-
tives become truth and as truth becomes the basis for exclusionary laws
that sustain the ideological and political borders of the nation. Insisting on
the consequences that silences produced by history have on the sustenance
of power and inequality, Trouillot argues that each historical narrative re-
news its own claim to truth through acts of epistemic repetition.39 Repeti-
tion of historical events, whether through historical or fictional narration,
can replace the actual trauma of violence with the symbolic effect of the par-
ticular act of violence on the hegemonic project of nation-bordering.
One of the ways silencing through repetition becomes visible in the dic-
tions I analyze is through passive voice interference in literary and historical
narration of violent events, which often materializes through allegorical and
14 INTRODUCTION
in the nineteenth century. Taylor argues that this complicity also allows for
public acts of forgetting that blur the obvious discontinuities, misalliances,
and ruptures that founded and sustained the myths symbolically bordering
the nation.43 Following Taylor, Nicole Guidotti-Hernndez warns us that
these public acts of forgetting happen because of, rather than in spite of,
the constant repetition of historical events. Repetition is another way of si-
lencing.44
The Borders of Dominicanidad assumes the enormous challenge of reading
in contradiction by analyzing the silences created by the repetitions and pas-
sive voice interferences that inhabit the Archive of Dominicanidad. To do
so, I analyze a wide variety of texts including never-before-studied evidence-
based documents found in historical archives in Santo Domingo, Port-au-
Prince, and Washington, DC, as well as lesser-known literary texts, salves,
photographs, performances, oral interviews, and films. The chronologically,
formally, and linguistically diverse readings of materials both contradicts the
hegemonic Archive of Dominicanidad and produces a new archive of con-
tradiction that I hope will invite further studies.
Archiving Contradictions
16 INTRODUCTION
of 1937, looks at the killings of ethnic Haitians and rayanos as remembered
in four fictional accounts: the short story Luis Pie, published in Havana
in 1942 by exiled Dominican writer Juan Bosch; the Haitian novel Compre
Gnral Soleil (General Sun, My Brother), by Jacques Stphen Alexis (Port-
au-Prince, 1955); a testimonio El masacre se pasa a pie by Freddy Prestol Cas-
tillo (Santo Domingo, 1973); and the celebrated novel by Haitian American
writer Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones (New York, 1998). My analy-
sis links the Massacre of 1937 to the anti-Haitian dictions of the early re-
public examined in the first chapter, showing how diction became law and
epistemic violence transformed into physical violence. Without diminish-
ing the importance of the horrific nature of these events, my analysis of the
massacre moves beyond the trauma of 1937, provoking a conversation among
Haitian, Dominican, and US American texts to analyze the rhetorical sig-
nificance of the massacre in shaping racial ideologies during the second half
of the twentieth century. In addition, the chapter insists on the persistence
of xenophobic nationalism in present-day Dominican Republic.
The second part of the book, Diaspora Contradicts, engages the impact
of transnational interventions in contesting hegemonic notions of domini-
canidad. This section shows how contradictions take various forms through-
out the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as other narrations of domini-
canidad emerge, particularly in the diaspora. Historical novels dominate the
bulk of Dominican American literary production, as evidenced in the works
of Julia lvarez, Junot Daz, and Nelly Rosario. Diasporic contradictions
thus, on the one hand, place the Dominican experience within US history,
insisting on the long and unequal relationship between the two nations that
has resulted in the massive migration of 10 percent of the overall population
to the United States in the last fifty years. On the other, they historicize the
Dominican experience from the perspective of people who have been si-
lenced in the nations archive: women, migrants, peasants, blacks, lgbtq,
and the disabled.
Chapter 4, Rayano Consciousness: Remapping the Haiti-DR Border
after the Earthquake of 2010, was inspired by a photograph I saw one week
after the Haitian Earthquake in 2010 of a rayana woman, Sonia Marmole-
jos, nursing a severely injured Haitian baby. The image provides an analyti-
cal framework for understanding the borders of dominicanidad in a global
context. The English translation of the word rayano, borderer, invites us to
think about the Haiti-DR border within the framework of border studies,
inevitably summoning a relational critique of the continued persistence of
18 INTRODUCTION
poetics of dominicanidad ausente has emerged as a dialectic process of trans-
national interpellation of the official national narration of dominicanidad
solidified during the Trujillo regime. This final chapter demonstrates that
marginality becomes a transnational experience for Dominican Americans
who are the same poor, black, marginal subjects who have been historically
oppressed and exiled from the nation-state.45
The borders of dominicanidad are many, encompassing the transnational
and diasporic experiences of Dominicans in the United States and else-
where; the existence of a community of Haitian-Dominican peoples on
the borderlands; and the growing presence of Haitian immigrants living in
Dominican cities. The Borders of Dominicanidad bridges the multiplicity of
margins of dominicanidad while also bringing attention to the intangibil-
ity and elusiveness of the divisions that emerge on the individual as well as
collective levels of the population. My book thus suggests a reimagining not
only of the physical, militarized borders that separate the two nations that
inhabit Hispaniola, but also of the series of loose articulations, discourses,
traumas, myths, contradictions, and historical events that have informed the
Dominican subjects understanding of him or herself in relation to Haiti and
the United States. Borders are about regulating, controlling, and prohibiting
the free crossings of bodies and objects from one locale to another. They are
also about containing the undesirable outside of the nations center. Thus
the body of the (undesirable) border crosser is inscribed with the historical,
social, and legal events that seek to contain/control it. These inscriptions
can in turn become another way of understanding truth. The body of the
border subjectthe prieto, the rayano, the Haitian immigrant, or the Do-
minicanyorkcan also become an archive of contradiction.
Dominicans should never forget the inherent ferocity of those monsters that penetrated
our homes . . . and even the innocence of our candid virgins destroyed.
Flix Mara del Monte, Cancin dominicana, 1844
Let us not forget all that we suffered under Haitian oppressing rule. . . . Even our tender
virgins were raped at the hands of those beasts.
Manuel Arturo Pea Batlle, Discurso sobre la cuestin fronteriza, 1944
All those enemies of our nation . . . who forget the incredible sufferings that under the
forced occupation of 1822 our nation endured. . . . That even the fragile bodies of young
virgins were raped and killed.
Vincho Castillo, Discurso, 2014
On May 31, 1822, during the first year of the Haitian Unification of His-
paniola (182244), widespread panic overcame residents of Santo Domingo
after a leaflet that read Beware of Rapists and Killers appeared around
the main plaza in the city center.1 The pamphlet described the events that
had happened the day before: three men, armed with machetes and rifles,
killed three girls and their father in the vicinity of Galindo. 2 The dismem-
bered bodies of the children were found in a well.3 On June 8, owing to
the testimony of a woman identified as Ysabel, the house servant, members
of the military government of Spanish Haiti (now the Dominican Repub-
lic) apprehended Pedro Cobial, Manuel de la Cruz, and Alejandro Gmez
in connection with the crime.4 The men were wanted criminals from the
Spanish Era who had escaped prison during the political transition from
Spanish colonial rule to independence.5 Cobial, de la Cruz, and Gmez self-
identified as Spanish Dominicans from East Santo Domingo.6
MONTE PLATA
Ozam
a Riv
er
Los Minas Bayaguana
SANTO DOMINGO
Los Alcarrizos
San Pedro de Macors
SAN
CRISTBAL Monte Galindo
Boca Chica
La
Caleta
Caribbean Sea
Map 1.1 Map of Santo Domingo East, circa 1822. Created by Kilia Llano.
24 CHAPTER 1
them.10 Some said the men raped the girls.11 The criminals then threw the
lifeless bodies of the children in the well, raided the hacienda, lit it on fire,
and left.12 They spared Ysabel, presumably because they believed her to
be mute. On June 11, 1822, a tribunal of Spanish Haitian judges convicted
Cobial, de la Cruz, and Gmez for their crimes. They sentenced de la Cruz
and Gmez to forced labor and five years in prison. Cobial was given the
maximum sentence: fifteen years in prison. 13
Through a narrative of repetition, silencing, and exculpation that resulted
in what I call the Archive of Dominicanidad, nineteenth-century Hispano-
phile writerswho privileged Spanish language, Hispanic culture, the tra-
ditions of Spain, and whitenessmemorialized gueda, Ana Francisca, and
Marcela Andjar as white virgins and the first female martyrs of the nation,
comparable only to the martyrdom of the revered Mirabal sisters.14 Cobial,
de la Cruz, and Gmez in turn became bloodthirsty black Haitians. The in-
vention of the Galindo Virgins eventually replaced the memory of the vio-
lent act and the subjecthood of the victims. This discursive strategy helped
to sustain elite desires for European cultural identity while appeasing global
anxiety over the potential creation of another free black nation on the island
of Hispaniola. Literature and History worked together in the production of
Dominicanness in contrast to Haitianness; Galindo became one of the most
important motifs for sustaining anti-Haitian ideology as the crime became a
metaphor for the Haitian unification.
The nation-building project, as Franklin Franco argued, aceler por un
lado el definitivo estrangulamiento de la deformada incipiente burguesa
colonial esclavista espaola e impuls por el otro la formacin de una bur-
guesa criolla profundamente integrada racialmente (accelerated the defin-
itive decline of the incipient, malformed proslavery colonial Spanish bour-
geoisie, and sparked the creation of a criollo bourgeoisie that was profoundly
racially integrated).15 However, it also resulted in a contradictory national
narrative that sought to produce a sovereign nation while simultaneously
appeasing criollo colonial desire to retain whiteness and European cultural
dominance.16 During the second half of the nineteenth century, this con-
tradiction manifested in a literary tradition that romanticized the Spanish
colonial past and demonized the Haitian unification as the darkest period
in Santo Domingo history.17
The first reference to the Galindo murders appears more than three de-
cades after the incident occurred, in Nicols Ureas poem Mi patria
26 CHAPTER 1
suggest a conscious political attempt to recuperate the trope of the Haitian
unificationdisplaced by the Galindo Virginsas a collective traumatic
experience at critical moments in the definition of the Haitian-Dominican
border. Del Montes epic poem, for instance, was written during the Spanish
reannexation campaign (186061) and circulated shortly after the passage of
President Gregorio Luperns Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Commerce
with the Haitian state (1867), which resulted in a new diplomatic crisis with
the neighboring nation over frontier demarcations in the Northwest.27 Simi-
larly, Henrquez Ureas version from 1940 follows the Haitian-Dominican
international crisis that emerged as a result of the massacre in 1937 of an inter-
ethnic borderland community, which I study in chapter 3. The reappearance
of the Galindo allegory reminded people of their national loyalty to Hispan-
ism so that, as del Monte better explained in the prologue to the 1885 edition
of his Las vrgenes de Galindo, Dominicans would never forget Galindo as
a symbol of the inherent ferocity of those monsters that occupied us . . . and
avoid at all costs, a new intervention.28 As if following del Montes mandate,
Dominican elite writers reiterated the Galindo case at various moments in
the history of the nation. Violence served as a historical reminder of the
threat Haiti represented against the sovereignty of the Dominican nation.29
Though studies about anti-Haitian ideology dominate the bulk of intel-
lectual and historical inquiries about the Dominican Republic in the US
academy, the case of the Galindo murders is rarely mentioned. The few cur-
sory allusions to the violent event that do appear in contemporary historiog-
raphy and literary criticism rarely consider the contradictions and repetitions
of the crime, acknowledging only its allegorical nature. This chapter calls
attention to the multiple ways in which Dominican elite criollo writers fic-
tionalized and produced the Galindo crimes to sustain hegemonic domini-
canidad through a multilateral writing process that: (a) invented Dominican
whiteness as a cultural category linked to Hispanism; (b) displaced black
bodies and black experiences from the nation-narration through a manipu-
lation of popular multicolor identification into mestizaje (Indian and Euro-
pean racial and cultural mixture); (c) co-opted, silenced, and whitened Do-
minican womens bodies as sites for contesting ideologies of race and nation;
and (d) erased Dominican criollo culpability for ethnic, sexual, and physical
violence. By studying the multiple repetitions of the Galindo murders within
the historical context in which they were produced, we better understand
the significance of History and Literature in the violent process of bordering
and producing the modern nation-state.
tienne Balibar argues that in the modern nation there can only be one
founding revolutionary event.30 For the Dominican Republic this founda-
tional event is the Trabucazo (the blunderbuss shot) that on February 27,
1844, ended twenty-two years of island unification under the Haitian flag.31
But arriving at this Dominican Republic birth date has been a rather com-
plicated question. The Spanish-speaking portion of Hispaniola declared
its independence three times: twice from Spain (1821 and 1865) and once
from Haiti (1844). The establishment of 1844 as the nations foundational
moment represents a trifold process of ideological contradictions. First, the
two dominant ideologies guiding the process of national independence
were in opposition, one demanding racial erasure and the other proposing
racial unity. Second, ensuring sovereignty depended on the global convic-
tion that Dominicans were indeed (racial) antagonists to Haitians. Finally,
nineteenth-century Hispanophile writers were caught between their own
ideological desire to preserve an essence of dominicanidad and maintain
Spanish cultural identities. These contradictions materialized in political tur-
moil, despotism, and the inability to unify and integrate the majority of the
population into a national project until the twentieth century. Further, they
led to multiple independences that make establishing the birth of the Do-
minican nation a project of historical and rhetorical contradiction.
The Spanish Colony of Santo Domingo obtained its first independence
from Spain on December 1, 1821. During the period known as Espaa Boba
(180921), Spain neglected its American colonies as it faced Napoleons in-
vasion (1807) and the aftermath of the Peninsular War (180714).32 Taking
advantage of the widespread discontent that overcame Santo Domingos cri-
ollos amidst the growing economic decline of the colony and Spains neglect,
writer and politician Jos Nez de Cceres rallied them to seek separation
from the European nation. Known as the Ephemeral Independence for its
short duration (December 1, 1821, to February 9, 1822), the first Repblica
del Hait Espaol did not abolish slavery, and thus had scant popular sup-
port. Dominican mulato hateros (cattle ranchers) and farmers reacted by
rallying behind Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer to unify the island and
abolish slavery. Boyers hatero supporters eventually formed the Radical
Party, while Ephemeral Independence leaders organized under the Liberal
Party.33 The two political factions dominated the bulk of nineteenth-century
Dominican politics.34
28 CHAPTER 1
Three years after the unification of 1822, following increasing interna-
tional pressures, Boyer signed the Reparations Act of 1825 in which he prom-
ised to pay France 150 million gold francs in compensation for the European
nations lost colonial investment and in exchange for recognition of Haitis
independence.35 Haiti had won the war against France in 1804, but Europe
and the United States refused to acknowledge the black nations sovereignty,
a fact that affected President Boyers ability to participate in international
trade. After the passing of the Reparations Act of 1825, Spain, the United
States, and England also recognized Haitis sovereignty, lifting a twenty-
one year economic embargo. To meet French demands, however, Boyer was
forced to increase taxation among landowners of East Hispaniola. Wide-
spread discontent over crippling taxes soon resulted in a unified Liberal and
Radical revolutionary front that, under the leadership of French-educated
criollo Juan Pablo Duarte, eventually founded the independent Dominican
Republic in 1844.
In 1861, fearing another unification under the Haitian flag, Pedro San-
tana (180164), a criollo, sought the support of Liberal elites to request that
the Spanish queen, Isabel II, reannex Santo Domingo to Spain. Santana ra-
tionalized his treason by insisting on the patriotic need to protect the pros-
perity of Dominican Hispanic essence.36 During the Haitian unification
of 1822, Spanish-language books and newspapers were censored and uni-
versities closed. Early republic intellectuals and politicians used the Span-
ish language, Hispanic traditions (music, dances, literature), and cultural
attributes (holidays, religion, foods) to rebel against political opposition to
Haitian censorship. Haitianness became equated with anti-intellectualism
while Hispanism became a political strategy for creating a sense of national
identification and culture.
Santanas reannexation was possible precisely because he utilized the
same language of nationalism that had engendered the Dominican Nation
in 1844. In the face of what appeared to be impending foreign invasions of
French-speaking Haitians or English-speaking North Americans, Hispanic
colonialism was equated with national belonging. Haiti and the United
States defined the political, cultural, and ideological borders of the nation
from its conception. After the violent two-year Restoration War (186365)
led by mulato general Gregorio Lupern with support from Haitian allies,
the Dominican Republic obtained its third and final independence on Au-
gust 16, 1865. Over the next decade, Lupern worked with Haitian poli-
ticians to draft clear geographic frontiers between the two nations and to
30 CHAPTER 1
of the century, as can be seen in the works of Puerto Rican novelist Alejandro
Tapia and Cuban poet Nicols Heredia.39 The colonial impositions that led
to the division of the island of Hispaniola into two separate states, and its
people into two ethnicities, also led to the existence of two ideological bor-
ders for the Spanish-speaking portion of Hispaniola. Such ideologies ef-
fectively forced Hispaniolas people to experience the epistemic violence of
colonialism in the reaffirmation of their national identities. The indepen-
dence movement of 1844, then, did not emerge out of antiblackness in its
conception. Rather, it resulted from a profound political awareness on the
part of both leading parties, Radicals and Liberals, of the impossibility of
building a free nation on Hispaniola without the support of the great ma-
jority of the nations population, which considered itself of color. Hispanism
came to signify national unity among the diversity of colors that made up
Dominican racialization.
In his seminal text La ciudad letrada (1984), ngel Rama argues that elite
criollo Latin American writers functioned as agents at the service of colonial
power structures, facilitating la jerarquizacin y concentracin del poder,
para cumplir su misin civilizadora (the hierarchization and concentration
of power, in order to fulfill their civilizing project).40 Letrados also allied
themselves to the nation-building project, facilitating the narration of a ho-
mogenous national discourse that sought to unite a racially diverse popu-
lation that resisted their ideological paradigms. Nineteenth-century Latin
American letrados often used literature as a vehicle to write their ideological
models of the nation, using poetic license to reimagine historical events to
benefit their own ideology. The fact that criollos letrados owned the ma-
jority of newspapers and printing presses served to solidify an ideological
monopoly of the nations political thought. The nineteenth-century Latin
American letrado was thus a proxy of the nation-state, writing the borders
of civilization and civility by privileging his own (European) cultural desires.
The particular way Dominican lettered men wrote their version of the na-
tion resulted in a production of dominicanidad as a race that was decidedly
mixed, yet other-than-black. Hispanism (Christianity, Spanish language,
and the elevated cultures of our mother Spain), and mestizaje (the mixture
of European and Tano blood) explained the colors of Dominican race
while also affirming Dominican cultural and racial difference from Haiti in
the eyes of the world.41
The letrado to first articulate the Dominican racial contradictions into
a cohesive political project was French-educated criollo Juan Pablo Duarte
32 CHAPTER 1
the Americas. The Masonic lodge was a powerful global institution with its
own rules and regulations that created an international brotherhood based
on history, knowledge, and trust. The founding fathers poem, which some
believe the patriot envisioned as the first national anthem, engaged popular
color identificationsblancos, morenos, cobrizos, cruzadosand called
for symbolic inclusion of Dominican self-defined racial diversity, and in par-
ticular of the multiple ways for naming blackness that had characterized Do-
minicans since early colonial times.
As early as 1608, the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo began to see what
some historians have called a de facto emancipation.46 Looking for fortune,
many rich criollos sailed to new territories, leaving behind a few sugar plan-
tations and scattered communities of cattle ranchers and farmers who sur-
vived through commerce and contraband with French and Dutch seamen,
pirates, and explorers who were beginning to take interest in the region. To
control contraband in the colony, Governor Antonio de Osorio demanded
everyone to abandon the northwest lands and to relocate closer to the city of
Santo Domingo, where illegal exports could be controlled.47 Known as the
Devastaciones (16056), these evictions resulted in the speedy economic
decline of Santo Domingo and the eventual colonization of western His-
paniola by the French.48
Another unintended consequence was the freedom (either by release
or rebellion) of nearly 60 percent of African slaves working in the cattle
industry, and the increased mestizaje among blacks, Indians, and whites
who took to the montes (wilderness) in armed resistance.49 Pedro Francisco
Bon, writing in 1857, argued that free blacks and mulatos who escaped to
the mountains during the Devastaciones of Santo Domingo gradually began
to understand themselves as different from black slaves of neighboring Saint
Domingue.50 These free mixed-race communities eventually began to use
other names and descriptions to assert their difference from both the Euro-
pean colonizers and the African slaves. Interesting terms such as blancos de
la tierra (whites of the land) and moreno oscuro (dark brown) emerged as a
result.51
Duarte believed Dominican multicolor racial understanding to be
strength in the process of nation building: Unity can arise from difference if
we all march to the same goal.52 Rather than substitute race with nation, as
letrado Jos Mart would propose at the end of the nineteenth century in the
case of Cuba, Duarte asked all Dominican races to work together and save
the nation from the tyrants.53 These tyrants, the patriot warned, could
34 CHAPTER 1
[Take up arms, Spaniards!
Fly to the lines!
You must decide
Victory or death!]
Nobles hijos de Santo Domingo
erguid vuestra frente guerrera
y saudos volad tras la fiera
que el solar de Coln devast
No hay piedad, el haitiano insolente
penetrando hasta nuestros hogares,
profan nuestros templos y altares,
nuestros fueros os atropellar,
y el pudor de la cndida virgen,
y las canas del msero anciano,
y cuanto hay de sagrado en lo humano
ultraj con orgullo voraz.59 (emphasis added)
[Noble children of Santo Domingo
Keep your warrior chin up
When confronting battle
And against the wild beast
That destroyed Columbuss land
No mercy for the insolent Haitian
who penetrated our homes
desecrated our temples and altars,
dared to destroy our dwellings
And the modesty of our candid virgin,
and the gray of our sad elderly,
and all that is sacred and human
destroyed with voracious hunger.]
Though del Montes Cancin dominicana (1844) did not become the
national anthem of the Dominican Republic as the letrado had envisioned, it
constitutes the first written model for Hispanophile ideology that Trujillo-
serving intellectuals solidified in the twentieth century.60 Joaqun Balaguer,
Trujillos right hand and most important intellectual ideologue, for instance,
quotes del Monte to insist that Santo Domingo es . . . el pueblo ms es-
paol (Santo Domingo is . . . the most Spanish nation) of the Americas.61
36 CHAPTER 1
diction, both criollos knew they would not be able to achieve independence
unless all races came together under one nation. Though seemingly irrec-
oncilable, both ideologies came together as one party in 1844 to create the
independent Dominican Republic. Del Monte and Duartes seemingly op-
positional ideologies became the basis for the Archive of Dominicanidad,
as well as the blueprints from which letrados of the second half of the nine-
teenth century produced dominicanidad in literature and history. Gradu-
ally, Duartes multicolor dominicanidad was transformed into a discourse
of hybridity that allowed postindependent letrados to manage racial poli-
tics either by promoting cultural over racial hybridity, as Shalini Puri argues
often happened in postindependent Caribbean republics, or by producing
racial mixes that they found acceptable.63 Thus, during the second half of the
nineteenth century, letrados, including Manuel de Jess Galvn and Csar
Nicols Penson, embraced del Montes proposed Hispanism as a legitimate
form of Dominican culture while transforming Duartes multiracial unity
into a rhetoric of mestizaje that allowed them to justify racial hybridity. The
marriage between del Montes and Duartes ideologies in post-1844 litera-
ture allowed for the solidification of Dominican as a nonblack race. Do-
minican nonblack racial hybridity substituted the living African with a di-
gestible fabrication of European and Tano mestizaje.64
Reflecting on the way history and literature have operated in the pro-
duction of cultural identities, douard Glissant suggests that the majority
of people, most of all those at the margins of the nation, experience his-
tory through repetition.65 The repetition and institutionalization of the Ar-
chive of Dominicanidad at the hands of elite Hispanophile writers under
the Trujillo regime solidified mid-nineteenth-century literary Liberal elite
narrations as historical truth, eventually completely erasing black and mu-
lato histories from the national imaginary. Though the 1844 independence
was a project of interracial cooperation and unity, the posthumous narration
of the 1844 foundational dateeven by contemporary criticscontinues
to erase Dominican blackness by privileging the critique of elite white su-
premacist and anti-Haitian discourse. I argue that the pervasiveness and per-
sistence of anti-Haitian violence, as evidenced in the multiple versions of the
Galindo crimes that inhabit the Archive of Dominicanidad, is to blame for
the abundance of such myopic readings of Hispaniolas history. Focusing on
the silences reproduced by the multiple repetitions of anti-Haitian violence
is the only way to (re)focus our historical gaze and gain some perspective,
even where evidence seems absent.
38 CHAPTER 1
ideologues such as Galvn interpolated Liberal criollo Hispanism into a
malleable discourse of cultural inclusivity that ultimately erased racial di-
versity from nation-narration. If mulatos were economically and politically
powerful, Galvns novel suggests, they could also become social equals, pro-
vided they were willing to dress white, a la moda de Castilla. It was not the
color of a persons skin (race) that made her hispano, Galvns Enriquillo pos-
its, but rather his performance of Hispanism (culture) as the union holding
together the multicolored bodies of the Dominican hybrid nation Duarte
had created in 1844.
Galvns Enriquillo is part of the corpus of late nineteenth-century indi-
genista literature, which also include the seminal works of celebrated writ-
ers Salom Urea and Jos Joaqun Prez, that played Indian as a way to
explain and substitute the multiple ways of naming blackness dominating
the nations popular ideology since the seventeenth century and that Du-
arte believed should serve as the nations foundation.72 However, the process
of founding the written archive of a nation is never solely derived from an
affirmative dictionDominicans are Indiansbut also from a contradic-
tionDominicans are not black; the affirmation depends on the perpetu-
ation of the negation.
The founding story of Indian affirmation in the Archive of Dominicani-
dad is de Las Casass legendary Brevsima relacin de la destruccin de las In-
dias (1552), in which the Dominican friar denounces the mistreatment and
destruction of Native Americans at the hands of Spanish colonizers. Yet de
Las Casass affirmation of indigenous humanity is simultaneously contra-
dicted by his negation of black humanity. De Las Casas suggests the impor-
tation of African slaves who are more fit to endure the harshness of forced
labor as a solution to the colonial labor problem.73 De Las Casass affirma-
tion thus resulted in the beginning of a long history of black dehumanization
(negation) in the Americas. Following the friars lead, nineteenth-century
Hispanophile letrados, such as Galvn, equated the affirmative diction We
are Indians to national belonging, while negating the diction African by
displacing it in haitianismo and therefore rendering black bodies foreign.
Affirming both dominicanidad and blackness became, at the hands of turn-
of-the-century Hispanophile letrados, an ontological impossibility and a se-
mantic contradiction.
While Galvns drag mestizaje, Enriquillo (1876), became the most cele-
brated affirmation of the mythical foundation of dominicanidad, Csar
Nicols Pensons Vrgenes de Galindo (1891) became, in turn, the negation
40 CHAPTER 1
insolente, se echaba all (Back then one lived freely in this blessed land that
did not know poverty. . . . All the luxury known to that era, which was nei-
ther ostentatious nor insolent, could be found there).76 Depicting Santo
Domingo as the cradle of Hispanic grandeur, Pensons sentimental and al-
most romantic lament of the long-lost Hispaniola in which poverty was
unknown is anachronistic given the international climate of 1891: Cubas
and Puerto Ricos revolutionary movements were at their height and the US
Good Neighbor Policy, which was in its early stages, particularly threatened
the sovereignty of Hispaniola.77 The journalists extemporal colonial desire
is better understood when read in tandem with del Montes epic poem, also
titled Las Vrgenes de Galindo o La Invasin de la Parte Este de la Isla (writ-
ten in 1860, published in 1885), in which Penson interpolates his fin de sicle
rendition of the crime.78
Del Montes Las vrgenes begins with a similarly nostalgic tone:
Sobre el Indiano mar en la ancha espalda
Una ciudad modesta se reclina . . .
Es su nombre inmortal Santo Domingo;
Otro tiempo lo fuera La Espaola
Cuando en sus sienes refulgente aureola
La magnnima Iberia coloc . . .79
[Over the expansive Indian sea
A modest city rests . . .
Its immortal name is Santo Domingo;
In a former time it was Hispaniola
When upon its brow brilliant praise
was bestowed by the magnanimous Iberia . . .]
But the tranquility is rudely interrupted by the Haitian Unification of 1822:
Acrcase las huestes haraposas
De opresin y pillaje al par sedientas
Y ay de los hijos que en tu seno alientas Misteriosa Ciudad
monumental!!! 80
[The ragged masses approach
Oppressing and pillaging, all together avaricious
and Oh, pity be on the children you shelter at your breast, monumental
Mysterious City!]
42 CHAPTER 1
Galindo murders that had inspired the outrage of criollo patriot Flix Mara
del Monte in 1860 provided Penson with the perfect symbol of the open
wound of elite political failure at bordering the nation. The crime provoked
what both authors describe as unspeakable fear, leading the majority of
the elite families to exile and, as Penson put it, bankrupting the culture
and spirit of our young nation.83 Reminiscing on colonial splendor, and
lamenting the loss of Hispanic civilized culture at the hands of the invad-
ing barbaric Haitians, Penson altered the rare and isolated crime into an
example of the shameful injustices that the nation suffered at the hands of
the invading force. Unlike del Monte, though, Penson did not only write for
the Hispanophile elites.
Sociologist Francisco Bon and Puerto Rican educator and thinker Eu-
genio Mara de Hostos insisted on the mulato identity of late-nineteenth-
century Dominicans, who they believed existed somewhere between US
American Whiteness and Haitian blackness.84 Penson was preoccupied pre-
cisely with the potential threat that Dominican mulataje could pose for the
nations progress. Anti-Haitianism became, as April Mayes argues, a conve-
nient strategy . . . to divide the laboring classes.85 Through his depiction of
Galindo, Penson sought to historicize the Haitian unification as the cata-
lyst for Dominican patriotism and national essence, replacing the gray and
dangerous border of Dominican mulataje with the more desirable and con-
tainable Hispanism that early-nineteenth-century letrados had preferred. In
turn, this ideology also consecrates 1844 as the nations true independence,
and thus Haiti as the nations eternal threat to sovereignty: No hay episodio
ms conmovedor . . . y smbolo ms caracterizado de la lnea moral divisoria y
del abismo que separa a este pueblo de Hait . . . Primeros mpetus patriti-
cos del pueblo recin independizado de su mayores y recin pisoteado por
una sedienta nacin brbara! (emphasis added) (There is no episode more
moving . . . or symbol more characteristic of the moral dividing line and of
the chasm that separates this nation from Haiti . . . The first patriotic impe-
tus of the nation newly independent of its elders and recently trampled by an
avaricious, barbarous nation!).86 Pensons diction is loaded with the ambigu-
ities of criollo colonial desire. He suggests that Haiti, not Spain, is the per-
petrator who comes to interrupt Dominican life. Spain, on the other hand,
is merely an elder, a benevolent guiding parent from whom the criollo son
parts to find his own way. By establishing Haiti as the perpetual enemy of
the nation, Penson paves the way for criollo colonial desire, epitomized in
Hispanophile ideology, to seamlessly emerge as essential to national identity
44 CHAPTER 1
Afro-religious Haitian rituals were viewed as savage and uncivilized.90 Pen-
sons Vrgenes is part of an emergent world literary tradition of the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries that was decidedly anti-Haitian. In the
Dominican context, global anti-Haitianism reached a greater magnitude as
it was met by the local elite Hispanophile, Indian-masked ideology of the
likes of Galvn, and by increased political preoccupation on the part of both
Liberals and Radicals with the project of nation bordering.
Pensons strategy for narrating Vrgenes tries to fit a legal ruling into an
anti-Haitian nationalist discourse that disavows blackness from the nation-
building project by displacing black in Haitian, therefore rendering Domini-
can blackness a marker of potential treason. The authors characterization of
Ysabel, the nanny, further epitomizes this formulation: Hacales compaa
la esclava sordo-muda llamada Ysabel, quien, aunque cuando poda gozar de
entera libertad con el nuevo orden de las cosas reinantes, haba preferido per-
manecer con las tres doncellas (emphasis added)91 (Their mute and deaf
slave named Ysabel, who even when she was able to enjoy freedom due to the
new order of things, preferred to stay with the three girls). Depicting Ysa-
bel as a grateful slave who owed her new freedom to the Haitian flag (the
new order of things), Penson reminds his readers that the Haitian Occu-
pation of 1822 was possible precisely because (Dominican) blacks aligned
themselves with Haiti in exchange for emancipation. If, as Galvn and del
Monte insisted, the cultural essence of dominicanidad was found in the na-
tions essential Hispanism, Penson clarifies that Dominican Hispanism is
not just a cultural category. Ysabel, an ex-slave, though Dominican born and
Spanish speaking, could not be fully Dominican, because she was not mu-
lata but black; her lack of whiteness became a source for suspicion and po-
tential treason.
According to statistical documentation, Andrs Andjar manumitted
Ysabel in 1803, before the girls were born and almost two decades prior
to the Haitian unification.92 Both Ysabel and her son Goyo lived with the
Andjar family of their own will. Although the court documents state that
Ysabel had problems communicating, which I assume to mean some kind
of speech impediment, they also insist that her testimony was clear and cru-
cial in solving the case and prosecuting the three men:
Que la domstica Ysabel nico residuo de la familia Andjar a todos tres
ha acusado y acusa de un modo claro y perceptible como autores de los
asesinatos cuyas sospechas se agravan con las circunstancias mencionadas,
46 CHAPTER 1
witnesses: Suministraron estos datos las seoras M.D.F. de C., C.T., A.Q.
y seores Dn. F. Ma. D.101 Though almost impossible to decipher most of
his sources, the last oneDn. F. Ma. D.clearly corresponds to Don Flix
Mara del Monte, whose poem, the author states, informs his descrip-
tions of the girls and the details of the crime. Pensons narrative effectively
substitutes history (in the form of the court transcript) with literature (del
Montes Poem), and testimony (Ysabels words) with rumor (del Montes gut
feeling).
Whether the criminals who ended the lives of the Andjar family were
ethnic Haitians or ethnic Dominicans is inconsequential given that the evi-
dence surrounding the Galindo Murders proves it an isolated event. Yet for
Penson and del Monte, declaring the ethnicity of the killers was essential to
establishing the myth of the Galindo Virgins as allegorical to dominicani-
dad. Pensons narrative provided the initial preformulations of ethnic and
racial prejudice in Dominican society. His discrediting of Ysabelwho was
the main witness to the crime and key in identifying, capturing, and sen-
tencing the criminalsis one of the most significant influences in the racial
bordering of the Archive of Dominicanidad. If Ysabel, a Dominican descen-
dant of slaves, could turn on her own nation, aligning instead with those
who shared her skin color and history, Penson seems to warn his readers,
other black Dominicans can also turn on their nation. The project of setting
and guarding the borders of the nationborderingshould thus belong to
those who align with Hispanism: white and mulatos who enjoy economic
and social mobility because of their light-skin privilege.
Though different in style and genre, the two versions of the Galindo Vir-
gins, del Montes and Pensons, function as complementary evidence in the
foundation of the Archive of Dominicanidad, particularly as linked to the
political process of bordering the nation that began after the Restoration
War in 1865 and continued until the Massacre of 1937 during the Trujillo
dictatorship. But if del Monte saw Galindo as a by-product of Haitian barba-
rism, Penson took the argument one long step further by locating the crime
as part of the military actions of the Haitian state and as a national wound
that needed to be remembered and possibly avenged by the Dominican pa-
triarch in order to regain his honor.102 The murders of the Andjar family
thus became an almost anonymous example in a list of ultrajes, vicisitudes,
y desvergenzas (insults, vicissitudes, and shameless acts) suffered at the
hands of the inferior occupier.103 For del Monte, Galindo is a historical le-
sion that, though healed, must be remembered, while for Penson it remains
48 CHAPTER 1
president, opined that Pensons eloquent historical account of the death,
misery and superstition of the unjust massacre of our own virgins was the
most vivid reminder of the essential abyss that separates our Hispanic na-
tion from Haiti.106 If the late nineteenth-century Hispanophile letrados laid
the literary foundation upon which the Archive of Dominicanidad would
be erected, Trujillo materialized rhetoric into tangible objects and actions.
The symbolic archive that emerged through the complementary narratives
of Galvn and Penson were transformed into physical monuments to His-
panism in the buildings, busts, and statues Trujillo built as a monument to
Dominican high culture. The Plaza de la Cultura (Culture Square) located
in the heart of Santo Domingo became a landmark of progress and civili-
zation and publicly affirmed Hispanism as the historical and cultural roots
of dominicanidad.107 Through the construction of La Plaza de la Cultura
and the institutionalization of the arts and education, the Archive of Do-
minicanidad became law. This transformation from myth to law required a
series of rhetorical strategies and the complicit cooperation of history and
literature in the production of monolithic cultural figures that silence and
contain Dominican blackness.
50 CHAPTER 1
evening that have been entrusted to him by the unnamed witnesses he in-
terviewed.115
Intimately related to the family as the posthumous historical narrator-
avenger, Penson suggests that the undressing of gueda was not his decision,
but that of the collective voicesthe sourcesthat informed his custom-
ary narration of the infamous day.116 One of the ways Penson exculpates
his role in the voyeuristic mutilation of gueda is through the use of the
passive voice (I was told), which interferes with the historical exactitude
of his narration. The passive voice simultaneously creates distance from any
blame (Though I was not there) and complicity with the shared respon-
sibility with the reader in the protection of the future (we must never see
our land invaded again).117 The passive voice renders gueda as a sexualized
ornament in the dusty home of the Andjars. Ultimately the success of Pen-
sons narrative depends on the presumed (male) readership participating in
his narrative counterpoint of distance and desire; Dominican patriots must
desire gueda so that the pain of losing her to black tyrant monsters can
be greater.
Resembling the sublime chronicle of colonial Santo Domingo that opens
the first section of Pensons tradicin, the peaceful life of the Andjars is also
abruptly interrupted in the fourth section, La Tragedia, by the horrible
shadows that appear in the Andjar homestead with the sole purpose of
causing destruction. The story then moves quickly from Pensons human-
male gaze to the beastlike desire of the Haitian criminals, whose hairy hands
cover the girls mouths as machetes cut their throats and rip their dresses to
ultimately rape the dead bodies of the girls. Through the use of necrophilia
in his repetition of the crime, Penson defines the ultimate border between
Dominican civilization and Haitian barbarism. Thus Haitian desire is not
just foreign, but beastly and inhumane: Ved a los tigres saciando su nau-
seabundo apetito y su sed de sangre . . . revolcndose en la inocencia de las
pobres nias, ya fras (See the tigers quenching their nauseous hunger and
thirst for blood . . . possessing the innocence of the poor girls who laid there
cold, dead). In his famous lectures from 1917 on the theory of sexuality, Sig-
mund Freud qualified necrophilia as horror, and the ultimate limit of human
desire.118 Similarly, literary scholar Sybille Fischer, borrowing from psycho-
analytic theory to approach Penson, asked what it meant for the desire of
Haitians to be imagined as horrific: It is a desire that is not only unnatural
but posthuman in that is satisfied only after humanity is vanished.119 Pen-
52 CHAPTER 1
centuries. Violence, she asserts, forms the foundations of national histo-
ries and subjectivities in the borderlands through repetition of the violent
events that often erased or silenced the physical bodies onto which the vio-
lence is being committedin this case the bodies of gueda, Ana Francisca,
Marcela and Andrs Andjarwhile simultaneously celebrating the event
as important and foundational to the nation. Thus repetition, as Guidotti-
Hernndez insists, may actually be a way of instructing us to forget pre-
cisely because the cursory references say nothing and say everything about
the effects of violence.126 The repetition of Galindo eventually replaced the
bodies and identities of gueda, Ana Francisca, and Marcela Andjar with
the figurative and symbolic Galindo Virginstheir martyrdom serving
as a reminder of the need to protect the virgin-land and virgin-bodies from
black invasion.
Pensons beautified narration of the Andjar crime simultaneously re-
minds us of the espanto indecible (unspeakable horror) that the Haitians
enacted upon the Dominican nation, while denying the reader the possi-
bility of confronting the actual violent act on the physical bodies of the
victims. The unspeakability of the crime negates the possibility of con-
fronting the truth of the historical eventthat three girls and their father
were killed in a horrendous crimeand substitutes the tangible horror with
the unspeakable symbol: that black Haitian monsters attacked (and there-
fore could attack again) white Dominican virgins. The institutionalization
of the myth of the Galindo Virgins simultaneously requires, as Guidotti-
Hernndez would argue, that we remember the violence while forgetting the
subjects onto whom the violent acts were committed. The lasting impact on
the nation and its subjects is alarming, for the repetition of violence, instead
of reproducing violence as the single act (the killing of the Andjar family),
transforms it to a paradigm of the series of unspeakable acts suffered at the
hand of the invading Haitian forces. Violence thus becomes the only way to
avenge national honor and protect the fragile borders of the nation-virgin-
land from future destruction.
Rendering the Andjar girls as the virgin-land, which is violated by the
foreign invader, Penson encapsulates his tradicin within a paternalistic dis-
course of the nation. However, this narration also points to Pensons pre-
occupation with the Dominican patriarchs inability to produce a cohesive
nation, a fact that manifested in the continued disenfranchisement of the
borderland population. Penson allegorizes his patriarchal anxiety through
the characterization of Andrs Andjar:
54 CHAPTER 1
to protect our nation from black Haitian invasion again or we risk losing our
Hispanic culture, that is, our white privilege.
Directly responding to Pensons critique of the Dominican patriarch,
twentieth-century Hispanophile elite and Trujillo-serving intellectual Max
Henrquez Urea published the historical novel La conspiracin de los Alcar-
rizos in 1940.129 The novel reconstructs the events surrounding the Liberal
criollo plot of 1823 to overturn the Haitian government, directly linking it to
the Galindo murders through the main character in the novel, Lico Andjar.
Lico is imagined as the surviving cousin of the murdered girls and guedas
fianc.130 Organized in Los Alcarrizos, a community located fifteen miles
north of Santo Domingo (see map 1.1), under the leadership of Baltazar de
Nova, Antonio Gonzlez, and Vicente Moscoso, La conspiracin de los Al-
carrizos sought to restore colonial ties with Spain.131 Henrquez Urea de-
scribes the Galindo crimes as a decisive moment in the consolidation of Do-
minican Race as different from Haitianness and as a catalyst to the 1844
independence movement: Ese crimen espantoso, obra de bestias y no de
hombres, es el fruto de la ignominia en que vivimos. . . . Ya no podemos fig-
urar ms en la lista de pases civilizados. Hemos retrogradado a la barbarie
(This horrifying crime, the works of beasts rather than men, is the fruit of
the ghastly times we live in. . . . We can no longer appear in the list of the civi-
lized nations. We have devolved to barbarism).132 Henrquez Ureas novel
ventriloquizes Penson and del Monte, reminding his (Dominican) readers
of the essential difference that existed between the two peoples that in-
habited the island of Hispaniola, and of the perpetual threat to sovereignty
Haiti represents.
Writing only three years after the Massacre of 1937, Henrquez Urea, like
other Trujillo-serving intellectuals of the period, justifies the violence that
ended the lives of more than twenty thousand people, through a repetition
of the historical wound of the Haitian unification of 1822, allegorized in
the Galindo Virgins. Violence became, at the hands of the dictatorship, the
logic for bordering the nation. The repetition of the Galindo Crimes, as an
example of the horrific violence that sent Dominicans to barbarism in the
nineteenth century, served as both the motive (vengeance) and the justifica-
tion (reciprocity) of the brutal state massacre on the multiethnic community
of the northern borderlands. If nineteenth-century literature provided the
foundation for the symbolic erasure of blackness from the Archive of Do-
minicanidad, twentieth-century literature became the historical diction that
56 CHAPTER 1
nian lens. The most recent example is a theatrical representation entitled,
once again, The Galindo Virgins, which debuted in the Dominican National
Theater December 10, 2013, following the international crisis that emerged
after the Dominican Constitutional Court approved a law that effectively
denationalized more than 200,000 Dominican-born ethnic Haitians. Like
Henrquez Ureas novel, this state-sponsored production by Hamlet Bod-
den reminded Dominicans of the violence of Galindo in order to justify the
dehumanization of ethnic Haitians at the hands of the state.134
The following chapters establish that the contradictory ideology that
grounds the Archive of Dominicanidad continues to color notions of citi-
zenship and belonging in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Dominican
Republic as ideologues and politicians such as Vincho Castillo, whose re-
marks from 2014 open this chapter, continue to manipulate historical events
and myths in their effort to disunite and divest the poor. Yet their rhetoric
does not go uncontested. Dominican blacks have continued to shatter the
silences, questioning and challenging the racist norms that sustain the bor-
ders of dominicanidad at home and abroad. Producing an archive of con-
tradictions that has begun to dismantle xenophobia and marginality within
political, literary, and historical discourse as well as in the public sphere, do-
minicanosparticularly, I argue, those in the diasporaplace their racial-
ized bodies at the center of history, contradicting Hispanophile ideologies
that insist on erasing them.
Haiti r
Bo
an Arroyo del Diablo
iti
Ha Maguana Abajo
a n-
nic
mi
Do Palma Sola
San Juan
de la
Maguana
Map 2.1 Map of San Juan Valley and the liborista territory. Created by Kilia Llano.
crucifixes, which she carefully dressed in yellow and red to place on the altar
along with velones (large candles used for religious rituals) and marigolds,
as is customary in the batey celebration.3 Early that Pentecost Sunday, when
the women of the cofrada arrived at Domingas house to prepare the stew
of chivo con chenchn (goat with corn meal) that would be served for the oc-
casion, Dominga was ready to receive her blessing.
At two in the afternoon, shortly after the three sacred drums had been
blessed with rum and prayer, the feast began.4 But just as the palo mayor
(main drum) redoubled to signal the beginning of the first danceable atabal,
a group of armed guardias commanded by US Marine Captain G. H. Morse
Jr. stormed into Alcntaras home, declaring that the party was over.5 The
marines ordered people to disperse and go home if they did not want to
spend the night in jail.6 They then took the rum, tobacco, and sacred drums
60 CHAPTER 2
during the Iraq War (20034), the confiscation and desecration of Alcn-
taras sacred drums epitomized the marines racism and intolerance toward
local cultural and religious practices.12 Letters from marines stationed in the
border region spoke of drumming as haunting and scary practices of crim-
inals and savages.13 Some marines even complained the drumming was driv-
ing them mad.14 The confiscation of drums and the punishing of drummers
became a common practice of the occupying marines in their efforts to civ-
ilize Hispaniola, and as a response to their fear of blackness.15
Disconcerted by the sacrilege of the Cofrada she had been charged with
guarding, Alcntara wrote a letter to the military governor of Santo Do-
mingo, General Harry Lee.16 In it, she denounced the confiscation of the
sacred drums of the Holy Spirit and demanded their immediate return:
Ciudadano Almirante: Despus de saludarlo tom de mi vil pluma para
reclamar me devuelvan los quijongos del espritu santo que le dicen los
palos camitos del espritu santo que en San Cristbal lo tocan como devo-
cin, en Las Matas tambin y a ninguno los han aprehendido solo los de
San Juan que los hizo preso al capitn Morcia [Morse] y hasta la fecha
estn presos. Pues yo quiero que Ud. me diga si los palos del espritu santo
son del gobierno o son de las gentes del batey. Ud[.] puede informarse con
el General Wenceslao Ramrez si esa hermandad no es muy vieja y el gobi-
erno nunca nos haba probado hasta hoy. Pues me despido con to respeto y
esta nica ama de dicho quijongo y del espritu santo queda en espera de
su contesta. Dominga Alcntara. P.D. Ahora lo tienen en la gobernacin
como distraccin y como ud. comprender esos son palos benditos y se
usan solo cuando se necesitan.17 (emphasis added)
[Citizen Admiral: After greeting you, I took up my mundane pen to de-
mand the return of the drums of the Holy Spirit, which are also known
as the sticks of camitos of the Holy Spirit, and which are played in cere-
monies in San Cristobal and also in Las Matas.18 And none have been
confiscated except for those from San Juan that were stolen by Captain
Morse. So I would like it if you told me to whom those drums belong. Do
they belong to the government or to the people of the batey? You can ask
General Wenceslao Ramrez about this brotherhood, about how old it is
and how the government had never tested us, until today.19 This servant
of the Holy Spirit and only master of those drums respectfully salutes you
and waits for your response. P.S. Now they have them (the drums) at the
62 CHAPTER 2
(to take) in an active assertion that assumes the responsibility for the com-
position of the letter and the tone of its content. Tom de mi vil pluma
(I took my mundane pen) is a performative diction that reminds the reader
of her action (writing) and the body that acts (taking of the pen with my
fingers), in stark contradiction with the impersonal and passive tone that
characterized official memoranda. The diction I took my pen to demand my
drums thus reminds the military governor that weapons can come in many
forms and shapes, and that war can be waged with guns, prayers, or pens.
The assertion of her literacy in the very first line of the letter places Al-
cntara in direct confrontation with the military government, a road seldom
traveled by women of any race or class in early twentieth-century Hispan-
iola, para reclamar los quijongos del espritu santo (to demand the Holy
Spirits drums). Though many letters addressed by women can be found in
the occupation records, they mostly concern the release of a son, brother, or
husband imprisoned by the marines, or a request for child compensation for
the offspring of a marine. In such cases it was often menlawyers, priests, or
officially respectable members of the communityon behalf of the plead-
ing women who wrote such letters, for in the 1920s Dominican Republic
the majority of the poor, particularly women from farming communities,
were illiterate.23 But Dominga Alcntara knew how to read and write. More
important, she recognized the power that her literacy conveyed. The queen
did not plead to General Lee as did other female letter-writers; rather, she
demanded (reclamar) her property rights as sole and only owner of the
drums (nica ama de estos quijongos). In so doing, she also allegorized
the US occupation of Dominican land in Morses usurpation of the drums,
reminding Lee of the impending possibility of rebellion.
Despite the fact that Alcntara wrote without intermediaries, she did not
interpellate the military government alone. Her somewhat vague mention
of General Wenceslao Ramrez, the most important caudillo of the region
and with whom the military government had negotiated in order to estab-
lish a post in San Juan, contextualizes her political power as a respected com-
munity leader. Alcntara was careful to let General Lee know that she could,
but chose not to, ask Ramrez to intercede on her behalf the way the caudillo
often did for other sanjuaneros (people from San Juan) who had grievances
with the marines. Instead Alcntara mentions Ramrez as a reminder that
neither forceimperial nor nationalhad tested her, suggesting, perhaps,
that they both should also fear the spiritual power she could summon.
On July 27, 1922, exactly one month after Alcntaras drums were returned to
her, a detachment of twelve men under the command of US Marine Captain
George H. Morse Jr. and Lieutenant G. A. Williams killed Olivorio Mateo.26
Pap Liborio, as he is still referred to by his followers, was shot fifteen times,
until his fingers and limbs fell on the ground.27 Unlike other executions en-
acted by the US military government during the eight years it occupied the
Dominican Republic, Mateos was a public event. The body of the spiritual
leader was tied up in front of the San Juan City Hall for all to watch it rot (see
figure 2.1). After three days of this macabre spectacle, Mateo was buried in
the San Juan City Cemetery. The local paper, El Cable, published an obituary
that read: With the death of Olivorio, we consider his coarse religion to be
finished forever. It constituted a disgrace for this municipality, particularly
since the majority of its followers were foreign elements (emphasis added).28
In the eyes of the marines, Pap Liborio was just another gavillero ban-
dit, a threat to US appeasement of the Dominican population.29 Guer-
rilla resistance had posed a significant challenge for the marines since their
arrival.30 Bands of Dominican guerrilla peasants from the eastern part of
the country, known as gavilleros, waged a guerrilla war against the occu-
piers. The guerrillas significantly hindered the actions of the US military,
creating public embarrassment and eventually forcing the United States to
withdraw in 1924.31 The final destruction of the Afro-religious prophet as-
64 CHAPTER 2
2.1 Olivorio Mateo en parihuela,
as exposed in front of the San Juan
City Hall. Reprinted with permis-
sion from the Archivo General de
la Repblica, Santo Domingo.
suaged marine anxiety over the potential uprising of new dissidents. The El
Cable obituary thus served in part as a precautionary note to other bandits
whowhether through prayer, pen, or combatmight want to lead people
against the imposed order.
But Olivorio Mateo was not only a problem for the US military regime.
The otherwise vocal anti-US intervention intelligentsia celebrated Mateos
execution because, in the words of Max Henrquez Urea, it [Liborismo]
constituted a disgrace to the civilization and unity of our Christian nation.32
Elite disavowal of Liborismo as barbaric and foreign is a performative repe-
tition of the diction of civilization versus barbarism that nineteenth-century
letrados such as Flix Mara del Monte and Csar Nicols Penson popular-
ized in their efforts to mark the racial borders of Hispaniola. Let us remem-
ber that at the end of the nineteenth century, Hispanophile writers such as
Penson and Manuel de Jess Galvn, through a rhetorical process of silenc-
ing and repetition, succeeded in solidifying a national myth that equated
blackness to Haitianness, and thus rendered Dominican blacks exiles in
66 CHAPTER 2
A God with Balls
Despite being illiterate, Olivorio Mateo was a skillful reader. He read the
sky for time, the grass for impending misfortunes, peoples eyes for illnesses
and secrets, and the rivers movements for bad weather. In 1908, his ability to
read led him to the mystical experience that transformed him from a farmer
to a god.36 The Great Storm of 1908 caused ferocious rain for more than a
week, triggering floods that destroyed crops and dwellings throughout the
Caribbean and the southeast United States.37 Mateo walked into the storm
and, as he would later tell his followers, in the clouds he read the wisdom of
the Holy Spirit (el gran poder de Dios). He then walked in the valley, fol-
lowing the storm, and there he came face to face with God.38
Assuming him dead, Mateos family held a funeral in his honor. On
the ninth day of the funeral, the last day of the customary mourning and
burial rituals, Mateo returned to his community of La Maguana, surprising
all.39 His return on such a symbolic day contributed to his beatification. A
popular salve remembers Pap Liborios mystical disappearance and return
during the 1908 storm as the source of his spiritual wisdom:
Liborio se perdi bajo un tiempo de agua
y volvi con un palo e pin en la mano y la cara de Dios de su lado.
Liborio era un santo y nos vino a salv
de la opresin, del hambre y la soled.
Alabado sea Pap Liborio.
[Liborio disappeared amidst a storm
and came back with a blessed cane in his hand and the shadow of God
on his side.
Liborio was a saint who came to save us
from oppression, hunger, and desolation.
Blessed be Pap Liborio.]
Garrido Puello also situated Pap Liborios emergence as a religious leader
in 1908, following his return from the storm.40 Yet people who knew Mateo
insist that he was always special, possessing the kind of clairvoyant wisdom
that drew people to seek his company and advice in times of trouble.41 The
link between Liborismo and a hurricane is noteworthy in two ways. First,
it ties the religious movement closely to the islands environment, making
it relevant to the everyday lives of farmers. Additionally, the storm chrono-
68 CHAPTER 2
peasants were suffering the pressures of an imposing state-serving economy.48
Like Moses in the burning bush narrative, Mateos mystical experience as
remembered in the salve allowed him to come back with the toolspalo
de pin (juniper walking stick) and the face of Godto lead a distressed
people during arduous times, thereby becoming an important symbol of
both spiritual and political hope.
News about Mateos healing powers and abilities to predict the future
spread throughout the country via rumors, newspaper articles, and salves.
Marine memoranda list letters coming from remote places as far as Higey
and Santiago in which people requested miracles and prayers to heal their
ailments.49 Mateos biographer, Garrido Puello, wrote that as early as 1909 a
community of over one hundred followers from different parts of the Fron-
tier congregated as an independent brotherhood under the liborista prin-
ciples of peace, community, and love.50 Rapidly, Mateos fame spread across
the island, attracting the attention of both friends and foes.51
Jan Lundius and Mats Lundahl, in their extensive analysis of Liborismo,
define it as a messianic phenomenon, the product of a charismatic leader
like many found throughout the history of humanity.52 Mateos success, the
authors argue, is the result of peoples perception that the leader possessed
thaumaturgic powers.53 Though I recognize that Liborismo can be com-
pared to a larger trend of socioreligious and messianic movements that took
place in Latin America at the turn of the twentieth century, I must insist on
its specificity as an organic and spontaneous socioreligious movement that
emerged in peaceful contradiction with the church and the state. Liboristas
imagined themselves as Catholic and Dominican, and did not believe their
devotion to Liborismo opposed their religious or national affirmations. Ad-
ditionally, unlike other Latin American messianic movements, Liborismo
was not short lived; on the contrary, it has endured until the present, influ-
encing other expressions of Afro-Dominican religiosity and quickly spread-
ing into the US and European diaspora.54
It is possible, however, to find connections between the sociohistori-
cal causes that allowed for the establishment of Liborismo and other Latin
America social movements, such as the canudos, that emerged in Brazil be-
ginning in 1893. Canudos, like liboristas, were farmers who faced similar so-
cioeconomic challenges as Brazil grappled with the pressures to modernize
following the Industrial Revolution, and particularly at the turn of the twen-
tieth century.55 Canudos operated as a communal group, practicing com-
mon ownership, and abolishing the official currency, as well as participating
70 CHAPTER 2
2.2 Portrait of Olivorio Mateo
(left), circa 1909. Coleccin de
fotos, Gobierno Militar (191624),
Archivo General de la Repblica,
Santo Domingo.
strong, staring fiercely and intensely. His shirt is unbuttoned, revealing his
chest, while his posture denotes alertness and physical readiness. We can
see the muscle tension in his arms. Rather than offering the other cheek as
suggested by Christianity, Mateos picture seems to warn the viewer of the
potential fist he would not hesitate to use in order to defend his honor and
that of his community. The picture does indeed suggest that Mateo was a
god with balls, as Acosta reminded me, a (masculine) leader capable of con-
tradicting Dominican (failed) white elite patriarchy.
Mateos performance of masculinity in the open-shirt photo (figure 2.2)
summons action rather than the passivity that characterizes Hispanophile
narratives of the turn of the century. Let us remember, as discussed in chap-
ter 1, that in their writings Penson (1891), Galvn (1871), and del Monte
(1861) cast the Dominican patriarch as lazy, passive, and weaka weakness,
the authors suggested, led to the loss of dignity (Haitian unification 1822
44) and honor (raped virgins) at the hands of a foreign (Haitian) invader.
Hispanophile letrados grappled with their colonial desire, fears of US ex-
pansionism, and racial anxieties by excluding blackness from the nations
72 CHAPTER 2
It is thought well at this time to remind all that we, a force of the United
States, are in Military Occupation of the Republic of Santo Domingo,
and that the territory has been placed under Military Government, and
is in a modified way in a status of territory of a hostile state, over which
military authority has been exercised. The authority of the legitimate
power having passed into the hands of the United States, we as represen-
tatives of the occupant shall take all the measure in our power to insure
public order and safety. . . . No cruel, harsh or unusual measures are per-
mitted against the inhabitants. Measures to locate and apprehend or cap-
ture lawbreakers and evildoers such as bandits and other criminals must
be taken in order to insure order and public safety.62 (emphasis added)
The diction of the military memo is as fervent and strong as it is vague.
Much is left to interpretation: Were evildoers robbers? killers? common
criminals? Could a censorship violator such as a journalist or writer who
criticized the military government be considered an evildoer? Could a sex
worker be an evildoer? Could a santero (Afro-religious priest) perform-
ing a non-Christian ceremony in a public space? Could an American officer
ever be an evildoer, or could only a native do evil? The ambiguous lan-
guage of the memo allowed for officers to interpret it using their own cul-
tural logic to decide who was an evildoer and how this person should be
punished. The result of this flexibility was what General Knapp described
as a series of undesirable events, which often included the killing of in-
nocent civilians, raids, rapes, and persecution, with an unnecessary harsh-
ness, even brutality that was exhibited by the officers against local civilians
as if Dominicans were in fact enemies of war.63 The unnecessary harshness
of the military during the US occupation of the Dominican Republic re-
flected the eugenicist-fueled racial ideology of the early twentieth-century
United States in which whiteness was perceived as a sign of civility and in
turn barbarity was a racialized characteristic of those who were perceived as
other than white. This binary opposition, as historian Roxann Wheeler has
argued, justified US imperial interactions throughout the twentieth century,
as marines successfully embodied the rhetoric of the white heterosexual na-
tion they represented.64
In his inauguration speech of 1904, President Roosevelt added a corollary
to the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that European countries should stay
out of Latin America. The Roosevelt Corollary took the Monroe Doctrine a
step further by affirming that the United States had the right to exercise mili-
74 CHAPTER 2
2.3 Political cartoon published in 1906 depicting Theodore
Roosevelt using the Monroe Doctrine to keep European powers
out of the Dominican Republic.
76 CHAPTER 2
sulated in Acostas diction god with balls and performed in the photo,
threatened the occupations narrative of racial superiority and the marines
masculine authority. Mateo, the marines must have believed, had enough
masculine courage (balls) to rally an army of rebels, spreading guerrilla resis-
tance throughout the southwest. Mateos performance of black masculinity,
in turn, also led to his increased persecution and to the transformation of
Liborismo from a peaceful religious community into a radicalized nomadic
rebellious cofrada.81
Bordering Hispaniola
78 CHAPTER 2
the public sphere in the United States during the occupation. The play re-
counts Brutuss life story in flashbacks as he makes his way through the for-
est in an attempt to escape former subjects who have rebelled against him.
ONeills play criminalizes black liberation through an allegory of the Hai-
tian Revolution that depicts Christophe as a convict rather than a maroon.
The metaphoric maroonage of Brutus renders black freedom criminal while
simultaneously suggesting the impossibility of black leadership.
Much like the paternalist logic guiding the US intervention of Hispan-
iola, ONeills subtext is the place of US blackness in the postCivil War
United States. The date of publication for The Emperor Jones, 1921, at the be-
ginning of the Harlem Renaissance and during the height of a black political
and cultural movement, also suggests that ONeill, like other antiblack writ-
ers of the time, was asserting his white masculine superiority amidst what
seemed like a potential change in the white-dominated US political scene.
The fact that black political writers and scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Ar-
thur Schomburg, and Langston Hughes publicly opposed the Haitian occu-
pation further fueled anti-Haitian public discourse in the mainstream media,
literature, and the emerging film industry. This growing climate of fear of
Haiti and antiblackness traveled along with the soldiers who went to the
island during the nineteen years of the Haitian occupation and eight years of
Dominican occupation, its influence underpinning soldiers military actions.
US anti-Haitian discourse also fueled marine persecution of Olivorio
Mateo, whom Dominican elites considered a black man of Haitian an-
cestry.96 Through a Pensonian trope, Dominican intelligentsia persistently
disavowed Liborismo as a degrading and low class superstition of Haitian
influence.97 Their disavowals focused on his racehe was dark, short and
uglyand his thaumaturgic powers as markers of foreignness (Haitian-
ness).98 Between 1910 and 1916 the regional San Juan newspaper, El Cable,
continuously portrayed Mateo as foreign and barbaric: The pestilent fake
leader who fools the poor . . . The uneducated Haitian voodoer.99 However,
after the arrival of the US military troops in 1916, the disdain that existed
among the elites of San Juan was transformed into a military persecution:
the US regime viewed Mateo and his people not only as a savage but, like
ONeills Brutus, as a savage who had the potential to rally guerrilla resis-
tance, further embarrassing the military regime amidst its struggle to contain
gavilleros in the east.
In 1922, in an effort to put an end to the fruitless and embarrassing four-
year persecution, Governor Harry Lee assigned the mission to capture and
80 CHAPTER 2
States? Was the killing of Mateos followers simply a part of Morses duty as
a marine, or was it a personal vendetta, a form of revenge for the embarrass-
ment liborista power had posed for the US military post of San Juan over the
years? Did he feel fear or hatred in addition to his clearly articulated disgust?
Or was Morse so frustrated at the impossibility of capturing the dissident
leader that he took out his rage on whoever was suspected of sympathizing
with him? We will never know the exact answers to these questions; how-
ever, we can speculate that the imperial discourse of civilization and progress,
as well as a history of US curiosity and exoticism of Afro-Caribbean religious
practices, evidenced in the representation of Haitian vodou, for instance,
could have informed the attitudes of Morse and his men.
Captain Morse, like many other marines who came to the Dominican
Republic during those eight years, recognized himself as an authority over
Dominican people, a symbol of the white civility he represented. As M. Jac-
qui Alexander argues, this type of understanding functions as an import-
ant way to maintain the hegemony of imperial, capitalist power across
geographical and psychological borders.102 Morses report describes every
person as a bandit, as a morally corrupt subject, and less than human, reduc-
ing Afro-religious practices to debauchery and prostitution. Morses report
on the destruction of Mateos camp not only reveals much about US military
operations that targeted those perceived as rebellious against (or different
from) the military regime, but it also offers glimpses of the cultural processes
that shaped the violence of US imperialism in the Dominican Republic, and
that contributed to the racial bordering of Hispaniola: the rum, the letters,
and even some of the liboristas came from Haiti. Morses report supports
Dominican elite ideology that barbarism, in the form of Afro-religiosity,
came from Haiti; containing the borders was thus an urgent matter in the
process of civilizing Dominicans.
Imperialism requires money and weapons, but it also needs diction: sto-
ries and narratives to justify it. The stories of flesh-eating Haitian zombies
and criminal black emperors the US Marines brought with them to the
island probably grew as they met the local rumors of Haitian monsters who
killed virgins and raped their dead bodies in broad daylight. Fear of Haiti
and a lack of understanding of cultures and religion, mixed with rumors and
stories propagated by the local anti-Haitian Hispanophiles meant that when
encountering liboristas, soldiers would probably have seen them as Haitian-
influenced evildoers who needed to be eradicated in order to insure the
safety and civility of Dominican population they were charged with civi-
82 CHAPTER 2
ation, separation, and amnesia that domination produces.108 The author en-
gages memory not as a secular, but rather as a sacred dimension of the self,
insisting that Knowledge comes to be embodied through flesh, an embod-
iment of Spirit.109 Following Alexander, I argue that the death of Olivorio
Mateo has allowed for the collective embodiment of an other memory of
the occupation among Afro-Dominican communities through songs, salves,
and literary texts that contradict the hegemonic Archive of Dominicanidad.
The salve that appears at the beginning of this section, Dicen que Li-
borio ha muerto, Liborio no ha muerto n (They say Liborio is dead, Li-
borio aint dead), is the best-known story of Liborismo in the present-day
Dominican Republic. Popularized by the Left in the wake of the second US
military intervention (1965), Dicen que Liborio ha muerto . . . is a perfor-
mative diction that denounces the crimes of the military occupation against
liboristas while simultaneously questioning the veracity of Mateos death.
Dicen (they say) interpellates the passive and indirect voice that domi-
nates the Archive of Dominicanidad and that persistently exculpates crim-
inals and erases the bodies of the victims of crimes. Disavowing the anony-
mous they, the salve rejects what they said, contradicting it with an other
truth: Liborio no ha muerto n (Liborio aint dead). The fact that this salve
became a common slogan for both the religious and the militant Left affirms
the Afro-Dominican religious episteme as a source of historical contestation
that summons the divine nature of Liborio: he is not dead, and his mascu-
line power: Liborio no come pendej (Liborio does not take any bull), to
remind the living of the possible union between the sacred and the earthly
power through the act of montarse.
Afro-religious practices such as spiritual possession contest hegemonic
understandings of dominicanidad at home and abroad by making visible
the too-often silenced bodies of Dominican racialized subjects.110 Through
Afro-religiosity, artists, particularly diasporic writers, are finding a diction
that allows them to interpellate the Hispanophile version of Dominican his-
tory, reimagining an other truth that can finally confront the passivity and
silencing of hegemonic Hispanophile texts. In his acclaimed novel, The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), for instance, Junot Daz writes fuk, an
Afro-Dominican curse, as the cause of disasters and maladies such as the
Trujillo dictatorship and the assassination of JFK. Much like salves, Dazs
fuk contradicts the Archive of Dominicanidad by offering an other gene-
alogy for understanding what happened and how it happened. Similarly,
Angie Cruz, in her novel Soledad (2001), also invokes Afro-Dominican re-
84 CHAPTER 2
With the promise of pesos, Graciela and Silvio found themselves in the
Galician vendors warehouse, where Peter West had staged many ribald
acts among its sacks of rice. . . . The pink hand tugged at her skirt and
pointed briskly to Silvios hand. They turned to each other as the same
hand dangled pesos before them. . . . In the dampness they shivered as
West kneaded their bodies as if molding stubborn clay. . . . Then Gra-
ciela and Silvio watched in complicit silence as West approached the
couch and knelt in front of them. . . . One by one, Wests fingers wrapped
around Silvios growing penis. He wedged the thumb of his other hand
into the humid mound between Gracielas thighs. Neither moved while
they watched his forehead glitter. . . . As promised, the yanqui-man tossed
Silvio a flurry of pesos.112
Postcards, as Krista Thompson argues, were important metropolitan texts
that created a visual narrative of the Caribbean as a fantasy of colonial de-
sire.113 At the turn of the twentieth century, as photography and reproduc-
tion became more accessible, postcards became an important medium for
disseminating travel stories across the world, becoming readable texts even
for the illiterate. Rosarios historical contradiction of Wests photo offers an
other postcard of the occupation that shows how white American and Euro-
pean civilians also invaded Dominican bodies with the support of the US
military. When a land is occupied, so are its inhabitants. Providing a back-
story to the usually anonymous models that appear on commercial photo-
graphs, Rosarios text gives the models names and a history, contradicting
the West(ern) archive that rendered them objects. More than characters, Sil-
vio and Graciela appear as spirits, or rather as water saints that mount the
novel and, like Afro-religious salves, sing truth. Both Silvio and Graciela die
because of the impact of the occupation. Silvio is eventually gutted by the
Marines after joining the gavillero rebellion. Graciela contracts syphilis after
a sexual encounter with Eli, a European tourist drawn to the island after see-
ing Wests postcard.
Rosarios story of the photographic scene imagines a genealogy of the
prevalent present reality of the Caribbean sex industry in which women,
young girls, men, and young boys become part of an exploitative system that
sinks people deeper into the circle of poverty.114 The postcard can be read as
a premonition of the Internet sites and multiple cable television specials that
sell the Dominican Republic as a sexscape, to borrow Denise Brennans
term,115 as a location for commercialized sexual exchange between white
86 CHAPTER 2
who married them: It is generally known that some enlisted men in various
posts of the country are or have been living with native women as matrimo-
nias. Some of these women, undoubtedly without either the knowledge or
consent of the men in question, have prostituted themselves.118 The women
in the report are imagined prostitutes and therefore corrupt, treacherous,
and needing no protection.119 On the contrary, the marines are exculpated;
their transgressions are seen as worthy of forgiveness. This logic, much like
the myth of the mulata that had circulated within colonial thought since the
beginning of the seventeenth century, located in the racialized female body
the potential for corruption and transgression. Carrying a form of savage
sexual magnetism, these women were capable of seducing even the most
righteous men. It was them, therefore, and not the men, who needed to be
controlled.
The official documents of the intervention tell us little about the extent
of individual relationships between US Marines and the local population.
However, we do know that efforts were made to keep marines from creating
long-term ties with locals, particularly women.120 Despite the official position
of the government, we can speculate that many Americans, and especially
many of the stationed men, ventured into the towns and befriended locals, es-
pecially women, who must have served as a bridge between both groups. As a
result, the occupying regime exhibited a lot of concern for the role of women
and their potential ability to distract and corrupt the marines.121 However,
often women who engaged in sexual relationships with the marines were la-
beled wenches or prostitutes, becoming targets of the military govern-
ment and local communities alike. This rhetoric contributed to a number of
reported imprisonments and many other crimes against women.122
Dominican prostitutes were often accused of carrying venereal diseases
and were quarantined. These practices became a common way to repress and
contain female troublemakers, or those women perceived as potentially
dangerous to stationed men. At least 953 women were imprisoned during the
intervention, accused of carrying venereal disease or prostitution.123 Many
others were routinely forced to attend local clinics to be checked for venereal
diseases. The roundups of Dominican prostitutes were indiscriminate and
often included young girls who were not sexually active.124 That was the case
for Luisa Salcedo, a seamstress from Santiago de los Caballeros. Captain B. F.
Weakland, who was in charge of the Sanitation Office in La Vega, accused
Salcedo of carrying gonorrhea and syphilis and consequently imprisoned
her.125 Salcedo appealed, with support from a local doctor who attested to
88 CHAPTER 2
ease for the protection of the military and naval forces of the United States
and that the discovery of venereal infection upon examination could consti-
tute proof of prostitution.134 Under the Chamberlain-Kahn Act, any woman
under the jurisdiction of the United States could be detained and medically
examined if the officer was of the opinion that her lifestyle observed or ru-
mored sexual behavior indicated she might be infected.135 Salcedos case is a
documented example of how eugenicist-fueled logic affected everyday citi-
zens, particularly women, at the hands of the marines. Sadly, there are few
documented cases that provide the backstory of women like Salcedo.
Rosarios texto montado provides us with the possibility of imagining
how the policies implemented by the occupation affected the body as much
as they affected the land. If the body of the black Dominican man, as ex-
emplified in Mateos lynching, could be mutilated and destroyed, the body
of the Dominican woman, as seen in Salcedos case, was imagined as a site
for consumption and control. Where evidence is lacking, Rosario imagines,
voicing the silenced histories of violence against black women during the
occupation through the occupied female body:
A woman with the carriage of a swan and a bundle balanced on her head
walked from the nearby stream. Her even teeth flashed a warning as she
stepped onto the road. . . . Graciela shaded her eyes. Tall uniformed men
in hats shaped like gumdrops sat on the roadside. They drank from can-
teens and spat as far onto the road as they could. . . . The yanqui-mens
rifles and giant bodies confirmed stories that had already filtered into
the city from the eastern mountains: suspected gavillero rebels gutted
like Christmas piglets; women left spread-eagled right before their fathers
and husbands; children with eardrums drilled by bullets. Graciela had
folded these stories into the back of her memory when she snuck about
the city outskirts with Silvio. The yanqui-man in the warehouse seemed
frail now, his black box and clammy hands no match for the long rifles
aimed at the woman. Run you Negro wench! The soldiers shout was
high pitched and was followed by a chorus of whistles. A pop resounded.
Through the blades of grass, Graciela could see the white bundle continue
down the road on a steady path. The woman held her head high as if the
bundle could stretch her above the hats. Another pop and Graciela saw
the woman drop to the ground. The soldiers milled around screaming
and thrashing in the grass. Some already had their shirts pulled out of
their pants.136
90 CHAPTER 2
territory, which became evident to the world with the Spanish-American
War in 1898. But for Dominicans, the time the US military forces spent on
the island radically changed the countrys political, social, and cultural life.
The agricultural laws promulgated in 1919, for instance, contributed to the
strengthening of an economic system that condemned Dominican peasantry
to poverty.141 The establishment of the Guardia Nacional Dominicana in
1918 by the US Marines served as a vehicle for the founding of the thirty-
one-year dictatorship of Rafael Lenidas Trujillo and many other ruthless
and violent episodes in Dominican history. Mateos obituary in El Cable
was emblematic of the imperial rationality that qualified the US occupation.
While elite writers portrayed Afro-religious believers such as the liboristas
as foreign, and potentially threatening Dominican cultural essence, US
foreign impositions altered every aspect of society. Baseball, for example,
eventually replaced cockfighting as the national pastime; foxtrot and jazz
were played in local bars while Afro-Dominican music was banned from
public places; and US evangelical missionaries erected churches in many vil-
lages, whereas Afro-religious practices were declared illegal on the island.142
Through US-centric ideas about race, gender, sexuality, religion, and exot-
icism, the US military intervention contributed to the disenfranchisement
of black Dominican women and the persecution of people who practiced
Afro-cultural and Afro-religious traditions. This legacy was continued under
Trujillo during his thirty-one-year dictatorship, and persisted throughout
the twentieth century.143
After the assassination of Trujillo in December 1962, following intense
pressure from the US to eradicate all peasant and grassroots groups that
could harbor communist sentiments, liboristas were once again attacked.
President John F. Kennedys anti-Communist plan meant that the United
States kept a close eye on all aspects of Dominican life, making sure that it
would become a democracy and not another Cuba.144 Thus, following Ken-
nedys plan for democracy, the US-formed gnd, under US military observa-
tion, air-struck the liborista camp in Palma Sola, killing nearly two hundred
unarmed civilians, including children, and taking more than six hundred
people into custody.145 The act, known as the Masacre de Palma Sola, was
the climax of many decades of antiblackness.146
The beginning of the twenty-first century has brought more US involve-
ment into the internal politics of underprivileged nations, as evidenced by
the military occupations of Afghanistan (2002), Iraq (2003), and Haiti
(2004). The Dominican intervention of 191624 is an important example
92 CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
Speaking in Silences
Literary Interruptions and the Massacre of 1937
Dy mon gn mon.
[Beyond the mountains, there are more mountains.]
Haitian proverb
Driving around the Artibonito Valley in the northwest of the island of His-
paniola (see map 3.1), a person can suddenly feel overwhelmed. The large,
curved mountains block all other views, forcing passersby to take in their
majesty. Local santeros call the valley the endless mountains, for it is diffi-
cult to see or imagine anything beyond them. The Afro-religious respect the
valley and honor it because, to them, Artibonito holds powerful, unmen-
tionable secrets that concern us all.1
That which the local Afro-religious dare not mention is what foreign
historians have termed the Haitian Massacre: the genocide of rayanos and
ethnic Haitians that took place from October 2 to October 8, 1937, near the
fatefully named Masacre River in the northern borderland (see map 3.1). 2
No one knows the exact number of victims.3 Using machetes and knives
to simulate a fight among peasants, Dominican military and civilian allies
murdered an estimated fifteen thousand to twenty thousand people, con-
verting a once peaceful, multiethnic border community into a site of hor-
ror.4 Today, tourists hiking the mountains or travelers on the International
Highway would never suspect the horrible secrets that dwell in them. That
is because officially, according to the Dominican state, the Massacre of 1937
never happened.5
Contrary to Dominican state silence, US-produced historiography about
Hispaniola has largely focused on the Haitian Massacre. Some categorize
it as the worst in the long list of the atrocities committed during the Trujillo
Monte Cristi
Rouge
Bassin Dajabn
Ouanaminthe
Dosmond
Monte Organis
Haiti Elas Pia
Ar
t ibonite River Dominican Republic
Independencia
Port-Au-Prince
Savane Zonbi Jiman
Pedernales
94 CHAPTER 3
border population. Ultimately, the production of the 1937 violence as a
Haitian Massacre erases the bodies of the multiethnic Afro-Hispaniola
rayano population that was attacked and destroyed at the hands of the Tru-
jillo forces. The label Haitian Massacre also delays Dominican confronta-
tion with the traumatic historical truth that in 1937, Dominican military and
civilian allies killed their own people.
In the Dominican Republic, the 1937 violence is remembered by the eu-
phemism El Corte (Kout kouto a in Creole). The diction El Corte situ-
ates the genocide within the genealogy of Caribbean coloniality. Evoking la
zafra (also known as el corte), the period in early fall when sugarcane is har-
vested, El Corte is reminiscent of the European sugar plantation economy
that resulted in the largest slave population of the Americas. But the cut-
ting also summons the contemporary global sugar plantation economy
that exploits, once again, Hispaniolas black bodies for foreign benefit.
Latin American decolonial studies have brought attention to the dynamics
of global coloniality that operate whether or not a colonial administration
is present. In the Dominican Republic, as we saw in chapters 1 and 2, colo-
nial desire, structures, and thought continued to guide elite state-serving
intellectuals and state administrators, shaping the nations politics and the
nations archive. At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the
twentieth century, US economic and political interventions on the island
further complicated these colonial structures through racially based modes
of labor exploitation.
Unlike other euphemistic dictions of dictatorial violence in Latin
Americathe desaparecidos of Chile and Argentina and the olvidados of
BrazilEl Corte historicizes the gruesome violence as the diction describes
how Trujillos men killed the victims. The palimpsestic violence that inhabits
the diction El Corte brings attention to the present and past structures that
operate together in the process of silencing, erasing, and destroying the black
body. Despite multiple historical and literary repetitions, it is silence that
dominates the archive of the Massacre of 1937. Michel Trouillot taught us
that truth is a construct of absences and presences substantiated by historical
proofs. But those truths are neither neutral nor natural. Rather, Trouillot
reminds us they are creations: Truths derive from mentions or silences of
various kinds of degrees. And by silences I mean an active and transitive
process: One silences.10 The silences surrounding the Massacre of 1937, and
the transitive process that engendered themthe silencingare not always
equal; they do not emerge from the same source, and they do not seek the
SPEAKING IN SILENCES 95
same objectives. There are unspeakable silences that erase the victims bod-
ies through the very repetition of the historical event; guilt-driven silences
that exculpate the criminals through passive voice, allegory, or euphemism;
and solemn silences held by those for whom speaking is simply too painful.
This chapter is about the silences, absences, and suppression that inhabit the
archive of the Massacre of 1937. But it is also about re-membering the muti-
lated, violated, silenced bodies destroyed at the hands of the 1937 murderers,
and honoring the living, who everyday continue to embody the memory of
violence so that the rest of us do not forget.
Unspeakable Silences
Rumor has it that Trujillo ordered the killings while drunk. When a captain
interrupted a party to complain about unrest in Dajabn, annoyed, the Jefe
responded: Kill them fucking Haitians; kill them all.11 To this day, how-
ever, no one knows with certainty how the massacre was put in motion. Did
Trujillo plan it? Did the intellectuals suggest it? How exactly did the vio-
lence escalate to such a high number of victims? Whatever the motives and
reasoning behind Trujillos orders to kill all Haitians living in the border-
lands, the results were effective: the Haitian-Dominican frontier was for-
ever redefined and, as historian Richard Turits argues, what was once a fluid,
mixed population became divided.12
From the beginning of his populist regime, Trujillo promised a perma-
nent solution to the border problem that had preoccupied the Dominican
state since the second half of the nineteenth century.13 Following in the foot-
steps of the United States military, the dictator attempted to control the flow
of people and capital between the Dominican Republic and Haiti through
legislation and militarization of the frontier.14 As seen in chapter 2, during
the US military occupation of 191624, Hispaniolas borders began to trans-
form due to economic and political control.15 Despite the occupation and
nationalist efforts to modernize the frontier, rayano communities contin-
ued to develop somewhat independently of the two states. In chapter 1, I ex-
amined how early intellectuals of the republic Csar Nicols Penson, Flix
Mara del Monte, and Manuel de Jess Galvn produced dominicanidad as
a hybrid, nonblack race. But while influential in shaping Dominican poli-
tics and public opinion, intellectual works did not contribute to a tangible
redefinition of ethnic identities among the peasantry and the borderlands
population. This complexity was in part because borders, both geographical
96 CHAPTER 3
and imaginary, continued to be fluid for the two nations sharing the island
of Hispaniola. The people, particularly those who lived in the borderlands,
often found common interests that united them.16
Prior to the violence of 1937, the Haitian-Dominican parallel borderlands
constituted a bicultural area where generations of ethnic Haitians and ethnic
Dominicans resided and interacted through commercial, religious, and, at
times, political cooperation. Pedro Campo, a native of the southwestern bor-
der town of Jiman (see map 3.1) recalls:
Aunque yo era un muchachito en eso primero ao de Trujillo, yo me
acuerdo que eso tiempo eran diferente. Uno poda dec que sutano o men-
gano era haitiano o dominicano, pero aqu en Jiman al meno, eso no era
n; nadie era mejor que nadie. Decile haitiano a uno no era un insurto en
eso tiempo porque enante to er mundo tena haitiano en su familia. En la
ma haba do, la mam de mi mam y el pap de mi pap.17
[Though I was only a little boy during the early years of Trujillo, I remem-
ber that in those times things were different. You could say so-and-so was
Haitian, or so-and-so was Dominican, but here in Jiman that really did
not mean much; it did not mean one person was better than the other.
Saying a person was Haitian was not an insult back then because all fami-
lies had [Haitians] in them. In my case I had two, my mothers mother
and my fathers father.]
Historical documentation of the turn of the twentieth century corrob-
orates Campos memories of La Lnea Fronteriza as a fluid, transnational,
and multicultural territory. Ethnic Haitians and ethnic Dominicans often
crossed into Haiti to perform religious rituals such as baptisms, weddings,
and cleansings.18 Some crossed the border daily to work or visit their families
because, as Campo recalled, crossing the border just meant walking over to
another neighborhood. It was not a big deal.19
My historicization of the fluidity of the Lnea Fronteriza does not seek
to romanticize the pre-1937 Haitian-Dominican border. Rather, I want to
highlight that amidst the multiple understandings of ethnicity, culture, and
race, and in addition to the colonial and early republican territorial conflicts,
the Lnea Fronteriza was as Campo remembers: a residential space where
people lived normal and productive lives. The people who inhabited the
area shared more than just land or the conflicts of two colonies and two frag-
ile states seeking, unsuccessfully, to control them. The transnational nature
SPEAKING IN SILENCES 97
of the rayano population of the Lnea contributed to the construction and
imagining of racial understandings of Afro-cultural and Afro-religious prac-
tices as Haitian. Yet, as Derby argues, the cultural categorization Haitian
did not preclude rayanos and ethnic Dominicans from participating in, pre-
serving, and enjoying those cultural practices regardless of their citizenship
or ethnic affiliation.20 Further, the equation of Haitian with Afro-cultural
practices did, in turn, facilitate political impositions under the Trujillo re-
gime that came to divide people into two distinct races and cultures. But
prior to 1937, regardless of how people chose to name themselves or their
cultural practices, in the Lnea Fronteriza Haitianness did not signify bar-
barism the way it did for elite state-serving intellectuals living in the cities.
It was precisely the fluidity and cultural hybridity of the Lnea Fronter-
iza that preoccupied Trujillo and the Hispanophile intelligentsia. Manuel
Arturo Pea Batlle, for instance, saw Haitianmeaning Afro-derived and
rayanocultural presence in the borderlands as a form of invasion of
Dominican values, equal to the Haitian Unification of 1822.21 The ethnic
Haitian culture of the borderland, Joaquin Balaguer insisted, threatened
national sovereignty and the Hispanic essence of dominicanidad:
Nuestro origen racial y nuestra tradicin de pueblo hispnico no nos deben
impedir reconocer que la nacionalidad se halla en peligro de desintegrarse
si no se emplean remedios drsticos contra la amenaza que se deriva para
ella de la vecindad del pueblo haitiano. . . . Para corregirlo tendr que re-
currirse a providencias llamadas forzosamente a lastimar la sensibilidad
haitiana. Lo que Santo Domingo desea es conservar su cultura y sus cos-
tumbres como pueblo espaol e impedir la desintegracin de su alma y la
prdida de sus rasgos distintivos.22 (emphasis added)
[Our racial origins and traditions as a Hispanic people should not keep
us from recognizing that our nationality is in danger of disintegrating if
we do not employ drastic measures against the threat represented by the
neighboring Haitian people. . . . In order to correct this, we might have
to employ tactics that will, without a doubt, hurt the sensibility of the
Haitian people. What Santo Domingo desires is to preserve its culture
and customs as the Hispanic people we are, and to stop the disintegration
of our soul and the loss of our distinctive characteristics.]
Ventriloquizing del Monte and Penson, Balaguer summons the Hispanic
origins of dominicanidad as essential to the national identity. But unlike
98 CHAPTER 3
the nineteenth-century letrados, Balaguer does not use the euphemistic
language of culture; instead, he speaks of race, inserting himself within the
civilizing political project of twentieth-century eugenicists. Balaguer warns
about the dangers of cultural and racial miscegenation. His concerns are
therefore not about the Haitian immigrant, but rather about the rayano,
whom he saw as a potential threat to his national project of ethnic cleans-
ing. Referring to the border area as a site of risk, Balaguer claimed Haitian
mixing posed a threat to the Hispanophile project of nation bordering. If
the rhetorical project of nineteenth-century intellectuals such as Penson was
to produce Haitians and Dominicans as two essentially different races, the
project embodied by Trujillos intelligentsia, as seen in Balaguer and Pea
Batlle, was to extend the definition of Haitian (foreign blackness) to the
mixed-race rayanos. I argue that when referring to Haitians, Balaguer and
Pea Batlle are also speaking of Dominican citizens who practiced Afro-
religiosity, lived on the borderlands, or had an ethnic Haitian background.
Intellectuals such as Balaguer played an important role in drafting the
ideology of the dictatorship, especially in relation to race, culture, and
national borders, by drawing on nineteenth-century Hispanophile ideology
la Penson, and on early twentieth-century eugenicist theories.23 Although
during the first seven years of the regime (193037), there was little visibly
state-sponsored anti-Haitian propaganda, the education, sanitation, and
immigration policies reflected an increase in institutionalized racism and
xenophobia.24 Like Balaguer, many other important twentieth-century in-
tellectuals worked to sustain the nationalist rhetoric of the preservation
of Dominican essence, allegedly threatened by Haitian immigration.25 In
this racist climate, the massacre then came to be a solution to the national
threat the elite saw in the rayano population.
Appealing to the Hispanophile version of Haitian-Dominican history,
Balaguer naturalizes the Massacre of 1937 as part of the Dominican struggle
for sovereignty. As Nelson Maldonado-Torres reminds us, such a process
emanates from the Eurocentric episteme of control that can create radical
suspension or displacement of ethical and political relationships in favor
of the propagation of a peculiar death ethic that renders massacre and dif-
ferent forms of genocide as natural.26 The naturalization of the Massacre
of 1937 responded to the prevalence of colonial structures of the Domini-
can state that continue to dehumanize subjects perceived as a menace to
the nation and relegate them to the margins, to displacement, or to death,
whether physical or symbolic.27 In the climate of a bellicose world, between
SPEAKING IN SILENCES 99
World War I and World War II, it was fairly easy for Balaguer to validate war
against rayanos in 1937.
The Massacre of 1937 became the final solution to the bordering that had
begun in 1907 when the United States took control of the customhouses
and restricted border trade between the two peoples of Hispaniola. Under
Trujillos populist regime, however, ethnic separation from Haiti became a
matter of life or death for the poor, and in particular, for rayanos. During
his regime, Trujillo affirmed the working people as his friends. Yet he also
required the working peoples devotion to his national project. Trujillos per-
formative embrace of the working class carried the simultaneous disavowal
of the presumed national enemy: the political dissident, the tax evader, and
the rayano.28 The friend was thus obliged to participate in the destruction,
ostracizing, and silencing of the foe. The Massacre of 1937 elucidated Tru-
jillos relationship with the population: he was El Jefe, and all needed to
follow him to escape peril.29 The fact that Trujillo did not pay reparations
to Haiti after the Massacre of 1937 also confirmed that the dictator operated
with impunityor, even worse, with US support.
In the decade following El Corte, Trujillo-serving intellectuals were
charged with justifying the killings in front of the international community.
Intellectuals such as Hctor Inchustegui Cabral and Ramn Marrero Aristy
joined Trujillos cabinet in the early 1930s, hoping to influence the dictator
in pushing for a land reform that would end with the massive US expansion
over the national territory that began at the dawn of the nineteenth cen-
tury and spread during the military occupation of 1916. Trujillos Partido
Nacional promoted a nationalization agenda that capitalized on elite desire
to eradicate the larger-scale foreign land ownership that was threatening
national sovereignty.30 After the massacre, however, they had to confront
international media and diplomatic pressures from the United States and
Mexico (which had been selected as arbiter of the conflict) to explain and
contextualize the killings. 31 As a response, Pea Batlle and Balaguer pub-
lished multiple articles and volumes of books historicizing Haitian attempts
to occupy Dominican territory since the 1844 independence. Along with
Max Henrquez Urea, Inchustegui Cabral and others, they built an ar-
chive of exculpation that presented the genocide as a conflict between Do-
minican peasants and Haitian (undocumented) immigrants, accusing the
latter of trying to take over land and stealing cattle from Dominican border-
land ranches. Summoning the history of the 182244 Haitian Unification
of the island, Trujillos writers presented the Massacre of 1937 as a necessary
100 CHAPTER 3
action taken by civilians in order to protect the borders of their nation from
the tyrannical, neighboring enemy that was allegedly slowly taking over do-
minicanidad. In a letter to the editor-in-chief of Colombias El Tiempo, one
of the most important Spanish-language daily papers in the hemisphere at
the time, Balaguer explained the allegiance of the intellectual class to the
Trujillato: Si los hombres de pensamiento, con tres o cuatro excepciones,
respaldan el rgimen del Presidente Trujillo, es porque el estadista domini-
cano est resolviendo, con iluminada devocin patritica, los problemas fun-
damentales de cuya solucin depende el futuro de la Repblica Dominicana
(If thoughtful men, with three or four exceptions, support the Trujillo re-
gime, it is because the Dominican statesman, with enlightened patriotic de-
votion, is taking on the solutions to fundamental problems upon which the
future of the Dominican Republic depends).32 Balaguers diction, though
adulatory of Trujillos response to the feared blackening (ennegrecimiento)
or hybridization of the Dominican race, is quite vague. He clearly states
that Haitians are a problem for the Hispanic culture of Dominicans. How-
ever, he does not address how exactly Trujillo is solving this grave problem.
The displacement of Trujillos violence onto the euphemism of problem
solving is exemplary of the passive diction that interferes in most narra-
tiveswhether anti- or pro-Haitianabout the Massacre of 1937.
The desire to maintain the illusion of Dominican whiteness moved intel-
lectuals to actively support Trujillos campaign and to defend state-endorsed
racist ideologies. Balaguer, Max Henrquez Urea, and Manuel Arturo Pea
Batlle, among other important Hispanophile intellectuals supporting the re-
gime, served as ambassadors to various European and Latin American coun-
tries, promoting their idea of Dominican national and racial identities and
enthusiastically defending Trujillos actions. This strategy continued and
grew even after the dictators decisions resulted in one of the most shame-
ful crimes against humanity ever committed in the Dominican Republic.
After the fall of Trujillo, anti-Haitianism continued to grow under Joaqun
Balaguer, whose dictatorial regimes (196678, 198696) heavily influenced
the nation for the greater part of the twentieth century.
Despite the number of anti-Haitian texts that inundated the Archive of Do-
minicanidad during the Trujillo Era (193061), and particularly surrounding
the violence of 1937, critics have also categorized the decade that followed
102 CHAPTER 3
bases recommended building a naval base in Vieques, Puerto Rico, rather
than in Saman, Dominican Republic, because the native labor in Puerto
Rico was perceived as largely white. On the contrary, the survey shows
that the available labor in Hispaniola was largely Negro and therefore less
desirable.37 During the intervention, Puerto Ricans often occupied clerical
and managerial positions, while Dominicans were relegated to remedial jobs
and Haitians only cut cane. Marrero Aristy interpellates the prevalence of
US race-based economic inequality in Trujillos Dominican Republic, alle-
gorizing its corrupt and unethical basis through another euphemistic dic-
tion: the over.
The English term over references the value that cane weighers keep
when they underrepresent the weight of cut stalks in order to make a profit.
Over also refers to the amount the bodegueros must keep if they want
to turn a profit. Over is the money payroll clerks steal from the workers
wages. Over ultimately symbolizes the effects of US capitalism in postoc-
cupation Hispaniola. Seduced by the possibility of a profit, or forced by the
need for survival, all employees of the sugar corporation participate in theft
through the overthat is, all but the cane cutter who, though aware of the
crime, can do nothing to contest it. Undoubtedly battling with the guilt and
responsibility of the Massacre of 1937, Marrero Aristys Over explains how
in an economy of inequality, everyone participates in economic exploitation
and social oppression. Survival, Daniel suggests, depends on ones invest-
ment in the racially based system of economic inequality. For the narrator,
that requires buying into Trujillos anti-Haitian narrative by reducing Hai-
tian bodies to the collective anonymity of haitianaje. Marrero Aristys utili-
zation of the over functions as an allegorical critique of Trujillos corrupt
institutionalization of US imperial exploitation. During his regime, Trujillo
appropriated state resources for personal use, leaving the country bankrupt
upon his death. The novel warns the reader, in an almost premonitory tone,
of the prevalence of corrupt capitalism in the Dominican Republic that, re-
sembling a prison, will trap everything, everywhere without the possibility
of hope or escape.38
Also critiquing the unequal race-based economy of the sugarcane com-
pany, Juan Bosch approaches the Massacre of 1937 through the allegorical
figure of the cane cutter. Unlike Marrero Aristy, who writes under the gaze
of Trujillo and is eventually murdered by the regime, Bosch writes from exile
with the support of left-wing politicians and intellectuals from all over the
Americas and Europe. Geographic distance allowed Bosch to clearly articu-
104 CHAPTER 3
Luis, con su herida y su fiebre delirante, haba quedado atrapado dentro
de un incendio que por descuido caus su patrn en el caaveral, hecho
por el que luego sera culpado. En momento de desesperacin, Luis clama
a Bony, al dios de los cristianos que segn sus cavilaciones debe ser tan
bueno como los dominiquen bom que le han dado la oportunidad de
trabajar en su tierra.42
[Suffering from a delirious fever due to his infected wound, Luis was
trapped in a fire caused recklessly by his boss, for which he would later be
blamed. In the midst of his desperation, Luis prays to Bonye, the god of
Christians, a god that, he imagined, must be as good as the good Domin-
icans that allowed him the opportunity to work in their land.]
Soon, the overseers tie Pie up and drag him across the batey while his chil-
dren watch his execution: Inmediatamente aparecieron diez o doce hom-
bres, muchos de ellos a pie y la mayora armados de mochas. Todos gritaban
insultos y se lanzaban sobre Luis Pie (Ten or twelve men showed up imme-
diately; many of them on foot and almost all with machetes. They yelled out
insults and lunged themselves on Luis Pie).43 Confused by the sudden ag-
gression, and not knowing what the accusations against him were, Pie prays,
asking God to save him from what seems like his imminent death. But the
Christian God does not listen to this Haitian man, and the story ends with
the image of Pies little children watching as their father is slowly murdered
by an angry mob of Dominicans who seem completely blind to this poor
mans suffering.
Boschs depiction of Pie renders him a martyrabandoned by the state,
the community, and even God. Perhaps in an effort to recast a narrative
tradition that has doggedly portrayed Haitians as inhuman, violent, and
dangerous, the omniscient narrator who takes us inside Pies torturous world
shows us a man of spiritual strength and innate goodness, capable of being
peaceful even at the time of his death. Taking various rhetorical steps, Bosch
deconstructs the dominant literary characterization of the Haitian savage.
First, the author shows us a Dominicanized Pie through the insertion of
recognizable popular Dominican values, such as the relationship to the land,
to family, and to a Christian God, even if this God is referred to in Crole
as Bony (Bon Dieu). Then Pie appears as the victim of two systems of
oppression: the sugarcane plantation economy and institutionalized racism.
Finally, at the end of the story, Pie is rendered as a hero and a martyr; his
106 CHAPTER 3
we will see in chapter 5, influenced national politics and diasporic writing
during the second half of the twentieth century.
Though the story does not directly historicize the massacre, Boschs narra-
tive does not exculpate Dominicans from their participation in the horrific
violence. Everyone is guilty: the soldiers who hit Pie, the overseers who or-
dered the lynching, and the people who watched silently and did not defend
him. But while the narrative of Pies tragic incident attempts to confront
the guilt and responsibility of Dominicans in perpetuating anti-Haitianism,
it also contributes to further solidifying the 1937 violence as The Haitian
Massacre for Pie is a Haitian immigrant working in the bateyes, rather than
a rayano from the borderland. Although the allegorical displacement of the
Massacre of 1937 in the body of the immigrant cane worker allows for a cri-
tique of economic oppression of the sugar industry, it perpetuates the image
of Haitians as foreign cane workers rather than as citizens of the Domini-
can nation. Boschs allegory appeases the unstated anxiety produced by the
knowledge of the potential killing of Dominican blacks and during the Mas-
sacre of 1937.
Boschs narration of solidarity equates the Haitian worker with the Do-
minican peasant through a reinforcement of common cultural and religious
values. Pies submission to his Dominican aggressors and his eventual death
are presented as examples of a superior spirituality that, the narrator sug-
gests, can be obtained only through suffering and poverty. This alleged in-
nate goodness is proffered as a lesson to the Dominican subject embodied
in the figure of the soldier:
El soldado se contuvo. Tena la mano demasiado adolorida por el uso
que le haba dado esa noche, y, adems, comprendi que por duro que le
pegara Luis Pie no se dara cuenta de ello. No poda darse cuenta porque
iba caminando como un borracho, mirando el cielo hasta ligeramente
sonredo.46
[The soldier restrained himself from hitting Luis. His hand was already
hurting, and he also understood that no matter how hard he hit him, Luis
would not feel the blows. He would not even notice because he was walk-
ing like a drunk, looking at the sky and smiling.]
Since the early nineteenth century, narratives about Haitis magical
powers have appeared in literature throughout the Americas, and especially
in the United States and the Caribbean. Some authors, as seen in chapters
108 CHAPTER 3
an integral part of the nation through his role as a worker and as a father of
possibly Dominican-born children. As we will see in chapters 4 and 5, this
formulation of Haitian-Dominican subjectivity, exemplified in Bosch and
other Literature of Compassion writers, served as the basis for important
contestations of Dominican dominant ideology throughout the twentieth
century on the island as well as in the diaspora.
But the insertion of Luis Pie into the nation reaches a certain discursive
limit in the story that is resolved only through the embodiment of a mythic
Haitian heroism that transcends the tangible reality of Haitian-Dominican
relations. The recourse to mysticism within an otherwise social-realist text
points to a common limitation Compassionate writers encountered in their
struggles to articulate a new vision of the various Haitian-Dominican bor-
ders. They were haunted by the collective guilt and trauma of the Massacre of
1937. Despite these limitations, Luis Pie is the earliest example of a literary
tradition seeking to contradict Trujillo-based anti-Haitianism by pointing to
the possibility of solidarity and reconciliation.
We have studied thus far the complicated rhetorical process through which
the archive of the Massacre of 1937 has silenced, even in texts that other-
wise deconstruct anti-Haitianism, the bodies of the victims through passive
voice, euphemisms, and digression. To simplify my analysis, I have grouped
the works into two major categories: (1) The first category comprises His-
panophile narratives, which often justified anti-Haitianism and minimized
the events as a series of simple disagreements between local borderland Do-
minican peasants and Haitian cattle thieves. In this group we can include the
work of Balaguer, Pea Batlle, and Max Henrquez Urea. (2) The second
category comprises the contradiction of Literature of Compassion that de-
scribes the general state of poverty and desperation affecting Haitians in the
Dominican Republic while also rendering Haitians as weak. In this group
are such writers as Bosch and Marrero Aristy.
The climate of intellectual ambiguity surrounding the massacre contin-
ued to grow throughout the Trujillo regime and well into the late twentieth
century as Dominican writers struggled with the trauma of the violence and
their desire to produce a cohesive modern nation. In a literary culture where
historical novels are prominent, the virtual self-censorship regarding the kill-
ings is, at the very least, distressing. This is why Freddy Prestol Castillos text
110 CHAPTER 3
you eat is stained with blood. . . . If you stay here, you too will float in the
river of blood.]
The sudden switch from first person (yo/I) to second person (t/singu-
lar you) not only assumes that the reader is Dominican, but also makes him
or her an accomplice, and in turn makes El Masacre a project of collective
expiation. Like Luis Pie and other Compassionate texts of the period, El
Masacre is inserted within the ambiguity of Dominican nationalist rhetoric
while critiquing state-sponsored anti-Haitianism. In that sense, the textual
project continues to reproduce the rhetoric of Dominican national identity
as one in contradiction: to write a Dominican nationalist text in the context
of the Trujillo regime is to write an anti-Haitian text. As I see them, these
two ideologies are not mutually exclusive, but essentially interdependent.
Yet the content of Prestol Castillos novel gestures, at the very least, at a con-
frontation with the trauma, guilt, and silences surrounding the killings and
his own (Dominican Hispanophile elite) culpability.
El Masacre opens with an autobiographical prologue, titled Historia de
una historia (History of a History), in which the author explains the rea-
sons behind his firsthand knowledge of the events he is about to narrate.
Owing to the loss of his fathers fortune to North American industrial ex-
pansion in the country, the author/protagonist had to obtain a modest job
as a state prosecutor in the borderland province of Dajabn, a less-than-
desirable position for any young lawyer. The author describes the experience
of moving from his hometown of San Pedro, located forty miles east of the
capital, to the distant borderland town of Dajabn as a psychological exile:
Escrib bajo cielo fronterizo, en soledad. Sin darme cuenta, yo estaba exil-
iado (I wrote under a frontier sky, in solitude. Inadvertently, I had gone into
exile).58 The narrators depiction of the area later summarizes the general per-
ception of the elite intellectual class regarding the borderlands. They saw it
as a backward, uncivilized area, populated by half-breed peasants who had
no notion of what it meant to be citizens of a nation.
Assigned to work in the borderlands, the narrator is suddenly trans-
planted into what feels like the limits of the nation, a place he considers for-
eign and untamed. Yet he is more than ever inserted into the nation, for he
is sent by the dictatorship to be part of a nationalization plan, and in the
process becomes an ally of the very system he despises:
El Amalcigo, un paraje lejano agreste, en soledad sin caminos, donde ella,
la maestra, es la nica persona que sabe eso de que hay una Repblica Do-
112 CHAPTER 3
he suffered because of his dissident thinking during the Trujillo regime. Yet,
unlike other antiregime writers such as Bosch, Prestol Castillo remained in
the country even when presented with the opportunity to leave.63 In addi-
tion, the author held a position within the state and was, in fact, one of
the judges in charge of the proceedings conducted against Dominican peas-
ants in Dajabn after the massacre.64 That the author does not let the reader
clearly see what his role was in the genocide makes his text a narrative of
suppression and silencing. A reading of his earlier and extremely obscure
essay Paisajes y meditaciones de una frontera (1952) offers the opportu-
nity for further understanding the authors self-censorship and narrative of
contradiction as a desire to express a collective complicity of silence through
the partial narration of his autobiography.65 In Paisajes the author adheres
to the anti-Haitian, state-sponsored propaganda to show clear racial and
innate differences between Dominican and Haitians, while portraying the
rayano as an obscured hybrid man without a fatherland.66
For the intellectuals of the early republic, these incongruities were lo-
cated in their desire to maintain colonial ties with Spain and thus retain
a white European identity while claiming sovereignty and freedom as an
independent nation. However, for twentieth-century intellectuals such as
Prestol Castillo, the narration of Dominican national and racial identity was
further complicated as the peasants and Haitian immigrants began to in-
tegrate into the nation (mainly through urban migration), bringing with
them Afro-Caribbean cultural traditions. Twentieth-century intellectuals
were then forced to reconcile, on the one hand, their project of solidarity
with the oppressed and, on the other, their desire to maintain clear national
borders that would protect the very elusive idea of the Dominican nation as
imagined and narrated by nineteenth-century republican intellectuals. For
Prestol Castillo, these contradictions are evidenced in his two very different
depictions of Lnea Fronteriza.
As the author/character confronts the guilt of his own passive participa-
tion in the genocide, El Masacre turns to an analysis of the socioeconomic
conditions that are shared by the two nations of Hispaniola:
Qu es esto? Es un balance de conciencia. Y todo esto acontece en una
isla antillana dividida en dos pases, en cada uno de los cuales existen sen-
dos pueblos azotados por el hambre y por los ltigos de los que mandan.
Adnde voy? . . . Yo mismo no lo advierto, mientras camina la mula.
Qu busco aqu? Me dice mi conciencia Por qu no te vas?67
114 CHAPTER 3
position as a writer and intellectual from a more privileged, civilized area of
the country.69
If El Masacre is contrasted with his earlier essay, Paisajes y meditaciones
de una frontera, one cannot help but wonder who Prestol Castillo truly
was and which version of his depictions of the borderlands is truthful. We
might never find the answer to this puzzling question. However, reading
both texts in the contexts in which they were written and published suggests
a meaningful point of departure for posing stimulating questions regarding
the power of Dominican nationalist rhetoric, as El Masacre attempts to re-
cast the events of the genocide and Paisajes seeks to protect the border-
lands from the Haitians. The dichotomy, however, is not always clear because
Paisajes grows as an intertext of El Masacre, allowing the reader to grasp
a more complete picture of Prestol Castillos understanding of the border-
lands and the rayano.
Paisajes can certainly seem to be nationalist propaganda that perhaps
sought to gain the favor of Trujillo during a time of severe censorship and
oppression. In the foreword to his essay, which the author titled Palabras de
explicacin (Words of Explanation), he asserts,
All pensaba en las dos patrias nuestras: la de los guerrilleros mulatos olvi-
dados por la crnica, que en aquellas sabanas hicieron prdigos de valor
intil y la nueva patria de Trujillo, que hoy construye una nueva economa
y una nueva conciencia cvica en aquellas tierras secas y grises.70
[There I thought about our two fatherlands: that which belonged to the
mulatto guerrillas, now forgotten in the chronicles, who in this land exer-
cise their amazing yet futile courage; and the new fatherland of Trujillo,
which today builds a new economy and a new civic conscious in these
dry and gray lands.]
Prestol Castillo disavows mulato historical agency in the construction of the
nation: futile courage. The author then declares Trujillo the true founder
of the modern nation for the dictators extraordinary work on the border-
lands actually succeeded, in doing what nineteenth-century mulato war-
riors failed to do: inserting the borderland into the nation-state.71
Dominican national identity developed as a slow process of historical in-
terpellation that constantly relied on the history of colonialism and the rela-
tionship with a neighboring colony-state. The borderlands existed as an inte-
gral part of the Dominican imagination, but not necessarily as a civic partner
116 CHAPTER 3
nation. In his effort to speak for the victims, Prestol Castillo often rendered
Haitians as either primitive or helpless.
hear the body of the victim. To conclude my analysis, I now turn to two
novels that I argue attempt to center the Haitian-rayano body in order to
remember the victims of 1937, honoring Afro-religious Hispaniola tradi-
tion: Compre Gnral Soleil (General Sun, My Brother; 1955) by Haitian-
Dominican author Jacques Stphen Alexis and The Farming of Bones (1998)
by Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat. Despite their temporal and
geographical distance, these two novels establish a fascinating dialogue
within themselves while interpellating Dominican narratives by posing a
confrontation with memory and history from the perspective of the vic-
tims. Read in contradiction with Dominican nationalist texts, and within
the historical context in which they were produced, they allow for a more
complete picture of the events while creating the possibility of building a
literary community of healing.
Born in Gonaves, Haiti, in 1922, Alexis was the son of Haitian ambas-
sador Stphen Alexis and Dominican dancer Lydia Nez. A revolutionary
leader and communist, Jacques Stphen Alexis planned a coup dtat against
Haitian dictator Francois Duvalier.75 The plan failed, however, and Alexis
118 CHAPTER 3
was assassinated in 1961, the same year as Trujillo. Compre Gnral Soleil,
his first novel, is a peasant, or proletarian, text.76 It defies the mystification of
Haitian subjects who inundated Negrista literature while maintaining cer-
tain traditional ideas about Haitian identity: the closeness to the land and
the legacy of resistance and struggle acquired through the Haitian Revo-
lution.
Compre Gnral Soleil narrates the story of an impoverished Haitian
couple who migrates to the Dominican Republic to work in the sugarcane
fields. Upon arrival in San Francisco de Macors, Hilarion and his wife,
Claire-Herouse, are suddenly confronted with an ongoing racial conflict but
find comfort in the kindness of Dominican neighbors. Soon after the move,
their first baby is born and so they start to imagine a future on this side of the
frontier. The events of October 1937, however, interrupt this new existence,
and the couple is forced to run for their lives. The last chapter of the novel
describes the horrors they suffer as Hilarion and Claire-Herouse embark
on what seems like an impossible journey through the Dominican montes
(the wilderness) back to the Haitian border. On the way, the couple loses
their child to hunger. Although they eventually reach the Masacre River,
which divides the two nations on the northern borderland (see map 3.1),
a Dominican guard shoots Hilarion as he and his wife attempt to cross it.
In his dying moment, Hilarion acquires a revolutionary consciousness, for
he has seen the light when a great red sun lit the chest of a worker named
Paco Torres.77 Paco was a Dominican community organizer who had intro-
duced the couple to militancy and political struggle. As he approaches his
death, Hilarion sees the future in the common struggle of the people under
the red sun, an emblem of Communism. In a hopeful gesture for Haitian-
Dominican solidarity of the oppressed, the text ends in the middle of the
Masacre River, halfway between the borders of both nations.
A quick glance at Alexiss characters offers us a good idea of the nov-
els social aspirations: Hilarion, the protagonist, representing the working
class, is driven by hunger to a criminal life. While in jail, Hilarion meets a
political prisoner who teaches him about Communism and the struggle for
equality. As the novel unfolds, Hilarion encounters many other Communist
artists and intellectuals as well as community leaders and, ultimately, con-
verts to the revolution at the time of his death. Claire-Herouse, is a street
vendor who lives in extreme poverty and has no formal education but is full
of ambition and ideas for their future. She is presented as a simple charac-
ter whose desires do not go beyond individual material gain. As Hilarion
120 CHAPTER 3
the Yanqui-soldier who refuses to pay exercises his privilege and power. La
Frontire is the embodiment of the various underlying realities of the His-
paniola marginal subject, who is black, poor, oppressed, possessed, occupied
and, ultimately, very hungry. Like the depictions by Ana Lydia Vega and
other contemporary Caribbean writers, Alexiss representation of the border
is not solely a critique of colonial oppression. It also encompasses a hopeful
proposal for the possibility of a Pan-Caribbean community that, as Yolanda
Martnez-San Miguel demonstrates, is eventually created precisely through
marginality in the various enclaves of Caribbean immigrants in New York
and San Juan.80 If the nation-state has failed to protect the Caribbean subject
against imperialism, Alexiss novel reminds us, the subject has not failed the
nation for he carries it on his very body, like a stigmata. The body of the Ca-
ribbean marginal subject, Alexis suggests, contradicts historical oppression.81
In his study of Haitian-Dominican borderland relations, literary theorist
Eugenio Matibag suggests looking at the island of Hispaniola as a loosely
articulated system where parallel histories can evoke a pan-insular common
identity.82 Misery, Matibag insists, is one of the commonalities shared by
the two people of Hispaniola. Interpellating Hispaniolas history of misery,
Alexiss text evokes the multiple psychological borders that regulate His-
paniola subjectivity. If misery is one of the common denominators of His-
paniolas people, Alexiss text questions, why then are the two peoples of this
island not fighting together against the common enemy instead of with each
another? Alexiss narrative offers a thoughtful examination of how nation-
alist and capitalist interests have been reproduced within the borderlands
legitimating the power structures that ultimately separated working peoples
who might otherwise have built strong alliances to oppose the oppressing
power structures of the nations.
Imperialism on the part of the United States appears in the previous pas-
sage in the figures of the marines and later in the novel in the sugarcane
plantation manager. As in Luis Pie, American capitalism is to blame for
Haitian-Dominican suffering: American cars that roll over the body of poor
Haiti like enormous toads. . . . The city dweller is the slave of the American,
the slave of the state and certain among them would even be ready to sell
their wives for that state!83 Although the main characters do not seem aware
of the significance of US imperialism in the everyday life of the peasants and
workers, they are puzzled by this foreign presence on their land. Hilarion,
ultimately conscious of the dangers of both imperialism and nationalism,
sees them as two partner forces that oppress the people of Hispaniola. His
122 CHAPTER 3
memory, Amabelles character demonstrates, shatters silences. Through Am-
abelles body, the reader must confront the violence of the present as in-
formed by the historical consciousness of individual and collective identities.
In an interview Danticat stated that what she does with her work is bear
witness, voicing the silences of the victims so that they are not forgotten.87
Writing about The Farming of Bones, Surez argued that through narrating
the memories of violence, Danticat builds a monument against silenced
tragedies, that can serve as a vehicle to recovery for individuals.88 To this,
I add that Danticats intervention offers a third side to understanding the tri-
angular construction of Dominican and Haitian narrations of identity, for
the novel is written from the diasporic perspective of actors, who may have
left their homeland but carry with them the emotional, psychological, and
political history of that which engendered their exclusion.89 Danticats novel,
like Rosarios Song of the Water Saints, is then also a texto montado that car-
ries the stories that the Archive of Dominicanidad has silenced. The fact that
the novel reached international success also consecrates it as a monument of
contradiction.
Like Bosch, Marrero Aristys, and Alexiss stories, The Farming of Bones
takes place within the context of a Cibao sugarcane town, allowing the reader
to experience the complexity of Haitian-Dominican twentieth-century so-
cioeconomic history. The accuracy of historical dates, as well as the authors
insistence on the Haitian body as a contact zone for historical encounters,
echoes Alexiss narrative project. Danticats text, however, proposes the ne-
cessity to examine the consequences of historical events. Unlike the other
texts examined herein, which end with a view of the slaughter or the death
of the suffering character, The Farming of Bones insists on the contemporary
urgency of history as embodied in the memory of the surviving victims and
the subsequent generations. Written in English and published in the United
States, Danticats novel seems to take Alexiss proposal a step further by pro-
voking a pan-Caribbean dialogue that looks at the violence of history from
outside the geographical and linguistic borders of the island nations. It chal-
lenges established historical and rhetorical perspectives. In that sense, the
novel reproduces, as Luca Surez argues, the possibility of viewing tragedy
from the perspective of a potential witness.90 The characters live as witnesses,
if not of the massacre, then of the traumatic effects transmitted through the
experience of those who, like Tamaras family, did survive.
A form of interpellation and transnational linkage can be seen in Dan-
ticats The Farming of Bones, which examines the structures of nationalism
124 CHAPTER 3
when history has served the purpose of the state.92 Writers of the US Carib-
bean diasporasuch as Julia lvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Cristina Garca,
Achy Obejas, and Nelly Rosariooften contradict the canon imposed by
the paternalistic discourse of national Caribbean narratives by destabilizing
history at a very fundamental level. Julia lvarez and Edwidge Danticat, for
instance, have proposed an other history from the perspective of women.
Achy Obejas and Nelly Rosario queered the foundational fictions of the na-
tion, extending the love to a geographical triangulation that includes the
political relationship with the United States and the everyday lives of the
exiled/immigrant subjects.
Diasporic interpellations thus insert themselves within the national ar-
chives while posing new ways to question official truths. The public discom-
fort of nationalist historians with the fictionalization of truths, demon-
strated for instance in the publicized exchange between historian Bernardo
Vega and Edwidge Danticat, points to the capacity of diasporic literature for
destabilizing the national archive.93 Through the fictionalization of historical
interpellations, diasporic writers participate in the debates of two national
narratives: the one they evoke (Dominican Republic/Haiti/Cuba) and the
one they invoke (United States). Consequently, their work produces trans-
national bonds that blur the geographies of home and propose a fluid vision
that connects wider sociohistorical discussions of dictatorships, US military
intervention, imperialism, and economic exploitation to the local experience
of their immigrant communities.
The brutality of the Massacre of 1937, as well as other tragedies of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuriessuch as US military interventions,
local dictatorships, and the earthquake of 2010has affected both Haiti
and the Dominican Republic. The process of remembering the specificities
of tragic events, as seen through this study, has been marked by silences,
omissions, and allegorical representations that, though sometimes summon-
ing an important critique of the colonial, imperial, and dictatorial realities
that intervene in the production of Hispaniolas history, often erase the
rayano and the black body from the archive. Foregrounding the rayano body
in our discussion of the Haitian-Dominican border, this chapter argues, can
help us find more than a space of violence and separation in the Haitian-
Dominican border; such foregrounding also helps locate embodied mem-
ory from which silences can be confronted. My reading thus calls for rayano
consciousnessone that acknowledges the border and its people as human
subjects rather than as objects of state and colonial control.
126 CHAPTER 3
II
Rayano Consciousness
Remapping the Haiti-DR Border after the Earthquake of 2010
Consider Sonia Marmolejos and understand why, despite everything, I still have hope.
Junot Daz, Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal
In January 2010, as the world coped with news about one of the most le-
thal disasters in the history of humanity, Sonia Marmolejos, a Dominican
rayana from Bahoruco, became a worldwide celebrity.1 On January 14, brav-
ing the chaos left by the magnitude seven earthquake that shook the island
of Hispaniola, killing about 230,000 people, Marmolejos traveled to the
capital city of Santo Domingo to seek medical assistance for her two-year-
old daughter. The toddler was born with a rare genetic condition and re-
quired bone replacement surgery to walk. Marmolejos was hoping to receive
aid for her daughter at the public Daro Contreras Hospital, where she had
finally been able to secure an appointment after a six-month wait. But when
she arrived, the toddler could not be seen because all medical personnel were
tending to the hundreds of Haitians in critical condition who had been air-
lifted to the Daro Contreras Hospital after the disaster.2
While waiting for her daughter to be seen, Marmolejos noticed a baby
suffering from cranial wounds among the injured Haitians. The baby cried
incessantly and seemed dehydrated and hungry. Marmolejos, who had left
her own four-month-old baby in Bahoruco in her mothers care, acted on
maternal instinct, picking up the Haitian infant and nursing him to sleep:
Yo lo vi as y actu por impulso, como madre, es lo que poda hacer (I saw
him in that state, and I acted on instinct, as a mother, I did what I could).3
Days later, Marmolejos continued going to the hospital, eventually nursing
twelve injured babies to wellness.4 The Dominican mothers humanitarian
gesture moved people across the globe. The photograph of a smiling Sonia
4.1 Sonia Marmolejos smiles while nursing a wounded baby at the Daro Contreras
Hospital. Viviano de Len, Listn Diario, January 17, 2010. Courtesy of Viviano de
Len.
130 CHAPTER 4
4.2 Sonia Marmolejos (center) is congratulated by the president of the Dominican
Republic, Leonel Fernndez (far left), after she was awarded the Duarte y Snchez
Order. She stands next to former president of Haiti Ren Prval (left) and former
US president and special un representative for Haiti Bill Clinton (right) during the
opening session of the World Summit for the Future of Haiti in Punta Cana, Do-
minican Republic, June 2, 2010. Erica Santelices / afp / Getty Images.
132 CHAPTER 4
Dominican racial antagonism. Her public act of nursing becomes part of
a larger performative archive of rayano contradictions this chapter produces
through the dialogic analysis of a variety of temporally, linguistically, and
formally diverse texts: Cantos de la frontera, a poetry collection (1963) by
Dominican nationalist writer Manuel Rueda; a series of performances and
videos (20052010) by David Karmadavis Prez; and Da pa lo do, a song
and music video (2011) by writer and performer Rita Indiana Hernndez.
In her influential book The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor
argues that performance in the Americas is a vital act of transfer, transmit-
ting social knowledge, cultural memory, and identities.11 For Taylor, both the
archive (texts and other documents) and the repertoire (so-called ephem-
eral social practices, such as spoken language, gestures, and rituals) operate
as valued sites of knowledge making and transmission. Following Taylors
important theorization of the archive and the repertoire, this chapter pro-
poses Marmolejoss act of transferthe practice of communal nursingas
a framework for understanding what I call rayano consciousness: the multi-
plicity of performative dictions that make up the transnational, interethnic,
and multilinguistic borders of dominicanidad.
Through rayano consciousness, artists, writers, and the general public are
able to confront anti-Haitianism within and beyond the island territory and
find communal ways to create and historicize their own everyday realities.
Transcending the conceptual limits of the militarized territorial Haitian-
Dominican border, my conceptualization of rayano consciousness remaps
Hispaniolas borders on the historicized body of the Dominican racialized
subject, bringing attention to the persistent violence of colonial presence, but
also to multiple ways of contestations. Rayano consciousness offers the possi-
bility of imagining the rayano body as a site for the performance of political
contradiction. This process is evident in the works of David Prez and the
music video by Rita Indiana Hernndez that I engage in this chapter, as both
artists physically embody the genealogical trauma of the Haitian-Dominican
border violence in order to contradict it. But rayano consciousness also
evokes a moment prior to the violence and destruction that has marked the
narration of Haitian-Dominican relations since 1937a moment immor-
talized in the post-Trujillo poetry of nationalist writer Manuel Rueda. This
chapter historicizes the multiple ways in which contemporary artists from
different traditions and generations have interpellated the hegemonic ver-
sion of the Haitian-Dominican border through the figure of the rayano and
the Lnea Fronteriza territory. The works I engage in this chapter produce an
134 CHAPTER 4
La tierra era pequea y yo no tena otro oficio que el de
recorrerla. . . .
y mis espaldas era fuertes como los caminos y las
montaas de la tierra.
A veces sucedanse juegos y locas carreras a lo largo de la costa,
pero me detena el mar
l slo era mi valla y yo me asemejaba a l en podero y
ansia de lo libre.15 (emphasis added)
[The land was small and I had no occupation other than that of
traversing it. . . .
and my back was strong like the roads and the
mountains of the land.
Sometimes games and crazy paths would occur along the coast,
but the sea held me back.
The sea alone was my border, and I took after him in the power and
longing of freedom.]
One of the most intriguing metaphors of Ruedas Cancin del rayano is
that of the sea as a border. When thinking about borders as a location for
the exercise of colonial and state control, we tend to imagine them as land
between two nations. Yet, in the Caribbean and, more recently, in the Medi-
terranean, the question of bordering the nation inevitably encompasses the
sea from which potential threatsin the form of colonial forces or, more
recently, undocumented immigrantscan arrive. A contemporary reading
of the sea-border metaphor encapsulates the image of boat people, to bor-
row from Mayra Santos-Febres, or yoleros, who risk their lives in homemade
rafts to cross the dangerous Mona Canal from Hispaniola to Puerto Rico,
or balseros crossing the deathly ninety-mile route from Havana to Florida in
search of a better life.16
For Ruedas poetic voice, however, the sea is both a valla (fence) keeping
him from leaving the island as well as a symbol of freedom. It is the space
that marks both the end of the insular territory and the beginning of the
endless possibilities of a world beyond. The notion on the Caribbean Sea
as a dichotomist barrier/opening dialogues with a larger Caribbean intel-
lectual and literary tradition defining the archipelago. douard Glissant,
for instance, describes the Caribbean Sea as the estuary of the Americas
where the three great riversthe Mississippi, the Orinoco, and the Ama-
zonflow into the Atlantic.17 Following Glissants articulation, the Carib-
136 CHAPTER 4
of the island. In addition, Haitians had been living on the western part of San
Juan (south) and Artibonito (north) for at least a century after the Aranjuez
Treaty was signed, knowingly ignoring colonial laws.21 During the years fol-
lowing the proclamation of independence, Dominican patriots such as Flix
Mara del Monte and ngel Perdomo sought to restore the original line
defined in the Treaty of Aranjuez as the legitimate division of the island, an
action that, as Sili reminds us, responded to a colonized imagination.22
Critiquing the colonial imagination that dominated Dominican politics
in the second half of the twentieth century, Ruedas Cancin del rayano
musters a prepartition Hispaniola, when the rayano inhabited a free (bor-
derless) land. Ruedas rayano world thus precedes the nation(s), and as such
exists beyond the nation in a space that is, according to the poem, its own
earthLa tierra era pequea . . . (The land [or the earth] was small . . .).23
This space was thus more than a nation. Ruedas depiction of the rayano as
indigenous to Hispaniola is incredibly powerful as it contradicts the official
narrative of Dominican racial hybridity that nineteenth-century intellectu-
als and writers had explained through indigenismo.24 They deployed indios
as the ethnic element of the national racial makeup, and as the true and
only natives to the nation. Yet indios were also narrated as extinct, only sur-
viving in an indefinable space of national elite imagination. Substituting the
symbolic (decimated) Indian with the (living) rayano, Rueda contradicts the
Archive of Dominicanidad while challenging the persistent Hispanophile
rhetoric that renders Haitians and Dominicans as ethnic enemies.
In the opening poem of the collection, Canto de regreso a la tierra pro-
metida (Song of Return to the Promised Land), Rueda insists on the raya
the unnatural division of the land and peoplerather than the rayanothe
people who inhabit the territory now divided by the stateas the evidence
of colonial violence:
Medias montaas,
medios ros,
y hasta la muerte
compartida.
El medioda parte
de lado a lado al hombre
y le parte el descanso,
parte la sombra en dos y
duplica el ardor.25
138 CHAPTER 4
land poet, is thus charged with the difficult task of standing on the border
hoping to unite this broken island-person into a whole again:
Oye al pobre poeta,
un corazn entero, tan entero!
cantar en medio de las heridas
sin comprender la marca de la tierra
sin probar de su fruto dividido27
[Hear the poor poet,
a whole heart, so complete!
sing in the midst of wounds
without understanding the lay of the land,
without tasting of its divided fruit]
Literary critic Homi K. Bhabha defines the border as a Third Space where
the cultures and values of both the colonizer and the colonized transform
into something new.28 Ruedas placing of the lyric voice in between Haiti and
the Dominican Republicon the rayais an important symbolic gesture
for transforming and contesting the dominant rhetoric of the nation-state, as
suggested by Bhabha. It proposes that borderer, the rayano, has the potential
of being both self and other, serving as a translator between languages and
cultures. In so doing, the poet proposes rayano consciousness as an antidote
to the colonial imagination that dominates and cuts Hispaniola into two
antagonistic halves.
Ruedas divided island became a trope celebrated by both anti- and pro-
Haitian writers of the second half of the twentieth century because the
metaphor encapsulated a clear, if violent, visual of the destiny of the two
peoples inhabiting Hispaniola. Yet, contrary to what anti-Haitian writers
imagined, Ruedas poem is not a geopolitical manifesto of what has come to
be known as the Haitian-Dominican problem. Rather, the poem visualizes
what the rayano, as one who stands in between the two halves of the island,
can see from his/her vantage point: Mira tu paraso entre dos fuegos, nido
de serpientes elsticas (Look at your paradise between two fires, nest of
elastic serpents).29 The powerful image of the two fires and elastic serpents
that destroy the unity of the island poses a strong critique of the political
imposition of the two states seeking to control the people and land of the
Lnea Fronteriza.
Ruedas poetic voice represents the rayano body as a symbol of anticolo-
140 CHAPTER 4
Trata de dormir ahora,
de entregar el nico prpado a tu sueo
inconcluso.
Trata de dormir.
Tratemos de dormir
hasta que nos despierten
leadores robustos,
hombres de pala y canto
que hagan variar el curso de nuestra pesarosa
isla amada,
de nuestro desquiciado
planeta.33
[Try to sleep now,
to surrender the singular eyelid to your
unfinished slumber.
Try to sleep.
We must try to sleep
until we are awakened by
robust woodcutters,
men of the shovel and song
who will change the course of our sorrowful
beloved island,
of our insane
planet.]
A sense of urgency becomes clearer in the last verse of the poem, warning
about the possibility of colonial/imperial intervention, as symbolized by
the metaphor of leadores robustos. Responding to a Latin American social
consciousness that very much marked the literary production of the mid-
twentieth century, Rueda was acutely aware of US political and military in-
terventions in Latin America. His reading of the border locates Haitian-
Dominican relations in a global context, while warning about the dangers
of US military interventions in a premonitory tone.34
Ruedas poetry presents the rayano as a symbolic category for explaining
the Haitian-Dominican border. In so doing, the author successfully chal-
lenges the anti-Haitian nationalist writing machine that was set into full
speed during the Trujillo regime. This contesting position was highly criti-
142 CHAPTER 4
The proud stroke upon the silencing cane field . . .
And I knew that there would never be hope for you or
Us,
Brother who stayed for a night, from afar,
Forgotten and asleep beside the water.]
Ruedas lyric voice laments the attack on the multiethnic rayano com-
munities through genocide and border policies, and through the increasing
political and symbolic persecution of border subjects at the hands of nation-
alist thinkers. Writing from exile in the 1940s, the poet appeals to a human-
istic rather than a political reaction, lauding what he perceives as the origin
and destiny of the island as a whole. Referring to Haitians as brothers, the
author laments the genocide of 1937 not only as a human catastrophe, but
also as a spiritual destruction that separated siblings. The Massacre of 1937
destroys hope and the possibility of reconciliation, not only for Haitians
but also for nosotros, Dominicans. Ruedas interpretation of the massacre is
as a destruction of Dominican essence, and not as an event affecting only
Haitian immigrants. Contradicting international depictions of the genocide,
Rueda asserts that the Massacre of 1937 happened to all of Hispaniola, avow-
ing the rayano as part of the Dominican nation.
Part IV of Canto de la frontera is a critique of the complicity of the Hai-
tian and Dominican states in the destruction of the rayano communities:
IV
Era domingo y despus de or los himnos y discursos
despus de batir palmas, los seores presidentes se abrazaron. . . .
Luego los dignos visitantes, sin traspasar las lneas,
retirronse al ritmo de msicas contrarias
reverencias y mudas arrogancias y volvimos a dar nuestros alertas,
a quedar con el ojo sooliento sobre los matorrales encrespados.
Y volvimos a comer nuestra pobre racin, solos, lentamente,
all donde el Artibonito corre distribuyendo la hojarasca.40
[It was Sunday, and after hearing the hymns and speeches
after clapping our hands, the presidents embraced. . . .
Then the visiting dignitaries, without overstepping their bounds,
went back to the rhythm of opposing music
reverences and mute arrogances and we went back to give our warnings,
to remain with a sleepy eye upon the rough overgrowth.
144 CHAPTER 4
despite all attempts to define the borders.43 As argued in chapter 3, the Mas-
sacre of 1937 was an attack on rayano communities as much as it was on Hai-
tian immigrants living on the borderlands.44
Ruedas recasting of the rayano as intrinsic to the nation is powerful be-
cause it confronts the unmentionable truth of the 1937 genocide: that Do-
minicans killed Dominicans. The common narration of the Massacre of
1937 as an attack of Dominicans against Haitians does not erase its horrific
nature. However, the displacement of the genocide as one of Dominicans
against Haitians perpetuates the narrative of conflict and hatred that has
sustained anti-Haitianism for over a century. The dominant rhetoric of the
massacre also led to the further erasure of rayanos from the history of both
nations, a fact that has contributed to the continued obliteration of these
communities from the national imagination. Ruedas rayano consciousness
reminds the presumed Dominican reader of several points that have been
erased by all prior literary depictions of the frontier and of the 1937 destruc-
tion: (1) Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same land, and share
a connection that goes deeper than national identity. (2) The rayano is not
only Haitian, nor is he only Dominican, but a hybrid subject who is indige-
nous to the borderland and who suffers the great tragedy of having been
divided in half, the same way the land was. The rayanos lack of national al-
legiance is, according to Rueda, also natural, and so he/she must be under-
stood and nurtured rather than alienated and persecuted. (3) Both nations
need to cooperate and coexist because the ecological future of the island
depends on it.
Keeping the concerns that underline Ruedas Cantos de la frontera in
mind, one can see strong correlations between the factors contributing to
Ruedas rayano consciousness and those contributing to a resurgence of a
rayano consciousness in contemporary times. The issues raised in Cantos
de la frontera illuminate some of the actions and reactions of cultural and
political actors in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, contributing to the
dissemination of rayano consciousness in the public sphere. The 2010 tremor
literally shook both Hispaniola nations, though only Haiti suffered massive
destruction. Writer Junot Daz, reflecting on the earthquake, says it shook
Dominicans to the core, making them contemplate the vulnerability of the
island and the tangible possibility of disaster that Rueda warned his compa-
triots about in 1963.45 In the days following the quake, the spirit of interde-
pendence and cooperation symbolized in the figure of the rayano, as imag-
ined by Rueda, overcame the general public. Artists, and scholars, began to
146 CHAPTER 4
4.3 Lnea fronteriza. Video still courtesy of David Karmadavis Prez.
tradition that engages the topics of violence, state repression, drug wars, dic-
tatorships, and the presence of coloniality in Latin America. Further, a read-
ing of Prezs works places the Haitian-Dominican border conflict beyond
the island and in the context of the growing global border violence that has
marked the beginning of the twenty-first century.
One of the most powerful critiques of border violence is found in Prezs
piece Lo que dice la piel (What the Skin Says; 2005). Through a translator,
the artist asks an undocumented Haitian immigrant to tell him what he
thought was the cause of the Haitian-Dominican conflict. The Haitian man
writes his answer on a piece of paper: biznis gouvenman bnefis gouven-
man (government business benefits governments). The mans words sum-
148 CHAPTER 4
body engravingsocial, surgical, epistemic, disciplinaryall mark, indeed
constitute, bodies in culturally specific ways.47 Groszs theorization of the
body-text is particularly helpful in thinking about the political project guid-
ing Prezs Lo que dice la piel. A light-skinned Dominican from the capital
city of Santo Domingo, Prezs body contains, as Grosz would argue, the
historical (if at first invisible) inscriptions of the Dominican states colonial
imagination. His light skin and level of education, as well as his privileged
position as an artist, serve as a sort of passport, allowing him free passage in
the everyday life interactions of urban Dominican Republic. The decision
to mark his skin with Kreyl is a way of both acknowledging and challeng-
ing his own privileged position as an heir to (perhaps unwanted) colonial
privilege. The incorporation of pain and blood through the act of tattooing
Kreyl, however, also operates as a permanent reminder of the historical
violence of Hispaniolas borders. Lo que dice la piel rebukes the ephemeral
nature of performance art through the permanent inscription of the Kreyl
message on the artists skin. The incorporation of pain and blood, in addi-
tion to using the body as Kreyl text, physically summons recognition of
the colonial legacy of the Haitian-Dominican border violence while simul-
taneously challenging the presence of coloniality on his performative body.
Prezs permanent performance of Haitian-Dominican solidarity contains
a palimpsest of representations: the violent and the communal, the Haitian
and the Dominican episteme, and the presence of the linguistic difference-
unity of the Lnea Fronteriza.
The notion of an island divided by linguistic difference has been an im-
portant thread sustaining anti-Haitianism since the early twentieth century.
The nationalization of the Spanish language was the most important tool in
the process of Dominican national identity formation since the birth of the
republic in the nineteenth century.48 As language historian Juan R. Valdez
argues, Spanish was an important way of differentiating Dominicans from
their neighbors during colonial times, allowing colonos to maintain cultural
ties with Spain.49 In the period following the Massacre of 1937, the ability to
speak Spanish clearly became a symbol of national belonging, particularly
for dark-skinned Dominicansa dynamic symbolized in the racist popular
phrase El que sea prieto que hable claro (If you are black, speak clearly).
During the days of the Massacre of 1937, cultural authenticityas deter-
mined by the ability to speak Spanishbecame the deciding factor for sur-
vival. One of the methods of identification consisted of asking the potential
victim to pronounce the word perejil (parsley), the assumption being that
150 CHAPTER 4
4.5 Still from Estructura completa,
2010. Courtesy of David Prez.
superimposed on his torso. The mans eyes are closed, while hers are open.
The notion of completeness, of a single structure, comes through quite
clearly in the still despite the gender and skin differences. Prez describes
Estructura completa as a complete human structure made of two individuals
who form something whole.51 A strong metaphor for the Dominican and
Haitian peoples, Estructura completa interpellates the history of Hispaniola
as two fragmented territories sharing tragedies, particularly that of having
been guided by deficient mutilated governments that care very little about
the people who sustain them.52 The performance, which first debuted in
the Len Jimnez exhibition in Santiago, urges the viewer to think about
Haitian-Dominican relations from quotidian observations, away from na-
tionalistic rhetoric, devoid of flags and removed from the imposed territorial
border. The author appeals to a sense of urgency of the present reality of two
peoples who, crippled by the presence of coloniality, can only make headway
through cooperation and interdependency, through a rayano consciousness
in which Hispaniola can be imagined as a whole island.53
152 CHAPTER 4
sciousness, offering meaningful explorations of Haitian-Dominican (mis)
understandings, Estructura completa became the climactic piece of his ca-
reer, earning a place in the Venice Biennale in 2011. The timing, as the piece
was first presented a few months after the earthquake of 2010, was of par-
ticular importance at a moment in which Dominicans grappled with their
role as partners in the reconstruction of a partially destroyed island. Fol-
lowing the earthquake, Dominican rescue workers were the first to enter
Haiti. They arrived within hours of the quake, and in the crucial first days
of the crisis, Dominicans offered Haiti urgent aid that saved thousands of
victims. Dominican hospitals, for instance, were emptied in order to receive
the wounded, and all elective surgeries were canceled for three months. The
Dominican government provided generators, mobile kitchens, and clinics
on Haitian grounds. In addition, Dominican communities in the US and
Europe organized to send supplies and money to the victims. While Estruc-
tura completa was not actually inspired by the earthquake, as the artist con-
ceived the piece before the tragedy, the video performance came to repre-
sent an important metaphor for the mindset and concerns of Dominicans
following the tragedy.57
One of the most significant actions of solidarity that emerged as a result
of the tragedy came, shockingly, from the Dominican state. President Leo-
nel Fernndez, seeing the urgent need of the victims and the slow response
of the international community, declared an open border policy, allowing
Haitians to transit freely to the Dominican Republic without need of doc-
umentation.58 The atmosphere, briefly captured in the short film El seno de
la esperanza (Milk of Hope; 2012), was marked by a steady flow of wounded
Haitians walking east on the International Highway while Dominican pass-
ersby watched with mixed expressions of horror and sadness.59 Some offered
help, water, or food; others just watched in tears. Though there were anti-
Haitian reactions in the public sphere, as well as in the media, the major-
ity of Dominicans either actively tried to reach out to Haitians, or at the
very least avoided causing them more pain. A few days after the earthquake,
a common scene in Santo Domingo included Dominicans giving up their
seats for Haitians on crowded buses, or passersby asking Haitian street ven-
dors if everyone in their family was safe. Meditating on this significant shift,
author Junot Daz writes: In a shocking reversal of decades of toxic enmity,
it seemed as if the entire Dominican society mobilized for relief effort. . . .
This historic shift must have Trujillo rolling in his grave. 60 As if inspired
154 CHAPTER 4
Trans-Bordering Rayano Consciousness
156 CHAPTER 4
soldiershave sponsored death and pain, when stripped of their uniforms
and flags, the peoples of both countries simply love each other.
Caribbean scholar M. Jacqui Alexander proposes memory as an anti-
dote to alienation, separation, and the amnesia that domination produces.68
Hernndezs video performance recalls the painful historical moments that
have marked the narrative of Haitian-Dominican relations, while seem-
ing to pose the questions: But where are we now? And more importantly,
where do we go from here? Hernndezs answers to these interrogations,
I argue, materialize in the contradicting narratives that the song and video
offer. These narratives of contradiction fill in the gaps perpetuated by the
dominant scholarship on Haitian-Dominican relations, while also shatter-
ing the long silences sustained by the Hispanophile hegemony of the Archive
of Dominicanidad. In so doing, the memories created in Da pa lo do, as
Alexander would suggest, have the potential to be become an antidote to
the coloniality of power that engendered and sustained anti-Haitianism for
over a century.
The first and most significant contradiction to the hegemonic version of
dominicanidad Da pa lo do presents us with is the metaphor of the Do-
minican Republic as an orphaned child. Nineteenth-century Dominican in-
tellectuals, battling with their desire for sovereignty and their yearning to
maintain a link to Mother Spain, lamented the loss of Hispanic cultural
values, blaming the challenges of their republican enterprise on that loss.69
Hernndez rescues the metaphor of orphanage that nineteenth-century let-
tered men repeated, but rather than apply it only to Dominicans, she recasts
both siblings as colonial orphans.
Without a mother, the two sibling-nations must depend only on the care
of an abusive and brutish father: Haban dos hermanitos compartiendo un
pedacito porque eran muy pobrecitos y no tenan ni mam (There were two
little brothers sharing a little piece because they were so poor, and they didnt
even have a mother).70 By making both brother-nations orphans, Hernndez
deconstructs the foundational myth of the Dominican Republic that per-
sisted in casting Haiti as a colonizer-invader, replacing it with a memory of
the shared colonial history of the two nations:
Sintelo
el abrazo del mismo abuelo
Desde Juana Mndez hasta Maimn
Y desde ah a Dajabn71
158 CHAPTER 4
nial/imperial history, Da pa lo do reminds us that the US continues to be a
force in deciding the fate of the two nations. Hispaniolas survival depends,
as Prezs performances also suggest, on the two nations willingness to work
together as one:
Una puerta para do comenj
Dos nmeros pa juga pal
Un mar de sudor pa to eto pece
al, al, al.76
[One door for two termites
Two numbers to play the lotto
One ocean of sweat for all these fish
al, al, al.]
If left unaddressed, the inherited violence, Hernndez suggests, will turn
destructive as the two sibling-nations will slowly, like termites, destroy the
island, leaving behind only more violence and dust. Hernndezs historical
interpellation of Haitian-Dominican conflicts contradicts the dominant dis-
course of difference sustaining anti-Haitianism by insisting instead on the
two siblings as abandoned orphans living in poverty under the tight grip of
an abusive and dominant father.
The image of Haiti and the Dominican Republic as two (contrasting)
parts of a whole has been a recurring trope in Dominican Narratives of Sol-
idarity of the twentieth century, as seen in the work of Bosch, as well as in
US public and intellectual discourses of difference regarding the two nations
of Hispaniola. In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, for instance, con-
trasting views of Haiti and the Dominican Republic resurged in US media.
Almost every mention of Haiti in the press reiterated that it was the poor-
est nation in the western hemisphere, in comparison with its prosperous
brother/neighbor.77 Words such as chaos and dysfunction, as well as a
recounting of Haitis historical struggle for democracy, almost always ac-
companied the images of destruction. Through a discourse of pity, Haitis
misfortunes were racialized as results of the countrys African religiosity and
as signs of barbarism and incivility, a view exemplified in the now-famous
broadcast by televangelist Pat Robertson. Robertson opined that Haitians
were suffering because they had made a pact with the devil and turned
their backs on God.78 A few days after Robertsons remarks, David Brooks
published a column in the New York Times in which he explained Haitis
160 CHAPTER 4
and Haitian peoples, allegorized in the two soldiers, that rather than being
at the service of the state, their loyalty should be to the spirit, which resides
in the soul of the land and the bodies of the people.
Traumatic memories are often marked on the body as the result of state
impositions of the colonial order. To get rid of such trauma, the Afro-
religious believe, the body must be stripped and washed of traumatic inscrip-
tions so that that it can heal, once again becoming a canvas onto which new
narratives of truth can be inscribed. In Afro-Dominican religious rituals,
despojos (cleansings) are often practiced on people living through hardships
and sorrows. The despojado (person being cleansed) must wear only white
clothes during the ritual so that the body can successfully absorb light and
goodness, ridding itself of all spiritual ailments. Hernndez transfers, to
borrow from Taylor, the religious performance onto the political realm
through the image of the two soldiers who, stripping their uniforms and
wearing only white pants, proceed to wash in the river (see figure 4.6). The
two men then receive the cleansing from the Madonna, embracing in broth-
erly peace.
The image of the mulata Madonna (figure 4.7) is the richest and most
provocative one in the music video, yet I found it the most difficult with
which to engage. Though Hernndezs performances and literary works are
known for their stylistic irreverence, the artists decision to appear in what,
from a US perspective, may be perceived of as blackface made me terribly
uncomfortable at first. I decided to study the song as soon as I first heard it
on the radio. Once the video launched, however, I was drawn to its symbolic
richness, and in particular to Hernndezs engagement of Afro-religiosity as
an anticolonial praxis. Yet the performance of the mulata Madonna brought
me closer to a confrontation with my own contradictions.
Though I am a light-skinned Dominican like Hernndez, my encoun-
ter with US racism, particularly outside the urban area in which I grew up,
led me to identify as black. Still, I am awareand often remindedof the
fact that in the Dominican Republic, my light complexion and my acquired
middle class make me a racially privileged Dominican.83 My own racial con-
tradictions, combined with my engagement in US race/ethnicity struggles,
provoked a discursive dead end in my analysis (commonly known as writers
block) when confronting the mulata Madonna. In order to escape this crisis,
I began to ask myself questions about my own discomfort with the image:
Why did the Madonna bother me so much? Was I examining the video
within its historically specific context? How did the image of the Madonna
164 CHAPTER 4
Leonardos virgin was intended as a representation of the racial majority of
the population. However, read outside the intended cultural context and
through a US-mediated racial lens, the video resulted in another contro-
versy that further condemned Dominicans for what was perceived as a lack
of racial consciousness.
Reading multiple reactions to the video posted on YouTube and Face-
book, though paralyzing at first, also pushed me to confront my own con-
tradictions about the mulata Madonna in Da pa lo do. A culturally specific
reading of Da pa lo do would not cast Hernndez as a performer in black-
face, as many of the commenters suggested. Instead, it points to the artists
embodiment of the mulata Madonna as an attempt to make Afro-Hispaniola
religiosity an alternative way for understanding the islands cultures and his-
tories. Arguably, Hernndez was not in blackfacea term specific to US
racial historybut in brown skin, a counterhegemonic action in the con-
text of Dominican national ideology and cultural dominance.
The controversial reactions to the video that inundated cyberspace
shortly after its international debut raise concerns regarding how scholars,
writers, and cultural producers understand and disseminate information re-
garding sociopolitical and historical processes and their effects on communi-
ties. A more just approach thus necessitates the constant and often difficult
exercise of entering the cultural specificity of the subject as part of larger
transnational intellectual dialogues. While difficult, this practice is the only
fruitful way of understanding and engaging complicated topics, such as race,
without falling into a colonizing trick in which that which we are seeking
to deconstruct is reproduced in our work.95 After pushing through my own
contradictions, I was able to approach the mulata Madonna within the cul-
tural context in which she was produced, a process that in turn allowed me
to unpack the various meanings she embodied, finding multiple layers of
significations beyond the oversimplification of US black-white racial un-
derstanding.
The mulata Madonna is also Mambo Ezili Freda, the deity of love and
discord, herself an image of contradiction. Ezili Freda is powerful and sen-
suous, emanating life and beauty, yet she can be vengeful and can be used to
divide lovers. Ezili is mulata; her mixed-race ancestry represents power and
wealth while also symbolizing the hybrid nature of the island after the colo-
nial encounter. She is a native of Hispaniola and a rayana. In addition to her
many attributes, Mambo Ezili Freda is known for her love of jewelry, a sign
of her delicate femininity and upper-class status. Leonardos version of Ezili
166 CHAPTER 4
mass media forms.99 The Virgin Mary, in all its variations, is often offered
as a sacred image of the nation, as the mother watching over a country. In-
stead of giving us La Vrgen de la Altagracia, the white, pure image of Do-
minican Christianity, Hernndez presents us with a virgin in drag, as Rachel
Combs puts itone that is African, brown, Dominicanyork, irreverent, and
sexual.100 Similar to the appropriation of the Vrgen de Guadalupe by the
Chicana feminist artists Combs explores, Hernndezs mulata Madonna
crosses a multiplicity of borders, becoming a contact zone for the marginal
subjectivities of dominicanidad. Rather than a virgin mother, offering un-
conditional yet passive love, Hernndezs virgin comes across as a tguera
(woman with street smarts)a matron whose knowledge is both spiritual
and immensely mundane. She understands it all, as she is both the spiritual
mother and the immigrant-mother-returnee who has come back to care for
her (abandoned) children.
The Dominicanyork returnee virgin is an important metaphor for the
social reality of present-day Hispaniola. Migration continually forces the
separation of Hispaniola families, as mothers are often obligated to leave
their children behind in the care of extended family to go abroad to work
caring for children of the privileged. Referred to as los dejados (those left be-
hind), these children often experience feelings of abandonment and resent-
ment. Los dejados are a recurring theme in Hernndezs literary and musical
work through which the artist insists on the impact of migration on those
who never travel but are as affected by the process. In Hernndezs novel Papi
(2004), for instance, the main character, an eight-year-old girl, fantasizes
about the return of her father from New York. Though her fathers absence
is compensated for by gifts from abroad, the girls yearning for her fathers
presence drives her into a fantasy world to which she retreats when her father
is killed in the Bronx.101
A rayano consciousness, as articulated through Hernndezs work, de-
mands an understanding of the triangularity of Hispaniolas borders and the
tangibility of the diasporic rayano experience. Haitians migrating to the Do-
minican Republic must often leave their children behind to work; Domini-
can migrants must do the same. Meanwhile, children and loved ones left
behind experience the violence of migration in different and complicated
ways. Abandonment and the orphanage are both symbolic and real experi-
ences affecting both peoples of Hispaniola. The only way to bear the pain of
the reality is, as Hernndez insists, through a very tangible form of solidarity
and interdependencyone that requires a return to the communal way of
168 CHAPTER 4
Moved by Sonias actions, Vargas, a Dominican American whose career
was launched in the United States, returned to the island to make the film.
In the process, the story the film narrates became intertwined with the film-
makers experiences, providing a metaphor for understanding how rayano
transnational consciousness is evolving as an integral part of dominicani-
dad. Though the rayano community that existed in the borders prior to 1937
was indeed violently attacked and destroyed by the Trujillo dictatorship in
1937, rayano consciousnessas exemplified in Marmolejoss actions, and
theorized in this chapter through the analysis of the artistic works of Rueda,
Prez, and Hernndezhas survived, gaining strength through the expe-
rience of migration(s) and diasporas. The reactions of Dominicans such as
Marmolejos following the earthquake allowed for an important epistemic
break that inspired cultural, literary, and artistic production, in addition to
a heightened sense of awareness at every level of the population. Has anti-
Haitianism, xenophobia, discrimination, and intolerance ended in the Do-
minican Republic? Sadly, it has not. But a more inclusive, fair, and construc-
tive dominicanidad in which the multiplicity of borders, experiences, and
identities can be represented has begun to be imagined, allowing for the visu-
alization of a dominicanidad inclusive of a multiplicity of borders, through
which more than 150 years of oppression, silences, and hatred can finally be
contradicted.
Writing from El Ni
Exile and the Poetics of Dominicanidad Ausente
172 CHAPTER 5
these terms to accurately capture the experiences and conditions of the sub-
ject(s) they attempt to define.
A further analysis of Torres-Saillants enunciation necessitates a critique
of the performative element of the dictions migration, exile, and expatriation
as linked to questions of representation, legality, and national belonging or
acceptance. That is, these terms are more than mere descriptions, for they
can function as speech acts that could grant the exiled person, for instance,
certain legal rights and opportunities not usually available to the immigrant.
This disparity of meaning often extends from the statutory realmas in the
ability to obtain a work permit or a social security numberto the sym-
bolicas in cultural representations of migrants as unwanted subjects or
invadersbecause migration, unlike exile, is often perceived as voluntary, an
act of desire and will rather than an escape from oppression and desperation.
Torres-Saillants theory of Dominican migration as exile or expatriation is
the premise for this chapter. To Torres-Saillants contribution I add that in
the United States, Dominicans and their US-born descendants encounter
another form of exile as they become racialized into a US minority and are
thus excluded from full US citizenship, inhabiting the dual border space of
marginality. Dominicans who migrate to the United States are racexiles;
they are expunged from the Dominican nation because of their race yet they
remain inadmissible in the United States for the same reason.
Paradoxically, the dual marginality occupied by racexiled Dominicans has
resulted in an interstitial space of belonging that, borrowing from artist Jose-
fina Bez, I will call El Ni: literally neither here nor there.7 Like Anzaldas
metaphor of the borderlands as a barbwire in the epigraph of this chapter,
El Ni is an uncomfortable place that hurts and makes the subject bleed,
creating an open wound of historical rejection: una herida abierta.8 Yet this
discomfort also offers the possibility of finding a poetics of dominicanidad
ausente, from which to interject both US and Dominican histories. It is in
El Ni that the contradictions of dominicanidad are embraced and redefined,
allowing the Dominican subject to emerge as an agent of his or her own his-
tory and identity/ies, finding hope, harmony, and even bliss within this very
uncomfortable space of contradiction.
The image at the beginning of this chapter, titled Rabia (figure 5.1),
symbolizes the complexity of Dominican racialization as linked to the
ever-present role of the United States in the nations culture, politics, and
economy. Photojournalist Juan Prez Terrero took the photo during the
second US military intervention in the Dominican Republic that began
174 CHAPTER 5
exemplified by the work of Bosch and the diasporic literature of Dominican-
york writers such as Josefina Bez, this chapter traces the trajectory of both
authors linked by an ancestral notion of national identity in which writing
away from the national territory has allowed Dominicans to confront colo-
nial and state violence. The major difference between the exilic and dias-
poric writings of dominicanos ausentes is the desire and/or possibility of
returningclearly expressed in Boschs exilic literaturethat are absent in
the diasporic writings of El Ni, where there is no desire to return. The latter
embodies an active voice that contradicts, confronts, and revises the passivity
that dominates the hegemonic Archive of Dominicanidad.
176 CHAPTER 5
This is how the Dominican Revolutionary Party (Partido Revoluciona-
rio Dominicano, prd) was created in 1942.15 Traveling to the various coun-
tries where Dominicans had gone during the Trujillo regimeCuba, Puerto
Rico, the United States, and VenezuelaBosch was able to form small sec-
tions of perredesta supporters under the leadership of local juntas, a method
that would later become the basis for the Dominican party system. New
York and Havana became the two most important enclaves of dissidence
for Dominicans, while the technology of writingthe use of writing as a
mobilizing machinefunctioned as the medium for the creation of this
transnational community and for the drafting of a unique narrative of social
justice.
Upon his arrival in Puerto Rico in 1938, Bosch realized that he was known
as a writer because some of his short stories had been circulating in liter-
ary magazines. Through Boschs literary works, many readersincluding
important writers and thinkersbefriended Bosch, imagining, to borrow
from Benedict Anderson, a new form of nation.16 Bosch wrote:
Cuando llegamos a Puerto Rico tena solo 90 dlares pero encontr que
all me conocan; por lo menos me conocan en los crculos literarios y
a los pocos das tena amigos que hicieron todo por ayudarme, antes del
mes estaba trabajando en la trascripcin de todo, casi todo lo que haba
escrito Hostos, y puedo afirmar que Hostos fue para m una revelacin,
algo as como si hubiera vuelto a nacer. Es curioso que un maestro pueda
seguir siendo maestro 33 o 34 aos despus de muerto, pero en el caso
mo, Hostos hizo su obra de formador de conciencia un tercio de siglo
despus de su muerte.17
[When we arrived in Puerto Rico I had only $90, but I found out that
they knew me there, at least within the literary circles, and so within a few
days I had friends that did everything to help me out. Within a month I
was working on the transcription of everything, or at least almost every-
thing, that Hostos had written, and I can say that Hostos was a revelation
to me, something like a rebirth. It is interesting that a teacher can con-
tinue teaching thirty-three or thirty-four years after his death, but in my
case Hostos completed his work as conscious builder a third of a century
after his death.]
Much like the ideological closeness that Bosch developed with Hostos
while working on the edition of his works, many Caribbean literary circles
178 CHAPTER 5
as to a sense of legitimacy through the forced displacement of the narrator
from his homeland. It is important to note, however, that most of the stories
that appear in this collection had already been published as individual texts
or as shorter compilations under different titles. The decision to employ the
word exile in the title demonstrates Boschs awareness of the significance of
his condition as dominicano ausente. That is, Bosch was aware that his story
of forced migration would allow him to establish his political persona as a
patriotic leader who, despite being abroad for many years, was very much part
of the nation. In addition, Boschs exiled persona functions as a performative
contradiction that led the author to exile.20
In exile, Bosch was able to maintain an impressive closeness to the his-
tory and to the present political situation of the Dominican Republic, a task
he admitted was difficult yet rewarding: Los efectos del exilio en un escri-
tor pueden ser muy malos; desarraigan al escritor. Lo que ocurre es que yo
no me desarraigu. . . . Es decir, iba viviendo, minuto a minuto, la vida de la
Repblica Dominicana (The effects of exile can be devastating for a writer;
they can uproot him. But what happens is that I do not become uprooted. . . .
That is, I continue to live, minute to minute, the life of the Dominican Re-
public).21 Arguably, Boschs rooted consciousness constitutes one of the most
significant traits of the exile experience because, as Torres-Saillant insists,
those who leave never forget.22 The very condition of physical absence has
allowed diasporic Dominicans a consciousness evident in the prominence of
historical novels within the Dominican American literary corpus.23
Without attempting to, Bosch was able to draft the blueprints for the poet-
ics of dominicanidad ausente, which, as he eloquently describes during his in-
terview with Morrison, was largely present in the construction of the modern
Dominican nation. Thus, during his long and multiple exiles, Bosch became
the first thinker to articulate and promote a dominicanidad that could extend
outside the geographical borders of the nation. He did this by believing in the
likelihood of a community alliance of Dominicans living abroad with those
who resided on the island, and by insisting on the possibility of staying rooted
in the nation while being physically forced out by the regime.
Boschs absence from the national territory is presumed, in the titles of his
books, as a necessity, an involuntary and temporary circumstance caused by
the persecution of a dictatorial regime. However, as Torres-Saillant argues,
all diasporic Dominicans are living in exile because they have been forced
out of their nation by hunger and desperation.24 Following Torres-Saillants
argument, we should read Boschs discourse of exile as the earliest beginnings
On April 28, 1965, the US military landed in Santo Domingo with the excuse
of protecting American investment in the island during the civil war that had
begun a few days earlier. The purpose of the war was to restore the demo-
cratically elected president, Juan Bosch, who was then in exile.25 A little over
two years prior to the intervention, an overwhelming majority had elected
Bosch president of the republic, only for a military coup headed by Colo-
nel Elas Wessin y Wessin to overthrow it seven months later on September
25, 1963. A triumvirate was established shortly after, but dissidence and the
desire for democracy produced a series of social upheavals that ultimately
gained the support of the liberal faction of the military that favored a return
to the Constitution and the elected president, Juan Bosch. After three days of
battle, however, the United States invaded the island and sided with the coup
leaders, preventing Juan Bosch from occupying the presidential position that
he had earned during the elections of 1962. The presence of the marines led
to frustration among Dominican rebels, who found themselves with noth-
ing but their fists and anger to fight a giant and powerful force. The Pulitzer
Prizewinning photograph by Juan Prez Terrero that opens this chapter ac-
curately exemplifies the impotence felt by the people as the efforts of 1965
were crushed by the giant fist of the US intervention forces, ultimately de-
stroying the democratic dreams embodied in the figure of Juan Bosch.
Demoralized by their loss and with the country in the hands of the right-
wing Trujillistas once again, many Dominicans began to look at migration
as their only alternative to repression and hunger. Soon it became clear the
ideals of freedom and democracy Bosch embodied would never materialize
in his country as long as the United States continued to intervene in the mat-
ters of the nation: Creo que en la Repblica Dominicana Latinoamrica ha
recibido una leccin . . . que no es posible establecer democracia con la ayuda
de Estados Unidos, y que tampoco es posible establecer democracia con-
tra los Estados Unidos (I believe that with the Dominican Republic, Latin
America has learned a lesson . . . that it is not possible to establish democracy
with the help of the United States, nor is it possible to establish democracy
against the United States).26
180 CHAPTER 5
The intervention and ultimate trauma of 1965 led Bosch to a different
type of exile than his first one in 1938: he stopped writing, became disillu-
sioned, lost faith in his party, and ultimately became much more radical in
his political views. Never again would he be president of his country. Iron-
ically, for many of his followers, this disillusion marked the beginning of a
massive migration to the United States, which has continued to today, as well
as the emergence of prominent diasporic Dominican literary production.
The unequal relationship between these two nations, and in particular
the role of the United States in Dominican politics after the assassination
of Trujillo, opened many doors through which Dominicans could emigrate.
During the Trujillo dictatorship, it was extremely difficult to travel outside of
the country. Passports were virtually unaffordable to anyone but the rich, and
government control made travel difficult. In 1950, the Dominican commu-
nity in New York numbered about thirty-nine thousand. By 1965, this num-
ber had quadrupled, as the first demands of Dominicans after the assassina-
tion of Trujillo were the right to travel, the opening of the borders, and access
to passports and US visas. Historian Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof argues that due
to public pressure the United States granted Dominicans ten thousand resi-
dent visas per year through the 1960s, in addition to thirty to forty thousand
tourist, transit, and student visas.27 Dominicans left the island en masse in
search of opportunities and a better life after the regime or to escape perse-
cution in an uncertain political climate. For many, the United States, particu-
larly New York, represented the only possible way to better their lives amidst
the economic and political climate of the Dominican Republic in the 1960s.
Pedro Vergs, in his novel Slo cenizas hallars (bolero) (1980), depicts
the brief historical moment (196162) following the death of Trujillo and
before the first democratic elections won by Bosch in which migration to the
United States became a possibility. Using a premonitory tone, the author un-
packs the complexity of the moment as Dominicans, particularly the young,
feared the failure of a democratic government and looked to emigration as
their only possible path to freedom and citizenship. Despite the hopes em-
bodied in Juan Bosch after the death of the dictator, the characters in Vergss
novel appear as characters in a bolero searching for love but finding nothing
but disillusion in the pre-1965 revolution political climate.28
The title of the novel proposes bolero as an allegory of post-Trujillo do-
minicanidad. A ballad-like romantic style born in Cuba and popularized
in Mexico at the beginning of the 1920s, boleros usually tell a story of love
or disillusion (desamor) from the heterosexual male perspective. In his im-
182 CHAPTER 5
The ladies of the housethe emerging Dominican bourgeoisiegive Lucila
(the peasant) a radio to entertain her with bolero. Lucila is quickly seduced
by the political rhetoric of progress and is swept up in the arms of the ucn:
Que gane la ucn, y ya se vea en el futuro la seorita Lucila, encargada de
tal o cual, con un sueldito chvere (Should the ucn win, she could already
see her future as Miss Lucila, in charge of this or that with a pretty nice sal-
ary).32 Though Lucila is very interested in national politics, she sees it as a
quick way to attain social mobility and escape the stagnation in which her
family had been forced to live during the Trujillo regime. The bolero Lucila
hears is not about the creation of a collective, freer country, but rather about
the new possibilities for economic progress in the booming capital city. Yet,
like a bolero of desamor, hers ends up being a disappointment as Lucila finds
herself back in the campo (countryside), poor, pregnant, and disillusioned.
There, she begins to hear another bolero that would take her far away to New
York, where she could finally have a better life.
The bolero in Slo cenizas facilitates a symbolic engagement with what
the author, using the allegorical and passive voice that characterizes nation-
alist literature of the twentieth century, calls the forces of historythat
is, the violence that the union of the Dominican state and the US corporate
interest perpetrate against the Dominican citizenry.33 The forces of history,
as it were, would make it impossible for the Dominican Republic to become
a democratic state, as the majority of the people were prevented from gain-
ing political representation, economic mobility, and equality. Yet, like a bo-
lero, the political rhetoric of the emerging parties would seek to seduce and
entice the citizenry with the promise of progress, freedom, and cosmopoli-
tanism in order to exploit them. Many, like Lucila, continue to participate in
the political process, amidst the violence and corruption that continuously
benefits the almighty alliance of US corporate interests and the Dominican
Hispanophile elite.
Vergss allegorical bolero tells the dysfunctional fiction of post-Trujillo
dominicanidad through which the romantic story sustaining the myth of
national unity turned sour, leaving visible a generalized disillusion and des-
amor with the national project. Trujillos nationalism, as I have argued thus
far, sustained the Hispanophile hegemony of dominicanidada process
Doris Sommer linked to the nations foundational fictions of love and de-
sire.34 In the post-Trujillo Dominican Republic, this fiction crumbled, turn-
ing into cenizas (ashes) as Dominicans faced the impossibility of democracy
and progress in a country dominated by the forces of history. In such a
184 CHAPTER 5
from it. . . . The thing is, Wilson said, once you leave you understand it so
well that no one can make you return.]
Freddys awareness of the forces of history leads him to predict that
Bosch will not last long in power, that democracy will not succeed, and that
he will never be able to simply exist within the oppressive walls of the nation:
En los ltimos das, en efecto, Freddy haba tenido en todo momento
la sensacin de que . . . la Historia, los dems, lo que estaba ms all de
s mismoacabara agarrndolo por los pelos y arrastrndolo por toda
la ciudad con los ojos abiertos y asombrados. . . . [S]aba de sobra que
nunca sera hoy, que jams surgira semejante oportunidad y que los que
eran como l no tenan ms remedio que largarse o joderse o pegarse un
plomazo en la cabeza.39
[Recently, in effect, Freddy had constantly felt the sensation that . . . His-
tory, others, those forces larger than himself, would end up grabbing him
by the hair and dragging him throughout the whole city with his eyes
open and amazed. . . . [H]e knew all too well that neither today nor ever
would there arise a similar opportunity, and that those who were like him
had no recourse other than to leave or fucking put up with it or put a bul-
let through their heads.]
In the midst of his exasperation, Freddy finds comfort in the possibility of
exile from which he hopes to return, eventually, with a deeper understand-
ing of his own country. But the reader imagines that it will be many years
before Freddy can return and, as predicted by his friends, he will never be
able to stay. Like Bosch in 1938, Freddy recognized that he could not do any
more from within the nation; he becomes aware of the possibility of being
Dominican from outside. However, unlike Bosch, Freddys absence ends
up being marked by the forces of history that eventually turn him into a
Dominicanyork, an unwanted subject in official late twentieth-century Do-
minican narration.
The lives of these two charactersthe fictional Freddy and the historical
Boschintersect in Vergss text through a disillusionment narrative that ul-
timately separates both men from their homeland and their political dreams.
As predicted by Freddy, the same historical forces that attacked him end up
destroying Boschs possibility of governing the nation, sending the writer and
revolutionary back into exile and condemning the country to what seems
like an eternal crisis of democratic values. Vergss novel ends with exile as an
The stage is dark. A trumpet plays a slow melody while a timid orange color
lights the back of the stage. The sun has risen. A woman enters the stage, her
hands placed together above her head, body contorting so as to re-create
slow waves (see figure 5.2). She is a boat crossing the ocean at sunrise. She
has arrived. The dominicana ausente is born. In the opening scene of her
performance piece Dominicanish (1999), Josefina Bez re-creates the arrival
scene of the soon-to-be immigrant.41 Like many other immigrants, the main
186 CHAPTER 5
5.2 Josefina Bez performing Dominicanish at Ay Ombe Theatre in New York, 2007.
Courtesy of photographer Jorge Vismara and performer Josefina Bez.
character, Josefina, arrives in New York with a suitcase full of hope and the
determination to attain the American Dream. But unlike in fairy tales, the
American Dream does not come true.42 Instead, a series of dislocations
and disruptions are presented throughout the forty-five-minute one-woman
performance, as Bez re-creates the Dominican racexile migrants difficult
encounter with the binary US racial system, the English language, and the
city of New York.
Upon her arrival in the United States, the character Josefina, like many
other Dominicans, was forced to confront questions of political and cul-
tural belonging and to choose ethnic alliances in order to survive on the
streets of New York: Hablo con el pjaro del barrio. Craqueo chicle como
Shameka Brown. Hablo como Boricua y me peino como Morena (I talk
with the neighborhood fag. I crack gum like Shameka Brown. I speak like
a Puerto Rican, and I do my hair like an African American girl).43 Defying
the norm, Josefina embodies the multiplicity of the New York City under-
ground while searching for a place of belonging. But as sociologist Ginetta
Candelario demonstrates, these alliances require one to navigate a palimp-
sest of contradictions that are intersected by a long history of colonialism and
oppression.44 Moreover, the liberal political thought of the United States in
188 CHAPTER 5
ticularly Mexican immigration to the United States, they actually allowed
for a much larger flow of illegal immigration and for the racialization of
Mexican and other US Latino/as as illegal immigrants or foreignthat is,
as unwelcome subjects.
Literary scholar Lisa Lowe reminds us that the modern nation-state
forms abstract citizens . . . disavowing the racialization and gendering of
noncitizen labor in the economic sphere through the reproduction of an
exclusive notion of national culture.48 Immigration policies enforced in the
second half of the twentieth century, in addition to protecting the bor-
ders of the nation, also contributed to the construction of Latina/os as for-
eigners, strangers, exotic, and objects of fear, a dynamic that anthropologist
Arlene Dvila warns us is still very much in place today.49 On the east coast
of the United States, the dynamics of Puerto Rican migration complicated
this Latina/o racialization process by introducing questions of citizenship,
national belonging, and coloniality to political thought. As a result, and
in the context of the Civil Rights Movement and a widespread climate of
social dissidence, the 1960s became an important decade for the creation
of a Chicano-Nuyorican-Latino cultural citizenship that interjected itself
into the national consciousness through cultural, political, and social rep-
resentation.
When, in heavily accented English, the character Josefina states: Black
is Beautiful, Bez confronts this complexity of racialization and dual in-
visibility Dominicans face while bringing attention to the contradictions of
race that have dominated both cultural and academic dialogues on US Do-
minican identities.50 This short line in the performance brings attention to
the significance of racial politics in the United States of the 1970s and to
the binary racial system encountered by the newly arrived Dominicans who
become labeled in two significant ways: as foreigners (with accents) and as
blacks. Being black and being Dominican appear, at the moment of Josefinas
arrival to the United States, as contradictions.
Despite the fact that the majority of Dominicans are mulatos (of African
and Spanish descent), the Dominican nation, as we have seen throughout
the book, has been historically constructed as a mythic mestizaje of white
and Indian blood, with some minor African influence.51 The Dominican
racial vocabulary uses terms such as indio or moreno (Indian or brown) to
describe blackness, reserving the latter term for the enemy of the nation: the
Haitian immigrant. Let us remember that in its formation, the Dominican
Republic was conceived as a hybrid nation where there could only be one
190 CHAPTER 5
often contains a political message and a hidden history of mourning and
renewal.57 Bezs teachers brought her closer to an understanding of what
Vergs called the forces of history. Further, it gave her a language to con-
front the colonial legacy of white supremacy that silenced her racexiled body
from the historical archives of her home and host nations.
The complexity of Dominican racialization is precisely linked to the fact
that black, as an ethnically differentiated segment of the population, does
not exist in the Dominican imagination.58 What does exist is a series of social
injustices and inequalities that are in large part the result of the economic
exploitation of the majority of the population, which is black and mulato,
by the international corporations and the local government. Or as Torres-
Saillant explains: To measure the living conditions of Dominican blacks
and mulattos would mean no more than to assess the social status of the
masses of the people, which would correspond more fittingly to an analysis
of class inequalities and the social injustices bred by dependent capitalism
than to a discussion of ethnic oppression.59 In what is now a famous quote,
historian Frank Moya Pons argued that in the United States, Dominicans
realize they are black.60 Critiquing that provocative idea, Torres-Saillant
argues that Dominicans in the United States are confronted with new forms
of racism and are therefore forced to make ethnic alliances with other racial-
ized minorities.61 Though I find Moya Ponss analysis simplistic, I concede
that in the diaspora Dominicans are indeed confronted with a different type
of discrimination from the one they faced at home. In the United States, it
is not just class, but also skin tone, hair texture, accent, education, level of
cultural assimilation, and ability to participate in the purchase of cultural
commodities that define ones race. Thus, in the diaspora, confronted with
a US racialization that is very much linked to the open wound of slavery
and Jim Crow as foundational experiences of the American Nation, dias-
poric Dominicans find that blackness provides a language for confronting
their new place in the host nation while interpellating historical oppression
back home. It is not that Dominicans find out they are black when they
migrate to the United States, as Moya Pons suggested, but rather that in the
United States Dominicans find a political language from which to articu-
late their own experience of racialization, oppression, disenfranchisement,
and silencinga process that allows them to build alliances with other op-
pressed communities around the world.
In the United States, and through her new soul teachers, the charac-
ter Josefina finds a diction from which to translate her oppression and ra-
Para conocer el pas dominicano en sus bordes ms intensos hay que tirar una hoja a la iz-
quierda y advertir el otro corazn de la creatividad local. Estaremos frente a Nueva York. Si
buscamos un nombre que sintetice la variedad de nuestros colores, que nos tense ms que
la mejor tambora, hay que caer en un nombre: Josefina Bez.
[In order to know the Dominican country to its most intense limits, one must turn the
page and take note of the other heart of local creativity. We would thus find ourselves fac-
ing New York. If we look for a name that synthesizes the variety of our colors, that tightens
us more than the best drummer, you have to fall on one name: Josefina Bez.]
Miguel D. Mena, Y con ustedes, Josefina Bez: De la Romana al Infinito
192 CHAPTER 5
Dominicanyork presupposes the recognition of an intrinsic marginality).64
Following this reasoning, it is safe to argue that Bezs work embarks from
the premise that the Dominicanyork condition does not secure access to, but
rather the erasure from, both nations. But, as she asserts, You see there is no
guarantee. Ni aqu ni all. Not even with your guiri guiri papers. Here, there,
anywhere. There is no guarantee without accent or PhD.65 This condition
of in-betweenness that constitutes Dominicanyork subjectivity accentuates
the idea that once a person is an immigrant, she will always be an immigrant,
defined only by the action of leaving, moving, and never fully belonging to
a location. Or, as Bez better describes it in her text Comrade, Bliss Aint
Playin (2007): From too many places I have arrived. From many places
I have left. . . . All ask the same questions: Where are you from? When are
you leaving?66 For Bez, however, this condition of in-betweenness, rather
than a loss or a reason to lament, creates alternative forms of enunciation and
representation liberating to the Dominican subject who now has the ability
to create his or her own nation, a Flagless nation. A nation with no flag.67
Bezs New York City is the underground location from which the po-
etics of dominicanidad ausente emerge as a result of contact with the vio-
lence, multiplicity, and crookedness this place embodies: Crooked Cupid
a woman named city hips swing male or female. Hips swing creating our
tale. . . . No one to blame or complain but go. Just go let go go fast but go.
Crooked City. A woman named cupid. City glorifying the finest brutality in
blue. City nuestro canto con viva emocin. City a la guerra morir se lanz.
City. Suerte que la 107 se arrulla con Pacheco. . . . Me chuli en el hall. Met
mano en el rufo. Craqueo chicle como Shameka Brown. City. I pulled the
emergency cord (emphasis added).68 In New York, the immigrant is con-
fronted by the crooked city, the place where police brutality is the norm
and marginality reigns. Yet it is also a place from which solidarity can emerge
through contact with other marginalized ethnic groups, a place where the
music of Johnny Pacheco and Spanglish can mix in a comfortable crook-
edness that the immigrant can navigate with ease. In the crooked city, the
immigrant becomes a powerful subject by performing small acts of resistance
in her daily activities: speaking Spanglish in the public spheremet mano
en el rufo (I messed around on the roof )interpolating Dominican op-
pression by singing a verse from the national anthemA la guerra a morir
se lanz (Launched into war to the death)and making the city stop and
listen to her voiceI pulled the emergency cord. Thus, New York City,
or at least its underground, is converted into a home for the immigrant, the
194 CHAPTER 5
saying, glorifying the finest brutality in blue, she makes history as de Cer-
teau proposes (see figure 5.3).71 The language of her body, juxtaposed with
the rhetoric of her speech, creates a space for manipulating the official dis-
course and stating a new truth in a nonofficial language. Her speech act,
I pulled the emergency cord, is a performance of power.72 It is a form of
authoritative speech that puts the interlocutor in the role of the actor. By
pulling the emergency cord, Josefina brings the audience into the crooked
city, making the audience, even if only for the forty-five minutes of the per-
formance, feel exiled, while she is clearly at home in her crooked city.73
Bezs New York includes Dominican politics, Caribbean history, and
particularly all the contradictions that had been denied in the official nar-
ration of the Dominican subject in the United States and the Dominican
Republic. Although her work departs from the specificity of the individual
experience of Josefina, the immigrant from La Romana, Bez successfully
performs an immensely collective experience of dominicanidad that at times,
because of New York, becomes a larger Caribbean, immigrant, marginal, uni-
versal subject experience of identification: I write about the very mundane,
common experience of being from La Romana and New York, which turns
out to be not so specific but rather a common experience of you and me.74
Much like Juan Boschs encounter with the Confraternidad Caribea
during his exile, Josefina Bez imagines the possibility of being Dominican
once she is surrounded by caribeos in New York because, as Martnez-San
Miguel asserts, New York is transformed through migrations into another
Caribbean space from which national identities are renegotiated. 75 By be-
coming part of something largerCaribbean peoples, immigrant subjects,
blacks, Dominicans, exilesBez interjects national narratives. Doing so
redefines her own notions of dominicanidad and proposes collective ways
of being, a process that is most clearly exemplified in her latest piece, Le-
vente no. Yolayorkdominicanyork (2011). In it, through a voice the author
calls Ella-el-Pueblo(s), and in the multiplicity of characters that live in the
island-nation building of El Ni, solidarity becomes the norm and the only
way of survival:
Como en nuestro edificio-barrio-pueblo-pas-isla-continente-mundo
conversemos con la nica regla de que podemos estar en desacuerdo y ser
amigos. . . . Somos personajes del Levente no. Un poema con grajo. Un co-
mentario sin visa, ni ningn sueo. La llamada no literatura. . . . T, yo, o
alguien a quien conocemos.76
196 CHAPTER 5
5.3 Bindi by Jorge Vismara, 2007. Bez mimes the placement of a bindi using her
middle finger. Courtesy of photographer Jorge Vismara and performer Josefina Bez.
198 CHAPTER 5
The Dominicanyork as presented in Dominicanish is a subject in transit,
constantly running from the yoke of the states that persist in enslaving her:
No way to blame of complaint but go. Go fast, go slow, but go.82 The exilic
condition is a handicap to active political life within the nations: having an
accent, for instance, is often perceived as a handicap to US citizenship; in
the Dominican Republic, those who live abroad are often seen as traitors or
not Dominican enough to be allowed to make social or political contri-
butions. Thus, the dominicana ausente is not accepted on the island because
she is seen as poor, black, and uneducated. She does not find a place in her
new nation for the same reasons. Yet the body of the immigrant becomes a
means for representing history in the underground of New York and in El
Ni. Bezs invented language, Dominicanish, emerges as a means of contra-
dicting the archive.
200 CHAPTER 5
capable of communicating the realities and values true to themselvesa
language with terms that are neither espaol ni ingls, but both. So we
speak a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages . . . language
is a homeland.86 (emphasis added)
Bezs confrontation with linguistic terrorism is highly corporeal: I thought
I would never learn English. No way, I will not put my mouth like that. No
way. Jams ni never. Gosh. To pronounce one little phrase, one must be-
come another person, mouth all twisted. Yo no voy a poner la boca as como
un guante.87 The acquisition and resignification of language as performed
by Bez serves as an antidote to linguistic terrorism because it represents
the corporeal, subjective, and highly individualized experiences through the
enunciation or writing of words. Historically grounded, Bezs border lan-
guage is constantly becoming through the performance of the very condi-
tion of absent/immigrant/exile that it re-creates. This is evident in the dif-
ferent ways and forms in which Dominicanish, the language, is depicted
in performance texts. Thus, Bezs Dominicanish emerges from El Ni as a
performative lexicon that embraces the multiplicity of experiences of the
immigrant who confronts the contradictions and oppression of linguistic
terrorism and the historical silences of US-Dominican exclusion, or as her
character Kay explains: I am pure history.88
Soon after the stage lights up at the beginning of Dominicanish, the art-
ists mouth starts to move, fast and abruptly, talking about itself, as if it
existed apart from the body that stands immobile. The first few minutes
of the monologue employ the Brechtian alienation effect, a theatrical tech-
nique that produces confusion and anxiety in the audience. 89 Words in a
semifamiliar language seem to flow without any obvious connection: Every
sin is vegetable. Begetable. Vege tabol.90 The audience seems confused yet
interested in what this mouth is molding as it produces unfamiliar sounds.
The performers strategy is powerful because she invests what (s)he has to
show with definite gesture of showing.91 Furthermore, she persuades the au-
dience that her experience is authentic in order to lead them to a conclusion
about the entire structure of society in this particular historical time. Bezs
initial performance of speaking Dominicanish grabs the audiences attention
at the same time that it creates a feeling of alienation for the monolingual
subject.
This initial alienation allows for a dramatization of an everyday life
reality: immigration, assimilation, and oppression, shedding light on the sig-
202 CHAPTER 5
POSTSCRIPT
My name is Mara. This is my country. The only one I have ever known. Here I learned
to walk, to talk, and to write my name, Mara. My parents came here to give me a better
life. I have broken no laws. Yet I am treated worse than an animal, like a goat, like a cow
brought up to exist without identity. I have no papers. Yet here I am, belonging to no
other nation than this one. Why do they do this to us? My only crime is that I was born
to poor black immigrants who followed the route to work and survival.
Mara Pierre, 19, ethnic Haitian born in the Dominican Republic
My name is Elizabeth. I am undocumented. I was brought to this country when I was five
years old. . . . My parents made a choice to move here in an effort to provide a better life
for their children. . . . I was enrolled in American elementary school. I take all AP classes.
I play violin for the youth symphony. I get good test scores and I participate in my com-
munity. Yet my opportunities get slimmer and slimmer due to recent legislation. . . . This
reminds me of Jim Crow when customers were turned away with cash in hand . . . all be-
cause they were a different race. . . . How could someone who doesnt know me judge and
reject me? . . . My name is Elizabeth. I am a high school senior. I was brought here when
I was five. I broke no laws. I am not a criminal. Please dont let them treat me this way.
Elizabeth Garibay, 19, ethnic Mexican, raised in Athens, Georgia
204 POSTSCRIPT
minican Republic, that Haitians will contaminate the Hispanic language
and culture of Dominicans, and that Haitian migrants take away jobs and
resources from Dominican citizens. These myths resonate with nineteenth-
century nationalist literature (del Monte, Galvn, and Penson) and with
ideologies dating from the mid-twentieth century and promulgated by the
Trujillo intelligentsia (Balaguer, Pea Batlle, and Max Henrquez Urea).
They also echo global present-day conservative rhetoric that presents mi-
grants as economy drainers (they are coming to take our jobs) and moral
corruptors (they bring drugs and violence). Historical anti-Haitianism has
thus merged with contemporary anti-immigrant xenophobia, demonstrating
how, as Trouillot warned us, the past can persist in sustaining structures of
power that create oppression.
In the Dominican Republic the structures of power behind anti-
Haitianism materialize in the continuous exploitation, erasure, and destruc-
tion of black bodies for the benefit of national and foreign corporations
(such as the Vicini family, Citibank, Nike). Dominican-Haitian human
rights leader Sonia Pierre declared that the community of poor Haitians
and poor Dominican-Haitians is the poorest and most vulnerable, subjected
to the cruelest denial of their rights.4 Perpetuating poverty, Pierre reminded
us, ensures the continuity of exploitative working conditions that made the
rich richer and the poor more vulnerable.5 To Pierres reasoning, I add that
the profitability of corporations operating in the Dominican Republic is
dependent upon the successful antagonism of Hispaniolas poor blacks.
Transethnic alliances can facilitate, as they have in the recent past, the suc-
cessful contestation of oppressive economic regimes.6 La Sentencia is at least
partly a response to the rising rayano consciousness that, as demonstrated in
chapter 4, has matured since the earthquake of 2010. Rayano consciousness
strengthens political and economic collaboration among poor Dominicans
and poor Haitians living in the borderlands and the bateyes, as the recent
film by Lor Durn documents.7 Rayanos and the organizations that support
them understand that the future of the borderland region lies neither in the
hands of the state that excludes them, nor in the corporations that exploit
them, but in the mutual cooperation of the communities that inhabit the
region.
It is precisely because of the expanding rayano consciousness that La Sen-
tencia has been contested. Contrary to the silence and passivity that charac-
terized mid-twentieth-century intellectual and public response to the Mas-
sacre of 1937, for instance, the present wave of anti-Haitian nationalism and
206 POSTSCRIPT
before coming to this country to talk nonsense.12 But the linguistic terror-
ism to which Daz was subjected is not a rare experience for US Latinos/as,
as Gloria Anzalda reminds us in her seminal essay How to Tame a Wild
Tongue.13 Bilingualism, Spanglish, and the emerging variations of Latino/a
languages in the United States have been a source of anxiety for both US
and Latin American nationalists since the 1970s. In the Dominican Repub-
lic, the linguistic bordering of the nation, exemplified in the case of Daz, is
entangled with the gruesome anti-Haitian violence of 1937, when proper
use of the Spanish language was often used as a marker of national belong-
ing. Dazs interpellation of nationalist politicians and the attacks that fol-
lowed led to a widespread condemnation of La Sentencia among US Latinos
and ethnic minority activist groups. The Haiti-Dominican border, as I have
argued, is present in the United States through the body of the Dominican
racexile. The Latino/a critical reaction to La Sentencia further avowed this
reality, enabling a more nuanced critique of the Haitian-Dominican border
as a product of US Empire.
Since the independence of 1844, the United States has influenced the
construction of dominicanidad in opposition to haitianismo. This process
intensified during the military occupation of 191624, when the United
States introduced the concept of border patrol and implemented the bracero
labor system that brought cheap Haitian labor to cut cane in the US-owned
sugar corporations. The most recent example of the role of the United States
in bordering Hispaniola is the creation in 2008 of the cesfront, a special-
ized border security police, trained by the US Border Patrol as part of the
American Empires effort to promote strong borders abroad.
Enforcement of the US border, particularly in the context of the Global
War on Terror, is shaping actions and dictions, defining national sovereignty
in a post-9/11 world. The international expansion of the War on Terror is evi-
dent in the policies and legislation shaping present day Hispaniolas borders
and in the nationalist rhetoric that seeks to define citizenship and belong-
ing. Yet, as the Latino/a response to Dazs case demonstrates, while physical
and ideological borders are erected across the world, they are also contested
in unprecedented ways. Immigrant and racialized communities are finding
new ways to collaborate and contest oppression through social media and
international activist networks. They are producing a lingua franca of con-
tradiction (Black lives matter, No human being is illegal) aimed at dis-
mantling the structures of power producing immigrant and black bodies as
a criminal mass.
Two testimonies open this final chapter of the book. The first is by Mara
Pierre, a Dominican woman born to undocumented Haitian parents and
who has recently become stateless, and Elizabeth Garibay, a Mexican-born
undocumented high school senior who has lived in the United States since
age five. Though the legal structures surrounding immigration in the United
States differ significantly from the 2013 actions of the Dominican Consti-
tutional Court, the similarities in the testimonies of both women point to
the violent consequences of the global process of bordering nations that
police and control immigrant bodies. In 2011 Elizabeth spoke in front of
the Georgia State House against two rulings: Georgia hb 87, a copycat of
the infamous 2010 Arizona sb 1070which was, at the time, the broad-
est and strictest anti-immigrant legislation in US historyand Policy 413,
which banned undocumented students from access to the top state public
universities.14 Georgia hb 87, like its predecessor, required law enforcement
officers to inquire about immigration status during routine stops for minor
traffic violations and to hand over any undocumented suspects to federal au-
thorities. The bill also required most employers to check immigration status
through the federal E-verify database, and stipulated possible prison sen-
tences for those convicted of knowingly harboring or transporting undocu-
mented residents. The actions effectively legalized racial profiling, marking
black and brown bodies as suspiciously foreign. While the show-me-your-
papers provisions of Georgias hb 87 and similar laws have resulted in civil
liberties lawsuits and preliminary injunctions by federal judges ending in
the eventual dismissal of the provisions, insufficient attention was given to
the move by the Board of Regents to deny undocumented students access to
state universities and colleges. Clearly, the state of Georgia did not expect
a loud response from the population. The unintended result was, however,
the emergence of a new movement that employs tactics similar to those used
during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s to combat present-day segrega-
tion.15
Employing those old tactics, Elizabeth reminds her audience that it is
not her immigrant condition but her race that renders her foreign. Refer-
encing Jim Crow at the Georgia State House, Elizabeth demonstrates her
historical awareness and asserts her belonging to the nation that seeks to
expel her. Angela Davis, speaking at Spelman College in Atlanta in 2011, a
208 POSTSCRIPT
few weeks after Elizabeth, further avows the Georgia immigrant struggle as
a civil rights struggle: Anti-immigration draws from and feeds on the rac-
isms of the past, the racisms that have affected people of African descent.16
The struggle for immigrant rights, Davis concluded, is the key struggle of
our times.
In her powerful address against hb 87, Elizabeth repeats her name
twice. Her speech act, My name is Elizabeth, contradicts anti-immigrant
rhetoric that seeks to render her part of a criminal mass. Insisting on her in-
nocenceI was brought here when I was fiveElizabeth also reminds
listeners of the unconstitutional cruelty of the Georgia legislation that pe-
nalizes her for an act committed at age five. Similarly, Mara appeals to an
audience of fellow citizens asserting her belonging to the nation at the face of
state disavowal: This is my country. Also repeating her name twice, Mara
proclaims her individuality while asking the collective dominicanidad to
recognize her as one of their own. Community recognition, Mara and Eliza-
beth seem to suggest, can contradict the states that persistently push them
out of their home.
Mara and Elizabeths stories, read in tandem, illustrate the sordid conse-
quences of present-day racialized anti-immigration policies on the everyday
lives of people. The striking similarities in the racialized ethnic Mexican ex-
periences in the United States and the racialized ethnic Haitian experiences
in the Dominican Republic are not coincidental. Rather, as this book high-
lights, they are part of the centuries-old unequal and complex relationship
between the United States and Hispaniola. Elizabeths and Maras public
speeches are unequivocally rooted in their understanding of the links
between economic exploitation, racism, and anti-immigrant prejudice.
Their words, uttered in two very different geographical spaces and two years
apart, show that as global oppression expands, immigrant and ethnic mi-
nority struggles also transcend bordersa fact that in turn allows for trans-
national coalitions of contestation. In particular, the comparative reading of
the two testimonies crystallizes the significance of US ethnic and immigrant
political diction in shaping transnational justice and democracy struggles.
Both young womens speech acts respond to broader anxieties about race,
immigration, and citizenship in our present world. Further, Maras assertion
My only crime is that I was born to poor black immigrants who followed
the route to work and survival appeals to the vast Hispaniola diaspora and
the international immigrant population.
210 POSTSCRIPT
Barack Obama. Meanwhile in Europe, anti-immigration and racism have
also increased. During the first half of 2015, 1,300 black and brown bodies
washed up in the Mediterranean while politicians discussed how to shoot
boats carrying immigrants as a way to deal with the immigration and refugee
crisis.17 All these tragedies take place as the global economy rests on the
backs of racialized immigrants.
This book is in many ways my way to respond to the growing anti-
immigrant and antiblack violence devastating our (my) present world.
Speaking about the need for a more conscientious scholarship that engages
in actually dismantling oppression rather than simply critiquing it, Barbara
Tomlinson and George Lipsitz argue that scholars need to know the work
we want our work to do and how our scholarship can serve to accompany
positive changes in our society.18 The myths sustaining white supremacy,
and its particular Hispaniola brand (anti-Haitianism), are linked to a long
scholarly tradition. In Latin America, for instance, lettered men such as Do-
mingo Faustino Sarmiento and Csar Nicols Penson constructed intellec-
tual projectshistorical and literary projectsthat shaped the racial ide-
ology, national archive, and intellectual history of generations.
Letrados such as Penson and Sarmiento knew what they wanted their
work to do for the nation they were helping to build. They were effective
in shaping the nations archive, psyche, politics, and ideology. The after-
shocks of their scholarship are still destroying lives. Paradoxically, Penson
and Sarmiento are widely read and studied in schools and universities across
the world. Their literary and intellectual contributions are widely acknowl-
edged and praised. There are monuments, streets, and libraries named after
men such as Penson all over the world.
I am acutely aware that my book will not change the painful experi-
ences of people like Mara Pierre and Elizabeth Garibay, nor will it erase the
trauma of the violence that forces them and many more to live in their own
country as exiles. But I am hopeful that the work I want my book to doto
shatter silences and uncover other archives of knowledgewill get us closer
to a dialogue about the ways in which scholarship can dismantle the intel-
lectual legacy sustaining systems of oppression.
Humanity continues to search for ways to make sense of our violent
historyslavery, colonization, and the Holocaustand its legacy on our
present world. Yet, as drug violence, gun violence, racial violence, and anti-
immigrant violence grow, it is clear that we do not yet have the answers. My
book argues that in order to truly understand the present we must examine
212 POSTSCRIPT
NOTES
Introduction
1. The exact location is not clear, though there is a reference to the catedral and
muros from which I draw the conclusion that the posters were indeed hung on the
cathedral and surrounding walls of Calle Las Damas in the colonial city. See Archivo
de la poca Haitiana (182244), Legajo 2, Folder 1, agn, Santo Domingo, DR.
2. Guerra Snchez locates Galindo in the northern outskirts of the city walls, while
the official record book indicates the hacienda was about nine kilometers east of the
city. I was unable to locate the original records Guerra Snchez cites. I have recon-
structed a map following the record book and the court transcripts I was able to con-
sult at the National Archives between 2005 and 2006 to guide the reader through a
timeline of the crime. The significance of the location is its isolation. Both versions
(the record book and Guerra Snchezs article) describe Galindo as an isolated monte
(wilderness). See Guerra Snchez, Toponoma y genealoga Galindo o barrio Mejo-
ramiento Social, 11, and Venta de Hacienda Galindo, in Protocolos, Libro de asiento
181822: poca Haitiana, Legajo 2, agn, Santo Domingo, DR.
3. See Sentencia de los reos de Galindo, in Sentencias Penales de la poca Haiti-
ana (182231), Boletn 83, 1954, agn, Santo Domingo, DR.
4. During the Haitian Unification of the island (January 1, 1822, to February 27,
1844), the territory of what is now the Dominican Republic was officially identified as
Spanish Haiti. Informally, many referred to this part of the island as Eastern Santo Do-
mingo. The term Spanish Haitian refers to residents of the east who self-identified
as Spanish or Dominican.
5. Sentencias de los reos de Galindo, 335.
6. Given that all citizens of Hispaniola were Haitian, ethnic distinctions or some-
times linguistic distinctions such as Spanish Haiti or French Haiti were also used.
7. Sentencia de los reos de Galindo, 334.
8. There is discrepancy in the ages and names of the girls between the historical
records available for consultation and Guerra Snchezs findings. The court tran-
scripts state that the ages of the children were six, ten, and fifteen. gueda appears as
the eldest. These records are contradicted by Guerra Snchezs genealogical research
(based on baptismal records), in which the childrens ages are recorded as two, five,
and eleven. See Guerra Snchez, Toponoma y genealoga Galindo o barrio Mejora-
miento Social, 11; Archivo de la poca Haitiana (182244), Legajo 2, Folder 1, agn,
Santo Domingo, DR; and Sentencia de los reos de Galindo, 335.
9. Sentencia de los reos de Galindo, 334.
10. Sentencia de los reos de Galindo, 335.
11. Sentencia de los reos de Galindo, 335.
12. Sentencia de los reos de Galindo, 335.
13. Sentencia de los reos de Galindo, 335.
14. Also known as las mariposas (the butterflies), Patria, Minerva, and Mara
Teresa Mirabal were assassinated on November 25, 1960, for opposing the Trujillo re-
gime. They have become a symbol of bravery, feminism, and dominicanidad. Domini-
1. The term cofrada, for Afro-religious organizations founded by African slaves and
free blacks as early as 1690, has the same religious connotation as the words brother-
hood or sisterhood, but it is gender-neutral and typically includes men and women.
San Juan de la Maguana is one of the most important locations of cofradas.
2. Letter from Dominga Alcntara to the Military Governor Harry Lee, Chief
Naval Operations 191725, rg 38, Box 49, Folder 2 (22650), Navy Department, Re-
cords of the United States Marines, Military Government of Santo Domingo (1916
24), National Archives, Washington, DC.
3. The word batey originally meant community and was used to name rural com-
munities of mainly rayanos. Today batey refers mostly to neighborhoods or sugar
barracks where the Haitian cane workers live. The account of Alcntaras preparations
is from Adalberto Grullns video Fiesta de palos (aaa Producciones, 2006).
4. Grulln, Fiesta de palos.
5. See note 10 for description of the guardias. In Afro-Dominican religiosity the
word atabal (which in Spanish means drum) refers to the rhythm rather than the ac-
tual object. Documentos Guardia Nacional Dominicana (192022), Legajo 3, Folder
2, Archivo del Gobierno Militar de Santo Domingo (191624), agn, Santo Do-
mingo, DR.
6. Documentos Guardia Nacional Dominicana (192022), Legajo 3, Folder 2.
7. Documentos Guardia Nacional Dominicana (192022), Legajo 3, Folder 2.
8. Herrera, When the Names of the Emperors Were Morgan and Rockefeller,
2937, 46.
9. Herrera, When the Names of the Emperors Were Morgan and Rockefeller, 47.
1. Jos Matos, local Afro-religious leader and santero, interview by author, Da-
jabn, March 19, 2006.
2. See introduction, note 7.
3. Richard Turits believes the number of victims to be about fifteen thousand. See
Turits, Foundations of Despotism, 161. Other scholars mention figures as high as thirty
thousand. See Fiehrer, Political Violence in the Periphery, and Malek, Dominican
Republics General Rafael Trujillo and the Haitian Massacre of 1937.
4. Turits, Foundations of Despotism, 161.
5. Despite overwhelming evidence collected by local and foreign scholars, as well
as the testimony of survivors, the official position of the Dominican state continues to
be ambivalent and vague. During the Trujillo dictatorship, the Massacre of 1937 was
depicted as a conflict between peasants, though there is ample evidence that hundreds
of Dominican troops had been deployed to the borderlands to carry out the massacre
(see Turits, Foundations of Despotism, 16367). Joaqun Balaguer, who served as one
of the intellectual masterminds of the Trujillo regime, justifying the massacre, be-
came president of the Dominican Republic for more than two decades after the US
intervention in 1965. It was not until the twenty-first century that the trauma of the
massacre was publicly confronted with Dominican state officials in a un-mediated
event that took place in New York in November 2000. To date, however, there are no
monuments or public displays that memorialize the genocide. In addition, the mas-
sacre is not studied in any school curricula (public or private), thus the majority of the
Dominican population still does not know that this event happened. In the diaspora,
however, it is one of the most important topics addressed by Dominican, as well as
foreign, scholars of the Dominican Republic.
6. Roorda, Genocide Next Door, 302.
7. The Massacre of 1937 is one of the most studied events by US historians in-
terested in the Dominican Republic. Derby, Haitians, Magic, and Money; Turits,
Foundations of Despotism; and Roorda, Genocide Next Door, study the massacre as
a significant event in establishing the border between the two nations and locate it
as a significant strategy of the Trujillo nationalist agenda. Although significant con-
tributions to the study of Dominican and Haitian histories, these works contribute
1. For more on the damage and casualty losses of the earthquake, see Bilham, Les-
sons from the Haiti Earthquake, 878.
2. It is estimated that before international assistance arrived, more than nine thou-
sand Haitians were cared for in Dominican hospitals. In addition, hundreds of Do-
minican medical personnel went to Haiti within hours of the quake, offering first aid
and helping to rescue victims prior to the arrival of international aid. For more on the
Dominican response to the Haitian Earthquake, see Margesson and Taft-Morales,
Haiti Earthquake, and Auerbach et al., Civil-Military Collaboration in the Initial
Medical Response to the Earthquake in Haiti.
3. Viviano de Len, Madre dominicana amamanta nios de Hait lesionados,
Listn Diario, January 17, 2010, http://www.listin.com.do/la-republica/2010/1/17/
128354/Madre-dominicana-amamanta-ninos-de-Haiti-lesionados.
4. See Freddy Vargas, http://vimeo.com/35493047 (accessed May 1, 2012).
5. El seno de la esperanza (Milk of Hope), directed by Freddy Vargas (V Films,
2012).
6. Bateyes are the impoverished barrack towns where sugarcane workers live. See
chapter 3, note 8.
7. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 14142.
8. Sonia Marmolejos, interview by Teleantillas, https://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=hyZIwts2_jI (accessed February 2, 2012).
9. Altagracia Garca, director of Colectivo Mujer y Salud, interview by author,
May 13, 2014, Loma de Cabrera, DR.
10. Clinton was charged with managing the relief funds, while Fernndez was to
serve as liaison, offering superior Dominican state infrastructure for the disburse-
ment of funds and the coordination of international relief. Only two years after the
quake, however, while Haitian refugees continued to live in tents and slums, scandal
surrounded Clinton and Fernndez, as both ex-heads of state were accused of misman-
aging, stealing, or otherwise profiting from the funds meant to relieve the victims of
the quake.
11. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 2.
12. Torres-Saillant, La condicin rayana, 222.
13. In 1920, nearly 20 percent of the population of Monte Cristi was ethnic Haitian,
and by 1930, over 40 percent of all Dominican ethnic Haitians lived in Monte Cristi.
14. Rueda, prologue to Cantos de la frontera, in La criatura terrestre, 25.
15. Rueda, La criatura terrestre, 3233.
16. Moreno, Bordes lquidos, fronteras y espejismos.
17. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 139.
18. Rueda, prologue to Cantos de la frontera, in La criatura terrestre, 3.
19. Sili, Aspectos y variables de las relaciones entre Repblica Dominicana y
Hait.
20. San Miguel, La isla imaginada, 23.
Postscript
Epigraphs: Testimony of Mara Pierre, Noticias Sims, Santo Domingo, November 12,
2013. Speech given by Elizabeth Garibay in front of the Atlanta City Hall during pro-
test against Georgia hb87 legislation, November 9, 2011.
1. Sentencia 168-13, Expediente nmero tc-05-2012-0077, October 2013, Tribu-
nal de Sentencia de la Repblica Dominicana, Santo Domingo, DR.
2. Sentencia 168-13.
3. I use quotations to indicate that these myths, as I argue in the previous chapter,
refer not only to immigrants from Haiti but also to ethnic Haitians and mixed people.
4. Testimonio of Sonia Pierre, November 2, 2007, https://www.frontlinedefenders
.org /node/2018 (accessed June 1, 2015).
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INDEX
262 INDEX
cabildos, 62 cockfighting, as Haitian-Dominican con-
Cceres, Jos Nez de, 28, 30, 5455 flict metaphor, 156
cadenuses, 166 Cofrada del Espritu Santo (Brotherhood/
Calder, Bruce, 223n31 Sisterhood of the Holy Spirit), 5860,
Campo, Pedro, 97 6264
Cancin del rayano (Rueda), 13436 cofradas, political purpose of, 6264,
Cancin dominicana (del Monte), 3437 221n1
Candelario, Ginetta, 163, 18788, 220n106 colonization: disruption of Latinidad
Candombl, 222n16 and, 1011; earthquake of 2010 and
Canto de regreso a la tierra prometida persistence of, 1718; Galindo Virgins
(Song of Return to the Promised) narrative as reinforcement of, 2427,
(Rueda), 13539 5557; Haiti-DR border and, 710;
Cantos de la frontera (Rueda), 18, 133, Hispanic nationalism and, 2937; of
13546 Hispaniola, 7782; impact in Haiti
canudos, 6970 and, 15960; in Latin American narra-
Crdenas, Lzaro, 233n31 tives, 52; Massacre of 1937 and effects of,
Caribbean identity: Haiti as inspiration 95101; migration and, 18692; Pen-
to, 78, 1079, 234n48; literature of, sons nostalgia for, 4044; in Ruedas
12426, 13436, 17580, 186; migration poetry, 13446; United States expan-
to New York and, 19496, 245n75 sionism and, 3
Carpentier, Alejo, 108, 234n48 colonizing trick, Haitian fantasy narratives
Cass, Roberto, 68 as, 108
Castillo, Vincho, 23, 57 Combs, Rachel, 167
Castro, Fidel, 124 Commission of Inquiry for the Annex-
caudillismo, 4243, 219n82 ation of Santo Domingo, 89
ceiba pentandra tree, 239n63 Compadre Mon (Cabral), 102
Cenizas (song), 184 Compre Gnral Soleil (General Sun, My
cesfront security police, 207 Brother) (Alexis), 17, 11826
Cspedes, Digenes, 110, 234n56 compulsory sterilization, 8889
Chacn, Iris, 194 Comrade, Bliss Aint Playin (perfor-
Chamberlain-Kahn Act, 8889 mance), 174, 193
Chicana cultural production, 167; colo- Conde, Pedro, 234n56
nialism and, 11 Confederacin Antillana, 176, 242n12
Christianity, Afro-religious traditions and, Conselheiro, Antnio, 70
6972 Conspiracin de los Alcarrizos, 55, 216n24
citizenship, race and, 710 contradictions: Afro-religious traditions
civil rights movement, immigration and, and, 11826; Archive of Dominican-
189 idad and, 1215; archiving of, 1519;
Civil War (US), Haitian military aid border embodiment and, 56; defined,
during, 78 13; in diaspora literature, 17, 8292;
Clay, Henry, 219n77 disruption of Latinidad and, 1011; of
Clinton, Bill, 13032, 144, 237n10 dominicana ausente, 171202; domini-
Cobial, Pedro, 2325, 44 canidad in, 13; dominicano ausente
INDEX 263
contradictions (continued) de Certeau, Michel, 19495
and, 173202; Dominican Republic dcimas poetry, 40
independence and, 3037; foundations Deguis, Juliana, 2047
of, 2837; in Galindo Virgins narra- de la Cruz, Manuel, 2325, 44
tive, 16, 2527; in Hernndezs Da pa Delany, Martin, 8
lo do, 15669; Indian affirmation and, de las Casas, Bartolom, 3839, 218n69
39; in Latin American fiction, 3857; del Cabral, Manuel, 102
in Literature of Compassion, 10217, Deleuze, Gilles, 200
233n39; in migration, 18692; rayano del Monte, Flix Mara, 7, 16, 23; domini-
consciousness and, 13146; in rhetoric canidad production and, 9698; Do-
of US occupation, 7277; spiritual pos- minican independence and, 3437,
session and, 8292; in US occupation 218n57; Galindo Virgins narrative of,
of Dominican Republic, 6264 2627, 4144, 4657; on Haitian-
Coronado, Ral, 11 Dominican border, 137; Hispanophile
costumbrista literature, 26, 4649, 216n21 ideology and, 6566; patriarchy in writ-
Cotubanam Henrquez, Enrique, 176 ing of, 7172
criollo elite: colonial power structure and, del Monte, Joaqun, 4647
7, 31; co-optation of gender by, 4957; Deloria, Phil, 245n78
de facto emancipation by, 33; defi- de los Santos, Jos, 24
nition of, 216n16; dominicanidad and, del Toro, Benicio, 3
1315; Dominican independence and, Demorizi, Emilio Rodrguez, 1067
12, 2830, 3437; Galindo Virgins de Osorio, Antonio, 33
narrative and, 16, 2527; Hispanophile Derby, Lauren, 98
ideology of, 3839, 42, 7172, 233n39, de Rosas, Juan Manuel, 220n105
234n40; Liborismo movement and, Derrida, Jacques, 108
6466, 72, 7980; political hegemony desamor, Dominican politics and, 18086
of, 217n34; racism of, 99101; support despojo (cleansing ceremony), 11718, 161
for Trujillo from, 100101 62, 239n64
Cruz, Angie, 8384 Devastaciones, 33, 217n48
Cuba: revolutionary movement in, 41; US Daz, Junot, 3, 17, 8384, 129, 153, 180, 200,
intervention in, 74 2067
Cuban identity, 4 Dicen que Liborio ha muerto, Liborio
Cuentos escritos en el exilio (Bosch), 102, no ha muerto n (They say Liborio is
17880 dead, Liborio aint dead), 8293
cultural hybridity, Haitian-Dominican difference, in Literature of Compassion,
border and, 97101 1089
disability images, communities and, 15054
Danticat, Edwidge, 17, 9496, 118, 12226, dominicanidad: blackness and affirma-
206, 232n9, 236n85 tion of, 39; bolero as allegory in, 183
Da pa lo do (song and music video), 18, 86; evolution in US of, 13; Galindo
133, 15569 Virgins narrative and, 2627, 4449,
Dvila, Arlene, 189 5657; Haitian role in, 1516; Mateos
Davis, Angela, 2089 image and, 7172; poetics of ausente,
264 INDEX
1819, 170202; race and borders and, tion of, 39; bolero as allegory in, 183
710; rayano consciousness and, 131 86; evolution in US of, 13; Galindo
34; spiritual possession and, 8392; ter- Virgins narrative and, 2627, 4449,
minology of, 213n1, 214n33; whiteness 5657; Haitian role in, 1516; Mateos
as guardian of, 5257 image and, 7172; poetics of ausente,
dominicanidad ausente, 1819, 170202; 1819, 170202; race and borders and,
Dominicanyork and, 19299; exile and 710; rayano consciousness and, 131
poetics of, 17580; migration and race 34; spiritual possession and, 8392; ter-
and, 18692; post-Trujillo politics and, minology of, 213n1, 214n33; whiteness
18086 as guardian of, 5257
Dominicanish (performance), 174, 18692, double-consciousness, 244n55
196202 Douglass, Frederick, 89
dominicanismos, Pensons dictionary of, 40 Duarte, Juan Pablo, 29, 3137, 39, 42, 164,
dominicano/a ausente, 1819, 170202; 241n91
exile and poetics of, 17580 Du Bois, W. E. B., 8, 79, 150, 234n48,
dominicano espaol identity, 3435, 3839, 244n55
218n57 Durn, Lor, 205, 246n7
Dominican Republic: anti-Haitianism in, Duvalier, Francois, 11820
15, 17, 2837, 98101, 16169; citizen-
ship exclusion for Haitians in, 2037; earthquake in Haiti, 12, 1718, 12934;
denationalization of Haitians born in, Haitian-Dominican border and, 144
57, 1069, 234n44; earthquake in Haiti 46, 15054
and, 12, 12934, 239n2; fictional images East Indian cultural practices, Caribbean
of, 3857; footnote condition of, 3; identity and, 19699
foundational myth of, 710, 2830, El Cable newspaper, 6466, 7982, 91,
4957; Haitian migration to, 610, 223n28, 224n38
12, 14, 7782, 227n86; independence El Corte, as euphemism for Massacre of
for, 2837, 213n6; Massacre of 1937 in, 1937, 9596, 100101, 118
12, 14, 17; Massacre of 1937 in memory El Masacre se pasa a pie (Prestol Castillo),
of, 9396, 231n5; overview of scholar- 11017
ship on, 1519; post-Trujillo upheaval El Ni, 46, 11; defined, 242n7; domini-
in, 18086, 243n25; sexscape images of, cano ausentes and, 173202; Domin-
8592; Spanish re-annexation campaign icanyork and, 19299; migration and
and, 27, 29, 42, 4749; US intervention race in, 18692
in, 23, 610, 12, 16, 5892, 1029, 116 El seno de la esperanza (Milk of Hope)
17, 17374 (film), 15354, 16869
Dominican Revolutionary Party (Partido Emmanuel Methodist Church
Revolucionario Dominicano) (PRD), (Charleston), murders at, 210
177, 234n40 embodied memory, Alexanders concept
Dominicanyork, 16768, 171202; El Ni of, 8292, 224n42
and, 19299; identity of, 46; language The Emperor Jones (ONeill), 7879, 82
and, 199202 Enriquillo (Galvn), 3839, 45, 4849, 52,
dominicanidad: blackness and affirma- 56, 218n68
INDEX 265
Ephemeral Independence, 28, 30, 5455 Freemasons in Dominican Republic, 32
Espaa Boba, 28 33, 6264
espanto indecible (unspeakable horror), Freud, Sigmund, 51
in Dominican literature, 53 Fronterizas (film), 24n7
Estructura completa video installation, fuk (Afro-Dominican curse), 8384
15054
Etnai (Prez), 52 Gabriel Conspiracy, 8
eugenics: Hispanophile ideology and, 98 The Galindo Virgins (theatrical perfor-
99; Massacre of 1937 and, 21013; occu- mance), 57, 221n134
pation logic of, 8692 Galindo Virgins narrative, 12, 14, 16; ano-
Europe: anti-immigration and racism in, nymity of victims of, 5052; diasporic
211; Dominican migration to, 242n5 literature and, 9092; Dominican in-
Executive Order 591, 223n28 dependence and, 3637; in Dominican
exile: migration and race and, 18692; literature, 3943; location for, 215nn1
poetics of dominicanidad ausente and, 2; testimony and historical evidence
17580 concerning, 2327
Ezili Freda (Mambo deity), 16566 Galvn, Manuel de Jess, 7, 3739, 45, 48
49, 52, 65, 71, 96, 197
Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias So- Garca, Cristina, 125
ciales (flacso), 170 Garibay, Elizabeth, 2089, 211
Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 10, 163, 214n32
(Sarmiento), 3637, 218n62, 220n105 Gautreau de Windt, Eduardo, 206
Famboa, Blanco, 76 gender: Afro-religious traditions and, 70
The Farming of Bones (Danticat), 17, 118, 72; in Dominican foundational litera-
12226, 232n9, 236n85 ture, 4957
Father of Racism (film), 16466, 241n91 genealogy, of dominicanidad, 1215, 8592
feminist theory, tattooed body in, 14849 geography, triangulation of US-Haiti-
Fernndez, Leonel, 13032, 144, 15354, Dominican borders, 910, 12526
237n10 Georgia HB 87, 2089, 246n14
Fiallo, Fabio, 76 Gil, Lydia, 11617
film, anti-Haitianism in, 4445 Gilroy, Paul, 244n55
Fischer, Sybille, 5152 Glissant, douard, 37, 13536
Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories Gmez, Alejandro, 2325, 44
of Popular Music (Lipsitz), 184, 19091 Gmez, Mximo, 124
forces of history, Dominican politics Good Neighbor Policy, 41, 219n77
and, 18086 Gray, Freddie, 210
Foucault, Michel, 12 Great Storm of 1908, 67, 224n37, 225n43
foundational fiction: Dominican identity Grosz, Elizabeth, 56, 14849
and, 4957; in Latin America, 38 Guaba Rebellion, 217n47
France, colonization of Haiti by, 29 Guardia Nacional Dominicana (Domini-
Franco, Franklin, 25 can National Guard), 60, 80, 91, 222n10
Franco, Jean, 52 Guarocuya Rebellion, 3839
266 INDEX
Guattari, Pierre Flix, 200 Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint (Mati-
Guerra Snchez, Antonio Jos Ignacio, bag), 232n16
215n2, 215n8 Haitian-Dominican identity, race and bor-
guerrilla resistance, to US military, 6466, ders and, 710
7677, 223n31, 225n51, 226n75 Haitian-Dominican subjectivity, in Litera-
Guidotti-Hernndez, Nicole, 11, 15, 5253 ture of Compassion, 109
Gutirrez, Laura, 11 Haitian intruder, in foundational litera-
ture, 4957, 7172
Haiti: African American emigration to, haitianismo, 39
89; constitution established for, 77; Haitian Massacre of 1937. See Massacre of
Devastaciones in, 33; dominicanidad 1937
and, 1516; Dominican Republic inde- Haitian Revolution, 78, 12, 7882
pendence from, 2830, 213n6; earth- Haitian Unification, 23, 3637, 4144,
quake in, 12, 1718, 12934, 14446, 5257, 98, 100101, 215n4
15054; fantasy narratives of, 78, 107 Harlem Renaissance, 79
9; in Galindo Virgins narrative, 2527; hateros (cattle ranchers), 28
independence for, 2830; as inspiration, Hayek, Selma, 3
78, 1079, 234n48; in Literature of Henrquez Urea, Max, 2627, 40, 55
Compassion, 1029, 11726; migration 57; anti-Haitianism of, 109, 11213; on
to Dominican Republic from, 610, 12, Mateos execution, 65; Trujillo regime
14, 7782, 227n86; military attempts and, 101
to regain Dominican Republic, 42; Heredia, Nicols, 31, 217n39
political and cultural imagery of, 78 Hernndez, Ramona, 190, 241n90
82, 1079; revolutionary movement Hernndez, Rita Indiana, 18, 133, 15569,
in, 11819; slave revolt in, 7; Spanish 206
re-annexation campaign and, 27, 29, 42, Heureaux, Ulises, 222n19
4749; US intervention in, 60, 74, 91; Hispaniola: Artibonito Valley of, 93; bor-
in world literature, 4445. See also anti- dering of, 7782; contradicting borders
Haitianism of, 13446; Dominican Republic inde-
Haitian-Dominican Agreement (1938), pendence and, 2837; earthquake di-
233n31 saster and images of, 13134; ethnic and
Haitian-Dominican border: earthquake linguistic distinctions on, 215n6; Good
in Haiti and, 1718, 13034, 14446, Neighbor Policy and, 41; in Literature
15254; Galindo Virgins narrative and, of Compassion, 11926; race and bor-
2627, 4749; history of, 610, 13536; ders and, 610; US intervention in, 74;
in Lnea fronteriza video installation, US occupation of, 6061
14654; in Literature of Compassion, Hispanophile ideology: anti-Haitianism
11926; Massacre of 1937 and transfor- and, 8182, 10917; cultural hybridity
mation of, 96101; in Ruedas poetry, and, 98101; in del Montes narra-
13446; soled (loneliness or desola- tive, 4142, 4849; Dominican poli-
tion) near, 6872; US preoccupation tics and, 3536, 218n57; in Domini-
with, 7782 can Republic, 2837; in Dominican
INDEX 267
Hispanophile ideology (continued) interpellation: of black Dominicans, 63
school curricula, 5657; Galindo Vir- 64; of diaspora, 11726; in diasporic
gins narrative and, 4849, 5657; in literature, 12426; of dominicanidad, 6;
Hernndezs Da pa lo do, 15657; his- Marxist theory of, 213n18; of oppres-
torical sources on, 232n23; La Sentencia sion, 11417; spiritual possession and,
and, 2047; in Latin American fiction, 8392
3839; Liborismo movement and, 65 In the Time of the Butterflies (lvarez),
66; in Pensons Galindo narrative, 39 215n14
41, 4849; rayano challenge to, 13134; Iraq War, 6061, 91
resistance to colonization and, 3037;
in Trujillo regime, 233n24; US paternal- Jimnez, Juan Isidro, 176
ist discourse and, 7172 Jones Act of 1917, 188
history: cultural identity and, 37; literature
and, 1415; on Massacre of 1937, 94 Kazanjian, David, 108
96; in Ruedas poetry, 13846 Kennedy, John F., 9192
Hoffnung-Garskof, Jesse, 181 Knapp (General), 73
Hogan, John, 9, 227n91 knowledge, decolonization of, 5
Hochschild, Jennifer L., 240n87 Kreyl, anti-Haitianism and language of,
Hostos, Adolfo, 17576, 186 14854
Hostos, Eugenio Mara, 43, 176, 186 Kuchipudi (Indian dance), 19697
Howard, David, 102
How to Tame a Wild Tongue (Anzal- labor migration, Dominican sugar indus-
da), 207 try and, 7782, 1023, 227n86, 232n8
Hughes, Langston, 79, 108 La ciudad letrada (Rama), 31
Hurricane San Zenn, 225n43 La conspiracin de los Alcarrizos (Hen-
rquez Urea), 26, 5556
Illuminati, 32 La criatura terrestre (Rueda), 134
Immigration Act of 1965, 188 Ladero, Federico, 233n31
Immigration Restriction League, 230n131 La guagua area (Snchez), 4
The Impact of the Intervention (Calder), La Guerra de Abril, 174
223n31 La Sentencia, 2037, 21013
imperialism: disruption of Latinidad and, Las vrgenes de Galindo (tradicin) (Pen-
1011; Haiti-DR border and, 710; in son), 26, 3957
Literature of Compassion, 12126; US Las vrgenes de Galindo o la invasin de
expansionism and, 3; US occupation los haitianos sobre la parte espaola de
of Dominican Republic and, 7277, Santo Domingo (The Galindo Virgins
8182 or the Haitian Invasion on the Spanish
Inchustegui Cabral, Hctor, 100101, 142 Side of Santo Domingo) (del Monte),
Indian affirmation, 19798, 245n78; indi- 16, 2627, 3637, 4157, 219n78
genista literature and, 39, 5657 Latino/a ethnicity: absence of Domin-
indigenismo, 3435, 13536 icans in, 3; disruption of Latinidad
indigenista literature, 39, 5657 and, 1011; dual marginality and, 46;
268 INDEX
migration and race and, 18892; rayano Lipsitz, George, 184, 19091, 211
consciousness and, 1718; socioreligious literacy, of black Dominicans, 6264,
and messianic movements and, 6972 222n16
La Trinitaria, 3234, 42, 241n91 literature: anti-Haitianism in, 4449,
Lee, Harry (General), 6164, 66, 7273, 10117; of Caribbean diaspora, 12426;
7980 cultural identity and, 37; foundational
leadores robustos, in Ruedas poetry, 141 themes in, 4957; history and, 1415;
Leonardo, Engel, 16466 Latin American foundational fiction,
letrados: Caribbean literature by, 17580; 38; Massacre of 1937 in, 9496, 109
Dominican independence and, 3137; 17; roots of contradictions in, 2837;
Galindo Virgins narrative and, 4849; spiritual possession in, 8292; of US
Hispanophile ideology of, 7172, 98 Empire, 7982, 228n95
101, 211, 224n33; Indian affirmation and, Literature of Compassion: anti-
39; Massacre of 1937 and, 96101; sup- Haitianism and, 10917; Massacre of
port for Trujillo from, 100101 1937 and, 1019
Levente no. Yolayorkdominicanyork (per- literature of suffering, 120
formance), 174, 19599, 242n7 Lo que dice la piel (What the Skin Says)
Liberal Party (Dominican Republic), 29, (video installation), 14749
31, 42, 45, 55, 217n34 Lora, Quisqueya, 206
Liborismo movement, 6466; Mateos Los de abajo (Azuela), 102
leadership of, 6772, 7982; possession los dejados (those left behind), 167
practices and, 8292; in post-Trujillo Louisiana Purchase, 3
era, 9192, 224n35 Lowe, Lisa, 189
Lnea Fronteriza: anti-Haitianism and Luis Pie (Bosch), 17, 1049, 12126
politics of, 45, 10917; black Domin- Lundahl, Mats, 69, 224n36
icans, border embodiment and, 46; Lundius, Jan, 69, 224n36
disruption of Latinidad and, 1011; Lupern, Gregorio, 27, 2930, 216n27
earthquake in Haiti and, 1718, 130
34, 14446, 15254; Galindo Virgins Madonna imagery, in Hernndezs Da pa
narratives and process of, 4749, 51 lo do, 16069
57; of Hispaniola, 7782; in Lnea fron- Madre-Patria (Mother-Nation), depiction
teriza video installation, 14654; in Lit- of women as, 4957
erature of Compassion, 11217, 11926; Madrid, Alejandro, 182
Massacre of 1937 and, 96101; race and, Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 5, 18, 99, 150
610; rayano consciousness and, 131 Manifest Destiny, 89, 27n79
34; in Ruedas poetry, 13446 Mann Act, 8889
Lnea fronteriza (video installation), Marmolejos, Sonia, 12934, 144, 16869
14654 Marrero Aristy, Ramn, 100103, 109, 123
linguistic difference: anti-Haitianism and, Mart, Jos, 33, 78, 124, 175, 186, 244n45
14954; Anzaldas linguistic terrorism Martnez-San Miguel, Yolanda, 121, 171,
and, 200201, 2067; in Dominican 186, 195, 245n75
culture, 18990, 199202 Martnez-Vergne, Teresita, 233n39, 234n40
INDEX 269
masculinity: Mateos projection of, 6972, Mexico, migration to US from, 18889
7677; rejection of black masculinity, middle class, emergence in Dominican Re-
7477 public of, 6872, 18286
Massacre of 1937, 12, 14, 17; Afro-religious Mignolo, Walter, 5
traditions and, 11726; Galindo Vir- migration: border embodiment and, 46;
gins narrative and, 27, 5556; Gatess dominicanidad ausente and, 18692;
discussion of, 163; global context for, of Dominicans to Europe, 242n5; of
21013; in Hernndezs Da pa lo do, Dominicans to US, 2, 8492, 16769;
156; historical silence about, 9396; global war on blackness and, 2037; in
historiography concerning, 231n7, post-Trujillo era, 18086
238n44; linguistic difference following, Minich, Julie, 152
14954; Literature of Compassion and, Mi patria (Urea), 2526, 216n26
1039, 12526; memorial to, 214n40; in Mirabal, Tana, 164, 241n91
Prestol Castillos work, 10917; in Rue- Mirabal sisters, martyrdom of, 25, 215n14
das poetry, 13846; statistics on victims Monroe Doctrine, 7374, 230n140
of, 231n3; testimony concerning, 231n5 montarse (possession), 8292
Mateo, Andr L., 102 Montero, Hernando, 217n47
Mateo, Olivorio, 12, 14, 16, 5860; em- Moraga, Chrrie, 56
bodied memory in death of, 8392; moreno oscuro (dark brown), 3334
execution of, 6466, 7677, 7982; as Morse, George H. Jr. (Captain), 5960,
religious leader, 6772, 224n36 6266, 8082
Matibag, Eugenio, 121, 231n7, 232n16 Moya Pons, Frank, 191
Mayes, April, 43 mulata cabaretera, 194
McRuer, Robert, 152 mulatos (mulataje): colonial exclusion of,
media: anti-Haitian discourse in, 4445, 6264; Dominican concept of, 9, 30
7982; contrasting images of Haiti and 37, 4344, 5253, 18990; in Radical
Dominican Republic in, 15960; Do- Party, 217n34; whiteness and, 5257,
minican censorship of, 223n28; Haitian 216n24
earthquake coverage in, 13034; images Muoz, Jos Esteban, 16667
of Dominicans in, 3; Massacre of 1937 mysticism, in Literature of Compassion,
coverage by, 100101, 233n31; paternal- 109
ist rhetoric in US occupation coverage,
7477 Narratives of Migration and Displacement
Mella, Ramn Matas, 34 in Dominican Literature (Mndez),
Mndez, Danny, 233n39 233n39
Mndez, Denny, 200, 241n88 National City Bank of New York, Do-
merengue: Trujillos co-optation of, 182 minican finances in, 60
messianic movements, history in Latin nationalism: disability images and, 150
America of, 6972 54; in Dominican literature, 11017;
mestizaje: Galindo Virgins narrative and, Dominican Republic independence
27, 4749; Hispanism and, 37; in Latin and, 2930; Ruedas critique of, 14246
American fiction, 3839; race and nationalization, elite support for, 100101
nationalism and, 710, 3132, 18990 Nation and Citizen in the Dominican Re-
270 INDEX
public, 18801916 (Martnez-Vergne), literature, 4950, 5357; Liborismo as
233n39, 234n40 challenge to, 7172; US occupation of
necrophilia, in Galindo Virgins narrative, Dominican Republic and rhetoric of,
5152 7377
Negrista literature, 102, 119 Paulino, Edwardo, 206, 214n40
Ngritude, 102 Pedagogies of Crossing (Alexander), 45
Ngai, Mae, 198 Pea Batlle, Manuel Arturo, 23, 40, 98
Nicaragua, US intervention in, 74 101, 109
Nez, Lydia, 11819 Peninsular War, 28
Penson, Csar Nicols, 2627, 30, 37, 39
Obama, Barack, 211 57, 211, 216n22; dominicanidad produc-
Obejas, Achy, 125 tion and, 96; Hispanophile ideology
ONeill, Eugene, 7879, 82 and, 6566, 98; patriarchy in writing
Operation Wetback, 188 of, 7172
oppression, in Dominican literature, Perdomo, ngel, 137
11417 Prez, David Karmadavis, 18, 133, 14654
oral memory, in Dominican culture, Prez, Jos Joaqun, 39, 52
224n42 Prez, Juan Isidro, 32
Ortiz, Altagracia, 229n127 Prez Firmat, Gustavo, 4
Over (Marrero Aristy), 1023 Prez Terrero, Juan, 171, 17374, 180
performance: identity and, 13334; rayano
Pacini Hernndez, Deborah, 182 consciousness in, 14854
paintings, Galindo Virgins narrative in, photography: colonial desire depicted in,
26, 216n20 8586; disability images and, 15254;
Paisajes y meditaciones de una frontera dominicanidad border in, 13134; of
(Prestol Castillo), 11317, 235n65 inequality, 17374
Palabras de explicacin (Prestol Cas- Pierre, Mara, 2089, 211
tillo), 11517 Pierre, Sonia, 205
Palma, Ricardo, 40, 219n75 Plaza de la Cultura (Culture Square), 49,
Palma Sola Revival, 231n146 220n107
Palo Monte, 222n16 possession, in diaspora literature, 8292
Pan-African identity, 78 postcards, colonial desire symbolized in,
Pan-Caribbean community, 121 8586
Pap Liborio. See Mateo, Olivorio power, production of history and, 14,
Papi (Hernndez), 167 1819
Participacin Ciudadana (Citizen Partici- The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau),
pation), 206 19495
Partido Nacional, 100101 Prestol Castillo, Freddy, 17, 10917, 144,
Partido Reformista, 239n65 234n56, 235n6365
Partie Dmocratique Populaire de la Jeu- Prval, Ren, 13032, 144
nesse Hatienne, 236n75 The Price of Sugar (documentary), 232n8
patriarchy and paternalism: anti- prieto: race and nationalism and, 710; ra-
Haitianism and, 1079; in Dominican cialized classification of, 23
INDEX 271
proletarian literature, 11926, 236n76 Liborismo movement and, 6872; in
prostitution in Dominican Republic, 87 Literature of Compassion, 1089; in
92, 227n120, 227n123 Massacre of 1937, 14, 17; in Prez video
Puello, Garrido, 6769, 224n36, 224n38 installations, 14854; in Prestol Castil-
Puerto Rico: Bosch in, 17576; Domini- los writing, 11017; racialized classifica-
can community in, 242n5; Hispanism tion of, 23; in Ruedas poetry, 13446;
and, 3031, 217n39; migration to US terminology of, 213n7, 217n27; trans-
from, 189; military bases in, 1023; border consciousness of, 15569
revolutionary movement in, 41; trans- Reconicido (Recognized), 206
nationalism in, 4 Renda, Mary A., 74
Puri, Shalini, 37, 196 Reparations Act (1825), 29
repetition, silencing of history through,
Quiroga, Juan Facundo, 220n105 1314, 2527, 53
Repblica del Hait Espaol, 28
Rabia (photograph), 171, 17374, 180 Restoration War, 29, 216n27, 246n6
race: anti-Haitianism and, 16069, 210 Rivas, Wello, 184
13; dominicanidad and role of, 13; Rivero, Daniel, 206
dominicanidad ausente and, 18692; Robertson, Pat, 15960
dominicano ausentes and, 173202; Robles, Frances, 241n90
Dominican Republic independence Rockefeller Group, 60
and, 3037; eugenics and, 8889; in Rondn, Pura Emeterio, 206
Galindo Virgins narratives, 5257; Roosevelt, Franklin D., 77
global war on blackness and, 20313; Roosevelt, Theodore, 7374
Haiti-DR border and, 610; Hispano- Roosevelt Corollary, 7374, 15859,
phile ideology and, 9899; institu- 219n77
tionalized racism and, 21013; rayana Rosario, Nelly, 17, 8492, 123, 125
identity and, 13134; rejection of black Roth, Wendy, 163
masculinity and, 7477. See also black Rueda, Manuel, 18, 13346, 238n31,
Dominican identity 238n38; Lnea fronteriza video installa-
racexiles: Dominicans as, 173, 18687, 191, tion and, 14654
194, 2067 Ruiz, Flix Mara, 32
Radical Party (Dominican Republic), 28
29, 31, 45, 217n34 Salcedo, Luisa, 8788
Rama, ngel, 31 salves: to Mateo, 6772; possession as
Ramrez, Wenceslao (General), 6364, theme of, 8392
222n19 Snchez, Francisco del Rosario, 34
rayanos: consciousness of, 13146; in Snchez, Luis Rafael, 4
dominicanidad discourse, 1719; San Miguel, Pedro, 1415, 12425, 175
Dominican politics and, 4243; Santana, Jos, 2067
earthquake in Haiti and conscious- Santana, Pedro, 29, 42
ness of, 13034; genocide of, 9396; santera, 11718
Haitian-Dominican collaboration and, Santo Domingo: de facto emancipa-
2057; in Hernndezs work, 16769; tion in, 33; Hispanophile ideology in,
272 INDEX
49; map of, 24; Pensons depictions of, Stinchcomb, Dawn F., 10
4041 Surez, Luca, 90, 123
Santos-Febres, Mayra, 135 sugar industry: corporate ownership
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 3637, 211, of, 60; labor migration in, 7782;
218n62, 220n105 Liborismo movement and, 6872; in
Schomburg, Arturo, 8, 79, 234n48 Literature of Compassion, 1029, 119
sea-border metaphor, in Ruedas poetry, 135 26; Massacre of 1937 and, 9496; work-
Sentencias de los reos de Galindo, 26 place conditions in, 232n8
7 Das digital journal, 206 The Sugar Babies (documentary), 232n8
sexualized body of Dominican subject:
Andjar Murders of 1822 and, 16, 50 Tapia y Rivera, Alejandro, 31, 217n39
52; Dominicanyork and, 194; US impe- tattoos, 14849
rialism and, 8592 Taylor, Diana, 1415, 161
Silencing the Past (Trouillot), 14 Tejana identity, 4
Sili, Ruben, 13637 Terrible 12, 230n144
slavery: Dominican abolition of, 3334; textos montados (possessed texts), 8492,
in Galindo Virgins narrative, 4549; 123
Haitian revolt against, 7882; Hispan- textuality, history of, 11
iola independence movements and, Thompson, Krista, 85
2829; race and citizenship and history Tomlinson, Barbara, 211
of, 710 Torres-Saillant, Silvio, 2, 134, 163, 168, 170,
social realism, in Dominican literature, 17273, 17980, 19093
102, 109 Trabucazo (blunderbuss shot), 28, 30
socioreligious movements, history in Latin tradiciones, 219n75
America of, 6972 transnationalism: border embodiment
Solano, Patricia, 206 and, 46; dominicanidad discourse
soled (loneliness or desolation), 6872 and, 17; in Literature of Compassion,
Soledad (Cruz), 8384 11826; Massacre of 1937 and transfor-
solidarity, Dominican narratives of, 159 mation of, 97101
Slo cenizas hallars (bolero) (Vergs), Treaty of Aranjuez, 13637
18186 Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Com-
Sommer, Doris, 1415, 38, 110, 183 merce, 27
Song of the Water Saints (Rosario), 84 Trouillot, Michel, 1314, 9596
92, 123 Trujillo, Rafael Lenidas, 7, 68; anti-
sovereignty of Dominican Republic, Haiti Haitianism and, 14344, 233n24; assas-
as threat to, 4143, 98101 sination of, 9192; Bosch and, 17576;
Spain: Dominican Republic indepen- Dominican migration to US during
dence and, 2830; Hispanophile ide- regime of, 8492; Hispanophile ide-
ology and, 3436, 4344, 15657; re- ology under, 3537, 4849, 5557,
annexation campaign for Hispaniola by, 2047, 233n24; intellectuals sup-
27, 29, 42, 4749 port of, 100103, 10910; Massacre of
Spanish-American War, 3, 91; Hispanic 1937 and, 93101, 11617; merengue
Caribbean after, 9 co-opted by, 182; Rueda and, 14046;
INDEX 273
Trujillo, Rafael Lenidas (continued) Vega, Ana Lydia, 121
US occupation of Dominican Republic Vega, Bernardo, 125, 236n85
and, 60, 225n43, 230n144; women her- Vergs, Pedro, 18, 174, 18186, 191
oines in dictatorship of, 50, 215n14 Vesey Plot of Charleston, 8
Turits, Richard, 96, 112, 14445 video production, dominicanidad dis-
course in, 18
Umberto Acosta, Felipe, 70 Vincent, Stnio, 144
unicef Rights of the Children, 234n44 violence: bordering and, 5253; in dias-
Unidad de las razas (Duarte), 3234 poric literature, 9092; euphemistic
Unified Island proposal, 30 dictions of, 9496; of US Dominican
Unin Cvica Nacional (National Civic occupation, 8692
Union), 186, 243n30 Vrgen de Guadalupe, 167
United Kingdom, Haitian sovereignty rec- La Vrgen de la Altagracia, 167
ognized by, 29 Virgen-Tierra (Virgin Land), depiction of
United States: anti-Haitianism in, 7882, women as, 4957
16069; anti-immigration sentiment in,
18892, 2089; border control in, 207; Washington, Booker T., 234n48
bordering of Hispaniola and, 7782, Weakland, B. F., 8788
239n66; dominicana ausentes in, 171 Welles, Sumner, 112, 233n31
202; Dominican migration to, 3, 12, Wessin y Wessin, Elas, 180
8492, 16769, 171, 18092; Domini- Wheeler, Rosann, 73
can politics and, 18086, 207; eugenics whiteness: in Galindo Virgins narratives,
in, 8889; expansionist policies of, 23, 2427, 5257, 216n24; rejection of
7, 1011; Good Neighbor Policy of, 41; black masculinity and, 7477; Trujillos
Haitian sovereignty recognized by, 29; defense of, 101, 233n24
in Hernndezs Da pa lo do, 15969; Why the Cocks Fight (Wucker), 156
history of blackness in, 710; interven- Williams, G. A. (Leit.), 6466
tion in Dominican Republic, 23, 6 Wilson, Woodrow, 7475, 15859
10, 12, 16, 5892, 1029, 11617, 17374, women: as Dominican cultural category,
18086, 243n25; Trujillo supported by, 4957, 16469; eugenics and, 8892;
99101, 1034 impact of US occupation on, 8492,
Urea, Nicols, 2526, 216n26 229n120, 229n123; literacy in Domini-
Urea, Salom, 26, 39 can Republic of, 6264
Wucker, Michelle, 10, 156, 239n66
Valdez, Juan R., 149
Valerio-Holgun, Fernando, 108 Ysabel, in Galindo Virgins narrative, 24
Vallejo, Catherina, 49, 230n138 27, 4549
Van Doren, Carl, 228n95
Vargas, Freddy, 168 Zapete, Marino, 206
Vasquez, Horacio, 233n24 Zoot Suit Riots, 188
274 INDEX