The Dominican Racial Imaginary

Milagros Ricourt

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813584492
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This book begins with a simple question: why do so many Dominicans deny the African components of their DNA, culture, and history?    Seeking answers, Milagros Ricourt uncovers a complex and often contradictory Dominican racial imaginary. Observing how Dominicans have traditionally identified in opposition to their neighbors on the island of Hispaniola—Haitians of African descent—she finds that the Dominican Republic’s social elite has long propagated a national creation myth that conceives of the Dominican as a perfect hybrid of native islanders and Spanish settlers. Yet as she pores through rare historical documents, interviews contemporary Dominicans, and recalls her own childhood memories of life on the island, Ricourt encounters persistent challenges to this myth. Through fieldwork at the Dominican-Haitian border, she gives a firsthand look at how Dominicans are resisting the official account of their national identity and instead embracing the African influence that has always been part of their cultural heritage.     Building on the work of theorists ranging from Edward Said to Édouard Glissant, this book expands our understanding of how national and racial imaginaries develop, why they persist, and how they might be subverted. As it confronts Hispaniola’s dark legacies of slavery and colonial oppression, The Dominican Racial Imaginary also delivers an inspiring message on how multicultural communities might cooperate to disrupt the enduring power of white supremacy.   

1

Introduction

This book starts with a simple question: Why do Dominicans deny the African component of their genetic DNA, culture, and history? This question has been raised before: authors from myriad disciplines have investigated the meaning of race in the Dominican Republic, many of them concluding that Dominicans profess European ancestry, deny their blackness, and, correspondingly, despise their neighboring Haitians’ African origins.1 It is assumed that all Dominicans are equally in denial of their racial ancestry and that, although largely a national populace of mulattos and blacks, they envisage themselves as ancestrally white, or perhaps as somehow decolorized.2 These assertions locate Dominicans, who occupy the eastern portion of the island of Hispaniola, as victims of a distorted history that claims their nation to be Hispanic and Catholic in opposition to an African and “barbaric” Haiti, which occupies the western part of the island.

This critical perspective on “official” Dominican history, a history in fact embraced by many Dominicans, remains largely uncontested, even today. Thus, a racially anomalous, Peau noire, masques blancs country with a deep Fanonian psychological schism apparently persists; yet at the same time it is one side of a coin that has its Haitian counterface. Haitians are les damnés in Dominican eyes, envisaged within an ideology of racial stereotypes, anti-Haitian attitudes, and historical distortions.

These critical viewpoints, however, are at odds with my experience across five decades living in and out of the Dominican Republic. Was it I, as I began to ask myself, who was in denial? Were the people I encountered in the southern Dominican Republic countryside also in denial? Were my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother in denial as well?

I grew up hearing what were understood to be African drums during funerals, in celebrations of the Virgen del Carmen (Virgin of Mount Carmel) in the rural community of Doña Ana, and when taking long walks with my grandmother from the city of San Cristóbal to visit my great-grandmother in the nearby rural community of Samangola. Located in what used to be the center of a slave plantation in colonial times, the designation “Samangola” was believed to have been created by enslaved Africans who arrived on Hispaniola from the Angola region.

As a child, I remember walking behind a bakini, a funeral procession for an infant, and trying to understand the lyrics, a mixture of African and Spanish words, that people were singing. Anthropologists trace this tradition to Central Africa, but did those singers, or anyone else involved, ever think about the connection?

There are other instances of this. Frequently, I recall, I had seen large altars for San Miguel, or Saint Michael, in my mother’s friends’ houses. Saint Michael, also known as Belié Belcán, is a mystery (lua), or deity, in Dominican Vodou.3 The term “Dominican Vodou” (or “Vodú,” “Vudú,” “Vudu,” or “Vodun,” but rarely anymore “voodoo”) has a long genealogy, dating in print at least to the 1970s.

Later in my adult life, between 1980 and 2000, I spent several years in the Dominican countryside conducting research about one of the largest peasant organizations in Latin America, Confederación Nacional de Mujeres Campesinas (National Confederation of Peasant Women), which has as its identifying symbol the black face of Mamá Tingó, or Florinda Soriano, a peasant who fought for her land when the military seized it illegally but then was arrested and executed in 1974, during the regime of Joaquin Balaguer (1966–1978), after mobilizing the peasantry of Yamasá, a rural area several kilometers north the capital city and within the province of Monte Plata. Mamá Tingó was a black woman whose only photograph shows her with a bandana overing her head and a pipe between her lips.

Then, in meetings and parades in the Dominican countryside, I heard members of the organization play palos, African-derived drum ensembles used in Dominican Vodou, as they sang salves,4 called by Martha Ellen Davis musical versions of archaic prayers to the Virgin Mary, that are characterized by antiphonal verbal and musical repetition, in a strong African rhythm, and are used in sacred celebrations in Dominican Vodou.5

But it is in the Dominican diaspora to the United States, in which I have lived and studied since 1984, that I have often heard youngsters say, “I am Dominican of African descent,” and I have observed Dominicans wearing dreadlocks in radical acknowledgment of their supposed historically denied black ancestry.

My experiences have also included ethnographic research between 1989 and 2011, when I spent from one month to four years in villages in the Dominican provinces of San Cristóbal and San Juan de la Maguana; in neighborhoods of the capital city, Santo Domingo; and in towns near the Haitian-Dominican border. And I have conducted interviews in still other regions of the country and among Dominicans in New York City.6 My ethnography in communities of the country’s south has revealed ongoing cultural production with strong African components; and my interviews conducted among individuals of varying urban and rural social backgrounds have illuminated the complicated relationship between cultural practices and individual identity.

My research also encompasses ethnographic observations on public buses traveling back and forth from Santo Domingo to the Dominican-Haitian border towns of Pedernales, Jimaní, and Elias Piña. Both Haitians and Dominicans ride these buses, which provide an opportune setting for observing Dominican-Haitian relations at the grassroots level, beyond the “official” discourse of national essences and African denial.

Finally, I have also spent many months in the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Seville, Spain, and the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The AGI is a trove of historical documentation on the conquest, colonization, and administration of Spain’s possessions in the Americas, and the AGN is the main historical archival repository in the Dominican Republic.

It was my personal experience that first pushed me to ask my initial question about African denial. Then, over my extended ethnographic and archival explorations, I found myself navigating from initial personal curiosity through history, music, sociology, literature, anthropology, religion, and public health to synthesize and construct the subject matter of this book—the historical career of bifurcated notions of race in the anything but racially bifurcated Dominican Republic. As a result of my research, I now see the formation of the Dominican nation, not as a single historical trajectory of sociocultural dynamics and racial identity formation, but rather as a series of overlapping tendencies always in contradiction. Although what I identify as the “official” history of the Dominican Republic retains its bifurcated racial fundamentalism, I argue that Dominican racial self-perception in fact divides into different “imagined communities.”7 Here I use Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined community yet am taking certain liberties: in my view of a split Dominican nationality, I go beyond Anderson’s assertion that authenticity in identity is solely conceivable in terms of nationalism.

Following Edward Said, I use an approach to nationalism that takes into consideration its overall thematic continuities and at the same time considers its historically specific cultural particularities and discontinuities. Still following Said’s approach, I argue that there are different national imaginaries within the same national space-time framework—first, the colonized imaginary, representing the continuity of the colonial framework of power, and, second, a subversive imaginary, defined by those who see themselves as black and ready to fight against slavery—thus exposing shifting discontinuities in the colonial racial and cultural system.

The imaginary of Criollo/New World–born colonial plantation masters, rich mulattos, Catholic authorities, and local intelligentsia, all influenced by intrusive US racialization, was nurtured by the values of the former Spanish rulers, who intentionally generated an anomalous historical narrative that distorted the on-the-ground essence of Dominican racial and cultural makeup. This has evolved into the contemporary constructions of the Dominican Republic as the “most Spanish nation in the Americas”8 and “the oldest Christian people of the Americas.”9 This imaginary indexes the apparent triumph of the Dominican elite, who retain colonial values and behaviors encysted within a modern structure of power and domination. It has erased Africa within the “official” Dominican racial imaginary through many decades of socialization, utilizing discursive, print, and visual media and artifacts, as well as reflecting an assumed Euro-Christian epistemological base.

An underacknowledged and parallel imaginary, however, has resisted the imposition of these values, which kept ancestral Dominicans in physical slavery and their descendants in prolonged psychological denial. This second imaginary fed upon the values of ancestors who acted upon their desires for freedom. Their resistance to colonial rule is exemplified by significant movements: insurrections of enslaved Africans in the early sixteenth century; the creation of alternative maroon societies surviving over centuries; the role of blacks and poor mulattos in the achievement of independence in 1844; and their leadership in the War of Restoration in 1865. These submerged values survived as well in religion, aesthetics, and peasant movements and other forms of resistance in the twentieth century, and they continue today. I unequivocally affirm in this book that the elite imaginary failed to penetrate the entire Dominican social tissue. Abhorred and persecuted, Dominicans, from the southern rural areas in particular, preserved their African-Taino-Spanish religion, sacred music, and traditional instruments along with other cultural elements and orientations.

In a country with longstanding racial hybridization, the historical movements, assertions, and responses I will examine are too complex “to be captured in simple equations of domination and resistance,”10 or with a binary black/white formula. In this sense, race will be understood here within a dialectical process that throughout history incorporates and accommodates spaces of resistance. People and their movements redraw the boundaries of principal contradictions creating new zones of conflict and collective actions. Several examples illustrate my point.

First, the border dividing the island was the embryo of contradictions both in colonial and republican times. In spite of governmental policies, ideologies, violence, and surveillance, the border is space where ordinary people, both Dominicans and Haitians, engage in the creation of an alternative community of cultural fusion, cooperation, and achievement of citizenship. People in the border have developed a counter-logic of shared meaning disrupting the racial divisions encapsulated in the official ideology. In fact, the social formation of the Haitian-Dominican border, as we shall see, incorporates the active presence of mulattos and blacks in its gestation and maturation processes. Today, when the Dominican government is stripping the nationality of Dominicans of Haitian ancestry and hate emanates from the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the oligarchy, and government-dominated mass media, the Dominicans’ perception of the situation is radically divided. For example, social media discussions reflect struggles of Dominican and Haitians for human rights and mutual respect, several sectors of the Catholic Church deviated from the racist teaching of the Church hierarchy, and the Dominican diaspora has expressed its discontent with racist policies.

Second, the slave resistance to colonial rule did not stop the blending of races. These complexities of race, as Roger Sanjek (referring to Brazil) argues, encompass transgenerational social and biological melding and its compounded results, which include the blending of blacks into dominant European cultural groups “frequently at low social status, but occasionally in elite circumstances.”11 This array of colonial history, resistance, social transformation, and biological melding are mutually implicated factors in the social construction of race. In the Dominican case, one can argue that a hybrid nation of longstanding racial and ethnic complexity generates spaces of accommodation, resistance, and negotiation of racial identity simultaneously, at both individual and community levels. Rich mulattos, for example, took the political control of the country at the creation of the Dominican Republic, and in alliance with former Creole slaveholders, appropriated the elite’s racial discourse of Hispanidad and Catholicism. On the other hand, ordinary people construct their own way of thinking, in terms of racial identity, according to their rural/urban background, social class, and education.

Third, enslaved Africans’ resistance in the early life of the Spanish colony of Hispaniola is essential to decoding the continuing dynamics of race and cultural production. The lessons of freedom in the sixteenth century did not end with the comparatively short-lived plantation system created by the Spanish, and they generated an underground culture perpetuated in maroon communities that survived for centuries, initially blending with indigenous Tainos and later with other ethnic components. These maroon spaces re-created social and self-emancipation, as well as alternative knowledge, through their counter-colonial histories and practices. Still, ongoing sociocultural processes manifested in many Dominican settings, and refashioning of Dominican Vodou emanate from maroonage. Here ordinary people subverted the neat location of the Catholic Church, and their black bodies dancing to the rhythm of palos reimagined the national.

Fourth, although insufficiently acknowledged, previous writers, historians, social scientists, politicians, social and cultural organizations, merengue singers, and human rights advocates have been instrumental in resisting the “official” Dominican imagination. Starting in the 1970s, a wave of thinkers and activists rewrote history searching for Dominican African component. The works of Carlos Andújar Persinal, Celsa Albert Batista, Franklin Franco, Blass Jimenez, Fradique Lizardo, Dagoberto Tejada, Hugo Tolentino Dipp, and Rubén Silié have fiercely challenged the official historical narrative in arguing for the relevance of Africa in the racial and cultural formation of the Dominican Republic.12 These Dominican scholars joined the Slave Route of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). They opened a new space of dialogue to break the silence about slave trade in the former Spanish colony of Hispaniola. Black politicians such as Maximiliano Gómez and José Francisco Peña Gómez were also instrumental in understanding the acceptance of regular Dominicans of their African heritage. In the diaspora, the recent work of Silvio Torres-Saillant and Ginetta Candelario refutes the “official” Dominican imaginary.13

This book examines each of these spaces of resistance, negotiation, intimacy between Dominicans and Haitians, cultural production, and academic challenge to the ruling class’s negrophobia. It is an effort to understand the Dominican nation both ethnograph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Border at the Crossroads
• 3 The Creolization of Race
• 4 Cimarrones: The Seeds of Subversion
• 5 Criollismo Religioso
• 6 Race, Culture, and National Identity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index