The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola

The Dominican Racial Imaginary

Critical Caribbean Studies

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

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

Giselle Anatol, The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora

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

Milagros Ricourt, The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola

The Dominican Racial Imaginary

Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola

Milagros Ricourt

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ricourt, Milagros, 1960– author.

Title: The Dominican racial imaginary : surveying the landscape of race and nation in Hispaniola / Milagros Ricourt.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 2016. | Series: Critical Caribbean studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016008278| ISBN 9780813584485 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813584478 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780813584492 (e-book (epub)) | ISBN 9780813584508 (e-book (web pdf))

Subjects: LCSH: Dominican Republic—Race relations—History. | Racism—Dominican Republic—History. | Ethnicity—Dominican Republic—History. | Nationalism—Dominican Republic—History. | Blacks—Dominican Republic—History. | Creoles—Dominican Republic—History. | Cultural pluralism—Dominican Republic—History. | Anti-racism—Dominican Republic—History. | Dominican Republic—Social life and customs. | Dominican Republic—Social conditions.

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

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

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2016 by Milagros Ricourt

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

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

Manufactured in the United States of America

For the women de piel color de azabache who gave me life and knowledge: my great-grandmothers, Gregoria Rodriguez and Quita Diprés; my great-grandaunt, Elisa Diprés; my grandmother, Esperanza Rodriguez; and my mother, Andrea Diprés

Contents

Preface

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

Preface

Today more than ever, the Dominican Republic is in the eye of the storm of racial relations. The current debate on citizenship denial to Dominicans of Haitian ancestry; the thousands of undocumented Haitians facing deportation; the spreading of anti-Haitian sentiments; the violence against Haitians throughout the Dominican territory each poured a drop unleashing a national and international storm. The storm’s winds blow against the Dominican Republic government, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the oligarchy, and their media. Rather than receive total acceptance from the Dominican population, the policies of the government are questioned. An important number of Dominican women and men from different social backgrounds and organizations abhor the government, and several international institutions have sanctioned it. The Dominican diaspora has pronounced against the Dominican government through a series of articles in newspapers, including the New York Times; demonstrated in front of Dominican embassies and consulates; and sought advocacy with the United States Congress and Black Caucuses. The response of the Dominican government has been to accuse Dominican protesters of being anti-Dominican. And because he spoke and wrote against the government, Junot Díaz, a Dominican American writer and winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, received threats that he would be stripped of the honor the Dominican government had awarded him back in 2009.

The Dominican Republic has always been in the eye of the storm. Dominicans are known for their racism against Haitians and their understanding of themselves as whites—a burlesque of negrophobia and white supremacy that I never doubted was totally dominant. But in spite of violence, surveillance, and a fierce socialization process, many Dominicans battle against the continuity of white supremacist values, accept their blackness, and consider themselves part of the Caribbean archipelago.

I was one of them. I remember walking amid ackee trees on the Jamaican Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies, looking at men and women wearing dreadlocks and listening to a different language, and not feeling lost in translation. I felt I belonged. I was connected to the hot weather, to the rhythm, to the ocean view, to the loud voices, to the drum beatings, to the anguish of poverty, to the bloody sound of violence, and to the ackee tree, transported along with the people who brought it in slave ships from West Africa.

My experience and the experience of other Dominicans are unknown to many, and telling about these disparate narratives became an obsession with me. But how could I explain all this? A long process of reading, traveling to Haiti and other Caribbean Islands, visits to archives, observation of Dominicans both in country and throughout the diaspora followed, and through the years I accumulated hundreds of pages of historical facts, ethnographic observations, summaries, and quotations from books and chronicles. The result, a chaotic tome, sat sadly on my desk.

In the middle of my frustration over what to do with all this, I met my mentor, Professor Roger Sanjek, during a reunion of our Queens College project group (the New Immigrants and Old American Project). He asked me about my research. I told him that I had written this manuscript that was lost in words and going nowhere, and he told me to mail it to him. I did, and afterward we started an intense academic dialogue. For two years Professor Sanjek pushed me to reflect further on the direction of the manuscript and its main ideas, do some reading here and there, and rewrite. And the professor’s own editing skills moved the words beautifully, producing, finally, a coherent manuscript. This book is the result of that working process, and it’s not only mine but Roger’s. And thanks to Loni Sanjek, Roger’s wife, for her kind words of encouragement.

I’m also thankful to other colleagues who kindly read parts of the manuscript and provided me with very worthwhile suggestions and criticism. Professor Michaeline Crichlow provided many helpful suggestions for chapter 1, Professor Kathleen López read chapter 2 with a critical eye, and the contributions of Distinguished Professor Laird Bergad greatly strengthened the historical argument in chapter 3. Theologian Hector Laporta carefully reviewed chapter 5.

This book states strongly that a more complex Dominican national imaginary exists and that it is advancing in the Dominican Republic. The voices of Dominicans rejecting racism and xenophobia are louder than ever, and white supremacists are being subverted by the practices and knowledge of the people. Africa is nearer.

The Dominican Racial Imaginary

Map of Hispaniola

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

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

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 Americas⁸ 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 ethnographically and historically along with the struggles of people against the imposing racial and cultural values of the country’s elite.

The Evolution of Official Intellectual Discourse

If there is something black or African in the Dominican Republic it came from Haiti.

Dominicans are essentially Hispanics and Tainos.

"Unfortunately, Haitians have to be our next-door neighbor, tainting Dominican Hispanidad."

Haitians are a threat to our sovereignty because Haitians want to impose what their Constitution says: ‘the island is one and indivisible.’

I don’t know why are we waiting to send them all back to Haiti, and if they resist, kill all of them. [My translations from the Spanish]¹⁴

These Dominican Internet posts reflect the official Dominican history in which Haiti, tragically, is the central point shaping the idea of Hispanidad. The Spanish colony has been falsely described as a place of harmonious mixing of Spaniards and Tainos until African slaves fled from the French side to the Spanish side of the island, and then, later, repeated invasions by Haitians brought further black menace to the Hispanidad of Dominicans. What are the deeply embedded reasons that push one nation to harbor hate, racism, and genocidal sentiment against a neighbor nation? What factors inspire a nation to construct its identity by celebrating its racial superiority over another nation? Does the Dominican elite have a historically interpretable and understandable reason to express such a virulent anti-Haitianism, or did Dominican intellectuals just wake up one morning and decide to build a racist discourse merely for the sake of being racists? Were there only external forces, such as the United States’ nineteenth-century racialization of Dominicans versus Haitians that provoked the mentality of these individuals? Are these elite so-called intellectuals the only island voices regarding the relations between Dominicans and Haitians?

I will argue that the voice of the Dominican elite—formed by slaveholders and educated mulattos in colonial times, and by former