THE BORDER S OF

D O M I N I C A N I DA D

Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction

Lorgia García-P eña
 THE BORDERS OF
DOMINICANIDAD
Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction

LORGIA GARCÍA- PEÑA

Duke University Press

Durham and London
2016
© 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of
America on acid-free paper ∞
Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro
by Graphic Composition, Inc.,
Bogart, Georgia

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: García-Peña, Lorgia, [date] author.
Title: The borders of Dominicanidad : race, nation, and archives
of contradiction / Lorgia García-Peña.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2016021424 (print)
lccn 2016023796 (ebook)
isbn 9780822362470 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822362623 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822373667 (e-book)
Subjects: lcsh: Dominican Americans–Race identity. | Blacks–
Race identity–Dominican Republic. | Immigrants–United States–
Social conditions. | Race in mass media. | Dominican Republic–
Relations–Haiti. | Haiti–Relations–Dominican Republic. |
United States—Foreign relations–Dominican Republic–History. |
Dominican Republic—Foreign relations–United States–History.
Classification: lcc e184.d6 g36 2016 (print) | lcc e184.d6
(ebook) | ddc 327.7307293–dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021424

Cover art: Pepe Coronado, US/DR en relación, 2016

 A MIS PADRES,

DOÑA MARITZA PEÑA Y DON TULIO GARCÍA,

Y A MIS HOMBRES,

JOHN GALLAGHER Y SEBASTIÁN GALLAGHER- GARCÍA.

GRACIAS POR DÁRMELO TODO. AQUÍ LES DEVUELVO UN CHIN.

 CONTENTS

Note on Terminology ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction Dominicanidad in Contradiction 1

PART I. Founding the Archive

1 The Galindo Virgins: Violence and Repetition in

the Archive of Dominicanidad 23
2 Of Bandits and Wenches: The US Occupation (1916–1924)
and the Criminalization of Dominican Blackness 58
3 Speaking in Silences: Literary Interruptions and
the Massacre of 1937 93

PART II. Diaspora Contradicts

4 Rayano Consciousness: Remapping the Haiti-DR Border

after the Earthquake of 2010 129
5 Writing from El Nié: Exile and the Poetics of
Dominicanidad Ausente 170

Postscript Anti-Haitianism and the Global War

on Blackness 203
Notes 213
Bibliography 247
Index 261
0.1 Map of the unified island of Hispaniola, 1822. Archivo General de la República,
Santo Domingo.
 NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

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 Línea 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 Báez, 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 Hernández; the ac-
ciones of David “Karmadavis” Pérez; and the literary gifts of Junot Díaz, Rey
Andújar, Nelly Rosario, Loida Maritza Pérez, 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 Alcántara, the Andújar 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 Martínez-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 Méndez, 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 González, 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-Hernández 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 Gutiérrez 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 García Calderón, 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 Nicolás
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-
versity—Genevieve 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 Jiménez Polanco, and Ra-
mona Hernández, and to transnational Hispaniola scholars April Mayes, Raj
Chetty, Maya Horn, Arturo Victoriano, Carlos Decena, Néstor Rodríguez,
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 Dávila, Lourdes Torres, Josie Saldaña, Adriana Zavala, Deborah Pacini
Hernández, Camila Stevens, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, Marisel Moreno, Ben
Sifuentes-Jáuregui, 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 Báez, Eric Gómez, Daryelin Torres,
Adnaloy Espinosa, Nimsi Guzmán, Indhira García, María Scharbay, Laura
Catelli, and Afia Ofori-Mensa. And my dear friends and biggest supporters
Junot Díaz, David Tábora, Julie Tábora, 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 García Peña and Kerwin
García Peña, 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 añoñarme toda la vida. To my nieces and nephews for their love
and laughter. To my cousins in the Dominican Republic—Eliezer, Abel, and
Iván Doñé—for 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 Peña 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 Doñé, 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 García, introduced me to
books and taught me to love words and language. My mother, Doña Maritza
Peña, taught me the true meaning of the phrase “sí 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, Sebastián. 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. Sebastián 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-
bastián, 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

During my first semester of graduate school at the University of Michigan,

I attended a gathering aimed at connecting graduate students of color with
university resources. Upon hearing me speak Spanish to a friend, a professor
asked where I was from. Understanding he was not interested in my New
Jersey upbringing, but rather in figuring out the origins of my ethnicity and
Spanish-speaking abilities, I told him I was born in the Dominican Republic.
The professor smiled and said to me: “Ah, dominicana! I love your country!
Good rum and cheap whores!” I excused myself and abandoned the gath-
ering.
As I walked home that night my body shook with a combination of anger,
indignation, and confusion. Why did the professor think it appropriate to
refer to my birth country in such aggressive terms? What logic made it pos-
sible for him to associate me, a doctoral student, with his hedonistic esca-
pades to the tropics? The dynamics at play in the professor’s diction are foun-
dational to some of the basic questions this book raises.
Given my scholarly training and my preoccupation with the production
of dominicanidad at home and abroad, the encounter with the professor
prompted a more urgent questioning of the multiple ways in which silences
and repetitions operate in the erasure of racialized Dominican subjects from
the nation and its archive. Those silences, as my encounter with the professor
shows, are then filled with fantasies that reflect colonial desires and fears.1
Through a colonizing gaze, the professor replaced my (Dominican) sub-
jectivity with the symbolic tropes of colonial desire: “good rum and cheap
whores.” Yet as I reflect on what is still a very troubling encounter, I recog-
nize that my body, by its mere positioning within the academic space, also
interrupted the professor’s “knowledge” of dominicanidad.
In many ways, this book is a project of recovering and historicizing
knowledge interruptions through what I call contradictions, “dictions”—sto-
ries, narratives, and speech acts—that go against the hegemonic version of
national identity and against the mode of analysis we tend to value as histor-
ically accurate or what most people call truth. The Borders of Dominicanidad
is concerned with the ways in which dictions are projected and performed
on racialized bodies to sustain the exclusionary borders of the nation. Such
acts of violent nation bordering are historically determined; yet they also
require the complicity of citizens in the violent policing and erasure of ra-
cialized bodies. The professor’s diction—“good rum and cheap whores”—
summoned the historical nexus that has marked the relationship between my
birth country, the Dominican Republic, and my adopted one, the United
States. His diction encapsulates the unequal dynamics through which racial-
ized immigrant and ethnic minority subjects are marked as perpetual others,
becoming the carriers of two nations’ exclusion—the one associated with
their ethnicity and the one in which they reside.
Literary scholar Silvio Torres-Saillant argues that emigration for Do-
minicans is always a form of exile because the emigrants are forced to leave
their homeland due to poverty and disenfranchisement: “Emigra quien no
puede quedarse. . . . Nuestra emigración es una expatriación” (Those who
emigrate do so because they cannot stay. . . . Our emigration is the same as
expatriation).2 I take Torres-Saillant’s argument further by insisting that
black Dominican migrants are exiles at home and abroad. They are symboli-
cally and physically expunged from their home nation because they are black
and poor, yet they remain unadmitted into their host nation for the same
reasons. While “black” does not exist as an ethnically distinguished cate-
gory in the Dominican Republic the way it does in the United States, being
black (prieto, Haitian, or rayano) there inhibits social mobility through civic,
political, and economic exclusion. A poor prieto, someone with dark brown
skin, can easily be assigned the category of foreigner (haitiano). A poor
prieto who migrates to the United States then becomes a Dominicanyork,
her body doubly marked as black and foreign. The multiple geopolitical bor-
ders of dominicanidad—Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the United
States—become visible through the body of the racialized Dominican La-
tino/a. This dynamic made it possible for the professor to see in me his fan-
tasy of dominicanidad despite my subject position as a US national.
The long and unequal relationship between the United States and the
Dominican Republic has been relegated to the often unread margins of the
US archive. Historians of American Empire, for instance, rarely include

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 1916–24.3
This Dominican “footnote condition,” which writer Junot Díaz 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/a—a
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

domInIcAnIdAd In contrA DICTION 3

Living in El Nié

In the United States, the Dominicanyork can be read as African American

until the person’s accent or ability to speak Spanish sets the individual apart
as an other black. The Dominicanyork thus inhabits a space of dual margin-
ality belonging to neither nation, a space artist Josefina Báez allegorizes as
the “flagless nation” of “El Nié”: neither here nor there.8 But the ambivalence
of El Nié is not unique to the Dominican diasporic experience. Gloria
Anzaldúa writing in 1987, for instance, described her Tejana condition as
one of such discomfort it could be equated to living on barbwire.9 Speaking
about Puerto Rican transnationalism, novelist and critic Luis Rafael Sánchez
in his seminal essay “La guagua aérea” (1994) called Puerto Rico a “flying
bus.”10 Similarly, scholar Gustavo Pérez Firmat, also writing in 1994, the-
orized the Cuban American condition as “living on the hyphen.”11 While
highlighting the inherent discomfort of their particular liminalities, Anz-
aldúa, Sánchez, and Pérez Firmat hinted at an advantage awarded to the
border-immigrant-transnational subject: They can serve as a bridge between
two geographical, historical, and linguistic borders, contesting, as Anzaldúa
would argue, “the unnatural historical boundaries” that prohibit human
bodies from freely crossing between here and there.12
But the specificity of Dominican alterity allegorized through Báez’s
Nié—which also means, in its most vulgar sense, the “taint”—queers both
the hegemonic narrative of the nation-state(s) and the very location of in-
betweenness inhabited by Anzaldúa, Sánchez, and Pérez Firmat: “We all live
in the same building. El Nié. My mother, my grandmother, la comadre—mi
madrina, el ejemplo, la quiero a morir [my comadre—my godmother, the
role model, I love her to death].”13 Through a diction that embodies and
projects the very liminal experiences of the black Dominican and Domin-
icanyork subject the nation seeks to contain, Báez’s Nié becomes a trans-
historical location where the stories of exclusion can be recovered and
preserved. El Nié signifies not the border space that the subject inhabits—
Anzaldúa’s the barbwire—but rather the body that carries the violent bor-
ders that deter them from entering the nation, from access to full citizenship
and from public, cultural, historical, and political representation. Such act
of border embodiment is a manifestation of Afro Dominican spirituality.
M. Jacqui Alexander’s groundbreaking work Pedagogies of Crossing medi-
tates on the role of the sacred Afro-religious traditions in the process of un-
covering historical silences that produce oppression. She argues that the

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 Nié 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 Nié 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 Nié 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 subject—the rayano;
the exoticized, sexualized brown-skinned dominicana; the Dominicanyork;
and the Dominican migrant—contradict 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-
tions—that which is written, said, or described—impact the way people,
particularly those considered ethnic minority, colonial, or racialized sub-
jects, are imagined and produced across national paradigms.
Chicana feminists Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga called for a the-
orization “from the flesh” in order to contrast the epistemic violence that
perpetually excluded minoritized people’s 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 Grosz’s 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-

domInIcAnIdAd In contrA DICTION 5

nant rhetoric of sex and gender can be contested, I argue it can also be a site
where the violence and silencing of the borders contained in the nation’s ar-
chive can be contradicted. If the body of the racialized subject can carry the
burden of coloniality (“good rum and cheap whores”), becoming a screen
onto which colonial desires and fears can be projected, this book argues it
can also become a site from where the histories and stories that perpetuate
and sustain the oppressive borders of the nation can be interpellated.18 I pro-
pose the body—the racialized body of dominicanidad living in El Nié—as a
site for negotiating the narratives of race, gender, and cultural belonging that
operate in bordering the nation.

Race and Borders

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 people’s 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 (1914–34) and the massive Dominican emigra-
tion to the United States that began after the assassination of dictator Rafael

6 IntroductIon
Leónidas 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 Haiti”—the 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 1804—is 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 Empire’s relationship to the two
Hispaniola republics.19
During the early years of the foundation of the Dominican Republic
(1844–65), 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 Félix María del Monte and Manuel de Jesús Galván to pro-
duce dominicanidad as a hybrid race that was decidedly other than black,
and therefore different from Haiti’s 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: 1916–24; Trujillo dictatorship: 1930–61; US military: 1965; and
Balaguer regime: 1966–78).
The history of US blackness is also largely intertwined with the history of
Hispaniola’s independence projects. With the emergence of two black and

domInIcAnIdAd In contrA DICTION 7

mulato-led republics (Haiti in 1804 and the Dominican Republic in 1821),
Hispaniola became an international locus for black resistance and liberation
as well as the object of fear in the antebellum United States.21 At the begin-
ning of the Haitian Revolution, thousands of French planters fled the island,
taking refuge in the United States; many took slaves with them.22 By 1792,
more than two hundred white Saint Domingue families had moved to Phila-
delphia.23 Following the fall of Cap-Français in 1793, the number of refugees
increased daily, at one point reaching a rate of ten thousand per day for over a
week. Most refugees went to the United States in the hopes of continuing to
participate in a slave-driven economy.24 The Saint Domingue events arguably
influenced early abolitionist efforts and black insurgency in the nineteenth-
century United States. Examples of this influence can be found in the Gabriel
Conspiracy (1800), a plan by African American slaves to attack Richmond
and destroy slavery in Virginia that “Frenchmen” allegedly orchestrated, as
well as the famous Vesey Plot of Charleston (1822), in which the accused
mentioned the Haitian Revolution as their inspiration for insurgency.25
During the second half of the nineteenth century, blackness was an im-
portant category in the definition of US destiny. A nation that was built at
the expense of black people’s freedom now had to figure out a way to re-
define itself as multiracial, facing its great crime and finding ways to deal
with the trauma of slavery. In this atmosphere—which coincides with the
progression of Manifest Destiny, and the growth of the “White Man’s Bur-
den” ideology in Washington—US discourse of blackness that, as I argue,
emerged in dialogue with Hispaniola, traveled back to Hispaniola through
political and cultural imperialism. Nineteenth-century African American
abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany, as well as early
twentieth-century thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Arturo Schom-
burg, located in Haitian slave rebellions the spirit of liberty and freedom
needed to fight for the equality of races.26 Some of these figures would even-
tually argue for emigration efforts of free American blacks to Hispaniola.
Between 1823 and 1898, as many as twenty thousand black Americans emi-
grated to the southern part of Cap-Haïtien and to the Bay of Samaná, even-
tually forming communities and influencing the culture and history of both
nations of Hispaniola.27
Frederick Douglass, who joined the Republican Party and participated
amply in the imperial project, was appointed to the Commission of Inquiry
for the Annexation of Santo Domingo, in 1871.28 Douglass, an ex-slave and
great defender of racial equality, actively participated in a project that would

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 post–Civil 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 blackness—which he embodied in the eyes of his nation—as
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 Americans—Douglass’s actions
seem to suggest—had 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 post–Civil War
United States.
My proposed genealogy and geographical triangulation of the US-Haiti-
Dominican borders can shed light on the contemporary prevalence of anti-

domInIcAnIdAd In contrA DICTION 9

Haitianism in the Archive of Dominicanidad.33 At the same time, it offers a
way out of the discursive checkmate that persistently produces Dominicans
and Haitians as racial opposites. Contemporary studies about Hispaniola
tend to cast Dominicans and Haitians as enemies, the former being (more)
successful, yet negrophobic and anti-Haitian, while the latter often being
romanticized as poor, yet symbolic of black pride and black resistance. The
common juxtaposition of Haiti and the Dominican Republic—which ap-
pears in the works of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michelle Wucker, and Dawn F.
Stinchcomb, among others—although important in beginning a conversa-
tion about the complexity of transnational race studies, can reproduce a de-
contextualized understanding of anti-Haitian discourse as a postmodern and
local phenomenon resulting from twentieth-century Trujillo nationalism.
Such an anachronistic approach obscures the fact that anti-Haitianism is a
colonial ideology that traverses Hispaniola’s historical struggle with European
colonialism and US imperial expansionism. It also erases the fact that present-
day Dominican anti-Haitianism is founded on nineteenth-century global
anti-Haitianism. A more productive examination of the Dominican-Haitian
relationship thus requires our awareness of the intricacies of Hispaniola’s bor-
der history in dialogue with US history. Such analysis would also lead us to
recognize the present Haiti-DR border as a product of the US Empire.

Disrupting Latinidad

The second disruption I propose as a way of expanding our understanding

of race, nations, and borders as central in producing the US ethnoracial cate-
gory of Latino/a. This epistemic interruption decenters the experiences of
migration and border crossing—the movement of the body from one loca-
tion to the other and/or the shifting of geographical frontiers that end up
moving a community or locale from one nation to another. Rather, I argue
that US political, economic, and military expansion over Latin America—
which began circa 1790 with the slave revolts that led to the Haitian Revolu-
tion—are foundational to the production of Latino/a as a US racial category
and consequently to the process of US cultural bordering that continues to
render Latina/os as foreign. To explain this process, I examine dominicani-
dad neither through the dominant yet mutually exclusive temporal and geo-
graphical lenses dividing island and US Dominicans, nor through the polar-
ization of migration-minority experiences. Instead I approach Dominican
racialized subjectivity through a study of the palimpsestic coexistence of

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 location—El Nié—where 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 Nié 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-Hernández, Laura Gutiérrez, and Raúl 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.
Coronado’s “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-Hernández 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-Hernández’s 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.

domInIcAnIdAd In contrA DICTION 11

Contradicting the Archive

In order to understand my proposed geopolitical triangulation, The Borders

of Dominicanidad examines the structural foundations of what I call the Ar-
chive of Dominicanidad—historical documents, literary texts, monuments,
and cultural representations sustaining national ideology—through which
I argue the criollo elite sought to define the racial borders of the nation fol-
lowing independence from Haiti (1844) and throughout the second half
of the nineteenth century. I trace how these foundational ideologies have
been interpolated, institutionalized, deployed, and embodied through repe-
tition at five critical moments in the history of the nation: (1) the murders
in 1822 of the Andújar sisters, better known as the Galindo Virgins, during
the Haitian unification of the island of Hispaniola; (2) the killing of Afro-
Dominican religious leader Olivorio Mateo in 1922 during the first US mili-
tary occupation of the Dominican Republic; (3) the Massacre of 1937 of
more than twenty thousand ethnic Haitians and Afro-Dominicans in the
northern borderlands during the Trujillo dictatorship; (4) the 1965 military
intervention of the United States in the Dominican Republic and the sub-
sequent emigration of one million Dominicans to the United States; and
(5) the earthquake that devastated Haiti and parts of the southwest region
of the Dominican Republic in January 2010.
The time period encompassed in this study (1822–2010) is sizeable. How-
ever, I am not interested in producing a historical survey of dominicanidad.
Rather, my work traces the genealogy of Dominican discourses of nation
and race, and their appearances, reconstructions and interpellations across
time and space through the literary representations of the five historical epi-
sodes at key moments in the nation’s political history. Michel Foucault pro-
posed the concept of “genealogy” as one that does not produce history as
causal to the present or that pretends to “go back in time to restore an un-
broken continuity.” Instead, he argued: “Genealogy allows us to see how
the complexity of the present is somehow linked to the errors, the false ap-
praisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that con-
tinue to exist.”37 My book creates a genealogy of dominicanidad through a
careful reading of the conflicts and incongruities that appear in the dictions
performed through the multiple repetitions of the five episodes The Borders
of Dominicanidad proposes as key to the foundation of the nation and its
archive.

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

domInIcAnIdAd In contrA DICTION 13

metaphorical language. The passive voice often interrupts and exculpates the
pain and trauma caused on the bodies of the victims of violence (the Galindo
Virgins, Olivorio Mateo, the twenty thousand rayanos and ethnic Haitians
killed in 1937), delaying both the traumatic historical confrontation of the
event and the possibility of healing. Allegorized rather than confronted,
violence becomes a vehicle for the nation’s bordering, which is reinforced
through the constant, but indirect, repetition of the traumatic event in lit-
erature and history.
One well-documented example of the effects of silencing and repetition is
the Massacre in 1937 of twenty thousand rayanos and ethnic Haitians that I
study in chapter 3. The multiple, mostly foreign, studies about the Massacre
of 1937 further exacerbate its erasure by casting it as an anti-immigrant state-
sponsored crime against Haitians living on the Dominican side of border
rather than as the genocide of the intraethnic border population of rayanos
who lived and worked in the northwestern border towns of the Artibonito
Valley. Thus, repetition contributes to erasing the fact that in 1937 Domini-
cans killed their own. Though the massacre is the most recurrent event in
the historical and literary archives of twentieth-century Hispaniola, the ac-
tual violence on the bodies of victims has yet to be acknowledged. There are
no memorial sites, official commemorations, or state-sponsored efforts for
peace and reconciliation of the victims and survivors.40
In Silencing the Past, Trouillot insists on the relationship between power
and the production of history, reminding us that silences enter every stage
of constructing the historical archive: “at the moment of fact creation
(the making of the sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of the
archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the
moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final in-
stance).”41 A better way to find out “what happened” or what Trouillot calls
“the final product of history” requires the reading of the creation of silences:
a reading from the silences left by history. To do so, Trouillot urged us to be
less concerned with what history is, but rather how it works.42
The methodology I follow throughout the book guides the reader to see
how literature and history have silenced black lives, actors, and histories from
the Archive of Dominicanidad, and how these silences have, in turn, pro-
duced violence and exclusion of actual human beings throughout the history
of the nation. Diana Taylor, Pedro San Miguel, and Doris Sommer have in-
sisted on the complicity between history and literature in the construction
of the Latin American archive since the emergence of the modern nation

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-Hernández 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

The majority of scholarship focusing on the Dominican Republic concen-

trates on the study of the Trujillo dictatorship (1930–61), the effects of sex
tourism since the 1990s, and the present state of Dominican migration to
the United States. Though many scholars are concerned with questions of
racial identity and representation, these questions are typically examined
through a contemporary lens. I argue, however, that to understand present-
day dominicanidad and the borders that have produced it, we must look at
the historical and rhetorical narratives of the early nineteenth century that
sustain racism in the Dominican Republic. Such historical grounding would
lead us, for instance, to understand that the present-day extreme xenopho-
bia better known as anti-Haitianism that led the Dominican government
to denationalize more than 200,000 citizens in October 2013 is the result
of a colonial bequeath that was in turn upheld and sustained by the United
States to preserve its own imperial ventures, rather than the recent legacy of
the Trujillo dictatorship.
Part I, titled “Founding the Archive,” examines the considerable role that
Haiti played in the process of imagining and narrating dominicanidad along
racial, cultural, and political lines during the critical years of the birth of the

domInIcAnIdAd In contrA DICTION 15

Dominican Republic and through the first half of the twentieth century.
Chapter 1, “The Galindo Virgins: Violence and Repetition in the Archive of
Dominicanidad,” shows how the racialized and sexualized body of the Do-
minican subject—exemplified in the case of the Andújar Murders of 1822—
is objectified, violated, and sacrificed for the benefit of the nation-state.
The chapter traces the transformation of the historical crime against the
Andújar family into the symbolic rape and murder of the Galindo Virgins
at the hands of the state-serving criollo letrados. The chapter examines the
court transcripts of the proceedings against the murderers of the Andújar
family in contradiction with the multiple literary repetitions of the crime
that begin with Félix María del Monte’s epic poem Las vírgenes de Galindo
(1860). In their efforts to preserve their own white colonial privilege, del
Monte and his successors produced Galindo as a crime of barbaric black
Haitians against white civilized Dominicans. The production and repetition
of the Galindo Virgins, I argue, is foundational to Dominican anti-Haitian
rhetoric.
Chapter 2, “Of Bandits and Wenches: The US Occupation (1916–1924)
and the Criminalization of Dominican Blackness,” proposes Afro-religious
rituals of possession (montarse) and storytelling through salves (sacred songs)
as important contradictions of the dominant exclusionary archives that un-
derlines my analysis of the 1922 murdering of Afro-religious leader Olivorio
Mateo at the hands of the US Marines during the military intervention of
1916–24. My historical analysis sheds light on how the US military inter-
vention in the Dominican Republic shaped the Haitian-Dominican border,
and contributed to further erasing and disenfranchising of black Domini-
cans. Through close readings of military records related to the persecution of
Olivorio Mateo; traditional liborista salves; oral interviews; letters; and the
novel Song of the Water Saints (2002), by Dominican American author Nelly
Rosario, I analyze how the logic of the occupation contributed to imagin-
ing the Dominican body as a site that needed to be controlled and civilized.
The chapter also recovers and preserves the multiple ways in which racial-
ized subjects contradicted the epistemic violence imposed on them by the
Dominican and the US states through reading of letters, literary texts, and
oral interviews. The variety of evidence this chapter engages creates a sen-
sible account of the US military intervention that shows not only how the
marines implemented US policies in the Dominican Republic, but also how
these policies affected the everyday life of Dominican citizens at the time.
Chapter 3, “Speaking in Silences: Literary Interruptions and the Massacre

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 Compère
Général Soleil (General Sun, My Brother), by Jacques Stéphen 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 Álvarez, Junot Díaz, 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 nation’s 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

domInIcAnIdAd In contrA DICTION 17

US colonial domination on foreign territories, which shapes national iden-
tities, cultures, and bodies. My conceptualization of rayano consciousness
creates a transnational, transtemporal interchange that I hope produces new
ways to theorize Latino/a studies, inciting fruitful dialogues that can help us
rethink how power and politics interact with the production of symbolic
and geographic borders that shape our understanding of race, nation, and
culture. Transcending the political and conceptual limits of the Haitian-
Dominican border, rayano consciousness, as I define it, encompasses the
multiplicity of borders—transnational, interethnic, and multilinguistic—
that characterize the Dominican experience on and beyond the island.
Rayano consciousness thus refers to the historical and present awareness of
Dominican borders—symbolic, political, and geographical—a process that
includes marginalized subjectivities in the imagining and narrations of do-
minicanidad. Following the structure of previous chapters, chapter 4, while
focused on the present, puts into dialogue a variety of temporally, linguisti-
cally, and formally diverse texts: Cantos de la frontera, the poetry collection
(published 1963) by Dominican nationalist writer Manuel Rueda; a series
of performances and videos (2005–10) by David “Karmadavis” Pérez; and
“Da pa lo do,” a song and music video by writer and performer Rita Indiana
Hernández (2011). The diversity of the texts studied in the chapter moves my
analysis toward a decolonial turn, to borrow from Caribbean critic Nelson
Maldonado-Torres, that helps us better understand dominicanidad within
its context while proposing the possibility of a hopeful dialogue of solidarity
that can contribute to dismantling anti-Haitian and xenophobic discourse
on the island and beyond.
Chapter 5, the final chapter, “Writing from El Nié: Exile and the Poetics
of Dominicanidad Ausente,” proposes that rayano consciousness informs the
creation of an alternative poetics of dominicanidad in the diaspora. Histor-
ically rooted in the 150 years of unequal relationship between the United
States and the Dominican Republic, and particularly in the trauma of the
US intervention of 1965, I argue that this poetics of dominicanidad ausente
breaks away from the nostalgic trope of migration narratives in order to pro-
pose a critique of the relationship between power, the production of history,
and the construction of transnational citizenship and identities. The chap-
ter offers a reading of works by Dominican American artist and writer Jose-
fina Báez in dialogue with twentieth-century Dominican narratives of exile,
as exemplified in the seminal works of Juan Bosch and Pedro Vergés. In so
doing, the chapter awards the opportunity to explore the ways in which a

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 subject’s 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 nation’s 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 subject—the prieto, the rayano, the Haitian immigrant, or the Do-
minicanyork—can also become an archive of contradiction.

domInIcAnIdAd In contrA DICTION 19

 NOTES

Introduction

Unless otherwise noted, translations of foreign-language quotations are my own.

1. I use the Spanish version of the term “dominicanidad” without italics and in
lowercase to name both the people and the ideas related to Dominicanness. When
“Dominicanidad” appears capitalized it refers to hegemonic and official versions of
Dominicanness (as in the Archivo of Dominicanidad or the Archive of Dominican-
ness). See “Note on Terminology” at the beginning of the book.
2. Torres-Saillant, El retorno de las yolas, 18.
3. The military base of Barahona and San Juan became operational once again fol-
lowing the closing of the Vieques US Navy Post in Puerto Rico in 2001.
4. US Bureau of the Census, 2000.
5. Dávila, Latinos Inc.
6. I choose not to give an exact date of independence here as the very argument of
my book suggests that the birth of the nation is a process of contradiction. In chapter 1,
I explore the three possible dates for Dominican independence: 1821, 1844, and 1865.
7. The term rayano comes from the word raya (line) and alludes to people living
on the dirt line that for centuries divided the two territories that make up Hispaniola.
8. Báez, Levente no., np.
9. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 25.
10. Luis Rafael Sánchez, La guagua aérea.
11. Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Life on the Hyphen.
12. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 25.
13. Báez, Levente no., np.
14. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing.
15. Anzaldúa and Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back.
16. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres,
Against War.
17. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, xiii.
18. In Marxist theory “interpellation” refers to the process by which an ideology is
embodied in major social and political institutions, informing subjectivities and social
interactions. My use of the term follows Althusser’s argument that the situation always
precedes the subject. Individual subjects are thus presented principally as produced by
social forces, rather than acting as powerful independent agents with self-produced
identities. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 11.
19. Renda, Taking Haiti, 15.
20. Renda, Taking Haiti, 15.
21. See Fischer, Modernity Disavowed.
22. Treudley, “United States and Santo Domingo,” 112.
23. Fordham, “Nineteenth Century Black Thought in the United States,” 116.
24. Treudley, “United States and Santo Domingo,” 112, 113.
25. Treudley, “United States and Santo Domingo,” 113; Fordham, “Nineteenth
Century Black Thought in the United States,” 175.
26. Fordham, “Nineteenth Century Black Thought in the United States,” 120.
27. Fordham, “Nineteenth Century Black Thought in the United States,” 120.
28. Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 410.
29. Brantley, “Black Diplomacy and Frederick Douglass’ Caribbean Experiences,”
197–209, 203.
30. Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 398.
31. Welles, Naboth’s Vineyard, 77–78.
32. In his pbs documentary airing in 2012, race scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. in-
troduced the topic of Dominican racialization, avowing Dominicans’ denial of their
blackness. I further explore this subject in chapter 4.
33. Here I capitalize Dominicanidad for two reasons: to follow Spanish grammar
and to highlight the hegemonic/official nature of term as different from dominicani-
dad (in lowercase) which is more fluid and inclusive.
34. See Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza; Lazo, Writing to
Cuba; Ortíz, Cultural Erotics in Cuban America; Saldívar, Trans-Americanity; and
Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American.
35. Coronado, A World Not to Come, 34.
36. Guidotti-Hernández, Unspeakable Violence, 12.
37. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 64–139.
38. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 4.
39. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 23.
40. An unofficial collective annual commemoration began in 2013 organized and
led by Edwardo Paulino, a Dominican American historian: the Border of Lights, an
event in which artists and community activists stage a memorial of the massacre in
Dajabón and Ounaminthe.
41. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 26.
42. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 34.
43. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire.
44. Guidotti-Hernández, Unspeakable Violence, 12.
45. The Dominican migration to the United States has been mostly caused by eco-
nomic crisis. See Torres-Saillant, El retorno de las yolas; Hoffnung-Garskof, A Tale of
Two Cities; and Duany, Quisqueya on the Hudson.

214 notes to IntroductIon