The impact of historical factors on modern race relations and identity in the Dominican Republic (original) (raw)
This paper was produced for Anthropology 313: Peoples of Latin America (Fall 2017) taught by Dr. Shaozeng Zhang at Oregon State University. In this paper, I explore the concepts of dominicanidad, or Dominican identity, in the context of the Dominican Republic's historic relationship with Haiti. First, I examine colonial developments and conflict, and how different factors created two ethnically different states. I then examine the Trujillo regime's policy towards Haiti. Next, I look at media portrayal of dominicanidad and Dominican self and group identification. Historical factors are connected with modern results, and current political developments are tied in. The paper concludes by naming historical conflict as a significant factor in Dominican ethnic identity.
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Between 1930 and 1961, the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo took firm control of nation-building in the Dominican Republic. During this period he mobilized state historians, government departments, and the media to distance dominicanidad [Dominicanness] from Africa and orient it towards Europe. Trujillo's regime defined the national color as indio [Indian] and disseminated a racist discourse of antihaitianismo [anti-Haitianism] to posit the nation as civilized and modern in opposition to Haiti's poverty and primitivism. Santo Domingo, renamed Ciudad Trujillo, was the primary site for the objectification of national identity. Under Trujillo's authority, inner-city slums were cleared to make way for wide, Paris-style avenues and model suburbs. Trujillo built bridges to expand the city and monuments to concretize the importance of past heroic events to the nation (Derby 1998). Migration from rural areas to the city was restricted, and public spaces reserved for the light-skinned elite. This was Trujillo's modernity: a Dominican nation unified under a unique racial classification and with the promise of future progreso [progress].
¿Ajeno Siempre Será (Foreigners Forever)?:The Spectacle of (Un)Making Dominican/Haitian Identity
This article examines Dominican state actions leading up to the September 23rd, 2013 constitutional court decision in Dominican Republic which changed the country’s citizenship policy and applied it retroactively to 1929. This amendment violates their own Constitution and several human rights laws because it creates over a quarter of a million stateless people within the Dominican Republic, a majority of whom are of Haitian descent. The court and government officials argue that this is not racist nor a human rights violation by citing the “in transit” clause in their 1929 citizenship policy, Article 9 of the Haitian constitution and espousing nativist arguments that question immigrants capacity to assimilate and to progress the nation towards Dominican ideals of “modernity.” I argue that the constitutional decision is part of a long-standing “pro urban, light-skinned non-Haitian, non-poor” tradition of Dominican governments and the minority elites which disguise power-seeking, racist and discriminatory policies that systematically disenfranchised Haitians, Dominicans of Haitian descent, the poor rural communities and ultimately the Dominican identity. These actions fall in line with generations of Dominican nationalist discourse and practice that changes the factors of Dominican identity by defining who has the right to belong to the nation-state. In this article, I will examine the case of the Japanese immigrant community in the Dominican Republic and in doing so highlight the contradictions in and implication of inherent of the 2013 Dominican Constitutional Court Amendment.
School of Advanced Study, UK. Centre for Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CLACS), 2012
This paper will tease out the historical and political grounding of dominicanidad, drawing on examples from the colonial epoch and complementing this with an exploration of how the Trujillo regime (hereafter Trujillista) strategically deployed ideologies of dominicanidad in the post-independence era for the purpose of marginalising expressions of black identity. This paper will consider how dominant racial and ethnic-charged ideologies strengthened during the Trujillista, were utilised initially by the elite to denigrate blackness but sought also to transform Dominican negotiations of African ancestry. This paper will highlight the emergence of discourses in the Dominican Republic and the United States (through outward migration) that stand as a counter to the dominant ideologies of dominicanidad, and hint at what these newly formed spaces have offered Dominican nationals in the way of a radical revival of expressions of black identity.
Caribbean Exceptions: The Problem of Race and Nation in Dominican Studies
LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH REVIEW, 2019
The analytic paradigms of race and nation have dominated scholarship on the Dominican Republic and have framed social and cultural analysis in ways that have limited the theorizing of Dominican materials to a narrow focus on identity. These gatekeeping concepts have been especially influential in shaping Dominican studies in the United States and in defining the predominant questions of interest in the field. This article assesses the conceptual limits of race and nation as persistent modes of analysis applied to the Dominican Republic and evaluates how these restrictive themes both shape and are shaped by conventional ideas about Dominican society. We argue for deeper engagement with homegrown scholarship and voices on the ground in order to move beyond repetitive and provincial concerns with "Dominicanness" and to trouble the far-too-common portrayal of the country as a novel racial problem. Los paradigmas analíticos de raza y nación han dominado las cuestiones académicas sobre la República Dominicana y han enmarcado el análisis socio-cultural de la isla de manera que se ha limitado la teorización a un estrecho enfoque en la identidad. Estos conceptos barrera ("gatekeeping concepts") han sido especialmente formativos en la creación de los estudios dominicanos en los Estados Unidos y han definido las cuestiones dominantes en este campo académico. El siguiente ensayo crítico evalúa los límites conceptuales de raza y nación como modos persistentes de análisis aplicados a la República Dominicana y analiza cómo estos temas limitantes forman ideas convencionales sobre la sociedad dominicana. Argumentamos por un compromiso más profundo con la producción académica de la isla y también por un compromiso con otras voces locales no-académicas para ir más allá de nociones repetitivas y provinciales sobre la "dominicanidad". Complicamos la muy repetida imagen del país como un siempre nuevo problema racial que merece más investigación.
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