Dominican Blackness

Abstract

Dominicans come originally from the Dominican Republic, a country that shares with the Republic of Haiti the island of La Española (Hispaniola, in English). Also known as Santo Domingo, La Española became the first European colony in the Americas and the first port of entry for the transatlantic slave trade. Besides serving as the initial site of the cultural syncretism that began in the Western Hemisphere in 1492, the colony was the home of the first Black-majority society in the Americas. Thus, people of African descent outnumber those of other ancestries in the Dominican Republic. This predominantly Black and mulatto population’s experience, struggles, and contributions have constantly failed to attract the attention of scholars around the world. Often described as a population that has embraced a Eurocentric vision tracing their ancestry to Spain and excluding non-white heritages, the US historiography about Dominicans for the most part had not included resources on Dominican blackness. Overall, many books published in the United States that mention the Dominican Republic do not mention Maroon societies, slave rebellions, folk culture, women’s contributions, and spiritual expressions traceable to the African heritage. Nevertheless, despite this constant omission and often denial, the omnipresence of Blacks in all aspects of Dominican life cannot be disputed. Although the Dominican Republic and the Republic of Haiti share the same island and a collective history of colonialism and blackness, both countries have distinct histories. During the 19th century, Santo Domingo transitioned from a Spanish colony to an independent republic. In 1844, upon ending twenty-two years of Haitian rule, Dominicans declared their independence. The Haitian unification period and the triumph of the independence movement have persisted in official discourses on Dominican national and racial identity. This interaction between the two countries has also generated a literature that frames the African descent of most Dominicans in relation to Haitian blackness. Yet the Dominican Republic has a history of blackness of its own that began to be documented by Dominican scholars in the late 1960s. This new knowledge on the lives, works, and struggles of these early African ancestors of today’s Dominicans shed light on their demographic, economic, racial, and ethnic complexities. The complexity of Dominican racial identity reached a turning point under the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship (1930–1961) that promoted a whitened, Hispanicized image of Dominican identity disregarding blackness and Haitianness. The Trujillo regime executed the massacre of 1937 that ended in the deaths of thousands of Haitian immigrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent at the Haitian-Dominican border. On the other hand, the Dominican Republic’s many acknowledged shades of blackness contrast with the racial classifications prevalent in the United States, where the one-drop rule precluded a person with the slightest trace of African ancestry from claiming the privileges assigned to whiteness.