Pajón power: styling citizenship and Black politics in the Dominican natural hair movement

Abstract

ABSTRACT Anti-Black racism has been widely criticized in scholarly and cultural representations of the Dominican Republic. Yet, this narrative of “Black denial” obscures growing activist and popular culture movements that are breaking the silence around race and visibilizing blackness. This paper examines one emergent thread of Black popular culture, the natural hair movement. This growing trend and commercial space promoting the acceptance of afro-textured hair challenges anti-blackness and exclusionary national ideologies of mestizaje. Given the ways that blackness and Haitianness are co-articulated in Dominican culture, this paper evaluates the potential of the cultural politics of hair to challenge Haitian exclusion. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Dominicans of Haitian descent, this essay situates the natural hair movements alongside contemporary policies aimed at the exclusion of the Haitian diaspora. In particular, these activists identify the commercialization of the movement as a threat to its political efficacy.