The Dominican Republic Reader: History, Culture, Politics

Abstract

The Dominican Republic Reader is a valuable and eminently teachable collection that benefits from the varied interests and deep expertise of its editors. The collection is temporally balanced, beginning with entries about pre-Columbian indigenous societies and proceeding steadily forward through contact and colonization, the Haitian Revolution, and independence and into the twenty-first century. Three thematic sections conclude the book, organized around religion, popular culture, and migration and diaspora. As the authors observe, many aspects of Dominican history have not received very much attention in English. The editors present a number of key entries in translation for the first time, alongside an impressive collection of images.The reader offers a welcome blend of touchstone texts and harder-to-find documents. Particularly valuable well-known selections include, for example, Brother Antonio Montesino's infamous sermon “A Voice in the Wilderness,” Silvio Torres-Saillant's classic essay “Tribulations of Blackness,” and a thoughtful compilation and translation of work by renowned musicians like Milly Quezada, Johnny Ventura, and Juan Luis Guerra. Lesser-known texts include the fantastic César Nicolás Penson excerpt “Arrogant Bell Bottoms,” Pedro Francisco Bonó's description of the anti-Spanish war camps, and Rafael Damirón's essay on a Dominican archetype, el tíguere. All three of these latter selections reflect the editors' attention to Dominican social history across decades, offering a window into dress, self-presentation, and class. The voice of dictator Joaquín Balaguer emerges in a novel text, a poem from his youth. In a valuable counterbalance, testimony from peasant witnesses and firebrand opponents flesh out the political scene.The documents from the colonial period offer a somewhat conservative interpretation of the interrelation between the colonies of Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo. The introduction to part 2 discusses a “great deal of conflict” after the 1690s (p. 62), the next section reproduces an account of a visiting British merchant emphasizing “enmity” between the two colonies (p. 117), and so on. A document that considered, for example, the 1721 Dominican rebellion for more trade with Saint-Domingue might introduce a productive complication to this narrative: the interrelation of the more rural east to the plantation west. Lay and ecclesiastical authorities made a number of reports about maroon communities, some of them excerpted in the reader to good effect. However, the excerpt about the Boca Nigua revolt offers an opportunity to grapple with the presence (if not prevalence) of sugar slavery on Dominican soil as well. Clearly, elites in portions of Dominican territory struggled not just with rural free labor but also with the very real possibility of antislavery revolt, in the Cibao, near the capital, and elsewhere. The colony was not wholly exceptional so much as it was diverse within itself; revolution brought not only a “violent cycle” but also elements of liberation (p. 122).From the mid-nineteenth century, the reader gathers selections of lively dialogues about imperialism, racism, identity discourses, political power, and popular culture. Imperialist voices meet staunch anticolonial defense; the editors also take care to add entries that discuss quotidian aspects of occupation. The editors offer expert introduction to contentious turn-of-the-century debates about racial identity. They have curated a number of poignant sources about political violence as well, from dictators, victims, and witnesses. The collection highlights how labor organizing continued, even during the height of Rafael Trujillo's midcentury dictatorship. A short story from Juan Bosch and a radio entry from José Francisco Peña Gómez are among the documents that offer a unique and humanizing perspective on the political strife that followed Trujillo's downfall. The authors gather a devastating collection of sources about US intervention at the same time. As the editors assert from the collection's opening pages, readers cannot understand the country's history without grasping the outsize impact of direct imperial aggression on the island.The closing thematic sections of the reader on religious practice, popular culture, and diaspora are a culmination of the editors' careful attention to bringing a wider range of voices to a Dominican canon. Through a creative assemblage of multimedia sources and writings, readers gain insight into Dominican cultural archetypes (including a return to the figure of the big man, el tutumpote), cultural debates (including myths about the origin of merengue), an engaged sample of documents about popular worship, and firsthand testimonies of daily life. The section on the Dominican diaspora to the United States and Europe charts connections back to the island and the formation of new communities. A final entry, ingeniously compiled from a chain mail from the early 2000s and other platforms, links these communities to each other and to a new, expanded readership. With its broad-minded collection of documents, the reader is a welcome and well-crafted addition to a bookshelf of English-language works on the Dominican Republic and is certain to be just as valuable in the classroom.