The Dominican Republic reader: history, culture, politics

Abstract

Eric Paul Roorda, Lauren Derby and Raymundo Gonzalez, eds. The Dominican Republic Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 536 pp.R E VIE W E D BY F .S.J. L E DG I S T E RTHERE ARE ONLY TWO LAND BORDERS IN THE INSULAR Caribbean, on the islands of Saint Martin and Hispaniola. The Dominican Republic sits east of the longer of the two of these. The Dominican Republic occupies two-thirds of Hispaniola, the second largest of the Antilles, and is home, as this fascinating book makes clear, to some of the extremes of the region: the highest point (Pico Duarte); the lowest (Lago Enriquillo); the oldest European structure in the Americas (the Torre de Homenaje in Santo Domingo); the oldest university in the Americas (the Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo); it is also the first place African slaves landed in the Americas.This collection of readings brings to life accounts, as the sub-title indicates, of the history, politics, and culture of the country from its pre-history down to the early twenty-first century. It enables the student to obtain an idea of the richness both of the history of the Dominican Republic, and of the complexity of Dominican identity as the country has battled to define itself in opposition to its western neighbour, Haiti, which is unquestionably the black republic not only of the Caribbean but of the Americas as a whole. Many of the readings, in particular those that deal with the history and politics of the Dominican Republic from the moment of the Haitian Revolution on, attend to the ways in which Dominicans have been ambivalent, if not downright hostile, regarding their own enslaved African roots and have sought to build an identity on an imagined memory of the original Taino inhabitants of the land. Race makes its presence felt not only in the manner in which Dominicans have avoided dealing with the African roots of their history, but also in the way in which the United States has seen the people of that country, including one episode in which Barbadians in the Dominican Republic complain about how US occupation troops in the 1920s suppressed their efforts to organise a branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (269-70).One of the things that reading this text brought back to me, in fact, was the memory of discovering that the Dominican teaching assistant in the Spanish Department at the University of the West Indies, Mona, in the days when I was a student, had 'Indio' on his cedula de identidad when he was clearly not an Amerindian, as did his friends from his homeland. One of the many basic facts about the country that this text unveils is the root of this historic self-deception that lies at the heart of the way that the people of the Dominican Republic define themselves.The history includes not only accounts of the Taino drawn from the work of Irving Rouse, but descriptions by Spanish conquistadors, including Columbus himself; an excerpt from Exquemelin's buccaneer history; one from Moreau de Saint-Mery's account of Saint-Domingue; the document with which the Dominicans proclaimed their own independence; reports by US officials, and American occupiers; one account by Jose Marti; reports favouring the Trujillo dictatorship, and statements by opponents; statements justifying the second American occupation, and those opposed; and a number of documents relating to the post-1978 emergence of democracy. …