We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom by Anne Eller

Abstract

Reviewed by: We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom by Anne Eller Yveline Alexis We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom. By Anne Eller. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-8223-6237-1. 400 pp. $27.95 paper, $104.95 hardcover. Anne Eller's book We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom is a welcome addition to recent academic work in Dominican and Caribbean studies. Her work fits beautifully with April Mayes's book The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race, and Dominican National Identity (University Press of Florida, 2015). Both texts focus on Dominican society using Dominican archives and Dominican people to tell multicultural and multilayered stories. Eller's title announces the lens that focuses the text: it is a work about Dominican independence movements that involved the neighboring nation and citizens of Haiti. Chronologically, the book spans the nineteenth century, centering on how nations in the Americas fought for and defended Caribbean freedom. Eller meticulously researches Spain's role as a colonizer as well as the United States' active fascination with and actions toward the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Additionally, the reader learns about transnational circuits in the Caribbean whereby individuals from Curaçao, Venezuela, St. Thomas, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and New York could pass through and/or set up residency in the Dominican Republic. Using archives from the Dominican Republic, Spain, Cuba, Haiti, and the United States, Eller offers key insights that constitute an eleven-chapter text, including the introduction and epilogue. My review focuses on three aspects of this book: its research methodology, its contributions to studies of race, and its emphasis on Haitian and Dominican unity. First, Dr. Eller's research efforts constitute a teaching tool for students. Her work elucidates the process of writing a book that relies on multiple archives, multilingual texts, and numerous individuals. The diversity of sources—ranging from Haitian poetry to a Cantonese letter to a tombstone with a crucial family name—emphasizes the author's efforts to find and include a range of voices and adds to the richness of this work. It is a must-read for graduate students and scholars interested in Dominican and Caribbean studies, and it would also work well with undergraduate students who are given the proper context and training. Second, Dr. Eller's work adds to our understanding of race and racism in the Americas. Most of us are familiar with US American and [End Page 144] Spanish rulers' lies about Haiti's 1804 independence being an example of "Black barbarity" against whites. Some of us are also cognizant of the white immigration projects in the Caribbean to counter the African and/or Black presence. Eller's work examines how racist discourse and actions played out in the Dominican Republic. She demonstrates how some Dominican elites promoted the narrative of a race war that elevated whiteness and dehumanized Blackness within the nation. Simultaneously, she explores how that narrative existed alongside the reality that "the republic's first long-ruling presidents were wealthy men of color" (31). The racism of foreigners further complicated the attempt by some Dominicans to discriminate against Black and Brown people, despite the fact that they themselves were Black and Brown. Spanish officials proposed to the nation's ruler, Pedro Santana—who was a man of color—that his nation should embrace a "large scale white immigration" to the Dominican Republic for the "colony's progress" (107). Eller deftly explores the layers of race relations and racial discourses within the Dominican Republic. Third, We Dream Together helps prove that Dominicans and Haitians united in the nineteenth century. Often the public focuses on three moments in Dominican and Haitian relations that fostered racial antagonism: the so-called Haitian occupation of the Dominican Republic, 1822–1844; Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo's racist massacre of Haitians and darker-skinned Dominicans in 1937; and more recently, the Dominican Supreme Court's decision to remove Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent from the nation. Activists like Solange (Sonia) Pierre as well as the activists, scholars, and artists who are part of Transnational Hispaniola, a group seeking to transform dominant...