Joaquin Balaguer Research Articles

Juan Bosch, un perseguido político. Un atisbo a “El hombre que lloró”.

The aim of this work is to highlight the transition between the fictional sphere and politics, under the method of Eagleton’s theory of reception. Juan Bosch, committed to the Dominican reality, as Núñez Polanco has pointed out, perhaps the social denunciation of his narrative was not enough and he had to take a step forward in the political arena to fight against the dictatorial enemy: Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Hence the exile, hence the political persecution that did not end with the death of Trujillo, but rather continued with Joaquin Balaguer, the other face of the Trujillo dictatorship.

Balaguer al desnudo en el cuento El oidor, de Efraím Castillo

El presente trabajo constituye un estudio del cuento El oidor de Efraím Castillo, en el que, a través del análisis crítico y la revisión bibliográfica, se pretende establecer la estrecha relación que hay entre el personaje literario que lo protagoniza (el oidor) y el personaje histórico que lo inspiró (Joaquín Balaguer). Recurriendo a datos históricos, así como a otros textos literarios y críticos, se compara la personalidad del ente del relato con el ser concreto que vivió y ejerció la actividad política, y se subraya el acierto del autor al recrear rasgos típicos de la personalidad del caudillo. El trabajo destaca que tanto en la realidad social como en la ficción de Castillo el personaje sobresale por uno de sus rasgos más característicos: la no aceptación de la disidencia, de ahí que la intolerancia constituya uno de los comportamientos típicos en el accionar del oidor (personaje ficcional) y de Joaquín Balaguer (personaje real). Al final, como resultado de esas comparaciones, se concluye que, efectivamente, hay un vínculo directo, identificable, entre el personaje textual, el oidor, y la persona real que lo inspira, el caudillo político y escritor Joaquín Balaguer.

El culto a la palabra y la representación del lenguaje del bar en Bachata del ángel caído: narrativa maestra de la República Dominicana en el Postrujillato

Este trabajo analiza la reconfiguración de la idea de nación, la emergencia de subjetividades y las relaciones entre ellas que Pedro Antonio Valdez, escri- tor dominicano, lleva a cabo en su pri- mera novela, Bachata del ángel caído, en el contexto de las medidas sociales y económicas introducidas por Joaquín Balaguer en la República Dominicana al final del siglo XX. Mi tesis central es que este autor intenta “presentar” a esas subjetividades a través de la inclusión de fragmentos de bachatas y boleros que ilustran esas reconfiguraciones de la nación dominicana y a través de la parodia del intelectual tipo boom y de la representación que este hizo de las cla- ses subalternas. Palabras clave: Bachata, Representación, Subjetivida- des, Parodia, Intelectuales.

Charytín Goyco, la rubia de América: A Case Study of Television Stardom in the Dominican Republic in the 1970s

This essay explores the complex relationship between race and class in the formation of a very specific and enduring notion of Dominican televisual stardom stemming from the late 1970s. My point of analysis centers on Charytin Goyco (known affectionately as “the blonde bombshell of America”), whose career as a singer, actress, and television personality commenced in the Dominican Republic in the early 1970s and then continued in Puerto Rico and, subsequently, in Miami. Throughout this essay I explicate how Goyco’s rise to fame was, to some degree, made possible by the political and social media framework set in the Dominican Republic under the presidential administrations of Joaquin Balaguer, who served three terms during the years of 1960–1962, 1966–1987, and 1986–1996. Paying particular attention to Goyco’s evolution as a televisual persona, I argue that her television personality is a site of contradictory interpretations if we are to understand the specific places of power, race, and class that have b...

Masculinity After Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature by Maja Horn (review)

Seccion Bibliografica Horn, Maja. Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2014. 203 pp. Maja Horn’s Masculinity after Trujillo is an important contribution to Dominican, Caribbean, and Latin American studies. After the introduction, the first chapter “De-tropicalizing the Trujillo Dictatorship and Dominican Masculin- ity” analyzes speeches by Rafael Trujillo, Joaquin Balaguer, and other nationalist Dominican letrados to unearth the keys to the Trujillato’s discourse of masculinity, which, according to Horn, was in part a reaction to the long-lasting US occupation of the Dominican Republic and its imposition of a racialized imperial masculinity. The title of chapter two, “One Phallus for Another: Post-dictatorial Political and Literary Canons,” is a pun on the title of one of Doris Sommer’s books, One Master for Another: Populism as Patriarchal Rhetoric in Dominican Novels. In it, the author carries out a close analysis of two novels by Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, De abril en adelante and Una y carne, to show how even leftist-leaning Dominican intellectu- als reinforced this same rhetoric of masculinity during Balaguer’s governments, thus indirectly naturalizing authoritarianism. Horn argues that the attempts by Domini- can canonical writers to emasculate the image of Trujillo as the country’s most virile man reproduce the same masculinist ideology popularized by his government. In fact, they reduce serious political problems to the sexual prowess of the dictator’s phallus. In her view, Veloz Maggiolo and other authors reproduce hegemonic no- tions of gender and sexuality that limit their vision of political resistance. The third chapter, “Engendering Resistance: Hilma Contreras’s Counter- narratives,” rescues Contreras’s important counter-narratives of resistance, which challenge mainstream notions of honor, masculinity, and sexuality, and propose the recovery of the Trujillato’s cultural practices for anti-hegemonic ends. Horn focuses on the representation of Dominican gender formations in three works by Contreras: 4 cuentos, Dona Endrina de Calatayud, and La tierra esta bramando. She also looks at how Dominican cultural practices foster anti-hegemonic alliances and collective forms of action. According to the author, Contreras’s writing presents si- lence as a site of resistance during the Trujillato. Her novel La tierra esta bramando provides examples of strategies of resistance, such as the strategic use of femininity (being seen as a harmless and apolitical subject) beyond masculinist cultural logics and hyper-sexualized imaginary. The author proposes the recovery of the Trujillato’s cultural practices for anti-hegemonic ends and proves that the return of the Do- minican diaspora has, in many cases, reinforced hegemonic, masculinist Dominican notions. The last two chapters explore the effects of globalization, neoliberalism, the tourism industry, global media, mass migration, and diaspora on a new genera- tion of Dominican and Dominican American writers that emerged in the 1990s. In particular, Horn is interested in their critique of the discourse of gender and other hegemonic formations inherited from the Trujillato. “Still Loving Papi: Global- ized Dominican Subjectivities in the Novels of Rita Indiana Hernandez” studies Hernandez’s portrayal of new Dominican subjectivities in her novels La estrategia de la Chochueca and Papi. The chapter that closes the book before the conclusion,

Clientelistic Stability and Institutional Fragility

Since 1978, with the disappearance of the historical caudillos (Joaquín Balaguer, Juan Bosch, and José Francisco Peña Gómez), institutional fragility and electoral power have been the keys to the survival of the political party system in the Dominican Republic. The current parties are more stable but not more institutionalized. The authoritarianism that characterized the Dominican political system from the 1960s until the end of the twentieth century relied for its stability not just on power and repression but on political control through clientelism and prebendalism. These mechanisms served not only as an instrument of social control but also as a strong basis for legitimacy. Desde 1978, tras la desaparición de los caudillos históricos (Joaquín Balaguer, Juan Bosch y José Francisco Peña Gómez), la fragilidad institucional y la fuerza electoral han sido las claves de la supervivencia del sistema de partidos en República Dominicana. Los partidos son hoy más estables pero no más institucionalizados. El autoritarismo que ha caracterizado al sistema político dominicano desde los años sesenta hasta finales del siglo XX no se ha apoyado únicamente en la apelación a la fuerza y a la represión; la clave de la estabilidad ha sido el control político a través del clientelismo y la movilización prebendalista. Este mecanismo, no solo es un arma de control social, sino que asegura bases firmes de legitimidad.

Joaquín balaguer and contemporary dominican politics and society

The death of Joaquin Balaguer on July 14, 2002 took many Dominicans by surprise despite the fact that he was 95. Many Dominicans thought that Balaguer had challenged the laws of nature “successfull...

A Search for Identity in Julia Alvarez's How the GarcÍa Girls Lost Their Accents

The displacement of Caribbean people from their islands to the United States, for political or economic reasons, has produced a tension between the culture of the country of origin and that of the adopted homeland, one representing the past and the other the future of the immigrant. As time passes, for the immigrant, the rupture with the past, strongest in political exiles, is transformed into a desire to recover a lost moment in time. But the past ceases to exist as an island reality and is interpreted from the perspective of the mainland culture. The political migration of Dominicans from their island of origin to the United States is contemporaneous with the fall of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo and the first wave of Cuban exiles at the beginning of the 1960s. During his dictatorship, Trujillo had absolute control over the military, the economy, and the people and, except for a select group, he prevented anyone from leaving the island. During this stage of Dominican history, those who did abandon the island with or without the dictator’s consent sought political exile. The situation changed radically after the dictator’s death and the U.S. invasion of the island, which foiled any attempt to restore Juan Bosch to the presidency or convert the Dominican Republic into another communist Cuba. With the direct U.S. involvement in the internal affairs of the Dominican Republic and the support of Joaquin Balaguer’s presidency, the number of Dominican exiles increased and their conditions changed in character, from political to economic. The Dominican migration to the United States has steadily risen, making Dominicans, second to Puerto Ricans, the largest Hispanic group in New York. 1 However, as with other immigrant groups, Dominicans found themselves looking back to understand their present and future. If writers on the island were trying to come to terms with the Trujillo dictatorship and the U.S. invasion of their country, those who traveled to the mainland wanted to recover a lost origin. The Puerto Rican economic migration associated with Operation Bootstrap, after WWII, and the Cuban political exodus, related to the Castro takeover in 1959, produced a generation of Latino writers born or raised in the United States. The Dominican migration, which was first political and later economic, would also count among its members a significant number of writers. And just as the other immigrants or sons of immigrants have documented their experiences mainly in the cities in which they live, Dominican-American authors would also do the same, some of them writing in Spanish and others in English. 2 In her How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,

The struggle for democratic politics in the Dominican Republic

Over the past several decades, the Dominican Republic has experienced striking political stagnation in spite of dramatic socioeconomic transformations. In this work, Jonathan Hartlyn offers a new explanation for the country's political evolution, based on a broad comparative perspective. Hartlyn rejects cultural explanations unduly focused on legacies from the Spanish colonial era and structural explanations excessively centered on the lack of national autonomy. Instead, he highlights the independent impact of political and institutional factors and historical legacies, while also considering changes in Dominican society and the influence of the United States and other international forces. In particular, Hartlyn examines how the Dominican Republic's tragic nineteenth-century history established a legacy of neopatrimonialism, a form of rule that found extreme expression in the brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo and has continued to shape politics down to the present. By examining economic policymaking and often conflictual elections, Hartlyn also analyzes the missed opportunity for democracy during the rule of the Dominican Revolutionary Party and the democratic tensions of the administrations of Joaquin Balaguer. |A political history of the Dominican Republic, focused especially on the nature of its struggles for democracy during the past 35 years.

Hispanidad and national identity in Santo Domingo1

This article compares the nationalist discourse expressed in the writings of two conservative statesmen, one from Spain and the other from Santo Domingo, who tried to come to terms with the complex relation between race and nation. Francisco Franco and Joaquin Balaguer were contemporaries who dominated the ideological debates in their countries for nearly half a century. The nationalist discourse of Balaguer is shown to be more modern, and informed by Enlightenment philosophy (including the idea of democracy), than the discourse of Franco, who repudiated democracy and Enlightenment views. At the same time Balaguer's discourse is blatantly racist and social‐Darwinist, while that of Franco is inclusive and expresses a spiritual universalism. For Balaguer the main threat to the nation was demographical and external, while for Franco the main threat to the nation was political and internal.

The Dominican Model

August 16,1980, marked the second anniversary of the inauguration of Antonio Guzman as president of the Dominican Republic. On election day in the spring of 1978, military forces had seized the ballot boxes when it became clear that their favorite, the incumbent president, Joaquin Balaguer, was losing to the candidate of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD). A stern warning from the Carter administration, plus an outcry from a cross section of Dominican society, sent the troops back to their barracks, and the "popular will" in favor of Guzman was respected.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.