Blackness and Meaning

in Studying Hispaniola:
A Review Essay

Silvio Torres-Saillant

Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint: Nation, Race, and State on Hispaniola, Eugenio Matibag. New
York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ISBN: 0-312-29432-8

The Development of Literary Blackness in the Dominican Republic, Dawn F. Stinchcomb. Gaines-
ville: University Press of Florida, 2004. ISBN: 0-8130-2699-7

Eugenio Matibag’s Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint: Nation, Race, and State on Hispan-

iolaa and Dawn F. Stinchcomb’s The Development of Literary Blackness in the Dominican
Republicc participate meaningfully in the scholarly conversation about the meaning of
race, nation, and cultural identity in Dominican society, with particular attention to its
rapport with neighboring Haiti. The two studies do well what they set out to do, thus
earning a place of notice within a growing academic bibliography on this subject. Mati-
bag, associate professor of Spanish at Iowa State University, and Stinchcomb, assistant
professor of foreign languages and literatures at Purdue University, examine questions
similar to those explored in recent years in other studies coming from various other
disciplines. Salient among these are Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the
Struggle for Hispaniolaa (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999) by journalist Michele Wucker;
Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2000) by political scientist Ernesto Sagás; Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the
Dominican Republic (Oxford and Boulder: Signal Books and Lynne Rienner Publishers,

small axe 19 • February 2006 • p 180–188 • ISSN 0799-0537

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2001) by geographer David J. Howard; and Language, Race, and Negotiation of Identity:
A Study of Dominican Americanss (New York: LFB Scholarly Publishers, 2002) by linguist
Benjamin H. Bailey.
One may assess the contributions made by Matibag and Stinchcomb in light of
the discursive conventions that have prevailed in the bibliography on the question of
race among Dominicans. A distinguishing feature of the conventional wisdom on this
subject is a tendency to pass judgment on the Dominican population’s “backwardness,”
“ignorance,” or “confusion” on account of their inaccurate self-definition. The following
words said nearly three decades ago by Leslie B. Rout, Jr., encapsulate the tone and the
tenor of the typical formulation: “A mulatto nation situated in the Negroid Caribbean is
undoubtedly ailing if it cannot accept its racial image. . . . the glorification of Caucasian
features by the mulatto majority is disturbing and, for the black majority, psychologi-
cally disjunctive.”¹ More indictment than analysis, Rout’s view dates from a time when
scholars could regard racial identity as a stable ascription unproblematically linked to a
biological reality. Scholars today for the most part describe race as a social construction.
Even so, commentators on the race question in Dominican society persist in suggesting
that Dominicans get it wrong when they speak of themselves racially, implying that some
constructions are more accurate than others.
Fraught with the avatars of the discursive conventions embraced by Rout, studies
that attend to racial dynamics in Dominican society will construe the community under
perusal as racially anomalous. That interpretation, I contend, can hold only if one omits
the racial exegeses of Dominicans themselves and if one overlooks alternative narratives
that would place Dominicans at the forefront of the struggle for black liberation in the
modern world. The proponents of that interpretation pay insufficient attention to the
preeminence of Santo Domingo as the inaugural stage for the first discernable fruits of
the cultural and political legacy of people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere.
They overstate the significance of Haiti in the tribulations of Dominican blackness and
falsely portray the country’s official cultural commissars as uniquely negative in their
representations of Haitians. They exaggerate the exceptionality of Negrophobia in the
ethno-racial constructions of the Dominican nation. They pathologize the racial mis-
conduct discernible in given chapters of Dominican history, often imputing to the entire
Dominican population the words and deeds of the country’s rulers and the intellectual

1. Leslie B. Rout, Jr., The African Experience in Spanish America, 1502 to the Present Dayy (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1976), 288.
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elites who serve as their scribes. Their failure to consider the Dominican case in a com-
parative perspective leads to their unnecessary befuddlement. The regional context would
at least reveal that societies throughout the hemisphere came into being as a result of racial
crime. Genocide was the basis of the conquest and colonization of the Americas. When,
in the republican period, modern Creole nations emerged, the political leadership had
at their disposal only the racial thought and the idea of progress that the former colonial
regime bequeathed to them. Seldom did the new leaders distance themselves from the
racial crimes of the preceding social order. As I have insisted elsewhere, “The intelligentsia
created the conceptual paradigms that facilitated the crimes. They provided definitions
of national identity that rendered specific ethnically differentiated subsections of the
existing population of the region inimical to the very constitution of the nation,” thus
giving “respectability to racial oppression and ethnic exclusion.”² The disempowerment
of racial minorities in the United States and Latin America today is a direct result of the
oppression involved in the act of building nations throughout the hemisphere.
The tale of Dominican blackness contains the elements of a bad story, dominated by
the theme of Negrophobia, and a good story, consisting of a narrative of events that show
Santo Domingo setting the pattern of the struggle for freedom and racial equality in the
Americas. Santo Domingo ushered in the tradition of marronage, as enslaved blacks there
first escaped the colonial regime in 1503, only one year after their arrival in the ship that
brought Fray Nicolás de Ovando as governor of the island. The hemisphere’s first black
slave insurrection took place there on the plantation owned by none other than Gover-
nor Diego Colón, on 27 December 1522. There too flourished the campaigns of several
sixteenth-century maroon communities, including those led by Diego de Guzmán, Juan
Vaquero, Sebastián Lemba, Diego de Ocampo, and Juan Criollo, in various parts of the
island’s geography.³ Maroon settlements—manieles and palenques—spread throughout
the colony for three centuries, thriving in such areas as Altagracia, Azua, Buenaventura,
Cotuí, Neiba, Ocoa, Samaná, and San Juan de la Maguana.
Nineteenth-century Dominican literary texts, taken as documents of what people
of various classes were feeling and thinking, do not corroborate “the one-sided notion of
Dominican culture, race, and anti-Haitianism [subsequently] advocated by the ruling

2. Silvio Torres-Saillant, “Racism in the Americas and the Latino Scholar,” in Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos,
Blacks, and Afro-Latinos, eds. Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), 295.
3. José Juan Arrom and Manuel A. García Arévalo, Cimarrón (Santo Domingo: Fundación García Arévalo, Inc.,
1986), 46.
 SX19 • February 2006 • Silvio Torres-Saillant | 183

classes and their scribes, the intellectual elite.”⁴ Among the anonymous folk poems clas-
sified by Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi as “Afro-Dominican” from the period of the uni-
fication under Haitian rule, one finds texts that, through the persona of an uneducated
black woman of humble station, voice the yearnings of the downtrodden, affirm their
human dignity, and challenge the authority of their social betters on the grounds that
“these are not the times / of his majesty.” The learned poem, “Romance of the Haitian
Invasions,” circa 1830, similarly anonymous, treats the matter of the invasions in terms
that avoid racialist discourse and defamatory portrayals of Haitians, concluding instead
with a tribute to President Jean Pierre Boyer. The only label of racial “othering” used
in the poem is “the whites,” deployed by the Creole Dominican speaker to identify the
French during their occupation of Santo Domingo, thus circumscribing whiteness to the
sphere of the foreign. Similarly, Manuel Rodríguez Objío’s poem, “Capotillo’s Hymn,”
celebrates the defeat of the invading army of imperial Spain by Dominican nationalists in
1865 by taunting the departing troops thus: “The whites have already left / from Yamasá.
What a beating they got!”⁵
The “Manifesto of the Residents of the Eastern Part of the Island Formerly Known
as Española or SantoDomingo on the Causes of their Separation from the Haitian
Republic,” drafted by Tomás Bobadilla and signed on 16 January 1844, does not contain
a single reference to ethno-racial or cultural difference in its justification for de-linking
from Haitian rule. Perhaps the absence of racialism in the founding document of the
Dominican Republic simply reflected the ideas of the founding father of the nation, the
venerated Juan Pablo Duarte, who distanced himself and his separatist movement from
racially or ethnically tinged deprecations of Haitians. Having earlier proclaimed an end
to “the aristocracy of blood,” Duarte praised the political legacy of Haiti: “I admire the
Haitian people from the moment when, cruising the pages of history, I see it struggling
desperately against exceedingly superior powers, and I see how it triumphs and how it
comes up from the pitiful condition of servitude to constitute itself as a free and inde-
pendent nation.”⁶ Once independence was declared, the nascent government, initially

4. Silvio Torres-Saillant, “Dominican Literature and its Criticism: Anatomy of a Troubled Identity,” in A History
of Literature in the Caribbean, vol.1, ed. A. James Arnold (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Publishing Company, 1994), 56.
5. Ibid., 57.
6. Silvio Torres-Saillant, “Dominican Blackness and the Modern World,” in Perspectives on Las Americas: A Reader
in Culture, History, and Representation, ed. Matthew G. Gutmann, Féliz V. Matos Rodríguez, and Patricia
Zavella (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 271; “Introduction to Dominican Blackness,”
Dominican Studies Working Papers Series, No.1 (New York: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, 1999), 31.
184 | SX19 • Blackness and Meaning in Studying Hispaniola

called the Junta Central Gubernativa, quickly publicized a resolution aimed at welcoming
any Haitians who wished to stay on the Dominican side of the island, dispelling rumors
about plans to expel them, and vowing, on the contrary, to guarantee their personal safety
and their material possessions. That resolution and other key documents illustrate the
revolutionary bent of the first Dominican government.⁷
The view of racial inclusion that informed the founding of the Dominican nation has
very little precedent anywhere in the Americas, and one could argue that the progressive
texture of that undertaking did not emerge solely from the enlightened views of Duarte
and other independence leaders. Black Dominicans undoubtedly contributed to shaping
the political ideology of the independence movement, affecting the way the founding
fathers imagined the nation. Many blacks and mulattos, who owed their freedom to the
unification under Haitian rule twenty-two years before, had serious concerns about what
the newly created government would do about them. On can imagine the disquiet Afro-
Dominicans must have felt when hearing a projected national anthem, written by poet
Féliz María del Monte, emboldening patriots with the exhortation, “Rise up in arms, oh
Spaniards!” Political association with Spain, which still maintained black slavery in Cuba
and Puerto Rico, would have imperiled their freedom. Within hours of the independence
proclamation, an uprising of people of African descent, led by Santiago Basora in the
Santo Domingo section of Monte Grande, challenged the authority of the new govern-
ment. The independence leaders understood the urgency of appeasing the insurgents and
immediately entered into negotiation with them. The rebellion forced the new authorities
to reaffirm the abolition of slavery “forever in the Dominican Republic” and to integrate
the black Basora as the military commander of the country’s governing structure.⁸ The
very first decree promulgated by the government, on 1 March 1844, was the immedi-
ate and definitive abolition of slavery.⁹ When the decree was ratified as a law on 17
July 1844, it carried an article that penalized the slave traffic with capital punishment.
Another article stated that slaves coming from overseas would become automatically free
upon setting foot on Dominican soil.¹⁰ Radical for the time, these measures constituted
a provocation to Spanish imperial authority in the region if one considers that until

7. Julio Genaro Campillo Pérez, ed., Documento del primer gobierno dominicano: Junta Central Gubernativa,
febrero–noviembre 1844. Colección del Sequicentenario de la Independencia Nacional (Santo Domingo:
Gobierno Dominicano, 1994), 45.
8. Franklin J. Franco, Los negros, los mulattos y la nación dominicana, 7th ed. (Santo Domingo: Editora Nacional),
161–62.
9. Vetilio Alfau Durán, Escritos en Clío, vol. 2, Publicaciones del Sesquicentenario de la Independencia Nacional
(Santo Domingo: Gobierno Dominicano, 1994), 13.
10. Ibid., 373.
 SX19 • February 2006 • Silvio Torres-Saillant | 185

1878 the country attracted Puerto Rican runaway slaves whose masters had no hope of
reclaiming them once they entered Dominican territory.¹¹ The transnational scope of the
policy, in positing the immediate change in status of the servile population from abject
slavery to unqualified freedom irrespective of origin, arguably exhibited a human rights
logic unsurpassed by any other emancipation declaration in Spanish America. The role
of blacks in the formation of Dominican society—from the initial maroon settlements to
the configuration of the nascent state in 1844 and the complex rapport between the two
peoples who inhabit the island of Hispaniola—could place Dominicans historically at
the forefront of the struggle for black liberation in the Americas. These events exemplify
this alternative history of what I like to call the “good story” of Dominican blackness,
the one that hardly ever makes it to the bibliography on the subject of race and nation in
Hispaniola. Omitting the good story of Dominican blackness and focusing exclusively
on the theme of Negrophobia has caused scholars thus far to resort to the conventional
wisdom that satisfies itself with merely passing judgment on the political and psychologi-
cal shortcomings of the population’s self-identification.
One can approach the books by Stinchcomb and Matibag with an eye on whether
they inherit or deviate from the analytical conventions that have pervaded the literature
on the subject. The first thing that stands out as a significant contribution in Stinchcomb’s
The Development of Literary Blackness in the Dominican Republicc is her valuable exegeses
of important poets who until now had not received critical treatment in English, such
as Juan Sánchez Lamouth, the folk versifier Juan Antonio Alix, Jacques Viau Renaud,
Norberto James Rawlings, and Blas R. Jiménez. Among the other literary figures covered
in her study, Aída Cartagena Portalatín has received substantial attention, with literary
scholar Daisy Cocco de Filippis leading the way and even producing a bilingual selec-
tion of the verse of the renowned Dominican woman poet prior to the 1995 publication
by Azul Editions of an English and Spanish version of her epic poem Yania Tierra.
Stinchcomb’s critique of the cultural theory and definition of the nation implicit in
Manuel de Jesús Galván’s Enriquillo, for which she draws on the reading made current by
Doris Sommer, has numerous precedents in Dominican literary and historical criticism.
These range from a groundbreaking study by Pedro Mir, in his 1969 historical essay, Tres
leyendas de colores, to a full-length examination of the text by Franklin Gutiérrez in his
book, Enriquillo: Radiografía de un héroe galvaniano. But the pages Stinchcomb devotes
to Alix, Sánchez Lamouth, Viau Renaud, Jiménez, and James Rawlings constitute a most

11. Ibid., 379.

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useful introduction to their works even for readers interested in mining their poetry for
themes and concerns that lie outside her sustained exploration of blackness. Unfortu-
nately, throughout her study Stinchcomb remains seduced by the convention of indict-
ment that presumes that Dominicans occupy their waking hours in the all-consuming
business of denying their blackness and rejecting all that smacks of African heritage. She
quite recurringly insists that racism afflicts all Dominicans and fails to acknowledge the
work of rectification that has been done by scholars and artists in Dominican society
for the past four decades. Franklin J. Franco, Carlos Esteban Deive, Fradique Lizardo,
Rubén Silié, Carlos Andújar, and María Elena Muñoz, among others, owe their prestige
in the Dominican academy precisely to their contribution to challenging Negrophobic
constructions of national identity. Nor does Stinchcomb take the time to explain how
one can isolate Afro-Dominicans in a population whose overwhelming majority is black
and mulatto and in which African-descended folks almost invariably partake by word or
deed of any antiblack behavior that one might find in the society.
Matibag’s Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint, t on the other hand, charts a less straight-
forward path than the study by Stinchcomb. He takes the whole island of Hispaniola
with five centuries of human experience as his unit of analysis, convinced that a contra-
puntal narrative will reveal the intricately interlaced history of the whole insular system.
Rejecting single country studies on either side of the border and taking issue with
Michele Wucker’s metaphor of the cockfight to represent the political rapport between
Haitians and Dominicans through the centuries, Matibag covers the history of exchange
in Hispaniola starting with the depopulation of the western lands in 1605. He follows
the emergence of the French colony of Saint Domingue alongside the Spanish colony
of Santo Domingo all the way up to the formation of the independent nations of Haiti
and the Dominican Republic and their historical developments through the present day.
An estimable contribution of this book is its focus on the border as a site that can help
provide useful paradigms for the study of human experience in all of Hispaniola. The
author renders a significant service in bringing to light—through the work of Manuel
Rueda and others—some of the important thinking that Dominican intellectual history
has devoted to the subject of the border. The historian Frank Moya Pons has challenged
the view of the border as one singular and uniform line dividing the two countries, stress-
ing the distinct texture that the border acquires depending on the social and ecological
conditions of its principal towns. He has proposed that one can describe eight border
regions with discernible differences as seen from the Dominican side: “Some nearer the
country’s political center than others. Some more closely linked to Haiti than others.
Some more militarized than others. Some more permeable to Haitian penetration than
 SX19 • February 2006 • Silvio Torres-Saillant | 187

others. Some more tolerant of the Haitian presence than others.”¹² I, for my part, have
had occasion to argue, taking heed of Moya Pons’s injunction to scholars more than ten
years before, that we need to regard the border as a place where people live, not just as a
line that they cross.¹³
Matibag makes a good case for looking at Hispaniola as a single social field even if
he does not convince us that single-country studies have nothing to offer in our seeking
to understand the Dominican Republic or Haiti. In fact, perhaps a drawback of Hai-
tian-Dominican Counterpointt is the author’s negligence to speak about the difficulty of
tackling the entire insular system that his contrapuntal approach requires. He himself,
due probably to his training as a Hispanist, shows greater familiarity with the Dominican
bibliography than with its Haitian counterpart, the coverage appearing at time to lean in
favor of Dominican material. Witness his chapter on Haitians in Dominican literature
which is not matched by one dealing with Dominicans in Haitian letters. Apart from
the command of three languages (Spanish, French, and Creole), studying Hispaniola as
one interwoven tapestry requires equal access to the two societies. This matters a great
deal primarily because neither country boasts a functional publishing industry, making
it necessary for the researcher to undertake considerable field work to locate books, pam-
phlets, and other materials that do not easily travel outside the circuits of their privately
subsidized publication. Symptomatic of Matibag’s lesser access to Haitian sources is his
overreliance for the study of things Haitian on the Heinls’ Written in Blood. d ¹⁴
Matibag allows himself considerable license in his analyses of intricate historical
realities, and he does not escape the lure of the discursive tradition that pathologizes
the racial views of Dominicans as well as their rapport with their Haitian neighbors.
He contends, for instance, that the Dominican people identified wholeheartedly with
Trujillo’s massacre of thousands of Haitian immigrants and Haitian-Dominican residents
of the borderlands, on the grounds that “the genocide meant secure borders, and secure
borders meant a secure country, and what many condemn in public they commend in
private anyway.” (149) Naturally, given the reign of terror that the dictatorship instituted,

12. Frank Moya Pons, “Las ocho fronteras de Haití y la República Dominicana,” in La frontera: Prioridad en la
agenda nacional del siglo XXI,
I ed. Secretaría de Estado de las Fuerzas Armadas (Santo Domingo: Editora de las
Fuerzas Armadas Dominicanas, 2004), 227.
13. Silvio Torres-Saillant, “La condición rayana: La promesa diudadana en el lugar del quicio,” in La frontera, ed.
Secretaria de Estado de las Fuerzas Armadas, 227.
14. Robert Debs Heinl, Jr., and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995,
2d. ed., revised and expanded by Michael Heinl (Lanham, New York, and London: University Press of America,
1996).
188 | SX19 • Blackness and Meaning in Studying Hispaniola

no Dominican interested in remaining alive would have dared to condemn the atrocity.
If that huge crime against humanity made Dominicans as happy as Matibag insinuates,
would it not have been wiser to celebrate it publicly, thus earning the favor of the regime?
That he cites no instances of ordinary citizens celebrating the massacre would seem to
argue against his contention. He also takes an analytical liberty when he characterizes
Dominican independence as occurring prematurely, somehow suggesting, rather coun-
ter-intuitively, that nations follow a neat pattern of organic development (109). Thinking
less teleologically, one would posit that nations normally come into being chaotically,
the products of historical accidents or social urgencies rather than of tidy calculations.
The other analytical liberty that I wish to note here, his contention that Dominicans
built their nation “on the foundation of anti-Haitianism and the armature of chauvin-
ism,” I see stemming from a bibliographical problem, his citing the rabidly anti-Haitian
scribes of the Trujillo dictatorship as unproblematic sources to narrate the history of
Haitian-Dominican relations. This choice, whether conscious or unconscious, muddies
his narrative at some sensitive points, since what historian Roberto Cassá has called “the
official lie” was a regular feature of history writing during the Trujillo era. The choice
also accounts for Matibag’s subscribing to a chronology whereby the Spanish-speaking
residents of the colony are already “Dominicans” by the early years of the conquest, as
well as for imputing “anti-Haitianism” to Dominicans before that ideology had come
into existence.
Stinchcomb’s and Matibag’s works are commendable additions to the study of
Dominican blackness, national identity, and Dominican rapport with Haiti, and they
should elicit much conversation about their subject of inquiry. Starting from different
intellectual agendas and distinct conceptual dispositions, both authors seem equally per-
suaded that there is something insufficiently explained in their subject that needs address-
ing, and they are right. The challenge, it seems to me, is to realize that the complexity
lies in the reality under perusal, not in the particular axis of analysis one might wish to
deploy, and in having the humility to accept that one is not alone in undertaking the task
of explication, that others in the Dominican Republic, in Haiti, and in both diasporas,
have already moved the thinking along. The freshness of a scholar’s perspective is not
compromised but highlighted by acknowledging that if we are to study Hispaniola, the
center of the Caribbean and thus the navel of the modern world, we cannot possibly be
total pioneers.