My friend, Belkys, gave me my first introduction into the complexities of defining race and social class in the Dominican Republic. Belkys, a teacher in the preschools where I was volunteering that summer, along with two other students from my university, had come calling one Saturday to take us shopping. She stopped first at one host family’s home, only to have the door slammed in her face because she was from Pekín, a marginalized barrio, and was, therefore, black. Belkys was in tears by the time she arrived at my home, and even though I understood the words she told me, I didn’t yet grasp how intricately related race and social class were.
Feelings of belonging have come to be articulated in Dominican understanding by the concept of cultura, which “measures who or what belongs to the Dominican Republic and who or what belongs to the United States or Haiti, the two defining ‘others’ in the construction of Dominican Nationhood.”1 This vision of cultura was linked to Dominicans’ Spanish heritage as the source of refinement, although originally, there was no racial connection. By the early 1900s, cultura referred to race and national identifiers of dominicanidad, all of which retained their Hispanic roots, and later, it differentiated between social classes.2
This mode of differentiation contributed to a practice of defining belonging by contrasting oneself or group with the Other. As a social construct, the Other can be abstract or concrete, interior or exterior, individual or a group, close or far away. Sometimes, the Other is remarkably similar: “beings whom everything links to me on the cultural, moral, historical plane.”3 In other instances, the Other is so remarkably different that self-identification with him is impossible: “unknown quantities, outsiders whose language and customs I do not understand, so foreign that in extreme instances I am reluctant to admit they belong to the same species as my own.”4 Faced with this other entity, we judge his value and proximity to us, and finally, we either chose to embrace or reject him. This very type of accepting or rejecting others as part or representative of our group would influence bachata’s original discrimination.
The Dominican Republic and Haiti, two nations destined to share the same island, have had a contentious history. Spanish colonial authorities depopulated the island’s western region in the seventeenth century to try to halt the lucrative contraband trade centered there. Soon, French settlers from the nearby island of La Tortuga filtered into the former smuggling lands, and by the late 1600s, plantations owned by French-speaking slaveholders filled the region. The border between the two regions of Hispaniola was a hazy construction, and French-speakers so outnumbered the Spanish that Spain eventually waived its jurisdiction of the island in 1795.
Spanish-speakers in the east held at best a tenuous peace with their neighbors in Saint-Domingue where there had been considerable racial mixing. Although slavery was abolished and mulattos were officially equal to whites in Saint-Domingue,5 whites still discriminated against them. Slavery in the east made for an uneasy relationship, and in 1801, western forces under Toussaint L’Ouverture invaded and captured Santo Domingo. Toussaint abolished slavery and took steps to unify the island politically and economically. These policies had little time to take effect, for the French ousted Toussaint in 1802.6
It is telling that the residents of Santo Domingo preferred European rule to a Creole government headed by a black ruler. Approximately seventy-five percent of Santo Domingo’s inhabitants were free blacks or mulattos who supported themselves with subsistence farming and saw themselves as Creole because they were not enslaved, and by extension, not black.7 This self-identification reflects the construction of race in the Dominican Republic as something that is not solely dependent on phenotype. As Candelario notes, in the eighteenth century, “Dominican whiteness was an explicitly achieved (and achievable) status with connotations of social, political, and economic privilege, and blackness signaled foreignness, socioeconomic subordination, and inferiority.”8 The Dominicans’ worldview, which included the long-held practice of a broader definition of white ethnicity, made rule by those they saw as black undesirable.9
These tensions continued to grow following Haiti’s declaration of independence in 1804 as the world’s first black republic, and a second Haitian invasion (1822–1844). During this longer period of Haitian rule, President Jean Pierre Boyer abolished slavery across Hispaniola and used revenue from the eastern lands to help reimburse France for territories seized during the revolution.10 Culturally, Boyer alienated the Spanish Haitians by setting limits on the amount of time devoted to religious celebrations and outlawing the national sport, cockfighting.11 Dominican collective memory remembers this second occupation as violent, repressive, and denigrating. From that point forward, “the national memories of all things Haitian were grounded in the twenty-two years of the Haitian occupation.”12 The date when Dominicans won their independence from Haiti (February 27, 1844) marked a dividing point in Dominican nationalism. Although this was not the last time Dominicans won their independence, it is recognized as Dominican Independence Day.
Given this conflictive history, it is not surprising that Dominican identity has long been partially contrasted across the border with Haiti. Sarah Radcliffe and Sallie Westwood associate the concept of the Other with “geographies of identity” or “the sense of belonging and subjectivities which are constituted in (and which in turn can constitute) different spaces and social sites.”13 As Anderson accurately notes, “a nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them … has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.”14 Similarly, borders serve an important function in these imagined geographies for “they reinforce notions of purity and sameness within the territory, and difference and impurity outside the territory.”15 Thus, geographies serve as “symbolic anchors of identity” by linking identities to “a sense of belonging to a specific territory.”16 This linkage between self and place strengthens and reinforces boundaries:
Not only do communities with hard boundaries privilege their differences, they tend to develop an intolerance and suspicion toward the adoption of the Other’s practices and strive to distinguish, in some way or the other, practices that they share. Thus, communities with hard boundaries will the differences between them.17
Dominicans envision dominicanidad in contrast with Haitian ethnicity in terms of race, language, and religion. Whereas Dominicans consider themselves Hispanic (white), Spanish-speaking, and Catholic, they see Haitians as black, Krèyol-speaking Vodouisants. These two opposing identities are reinforced through stereotypes and flexible boundaries. As Sander Gilman observes, such stereotypes
perpetuate a needed sense of difference between “Self” and the “object,” which becomes the “Other.” Because there is no real line between the Self and the Other, an imaginary line must be drawn; and so that the illusion of an absolute difference between self and Other is never troubled, this line is as dynamic in its ability to alter itself as is the self.18
We imagine borders as protective and impervious, and they solidify the perceived link between “‘race’ and ‘place.’”19 Dominicans’ racial and cultural identification with a predominantly Hispanic identity gives the border with Haiti an even greater significance: it serves as the imagined barrier, keeping in what is Dominican, and keeping out what is not.
The Dominican-Haitian border is a longstanding concern for Dominicans, much in the same way that the U.S. border with Mexico has come increasingly into the limelight in recent years. Official histories and nation-building efforts have heightened the preoccupation with Haitian encroachment on Dominican soil as a silent invasion. Labor questions have contributed to this sense of invasion since sugar producers first looked to Haiti for cheap labor in the early decades of the 1900s. Since then, Haitians continue to migrate to the Dominican Republic in search of jobs, working at tasks that Dominicans consider beneath them. In economic downturns, Haitians bear the brunt of the blame, making them a convenient scapegoat.20 The “generations of official vilification of Haitians”21 have helped create ties of identity among Dominicans based on understandings of who they are not.
This same understanding of purity within boundaries is equally important in the construction of the United States as Other, first during the eight-year Marine occupation of 1916–1924. This occupation was the result of both economic and political factors, including the Dominican Republic’s increasing indebtedness to foreign powers, among them Germany, and the country’s ongoing political instability. The occupying forces dissolved the Dominican cabinet and earmarked funds formerly of the Customs Receivership for government use and public works projects to better unify the country. Economic measures provided incentives to American-owned sugar companies to facilitate their expansion at a time when world sugar prices soared. Bustling cities exploded where mere villages had been before. Violence and repression were also common elements of the occupation. U.S. forces censored the press, disarmed the population, and formed and trained the Dominican National Guard to suppress regional uprisings once the occupation was over.
The U.S. occupation was a stinging affront to Dominican sovereignty, and nationalists responded with an essentialist return to the meaning of domnicanidad. This involved, in part, the idealized image of the Dominican campesino as the essence of a Hispanic Dominican identity.22 The peasant was seen as innocent and pure, “clever and honorable yet duped by crafty and rapacious Yankees.”23 Although Dominicans had shied away from Hispanicism and associations with Spain during a brief period of Spanish reannexation (1861–1865), they embraced them anew during the U.S. intervention.24 Cultural resistance to the occupation opposed the intrusion of uncouth North American culture and glorified all things Dominican.
In spite of such strong feelings of nationalism, Dominicans’ outward-looking gaze switched once and for all from Europe to the United States at that time. Previously, consumers preferred European products,25 but during the occupation, U.S. products flowed into the country for the Marines’ and local consumption. The eight years of occupation “left behind a very pronounced taste for the consumption of North American … goods.”26 Baseball supplanted cockfighting as the Dominican national sport, and Dominican Spanish adopted numerous loanwords from English.27 Another byproduct was the widening chasm between the vast majority of Dominicans in the lower class and the elite. Distinctions became increasingly precise in light of the elite’s loss of political power, and the upper class took refuge in a cultural elitism that highlighted their ability to consume high-class products.28
Some one-half million indigenous people, the Taíno, inhabited the island they knew as Quisqueya when Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. This population dwindled swiftly as the Taíno fell victim to European diseases and the harsh conditions of forced labor. Spanish colonists began to import slaves from Africa in the 1530s to work in the mines and fields.29 At this time, many colonists were leaving for Mexico and several South American colonies, enticed by the discovery of silver. This out-migration far outweighed the influx of slaves, and by 1546, slaves outnumbered their masters by a ratio of almost 2.5 to 1.30
Although racial mixing had been common in Santo Domingo, colonists did not openly acknowledge this mestizaje (racial mixing). This was partially due to the practice of recognizing persons of mixed race as Spanish (read “white”) that colonial authorities adopted as a way to increase the official count of citizens in light of the dwindling European population.31 This practice marked the beginning of an intricate linguistic system for identifying race in the Dominican Republic. Dominicans’ association of all things evil with Haiti further distanced them from identification with their African heritage. As Frank Moya Pons observes, Dominicans “had come to believe that only the Haitians were black.”32 Although Dominicans now acknowledge mestizaje, the weight they attribute to each of the three ethnicities that comprise domincanidad—Spanish, indigenous, and African—is re-imagined. Within this pyramid, Dominicans view their European heritage as the broad, influential base, and see African ethnicity as contributing the least. The heritage left by the Taíno people—who were decimated early during the colonial period—was the ideal solution to recognize racial mixing without acknowledging blackness, for the Taíno “represented a category typified by non-whiteness as well as non-blackness.”33 Dominicanidad became the amalgamation of indigenous racial and cultural Hispanic identities,34 a self-identification that evokes roots predating the Haitian and U.S. invasions.
Although African influences and contributions have been officially downplayed or discredited across Dominican history, they are not fully ignored. Ginetta Candelario references a common joke among Dominicans that the eighth wonder of the world is a white Dominican.35 In the title of her study, Candelario recalls another Dominican saying, “Tenemos el negro detrás de las orejas [We have the black behind the ears].”36 This saying reiterates the criticism of Juan Antonio Alix’s 1883 poem, “El negro tras de la oreja,” in which the poetic voice pokes fun at Dominicans who try to claim a Hispanic identity and criticizes their loss of good judgment when trying to pass as white:
Cómo hoy la preocupación
A más de una gente abruma,
Emplearé mi débil pluma
para darle una lección;
Pues esto en nuestra Nación
Ni buen resultado deja,
Eso era en la España vieja
Según desde chico escucho
Pero hoy abunda mucho
“El negro tras de la oreja.”Since nowadays so many people
Are overwhelmed with worry,
I will use my weak pen
To give them a lesson;
For what’s going on in our Nation
Doesn’t even work,
That was in old Spain
Or so I heard as a child
But today, there’s no shortage of
“The black behind the ear.”37
As the poetic voice insists, the African heritage of many Dominicans is always “just behind the face of Dominican national and individual bodies.”38
Dominicans have long used selective word choice to more precisely define and blur the boundaries between races. As early as 1549, racial categories were specifically defined in Santo Domingo, dividing inhabitants among seven different groups: black (African slaves or their descendants); white (Spaniards or their descendents); mulatto (the child of one black and one white parent); mestizo (the child of one indigenous and one white parent); tercerón (the child of one mulatto and one white parent); cuarterón (the child of one tercerón and one white parent); and grifo (the child of one indigenous and one black parent).39 This tendency to specify and differentiate has continued across Dominican history, with language helping to articulate subtle racial variables. Dark-skinned Dominicans of the nineteenth century adopted the habit of calling themselves blancos de la tierra (whites of the earth).40 In the 1920s, the term indio (Indian) began to be used as an inoffensive identifier of people of color; this same term, modified by numerous differentiating descriptors, went on to emphasize belonging during the thirty-year dictatorship of Rafael L. Trujillo.41 As Dominican poet and essayist Blas Jiménez notes, even those Dominicans who wished to self-identify as blacks on their official documents were recorded as some form of indio, such as indio oscuro (dark Indian).42
Dominican racial identification is both highly specific yet equally indeterminate. A popular decoration and souvenir, the Dominican faceless doll, concretely exemplifies this tendency to include and exclude at the same time. These ceramic dolls hold flowers or baskets and wear long, flowing dresses, some of which are intended to appear folkloric while others are distinctly European and colonial in nature. Dominicans explain the dolls’ defining characteristic—their lack of facial features—as being indicative of the essence of dominicanidad, for just as the dolls, the Dominican is a mix of three different ethnicities and has no single face.43 Notably, the dolls’ skin tone, a bronze color, is reminiscent of an indigenous identity. Whether they are carried home as a souvenir or adorn a Dominican home, the faceless dolls are a subtle reminder of the understandings of dominicanidad.
Dominicans continue to employ an intricate yet specific set of terms to identify a broad spectrum of racial differentiations. Daysi Josefina Guzmán’s study in the early 1970s considered the vocabulary residents of Santiago used to define race and racial characteristics, including hair type, skin, hair and eye color, and facial and body features.44 Among those interviewed, Guzmán found that participants were able to identify fifteen categories of hair texture and nine hair colors. They also specified six body types, ten facial features, and five racial shades or hues.
It is interesting to note that the characteristic with the greatest number of categories—hair type or texture—continues to be the primary determinant of race among Dominicans, “followed by facial features, skin color, and last, ancestry.”45 Juan Antonio Alix’s aforementioned poem also emphasizes the incriminating role of hair.46 Pelo bueno (good hair)—soft, straight, Caucasian hair—and pelo malo (bad hair)—kinky, coarse, Negroid hair—mark the two extremes of a long list of hair types.47 Ginetta Candelario’s ethnographic study of a Dominican beauty salon in Washington Heights (Upper Manhattan, New York) reiterates how hair as a racial marker plays out daily on the bodies of Dominican women who straighten and alter their hair to embody an imagined (to use Anderson’s term) national identity. This insistence on hair as a racial signifier is as ambiguous as it is important, given that kinky or curly hair can be straightened, and hair color can be altered.48
Race is also linked to social class, making it an alterable and achievable category. The bond between class and race is indivisible and the two support each other reciprocally.49 As one improves his class, his race may whiten; similarly, if one loses his social position, his race may consequently darken.50 The link between race and social class heightens divisions; as Lauren Derby has pointed out, race is so interwoven with social class that it functions as its principal indicator.51 Conversely, class can eclipse race in certain cases as, for example, in the case of dark-complexioned, white-collar, educated Dominicans.52
The relationship between race and class goes hand in hand with cultura, which Dominicans use to differentiate between social classes: those with refinement, and those without. Thus, while “race may be based on a metaphor of blood lineage … it is fundamentally achieved in part by social class and in part by style and manners.”53 For this reason, “middle-class and poor Dominicans tend to express their identities in terms of race as cultura, rather than race as a social community determined by color.”54 Cultura unites people of different phenotypes under a broader blanket whose threads are woven of elements reaching back to the Spanish colonial era and its more contemporary understandings as a marker of social class, and by extension, race.55
The opposition between the city and country is a longstanding tradition in Dominican thinking and politics. The division between these two arose from a lack of geographic unity that contributed to deeply rooted, fiercely regional loyalties. This regionalism added to ongoing political instability and conflict following Dominican independence from Haiti. A lack of internal infrastructure separated the nation’s population centers both geographically and politically. Without a sense of national identity, regional identities solidified around local caudillos (strongmen) who raised their own peasant armies. This model dominated Dominican politics during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, and the peasants’ participation in these armies convinced the liberal nationalists that the campesino was the primary obstacle to their goals of a centralized, democratic, and educated nation.56
Nationalists represented and understood these campesinos in contrasting ways, on the one hand, backwards and uncivilized, and on the other, the bearer of the essential elements of dominicanidad. Campesinos were largely independent well into the 1800s, living off the land, and nationalists pointed to this connection with the land as symbolic of their rootedness or purity—the essence of dominicanidad. This view of the campesino situated dominicanidad in a location somewhere between the black slave of Haiti and the European conquistador of Spain.57 In the face of U.S. intervention, nationalists increasingly viewed the campesino as the essence of a Dominican Hispanic identity.58
Despite ties to the land and agriculture, the campesino was, without question, poor. These were not the large landholders of the haciendas, but rather, subsistence famers who made do by cultivating enough land to survive and hunting whatever game was available.59 This manner of survival was completely unfathomable to city dwellers, and the campesino’s lifestyle, so rooted in years of traditions, did not fit into a model of progress and modernity. This view of the campesino led to strict migration policies meant to keep him out of the cities and safely tucked away in the countryside. Laws aimed at controlling the influx of rural migrants to urban centers were first passed following the San Zenón hurricane of September 1930, although they remained in effect for many years after the disaster.60 In 1953, it was decreed illegal for peasants to move to urban areas without first obtaining the permission of local authorities.61 As a result, the majority of Dominicans continued to live in the countryside, even as Rafael L. Trujillo embarked upon his agenda to modernize the nation during his thirty-one-year dictatorship (1930–1961).
Historic events contributed to merengue’s eventual rise to its position of Dominican national music in much the same way that those events led to the construction of a fluid racial identity for Dominicans. Merengue’s precise origins are unknown, and other Caribbean countries have also claimed to be its birthplace. One early legend told that the original merengue was created and performed after the Dominicans’ defeat of Haiti in the Battle of Talanquera. As the story goes, a faint-hearted Dominican flag-bearer ran from the battle with the national colors in tow, and Dominican troops commemorated both their victory and the flag-bearer’s cowardice that evening in the first merengue.62 This unsubstantiated legend cements the national music, merengue, with national independence63 and reiterates Dominicans’ essentialist ties to the genre as their national music.
The first reference in print to merengue occurred when Dominican intellectuals launched a passionate literary campaign against it, publishing a series of articles condemning the genre. These criticisms portray the merengue as uncouth and inappropriate for refined society and attack it as the instigator of misconduct among those who danced it. Others launched attacks against merengue because they feared it would become more popular than the national dance of the time, the tumba.64 Author Manuel de Jesús Galván rails against the merengue in his poem “Queja de la tumba contra el merengue (The Tumba’s Complaint Against the Merengue).” In Galván’s poem, the tumba mourns its forced exile by the merengue and accuses Dominicans of turning their backs to serve Satan.65 Merengue’s swinging hip movement and the proximity in which couples danced were also a source of concern. Galván’s tumba insists, “Where is modesty, where is morality…?” and demands that men consider how they would feel if they thought their sister or daughter were so “agile of hips.”66 Although this style of dance worried those concerned about propriety, they also likely condemned it because of hip movement’s association with African music. Dominicans’ recent independence from Haiti contributed to a rejection of all things associated with the black republic. Such a heated debate illustrates the prominent role that music plays in Dominican culture and identity processes. For merengue’s critics, the European-influenced tumba was a better representative of dominicanidad than merengue.
The passionate campaign against the merengue is indicative of the following it was gathering in the Dominican Republic, especially among those who lived in the countryside. This fan base was not insignificant, considering that 425,000 of the overall population of 435,000—some ninety-eight percent—lived in rural areas.67 Cultural traditions of African origin remained strongest in the campo, and music and dance were important cultural and social practices among peasants.
Although merengue’s instrumentation varied by region, it most commonly included string instruments, a tambora or goatskin drum, and the güiro—a scraper fabricated from a gourd. These instruments purportedly reflected the ethnicities of dominicanidad: the string instruments were of Spanish origin, the drum is common to African music, and the güiro was attributed to the Taíno.68 The one-row accordion, imported from Germany, eventually replaced the string instruments in the 1870s. Intellectuals launched another literary campaign against the merengue at this time, with former president Ulises Francisco Espaillat at its head. Espaillat condemned the merengue for its negative influences on those who heard it, maintaining that it “affected the nervous system too much and that it resulted in the ailment of being unable to control the imagination.”69 The accordion became the whipping post for merengue’s detractors because it had allegedly ousted so-called typical instruments such as the tres, cuatro, and seis; this dislike may lie in the fact that the accordion’s sharp sound accentuated the rhythmic aspects of merengue, and thus, its ties to African influences. In Juan Antonio Alix’s “El cuatro y el acordeón,” the cuatro accuses the accordion of being a short-lived fad and prophesies that worse will befall it “if something better comes along.”70 Alix’s décima now seems prophetic, considering the twentieth century tirades launched against bachata.
Merengue in its different regional forms continued to gain a following, in spite of the intellectuals’ literary tirades. In the Cibao region, the merengue cibaeño was solidifying in form on the eve of the U.S. occupation. This twentieth century invasion served as an impetus for Dominicans to seek out a defining cultural element to embrace in the face of this new foreign Other. Nationalists embraced the merengue in its different variations from across the nation as a symbolic tool of resistance. Specifically, they promoted the Cibao variant, the merengue cibaeño, as a national symbol of Dominican culture as contrasted with U.S. musical forms of the time that had become popular among the upper class prior to occupation. A group of composers worked with traditional music such as merengue, modifying the rural form to make it more appealing to upper class tastes.71 By embracing merengue, these nationalists set the music on its path towards helping to unify and strengthen a sense of national identity.
It is important to note that Dominicans embraced a Creole musical form as the basis for their musical resistance to the U.S. occupation.72 Forms of popular culture such as merengue have served Dominican nationalists across the years as they idealized folk and traditional cultural forms as the essence of dominicanidad.73 The choice of merengue as a tool to emphasize a Hispanic identity in opposition to the U.S. invaders “represents a sort of reinterpretation of hispanidad as a creole identity.”74 Additionally, the importance of dance as a social practice within Dominican culture provided yet another point of contrast: Dominicans’ ability to dance merengue fluidly as opposed to Americans’ jerky attempts. Dancing therefore instilled Dominicans with a sense of dominance over their own individual bodies as well as their own music.
Interpreting dominicanidad reveals a complex construction of identity that has both fluid and rigid boundaries. On one hand, racial categories have been imprecise since colonial times to broaden the reach of the Hispanic group. Race and nationality overlap, as Haitian has come to equal blackness, and Dominicanness is its own unique category that emphasizes racial mixing without specificity. In spite of detailed racial differentiations, race is not fixed and can change because of its ties to social class. Nationalists saw the Dominican campesino as the essential bearer of all things Dominican when desired, or as the uncultured obstacle to modernization and progress. This same tendency for imprecision lent itself to merengue’s acceptance across diverse groups of Dominicans during the U.S. occupation. In contrast, national borders are seen as rigid. The heritage of attempting to draw strict boundaries where none—or at best a very hazy one—existed would continue following the U.S. Marines’ departure in 1924. By 1930, a modern-day Dominican caudillo, Rafael L. Trujillo, would capitalize on old patterns of identification to solidify a sense of national identity, and through it, his own power.