Una utopia inconclusa: Espaillat y el liberalismo dominicano del siglo XIX (review)

Hispanic American Historical Review 80.1 (2000) 203-205

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Book Review

Una utopía inconclusa:
Espaillat y el liberalismo dominicano del siglo XIX.

National Period

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Una utopía inconclusa: Espaillat y el liberalismo dominicano del siglo XIX. By Mu-Kien Adriana Sang. Santo Domingo: Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, 1997. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xviii, 479 pp. Paper.

Dominican liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century have received relatively little attention from historians and political scientists, partially because they remained, for the most part, at the margins of political power. Conversely, the nineteenth-century caudillos, mainly Pedro Santana, Buenaventura Báez, and Ulises Heureaux, have been the objects of much greater scholarly attention. After publishing biographical works on Heureaux (1987) and Báez (1990), Mu-Kien Adriana Sang has turned her attention to Ulises Francisco Espaillat, one of the Dominican Republic's most influential liberals of the nineteenth century. Her book provides a much-needed view of the liberal strain in Dominican history.

In Una utopía inconclusa, Sang seeks to provide an international background to the ideas and actions of Espaillat and his fellow liberals. The book's first part is devoted in its entirety to tracing the development of liberal and positivistic ideas in Europe, North America, and Latin America. These introductory chapters offer a very superficial and schematic background that adds little to our understanding of the Dominican case. The book would have been better served had these chapters been replaced with a brief discussion of Latin American liberalism. Dominican liberals endured many of the same foes and obstacles that their counterparts faced in Central and South America; and attention to the latter cases would have produced some useful comparative angles for the understanding of the marginalization and failure of Dominican liberalism.

In part 2, Sang reconstructs the basic ideological tenets of nineteenth-century Dominican liberalism. She relies heavily on contemporary newspapers such as El Progreso, La Patria, and La Opinión and on the writings of Espaillat and other liberals. This reconstruction offers an interesting picture of the republic's special brand of liberalism, one that contrasts with the ideological package embraced by Latin America's archetypical liberals. Dominican liberals, for example, far from being anticlerical, were pro-church; Espaillat himself recognized the church as one of the republic's unifying institutions and called for the creation of pro-church publications. Authoritarianism also appears to have influenced many Dominican liberals who supported presidentialist constitutions, which provided electoral, rather than direct, voting rights to a reduced voting population.

In many regards, however, Espaillat and other Dominican liberals resembled their Latin American counterparts. They were unabashed admirers of Europe and the United States and hoped that their countrymen would embrace cultural patterns and political ideals derived from the North Atlantic. Espaillat, Sang tells us, went to the ridiculous extreme of prescribing that the Dominican population replace the debilitating national dish, sancocho, and the sensuous merengue dance with English steaks and European classical music. Ironically, some 125 years later, merengue music has become one of the republic's main cultural exports, and Caribbean cuisine exerts influence on the North American diet. Espaillat, like Argentina's Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, believed that immigration, preferably from Europe, would have a positive economic and cultural influence. While preferring German immigrants, Espaillat outlined a specific plan to import Puerto Rican workers. Three decades later, a similar migration materialized when U.S. sugar corporations brought hundreds of Puerto Ricans to work in Dominican sugar plantations.

The book's third and last part is devoted exclusively to Espaillat's ideas, to the acts of his short-lived government (April-October 1876), and to the rebellions which forced him to resign. Espaillat and his cabinet tried to put into practice many of the principles of Dominican liberalism and recognized that economic, political, and cultural forms of development were interrelated. Literacy, for example, was viewed as a precondition for democracy, and individual landownership was believed to strengthen both the economy and political stability. Perhaps because...