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6 GENDER AND HISPANIDAD IN THE NEW ERA Many years after her mother, Sarah Loguen Fraser, made a similar journey from the United States to Puerto Plata, Gregoria Fraser Goins returned to the Dominican Republic in 1939. Disembarking in San Pedro de Macorís, Goins traveled by car to Puerto Plata and arrived there on July 29: “Down we came in spirals . . . and finally the Atlantic Ocean . . . what breathtaking beauty . . . and Puerto Plata came into view. Into the town and the first thing I recognized was the Wesleyan Church.” People recognized her too: ninety-five-year-old Mary Ann hugged her and spoke kindly about her parents; the children of domestics who had once worked in their home, a son of the intellectual Eugenio Deschamps, and members of the Brugal family personalized the return home. As she wrote, “How I love this spot on earth. The ice wall formed by so many years of repression is gradually beginning to melt, will I actually once more live and feel?”1 Returning to a Dominican Republic under General Rafael Trujillo’s rule certainly helped Gregoria “feel” her Dominicanness again. She had apparently continued to speak the Spanish she grew up with but also converted to Catholicism , leaving behind the Protestant heritage of her parents and late husband . Shortly after her return to Puerto Plata, Gregoria’s particular longing to feel connected to a place and to a people found its answer in Trujillo-era pageantry when the “Padre de la Patria” (Founding Father) also arrived for a visit. Gregoria cried during the mass in honor of the Virgin of Las Mercedes and noted that taking communion in Puerto Plata differed from approaching the rail in the United States: “there seems to be more awesomeness and reverence in my attitude . . . the partaking seems to bring me more spiritual strength.” AfterGeneralRafaelTrujillo’syachtappeared in the port, Gregoria and friends from the Women’s Club went down to get a view. “The crowd was so great and congested that I was properly squeezed,” she wrote. Being nearly trampled, however, did not deter Gregoria from rising at five the next morning to join the children and “truckloads of men” to have “one grand time . . . for our own.”2 Gender and Hispanidad in the New Era / 117 “For our own.” This phrase echoed Frederick Douglass’s claims made nearly a half century earlier that U.S. African Americans could feel the full measure of their manhood in the Dominican Republic. Like her forebears, Gregoria went to the Dominican Republic for opportunity; she swapped racist repression in the Jim Crow United States for active engagement with Trujillo-era nation building. Trujillo’s national project (1930–1961), draped in the religious piety ofdevotionto Mary andlivedvividlythroughlarge,publicmarchesandrallies, attracted numerous educated, reform-minded women. Mass demonstrations, fairs, and pageants helped Dominicans believe in Trujillo and see in him the nation’s future. As an educated and religious woman, claiming ownership of a national project, “for our own,” hints at the gendered dimensions of Trujilloera nationalism. This chapter bridges the gap between the historiography on women’s activism and studies of the Trujillo era. I begin with the premise that modernizing stateregimesandchanginggendernormsaremutuallyconstitutiveprocesses.3 For example, just one year into his thirty-one-year dictatorship, Trujillo carefully nurtured the loyalties of feminists when he championed suffrage in a speech he gave during the first-anniversary celebration of Dominican Feminist Action (Acción Feminista Dominicana, AFD), held at Santo Domingo’s Athenaeum on May 14, 1932.4 By then, AFD was the country’s largest feminist organization, and the Athenaeum was the nation’s most prestigious intellectual venue. General Trujillo used the occasion to win the AFD’s support when he proclaimed his support for women’s suffrage: “It would benefit Dominican society if our women brought their delicate sentiments to the public arena.”5 The Dominican Congress finally granted women the vote in 1942; that same year the AFD became the Women’s Branch of the Partido Dominicano (Rama Femenina del Partido Trujillista adscrita al Partido Dominicano).6 However, in one of the first major studies about the Trujillo dictatorship, published in Chile in 1956, political exile Jesús de Galíndez dismissed the feminist movement as Trujillo’s creation. Prior to 1940, Galíndez argued, “there wasnospontaneousmovement.” Evenworse,hereported,whenTrujillomade clearhisintentionstochangeDominicanwomen’slegalstatus,this“triggered a hotbed of jealousies between those women who aspired to lead the movement and take advantage of its benefits.” The struggle, according to Galíndez, pitted feminist leader Abiga...

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