The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race, and Dominican National Identity

Introduction

INTRODUCTION In November 2009 Sammy Sosa, the Dominican-born Chicago Cub who competed with Mark McGwire, of the St. Louis Cardinals, in the home run race of 1998, once again made national and international headlines. Sosa was born in Consuelo, a sugar estate located on the outskirts of San Pedro de Macorís, a town famous for producing a critical mass of Dominicans who play Major League Baseball in the United States. During his baseball career, Sosa achieved a level of success, fame, and socioeconomic mobility that many young men from Consuelo and other sugar-mill towns grow up dreaming about. Now retired, Sosa made an appearance at the 2009 Latin Grammys that shocked reporters and baseball fans alike: Sosa, formerly a dark-skinned man (what some Dominicans may refer to as “indio-oscuro”), had a white face and white hands as a result of using bleaching creams. By using light-colored contact lenses, Sosa had transformed socioeconomic whitening (blanqueamiento ) into a physical fact.1 SammySosaadmittedtousinga“rejuvenating”skincream:“Iapply[it]before going to bed and [it] whitens my skin.”2 For Dominicans of a certain age, Sosa’s ritual probably resonated with the personal habits of General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the dictator who controlled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until 1961. Although a much lighter-skinned man than Sosa, he faithfully applied powder to his face to whiten his appearance. In the United States Sosa’s admission appeared to confirm representations of Dominicans as a racist people who deny their African ancestry. An article published in the Miami Herald claimed that Dominicans of African descent, long told that they were white Hispanics, suffered from a psychosis rooted in antiblack racism, anti-Haitian xenophobia, and the desire to whiten and distance themselves from their African past.3 How was it possible, some asked, for millions of similarly hued Sammy Sosas to think of themselves as white and Hispanic? It istruethat formuchofthetwentiethcentury,officialstatenationalismin the Dominican Republic privileged European ancestry and Hispanic cultural 2 / The Mulatto Republic norms such as the Spanish language and Catholicism. It is also the case that twentieth-century iterations of this national identity—hispanidad—achieved their most brutal expression during General Trujillo’s dictatorship. The architects of antiblack, anti-Haitian hispanidad in the 1930s and 1940s in effect transformed a racist conceptualization of the Dominican nation—as a collective unified by its rejection of blackness, vodoun, and Kreyòl—held by a small group of intellectual and bureaucratic elites into an ideology that has since permeated Dominican society and culture.4 The pervasiveness of antiblack, anti-Haitian nationalism among elites and nonelites alike raises questions: Is contemporary Dominican national identity simply a persistent legacy of the Trujillato (Trujillo regime)? Or does Dominican hispanidad represent a nationalism unique to an island divided between two countries long engaged with each other in sometimes cooperative and, at other times, conflicted ways? The present study makes three arguments to answer these questions. First, I will show that while hispanicismo, the elevation of cultural norms and values associated with Spain and Spanish colonialism, was present in all currents of nationalist thought elaborated in the late nineteenth century, not all conceptualizations of Dominican national identity were antiblack or anti-Haitian. I then argue that although hispanicismo had been, since the 1880s, a key element in intellectual conversations about dominicanidad (Dominicanness), its significance became more pronounced in towns such as San Pedro de Macorís as native-born elites expanded their ranks to include wealthy white immigrants from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Spain. Finally, I demonstrate that while the path from hispanicismo towardofficialhispanidadwasneverlinear,apatriarchal,racist , and authoritarian representation of the Dominican nation became viable and acceptable among modernizing elites by the 1920s. As a result, I conclude, Trujillo-era nationalism was an ideological invention unique to the dictatorship that drew on long-held ideas that national unity derived from Dominicans ’culturallypureHispanictradition.Proponentsofhispanidadnationalism, however, injected hispanicismo with a profound pessimism about the Dominican nation’s future and complemented this bleary outlook with a virulent antiblack rhetoric that resonated with Negrophobic intellectual traditions but was more vitriolic in its application. The origins of anti-Haitian and antiblack nationalist ideologies in the Dominican Republic have long been central to debates among Dominican historians , political scientists, and journalists concerning the relationship between popular expressions of Dominican identity and official nationalism. For example , as Franklin Franco Pichardo and Ernesto Sagás argue, Dominican in- Introduction / 3 tellectual and...