La Otra Historia Dominicana (review)

A skillful blending of analysis of socioeconomic developments and cultural dynamics, La Otra Historia Dominicana is a collection of articles originally published in Rumbo, between January 1994 and October 2000. The text presents an innovative and refreshing historical perspective from precolonial time up to 2000.

A well-known scholar, Moya Pons has published twenty books and hundreds of articles, edited forty other texts, and directed the publication of EME-EME, a journal published by the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (known then as Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra or UCMM), in Santiago, the Dominican Republic. As mentioned on the back cover of La Otra Historia Dominicana, the articles published in Rumbo, under the subtitle "La Historia tiene otra Historia," responded to Moya Pons' desire to bring attention to people who have been active agents of historical development, but have not been appropriately recognized.

The author's approach matches the new trend of historical research, which places less emphasis on political ideologies, political parties, and political leaders, and more emphasis on common people and ordinary events. La Otra Historia Dominicana, is organized in seventeen topical chapters. Each chapter includes subjects that are seldom, if at all, discussed in previous publications.

Recognizing the author's work during the ten years that he took to publish the articles, friends and colleagues suggested to Moya Pons to arrange the material and to produce a book. Initially he rejected the idea because, among other reasons, to assemble a book from a collection of previously published articles responds to a Dominican practice: "armar un libro que casi nadie lee con artículos de periódicos y revistas que se leyeron muy poco o simplemente pasaron desapercibidos" (to prepare a book that almost no one reads from newspapers and magazines articles that only few read or were unnoticed). Despite the initial rejection, because of the high quality and freshness of many articles, his friends did not give up. As indicated in the Introduction, one of those friends, José Chez Checo, a former President of La Academia Dominicana de la Historia, had a sweeping vision of arranging the articles by chapters and organizing the periodical publications into a solid volume.

Within the topical framework, one can see that the organization of the collection was a laborious job. The first article, "Los comienzos del Banco Central," published in Rumbo on January 24, 1994, appears almost at the end of Chapter 15, on page 464, in La Otra Historia Dominicana; on the other hand, one of last articles, "Las provincias de los Indios," published in Rumbo on May 8, 2000, appears on Chapter I, on page 25, in La Otra Historia Dominicana.

In the first chapter, readers acquire fundamental knowledge about of the Tainos, their political and geographic division, and the devastating impact of the Europeans on the inhabitants of La Española. This chapter, as well as others, includes subjective, provocative, even sexy subtitles, such as "La isla ya no era virgen." Chapter two deals with the colonial era, describing the economic conditions, disparities in bathing traditions between Tainos and Europeans, the interrelation between corsairs and tobacco production, and the rise of fur as "the international coin of contraband." Adding to the history of slavery, chapter three offers valuable information about the cultural role of the slave society and its influence and presence on the Dominican genealogy. "Gentes sin Historia" is the title of chapter four. The naming of the chapter is a clear indication of the author's main goal: to call attention to groups and/or individuals with a rich history, such as the buccaneers and those distinctive sexual lifestyle demands examination.

Chapter five discusses the nature and evolution of the criollo figure and its subdivision into four categories. The description offers interesting portraits of "one of the less studied elements of the [Dominican] national culture." Questions of national identity, racial typology, immigration, and ethnicity are some of the themes of chapter six. Origins and global interchanges of plants and...