Politica, identidad y pensamiento social en la Republica Dominicana (Siglos XIX y XX) (review)

Política, identidad y pensamiento social en la República Dominicana (Siglos XIX y XX). Edited by RAYMUNDO GONZALEZ ET AL. Madrid: Ediciones Doce Calles, Academia de Ciencias de Dominicana, 1999. Notes. Bibliography. 300 pp.

To say that questions surrounding the formation of a sense of nationhood in the Dominican Republic have haunted Dominican historiography might be too strong a statement, especially from one who studies precisely this issue. Yet, for the past 15 or 20 years, historians of the eastern part of Española, whose western third belongs to Haiti, have troubled themselves enough with the sources of Dominicanness and with the watersheds in its development to have allowed the theme, if not to dominate the conversation, then at least to intrude upon it frequently. The volume under review collects original essays by scholars who have examined these questions over the years, from the inside and abroad, and using a variety of theoretical and methodological tools. It contains the best and most complete coverage of the issues yet in print, and its intellectual reach will probably not be surpassed in many years to come.

The essays in this book have a number of hared characteristics. All of them focus on discourse analysis at different moments in Dominican history, and in so doing, present the reader with the mindset of the intellectual elite that sought to influence the course of a new nation. Raymundo González examines the writings of Pedro Francisco Bonó and Eugenio María de Hostos, respectively the nineteenth-century Liberal defender of the downtrodden and the early-twentieth-century positivist proponent of a truly progressive education. Roberto Cassá reflects on the relationship between the nascent state and the nation in the early years of the twentieth century through the writings of prolific liberal essayists Eugenio Deschamps and Américo Lugo. Lusitania Martínez places feminism in a spatial-chronological context through a short intellectual biography of Abigail Mejía. Michel Baud tackles the ideologues of Trujillismo: Manuel Arturo Peña Batlle and Ramón Marrero Aristy. Meindert Fenmena confronts the elusive question of race through a comparison of the writings of Franscisco Franco and Joaquín Balaguer. Pedro San Miguel dissects literature by Juan Bosch and the Trujillista projection of the role of the peasant. Josefina Zaiter is the exception with a psychological excursion into Dominicanness.

Collectively these authors examine the liberal and conservative currents in the national discourse of progress, which explains why certain moments are the inevitable stops along the route of history. Various authors offer instances of patriotism as an indication of the development of a primitive sense of community; the establishment of capitalism as the measure of a properly constituted state; anti-Haitianism (and racism?) as the other face of Hispanic-based Dominican identity; autocratic rule as the obstacle to the full development of nationhood. These are only some of the themes historians are obliged to revisit in the epic of the Dominican Republic's definition of a national project.

Especially significant are the contributions of González, Cassá, Baud, and San Miguel. González, the island's resident "bonocista," delights in showing the markedly moral ground from which the two progressive thinkers he writes about (Bonó and Hostos), launched their blueprints for social progress. Cassá is brilliant in revisiting the permanent Dominican dilemma--whether to include as partners in government "the (ignorant) people" or to limit the task of state-building to the contributions of an (educated) minority. Baud is bold in asserting that the anti-Haitianism the Dominican elite erected as the foundation of nationalism was not necessarily shared by the popular classes, and in fact was refuted as Dominicans and Haitians interacted on a daily basis. San Miguel skillfully "narrates" the imagined community through an analysis of historical memory in the essays and short stories of Juan Bosch, which he considers a "modernizing...