Dominican Race and Gender before Trujillo and beyond Caribbean Studies

This essay amplifies some of Maja Horn’s arguments in Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature (2014). First, the essay adds texture to Horn’s assessment of the Trujillo regime in relation to race by arguing that what Horn discerns as the Trujillato’s “emptying” of racial difference has a long historical precedent in the Dominican territory. Second, it deepens Horn’s remarks on the nineteenth century to suggest that it is difficult to limit the frame of Caribbean or hemispheric American scholarship to the twentieth century.