The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation and Archives of Contradiction by Lorgia García-Peña (review)

Lorgia García-Peña's The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction offers a historically grounded, meticulously researched, and thoughtful analysis of how dominant narratives of Dominican racial and national identity developed, and the ways in which these narratives have historically excluded racialized people. García-Peña argues that "The stories and histories upheld by nations and their dominant archive create marginality through acts of exclusion, violence and silencing" (3). This well-documented text not only underscores how these "acts of exclusion" happen through stories and repetition, but also the ways in which dominant narratives of dominicanidad are "contested and negotiated" (2). Centered on the intersecting histories of Hispaniola and the United States, the book also addresses current immigration policies and the vulnerability of black lives in a global context. Interdisciplinary, transnational, and intersectional in its approach, The Borders of Dominicanidad should be required reading for anyone engaged in Dominican, Caribbean, and Latino/a Studies.

Wide in its historical scope, the book is structured around five key moments in Dominican history: the 1822 murder of the Andújar sisters, the slaying of religious leader Olivorio Mateo in 1922, the 1937 massacre of thousands of people on the Dominican-Haitian border, the intervention of the US in the Dominican Republic in 1965, and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti (12). In her analysis of these events, García-Peña privileges the voices of people silenced by multiple discourses—historical, literary, and legal—to demonstrate the many ways in which marginalized people disrupt official narratives of the nation. García-Peña shows the processes through which discourses become "truth," particularly through repetition, and how those "truths" contribute to "the violence, silencing, and erasure of racialized people and their truths" (13).

Key to the articulation of dominicanidad is an understanding of the Haiti-Dominican Republic border and of the role the United States has played in shaping and (re) producing narratives of the border between the two countries based on difference. García-Peña argues persuasively that contemporary Haitian-Dominican conflicts should be traced to "historical and rhetorical narratives" (15) produced in the 19^th century that responded to a "colonial bequeath that was in turn upheld and sustained by the United States to preserve its own imperial ventures, rather than the recent legacy of the Trujillo dictatorship" (15).

By insisting on the critical influence of 19^th century narratives and the US on the drawing and imagining of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, The Borders of Dominicanidad proposes a unique interpretation of the relationship between the countries that share Hispaniola. While much of the research on the Dominican Republic and Haiti has focused on the contentious nature of these countries' relationship, García-Peña highlights the zones of contact, the shared history of colonial oppression and US imperialism, and the ways in which the border also functions as a site of creativity, resistance, and solidarity.

The last two chapters of the book explore the role of rayanos ("borderers") in contesting dominant narratives of the Haiti-Dominican Republic border and in offering alternative versions of dominicanidad. In Chapter 4, García-Peña presents a fascinating examination of Dominican-Haitian relations after the earthquake of 2010. Inspired by a photograph of Sonia Marmolejos—a woman who breastfed several Haitian children who were victims of the earthquake at a Dominican hospital—this chapter considers the rising of a rayano consciousness which, as the author argues, may serve as a "possible antidote to anti-Haitianism, internationalized anti-blackness and xenophobia" (148). García-Peña's detailed and careful analysis of the creative production of writer/performer Josefina Báez in Chapter 5 further underscores the critical role rayanos play in "the creation of an alternative poetics of dominicanidad in the diaspora" (18).

Among the book's many strengths...