The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo by Lauren Derby (review)

The Latin Americanist, June 2010 favor of interpretive methods that treat music as meaningful, participatory practice. Toward the end of the book Dent quotes his undergraduate teacher James A. Boon about the “refractory” nature of ethnography (211). Both the strength and weakness of River of Tears is its kaleidoscope quality. It constantly shifts from specific to general, from practice to theory, from discipline to discipline, from exposition to critique, and from detail to summary. And even though Dent works hard to explain his terms, locate his arguments, and directly engage the reader, this fragmentary quality can make for a dense and sometimes disorienting read. But for scholars of popular music, or Brazil, or Latin American public culture, it offers a trove of insights and evidence. And for any scholar interested in how popular culture can and should be studied, River of Tears is an impressive example of the power and delights of theoretically informed ethnography. Joli Jensen Department of Communication University of Tulsa THE DICTATOR’S SEDUCTION: POLITICS AND THE POPULAR IMAGINATION IN THE ERA OF TRUJILLO. By Lauren Derby. Durham: Duke UP, 2009, pp. 432, $25.95. Over the past several years there has been an increase in the publication of books about the Dominican Republic and Dominicans in the United States. This can be partly attributed to the increase of Dominican communities in cities such as New York, D.C., Miami, and Boston. Moreover, Dominican and Dominican-American writers who underscore the trials and tribulations of the immigrant experience are becoming more visible in the mainstream print. For scholars and the general public trying to understand the Dominican Republic at the beginning of the twenty-first century, certain recurring themes within Dominican historiography—from making sense of the Rafael L. Trujillo dictatorship (1930-1961) and his legacy to the evasive and historical role of democracy in the Dominican Republic— continue to pose challenging questions. The existing historiography on Trujillo and his long-lived regime has, for the most part, focused on the repressive nature and “sultanistic” excesses of the cruel dictatorship. Trujillo ’s fucú or curse has lingered over hi nation for over forty years. It is with Trujillo’s regime that this fucú is questioned and challenged in Lauren Derby’s The Dictator’s Seduction. Trujillo’s dictatorship was one of the longest and most brutal regimes in Latin American and Caribbean history. His ability was to apparently enact the impossible. As Derby illustrates, he survived three major coup attempts by invasions led by exiles, one with support from former Cuban leader Fidel Castro and the Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt. 134 Book Reviews Furthermore, Trujillo managed to kill his opponents in cities as far away as New York and Caracas; it was known among various circles that Trujillo had the young Spanish scholar Jesús de Galı́ndez murdered because of his Columbia University thesis on the harshness of the regime. Trujillo’s larger-than-life persona was also a product of the multitude of titles, ranks, decorations, medals, and prizes granted by servile cronies and more than twenty foreign governments and organizations. He even earned the illdeserved Great Collar of Democracy and Great Medal of Extraordinary Merit. In addition, all public works were framed as personal gifts from Trujillo, so that the presidential personal came to be seamlessly identified with the modernization and development of the country. The Dictator’s Seduction is a cultural history of the regime as it was experienced by Dominicans in Santo Domingo. By centering on everyday forms of political domination, Derby describes how the regime infiltrated civil society based on popular idioms of masculinity and fantasies of race, ethnicity, and class mobility. Derby argues that the most intriguing aspect of the dictatorship was how it appropriated practices such as gossip and gift exchange. She points out that Trujillo not only controlled the Dominican Republic but also became the political machine; he established and directed every aspect of the island from the courts to bureaucrats. The nation’s economy was run as the dictator’s own personal corporation and political progress was completely dominated by his own Partido Dominicano (Dominican Party). In chapter two, Derby discusses in detail how Trujillo changed...