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

Life along the 224-mile border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti can present a confusing cultural blending for those who think they know the Dominican Republic, but have never ventured west of Santo Domingo. Sentences spoken by people who may be Haitian or Dominican or some mix of both are interspersed with Spanish and Creole. A colorful tap tap rumbles down a Dajabón street. And although the Haitian moonshine triculí may not sit side by side with Barceló Añejo on the bodega shelf, it is still easy to find. These are superficial observations. Delving deeply into la frontera as a social construct shaped by discourse and power, Lorgia García-Peña makes a powerful argument for reexamining the notion of borders as a means of dividing humanity. García-Peña, an assistant professor at Harvard University, has received numerous awards for The Borders of Dominicanidad, including the National Women's Studies Association Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, the LASA Latino/a Studies Book Award, and the Isis Duarte Book Prize in Haiti and Dominican Studies.

Dominicanidad, the idea of what it means to be Dominican, has received significant treatment in scholarly works, media, and commentary. Among such work, García-Peña's book stands out as historically and culturally far ranging, socially aware and sensitive, yet analytically tight with its clear framing of borders as real and borders perceived as constructs to be interrogated and challenged. The author's subject is dominicanidad shaped by the Haitian-Dominican border, but the implications of her scholarship can be extended to other settings where social identity is created within an historical construct of hegemonic political interests, racism, and power struggles over representation of national identity and where borderlands are fertile ground for cultivating cultural mythologies.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, titled "Founding the Archive," examines how elites employ a set of dictions, to use the author's term, to create a literature and history that reflects their conception of dominicanidad. What García-Peña labels the "Archive of Dominicanidad" is compiled through diction around such events as the 1822 murders of the three Andújar sisters, who were mythologized into the Galindo Virgins. The Archive, which is reinforced through repetition, articulates a Caucasian-Iberian dominicanidad in opposition to an African-origin Haitian blackness. García-Peña reveals largely ignored and sometimes silenced practices and writings that operate in what she terms contradiction to the Archive. She introduces Afro-Caribbean religion, poetry by Manuel Rueda, and historical literature by Aristy and Bosch and more recently by writers such as Nelly Rosario as illustrations of challenges to the dominant narratives of dominicanidad created by an establishment with an adversarial approach to Dominican-Haitian relations and a benign view of US hegemony in the Caribbean.

In part two, "Diaspora Contradicts," García-Peña explores how what she terms rayano consciousness creates contravening narratives that act along geographic, racial, linguistic, and cultural borders to challenge the dominant discourse and historiography supporting the Hispanophile representation of what it means to be Dominican. Through art, language, performance, and social action, people both within and outside Hispaniola redefine notions of race, nationality, and culture in ways that contradict Haitian-Dominican differences that establishment elites within the Dominican Republic assert, as has the US government going back at least as far as the 1916–1924 occupation. Dominicans' compassionate and fraternal treatment of Haitians following the 2010 earthquake is the type of spontaneous social behavior that García-Peña presents as evidence that belies the false narrative of Dominican-Haitian separateness. This section also includes provocative yet cogent presentations of performance art's challenges to the Archive. García-Peña's analysis of "Da pa lo do," a music video by Rita Indiana y los Misterios, is personal yet broadly relatable, and her discussion of Josefina Báez's...