We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom by Anne Eller (review)

On February 27, 1844 the elite leadership of a new republic in the Caribbean – the Dominican Republic – completed a separation project that severed them from the western side of Hispaniola, now Haiti. That day has been declared the official date of "Dominican independence," and yet the eastern side of the island experienced multiple days of newly established sovereignty, including the day in 1822 when Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer led the liberation of the entire island from colonial rule, or the one in 1865 when the temporarily "extinguished republic" once again shed its Spanish colonial rulers and returned – for perhaps a third time – to sovereignty. Yet despite this complex web of challenging claims to citizenship, sovereignty, and a cohesive national past, historian Anne Eller focuses on the period of Spanish re-annexation and resistance to meticulously untangle some of these multiple narratives of independence in the Dominican Republic in We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom. As she writes, "Dominicans' independence unfolded over decades" (4) and it was a contested, contradictory, and multi-vocal project.

After offering an overview of the period of island-wide unification and end to colonial control of Hispaniola (1822-1844) Eller presents seven chapters that cover the "First Republic" (1844-1861), the project led by Pedro Santana to re-annex the country to Spain, its administration and its many points of contestation, the beginnings of resistance, outright revolution, and the pan-Caribbean currents that helped finalize Spain's withdrawal from the Dominican Republic. Eller makes clear that while the project to return to colonial control was an elite one, her focus remains on "how citizens made their lives between foreign powers and political revolution" (22). Despite a challenging archival record that regularly neglected the stories of the non-elite, Eller's work manages to fill in many of the gaps between intentions at the upper levels of administration and execution and reality on the ground. The book is richly researched across the extensive repositories that hold this story. Perhaps part of the reason it has yet to be fully told, the narrative of Dominican independence stretches across the archives of at least the six countries (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Spain, U.K., U.S.) Eller engaged, but also found its way into multiple forms of expression, including creative ones, that she also weaves into this story of independence, citizenship, and sovereignty.

Eller's work particularly shines when diving into the more quotidian and rural responses to Spanish re-annexation on the island and the ideological routes of resistance across the Atlantic. Locking onto the rumors that Spanish annexation would return slavery to the island, Eller argues convincingly that it was these fears of emancipation lost that most compelled individuals to join the fight, regardless of widespread administrative failures, and created the "scaffolds and justification of a plan to revolt" (147). When resistance to Spanish annexation finally boiled over into full, armed rebellion (later called the "War of Restoration") in 1863, Eller pieces together the "imperfect records of rebels' heterogeneous complaints and aims" (145) to provide the many personal reflections that ultimately added up to country-wide rebellion. For example, she uses a poetic epitaph to Santana ("Here lies a great idiot") to convey public sentiment toward the annexation project, or reports of seemingly minor scuffles to demonstrate rising tensions among Dominican loyalist troops (183).

Moreover, when assessing the transnational currents that weighed in upon renewed colonization or the mobility of bodies engaged in that discourse, Eller's scholarship reminds us viscerally of the very "common winds" of freedom, as Julius Scott might put it, that networked across the Caribbean. Tracing the peripatetic rebel Alejandro Ángulo Guridi from the Dominican Republic to New York and around the Caribbean, Eller provides details of a transnational life during this period, but also of the Atlantic throughways on which news of resistance and rebellion traveled. Yet while...