Hair Race-ing: Dominican Beauty Culture and Identity Production

Use to beYa could learn a whole lot of stuffsitting in thembeauty shop chairsUse to beYa could meeta whole lot of other womensittin' therealong with hair fryingspit flyingand babies cryingUse to beyou could learn a whole lot abouthow to catch upwith yourselfand some other folksin your household.Lots more got taken care ofthan hair ….

—Willi Coleman, "Among the Things That Use to Be"

At the most banal level, a beauty shop is where women go for beauty. But as Willi Coleman evocatively notes, at beauty shops "lots more [gets] taken care of than hair." The degrees, types, and technologies of artifice and alteration required by beauty are mediated by racial, sexual, class, political, and geographic cultures and locations. Thus, beauty shops can be considered as sites of both cultural and identity production. Some have argued that if the female body generally has been subjected to "externalization of the gendered self" (Peiss 1994, 384), the explicitly racialized female body has been subjected to "exile from the self" (Shohat and Stam 1994, 1994–33). With the rise of global colonialism, slavery, neocolonialism, and imperialism, African-origin bodies have been stigmatized as unsightly and ugly, yet, simultaneously and paradoxically as hypersexual (Hernton 1988). White female bodies are racialized as well, but this racialization is enacted via the assumption of de-racination, racial neutrality, and naturalized white invisibility (Frankenberg 1993). This White supremacist racial history interacts with masculinist imperatives of gender and sexual homogenization and normalization in particular ways (Young 1995). Moreover, bodily beautification requires material resources and aesthetic practices that are class bound. The beauty shop, then, can be analyzed as a site where hegemonic gender, class, sexuality, and race tropes simultaneously are produced and problematized.

In particular, hair—the subject and object of beauty shop work—epitomizes the mutual referentiality of race/sex/gender/class categories and identities. One can, as I found during a six-month participant observation at a Dominican beauty shop in New York City, "learn a whole lot of stuff sittin' in them beauty shop chairs." Here, the concern is to present both the representational and the production practices of hair culture as a window into the contextualized complexity of Dominican identity. The hair culture institutions, practices, and ideals of Dominican women in New York City during the late 1990s are presented as an instructive selection from a larger study (Candelario 2000).

Dominican Identity: Ethnicity and Race in Context

The importance of hair as a defining race marker highlights the centrality of beauty practices. Hair, after all, is an alterable sign. Hair that is racially compromising can be mitigated with care and styling. Skin color and facial features, conversely, are less pliant or not as easily altered. That Dominicans have equated whiteness both with lo indio, an ethno-racial identity based on identification with the decimated Taino natives of the island that now houses the Dominican Republic and "lo Hispano" or Hispanicity reflects the multiple semiotic systems of race they have historically negotiated. La/o india/o is invoked to erase the African past and Afrodiasporic present of Dominicans (Howard 1997). Hispanicity affirms the ethnoracial distance between Dominicans and Haitians, an organizing principle in Dominican national imaginaries since the rise of the state.

Operating in the context of both Latin American and United States' notions of race, transnational Dominicans engage in a sort of racial "code switching" in which both Latin American and United States race systems are engaged, subverted, and sustained in various historical, biographical, and spatial contexts and moments. For example, for a variety of reasons I explore at length elsewhere (Candelario 2000), Dominicans in Washington, D.C., identify as Black nearly twice as often as Dominicans in New York (see also Dore-Cabral and Itzigsohn 1997; Levitt and Gomez 1997; Duany 1994). Confronted in New York City with the U.S. model of pure whiteness that valorizes lank, light hair, white skin, light eyes, thin and narrow-hipped bodies, the Dominican staff and clients at Salon Lamadas continue...