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  • Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic
  • Christina Violeta Jones
Kimberly Eison Simmons. 2009. Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 144 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8130-3374-7.

In June of 2007, the Miami Herald published an article in its special series on Afro-Latin Americans on the Dominican Republic entitled "Black Denial." In this particular story, the reporter Frances Robles discussed how black denial is at the core of Dominican socialization and how the Spanish-speaking society defined itself without seemingly taking its African ancestry into account. Kimberly Simmons in Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic conceptualizes' this accusation of "black denial" and provides readers with a fresh and intellectual approach as to how Dominicans define "blackness" and how they come to terms with their African ancestry.

Simmons explores the fascinating socio-cultural shifts in Dominican racial categories, concluding that they are slowly embracing blackness and their contribution to the African Diaspora. She examines the transnational movement of individuals between the Dominican Republic and the United States, where traditional notions of indio (mixed) are challenged, debated, and called into question. The author questions how and why Dominicans define their racial identities only to reveal the shifting coalitions between Caribbean peoples and African Americans, which proves to be intrinsic to understanding identities in the Diaspora as a whole.

Early in her study, Simmons addresses the history of immigration as it affects those that reside in the Dominican Republic by centering on the state, the census, and the categories of indio that were and continue to be impacted. As in past studies recently produced by Ernesto Sagás, Ginetta Candelario, and Silvio Torres-Saillant, the author explores events that took place during the infamous Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina regime (1931-1960) such as the 1937 Haitian Massacre followed by the Dominicanization project that took place along the frontier region of Hispaniola. Simmons argues that events such as these helped to shape Dominican nationality, the definition of mixedness, and the institutionalization of the term indio as a national racial category. This in addition to the result [End Page 238] of generations of intermarriage and whitening up practices that took place in the Spanish-speaking island.

In the second chapter, Simmons then examines the term indio more closely and its historical context. It is in this chapter that she goes into an in depth analysis on how Trujillo institutionalized certain policies to nationalize the term within Dominican racial categories. She supports her argument with one's interpretation on how race and ethnicity are defined and determined by the Junta Central Electoral (JCE) employees towards those Dominicans that come to apply for their identification card the cedula. But more importantly, the cedula defines each and every Dominican citizen racially, which in the long run impacts factors such as census static's, citizenship, and voting rights. Simmons subsequently goes on to discuss how the term mulatto in the Dominican Republic came to replace indio. It is in this discussion that the author contends how the term has been interpreted by outsiders as wanting to be defined as Amerindian and/or of Native American ancestry. However, she clearly argues that the connotative meaning of indio in the Dominican Republic actually represents mixture and/or a someone of African ancestry.

The third chapter explores the Dominican experience in the United States. It is in the United States that Dominicans are confronted and at the same time connected with their Africanness. This is due to the relationship with African Americans and other immigrant groups of African descent. Simmons specifically explores the experiences of African American students who traveled to the Dominican Republic and found that many of them felt frustrated that Dominicans did not embrace their blackness in similar ways. Simmons questions what it means to be black and how this concept is still very different for those living in the United States than it is for an individual of African ancestry in the Dominican Republic. She makes an important point by arguing that the Dominican racial system is defined by color and not necessary by...

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