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"Ginetta E. B. Candelario's "Black behind the Ears" argues compellingly that any serious effort to understand Dominican ideas and practices of race in the ancestral homeland as well as in the diaspora requires a large conceptual framework, a triangular geography of knowledge, and a cultural history formed by Dominican nation-building projects, the difficult plight of the Haitian Republic in the midst of a negrophobic world, the impact of U.S. racial thought, and the Latin American glorification of the Hispanic heritage. Candelario's book remarkably dares to bring apparently disparate discursive sites to interact convincingly and engagingly in her analysis. The author renders facile readings of the Dominican chapter of the black experience in the Americas as exceptional or pathological simply unsustainable. She shows instead that it invites White Americans, African Americans, and other Latinos to revisit long-held assumptions about racial categories, ethnic identity, nationality, and the ideologies behind taking the 'visible' for 'real' in matters of race."--Silvio Torres-Saillant, coauthor of "The Dominican Americans"

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Black behind the Ears

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Figures and Tables..................................................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments.....................................................................................................................................................xiIntroduction. "We Declare That We Are Indians": Dominican Identity Displays and Discourses in Travel Writing, Museums, Beauty Shops, and Bodies.....................11. "It Is Said That Haiti Is Getting Blacker and Blacker": Traveling Narratives of Dominican Identity...............................................................352. "The Africans Have No [Public] History": The Museo del Hombre Dominicano and Indigenous Displays of Dominican Identity...........................................833. "I Could Go the African American Route": Dominicans in the Black Mosaic of Washington, D.C.......................................................................1294. "They Are Taken into Account for Their Opinions": Making Community and Displaying Identity at a Dominican BeautyShop in New York City............................1775. "Black Women Are Confusing, but the Hair Lets You Know": Perceiving the Boundaries of Dominicanidad..............................................................223Conclusion. "Black behind the Ears, and Up Front, Too": Ideological Code Switching and Ambiguity in DominicanIdentities.............................................256Notes...............................................................................................................................................................265References..........................................................................................................................................................297Index...............................................................................................................................................................323

Chapter One

TRAVELING NARRATIVES OF DOMINICAN IDENTITY

In much of Latin America, the official and unofficial policies of the state are played out on the bodies of its citizens, thus becoming the intimate personal experience and shaping the unique vision of the individual that gets expressed in what we recognize as the writer's particular voice.-Amy K. Kaminsky

On October 12 of every year, the entire country celebrates different cultural, religious, sports, and social events organized by both public and private institutions to commemorate the "Discovery of America," subsequently baptized "The Day of the Race" and today labeled more subtly, but still maliciously, "The Day of Hispanicity."-Dagoberto Tejada Ortz

In her important book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt convincingly argues that Spanish American independence movements were of such great interest to the French and British empires that an entirely new literary genre, the travel narrative, was developed to offer information about these new nations to the European metropolis. Acting as "advance scouts for European capital," these writers rewrote and reinvented the Americas in ways that suited the ideological, economic, and political projects of their empires. At the same time, American Creole intellectuals and elites engaged these narratives and offered their own transcultural visions of independent America. That transcultural vision positioned Creoles as legitimately hegemonic in the Americas because they were "Europeanizing" yet American, indigenous yet white, and republican yet patriarchal. Thus, European travel writing offered a narrative against which Creole counter-narratives of national identity and political legitimacy were elaborated.

In Santo Domingo and later in the Dominican Republic, travel writing played a similar role in the development of a discourse of Dominicanidad generated in dynamic dialogue with foreign interlocutors. However, the foreign narratives and narrators of the republic who inspired a Dominican counter-narrative were not so much European as North American. Moreover, as a people emerging from an island divided between two different colonial powers and, later, two different nations, Dominicans faced a geopolitical context to their identities unique in the Americas. The Dominican Republic came into existence through separation not so much from Spain, as was the case for the other emergent Latin American nation-states, as from French San Dominge and later Haiti. In addition, the Dominican Republic was seriously considered for U.S. annexation and territorial incorporation in the nineteenth century and was occupied and governed by U.S. Marines twice in the twentieth century. Accordingly, an examination of leading travel accounts of the island's landscape and people offers us insight into the ideological and political contexts in which Dominican identity was being formed, narrated, and displayed. In large measure, that context was defined by a triangle of relations between Haiti, the United States, and the Dominican Republic.

This chapter will offer a critique of travel narratives about the Dominican Republic and Haiti, paying special attention to the relationship between the travelers' racial projects and Dominican nation-building projects. "A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines." Following Michael Omi's and Howard Winant's helpful conceptualization, I am arguing that travel narratives formed part of an evolving geopolitical racial project that did the "ideological 'work'" of both U.S. imperialism and Dominican nation building through anti-Haitianist discourses. As Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester put it in his address to the National Geographic Society as part of that ideological work, "It [was] said that Haiti [was] getting blacker and blacker" as the Dominican Republic was getting whiter.

The Birth of a Dominican Nation: The Black Republic and the Whites of the Land

As the first black republic in the Americas, Haiti posed a great ideological and political challenge to white-supremacist, slaveholding states in the Western Hemisphere. Repeatedly threatened by the French empire and shunned by slaveowning states throughout the Americas, Haitian leaders justified their expansion into the Spanish part of Santo Domingo as beneficial to both parts of the colonially divided island. In 1822, Jean-Pierre Boyer invaded and unified the eastern two-thirds of the island to Haiti's western third. Just weeks prior to Boyer's unification of the island, Santo Domingo had declared itself to be independent of Spain and newly constituted as Hait Espaol, or Spanish Haiti, under the leadership of Jos Nuez de Cceres, whose original plan to participate in Bolivar's Gran Colombia project was easily reoriented toward Haitian unification. During the twenty-two-year period of unified Haitian rule, many Creoles in the former Spanish part chaffed under Haitian rule, even as others collaborated with the Unification government. Meanwhile many in the impoverished mulatto and black...