Latinidad, Dominicanidad, and Anti-Blackness: Two Nations under U.S. Empire

Abstract

Lorgia García-Peña’s Borders of Dominicanidad situates the history of racial differentiation and exclusion in Hispaniola within the context of U.S. empire, arguing that the multiple occupations of the Dominican Republic by the U.S. Marines played a significant role in locating Blackness on the Haitian side of the border and latinidad—which was meant to exclude Blackness—on the Dominican side of the border. This article argues that we need to attend to García-Peña’s argument about racialization and spatialization in the context of U.S. empire. It also reads her work as underscoring the importance of the production of gendered narratives of race—from the masculinity of the Afro-Dominican peasant hero and religious figure Papa Liborio (Olivorio Mateo), killed by the marines to the transformation of the banditry resulting in the deaths of the Galindo family into a story of “virgins” raped by Black Haitian soldiers, using tropes straight out of the folk mythology of the United States.