1998/05/01 by Silvio Torres-Saillant, Silvio Torres‐Saillant · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Caribbean history, culture, and politics
paper · doi:10.1177/0094582x9802500307
Dominican society is the cradle of blackness in the Americas. The island of Hispaniola or Santo Domingo, which Dominicans share with Haitians, served as port of entry to the first African to set foot on Spain’s newly conquered territories following Christopher Columbus’s eventful transatlantic voyage in 1492. Nine years into the conquest of what thenceforward became known as the New World, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella appointed Fray Nicolas de Ovando governor of Santo Domingo, authorizing him to bring slaves to their colony (Saco, 1974: 164). Marking the start of the black experience in the western hemisphere, the arrival of Ovando’s fleet in July 1502 ushered in a social and demographic history that would lead in the course of five centuries to the overwhelming presence of people of African descent in the Dominican Republic today.(1) Blacks and mulattos make up nearly 90 percent of the contemporary Dominican population. Yet, no other country in the hemisphere exhibits greater indeterminacy regarding the population’s sense of racial identity. To the bewilderment of outside observers, Afro-Dominicans have traditionally failed to flaunt their blackness as a collective banner to advance economic, cultural, or political causes. Some commentators would contend, in effect, that Dominicans have, for the most part, denied their blackness. Faced with the population’s tolerance of official claims asserting the moral and intellectual superiority of Caucasians by white supremacist ideologues, analysts of racial identity in Dominican society have often imputed to Dominicans heavy doses of backwardness, ignorance, or confusion regarding their race and ethnicity (Fennema and Loewenthal, 1989: 209; Sagas, 1993). I would like to invite reflection on the complexity of racial thinking and racial discourse among Dominicans with the purpose of urging the adoption of discrete paradigms in attempts to explicate the place of black consciousness in Dominican society and culture. BLACKNESS AND THE DOMINICAN STATE