The Mulatto Republic

During the authoritarian regime of General Rafael Trujillo, official renderings of Dominican national identity elevated European ancestry, Spanish language, and Spanish cultural formations. At the same time, proponents of Hispanidad nationalism, as it was called, virulently rejected blackness and Haitian culture as antithetical to the Dominican Republic’s forward progress under Trujillo’s leadership. This book seeks to understand the origins of Hispanidad nationalism through a socio-cultural historical analysis that focuses on San Pedro de Macorís, the town famous for its baseball players. By blending social and intellectual history, this book makes three arguments. While Hispanicismo, an appreciation for and elevation of cultural norms and values associated with Spain and Spanish colonialism, was present in all currents of nationalist thought elaborated in the late nineteenth-century, not all conceptualizations of Dominican national identity were anti-black or anti-Haitian. I then show how Hispanicismo’s significance increased and became more pronounced in San Pedro de Macorís as native-born elites expanded their ranks to include wealthy, white immigrants from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Spain. As a result, I conclude, although the path toward official Hispanidad was never linear, a patriarchal, racist, and authoritarian representation of the Dominican nation became viable and acceptable among modernizing elites by the 1920s. Trujillo-era nationalism, then, was an ideological invention unique to the dictatorship that drew upon long-held ideas that Dominicans’ national unity derived from their culturally pure Hispanic tradition.