Colonial Phantoms

Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present

Dixa Ramírez

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479846382
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Emigrazione e immigrazione

Highlights the histories and cultural expressions of the Dominican people Using a blend of historical and literary analysis, Colonial Phantoms reveals how Western discourses have ghosted—miscategorized or erased—the Dominican Republic since the nineteenth century despite its central place in the architecture of the Americas. Through a variety of Dominican cultural texts, from literature to public monuments to musical performance, it illuminates the Dominican quest for legibility and resistance. Dixa Ramírez places the Dominican people and Dominican expressive culture and history at the forefront of an insightful investigation of colonial modernity across the Americas and the African diaspora. In the process, she untangles the forms of free black subjectivity that developed on the island. From the nineteenth century national Dominican poet Salomé Ureña to the diasporic writings of Julia Alvarez, Chiqui Vicioso, and Junot Díaz, Ramírez considers the roles that migration, knowledge production, and international divisions of labor have played in the changing cultural expression of Dominican identity. In doing so, Colonial Phantoms demonstrates how the centrality of gender, race, and class in the nationalisms and imperialisms of the West have profoundly impacted the lives of Dominicans. Ultimately, Ramírez considers how the Dominican people negotiate being left out of Western imaginaries and the new modes of resistance they have carefully crafted in response.

1

Untangling Dominican Patriotism

Exiled Men and Poet Muses Script the Gendered Nation

The patria sings its siren song, luring the pueblo back to the familiar, dominant, father-figure discourse.

—Raúl Coronado, A World Not to Come (2013)

Just a few days before Christmas 1878, the influential literary and cultural society Amigos del País (Friends of the Country) held an event in honor of one of the country’s most renowned poets, Salomé Ureña.1 Held at the Public Library in Santo Domingo, which was “elegantly decorated” with “flowers, paintings, lights” and tastefully catered, the event was attended by some of the most important politicians, writers, and other notable figures in the country.2 In the words of Justo, a society columnist, these important personalities, a crowd of approximately 80 women and 70 men, had gathered in order to “render the tribute of estimation and justice to the Dominican Avellaneda,” a reference to one of Latin America’s foremost women poets, the Spanish Cuban Gertrúdis Gomez de Avellaneda (1814–1873), to whom Ureña was compared repeatedly.3 Playing “magnificent operas and delicious national waltzes,” the orchestra added to the atmosphere.4 Several members of Amigos del País, including its president at the time and Ureña’s future husband, the nineteen-year-old Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal, gave speeches in her honor. In Justo’s cheeky estimation, not all of the speakers were enthralling: “Penson awarded us an extensive, very extensive, too extensive literary work”5 that almost ruined the evening until “a reading was given of Oda a la Patria [Ode to the Homeland] by the eminent poetess Ureña.”6 Not only had Ureña’s verses provided succor to the many Dominican, and non-Dominican, patriots yearning for a better, independent nation, but they had also saved the evening. For her efforts and talent, the Amigos del País gave Ureña a Medal of Honor, funded by members and by donations from the public at large.

Receiving the Medal of Honor consecrated Ureña as the most important voice in the Dominican Republic during a time when the country was beginning to narrate what it meant to be Dominican. A grasp of the gendered and raced contours of twenty-first-century Dominican nationalism requires a thorough analysis of these early moments of discursive consolidation among the ruling elite. This chapter turns to these moments when the Dominican cultural elite wrote and read the nation into being, focusing especially on the person who best fulfilled the needs of the era, the poet and educator Salomé Ureña. I unspool the knot of associations that tightened at this crucial late nineteenth-century moment after the Dominican Republic reinstated its independence from Spain after a brief annexation from 1861 until 1865; when U.S. annexation was a real possibility; “progress” was a buzzword; and intellectuals and politicians vied for what the official nationalist discourse should be. To some, the country should invite the Plantation economy, then collapsing in the surrounding region with the abolition of slavery (Cuba, 1886; Puerto Rico, 1873–1876; the United States, 1865). To others, education and advances in agricultural and medical technology were the solution. To a few leaders, the Dominican Republic and Haiti together were setting an example of black freedom. It was during this critical moment of both nationalist consolidation and the rise of the U.S. as a global imperial force that Salomé Ureña emerged as the “muse of the nation.”

Ureña was born in 1850 in Santo Domingo and died of tuberculosis in 1897, having never left the country. Born into the urban bourgeois elite, her work as a poet and educator catapulted her to an unprecedented renown. After becoming the nation’s foremost poet, she opened the first “normal”—that is, secular—institution of higher education for girls. It offered students the chance to study beyond primary school, and many of the young women who graduated from this institution went on to open their own schools around the country. Dominican scholars such as Ramonina Brea and Isis Duarte credit Ureña’s educational efforts with “legitimizing middle- and upper-class women’s infiltration into the labor force and the public sphere.”7 Despite her gender, Ureña succeeded in an era and a field in which the patriarchal standards that predominated in the governing elite should have excluded her.8

Studying poems, letters, speeches, and essays by Ureña and some of her contemporaries, I trace the complex but clearly gendered scripts of patriotic performance in which her readers partook.9 Ureña’s poems elicited a set of reactions and behaviors from her readers. The poems themselves did not have to elicit these behaviors, but, as I undertake to show in this chapter, they did so due to the developing and firming of gendered assumptions in Dominican nationalist discourse. Why did the Dominican lettered ruling class—composed mostly of men—viscerally need the patriotic poems of a nonwhite woman? This is the question I endeavor to answer. The strong desire for Ureña’s poetry coexisted with many of these same men’s generalized assumption that the ideal citizen subject was a man, if not actually a white man then at least a landowning, Europeanized man. The impossibility of answering this question with total conviction notwithstanding, I conclude that Ureña’s embodiment of Dominican nonwhiteness combined with her status as a respectable woman allowed Dominicans of the intellectual and ruling elite to satisfy two intertwined impulses: (1) the desire to be a “civilized” (i.e., European) and “cultured” nation alongside the other nations in the Western hemisphere, and (2) a subconscious recognition that the Dominican territory differed markedly from the rest of this hemisphere. That is, Ureña’s never-mentioned blackness combined with her elite class status wedded two driving impulses behind the burgeoning Dominican nationalism. The first was to construct a national identity that could explain Dominican difference from Haiti, and, as such, justify a seat at the global table. The second, more subterranean impulse was a tacit acceptance that a nonwhite woman such as Ureña could only be considered “the muse of the nation” among an elite that valued whiteness because Dominican territory had a history of black freedom and colonial neglect. This colonial neglect, as I described in the introduction, resulted in the haphazard policing of racial and color lines that had significantly shaped neighboring colonies such as Saint-Domingue and Cuba.

Race and gender are inseparable in this discussion. While Ureña’s readers never mentioned her blackness during or directly after her lifetime, at least in writing, they obsessively discussed her gender. Her male readers were persistently surprised that Ureña was a woman, and they repeatedly gendered her patriotic poems as masculine—a positive trait—and her more “intimate” poems as feminine—a lesser trait.10 Many of Ureña’s readers called her the muse of the nation—rather than a poet whose muse was the nation, as was the case for male poets.11 The prevailing ideology of nationalists such as Ureña and others like her combined a yearning for progress with an active construction of an appropriate national past. The pull of tradition was gendered as feminine and the modernizing impulse was considered masculine.12 These binaries correlate with other semiotic categories so that tradition and lo femenino (the feminine) represent the (home)land and the hearth, while progress and lo masculino (the masculine) symbolize exile, movement, revolution, and modernity. In this case, tradition did not correlate with backwardness (the opposite of modernity), but with a domesticity that was a necessary, if lesser, corollary to modernity. That is, unlike the backwardness that el monte—the anonymous, autonomous, black, and often masculinized rurality—represented, this domestic femininity was not antithetical to progress. Ureña and her work could represent both poles comprising ideas of progress, rendering her an ideal vessel for the performance of late nineteenth-century patriotism.

The small but powerful elite of which Ureña was part created a long-lasting print culture that disseminated a nationalist vision. Ureña’s husband, Francisco “Pancho” Henríquez y Carvajal (1859–1935), and her brother-in-law, Federico Henríquez y Carvajal (1848–1952), were crucial members of an influential Liberal, urban bourgeoisie. Both of these men became political and intellectual leaders. Francisco became the president of the country in 1916 before he was illegally ousted through the U.S. occupying forces, and both men had long been at the center of the most important intellectual debates of the era related to education, literature, medicine, and agriculture. Alongside Ureña and Eugenio María de Hostos, the Henríquez y Carvajal brothers helped increase the number of teachers in the country.13

These and other men and women of the positivist movement were also the publishers and editors of influential literary magazines. They read each other’s work, published it, shared it, and wrote about it. The tremendous importance of literary periodicals at this historical juncture was such that one of Ureña’s children, Max, recalls that one of his and his brother Pedro’s favorite activities was compiling Dominican poetry and “publishing” a daily newspaper:

But Pedro and I were not content to just compile verses taken from newspapers: we wanted to have our own newspapers. I launched into circulation in our home a weekly one-page manuscript […]. I named it: The Afternoon. Naturally, I only printed one copy, which would circulate at home from person to person. […] Pedro released another one-page periodical, also weekly, which he baptized: La Patria, and within it appeared reproductions of our poets accompanied by his comments, likely the earliest manifestation of his future talent as a critic and essayist.14

Certainly, the Henríquez Ureña household—headed by two parents of national stature—cannot be considered exemplary of Dominican families. Even before her marriage, Ureña’s home was a literary salon of sorts, visited by intellectual elites from around the country and even other parts of the Hispanophone world. It became even more of a hub after she married an important patriotic actor and opened the Instituto de Señoritas in the family’s first small house in the Colonial Zone of Santo Domingo.15 Nevertheless, the point I wish to make is that reading, writing, and publishing was not a marginal component of the project of nation-building. The childhood game that Max describes illustrates how literary publications and newspapers were vehicles for writing the nation into being by the late 1880s and early 1890s.

Much of the literary print culture during Ureña’s lifetime can be described as romanticist infused with a positivist political ideology that focused on progress and modernization.16 Beyond the realm of literary discourse, positivist ideology prioritized “modern agricultural techniques, secular education, and political participation.”17 As Teresita Martínez Vergne writes regarding the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual circles of which Ureña was part: “Progress, as they envisioned it, was the concerted effort of a political and intellectual elite, with regulated input from common people.”18 According to Michiel Baud: “Most Latin American elites tried to forge their nations in the name of el progreso, a concept that symbolized the desire for rapid modernization, but at the same time they feared, and sometimes resisted the destruction of ‘traditional’ society.”19 In the realm of literary and cultural discourse, fantasies of the future, as well as “memories” of a heroic past, drove positivist ideology as it emerged in some of the most representative literature of the era. This search for a foundational creation myth explains the surge in indigenista literature by writers such as José Joaquín Pérez, who wrote the collection of poems Fantasías indíjenas (1877), and Manuel de Jesús Galván, who wrote the immediately canonical historical novel Enriquillo.20 Ureña was also part of this indigenista surge with her epic poem “Anacaona” (1880).21

Several scholars insist that indigenista works ghosted Dominicans’ blackness by replacing it with the glory of the indigenous rebellions against the Spanish in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Indeed, it has become pervasive that Dominican literature that does not mention Haiti proves anti-Haitianism. This scholarship on Dominican national identity contends that, on the one hand, indigenista discou...