Being La Dominicana

Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo

Rachel Afi Quinn

• Editorial: University of Illinois Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780252052712
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Sociología

Rachel Afi Quinn investigates how visual media portray Dominican women and how women represent themselves in their own creative endeavors in response to existing stereotypes. Delving into the dynamic realities and uniquely racialized gendered experiences of women in Santo Domingo, Quinn reveals the way racial ambiguity and color hierarchy work to shape experiences of identity and subjectivity in the Dominican Republic. She merges analyses of context and interviews with young Dominican women to offer rare insights into a Caribbean society in which the tourist industry and popular media reward, and rely upon, the ability of Dominican women to transform themselves to perform gender, race, and class.

Engaging and astute, Being La Dominicana reveals the little-studied world of today's young Dominican women and what their personal stories and transnational experiences can tell us about the larger neoliberal world.

1 Sites of Identity

Facebook, Murals, and Vernacular Images

He watched me for a moment, then whispered, “Who are you?” I didn’t say anything. I just stared at him in the dark for a moment, thinking of all the different answers to this question I had already given. You know how it goes. The disclosure, followed by the edifying speech. My body the lesson.

Danzy Senna, Symptomatic

When a snapshot of two young Dominican women appears in my Facebook feed, I glance at it in passing. But something about it sticks with me and I return to look again at the image. Penélope’s photograph is a deliberate critique of the medium.¹ It is an image squared by Instagram’s stylistic format but she has posted it simultaneously onto her Facebook page: two young brown-skinned women in the Caribbean standing side by side outdoors in late afternoon light. Penélope, standing on the right, is dressed in shiny black Doc Martin–esque boots, a white T-shirt and hoodie, and torn jeans reminiscent of the 1980s. Her short hair—recently dyed green—is a shock. She points her left index finger at her friend standing close beside her while at the same time she curls her tongue (à la Miley Cyrus circa 2014) and strikes a pose for the camera. Her friend Álida Reyes purses her lips, chin tilted up at the photographer. You can almost hear the sound of disapproval that might accompany this expression. Álida is wearing a baseball cap, a Wu-Tang Clan T-shirt cut to a high midriff, and high-waisted shorts (the fashion of the moment) hitched up with a narrow belt. Her feet are clad in the type of thin faux-leather sandals in metallic colors that are common across the island.

As a visual artist, Penélope Collado has used social media to share many images from her daily life. Because of her self-conscious awareness of the ways that images signify, the photographs Penélope shares often act as what Deborah Willis refers to as “frozen racial metaphors.”² Penélope posted this photograph online with the text: “Con la Jíbara en #SantoDomingoParadise.” Her comment makes cynical reference to things being not quite as one expects them to be in the Caribbean and sarcastically names her friend “Jíbara,” which, in Dominican terms, would imply that she is rural, uncivilized, and perhaps uncouth.³ Penélope’s hashtag in English serves as a sardonic reference to the ways that the reality of Santo Domingo does not conform to foreign viewers’ imagined paradise of the Caribbean. Rather, if you take another look at the photograph, you see that the two young women are standing in front of four or five oil barrel trash cans overflowing with garbage—a far more common sight on the island than a pristine beach. Comments written in colloquial English and Dominican Spanish below the photo range from shocked to supportive, encouraging to teasing, capturing the ways that community response is a part of posting curated images online.⁴ Penélope, who has much experience modeling her thin, racially mixed Dominican body in professional photos, is well aware her short green hair and the garbage in the background disrupt the dominant narrative of an exotic and appealing Caribbean. The image she has produced documents an alternate reality of Santo Domingo and provides a critique by way of a counter-image that demonstrates to viewers her awareness of the popular Caribbean visual discourse in which she is embedded.

Figure 1. Instagram photo of Penélope Collado and Álida Reyes. Photo composed by Penélope Collado.

Photographic images produced for a burgeoning tourism industry in the nineteenth-century Anglo Caribbean, especially in Jamaica and the Bahamas, have been fundamental to shaping the significance of the Caribbean in the popular imagination today. Those who lived on the islands internalized a postcolonial narrative about the space and were invested in bringing tourism, and thus worked to present their island communities in ways that conformed to dominant conceptions of the Caribbean “picturesque.”⁵ In the Caribbean of the 1800s, Krista Thompson explains, “a genealogy of images … inform[ed] representations of the region.”⁶ Images that romanticize a particular notion of the Caribbean associated with escapism, the natural world, and the exotic remain a highly marketable currency. “Visual images and visuality (specifically sightseeing), were crowned the ‘new sugar,’ the means through which the islands were subsequently consumed.”⁷ Professional photographs remain part and parcel of constructing what the Caribbean signifies today: palm trees, unspoiled beaches, and “happy natives.”⁸ Moreover, Thompson notes, “the picturesque, in contradistinction to the aesthetic category of beauty (which encompassed objects and landscapes that appeared symmetrical and balanced), privileged wild landscapes that were ‘free from the formality of lines.’”⁹ Today, a new rapidly changing and erratically-fashioned genealogy of images contributes to how Dominican women see themselves. These images are produced out of youth culture, an established scopic regime.

Internet users now face a tidal wave of globalized visual discourse. Unlike ever before, our daily engagement with airbrushed and photoshopped bodies, fake food and staged interactions—and the repetition of particular visual discourses—reinforces and produces racialized logics in our real and virtually mediated worlds. The reality of the Caribbean exists intimately alongside the fiction and the two remain in constant dialogue; what we see is informed by what we have come to believe about the region. For example, when a young Dominican woman posts on her Facebook account a picture of herself lying in a bikini in front of a sunset at the beach, the self-crafted image responds to a ubiquitous online visual discourse: “You look like you’re on a postcard,” comments a viewer. Embracing a range of cultural expectations while representing themselves online often means Dominican women are echoing a visual discourse that accentuates their physical features or celebrates a sexualized pose. Photographs of people convey not only the hierarchies of color that exist in the Dominican Republic but also the dialogic construction of racial meaning. Just as people value images that confirm that which they want to believe about themselves and others, representations of Dominican women are deemed authentic only when they align with beliefs that viewers already hold.

In this chapter I look to a Santo Domingo landscape marked by Latin American muralismo in order to understand the cultural context in which Dominican women make use of visual culture to define themselves.¹⁰ Facebook, as the most popular social media network among Dominican youth in 2010, extended beyond serving as a tool for narrativizing individual identity to facilitating a broader trajectory for Dominican visual culture. For those with access, Facebook has proven an effective tool with which to maintain diasporic relationships over the long term, promote community education, and organize movements of resistance. If it is the case that “we are now, each of us, a little media outlet unto ourselves,” what narratives are Dominican women advancing online and off?¹¹ Most of the ethnographic research I conducted with Dominican women in Santo Domingo in 2010 and 2011 took place when increased access to Wi-Fi meant a significant portion of daily life involved circulating digital images, short videos, blogs, messages, and personalized pages via the internet. My connection to and observations about a changing Santo Domingo from 2006 to the present have been able to continue via social media, namely Facebook, in between return visits to the island.¹² Facebook has allowed me to remain part of a transnational viewing audience for Dominican friends and acquaintances, and my relationships are sustained via this transnational bridge.

While the omission of images of enormous malls, the Metro, or the Ikea in Santo Domingo often make the reality of the urban Caribbean unimaginable for tourists, these locations appear in innumerable selfies by locals who themselves participate as if they are tourists in these newly developed public spaces. Modernization is regularly excluded from the popular imaginary outside of the Dominican Republic because it does not confirm what is believed to be true about the Caribbean or the rest of the developing world, let alone the African diaspora. The image of the Caribbean-as-destination is so firmly entrenched that it will not disappear.¹³ Dominican visual cultural producers create art that inherently negotiates this reality. In resisting the dominant visual narrative, their work reveals a contemporary surrealist aesthetic emerging from leftist roots and influences existing across the island. According to Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G. Kelley in their study of the often invisibilized black and brown surrealists, “Rejecting all forms of domination and the dichotomous ideologies that go with them—intolerance, exploitation, bigotry, exclusiveness, white supremacy, and all race prejudice— surrealists make the resolution of contradictions a high priority.”¹⁴ It happens that the roots of surrealism in the Dominican Republic run deep, revealing not only the ongoing impact of Spanish colonialism on Dominican culture and resistance to the rise of European fascism but also the sustained influence of Haitian cultural productions on the visual culture of the Dominican Republic.

Dominican women, whose bodies are interpreted through the Eurocentric gaze, as evidenced by ongoing discourse about hairstyles and other aspects of their self-presentation, have had to navigate with sophistication the transmission of the visual. They must decide whether or not they will adopt the visual language of the dominant culture and beauty standards that privilege whiteness. For, as Ella Shohat writes, “Colonial hierarchies have ramifications for the everyday negotiations of looks and identity.”¹⁵ And, argues Shohat, part of the work of resisting global hegemony is understanding the transmission of the visual—which needs to be combated with images and media representing us as we choose. According to Stuart Hall, popular culture “is where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to the audiences out there who don’t get the message, but to ourselves for the first time.”¹⁶ Facebook in particular reflects the kind of popular culture that might easily be described as a “profoundly mythic” and a “theater of popular desires.”¹⁷ Many who are marginalized by society use social media to connect with one another and carve out a space for themselves in which they are recognized.¹⁸ Women of color have newfound access to virtual spaces, while at the same time they themselves may be newly accessible to others in particular ways via the internet. Across the diverse and dynamic online archive that is Facebook today, I examine a series of what Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih describe as “creative interventions that networks of minoritized cultures produce within and across national boundaries.”¹⁹

“Maldito Feisbu”

With more than 483 million daily users worldwide at the time of my initial research in 2010 and some 1.84 billion daily users more than a decade later, Facebook is the most popular social networking interface on the World Wide Web. It far surpassed the once-popular sites HiFi and MySpace by quickly adapting its programming and applications to avoid losing young users; it has outlasted sites such as Friendster and acquired its greatest competitor, Instagram, in an effort to sustain its influence. Users worldwide have adapted themselves to life with social media, shifting culturally to meet the demands of this technological tool.

Early on, a great deal of Dominican cultural nostalgia circulated on Facebook, through quizzes and applications to test how Dominican you are, or give Dominican “gifts”—symbols of Dominicanness like plantains and Brugal rum—to friends online. Popular pages such as “Orgulloso de Ser Dominicano” (Proud to Be Dominican) and “Dominicanos Ausentes” (Dominicans Living Abroad) boasted tens of thousands of “likes.” Users could upload digital snapshots to what Facebook once called a “wall” and then later a “timeline,” so that they would show up in the “newsfeed” of their connected friends in real time.

Facetiously referred to as “Crackbook” due to its addictive qualities, Facebook provides users with a personalizable online location in which to share words, images, websites, games, videos, and more. Over time, the newsfeed has become a space curated by algorithms, shaped by each click, post, and preference. Travel photos mix with informal images in an online album that can be called up at any moment for sharing. Moreover, the digital image in proliferation becomes a way in which we document the same moment from a million different angles, offering a range of witnesses to the same event. With cellphone cameras, the photographer now exists within every community, and a new value is added to the visuals of everyday life.²⁰ Selfies, family photos shared for #tbt (Throwback Thursdays), and vernacular images gathered together both archive and produce personal narratives of identity.²¹ For some time now, Facebook has served as a way for diasporic communities to stay connected and hold onto something left behind. Dominican Facebook users produce a rapidly corporatized transnational space of cultural transmission with its own unique rules, meanings, and expectations, and typically remains highly prescriptive of gender, class, race, and nation. As elsewhere in the world, Dominican women readily employ visual culture and online networks to connect, seek information, sympathize, assert ideologies, mobilize one another around personal and political issues, and so much more. They do so from anywhere they are at any moment of the day—and often right from the palm of their hand—via BlackBerry, smartphone, or other internet-ready electronic device.

In her hypnotic ode to “Maldito feisbu,” a decade ago Rita Indiana named the ways that our whole lives were already being swallowed up into a virtual world online, in which it is possible to literally lose ourselves in an alternate reality. Nuanced lyrics in her ominous song carry a doble sentido (double meaning) that showcases her creative brilliance, wit, and awareness of the impact of technology in the social moment: “Tenia de to’ / no tengo na’ / todo por una computadora / ’toy enganchá’ igual que tú / por esa maldita vaina / maldito feisbu / miro tu foto / mira la mia / a toda hora de noche y de día / me puse a taggear sin compasión / mientras en mi casa se metia un ladrón. / [I had everything / I have nothing / all for a computer / I am hooked just like you / By this damn thing / Damn Facebook / I look at your photo / You look at mine / Every hour of the night and day / I tag you without compassion / while in my house is a thief.]” Rita Indiana suggests that the character she represents in her song, like you the listener, has been robbed while sitting at the computer. The ladrón is Facebook itself—or anyone on Facebook— grabbing your pictures, your personal information, and your identity off the popular social networking site. While this is now a well-known risk of using social media (with the additional awareness that the US government is tracking all our o...