From the Footnote to the Center of the Page

26 Dec 2019

This conversation features historians Elizabeth Manley (Xavier University) and Edward Paulino (John Jay College of Criminal Justice), who reflect on the contributions Lorgia García Peña’s The Borders of Dominicanidad makes to the growing field of Dominican Studies. They also address the way the book draws attention to the crucial place of the Dominican Republic and Haiti in histories of the Caribbean, Latin America, and the African Diaspora. Both build from García Peña’s insistence that studies of the Dominican Republic move “from the footnote to the center of the page,” and what this means in relation to archival work.



Elizabeth Manley | Begins:

Dear Eddie,

I’m excited to be able to contribute to this Ethnic Studies Rise! conversation from the perspective of Dominican Studies, something you and I are both a part of as historians of Hispaniola and the Caribbean. In reading the first exchange between Robin D. G. Kelly and Laurent Dubois, I was struck particularly by a comment about institutional spaces, exclusion, and violence, particularly as they pertain to a certain anecdote that Lorgia García Peña tells at the opening of The Borders of Dominicanidad. As Dubois writes, “we all see it in our different institutions. It takes different forms, frequently combining proud parochialism of Eurocentrism and disciplinary bordering with racialized habits of mind.” These patterns of exclusion that they are talking about, of course, have been central to the marginalization of scholarly work on Haiti and the Dominican Republic (and, even, within work on Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and are things that our own work grapples with.

In the introduction to her book Lorgia argues—as I think we often find ourselves required to do—that the work brings dominicanidad “from the footnote to the center of the page” (3). For many of us, this work of centering a footnote is a primary concern. We are often asked to demonstrate “why” the Dominican Republic matters and how it relates to Latin America more broadly. I don’t necessarily dispute this editorial practice, as it helps expand our work to more encompassing audiences, but I sometimes resist and want to ask why U.S. or European historians do not have to defend their geographical choices. Yet, returning to García Peña’s work, I believe we can definitively say that it has centered issues of blackness and Dominican national identity, for a wide variety of scholarly circles. But what I feel even more strongly about is the ways her scholarship highlights the broader centrality of the island nation and its diasporic community. Shining a spotlight on the place where the identities of the Americas were first forged, through forced labor, colonial imprints of hierarchy, and Christianizing missions, and later through imperialism, elite and authoritarian control, and migration, is critical to an entire hemispheric understanding of these very same ideas.

For many of us, choosing to build a scholarly career around the Dominican Republic, or even Caribbean Studies, was not a decision wildly applauded by our early mentors and advisors. They might have told us to focus on a country that was more “significant” like Mexico or Brazil, or perhaps that “no one cared” about the island and its stories. For some, this “advice” came with significant scholarly bullying and forced us to fiercely defend this place (and our place within it) that we found, often through intense passion and love, to be at the center of a nexus of race, identity, belonging, and, yes, contradictions. Ten or fifteen years ago these scholars might not have been totally to blame in pushing us away from a place so much of the scholarly community had denied and obfuscated, if merely for practical reasons. But what García Peña’s work does, so masterfully, is to prove that the very opposite—and ultimately what we believe—is true. That is, that the Dominican Republic is, to quote April Mayes, the very “center of the universe” or, at least, the center of a universe of ideas that ground the scholarly work we hope to accomplish, that scholarly work of centering footnotes.

And that brings me to another point that I wanted to raise, particularly from my perspective as an intensely archival-focused historian. Framing national identity through the use of an “archive” as García Peña does—through a wealth of diverse historical and literary artifacts—is not only a brilliant conceptual move and a model to be engaged in other places and narratives, but it reminds us of the significance of the past and all its stories to contemporary narratives of belonging. We know that the silences of history and the archive, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues, are powerful, ubiquitous, and unrelenting. The erasures both around and within the Dominican narrative work toward a political present that excludes and marginalizes. But we mustn’t cave to these silences, and García Peña’s intellectual labors—on the page, as an activist, and in the classroom—demonstrate that such work is not just the purview of the historian, but anyone who cares about how we comprehend and create identity and belonging anywhere.

Looking forward to reading your thoughts!


Edward Paulino | Responds:

Yes, Beth, I totally agree. I, too, was struck by the poignant exchange between Kelley and Dubois, two scholars whom I have come to know and who, like García Peña, did not just make critical contributions to our fields, but also, like García Peña, have shown a commitment to examining in writing the history of ordinary citizens in Haiti and the United States. They have thought seriously and intensely about honoring their lives by putting and/or framing their histories at the center, but also, just as crucially, dedicating time outside of the classroom and the archives to supporting undergraduate and graduate students as indefatigable mentors.

It is truly an honor for me to be discussing García Peña’s work with you. Her book, The Borders of Dominicanidad, is so refreshing (from the historiography of the ”Galindo Virgins” to the global war on blackness via Anzaldúa), because she is able to connect the history of the Hispaniola with broader scholarly conversations in a very timely way. Think: Caribbean, African diaspora, and women's histories meet Latinx history.

I love how she frames her book in “five historical episodes” (12). From the very beginning she reminds the reader that how you frame a story matters. By citing her introduction you aptly reminded me about the importance of re-framing narratives and bringing the footnotes up to the center of the page. These footnotes on Caribbean, black, women’s, and diasporic histories that traditionally have been relegated to the historiographical margins, now viewed with a different frame can become the center of the narratives of empire and ordinary people.

Take the chapter on the massacre, “Speaking in Silences: Literary Interruptions and the Massacre of 1937.” Anyone familiar with the historiography of the 1937 Massacre will reflexively say that only Haitians were killed. But García Peña extends us an invitation, saying, Stop! Let’s reframe. Where are the silences? In the introduction, she writes that she “examines how hegemonic 'truths' contribute to the violence, silencing, and erasure of racialized people and their truths" (13). Who would have been killed during the massacre in 1937? In other words, how were Haitians targeted in 1937? How were they profiled? Race. Skin color. García Peña rightly renames (reframes) the massacre as a genocide (as do I): a genocide specifically of “the multiethnic Afro-Hispaniola rayano population” (95). (This probably is the first time I’ve ever seen that phrasing but it makes so much sense! It fits! What about Afro-Hispaniolians, or Afro-Quisqueyanos? And this may be redundant, but Afro-Rayanos, which in English might be Afro-borderlanders?) She reminds her readers to reexamine the term that also comes out of an archive of myths, namely, the myth that only Haitians were killed. Afro-Dominicans were also killed.

But to the point: the common denominator of the victims was their perceived blackness by the Dominican army and police. García Peña attacks the elite-driven foundations and archives of a Western-oriented dominicanidad and connects the massacre with the 2013 ruling of the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal (TC 168-13), which effectively stripped nationality from hundreds of thousands of Dominicans, the vast majority of Haitian descent. She challenges us to see the 1937 Massacre and the denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent as a historic pattern of unceasing anti-black state violence, the victims of which litter and span the island of Hispaniola and extend beyond its border.

Her aim in this book is not just to expose and call out these myths. It also “offers a way out of the discursive checkmate that persistently produces Dominicans and Haitians as racial opposites” (10). I love that last line. She is locating familiar archives, ripping them open, and then re-configuring the parts. She reminds us that El Nié, birthed to us by the brilliant performance artist Josefina Baez, can be used to examine and understand the Dominican diaspora’s peculiar “ambivalence” and “alterity” (4). We can use El Nié to create or make sense of our own diasporic archives that we carry with us, as a crowbar to pry open or destroy old psychic boxes that contain too many myths that have brought us to the point of delusion, violence, political paralysis and moral laxity. That have brought us to amnesia.

García Peña uses the word contradiction with “diction” italicized as a powerful analytical and subversive tool to uncover silences and read and re-read against myths. We also read and re-read the very archives that contain these myths in order to “demonstrate how Latino/a voices, bodies, and dictions are silenced from multiple archives across time and geographies, but it also simultaneously creates an alternative archive that allows readers, if they so choose, to read in contradiction” (11). Her book can very well be described as a new "genealogy of dominicanidad" (12).

You are right, Beth: García Peña does not cave to the silences. In The Borders of Dominicanidad, she reminds us that historical moments in the Dominican Republic represent case studies of larger historical challenges and present-day threats globally. This book, like her teaching in and outside the classroom is, as she writes, “my way to respond to the growing anti-immigrant and anti-black violence devastating our (my) present world. Speaking about the need for a more conscientious scholarship that engages in actually dismantling oppression rather than simply critiquing it, Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz argue that scholars need to ‘know the work we want our work to do’ and how our scholarship can serve to accompany positive changes in our society” (211).

I mean, that’s all you need to know about García Peña. Like Paulo Freire, her scholarship and pedagogy are intertwined but serve the same purpose: liberation.



Elizabeth Manley

Elizabeth Manley is an associate professor of history at Xavier University of Louisiana. Dr. Manley teaches courses in Latin American, Caribbean, and World history, as well as thematic courses covering areas of interest such as gender, politics, human rights, and revolution. Her research interests focus primarily on issues of gender and participation in politics, nationalism and revolution, and political change in the modern Caribbean. She is the author of The Paradox of Paternalism: Women and Authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic (University Press of Florida, 2017) and has essays in The Journal of Women's History, Small Axe, and The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History.

Edward Paulino

Edward Paulino is a scholar, author, playwright, and Associate Professor at the CUNY John Jay College, Department of History. He leverages his insights on the history of genocide, race, border relations, nation building, Latin America/Caribbean, 1937 Haitian Massacre, and the African Diaspora. He is the co-founder of Border of Lights, an organization created to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the 1937 Haitian Massacre. He is the author of Dividing Hispaniola: The Dominican Republic's Border Campaign against Haiti, 1930-1961 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), and a solo performance piece, Eddie's Perejil.