In this exchange, Jossianna Arroyo (University of Texas, Austin), Sharina Maillo-Pozo (University of Georgia), and Danny Méndez (Michigan State University) delve into The Borders of Dominicanidad. Arroyo and Maillo-Pozo offer cogent analyses of the book’s wide-ranging contributions, and Méndez offers a moving response to their analyses that considers the book in relation to García Peña’s commitments.

Jossianna Arroyo:

Lorgia García Peña’s The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation and the Archives of Contradiction (Duke UP, 2016) is a major tour the force in Dominican, Caribbean, and African Diaspora Studies. Borders of Dominicanidad has shifted the field of Dominican Studies as it has problematized blackness by bringing forth the complex negotiations within and outside national borders by elites, intellectuals, and collectivities. The book has received several book awards, including the Gloria Anzaldúa Award from the National Women’s Association (2017) and the Isis Duarte Award offered by the Latin American Studies Association (2016). In this book García Peña looks at the “border” as an epistemological, social, and performative space from where the “contradictions” of blackness emerge in line with the influences of imperial narratives. The book takes several historical episodes as a point of departure to read them with literature and performative works as examples to assess the “contradictions” of the archive and the making of these archives in the Dominican Republic. Race, as well as blackness, are at the center in what García Peña describes as “rayano” or border consciousness that has shaped and continues shaping discourses of humanity, subjectivity, and race in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Along with the “rayano” García Peña reads the “nié” (ni de aquí ni de allá) as an epistemological standing for Dominicans who migrate and move transnationally between the island and the United States. By looking at the contradictions of the “Archive of Dominicanidad” García Peña reads the silences of history and the ways History, as well as histories in macro- and micro-levels, have shaped blackness in relation to dominicanidad.

The major contributions of Borders of Dominicanidad are threefold. First, it is an original reading of multiple texts and archives; second, and most importantly, it brings in Dominicans from the island and the diaspora into discussions of Caribbean and Latina/o Studies; and third it makes of the border a site of epistemological, philosophical and social intervention. Race and particularly blackness are at the core of these readings of the border as a material (socio-economic), epidermal (skin) and political question/construction. While the book departs from the unquestionable reality that Dominicans are black, it is one of the first scholarly works that looks at Dominican history, literature and performance in dialogue with U.S. histories/ imperial formations as a key element for a transnational/hemispheric understanding of the role of the U.S. in the process. García Peña, reads the archive against the grain, to assess the way the "dictions" perform active readings of social agency and are thereby duplicitous. In other words, they explain how social actors change or go against the “written” word, or how the written word or archival record contradicts itself.

The book shifts these histories from the archive to the lives and writings of Dominican migrants and Latina/o selves; but for my own research and work in 19th and early 20th century Caribbean Studies, the chapter on Oliverio Mateo and the Palma Sola movement stands out as one of the most important contributions to the historiography of empire and the U.S. occupation of Hispaniola. Thus, while the border as a political question emerges as a line demarcated by imperial designs, the cofradías at San Juan de la Maguana enacted forms of uprising and socio-political unrest through the language of Afro-Dominican religiosity, making Olivorio Mateo, the man saved or coming from the storm, a human god. Therefore, from the voice and diction of Dominga Alcántara, la reina de la cofradía, Afro-popular religiosity marks a point of diction and voices this unrest. This chapter not only connects these past incursions of the U.S. military invasion into Mateo’s followers (and his body) but looks at the creation of the “evil zombie” narrative on both sides of the border. By analyzing Mateo's body in photography (as a living body and as a corpse) García Peña deconstructs the hegemonic readings of the military archive and rescues the power of the religious leader. In addition, the construction of Liboristas as Haitian “evildoers” by the U.S. marines idealized the civility of the Dominican Republic, while Liborio is still present not only in other moments of political unrest (1965), but in salves and palos music, as well as daily ritual in the Dominican Republic.

As we see in contemporary films such as Cocote (2017), directed by Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, these shifts have also been negotiated against the influences of the Protestant church. As García Peña makes clear at the end of the chapter, literature, particularly the work of novelists such as Nelly Rosario and Junot Díaz as examples of “textos montados (possessed texts),” are grasping the silences of history in relation to U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic and Haiti (84). This chapter is also important for reading contemporary incursions into the Dominican Republic and Haiti, after the earthquake of 2010, as it is empire (military, economic, social) that is yet again demarcating the current uprisings in Haiti.

Sharina Maillo Pozo:

On December 9, 2016, I had the honor of presenting Lorgia García-Peña’s groundbreaking book, The Borders of Dominicanidad. Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction at Word Up Community Bookshop in Washington Heights, NYC.  Three years later, I find myself revisiting my remarks and reflecting on the revolutionary contributions of Borders of Dominicanidad to the field of Dominican studies. 

Borders of Dominicanidad challenges historical and fictional foundational narratives that have delineated Dominican (trans)national identity. This insightful and carefully researched book questions the role of silences and repetitions in the structural foundation of what García-Peña dubs as “the Archive of Dominicanidad” through a groundbreaking analysis of five pivotal moments in the history of the Dominican nation: the murders of The Galindo Virgins in 1822; the criminalization of Afro-religious practices during the U.S. occupation between 1916 and 1924 and the death of Afro-Dominican religious leader, Papá Liborio; the massacre of more than 20,000 ethnic Haitians and Afro-Dominicans on the Dominican-Haitian border in 1937; the 1965 US military intervention and the massive emigration that succeeded it; and the 2010 earthquake. By taking a revisionist and interdisciplinary approach, García-Peña recovers archives that contradict, challenge, negotiate, and redefine official narratives. In this sense, Borders of Dominicanidad historicizes dominicanidad through counter-hegemonic dictions that challenge the veracity and accuracy of official archives by examining a wide array of unexplored historical documents, cultural artifacts, and events.

In Borders of Dominicanidad, García-Peña understands dominicanidad as a conflation of a geopolitical triangulation (Haiti, The Dominican Republic, and the United States): “I see dominicanidad as a category that emerges from the historical events that placed the Dominican Republic in a geographic and symbolic border between the United States and Haiti since its birth in 1844” (3). By focusing on the role of U.S. imperialism in delineating racial borders between Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the United States, García Peña recovers dominicanidad from its “footnote condition” in the US historical archive. Further, centering narratives that consider the above-mentioned geopolitical triangulation paves the way for a more inclusive rubric of dominicanidad where plural subjects, dictions, territories, and ethno-racial categories, such as rayano, dominicano, Afro-Dominican, and Dominicanyork, are recovered, recorded, and validated. García-Peña’s Borders of Dominicanidad is an open invitation to engage in a collective effort to heal las heridas abiertas (Anzaldúa) that remain from structures of violence bestowed upon racialized subjects. 

Borders of Dominicanidad is an indispensable resource to approach, understand, and theorize Dominican identity from the margins. García-Peña’s theorizations on contra/dictions, rayano consciousness, the“ni é”, and dominicanidad ausente, are four of many concepts that have revolutionized and reshaped the epistemological approaches to the study of dominicanidad. Finally, I would be remiss not to highlight that Borders of Dominicanidad speaks to Lorgia García-Peña’s humanity and deep social justice conscience, dos constantes in her quest to create just archives, even if that means swimming against the current…

Danny Mendez | Response:

While reading both of your detailed analyses of the profound contributions of Lorgia García-Peña’s book The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation and the Archives of Contradiction (Duke UP, 2016) in Dominican, Caribbean, and African Diaspora Studies, I could not stop thinking of the symbiosis of academic rigor and engaged community practices in her work. In fact, for me, the mention of “Lorgia García-Peña’s work” materializes into a dual operation that is equal parts incisive critical research (on gender, race, dominicanidad, border studies), and also a deep commitment to challenging the contradictions she finds in research and seeks to lessen in practice, and especially in the realm of education. Lorgia García-Peña provides an indirect glimpse into this when she writes in the book what motivates her research: “The intellectual impulse guiding my investigation derives from a preoccupation with the footnote condition that mutes Dominican plurality, silencing stories and histories from both US and Dominican archives” (5). And thus, learning about dominicanidad and its triangular association with Haiti, the Dominican Republic and the United States and its contradictory effect in the ways that race, gender, and a rayano consciousness are written and/or performed into various archives, goes hand in hand with Lorgia’s community engagement and especially when we think about her role as co-founder of Freedom University and her constant devotion to inspiring and teaching all students.

Her work has been central to my evolution as a Dominican Studies scholar and especially because through her groundbreaking proposition of analyzing dominicanidad as a category that “is inclusive of subjects as well as the dictions that produce them” (3) has inspired me to delve into analyzing other materials that are not solely text-based and reside in alternate archives. Through Lorgia García-Peña’s, The Borders of Dominicanidad, and the historically contextualized analysis she weaves there, I have gained alternate theoretical paths that complicate and enrich concepts that prior to this book I took for granted (i.e., rayano consciousness, dominicanidad, the dominicano ausente trope). As a testament to the type of scholarship that Lorgia’s book is inspiring I posit my own as I am currently developing my next project that is deeply connected and stimulated by The Borders of Dominicanidad. Particularly, I am interested in analyzing female performers, activists, and writers that have been officially recognized as builders of Dominican culture abroad but whose political and cultural positions are embedded in contradictory practices. Undoubtedly, the path that Lorgia García-Peña paved in The Borders of Dominicanidad continues to stretch forward in the subsequent ideas and projects it has inspired.