Black images in Dominican literature

Abstract

On December 5, 1942, on his first voyage to America, Christopher Columbus arrived on the shores of Hispaniola. The island, so named by the Admiral himself, was populated by Taino Indians, who were soon enslaved and put to work in search for gold (see Moya Pons 1978). The hard work of mining; the general abuse of their labor; the murders perpetrated by the Spaniards; the massive suicides committed by the Taino themselves as an act of rejection of colonial domination; as well as the impact of European diseases, soon decimated the indigenous population. The efforts of the Dominican friars to defend the natives, and the legal measures enacted by the Spanish Crown in 1512 and 1513 to regulate the encomiendas , were of no avail. By the second half of the sixteenth century, the Taino were virtualy exterminated. In the early colonization process, some elements of Taino culture were absorbed by both Spaniards and African slaves. Most of these were in the realm of language and religion, others had to do with agrarian methods and techniques (see Cassa 1974, Vega 1981, Moya Pons 1983), and they still form part of the local culture. In the Dominican ethnic configuration of today, on the other hand, the indigenous component is of little significance. The first black slaves were brought to Santo Domingo in the early sixteenth century. At first they were imported in small numbers, but with insufficient Indian manpower in the mines, demand for African slaves increased rapidly. When the gold deposits were exhausted, cane sugar became the main agricultural product and the primary source of wealth. The black slaves' strength, their enormous tolerance for both exhausting labor on

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