Nation and Citizen in the Dominican Republic, 1880-1916

Abstract

Teresita Martínez-Vergne successfully combines intellectual and social history in this analysis of nation building, national identity, and citizenship in the Dominican Republic during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She focuses on the efforts of a group of liberal intellectuals and their political allies to modernize and develop the nation, examining their ideology, the endemic problems that prompted their proposed reforms, attempts to implement them following the 1899 assassination of dictator Ulises Heureaux (“Lilís”), and the many obstacles and contradictions that impeded their progress.This well-written and skillfully argued study rests on a thorough examination of Dominican archival records, contemporary newspapers and popular periodicals, and secondary sources that include useful comparative material from Latin America and elsewhere. This comparative perspective allows Martínez-Vergne to challenge some traditional concepts in Dominican historiography, such as the idea that Dominican identity was somehow fixed in the past by certain historical, geographical, or cultural determinants. The author instead argues that Dominican identity is a mutable and contested concept.Martínez-Vergne finds the contested aspect of nation building and national identity most apparent in the concept of citizenship, particularly in urban areas. For this reason she focuses on two of the rapidly growing cities of the south coast, Santo Domingo and San Pedro de Macorís. Both were beneficiaries of the large-scale development of sugar plantations after the 1870s, and their residents had access to education, newspapers, and economic opportunities. The cities were home to most of the country’s small middle class and the elite, including intellectuals, leading politicians, and prosperous businessmen. They also encompassed poorer and more marginalized populations that nevertheless viewed themselves as citizens. Martínez-Vergne draws this conclusion by examining police and court records, which show that the urban poor regularly challenged the efforts of elite reformers to co-opt, change, and control their lives. These assertions of citizenship identity and rights took place both through everyday actions (ranging from a general disdain for bourgeois urban niceties to strikes) and their frequent (and often successful) resort to the police and the court system.The liberal intellectuals at the center of the book had worked since 1880 to enact changes that would move the Dominican people forward. But a variety of problems, including political instability and the Heureaux dictatorship, put the damper on their successes, except for the formation of a few urban secular schools. Nevertheless, various figures from this period — including Puerto Rican educator Eugenio María Hostos, older reformers such as Pedro Francisco Bonó, and younger followers of Hostos — continued to analyze and plan. The “ideology of progress,” which they again tried to implement following Heureaux’s death, centered on private property, education, employment, responsible democratic government, national sovereignty, and a free press. They also championed the need for development, which these intellectuals associated mainly with the reform of agriculture (ideally by privatizing communal lands and encouraging the productivity of individual farm families — as opposed to corporate plantations — through education and greater use of technology).Reformers had relatively little success between 1899 and 1916, in part due to recurring problems of political instability, public debt, and disruptive foreign influence. But Martínez-Vergne argues that another major factor was the incompatibility of the reformers’ vision of the nation’s future with the reality of Dominican life. In three analytical chapters concerning race and ethnicity, gender issues, and the urban working class, the author probes the often contradictory attitudes underlying the intellectuals’ rhetoric of reform. Basically, the reformers tried to imagine a nation and concept of citizenship that was inclusive, but they failed to include workers (urban and rural) and the vast majority of immigrants (Haitian and West Indian) and relegated women to limited roles (reproduction and the transmission of culture).The roots of their ideas, she writes, are clear. Most intellectuals looked down on the Dominican peasantry and disparaged their aptitude for work. At the same time, they only grudgingly accepted black Caribbean migration for the growing sugar industry, instead supporting government-subsidized but unsuccessful white European immigration. They saw the urban popular classes as an unruly lot who needed discipline and control. The reformers also generally disfavored women who strayed from the bourgeois ideal of raising children, maintaining the home, and operating under the control of men. One reaction was that the marginalized urbanites — male and female — rather effectively contested both elite control and definitions of citizenship. Although the author offers only limited evidence for similar reactions to restrictions affecting educated women, such responses seem likely.Martínez-Vergne’s strong study greatly expands our understanding of the period from 1880 to 1916. It also illuminates later decades, providing additional evidence for the thesis I advanced in The Impact of Intervention (Marcus Wiener, 2006): that Domini-can ideas were central to many of the reforms enacted during the U.S. occupation of 1916 – 24. Martínez-Vergne’s work also clarifies the motivations of the liberal reformers who supported Rafael Trujillo’s rise to power in 1930; this dictator, as Richard Turits has recently shown in his Foundations of Despotism (Stanford Univ. Press, 2003), gave them an opportunity to realize some of their long-delayed objectives.

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