Unmastering the Script: Education, Critical Race Theory, and the Struggle to Reconcile the Haitian Other in Dominican Identity

By Sheridan Wigginton and Richard T. Middleton

Analyzes textbooks in the Dominican Republic for evidence of reproducing Haitian Otherness

Unmastering the Script: Education, Critical Race Theory, and the Struggle to Reconcile the Haitian Other in Dominican Identity examines how school curriculum–based representations of Dominican identity navigate black racial identity, its relatedness to Haiti, and the culturally  entrenched pejorative image of the Haitian Other in Dominican society. Wigginton and Middleton analyze how social science textbooks and historical biographies intended for young Dominicans reflect an increasing shift toward a clear and public inclusion of blackness in Dominican identity that serves to renegotiate the country’s long-standing antiblack racial master script.
 
The authors argue that although many of the attempts at this inclusion  reflect a lessening of “black denial,” when considered as a whole, the  materials often struggle to find a consistent and coherent narrative for the place of blackness within Dominican identity, particularly regarding the ways in which blackness continues to be meaningfully related to the otherness of Haitian racial identity. Unmastering the Script approaches the text materials as an example of “reconstructing” and “unburying” an African past, supporting the uneven, slow, and highly context-specific nature of the process.
 
This work engages with multiple disciplines including history, anthropology, education, and race studies, building on a new wave of Dominican scholarship that considers how contemporary perspectives of Dominican identity both accept the existence of an African past and seek to properly weigh its importance. The use of critical race theory as the framework facilitates unfolding the past political and legal agendas of governing elites in the Dominican Republic and also helps to unlock the nuance of an increasingly black-inclusive Dominican identity. In addition, this framework allows the unveiling of some of the socially damaging effects the Haitian Other master script can have on children, particularly those of Haitian ancestry, in the Dominican Republic.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Sep 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9780817392451

Book preview

Unmastering the Script

Unmastering the Script

Education, Critical Race Theory, and the Struggle to Reconcile the Haitian Other in Dominican Identity

Sheridan Wigginton and Richard T. Middleton IV

The University Of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Caslon and Optima

Cover image: Detail from the flag of the Dominican Republic

Cover design: David Nees

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2031-7

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9245-1

To Blas R. Jiménez, Flore Zéphir, and Abbey

—S. W.

To the wonderful people of Santo Domingo and Villa Altagracia, Dominican Republic. Also to Joseito Mateo, a cultural and musical ambassador of the wonderful country of the Dominican Republic. The world is truly an enriched place by your merengue ripiaos. We will miss you, El Negrito del Batey.

—R. T. M. IV

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Books, Bias, and Blackness: How the Haitian Other Helps Tell the Story of Dominican History and Identity

1. La Trinitaria: The Elevation of Whiteness and Normalization of a Pigmentocracy in Dominican Society

2. Truth and Trujillo: A Critical Approach to Studying the Trujillo Dictatorship

3. The Masters of the Script: Joaquín Balaguer, José Francisco Peña Gómez, and the Anti-Haitian Nation

4. Dominican National Identity: Social Science Textbooks and the Boundaries of Blackness

5. Color, Classrooms, and the Haitian Other

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1.1. Portrait of Juan Pablo Duarte

1.2. Portrait of Ramón Matías Mella

1.3. Portrait of Francisco del Rosario Sánchez

4.1. Illustrations of a wide range of professions

4.2. Illustrations of a man voting, a man registering a child for school, and people waiting in line at a bank

4.3. Illustration of what may be family members engaged in various modes of communication

4.4. Illustration of a Taíno man

4.5. Illustrations of a man and woman labeled Españoles and another couple with much darker skin labeled Africanos

4.6. Illustrations of people representing indígena, blanco, negro, mulato, and mestizo populations

4.7. Children’s cartoon showing the character María Moñito

Acknowledgments

Sincere thanks to California Lutheran University’s office of Academic Affairs, College of Arts and Sciences, Center for Equality and Justice, and Department of Languages and Cultures for their support of this project. Thank you to Kirstie Hettinga for editing assistance and to LaVerne Seales for reviewing the Spanish to English translations. I am deeply grateful for the friendship, encouragement, and good counsel of many extraordinary people: my Afro-Latin/American Research Association family, Kelly Eder, Rafaela Fiore Urízar and the usual suspects, Debbie Lee-Distefano, Marvin Lewis, Robin Mitchell, Dorothy Mosby, Basilia Pérez and family, and Joseph Powell. Thank you to Mom, Dad, Shaye, and Thomas for all the love, laughter, patience, and hope that simply being around you brings me.

—Sheridan Wigginton

Thanks to the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Missouri–Saint Louis and to my colleague Dave Robertson of the Department of Political Science at University of Missouri–St Louis for supporting my travel to the Dominican Republic, which facilitated research for this book. I am deeply indebted to my friend and colleague Faustino Sánchez of Villa Altagracia, Dominican Republic. This project could not have been completed without your insights, wisdom, and support. Thank you Alonzo, Amanda Rose, Jessica, Richard V, and Mom and Dad for your steadfast support.

—Richard T. Middleton IV

Introduction

Books, Bias, and Blackness: How the Haitian Other Helps Tell the Story of Dominican History and Identity

Unmastering the Script: Education, Critical Race Theory, and the Struggle to Reconcile the Haitian Other in Dominican Identity examines how school curriculum-based representations of Dominican identity navigate black racial identity, its relatedness to Haiti, and the culturally entrenched pejorative image of the Haitian Other in Dominican society. The materials we analyze—social science textbooks and historical biographies intended for school-age Dominicans—reflect an increasing shift toward a clear and public inclusion of blackness in Dominican identity that serves to renegotiate the country’s long-standing antiblack racial master script. The textbooks are for grades two through eight (ages six to fourteen) and are part of the Nivel Básico in the Dominican education system.

We argue that although many of the attempts at this inclusion reflect a lessening of black denial, when considered as a whole, the materials often struggle to find a consistent and coherent narrative for the place of blackness within Dominican identity, particularly as blackness continues to be meaningfully related to the otherness of Haitian racial identity. The school texts reflect the Dominican Republic’s larger societal struggle to reconcile its own blackness vis-à-vis Haiti’s blackness.

There is considerable literature that explores how Dominican and Haitian identity are largely diametric, situating Haiti and Haitians as the maligned black African Other to construct Dominican identity as being aligned more closely to a European (particularly, Spanish-Iberian), mixed-race ancestry. We analyze how discourse intended for school-age Dominicans is highly nuanced and couched in the country’s past and present negotiations with blackness, revealing neither total denial nor warm embrace. Throughout this book, when we refer to Other, we mean anyone who is separate from one’s (conceptualization of) self. As Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin note, The existence of others is crucial in defining what is ‘normal’ and in locating one’s own place in the world.¹ Similarly, Haitian Other means the socially constructed idea of a binary representation of Haitian identity compared to Dominican identity. When we refer to Haitian Other master script, we are writing about the collective body of narratives that permeate individual social science textbooks and are designed to socially construct Dominican racial identity as something other than Haitian and something other than distinctly black.

The essential nature of dominicanidad (Dominican-ness) is a much-debated topic within and outside the Dominican Republic. Despite paying such close attention to dominicanidad, Dominicans are not unique in their endeavor to self-identify and navigate a range of complex issues. All of Latin America is part of a multiracial, multiethnic, and often postcolonial milieu. However, negotiating that identity in such close physical, historical, and cultural proximity to what has been understood as the Other is what makes the Dominican journey along the path of identity construction particularly intriguing. There is no doubt that how and why people imagine themselves to be connected, or for that matter disconnected, are powerful tools that can be wielded in either helpful or harmful ways. Distinguishing which is which brings its own set of complications. April J. Mayes outlines a wide range of perspectives about how Dominican identity has positioned hispanidad, an emphasis on Spain and its cultural roots, into its own dominicanidad. Frank Moya Pons, Raymundo González, Emilio Cordero Michel, and José Chez Checo do not see anti-Haitianism as a mere consequence of hispanidad; rather, within the context of Dominican identity, hispanidad represents a nationalism unique to an island divided between two countries long engaged with each other in sometimes cooperative and, at other times, conflicted ways.² She highlights a new wave of Dominican scholarship that emerged in the 1980s that used social history methodologies to reinterpret the Dominican past ‘from below’ in order to refute Peña Batlle’s and Balaguer’s historical interpretations as ideological fictions invented to justify authoritarianism.³

Our work here builds on this new wave of Dominican scholarship that undergirds Mayes’s work, as well as that of Milagros Ricourt and Lorgia García Peña, which considers how contemporary perspectives of Dominican identity accept the existence of an African past and seek to properly situate its importance.⁴ Specifically, we frame ourselves using Kimberly Eison Simmons’s 2010 book, Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic. In Simmons’s groundbreaking work, she asserts that Dominican blackness is hidden, not denied: While Dominicans use popular expressions like ‘black behind the ear’ (Candelario 2007, 2001), implying a hidden or concealed nature of African ancestry, denial is different. The ‘denial’ suggests that there is a negative response to a question or idea. In other words, ‘denial’ implies that Dominicans do not believe that they have African ancestry. And this is not the case. To the contrary, African ancestry is often acknowledged, but it is downplayed and relegated to a place that is hidden or ‘behind the ear.’⁵ Simmons’s work is framed within the notion of reconstructing and unburying something that previously existed and notes that for Dominicans the process of reconstructing racial identity is often a gradual one as they interact with new definitions, laws, and people who define them in new and different ways.⁶ Unmastering the Script approaches the text materials as an example of Simmons’s reconstructing and unburying of an African past, supporting the uneven, highly context-specific, and slow nature of the process she describes.

Many Dominicans consider dominicanidad to be in direct opposition to, and at times threatened by, the perception of a black, impoverished, voodoo-practicing Haiti. Thus, within this framework, Haiti and Haitians function as a negative point of comparison that allows curricular materials used to present Dominican history and identity in a positive manner based largely on their non- or anti-Haitian essence.⁷ Unmastering the Script analyzes the simultaneously widening and shrinking divide between the Haitian Other and Dominican identity in school-based historical biographies and in social science textbooks—materials that form part of the Dominican Republic’s effort to officially locate blackness within the textbooks and the minds of young readers. Do these messages further a definition of dominicanidad that denigrates blackness or even seeks to render it invisible? Or, to use Simmons’s language, do these messages reflect the difficult work of reconstructing an African past? To investigate these questions, we use critical race theory as an underpinning to understand how the master script of social dominance and normatively good qualities of the white, Catholic, Spanish elements of Dominican heritage have the potential to produce deleterious effects on the social, political, and economic advancement of Dominicans of black African descent, as well as Haitians. Conversely, we probe how other messages in the texts situate blackness squarely within the Dominican definition of self. We examine representations of national identity in elementary school social studies textbooks, biographical narratives of the country’s three founding fathers known collectively as La Trinitaria, and political history as it relates to dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina (1891–1961), president and Trujillo sympathizer Joaquín Balaguer (1906–2002), and Balaguer’s dark-skinned political opponent José Francisco Peña Gómez (1937–98).

Contribution to the Extant Literature on Dominican Identity

The powerful role that textbooks and other pedagogical tools play in the process of identity formation is already well established in criticisms based in scholarship emanating from the United States, most prominently by Michael W. Apple and Cameron McCarthy. However, an in-depth investigation into how school materials influence the understanding of national identity in the Dominican context remains unexamined. Previous explorations of Dominican identity have largely taken place within the contexts of political science, cultural studies, and literary analysis. This book speaks to and informs a broad array of disciplines—among them education, political science, law, sociology, anthropology, Africana studies, and Latin American and Caribbean studies. Scholars and even casual observers can expect to gain an understanding of and appreciation for the role of childhood education in reflecting past and contemporary understandings about race vis-à-vis the construction of the nation (which Benedict Anderson has referred to as an imagined political community) as well as a national identity.⁸

In recent years, four critical and widely read books have offered a rich introduction to Dominican issues of race and national identity: Ernesto Sagás, Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic, David Howard, Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic, Dawn Stinchcomb, The Development of Literary Blackness in the Dominican Republic, and Ginetta Candelario, Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops.⁹ These books acknowledge education’s historical role in perpetuating a racially biased ethnic ideology in the Dominican Republic but do not explore how attitudes toward Haiti and blackness impact the process and products of education in school materials.

Unmastering the Script contributes a wholly new voice to the discussion by adding an ethnographic and document-based critical study of educational materials that is guided by the question: How does the figure of the Haitian Other help construct and convey the story of Dominican history and identity in schoolbooks? We situate the broader analysis within the framework of critical race theory to understand how the social construction of race in the Dominican Republic has far-reaching effects that extend beyond the classroom setting.

The Social Construction of Race and National Identity in the Dominican Republic

The lion’s share of the existing discourse on race and the historical evolution of racial identity