Paloma pulls up in front of a large apartment building in a neighborhood that doesn’t look familiar to me.
“That building to your right is on the land where Paraíso once stood,” Paloma says.
I get out of the truck. I stand in front of a large structure stabbing the sky and look as far up as the sun will allow. This is holy ground for me, the place that brought me so much happiness as a child, where I discovered the world on a globe in Papa’s study. I remember feeling that pieces of me were scattered around the world; I belonged to her, Mother Earth. Papa’s globe was one giant teta feeding my chubby self with rousing curiosity.
Almost every night after dinner, Papa and I would take walks around this neighborhood. Sometimes he talked about his brother, a conductor and musician who traveled the world and lived in Italy for a time before coming back to become a founding director of Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. He told me stories of being a shoe-shine boy as a child, of being dirt-poor, of being self-made. Sometimes Papa mentioned something about his father’s mother, una haitiana. “We are all related on this island,” he said. “Only the ignorant hate their neighbors.”
I remember sitting between my grandfather and his friend in the living room as they talked politics with the intensity of a bickering couple for what, to my young ears, felt like weeks. When he tried to make a point, vicepresidente Jacobo Majluta’s knee shook so hard that I’d jump on his lap for the ride. Don Majluta’s timepiece was so large and shiny that the reflection temporarily blinded me when I stared at it. Papa wasn’t nearly as passionate, but I could tell he enjoyed his friend’s company.
Not all was kosher in paradise. This is the stretch of land where my parents were married. This is where Rocío totally fucked up her life by leaving school and a comfortable situation for my father and an exhaustive list of other worthless men. This is where she forced me to leave the only stable family I had known, to live with her on Arzobispo Portes in the Zona Colonial before I leaped out of one nightmare and arrived in another with Dad and Alice in New York City.
“Do you remember the garden toward the back of the house where I played with my little pet rabbits?” I ask my aunt. “Whatever happened to them?”
“Of course I do,” she says. “They were multiplying so fast, Mama had to hand them over to the caretaker of a piece of property she was trying to develop.”
“Let me guess—”
“Yes, he started getting fat, and the rabbits started disappearing. I think they fed the whole barrio until most of them were gone, and you know, Mama, even as tough as she was, without Papa to intervene, lost control. He didn’t want the land.”
“That’s sick shit,” I say, imagining my bunnies being slaughtered.
Maybe it’s for the best that Paraíso, as lovely as it looked from the outside, is gone. “Bueno.” I turn and look at Paloma. “That’s that, then, let’s go.”
“I’d like to know more about our African history here,” she says, driving us to her house for lunch. “We’ve had such a long relationship with that part of the world, but I honestly haven’t put much thought into it until now.”
I understand where Paloma is coming from. Dominican Republic’s centuries-old ties to Africa have been forgotten, revised, and as in the States, rarely taught. Still, the history of Africa in the Americas is a fascinating one, and somewhere along the line, the narrative runs through my veins.
In July 1502, just nine years after a shipwrecked Columbus was discovered on the western side of the island, Santo Domingo’s governor, Nicolás de Ovando, made a move that would forever impact our gene pool. With the Catholic blessing of the ruling Spanish monarchs, he brought Spanish-speaking slaves of African descent to the island.
Bartolomé de las Casas, the first ordained priest in the Americas, accompanied Ovando to Hispaniola in 1502. The “Protector of the Indians” participated in raids and owned Taíno slaves, repenting after recognizing that they possessed human souls. He suggested that Africans be brought en masse to Santo Domingo and other Spanish colonies as replacements only to backpedal. While he wrestled with his spirit over the moral dilemma of Indigenous and African slavery, de las Casas himself owned slaves until 1544. By that time there was nothing he could do to stop the oars of the transatlantic slave trade from rowing.
Ovando and, arguably, de las Casas played a major role in what would become a genetic circumstance of the Columbus effect on Hispaniola, which is why, five hundred years later, we can see gradations of brown on the faces of her population. The conquistador led the way for other greedy Spaniards—like Hernán Cortés and Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, for example—to realize their own American dreams.
The conquistadores would have to contend with the captives’ own New American Dream: freedom. Marronage and slave rebellions became a way of life on the island of Hispaniola and throughout the rest of the Caribbean long before the slave trade made its way to North America.
Those first negro ladino slaves who landed in modern-day Dominican Republic—thought to be more cultured because they were Christianized—ran away as soon as they set foot on the island and were never recaptured. Later, between 1515 and 1518, the Spanish plantation owners moved to bring in negros bozales, or slaves directly from the African continent. They feared importing more negros ladinos because they spoke the same language and would be better able to organize and rebel. Alas, obtaining slaves directly from Africa didn’t work out well for the conquistadores, either.
The earliest slaves imported directly from Africa came mainly by way of the Cape Verde Islands. These men and women were gathered from all over the West African region known as Upper Guinea, the territories between today’s Senegal and Sierra Leone, including modern-day Guinea-Bissau. Many of these negros bozales, like the Hispanicized ladinos who escaped soon after arriving in 1502, would not bow down so willingly to serve the colonists.
The Wolof people of Senegal, literate and exceptionally shrewd merchants and traders back home, were reputed to be more defiant than other tribes known to the Spanish. The colonists on the island learned firsthand just how rebellious they were when, in December 1522, a group of Wolof slaves revolted on the sugar plantation of Diego Columbus, son of the discovered, and his partner, Melchor de Castro. The insurrection was quickly squashed and resulted in the severe punishment of several captured African freedom fighters. Others escaped into the mountains, never to be heard from again. This first slave rebellion in the Americas set off other insurrections for centuries to come on Hispaniola and throughout the Caribbean.
The number of runaways increased as many Africans joined communities of Taíno rebels led by the cacique Enrique, also known as Enriquillo. Since 1519, they had been warring with the Spanish, sneaking onto plantations at night to steal cattle and liberate other enslaved Indigenous and African peoples. While the news of Enrique’s victories and steadfast resistance spread and inspired other uprisings, his story ultimately went out with a whimper.
The Taíno chief signed a pact with the island’s colonists in 1533 in which he was granted amnesty and his followers their freedom in exchange for helping the Spanish recapture runaway African slaves on the island, estimated between two to seven thousand. Unfortunately, Chief Enrique wasn’t the only sellout on Hispaniola. Throughout Spain’s military campaign to recapture former slaves on the island, several captured African leaders negotiated their lives in return for betraying their own people. Regardless of how much they tried, it’s clear that the hunters ultimately failed to suppress the hunted. I see fluctuating degrees of Africa living on in the bodies, hair textures, and faces of the people Paloma and I drive by on the streets.
“That’s all really interesting,” Paloma says. I notice that most billboards around town are of blond-haired and blue-eyed adults and babies, hawking everything from cell phones to hair products. Those ads are in stark contrast to the locals—Afro- and mixed-raced Dominicans make up nearly 90 percent of the population—and the billboards featuring brown-skinned presidential ho
pefuls are so badly photoshopped that they look like smiling corpses.
While some of us have gotten drunk off the white-is-all-right-flavored Kool-Aid, like the dominicana back at the Delta gate in New York City and my high school classmate Socorro, we are hardly the only diasporic souls who need to check ourselves. While it feels almost too easy to dismiss the entire community as self-loathing on the surface, especially when viewed through the filter of our own American racial paradigms, the bleaching of Black Dominican consciousness isn’t as skin-deep as one might think.
The Dominican Republic became self-governing on February 27, 1844, after twenty-two years of unification under a Haitian-controlled government and before slavery was abolished in the Spanish Caribbean and the rest of the Caribbean was decolonized. As the emerging republic attempted to establish itself, the racial category of the people immediately became a grave issue for the Western powers that were. At the time, the slaveholding United States needed to find a way to conceive of Dominicans as other than Black in order for them, Spain, and France to recognize la república as an independent nation. In a report to then president John Tyler, U.S. Secretary of State John C. Calhoun suggested that recognizing the Dominican Republic as an independent nation would help America prevent “the further spread of negro influence in the West Indies.”
A commercial agent named John Hogan was sent by Calhoun to assess the racial constructs of the eastern side of the island. By any means necessary, his mission was to find a way to justify the claim that most of the country’s population was somehow white. And he did. Hogan’s explanation for whatever degree of blackness existed in la república had nothing to do with the fact that the island had been inhabited by slaves, free men and women, indios, afro-indios, mestizos, and other mixed-race people for over three centuries. Whatever blackness existed in the east, maintained the United States, was the fault of our insatiable Haitian neighbors, who forced themselves on Dominican men and women through the use of sexual violence.
Like scores of American statesmen, journalists, and travel writers throughout the nineteenth century, Hogan would go on to paint Dominicans as white in relation to Haitians. Whiteness became assigned to the people, as did a pliant and unthreatening view of the Dominican personality. Haitians were predictably painted as barbaric and savage Africans. How dare they jack their own independence before their French colonial masters decided it was time to grant it to them? Worse, how would news of a successful rebellion, if spread, impact the hearts and minds of African slaves throughout the rest of the Americas?
The United States created further division between both sides of the island with negrophobic travel narratives that were at their most prolific around the first U.S. occupation of the island, from 1916 to 1924. In turn, these accounts were lapped up by the Dominican ruling class and reincorporated into the nation’s own writings about identity. At the bottom of the white-supremacist well lay America’s interest in becoming the Dominican Republic’s new economic and political masters. And this freedom was something that the island’s elite were, for the most part, jonesing to give away like the neighborhood puta.
Still, African retention reveals itself in ways that we may not even think about, such as the polyrhythms of our local music, like merengue and bachata and gaga, and in our foods. I remember my first lunch in Ghana of what we would call moro (dirty rice), maduros (fried sweet plantain), and fish marinated with familiar spices. If I’d closed my eyes, I could have been transported to any Caribbean Latino restaurant in Nueva York or in the Dominican Republic.
Phenotypically, African retention exists on the faces of important figures who have held on to political roles throughout the country’s history, perhaps most notably General Gregorio Luperón. About twenty years after independence from Spain, the country’s ruling class moved to annex the Dominican Republic to their former colonial masters. An Afro- or mixed-race general Luperón—he’s been described as both—became a fierce protector of the republic’s sovereignty and waged a guerrilla war against Spain from 1863 to 1865. The War of Restoration, as it was called, is commemorated as a national holiday every August 16.
African retention is also preserved in our cultural memory; the stuff exists in our DNA. The way we speak, our tonal language, is a residual circumstance of the presence here and codependent relationship between Africans and Indigenous people. The latter contributed at least thirty-two hundred words to our lexicon.
Then there’s religion. Most Dominicans, like my great-uncle, classify themselves as Catholic. And like most things in the country, Catholicism is cortado, or cut, with African and Indigenous-based religious expressions. Back in the day, Dominican state-funded propaganda rejected any kinds of so-called pagan or animistic forms of worship, passing them off as Haitian. Finding that citizens were commemorating the War of Restoration by engaging in Dominican voodoo, the Trujillo regime passed Law 391 in September 1943. Dominicans caught practicing any kind of perceived African spiritual expression in the republic were fined up to five hundred pesos plus up to a year in prison. After Trujillo, his loyal bitch-boy Joaquín Balaguer kept the negrophobic torch lit for another thirty-plus years, until the end of his third term as president in 1996.
One of the major consequences of the first U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic was the rise of the former thief, pimp, and snitch Rafael Trujillo. Made up to the nines and wearing skin-lightening makeup, Trujillo became the Caribbean republic’s most zealous proponent of all that is Eurocentric, despite his own partial Haitian ancestry. Back then, he spread white supremacy faster than Peter Popoff could “supernatural debt relief” on BET. Just seven years into his reign, the führer sanctioned the killing of twenty thousand Haitian civilians by shibboleth. How did he determine who was Haitian as opposed to Dominican on the borderland? Soldiers would hold up a piece of perejil, or parsley, and ask, “What is this?” It all came down to the R in perejil. In Kreyól, pronouncing the R is challenging, so the answer sounded something like pewejil. This how Trujillo sanctioned the violent death of thousands of Haitian men, women, and children during what became known as the Parsley Massacre.
As a public relations move following the Haitian massacre, motivated by his effort to whiten the Dominican race, the führer encouraged European immigration, particularly that of Eastern European Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. He also encouraged those on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War to emigrate to the island.
Despite the West, Trujillo, Balaguer, and our own ruling class, Dominicans have, perhaps intrinsically, managed to resist disremembering their African ancestry rather than forgetting it. Despite our own miseducation across Latin America and the United States about our history, we can’t deny these demonized parts of our makeup. Doing so would come at the cost of denying our entire selves.
* * *
“I’m curious, Paloma,” I tell my aunt over lunch of spaghetti and maduros. “Are there are any slave records or documents around town?”
“That’s a good question for el doctor Moya Pons,” she says, chuckling. “Raquelita, are you sure we are talking about the same Frank Moya Pons?” Maybe it’s hard for her to believe I’d be cool with someone so respected in Dominican society because of the way I wear what Dad calls my pajonaso: untrained, wild, and worse, not fried straight.
Paloma and I have essentially become strangers. I haven’t seen her much since I moved to Nueva York with Dad and Alice. I’ve never spoken to my aunt about life in New York, about Maria or the other women who’ve stood in her sister’s place as my mother. I didn’t think she or Rocío’s side of the family wanted to know.
Today I’m getting to know her all over again, wearing the blemish of being Rocío’s daughter like a huge zit on the tip of my nose.
“That’s the cool thing about the U.S.—you can roll and rock with all sorts of people despite the pajon,” I tell Paloma on the way back to my temporary home in Santo Domingo, a comfortable small bedroom in the apartment of a friend of a friend.
“Just plea
se, Raquelita, te lo súplico, don’t go anywhere near the Zona Colonial,” she says. “It’s too dangerous for americanos. Meet him somewhere else.”
There we go again.
* * *
Today I will not be late for my meeting with Frank Moya Pons at Calle Las Mercedes in la zona. I leave hours before our meeting, enough time to grab breakfast and stop by Arzobispo Portes. I stand in front of the two-story slate-colored Spanish colonial structure and peer into one of the small windows to find that several flimsy walls have divided the large apartamento where Rocío once sent me to hell.
I wonder who lived in the building before I did, back in the days when colonists, African and Taíno slaves, and free people walked the streets of this, the first American city in the New World. There are no signs or plaques commemorating anyone of import who may have lived or visited Rocío’s dwelling. Still, the energy—something the locals probably take for granted—is far out and undeniable. It emanates from every relatively ancient cobblestone, modest structure, colorful colonial, and over-the-top baroque church in this section of Santo Domingo. Like the Pelourinho district in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, Santo Domingo is imbued with electricity. It’s as if the stones have been charged and given life through bloodshed. Contrasting that spirit with the woman squatting in the middle of an already narrow path, taking a shit as a steady flow of people walk by her on this hot and muggy day, is surreal.
Our old apartment is mostly dark inside, but I can make out garbage strewn about the floor and a wicker rocking chair in the middle of the living room. I have two memories of Rocío here. The first is of her writing something on a huge blackboard in the large open space that was our living room and talking to a few dozen teenagers or adults sitting at school desks in front of her. The second is of her sitting on her bed, yelling that I was a traitor and wishing me bad luck before throwing me out of her house, bellowing, “Go to hell with your father, maldita!”
Bird of Paradise Page 27