Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic

by Simmons, Kimberly Eison

• ISBN13: 9780813033747
• ISBN10: 0813033748
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-07-05
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Florida

Summary

A self-described light-skinned African American who spent years living and working in the Dominican Republic with her spouse and three children, anthropologist Simmons (Univ. of South Carolina) challenges the commonly held assumption that all Dominicans are in a continuous, constant, and hopeless state of race denial by steadfastly ignoring their African past She refers to the Dominican practice of defining an obviously mixed-race people as mestizo and indio, honed since the dictator Trujillo imposed racial identity labels in the postwar years. This deliberate and, frankly, laughable distortion of meanings enables Dominicans to deny their "blackness," a stigma that they readily apply to their much-despised black Haitian neighbors. Simmons perceives a visible shift resulting from the transnational experiences of legions of Dominican migrants to and from the US, where a different racial regime designates them as black. Consequently, some Dominican individuals and activist organizations are constructing new identities, such as mulatto and Afro-Dominican, in order to embrace their African heritage. This fine-tuned ethnographic study illustrates how racial formation works as a political project.

Author Biography

Kimberly Eison Simmons, president of the Association of Black Anthropologists, is assistant professor of anthropology and African American studies at the University of South Carolina.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
List of Appendixes	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction: Burying the African Past	p. 1
Stirring the Sancocho: Dominicanness, Race, and Mixture in Historical Context	p. 14
Indio: A Question of Color	p. 34
The Dominican Diaspora: Blackening and Whitening and Mixture across Borders	p. 61
Africanidad and Afro-Dominican: Alliances, Organizations, and Networks in the African Diaspora	p. 90
Conclusion: Unburying the African Past	p. 115
Appendixes	p. 121
Notes	p. 131
References	p. 137
Index	p. 145
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