Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

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Dominican Republic: The Society and Its Environment
in 1882, almost forty years after independence, of a famous
Dominican novel. The novel, Enriquillo: Leyenda historica dominicana
by Manuel de Jesus Galvan, concerns a Taino cacique
(chieftain), Enriquillo, who led a successful rebellion against
the Spanish. (Today one can see the monument to this "First
Hero of America" located in the center of the main crossroad
leading to Lago Enriquillo.) Enriquillo stresses the oldest and
first of the three racial-social themes of Dominican literature
that of nativism or Indianism (
indigenismo) ; it exaggerates the
Taino contributions to Dominican culture and ignores those
that are African. The second theme is hispanidad, the Roman
Catholic and "white" cultural legacy of mother country Spain;
from this perspective, non-Catholic and "black" Haitians are
viewed as inferior to Dominicans. The third theme is the outturn
criolla, or mixed common culture, between Spanish and
Africans.
The first theme long remained in literature and served as a
means of ignoring the African roots of Dominicans. A strain of
it continues today in the reluctance of many Dominican mulattoes
to admit their African heritage; instead, they claim Indian
heritage. The second theme, hispanidad, was maintained by the
intellectual elite both before and during the rule of Trujillo,
who made it governmental policy, and was continued by Balaguer
until the 1990s. Advocates of hispanidad maintained that
the Dominican heritage was entirely Spanish and suppressed
writing by non-white Dominicans and literature that dealt
favorably with non-white characters, especially Haitians. Balaguer's
book, Historia de la literatura dominicana, includes a
selection of writers who stressed the Spanish heritage. Trujillo's
regime made Haitians and Haiti the antithesis of hispanidad—
namely, African and uncivilized. Balaguer presented these
views in a 1947 book, which appeared in English in 1949 as
Dominican Reality: Biographical Sketch of a Country and a Regime.
(The 1983 Spanish edition had Haiti in the subtitle.) During
the Trujillo era, Juan Bosch Gaviho, a political opponent, novelist,
and later president, and Pedro Mir, who became the
National Poet, went into exile. Bosch became the leading
Dominican short story writer and wrote favorably about blacks.
The third theme came to the fore after Trujillo's 1961 assassination
and lasted until Balaguer was elected president in
1966. Before Bosch was overthrown as president in 1963, he
welcomed public recognition of Dominicans' African roots and
gave governmental support to Creole culture. The 1965 civil
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