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This chapter focuses on the shipwreck that happened to Baltasar de Castro and others on a ship from Spain bound for Hispaniola with a cargo of mares. It states that of the seventy-nine persons on board, forty-six were drowned and thirty-three were miraculously saved. Amador de los Ríos notes that in both the autograph manuscript and the sixteenth-century copy from which he was working, the texts of Chapters XI–XIX were missing, as well as the first part of Chapter XX. Fortunately, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés's general index to the third part has the initial chapter summaries, which at least give an idea of the missing contents. None of these summaries are dated.

This chapter describes the strange case of Juan de Lepe, subsequently a resident of Santo Domingo, on the island of Hispaniola. It relates how he was lost in Tierra Firme where a shipwreck left him among the wild Carib bowmen; and how miraculously God and his own courage rescued him from among them.

This chapter describes the wreck of a ship that embarked from Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola on which was traveling a gentleman resident of the island of Cuba named Juan de Rojas with his wife, doña María de Lobera, whom he had married in Santo Domingo a few days earlier. He was taking her to his home in the town of La Havana, on the island which is also known as Fernandina.

This chapter relates the greed of those who busied themselves in pearl harvesting on the islands of Cubagua and Margarita, provinces and coasts of Paria, Araya, and Cumaná. Those people were so thorough and diligent that they exhausted the profit of that business to the point that the trade almost totally ceased. A few years later, some pearl beds were discovered on the same coast more to the west around the cape called La Vela and thereabouts. Some residents of Cubagua, Santa Marta, and Hispaniola and of other parts went there to settle. Many pearls were brought to Hispaniola and sent on to Spain. With the news of the discovery, many from this city outfitted expeditions at great expense. Among them was a reverend father, canon of this holy cathedral, named García de la Roca, who spent much money on this business for ships, canoes, slave-divers, supplies, and other expenses.

This chapter recounts how in 1513, a ship from Spain bound for Hispaniola went off course and ran aground on the coast of Tierra Firme near the Río Grande, which is west of Santa Marta harbor. Everyone on the ship saw that there was no escape nor had they any possibility of saving themselves since if they were not drowned at sea, on land they would face death from the savage Carib Indians of that coast who were expert bowmen and cannibals. Aboard ship were a father and son from Seville and, faced with that situation, the old man told his son of about twenty-five years of age that they should take care of themselves the best they can and look to their own ingenuity until all else fails. The young man did as he was told. Many drowned there. Those who survived and made it to land were later killed by the Indians.

Other ships of the fleet returned to Spain, among them one whose master was Pedro Fernández Exuero, a native of Palos, Spain, and whose pilot was a certain Antón Calvo, a good man and expert navigator. The ship left the port of Darién and came to Hispaniola along the northern route. After taking aboard the necessary fresh supplies, it sailed in very fair weather. Three hundred or more leagues out to sea from Hispaniola the ship began taking on so much water that even two pumps could not save it and finally it sank in the ocean. When the twenty-five people on board saw that there was no way to staunch the flow of water they hurried to break out the ship's boat. However, with God's help, the boat was freed from the ship at the moment when the ship was almost submerged.

This chapter discusses works that highlight the often disavowed across-the-border continuity of structural violence on Hispaniola. Written by authors and directors born in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Algeria, and Mexico, these works include one film, two novels, two plays, and various pieces of journalism. Among them are Hulda Guzmán's Some are born to sweet delight (2011), Máximo Avilés Blonda's Pirámide 179 (1968), and Evelyne Trouillot's Le bleu de l'île (2005). These authors explore the lives of border-crossers and borderland dwellers, whose experiences reveal multiple across-the-border materialisations (migration, prostitution, environmental degradation, centralisation of resources, destitution, privatisation of survival) of Johan Galtung's structural violence. They suggest that social change is necessary to counteract across-the-border structural violence.

This chapter discusses two novels and two short stories that address the fragile border relations in Hispaniola: Frank Báez's ‘Ahora es nunca’(2007), Jacques Stephen Alexis's Les arbres musiciens (1957), Carlos Mieses's El día de todos (2008), and Junot Díaz's ‘Monstro’ (2012). The short stories denounce contemporary forms of vilification, mystification, and ‘erasure’ of the borderland which rely on the mobilisation of Gothic paraphernalia while also raising the possibility for renewal. El día de todos focuses on the ‘forever impending’ Haitian ‘invasion’ and anti-Haitian dominant discourses which continue to depict the borderland as the site where the dissolution of an essentialised ‘Dominicanness’ begins. Les arbres musiciens explores transnational local intensity and across-the-border cultural exchanges.

This chapter discusses various video performances, two sculptures, a musical video and the song lyrics it illustrates, a painting, and a poem by Dominican and Haitian artists who saw the Haitian earthquake of 2010 as an opportunity to improve the relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic which share Hispaniola. These artists tried to play a central role to support and promote solidarity and the kind of cultural exchange which could make a difference in the wake of the disaster. Works by Francisco (Pancho) Rodríguez, Rita Indiana Hernández, and David Pérez Karmadavis, among others, assert — or in some cases reassert — that ‘a brighter future’ is contingent on a willingness to rectify some of the misconceptions and disabling continuities which characterise pre- and post-earthquake Hispaniola and continue to hinder across-the-border dialogue.

This book concludes with a discussion of Manifisto (2013), a video-performance by the Dominican artist Polibio Díaz. Manifisto is a social commentary on the issue of Haitian immigration in the Dominican Republic, highlighting the systematic discrimination that ‘an underclass non-citizen’ has to endure due to ‘the institutional policy of the Junta Central Electoral’. It shows the importance of a birth certificate in the Dominican Republic in terms of name, nationality, citizenship, and access to health care and education, among other rights and privileges. Díaz also tackles the continuities and correspondences between Haiti and the Dominican Republic on one hand, and between the demonised borderland and the urban capital, on the other. The book also examines various responses to the Dominican Constitutional Court's ruling on citizenship and reiterates its position that the road towards a better Hispaniola requires engaging fully with the present and accepting the idea that an acceptable future can be attained.

This book examines a range of literary works from Haiti and the Dominican Republic, putting them in dialogue with texts from the rest of the world which have had the border between the two countries at their core. Conceived as part of a project called American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography, the book considers the politics of border-crossing and the poetics of borderland-dwelling. It also discusses the causes, unfolding, and immediate aftrmath of two events: the slave revolt of 1791 and the massacre of Haitians and Haitian–Dominicans in 1937. Finally, it analyses nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century reimaginings of the encounter between the indigenous population and the Spanish colonizers in early sixteenth-century Hispaniola, along with contemporary works (mainly from the 1990s onwards) which grapple with recent events and topical issues such as the Haitian earthquake of 2010, unregulated migration, and environmental degradation.

This chapter analyses two eighteenth-century works by Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, a prominent member of the white creole elite born in Martinique in 1750: Description Topographique et Politique de la partie espagnole de l'Isle Saint-Domingue (1796) and Description Topographique, Physique, Civile, Politique et Historique de la partie française de l'Isle Saint-Domingue (1797). Both texts highlight the contradictory dynamics engendered by the presence of a colonial frontier in Hispaniola. They also consider the border politics involving pre-revolutionary French Saint Domingue and Spanish Santo Domingo and reveal Saint-Méry's deep anxiety over vast portions of the island which were under the control of the maroons.

This chapter discusses three fictional reconstructions of the life of the Taíno Queen Anacaona, an important figure in early modern Hispaniola, by writers born in the Dominican Republic and Haiti: Salomé Ureña de Henríquez's Anacaona (1880); Jean Métellus's Anacaona (1986); and Edwidge Danticat's Anacaona: Golden Flower: Haiti, 1490 (2005). The chapter puts these texts in dialogue with each other and argues that they dramatise the ongoing tension between national narratives and island history while revisiting Anacaona's complex renegotiations of the ‘border’, which, in her time, was supposed to ring-fence the indigenous population from the Spanish colonists; Anacaona's renegotiations take place in an area which partly overlaps with the current borderland.

This chapter discusses Carlos Esteban Deive's historical novel Viento Negro, bosque del caimán (Black Wind, Bois Caiman, 2002), which deals with the slave revolt of 1791 and its consequences for the Spanish side. Deive chronicles Toussaint Louverture's entrance to Santo Domingo and his decision to immediately abolish slavery, recasting it as a fugitive but glorious moment in the shared history of Hispaniola. He reconstructs the effects of the rebellion on Santo Domingo and depicts the borderland as a site for rich cross-cultural exchange. In recasting of Hispaniola's past, Deive revisits dominant discourses related to the magical world of the island and to the representation of Vodou, one of the many manifestations of the process of creolisation which shaped the life and culture of the slaves. In the Dominican Republic, Vodou has long been associated exclusively with Haiti.

This chapter discusses texts that shed light on one of the most traumatic events in the history of Hispaniola: the 1937 massacre of Haitians and Haitian–Dominicans living in the Dominican borderland. These works are José Martí's War Diaries (1895); Manuel Rueda's Bienvenida y la noche: Crónicas de Montecristi (1994); Freddy Prestol Castillo's El Masacre se pasa a pie (1937; 1973) and Paisajes y meditaciones de una frontera (1943); Manuel Rueda's La criatura terrestre (1963); and Polibio Díaz's Rayano (1993). These authors explore the causes of the massacre, the ways in which it unfolded, and its dramatic consequences for the areas it affected. Their narratives enable readers to comprehend both the character and the signifiance of the borderland.

This chapter discusses works that explore the different ramifications of ‘the forgotten heart-breaking epic of [the] border struggle’. These works deal with Hispaniola from the 1960s onwards and include two novels, a long poem, a fim, and a piece of investigative journalism: Diego D'Alcalá's La Frontera (1994); Manuel Rueda's La criatura terrestre (1963) and Las metamorfosis de Makandal (1998); Perico Ripiao (2003), directed by Ángel Muñiz and written by Reynaldo Disla and Ángel Muñiz; Maurice Lemoine's Sucre Amer: Esclaves aujourd'hui dans les Caraïbes (1981); and Gary Klang's L'île aux deux visages (1997). Some of these works remind us of particularly vulnerable border-crossers, namely the Haitian braceros working in bateyes in the Dominican Republic.

This chapter describes the several shipwrecks of Cristóbal de Sanabria, of Seville, who at the time this case was written was a resident of Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola, and of the others who were with him. They returned to the coast and found certain dry sticks that appeared to have been washed ashore from the coast of Tierra Firme. Among those pieces of wood they found some that the Indians of those parts used to make a fire, and they lit a bonfire so that those on the other island would see it. The light for those on the other island was like seeing that star in the east the Magi told King Herod they were following to worship the newborn king of the Jews (as reported by the evangelist in the Holy Gospels).