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This chapter provides several examples of how Dominican women articulate their own racial identities in relation to dominant narratives that intersect with gender in a patriarchal society. Ethnographic research in this chapter reveals the ways that Dominican women constantly navigate hierarchies of color and how narratives of class, as in the case of transnational Dominican celebrity Martha Heredia, frequently inform shifting racial meanings within and outside of the country. In this chapter Santo Domingo artists Yaneris Gonzalez Gomez and Michelle Ricardo each describe experiences of overlapping and sometimes disparate negotiations with anti-blackness. Dominican terms such as indio, negra, and morena that emerge in these and other conversations take on different meanings based on user and context.

Chapter 1 introduces the contents of the book with regard to content and structure. It highlights the importance of understanding the interaction between the indigenous population and Europeans as a process that goes beyond the temporal limits of discovery and conquest, and that produced an outcome that is much more diverse and complicated than generally admitted. The concept of Indio is defined as individuals of indigenous origin but adjusted to life in a colonial environment, and outlines the theoretical framework that forms the basis for this study. This combines precolonial archaeology and history with a multidisciplinary focus, and emphasizes agency and transculturation in order to confront the study of the early colonial world in the Caribbean.

In the early 1600s, commoner Andeans moved back to their former hamlets, but refounded them as annexes of their reducciones, with grid-pattern design, and incipient cabildo and cofradías. Annexes furthered the fragmentation of pre-Conquest ethnic groups begun with reducción, as only some ayllus were included in each annex. To create their new annex towns, Indios Ladinos (those literate in Spanish) got permission from Spanish political and religious authorities, but they met resistance from local priests who accused them of fleeing Christianity to return to idolatry. Andeans persevered because the towns, with their cabildos, and saints and cofradías had become central to defining community and legitimate membership in it, making it easier for forasteros (“foreigners”) to join. This self-government by commoners was a colonial innovation, but Andeans adapted town institutions, organizing them through their ayllus, making them thoroughly Andean. These Andean commoner-led repúblicas laid the groundwork for political solidarity and sovereignty.