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This chapter traces suffragists' engagement with the Republican effort to annex Santo Domingo to the United States in the 1870s during national Reconstruction after the Civil War. This investigation of the intersection of the “Santo Domingo Question” and the woman question demonstrates how discussions about the expansion of the physical boundaries of national territory inflected discussions about the gendered boundaries of physical space. It was during these discussions that suffragists first introduced the New Departure, a strategy for gaining votes for women based on their new status as national citizens under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

In 1795, as a result of a military victory, the embattled French Republic acquired Spain’s oldest colony of Santo Domingo, the neighbor to Saint-Domingue. Since Paris had proclaimed the legal abolition of slavery throughout the entirety of the French empire the prior year, the annexation of Santo Domingo would seem to have legally freed that colony’s 15,000 or so slaves. Were these men, women, and children in fact freed? Chapter two engages with this question via an analysis of legal documents, military records, government decrees, and other sources. This chapter details the conflicts that arose when those claimed as slaves in Santo Domingo asserted their rights as free French citizens and connects these conflicts to political changes in the French and Spanish empires.

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 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 focuses on the nine-day period of preparation of the Festival in the village of Santo Domingo de Ónzole and presents an ethnographic discussion of the village's marked sexual dichotomy. This ethnographic information will help explain why gender is so important in that village's Festival performances. Topics discussed include the subsistence economy in the northern sector of Esmeraldas; the founding of the village at the end of the nineteenth century; kinship networks in Santo Domingo; outmigration from Santo Domingo de Ónzole; socioeconomic differentiation in Santo Domingo; geography of the village; and the organization of the Festival by a committee of women.

This chapter reconstructs the reception and appropriation of ancient Greece and Rome in the Dominican Republic, tracing the long arc of classical reception from the foundation of the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo to the politics of the twenty-first-century nation-state. Two interlocking appropriations of classical Greece are documented and scrutinized: the glorification of colonial Santo Domingo by postcolonial Dominican elites as the “Athens of the New World,” and the celebration of the modern nation-state as the “Sparta of the New World” during the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930–61). Both modes of scripting hispanophone Hispaniola as classically Greek turn out upon closer examination to derive their impetus from a racialized—and racist—cultural and nationalistic program whose imprint on Dominican debates about statehood and race remains visible to this day.

This chapter explores further the socioeconomic and political realities that make the contexts of the Play in Santo Domingo de Ónzole and La Tola by paying special attention to these two fields of meaning: race and racial relations, and sexual dichotomy, gender relations, and sexual role reversal. These explorations should provide additional evidence in support of interpretations of the Play in the two villages while also shedding some light on the Play's acts. The discussions cover Afro-Esmeraldian sexuality, “matrifocality,” and gender relations; reputation and the prevalence of the sexuality and gender relations field of meaning in Santo Domingo; and the prevalence of the racial relations field of meaning in La Tola.

This chapter analyzes Frederick Douglass's responses to the U.S. empire building in Santo Domingo between 1870 and 1872 and in Haiti between 1889 and 1891. As U.S. minister to Haiti and assistant secretary of the U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant's commission to study the prospect of annexing the Dominican Republic, Douglass fully supported the virtues of the U.S. expansion and the U.S. Pan Americanism as long as these ideologies promoted effective and egalitarian development in Caribbean and Latin American nations. Douglass opposed the U.S. empire if it perpetuated U.S. notions of racial domination. His ideas on these subjects shifted over time and proved to be linked to the progress and hardships of U.S. African American life in the U.S. South. The chapter also highlights the political challenges and contradictions of Frederick Douglass, a committed abolitionist, intellectual, and diplomat who fought to remain loyal to race and nation.

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.

In 1538, Fernando Gorjón sent to Castile a ship he owned with a cargo of crates of sugar, cowhides, and cassia. The ship sailed with good weather from the port of Santo Domingo and, following the usual route for more than a thousand leagues, made port at Tercera Island, one of the Azores. There a Franciscan friar traveling in the Indies away from his order disembarked, because from Tercera he was ordered to accompany his superiors to Spain. The surviving merchandise was very damaged or ruined. Fernando Gorjón, brought suit in the audiencia of Santo Domingo against Master Juan Bermúdez and Pilot Alonso de Baena, who had charge of the ship. The owner alleged that it was a case of malice and the fault of those aforementioned and that by their negligence and their untimely departure from Tercera Island they had returned the ship to this city. The court's decision was that it was an act of God.

Seven ships and caravels departed Santo Domingo in July 1543 for Spain. Among them was a ship of Portugal that had come to the city with a cargo of Negroes to sell. In Santo Domingo these slaves were valuable and necessary for farms and services to the residents, for working the fields and gold mines, and for the sugar mills. At the time this story was recounted, there were so many of these slaves that many had rebelled and fled their masters. These rebels did much harm on the island, and worse was expected if they were not to be punished more vigorously than had been done until that point. They sailed the western route around this island and went out through the islands of the Lucayos, and from there they turned to the course for Europe. After it was out to sea and seven or eight days separated from the other ships, the ship was beset by bad weather.

Chapter 1 examines mapping practices in colonial Hispaniola, focusing specifically on how historical actors manipulated allegiance to one European power or the other, playing Saint-Domingue off Santo Domingo. The chapter uses border theory and studies of frontier relations to argue that shifting allegiances along the colonial border meant that the border could never be consolidated or represent the hegemony of European control over the region.

To a large extent, the urban orientation of tourism in the Dominican Republic reflected dictator Rafael Trujillo's desire to showcase Santo Domingo, or his Ciudad Trujillo. Trujillo's efforts to promote tourism consisted mainly of luxury hotel development and hosting international fairs. Such a combination created a strange dichotomy, particularly as decentralized tourism began to emerge around the Caribbean. Hotels such as the Intercontinental Embajador (opened in 1956) created a splash for a couple of years, and then tourism began to ebb. Ironically, Santo Domingo boasted some of the Caribbean's finest hotels, but lacked the types of attractions and infrastructure that jet-set tourists were growing accustomed to in the 1950s and 1960s in places such as Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Tour guides gushed about the “modernity” of Trujillo's city, but found it difficult to provide tourists with other options in the Dominican Republic besides Santo Domingo. This chapter examines how the Punta Cana region has been transformed into a tourist destination in the Dominican Republic.

This chapter's story is about a ship whose master was Captain San Juan Solórzano which departed the river-port of Santo Domingo. At midnight or a little later on the day in question the crew weighed anchor, and in bright moonlight with a nice land breeze the ship sailed up the coast for Spain about two or more hours before daybreak. A Basque sailor who saw that the ship was on a collision course with the rocks stationed himself in the prow with the idea of jumping to land at the moment of impact. The boat, as reported, was pushed on course for Spain, where it arrived safely. The Basque sailor returned by land to Santa Domingo, arriving after a day or two and the ship took his sea chest and clothing to Spain for him. God saved the ship in the manner described and willed that sailor to remain behind to testify to the miracle.

One of Spain’s most perilous foreign adventures was the takeover of the Dominican Republic in March 1861.Anne Eller’s essay takes us to what will be less familiar territory for most readers. Dominican guerrilla fighters and their Haitian allies, many of them former slaves, forced Spain to leave in defeat. Their valiant struggle also inspired Cubans and Puerto Ricans to take up their own quest for independence from Spain.

The chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The aim of this book was to analyze the parodied racial identities—“whites,” “blacks,” and “Indians”—performed in the Afro-Esmeraldian Festival of the Kings. The fundamental theoretical premise has been that festivities are nonstatic texts that are always embedded in ever-changing or evolving sociocultural, economic, and political realities. It illustrated and emphasized that basic fact, valid for any festive reality, by looking at the Festival as it has been performed in two different contexts within one single cultural area (the province of Esmeraldas): the villages of La Tola and Santo Domingo de Ónzole. The book proposed to re-locate the Festival's “texts” within the webs of social relations and social practices that constitute its “contexts.” In doing so, it underscored the importance of “place” and “space” for the study of festivities in general, and of carnivalesque festivities in particular.

This chapter opens with detailed analysis of deculturation policy during the Spanish, Mexican, and American governance of New Mexico and the Pueblos. In the more recent history it includes discussion of the Code of Indian Offenses, the General Allotment Act (Dawes Act), the Carlisle Indian School, the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians (Hiawatha Asylum), and the evolving policies of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. These introductory remarks are followed by analyses of a 1935–1940 conflict at Santo Domingo (Kewa) Pueblo, when Archbishop Rudolph Gerken attempted to change traditional practice of Catholicism and to house a resident priest and sisters at Santo Domingo; and of a conflict at Isleta Pueblo that culminated when Monsignor Frederick Stadtmueller was removed in handcuffs by the pueblo governor in 1965. The Native American ministry of the archdiocese and native resistance to dogma are also considered more generally. Visiting information for Kewa and Isleta is included.

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.

In 1919 Feland returns to Headquarters Marine Corps in Washington, recuperates on leave, attends ceremonies, prepares war plans for invading Mexican oil fields, and waits for his next major assignment. In December 1919 he travels to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic to command Marines there. During 1920 Feland reports to Admiral Thomas Snowden, who is the Dominican Republic's military governor. Marines under the command of Feland's subordinate, James Carson Breckinridge, engage insurrectionists in the eastern part of the country. Feland is joined in Santo Domingo by Earl “Pete” Ellis, a brilliant but flawed officer whom Feland will support in future important ventures.

In August 1533, a ship loaded with cargo sailed from Santo Domingo bound for Spain. En route, while still close to this island, the ship's master, named San Juan de Ermúa, fell sick. His illness quickly worsened, and for his sake the ship put in at Mona Island between this island and San Juan Island, forty leagues from Santo Domingo. There the master died and was buried. Afterward the ship continued on and, due to the delay en route, another ship sailing from the port of Santo Domingo whose master was a pilot named Carreño caught up with it. This second ship was likewise carrying a very valuable cargo. Heavily damaged, they returned to the town of Puerto Plata on the northern coast of this island, their masts and yards broken and half or more of the cargo jettisoned.