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BEING LA DOMINICANA
DISSIDENT FEMINISMS

Elora Halim Chowdhury, Editor

A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.

Being La Dominicana
Race and Identity in the
Visual Culture of Santo Domingo

RACHEL AFI QUINN

Publication of this book was supported in part by funding from
the University of Houston’s Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies
Program and the UH Friends of Women’s Studies.

© 2021 by the Board of Trustees

of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Quinn, Rachel Afi, author.
Title: Being la Dominicana : race and identity in the visual
culture of Santo Domingo / Rachel Afi Quinn.
Description: Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2021] | Series:
Dissident feminisms | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: lccn 2021010536 (print) | lccn 2021010537 (ebook)
| isbn 9780252043819 (hardcover) | isbn 9780252085802
(paperback) | isbn 9780252052712 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Women—Dominican Republic. | Feminism—
Dominican Republic. | Dominicans (Dominican Republic)
—Race identity.
Classification: lcc hq1514 .q85 2021 (print) | lcc hq1514 (ebook)
| ddc 305.4097293 —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010536
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010537
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies,
Visual Culture, and the Ethnographic Project 1
1 Sites of Identity: Facebook, Murals, and Vernacular Images 31
2 Me Quedo con la Greña: Dominican Women’s Identities
and Ambiguities 60
3 Whiteness, Transformative Bodies, and the
Queer Dominicanidad of Rita Indiana 88
4 A Thorn in Her Foot: The Discomfort of Racism
and the Ethnographic Moment 118
5 The Camera Obscura: Teatro Maleducadas’ Production
of La Casa de Bernarda Alba 144
6 Feminist Rage and the Right to Life for Women
in the Dominican Republic 175

Notes 203

Works Cited 223

Index 241
 Acknowledgments

When I first visited my father in Ghana at age seventeen, his mother, Sarah
Doe Kpetigo Glover (“Nano”), gave me the Ewe name Ametolesi, meaning
roughly “many people stand behind you.” This could not be more true! I
have marveled at my good fortune to have such wealth of loved ones near
and far. This book is based on research from a decade and a half of travel to
the Dominican Republic and time spent living there. Many transnational
communities have sustained me over the years, and I recognize how all of
them have had some influence on me as I crafted this book. As someone
who thrives on the energy and inspiration of others, over the last decade
I have had the opportunity to connect with more people who have helped
make this book a reality than I can possibly remember and name here—but
I will give it a try.
Thank you to the numerous scholars I had the pleasure of working closely
with at University of Michigan while in the Program in American Culture:
Evelyn Azeeza Alsultany, who deftly guided me through my graduate studies;
María Cotera, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, and Lori Brooks, who each in their
own way helped me find my way with a first iteration of this project; many
thanks to Nadine Naber, Ruth Behar, and Magdalena Zabarowska in this re-
gard as well. I am particularly appreciative of the ever-thoughtful mentorship
and steady calm of Tiya Miles. Thank you also to Brandi Hughes, who made
sure I would find somewhere to land. The solidarity of so many sustained
me throughout graduate school: special thanks to Patricia Moonsammy, Afia
Ofori-Mensah, Roxana Galusca, Laura Wernick, Kanika Harris, and Vanessa
Díaz, with a big a shout-out to Shana Weaver.
viii . ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would not have been prepared to do this project, or had a way to approach
the work without the training I received for just two weeks at Cornell as part
of the Future of Minority Studies (FMS) summer institute led by Chandra
Talpade Mohanty and Beverly Guy-Sheftall in 2009. The FMS community
has been foundational to my work as a transnational feminist scholar and
the relationships forged there have inspired and fortified me on this long
journey. I am thankful to have found peer mentorship and friendship with
Sylvanna Falcón, Tania Triana, Azza Basarudin, Sharmila Lodhia, Michelle
Telles, Shareen Roshanravan, Edwin Hill, Moya Bailey, Arica Coleman and
many other dear FMSers. I have also been fortunate to join the fold of the
National Women Studies Association (NWSA), which has offered beloved
community. The NWSA’s Transnational Feminisms caucus—born out of the
Thinking Transnational Feminisms summer institute at Ohio State University
of which I was fortunate to be a part—continues to inspire my work. Funding
for this project began with the University of Michigan’s Global Transforma-
tions Fellowship that got me to the Dominican Republic for the first time.
Since, the University of Houston has been a tremendous supporter of this
research over the years. I was able to complete this project through the gift
of time and intellectual community provided by a Woodrow Wilson Career
Enhancement Fellowship, while comradery and funding from the UH Under-
represented Women of Color Coalition helped get me to the finish line—with
special thanks to Erika Henderson and Andrea Georgsson for investing in
my success.
Of course, this book is only possible thanks to the generosity of strangers
willing to share with me about their lives—and translate the details. Many
brilliant and talented friends in Santo Domingo contributed to my under-
standing of and love for the Dominican Republic over the years. Most espe-
cially, I am thankful for the friendship and generosity of Yaneris González
Gómez, Diana Pérez, Nathaly Ramos, Alejandra Prido, Michelle Ricardo,
Dulcina Abreu, Xiomara Fortuna, Isabel Spencer, Aurora Martínez, Glaem
Parls, Marcos Morales, Laura Bretón Despredal, Jeannette Tineo Durán, as
well as Princess Jiménez, Merlyn Cornelio, Inda George, and numerous other
kind souls who are not named in my work. I truly would not know the Do-
minican Republic the way I do without my longstanding relationship with
la familia García, in particular Marta, Mercedes, Criselda, Patricia, and la
doña Merida Reynosa de García (“Palina”), and all that I have learned from
their health clinic FUVICREF serving women and girls in their hometown
of Sabana Grande de Boyá. In my neighborhood of Los Jardines del Norte, I
was welcomed by Suni Rosario Batista and her children Liberman, Darlyng,
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS · ix

Carlos, Jerilee, and Ana Celia, and their extended family. It has also been
a pleasure to know Nairobi Acosta and Edwin Pérez and their daughter,
Genesis, since she was very small. I am also lucky to have overlapped in my
time in Santo Domingo with Erika Martínez—who taught me much about
the processes of writing and friendship—and friends Meg Hendrickson and
Roberto Obando, Sarah Adler-Milstein, and Julio Gonzalez Ruíz. Julio’s pas-
sion for life, and for the Dominican Republic, will remain an inspiration to
all of us who knew him. Much gratitude goes to my humble friend Lucía
Mendez Rivas for sharing her beautiful artwork for the cover image and to
photographers Lorena Espinoza Peña and Fran Afonso, along with Penelope
Callado and Cindy Galán. Ana Francisca Acevedo has been a patient and
enthusiastic friend and language teacher over the years and was critical to
my research success, as was Lisa Borchetta in the early stages of this project.
I am also grateful to Tertúlia Feminista Magaly Pineda under the leader-
ship of Esther Hernández-Medina and Yildalina Tatem Brache and all who
have welcomed me into that space. Many more scholars and activists whom
I have encountered in Santo Domingo have kindly encouraged me in this
journey, namely Quisqueya Lora, Frank Moya Pons, Sergia Galván Ortega,
and the late Magaly Pineda and Tony de Moya. I have felt fortunate to join
a tremendous network of Dominican studies scholars, who have supported
my intellectual growth and trusted in my work, in particular Lorgia García
Peña, Raj Chetty, Maja Horn, April Mayes, Elizabeth Manley, Sharina Mailla-
Pozo, Zaida Coroniel, and Jacqueline Jiménez Polanco.
My sincere thanks go out to the team of scholars who were willing to
workshop my manuscript and provide feedback necessary to propel it for-
ward: Roberto Tejada, Keith McNeal, Christina Sisk, and Elizabeth Gregory,
with Ana S. Q. Liberato. Thanks also to Trevor Boffone, Sarah Luna, Julie
Tolliver, Kavita Singh, and Maria Gonzalez who offered thoughtful com-
ments on an early chapter; to Sandra Zalman who welcomed my thoughts
on Surrealism, and to the UH Caribbean studies working group including
Mabel Cuesta, who made possible my first publication in Spanish. Historian
friends Marcia Walker-McWilliams and Leandra Zarnow also modeled for
me the care and rigor with which I might write the stories of women. This
book would not exist without the patient guidance of editor Dawn Durante
during her time at University of Illinois Press, where my work met with kind
and enthusiastic reviewers. Neither would there be a book without the calm
and skillful guidance of copyeditor Jordan Beltrán Gonzales. Not least of all,
I am extremely grateful to Elora Halim Chowdhury for her mentorship and
ability to see this book when I could not.
x . ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Houston is an incredible place to live and work. I am fortunate to have

landed in yet another expansive community of creatives who have influ-
enced my thinking, including my co-conspirators Rubén Durán, Donna
Pinnick, and Michael Brims, with whom I had the pleasure of making the
documentary film Cimarrón Spirit (2015). I also draw much inspiration from
mentoring relationships with Rikki Bettinger, Sylvia Fernández, Robyn Lyn,
Monica Lugo, Sylvia Mendoza, Adrienne Perry, and Jess Waggoner, all now
cherished friends. Endless gratitude goes out to my clever friend and online
writing partner of so many years Jillian Báez; and to members of my most
recent writing community Derria Byrd, LaShonda Sullivan, and Lanice Av-
ery, guided briefly yet profoundly by Meredith Gadsby. I also know I would
not have made it over the finish line without cheerleaders like Abigail Lapin
Dardashti, Mariola Alvarez, Julia Jordan-Zachary, Mai-Lin Hong, and Santhi
Periasamy.
Both of my parents, Naomi Robin Quinn and Bernard Kwesi Glover, passed
away in the years that I have been writing this first book and professionalizing
as a scholar. I do not have the pleasure of putting a copy of it into their hands,
but certainly their encouragement led me down this path and I trust they
would be proud. I am also grateful to have had as adopted family Davi Ruby
Dey (who gave me sisters Aseye, Nayram, and Emefa) and Kweku Garbrah
while they were on this earth. Andrea Yeager, Ronny Quevedo, Ayanna Mc-
Cloud (and my godson Zahir Jones), Bryant Holsenbeck, Mig Little Hayes,
Sara Mayer, Cornelius Moore, Rahdi Taylor, and Barrie McClune are family
to me and I could not have known I could write a book without their great
confidence in me over so many years.
Not least of all in this endeavor, I happily thank my number-one cheer-
leader and most thoughtful reader, Eesha Pandit, for being a true inspiration
in my feminist scholarship and with whom I am grateful to have made a life
in Houston, Texas. Eesha’s brilliance and emotional intelligence continue to
inspire me—as does her feminist rage.
BEING LA DOMINICANA
 Introduction
Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies,
Visual Culture, and the Ethnographic Project

Tens of thousands of faceless ceramic dolls of varying shapes, sizes, and colors
line the dusty shelves of gift shops throughout Santo Domingo. To purchase a
muñeca sin rostro (doll without a face) is to choose among the many for sale
throughout the capital: in the supermarket La Sirena, in tourist boutiques
along the pedestrian mall El Conde, or even in the city’s Barrio Chino. The
muñecas sin rostros become Mother’s Day gifts, souvenirs of tourists’ visits
to the Dominican Republic, or presents carried off into the diaspora by soon-
to-be houseguests or relatives making holiday visits, like the ubiquitous oil
paintings of the frizzy orange framboyan trees or the colonial architecture
and cobblestone streets of the capital city. The doll is crafted with a long
bell-shaped dress and high collar reminiscent of a bygone colonial era; she
is clasping a bouquet of flowers at her waist. Made from the clay of different
regions of the country, her skin tone is determined by the color of the earth.
Close inspection reveals that each is unique in form and paint. Beneath her
wide-brimmed hat and floral embellishments, every doll’s face is blank.1
Ask any Dominican why the muñeca sin rostro looks the way that she
does and they will tell you it is because “we are a mix of everything, we are
Spanish, we are indigenous, we have African roots. Our features cannot be
represented in any one form.” In a society in which the vast majority of its
members are racially mixed, this explanation refers to the Latin American
ideology of mestizaje in which racial mixture between Europeans and Indig-
enous peoples is celebrated; it became social policy in Latin America due to
Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos’s vision of “La Raza Cósmica” (The
Cosmic Race). Yet the story of the muñeca sin rostro told today seems to
also imply that Dominican women have no one single identity; rather, you
2 . Introduction

can see in them whatever you wish to see—they are interchangeable, easily
reproduced, anonymous pawns in a larger economy. The muñeca sin rostro
is one of several symbols integral to the visual discourse of contemporary
Santo Domingo that I have chosen to gather, curate, and examine in this text.
It joins a vast collection of ethnographic moments and visual illustrations
that I juxtapose in ways that they might speak to one another.
Taking a transnational feminist cultural studies approach to reading
contemporary Dominican society and popular culture, Being La Dominicana
examines the importance of everyday visual culture in the lives of Dominican
women growing up in Santo Domingo, from social media’s vernacular images
to Dominican theater productions, to Dominican-made music videos and
films. I ask, how do Dominican women theorize their own experiences of
race and color within the dominant visual discourse of the Caribbean? I
build on the insights of Krista Thompson, who draws from the culture of
the region to argue that black people’s performance for the camera is an
act of self-making.2 In particular, I contend that the manner and process of
self-making within the visual economy of the Dominican Republic, and the
performance of race and gender among young Dominican women in Santo
Domingo, relies on their capacity for racial transformation—a racial logic that
serves the demands of digital visual capital in the contemporary moment. I
interpret contemporary Dominican cultural productions through a diversity
of Dominican symbols of the everyday. Looking at Dominican visual culture
in this way, I take into account a legacy of Surrealism that emerges within the
contemporary moment in Santo Domingo and I look at several decidedly
surrealist contemporary texts.
Like other Caribbean nations, the Dominican Republic has always existed
as a transnational space. Long before the country’s formation as a nation-
state, the island of Saint Domingue existed as a transnational and trans-
cultural space.3 In the past, technologies such as the sailing ship produced
these Caribbean networks.4 But today, other technologies assist in the flow
of people, goods, ideas, capital, and culture in and out of these spaces, and
digital technologies, in particular, facilitate the rapid flow of beliefs, images,
meanings, and emotions. As nations desperately try to define and determine
the bounds of their territories, national borders are increasingly porous, and
Dominican transnational identity and experiences do not require physi-
cal travel abroad. The term “globalization” was utilized by scholars of Latin
America and the Caribbean in the 1990s, but more recently “transnational”
has been a key term of analysis in contemporary cultural studies to high-
light cultural “connectivities” or linkages among nation-states.5 As historian
 Introduction · 3

Elizabeth Manley has shown, Dominican women under dictatorship in the

twentieth century “found and expanded spaces of global and transnational
activism that advanced basic political rights and paved the way for the femi-
nist movement.”6 Transnational connectivities were a part of producing and
sustaining Dominican women’s feminist projects.
According to Dominican historian Frank Moya Pons, many politicians in
the United States and the Dominican Republic have “understood the Do-
minican Republic as a satellite of the US in the Caribbean Region. It has for
decades remained under US supervision, in a way, through US economic
reliance and thus US control, for the sheer fear of having ‘another Cuba’ in
the Caribbean.”7 Amalia Cabezas has described the Dominican Republic as
having “long been a quasi-colony of the United States,” and until the 1990s,
it was viewed as “emblematic of the problems that could beset Cuba, troubles
such as child prostitution, gambling, casinos, widespread social inequities,
and the pervasive lack of a social safety net for its citizens.”8 The United States
occupied the Dominican Republic through military intervention from 1916
to 1924 and invaded the country again in 1965—on both occasions with the
explicit aim of influencing political outcomes and “making the world safe
for capitalism” in the years before and during the Cold War.9
Today, one can plainly see a US cultural occupation of the Dominican
Republic, though it is not the only country with influence there.10 Being Do-
minican in Santo Domingo now means watching American-made TV shows
on your smartphone as much as it means viewing Latin American telenovelas
with the family; it means immediately adopting new fashions, foods, values,
and language from abroad, celebrating Thanksgiving and Halloween, and
sustaining a connection to relatives overseas via social media twenty-four
hours a day. The neoliberalization of Dominican women’s lives—including
the increased privatization of daily life, the nation-state’s investment in a
global tourism industry, and the broad influence of US popular culture and
cultural values—is legible throughout Dominican society and visual culture,
and central to the culture of Santo Domingo.
“Ya somos americanizadas [We are already Americanized],” asserts a friend
(via Facebook chat) who grew up in Santo Domingo, where countless new
condo towers, a massive Ikea, and a rapidly expanding Metro rail system
reflect in the city’s landscape how Dominicans understand themselves as
“transnational subjects” of the contemporary age.11 An entire generation of
Dominicans are forming their identities within a nation that has changed
dramatically under neoliberal development schemes; they are significantly
assimilating to US culture without ever leaving the island.12 English slang
4 . Introduction

like “chillin’” and hybrid phrases like “vamos al party,” “que hay de new,”
and “tomar un chance” turn up in conversation. Dominicanisms capture a
fluid use of language from afuera (outside the island). As Carlos Andújar
Persinal writes of Dominican Spanish, “Of course we are not speaking an
academic Spanish, but a typical Spanish from the street, the colloquial, that
is cultural Spanish and that is social Spanish that represents the history and
culture of American peoples.”13 Linguistic shifts are ongoing, as Dominican
youth on the street in Santo Domingo, or on Facebook in diaspora, can tell
you. Shifts in the meaning of the visual in Santo Domingo—including racial
meanings—are equally important.
In her essay in the Black Scholar, Lorgia García Peña effectively theorizes
the deep roots of an ever-shifting notion of blackness among Dominicans.
To understand how Dominican blackness might be misinterpreted and mis-
understood by many, suggests García Peña, it is necessary to understand
that it is continually produced through a sort of ebb and flow, or “vaivén”
as she calls it, that reflects “translations and negotiations of racial ideology
across markets and nations.”14 García Peña is clear that “Dominican black-
ness is an embodied concept that is performed, and inscribed on the flesh
of national subjects through social processes that are very much linked to
the political and economic realities of the nation in its relationship to the
history and persisten[t] presence of colonial (Spain) and imperial (US) im-
positions.”15 While her examination of Dominican blackness and its flows
points to markets, the ways that I theorize experiences of race and mixed
race among Dominican women explore how they internalize these colonial
and imperial impositions.

The See/Saw of Mixed Race

My interdisciplinary analysis of the significance of mixed-race bodies is in-
formed by an understanding of race as a social construct that, like gender,
is inherently performative. While I do not necessarily apply a performance
studies methodology to my readings of visual culture and ethnography
throughout this text, I recognize that “blackness and performance are two
discourses whose histories converge at the site of otherness.”16 Because mixed-
race people of African descent are often signifying and/or performing race
in multiple ways as we move across space and time, we have insights into the
ways that race is being performed and a heightened awareness of the details
of difference to which, on any given day, we may fail to measure up. When
shifting to represent different identities (e.g., black while in Europe, not black
 Introduction · 5

while in the Dominican Republic), Dominican women are often required to

perform race and gender in ways that lead to insight and interiority. As E.
Patrick Johnson affirms, “Self-reflexivity is usually a by-product of cultural
performance, and this is particularly true for the performer who performs the
Other.”17 A self-conscious awareness drawn from the experience of identify-
ing as black, yet being fair enough in color to pass as white, is an emergent
theme in literature of women of the African diaspora.18
An awareness of one’s subjectivity, argues feminist filmmaker and cultural
theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha, is essential to understanding the world outside of
one’s self: “The moment the insider steps out from the inside she’s no longer
a mere insider. She necessarily looks in from the outside while also looking
out from the inside. Not quite the same, not quite the other, she stands in
that undetermined threshold place where she constantly drifts in and out.”19
This theory speaks to my own experience of assimilating into Dominican
culture as an outsider and the ways that this text provides at some points an
auto-ethnography of my time in Santo Domingo. However, it also provides
a useful way to understand the experience of racial malleability that for
myself and the women I write about is one of being “not quite the same, not
quite other” in our families and our communities. In other words, our racial
identities may be experienced as a constant drifting. Many anthropologists
have observed this experience of being at the same time both inside and
outside when asked to write about their own communities by serving as
“native informants.” Jill Olumide refers to this epistemic knowledge of being
racially ambiguous as the “mixed race condition.”20
Throughout Being La Dominicana, I demonstrate the ways that Dominican
women’s mixed-race identities are not only in constant movement but also
that they “see/saw” in relation to others on a hierarchical scale of power. I use
the term see/saw, then, to convey this feeling of drifting up and down, and
to point to the fact that the movement is relational: the act of see-sawing up
and down requires that there be another body against which to balance one’s
self in that moment. See/sawing thus requires that for one person to rise,
another must sink: a highly relational construction of racial meaning. As I
show throughout this text, Dominican women’s identities are constantly re-
calibrated through relational interactions that reproduce hierarchies of color,
class, gender, sexuality, and more, thus revealing power dynamics, specifically
in relation to blackness. In part due to their racial ambiguity, they can see/saw
up and down in a racial hierarchy in any given moment, because the racial
meaning of their body is only fixed at the moment of interaction. The form
I use in constructing this term with a forward slash is also influenced by the
6 . Introduction

critical theoretical work of Dominican scholar Lorgia García Peña, whose

concept of contradiction employs italics in order to effectively demonstrate
her theory of the changing nature of dominicanidad across space and time
as it is produced through language. She necessarily exerts force on a word in
English, so that it can adequately capture the ways dominicanidad is always
contested and negotiated.21
My own use of a forward slash within the concept see/saw serves three
unique purposes: 1) it reminds us of the act of visual engagement in struc-
tures of power around race by demarcating two different forms of the verb
“to see”; 2) it acknowledges the possibility of seeing one thing racially in one
way and then looking back on it at a different moment only to understand
it another way. This is repeatedly the case in my study of race, gender, and
sexuality in Dominican society: I am constantly reevaluating what I see and
what I once saw in the archive of cultural productions, digital media, and
ethnographic moments that I have gathered. And, finally, 3) the line between
the two words captures a sort of cleaving and separation from others that oc-
curs when one is forced to see the world in new ways. The line between the
two acts of seeing—past and present—marks for us a process of fragmenta-
tion that is integral to the production of subjectivity that I explore among
Dominican women. It is a production of self that occurs through a weaving
together of visual images and navigating representations in visual culture.
Within the complex category of “the Americas,” the Dominican Republic’s
intimacy with the United States is noteworthy. A hemispheric orientation to
my analysis illuminates the many connections across the region.22 As many
families in Santo Domingo squeeze into tiny cinderblock apartments that lack
consistently running water or electricity, US cable television with subtitles
translates the MTV reality shows and Atlanta local news that flows into their
homes. High-end malls and US fast-food chains respond to and cultivate a
desire on the part of Dominicans in the capital city to live like those outside the
country. Writes Diana Taylor, “The Americas, I have been taught to believe,
are one—and I still believe it. Produced and organized through mutually
constitutive scenarios, acts, transactions, migrations, and social systems,
our hemisphere proves a contested and entangled space.”23 Across this text,
I explore how transnational subjects are produced within the Dominican
Republic and the many ways, as Taylor states, “the First World is in the Third
World just as the Third World lives in the First.”24 For, while the Dominican
neighborhood of Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan exists as an ethnic
enclave where you can live out your days speaking only Dominican Spanish
and eating asopao and tostones con salami, a corresponding reality holds true
 Introduction · 7

for North American expats who enjoy English-speaking upper-class lives in

Santo Domingo; upscale supermarkets across the Dominican Republic offer
a wide array of specialty foods for foreign palates (and paychecks).
Cultural histories of contemporary life in Santo Domingo are few and
far between.25 Past presidents Rafael Trujillo, Joaquin Balaguer, and Juan
Bosch were all prolific writers and publishers on the history of the nation;
they were also notorious for scripting the story of events only in ways they
wanted their actions remembered. Academic discourse that informs schol-
arly perceptions of the Dominican Republic frequently omits the dynamic
realities of contemporary life and gendered experiences.26 Yet women of color
have a distinct view within the workings of neoliberalism and its contradic-
tions in daily life, and this book reflects that. Women of color feminism as
a theoretical approach is at the center of my work. It is an epistemology
essential to drawing meaning from the cultural productions of women of
African descent because it places personal narrative at the fore, positioning
the experiences of other women of color as epistemic knowledge that coun-
ters colonialist and imperialist narratives about who Dominican women are.
Furthermore, when M. Jacqui Alexander calls for “pedagogies of the sacred”
as part of our work as black feminist, transnational, women scholars, she is
urging us to reclaim embodied knowledges, valuing beliefs and practices that
have so often be dismissed. As a praxis, women of color feminism challenges
accepted norms and cultural constructions such as heteronormativity and
heteropatriarchy.27 Women of color worldwide demanded of the feminism of
the 1970s and 1980s this level of self-reflexivity in which white women might
recognize their own privilege and complicity within a hegemonic structure
from which they benefit.
Applying transnational feminist theory as a paradigmatic approach to my
research has meant locating myself in solidarity with the many Dominican
women who inform how I tell this story. They are themselves activists and
artists connected to elaborate transnational feminist networks; they regularly
cross borders and are shaped by these experiences. Transnational feminism
also demands that I be conscientious about depicting the inherent inequalities
that come up each time women of color sit together (even metaphorically)
at the same table and it reminds me of the urgency of the work to be done
among us.28 Ultimately, my transnational feminist analysis is informed by
their insights about globalizing systems of uneven development, and the
postcolonial narratives of race and gender that they navigate daily.29 I have
sought out feminist alliances with women of color for whom my presence
and engagement in their lives is a benefit and with whom I share a critique
8 . Introduction

of capitalism and globalization across gender, class, race, and nation. Many
of the women I write about feel exploited as workers in industries that cross
borders—some work at call centers or are earning degrees in tourism to work
in hotels.
By using the term transnational I seek to highlight their experiences of
neoliberal globalization and its fluid movement on many societal registers.
I claim a transnational feminist research methodology because of the con-
versations I have engaged in that have shaped my approach to the work at
this moment in time. Furthermore, I wrestle with the imperialist model
of “knowledge extraction” as I seek a collaborative methodology through
which Dominican women’s voices in my scholarship are foregrounded.30
Transnational feminist studies is not fully formed as a field, as Richa Nagar
and Amanda Locke Swarr have argued, and as my scholarship shows, it
does require greater self-critical examination if it is to suggest that inherent
power dynamics might be disrupted through unorthodox ethnography.31 I
disrupt by sharing my work with the community I write about as I write,
and by including their full names in the text when they have chosen to be
identifiable.32 And a transnational feminist approach to this project has of-
fered me a way of theorizing my own experiences of the insider-outsider ebbs
and flows of African diaspora solidarities in the Dominican Republic. And
it has provided me a better lens through which to bear witness in spaces in
which cultural production as knowledge production occurs among women
in Santo Domingo.

Out from Underneath the Imagery of the “Picturesque”

To tell this story about the lives and experiences of Dominican women, I
am certain I must tell it with and through visual culture and account for
how photographs make visible Dominican women’s mixed-race bodies
within a specific racial schema. Writes Gloria Anzaldúa, “Images are
more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious.
Picture language precedes thinking in words; the metaphorical mind
precedes analytical consciousness.”33 The photograph has been used to both
humanize and dehumanize in the tropics and has been employed with great
consistency to create spectacle. The Caribbean has a long history tied to
the “picturesque,” a space of tropical flora, fauna, and the desirable native
Other. As Hazel Carby argues, it is through the technology of photography
that these images serve to “fix the colonies in a pre-modern moment.”34
Moreover, photography was developed alongside tourism, serving in part
 Introduction · 9

as a way to collect and bring back a piece of a place that one visited. And as
Thompson writes, “colonial representations were frequently not just reflective
of colonial views but became constitutive and iconic parts of the colonies’
landscape.”35 Photography was and is a part of constituting the native Other
in these spaces. For instance, Greg Grandin reminds us, “Photography’s close
association with travel writing, naturalism, medicine, and anthropology
coincided with the extension of nineteen-century European imperialism,
providing visual confirmation of ascendant pseudoscientific and rationalized
discourses of civilization, nation, and race.”36 Furthermore, photographs
can at times racialize or deracialize bodies. Highlighting contrasts between
who is perceived as “modern” and who is perceived as “savage,” is a tactic
of imperialism past and present that has consistently been used to justify
colonial intervention.37
Photographs hanging on the wall of a Dominican home today echo a time
in which households obligatorily hung portraits of dictator Rafael Trujillo
as a sign of their allegiance to the nation. His image served as a reminder
that he was always watching over them, both as a patriarch in the home
and as an agent policing how they performed their Dominicanness. Studio
portraits of two teenage girls hang on the wall above the dining table of
their family’s Santo Domingo apartment. Their hair blows in the artificial
breeze of a portrait studio. It only falls straight down past their shoulders
or flutters in the breeze because it has been chemically straightened and
pressed. The studio photographs work to confirm the racial status of each
of the young women by demonstrating that they have “pelo liso” or “good
hair,” thus positioning them within the Dominican racial category morena
(brown) or even morenita (a little brown), and thereby distancing them from
blackness. How these portraits are placed—centrally, alongside graduation
photos—in this working-class household tells a story of status attainment;
the omission of a dark-skinned family member on the photo wall reinforces
other values.
When I look at family photographs of others, I find myself obsessively
reading for “family resemblances,” trying to see who looks most like whom.
This viewing habit comes from being told as a black child that I did not look
like my white mother. When one has to look beyond color, one must learn
other phenotypic details on which to measure similarity and difference and
relationship: the way that the people in the photo are sitting together, the
setting and space that surrounds them. There is information for the viewer
about the subjects’ relationships to one another and their intimacies, more
so when viewing a family photo in which each family member is a different
10 . Introduction

shade. Photographic images capture social hierarchies as well as gradations

of color, differences that are named in Dominican speech, like negra, morena,
india (with gender indicated by the last letter of the word), and many other
terms that articulate gradations of difference. The term morena may be em-
ployed by Dominicans to refer to a woman who is dark in color, but in a
more socially acceptable way, thereby avoiding use of the term negra or black,
which is so often used in the Dominican Republic to refer to Haitians.38 De-
tails of difference are commonsense observations and visual code for those
who live in racially mixed communities. Details of phenotype that produce
racial categories are critical to how systems of race are sustained, not only
on an individual basis but as a larger social system.
Women in the Caribbean have for centuries learned to use their bodies
and their sexuality to access power and wealth.39 The images that domini-
canas circulate online of themselves in Santo Domingo today emerge and
exist within a visual economy in which their raced and sexualized bodies
are valued for drawing capital to the region. Moreover, a visual economy
built on what outsiders are eager to believe about the Dominican Republic
influences the aesthetic decisions made online by Dominican women tied
to their association with blackness. As Thompson writes in Shine: The Vi-
sual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice: “Photographic
forms . . . not only circulate particular iconographies and represent specific
geographies, but the shared genres inform a sense of connection between
diasporic groups, encouraging similar approaches to posing in public, to a
photographic self-fashioning. They also offer the possibility of recognition
by one’s peers and diasporic counterparts as co-participants, with different
level of power and visibility in visual cultural expressions.”40
When represented online as beauty pageant contestants, fashion models, and
film stars, globally disseminated media narratives make Dominican women
out to be little more than landscape or goods to be consumed in a global mar-
ketplace.41 “Tropicalization,” which Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chavelez-
Silverman use to describe the application of a Latin American exoticized ethnic
identity, is inextricable from the context in which Dominican women in Santo
Domingo live their lives. Their bodies are “tropicalized” by their location and
their identities are understood through a racialized narrative that gives them
a particular value, namely one that involves positioning them as part of an
exotic temptation narrative for foreigners.42 The transnational economy of
media and popular culture that Dominican women engage with is infiltrated
by the hegemonic discourses that hypersexualize their bodies and prize them
as being of greatest value to foreigners.
 Introduction · 11

Whose Narrative Eye in the Caribbean?

In popular discourse we are familiar with the common phrase “seeing is
believing” to suggest that to see something with one’s own eyes is to know
it to be true. Yet in reality, the “visual eye,” or how one sees in the physical
world, draws on a great deal of sociocultural bias. This becomes most evident
when we begin to talk about what we see when we see mixed race. Seeing the
racial identity of others requires not only visual cues but also narratives that
inform our recognition of those visual cues.43 Across this text, I consider the
ways that a “narrative eye,” or what we already believe to be true about race,
informs how we see Dominican women—and how they see one another.
Quite often, race is destabilized through its production and reproduction
within mass media; the internet, for example, provides a proliferation of
photographic images that inform racial meaning. Meanings attributed to
visual representation of a Dominican body by the viewer are in constant
flux, not unlike the ways that representations of Latinas in Hollywood film
have shifted across decades.44 Dominican women’s bodies are often racially
ambiguous in such a way that the subtleties of phenotype are perceived
differently depending on surrounding information. Understanding that the
visual eye is informed by cultural beliefs is crucial to reading the meaning
of mixed race in the Dominican Republic.
Drawing on their own words and cultural productions, I explore how
Dominican women understand their transnational identities and experiences
of mixed race in Santo Domingo today. I argue throughout that hierarchies of
color, the possibility for racial fluidity, and a malleable racial imaginary enable
unique neoliberal processes of identity formation for Dominican women.
Experiences of malleable racial identity, along with gender and sexuality,
reveal the intersections of dynamics of power that Dominican women
navigate in Santo Domingo in the contemporary moment, particularly when
there is a social value placed on being able to transform one’s self in terms of
identities we have long presumed fixed. I heed Siobhan Somerville’s challenge
“to recognize the instability of multiple categories of difference simultaneously
rather than assume the fixity of one to establish the complexity of another.”45
Through ethnography and visual culture analysis I question the types of
transnational identities that Dominican women in Santo Domingo forge
within this cultural context. How do they fare beneath the weight of a
culture of neoliberal policy and global development? How do they imagine
themselves within an economy that relies on their labor in and out of the
public sphere, or their availability as consumable goods?46 And how do we
12 . Introduction

imagine Dominican women within a Caribbean economy that relies so much

on the outsider’s consumption of the visual? By highlighting social media
throughout, and its centrality to Dominican identity and experience, I am
able to account for the ways that a hypervisual culture is critical to Dominican
women’s processes of self-making in Santo Domingo. My investigation aligns
with Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s assertion that “The effort must be
made to understand race as an unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social
meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle [emphasis in
original].”47
Being La Dominicana explores three fundamental aspects of contemporary
Dominican society that are shaping the lives and identities of Dominican
women in a neoliberal Santo Domingo: the hypervisuality of popular culture,
the commodification of mixed-race bodies of African descent (in particular
racially ambiguous Dominican women’s bodies), and the ubiquity of violence
against women and girls. I argue that it is necessary to foreground visual dis-
course as central to Dominican society where hierarchies of color inevitably
factor into the production of other categories of identity. By exploring how
Dominican women are characterized in advertising, murals, billboards, and
Dominican films and videos, and how they represent themselves in their
own cultural productions, I confront the enduring (mixed) race and gender
stereotypes that young Dominican women navigate. At the same time, I am
attentive to the constant destabilization of Dominican women’s identities as
they move transnationally and how their identities are recalibrated through
relational interactions that reproduce hierarchies of color, class, gender, and
sexuality, thus revealing fundamental power dynamics. Dominican women,
I contend, navigate the world shaped by the possibility of bodily transfor-
mation, and whether intentional or not, this epistemic knowledge relies on
a nonbinary framework of understanding racial identity in relationship to
blackness.
In addition to engaging in both ethnographic practices and auto-eth-
nography, drawing on visual culture studies and mixed-race studies, Being
La Dominicana also applies a queer lens of analysis to numerous aspects
of Dominican popular culture that resist heteronormative interpretation.
By exploring a broad range of Dominican women’s perspectives and their
lived experiences—from Marxist students fighting for environmentalism,
education, and LGBTQ+ rights, to Metalheads, Hare Krishnas, slam poets,
and black lesbian feminists pushing back against a conservative culture—I
counter existing stereotypes of Dominican womanhood that are embed-
ded in extensive cultural histories of slavery, colonialism, and decades of
 Introduction · 13

dictatorship. These stereotypes appear to combine essentializing represen-

tations of Black women and Latinas in the United States. For example, the
saintly and reliable Dominican mother, lauded as the “ama de casa (female
head of household),” is also seen as a self-sacrificing and hardworking “lucha-
dora (fighter),” and at times the figure seems to echo the “mammy” archetype
prominent in the United States who is dedicated to her family and asexual.
In contrast, the curvaceous and narrow-waisted hypersexual mistress/girl-
friend represents a costly sex object that every Dominican man is expected to
have. Although light-skinned, this “megadiva” echoes the Jezebel archetype
of African American lore, while doing double duty as the “fiery Latina.” The
many young women I interviewed readily describe these stereotypes and how
they negotiate these limiting gendered expectations daily, along with expec-
tations of a traditionally conservative culture, shaped by Catholicism. The
ubiquitous juxtaposition of the Virgin (the good daughter) and the Whore
(the hypersexualized girlfriend), along with the self-sacrificing Dominican
mother, become further entrenched under the weight of a neoliberal economy
and the uneven development of Santo Domingo. Another often overlooked
archetype of la dominicana that emerges in this text is that of the respectable,
well-educated Dominican woman, often portrayed as the striving student, as
with the studious rebel Minerva Mirabal, famously depicted by Julia Álvarez
in her 1994 novel In the Time of the Butterflies.
Being La Dominicana draws on an extensive archive of works produced by
artists and activists including print and online publications, documented live
performances, photographic images, and online discourse via Facebook in
particular, essential to broadening US scholarly perspectives on Dominican
identity. Facebook is brimming with images of Caribbean destinations,
vacation photos in which locals themselves participate in the production
of visual portrayals of an exoticized space. Today, one’s family album is
online—always already in the palm of any smartphone user’s hand—and the
curated wall of images is a digital one. Selfies and Facebook photos within an
economy of the picturesque inform the ways that Dominican women learn
about themselves through streams of transnational media. As Susan Sontag
recognized, with the technology of twentieth-century photography, “We learn
to see ourselves photographically.”48 Meanwhile, images of brown-skinned
Dominican women’s bodies that circulate widely online do so with similar
consequences to that of black women’s bodies elsewhere: they are understood
as commodities.49 There is no way to view them outside of such a racialized
and gendered historical interpretation and it is equally difficult for the women
to view themselves outside of this framework. As Norman Bryson explains,
14 . Introduction

“When I learn to speak, I am inserted into systems of discourse that were

there before I was, and will remain after I am gone. Similarly, when I learn
to see socially, that is, when I begin to articulate my retinal experience with
the codes of recognition that come to me from my social milieu(s), I am
inserted into systems of visual discourse that saw the world before I did, and
will go on seeing after I see no longer.”50 Dominican women learn to see and
be seen in racial terms within a dynamic cultural context that is informed
by global media.
The social media archive I have gathered for this text serves as a time cap-
sule, or a window into life in Santo Domingo. Early photography altered our
sense of what it means to know something about the world by having “seen it
with our own eyes”; how we see ourselves was also changed by technology.51
Images on social media have had an equally profound impact on how we
view ourselves. How Dominican women interpret and curate images online
has much to tell us about race and gender in Dominican society. For this
reason, I joined my Dominican friends and interviewees in engaging in the
media-saturated cultural moment; a cultural analysis of race and mixed race
done through ethnography alone would have been incomplete. I read Face-
book as a dynamic archive through which to see how Dominican women are
invested in representing themselves. Today’s digitally circulated vernacular
images, I argue, are an essential part of how Dominican women produce and
reproduce contemporary ideas about racial ambiguity, gender, and sexual-
ity in Santo Domingo. These aspects of their identity are already rooted in
existing “scopic regimes” under which they learn to see themselves.52
Immersed in Dominican culture I ask, How are our eyes constantly
conditioned to read race and color within a Dominican scopic regime?
How differently do my eyes read race from how Dominicans might? Cu-
ban artist and scholar Coco Fusco writes in her introduction to Only Skin
Deep, “Americans consume an astounding amount and variety of racial
imagery and fantasy in music, literature, film, television, pornography,
tourism, advertising, fashion, and beauty products. Sensationalized racial
conflicts that accentuate racial polarities and enforce stereotypes are just as
popular grist for the media mill as the prospect of eliminating, accentuat-
ing, or transforming racial characteristics through miracle treatments and
morphing machines.”53 In fact, in our globalized popular media of today,
an acceptable “brownness” has replaced blackness in representations of the
female ethnic Other, priming brown and ambiguous bodies for transna-
tional consumption.54 Thus, the possibility of adapting one’s racial identity
through symbols of race and class—being able to alter physical attributes to
 Introduction · 15

embrace or at other moments distance oneself from blackness—is pivotal

to many Dominican women’s lives.
Writing transnational cultural studies at this moment in time, when the
transmission of information via the internet is nearly instantaneous, is simul-
taneously terrifying and exhilarating. Conversations take place about images
online when users respond with other images evolving and reinforcing the
social meaning and significance of each image deployed. Visual referents
easily cross linguistic divides, signifying universal meanings as communities
receive widely circulated advertising from abroad. The racial essentialism of
modernity now appears to have been traded in for the “assemblage”—like
music mash-ups in which an old song is revitalized by being blended with
a new one.55 Popular culture from the United States takes on new life as
Dominicans repurpose for their own use aspects of the culture they claim.
Michael Jackson’s 1991 hit song “Remember the Time” acquired new cultural
significance when it was remixed and transformed into merengue dance mu-
sic by Dominican artist Omega. A form of transnational cultural pastiche,
mash-ups are inherently part of Dominican life, equally evident in street
foods that riff on American fast food to música raíz, a Dominican form that
blends several different styles of music—and in visual culture online and off.
Like elsewhere in the world, visual culture in Dominican society is deployed
to transmit national ideologies, battle sexism, resist government corruption,
and challenge neoliberal imperialism. From cellphone videos and digital
snapshots shared among peers, to music videos circulated across worldwide
networks, Dominicans in Santo Domingo today utilize digitized visual dis-
course that constantly engages social hierarchies of race, gender, and color.
In the work of award-winning Dominican writer Rita Indiana Hernández,
for example, one can see that she joins together pieces of transnational media
to produce cultural productions that are highly legible among Dominicans.
“We’re watching Rocky III again cuz it looks like, along with Dirty Dancing,
it’s the only thing playing this summer,” writes Hernández in her novel Papi,
as she expertly conveys the cultural continuity between the United States
and the Dominican Republic in the 1980s. Through her adolescent protago-
nists, Hernández portrays what Maja Horn argues are the subjectivities of
a disenchanted generation of Dominicans who grew into their identities in
the shadow of Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship (1931–1960), while living under
the presidency of Joaquín Balaguer.56 Papi focuses on life in Santo Domingo
under the presidency of Leonel Fernández (2004–2012), a president com-
mitted to modernization that came in the form of construction and tech-
nological infrastructure, more recently Danilo Medina (2012–2020) carried
16 . Introduction

this forward. Both represent the Partido de la Liberación Dominicana, or

PLD, and were viewed by those on the political left as a continuation of the
same political trajectory as the dictatorship.
When in his first term as president in 1996, Fernández vowed that he would
make Santo Domingo into a “little New York” (the place of his childhood), he
was mobilizing an ideology of contemporary Dominican identity—as modern,
connected to New York City, invested in notions of progress—and hinting at
major construction projects to come.57 This notion of progress was a tried-and-
true formula of dictator Rafael Trujillo before him. During his three terms in
office, “Leonel,” as he was known, funded the construction of bridges, parks,
tunnels, and a shiny new Metro system throughout Santo Domingo, which
would remake the face of the capital. Though as one Santo Domingo graffiti
artist aptly noted in 2010, “Leonel=Balager+Internet.” Misspelling and all, the
sentiment—later circulated as an image on Facebook—reflects an ongoing
critique of the way that the existing government perpetuates the same abuses
of power as the dictatorship and of the limits of technological advancement
to enact democracy.

The DR as a Site of Study

“It’s so difficult to actually listen to all the voices and then pick the ones that
build a solid concept about or opinion about the subject,” observes twenty-
four-year-old Jimena, after reading a piece that I had written about her peers.
“Yes,” I agree. “It will end up being a snapshot of what’s going on, you
know, in 2010, and what’s happening and what people were saying.”
“I like that concept, a ‘snapshot,’” she repeats. Indeed, I use the snapshot as
a metaphor to refer to a containment and framing of the day-to-day occur-
rences in one location at one particular moment. In this case, Santo Domingo,
from 2010 into the present. While Ingrid also understands my use of this
metaphor, she nevertheless questions my terms of analysis—“Transnational?
Why transnational?”—and I am reminded of the ways that this term, which
has been so important to the framing of my project in the field of American
Studies, has little resonance with her. “Because it really interests me how you
can live in the Dominican Republic and speak English and identify with US
culture,” I tell her. Her reaction also reminds me that the “transnational” is
so inherently a part of life for young people in Santo Domingo that it seems
hardly to require remark. The Dominican women I have interviewed for this
book do not know life any other way.
 Introduction · 17

All of the women I interviewed had regular access to the internet and typi-
cally spent time daily consuming popular culture online via desktop comput-
ers, laptops, or handheld devices (in 2010 this was mainly the BlackBerry). By
“consume,” I mean take in—both intentionally and unintentionally—through
images and other discourse the ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, Domini-
canness, and much more.58 True to ever-adapting Dominican vocabulary,
the Dominican term and concept of consumismo, meaning “consumerism,”
is a telling play on words that names a noticeable shift from a collectivist
culture to one that is more individualistic. It can also be understood as the
Spanish phrase con su mismo, which translates as “with yourself ” and as
such conveys judgment about the selfishness of a product-oriented lifestyle,
especially the desire for goods from abroad. In this way, the term marks
the visible increased consumption within Dominican society today and is a
critique made by some Dominicans about the acute impact of capitalism on
the values of other Dominicans.
Like so many countries in Latin America, the Dominican Republic has
relied on remittances—both cultural and economic—influencing social and
political life back on the island. The number of Dominicans immigrating
abroad steadily increased from the 1960s through the 1980s.59 Massive migra-
tions of Dominicans to New York in the 1980s brought US goods and cultural
remittances to the island. Using a range of new technologies, Dominicans
on the island today are able to maintain constant contact with family and
friends in the diaspora, sharing goods, news, ideas, and culture across na-
tional borders. In 2004, the Dominican Republic–Central American Free
Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) opened up Dominican borders to US indus-
try in the name of development. Now billions of dollars flow from the United
States into the Dominican Republic annually.60 Neoliberal economic policies
have the Dominican Republic developing in a fashion in which it lurches
forward unevenly, leaving many of its citizens far behind. As in so many
parts of the world, access to foreign goods has increased while incomes have
remained stagnant. Even as new luxury malls continue to open, Dominican
families in Santo Domingo subsist on locally produced staple foods, such as
plantains, processed meats, white bread, rice, beans, and eggs. And they are
significantly impacted each time the prices of these goods (and the gas with
which to cook them) rise incrementally. Uneven development throughout
Santo Domingo is emblematic of “structural disadvantages that have been
shaped by the colonial process and by the uneven division of international
labor.”61
18 . Introduction

Participation in the global market entails producing something for

consumption by other nations. On the island of Hispaniola, this has
historically meant the addictive substance of sugar, which, among other
things, produced a centuries-long dependence on the labor of enslaved
Africans. Today, the extraction of goods and labor from the Dominican
Republic for the benefit of more-developed nations continues—and often
Dominican bodies are the goods being extracted. For example, boys and
young men throughout the Dominican Republic have high hopes of becoming
baseball players for North American leagues. To be sure, every one of the
thirty US Major League baseball teams has contributed to the patchwork of
training academies built throughout the Dominican countryside. At this very
moment, the next big-league player is practicing for his “once in a lifetime”
opportunity. One Dominican recruiter enthusiastically likened the town of
San Pedro de Macoris (famous for producing outstanding peloteros) to a
mine where he knew he would surely hit gold. ESPN also uses this language,
stating frankly that these are “academies built to exploit what seems to be
an inexhaustible gold mine of talent.”62 In the film Sugar (2008), a pivotal
scene depicts the title character standing with a fellow young recruit in a
US clothing store as we watch it finally dawn on him that he himself is the
exported good. Having made the leap from a small Dominican town toward
his aspiration of being a US Major League ballplayer, he glances at the tag of
a shirt for sale that reads, “Made in the Dominican Republic.”
Like elsewhere in the Caribbean, a vast informal economy of sex tour-
ism impacts how outsiders view Dominican bodies as goods for consump-
tion. Tourists travel to the island to find Dominican and Haitian men and
women, boys and girls, cis and trans, who are willing to fulfill their sexual
desires.63 Sex tourism is so prevalent within Dominican society that low-
brow popular Dominican films such as Sanky Panky (2007) and its sequels
(2013, 2018) satirize the sexual economy that tourism creates, though in this
case for Dominican men.64 Yet Dominican women’s most intimate relation-
ships are informed by neoliberal policies under which their affective labor is
commodified as part of a thriving tourism economy.65 Dominican women’s
bodies are “made visible in the global context through particular articula-
tions of gender and sexuality that are deployed by consumer culture and
transported by mediated images.”66 Hypersexualized in popular media, they
are marked and marketed as consumable goods on multiple levels under a
neoliberal development plan that relies on tourism for economic growth.
In her book What’s Love Got to Do with It?, Denise Brennan reveals how
Dominican women in the town of Sosúa on the northern coast navigate
 Introduction · 19

an economy of sexual tourism that renders their identities and livelihoods

in terms of transnational opportunities. What Brennan terms a “sexscape”
for the coastal region in fact pervades the entire country, where power dy-
namics in romantic relationships are visible in the ways that women are
racially fetishized within the “transnational social field” of Santo Domingo
as well.
Economic inequalities and the ever-present possibility of purchasing
affective labor in the Dominican Republic is embedded in the social
interactions between foreigners and locals. Kamala Kempadoo’s research
reflects how Caribbean economic reliance on sex tourism produces a form of
cultural imperialism that relies on a desire for the exotic; today contemporary
neoliberal processes of globalization sustain this legacy.67 As Angelique Nixon
states, “tourism reproduces the destructive psychology and race and gender
dynamics of colonialism.”68 A version of this reality is visually confirmed
throughout the Colonial Zone of Santo Domingo, and on beaches across
the island as foreign men wrap their arms around Dominican and Haitian
women and adolescent girls.69

La Mulata
How Dominican women’s racially mixed bodies signify in the Americas today
emerges out of a Latin American ideological framework of generations past
and a global framework of the present that script the fair-skinned woman
as muse, pure and positioned on a pedestal, in contrast to black women and
mulatas as sexually available.70 Dominican women have historically claimed
an Indigenous identity rather than a mulata identity.71 However, in this text I
highlight the social currency of racial ambiguity and Dominican claims on
blackness that are obscured by a long history of distancing from blackness.
According to Daisy Cocco de Filippis, regarding the rejection of blackness
(meaning Africanness) in Dominican poetry: “The mulatto woman as icon
of Dominican womanhood does not enter the Dominican poetic landscape
until well into the twentieth century; and even then she must be hidden under
a protective cloak of euphemisms, such as india (light brown) or trigueña
(olive-skinned, dark complexioned brunette).”72 Moreover, as Dominican
activist Sergia Galván has argued, as elsewhere in the Caribbean, the myths
and prejudices perpetuated about black women sustain the trafficking of
dark-skinned Dominican women in particular into sex work for the benefit
of male European tourists.73 Embedded in a historical legacy of Domini-
can anti-blackness, white and lighter-skinned Dominicans today experience
20 . Introduction

preferential treatment and social benefits while brown and black Dominicans
have internalized beliefs about their body as a commodity.74
Instituting practices of rape and bondage, French and Spanish coloniz-
ers early in the fourteenth century quickly decimated the majority of the
Taíno, the Indigenous people inhabiting the island. Although Dominicans
are predominantly a mix of European, African, and Indigenous heritages,
it is routine for contemporary explanations of Dominican identity to omit
African heritage, falling in line with the Latin American racial project of
mestizaje in which being mixed race of Indigenous and European heritage
is viewed as superior. As Licia Fiol-Mata points out, the racial project taken
up by much of Latin America in the twentieth century invested in the no-
tion that racial mixing would disappear less desirable lineages in a few short
generations; the racial Other would be gone, opined Vasconcelos.75
Dominican national identity has long held the precarious stance that ra-
cially mixed bodies should represent a “civilized” Catholic, middle-class na-
tion. Dominicans have relied on Haitian blackness as a fixed racial category
against which Dominican racial identity could pivot.76 Rules of Dominican
national identity and with it racial identity are in no way uniform, but rather,
as Milagros Ricourt has argued, are “a series of overlapping tendencies always
in contradiction.”77 Just as the meaning of mixed-race bodies can adapt to
context and social signifiers, structures of power contort themselves to put
new values on racially ambiguous bodies—especially by mobilizing anti-
blackness. Colorism further contributes to the ways that racism structures
power by interpolating individuals within communities of color into so-
cial hierarchies that we maintain, even to our own detriment.78 Historically,
across the Americas “Mulattas and mestizas—in the feminine—have been
targeted as the source, the cost, and the evidence of mixture.”79 Today, the
“unique relationship between women and racial mixture” that Suzanne Bost
recognizes is quite evident within a neoliberal global economy that relies so
heavily on the labor of women.
Dominican anti-black prejudices are part of a centuries-long racial proj-
ect; disparaging beliefs about black people and subsequently the black body
emerge out of a cultural value system established under colonialism and
systems of slavery that permeate all levels of Dominican society today.80
The Dominican nation-state has long invested politically in distancing Do-
minican national identity from Haitianness, and its implied Africanness.81
As García Peña states, “Through a discourse of pity, Haiti’s misfortunes
were racialized as results of the country’s African religiosity and as signs
of ‘barbarism’ and ‘incivility.’”82 Xenophobic violence and misogyny, per-
petuated through conservative ideologies of race and gender among the
 Introduction · 21

Dominican elite, were further institutionalized under Trujillo’s regime.83 In

September of 2013, the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal ruled to revoked
citizenship from all Dominicans unable to provide formal documentation
of their citizenship as far back as 1929, thereby targeting Dominicans of
Haitian descent. The late activist Sonia Pierre has asserted that Dominican
elite have deployed “una óptica trujillista [a Trujillistic lens]” to erase the
African heritage of Dominicans and construct a Dominican identity in
contrast to Haitian identity, holding back the development of Dominican
society in a globalizing world.84
Colonizers from Spain and France, and immigrants from Germany, Leba-
non, Palestine, China, the United States, and elsewhere, have made the Do-
minican Republic a pluralistic society, yet the Dominican elite at different
points in time have invested in a narrative of national identity constructed
through xenophobia and anti-Haitianism. As geographer Marco Morales
pointed out to me, you only have to look back a couple of generations in the
Dominican Republic to see married couples of different racial backgrounds
in almost every family. A couple of generations back interracial marriage was
encouraged in an effort to lighten the population; choosing a lighter-skinned
partner would allow for greater social advancement of one’s offspring. Today,
these values and language (“mejorar la raza” [better the race]) remain. Ex-
hibiting features of European and Indigenous racial mixture has remained
a superior position in the racial hierarchy since blackness and Dominican
identity have been constructed in juxtaposition to one another, allowing
Dominicans to embrace a narrative of national identity in the form of His-
panidad and thereby closer to whiteness. A Dominican identity that is nation-
alist, Spanish, Catholic, and white and rejects African culture represents the
colonial racism of the state. Claudina Valdez argues that the anti-blackness
of the Dominican state has been internalized among black people in the
Dominican Republic through its state-sanctioned hispanofilia.85 However, a
recent trip to West Africa by Grammy award-winning Dominican American
rapper Cardi B—and her stated desire to gain Nigerian citizenship—boldly
defied a Dominican anti-blackness that is decidedly anti-African. Born to a
Dominican father and a Trinidadian mother and raised in the South Bronx
in part by her Dominican grandmother, Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar (Cardi
B) has been outspoken about her visit to Ghana and Nigeria at the end of
2019’s Year of Return.86 In her solidarity with Nigerians and embrace of Af-
rican heritage she publicly refused a Denial of blackness.
In stark contrast to the “one-drop rule” maintained by legal precedent in
the United States that determines that anyone with any nonwhite lineage
is not white, whiteness in the Dominican Republic functions as a social
22 . Introduction

category that can be accessed by those with light enough skin. Within Being
La Dominicana I reveal the ways that a consumable brownness or a narra-
tive of blackness is utilized by fair-skinned Dominicans. Kimberly Simmons
suggests that the racial mixedness of Dominicans serves to connect them to
“a sense of shared history and pastness, Dominican ancestry, with a sense
of being and feeling Dominican [emphasis in original].”87 Perhaps for this
reason, countless socially constructed and socially understood racial mark-
ers differentiate how Dominicans understand what they see on each other’s
bodies, in ways not readily discernable to people from outside of this racial
system. Of course, a great many Dominicans are dark in color. They may be
identified as “cocolos,” or the descendants of non-Hispanic African peoples in
the Caribbean; and there are many Dominicans and Dominicans of Haitian
descent who are not mixed race of European descent.88 Dominican historian
Celsa Albert Batista argues that most Dominicans are a mixture of whites
and blacks, resulting in a people that is “mulatos y mulatas por detrás, por
delante, por fuera y por dentro,” which is to say the Dominican past and
future is one of racial mixture and Dominicans are this mixture inside and
out.89 The accompanying image she uses with this theorization is a simple
silhouette of a white human head, with a darker silhouette inside of it; the
illustration serves to reinforce the notion that all Dominicans have within
them la mulata or el mulato. The Dominican expression “black behind the
ears” refers to the practice of examining the crease behind the ear of even
the fairest Dominican bodies for this visual trace of blackness—visualizable
proof of African ancestry.90
While interviewing Dominican women in a Washington, DC, salon, Gi-
netta E. B. Candelario showed them headshots of women and men in hair-
styling magazines in order to elicit a response about the meanings attributed
to different hair types and their associated skin color. She concludes that
among the diasporic Dominicans with whom she spoke, whiteness is not
the ultimate goal, but rather a mixture of European (referred to as “fino” and
suggesting “refined”) features are preferred: “not Nordic or Aryan whiteness
but mixedness that is more an approximation of Hispanic looks . . . straight
haired, tan skinned, aquiline featured.”91 In short, argues Candelario, there is
a Dominican preference to be “of color, but not black.” Notably, the nuances
of racial ideology and Dominican color hierarchy are not accessible to Can-
delario without her use of images as a barometer. Such hierarchies of color
are enacted and maintained through daily interactions and an elaborate and
detailed vocabulary of difference—both visual and verbal. Furthermore, Do-
minican women’s investments in “self-beautification” are investments in the
 Introduction · 23

transformation of racial signifiers, as they exist within and rely upon beauty
standards formed within a cultural value system embedded in centuries of
anti-blackness.92

Alicia en el País de Maravillas

To be clear, I do not believe that there exists some authentic Dominican
woman for me to document in my research. As E. Patrick Johnson states,
the notion of authenticity easily becomes “yet another trope manipulated
for cultural capital.”93 The narrowness of the construct certainly restricted
the scope of my research in some directions, but it was relevant and
responsive to the moment and social context. Within the Dominican social
imaginary, “the Dominican woman” is a composite of different intersecting
representations that reflect numerous social anxieties and expectations and
new social and economic pressures within a rapidly changing neoliberal
culture. La dominicana emerges in fragments over and over again in the
zeitgeist, comprising a series of composite figures; at times she emerges as
fully formed characters or caricatures on screen, in literature, and in stories
told. This social construction remains fluid, in a process of becoming. Thus,
viewing as surrealist the visual archive that I have compiled allows me to tell
a better story about when and where resistances to hegemonic representation
occur in Dominican contemporary culture.
Being La Dominicana accounts for the ways that an especially surreal visual
culture is evident in the Dominican Republic today as not only an echo of the
past but rather an organic response to contemporary disillusionment with
neoliberalism. When I point to “surrealism” throughout this text, I am refer-
ring to the Surrealist aesthetics of André Breton’s transnational avant-garde
art movement—some of which was inspired by his visit to Haiti—and the
various iterations that followed. Breton and his peers were interested in the
subconscious, free association, and what they saw as pure thought without
reason. In their cultural productions they used language experimentally and
bounced meaning off found objects and objects out of context. As Dominican
poet Frank Báez so aptly explains, “You see, for a Dominican it is normal
for one to drink from different traditions. Maybe a writer from a European
country could do his or her work without having to read literature from
other countries. But for a Dominican, it is necessary to keep up with what
is happening everywhere. So one develops these cosmopolitan interests.”94
In the case of Dominican women in particular, surrealist art becomes a
mode of art-making as well as a way of understanding contemporary reality
24 . Introduction

in the process of producing subjectivities. Art historians Ilene Susan Fort

and Tere Arcq note that “For surrealist artists of North America, surrealism
became a means for gaining self-awareness, exploring their inner thoughts
and feelings, dealing with their experiences, and locating their true identi-
ties.”95 What might this process of exploration mean for Afro-Dominican
women artists locating their identities in a flow of global visual culture, a
culture inherently drifting, or among identities perpetually see/sawing up
and down hierarchies of power? The metaphor of the Dominican muñeca
sin rostro that opens this book not only points us to the possibilities of ra-
cial ambiguity on Dominican women’s bodies but is also a gesture toward
that which is surrealist about Dominican women’s cultural identities and
experiences of race and gender in the present day. It is easily emblematic of
the Afro-Surreal, a contemporary aesthetic that D. Scot Miller has argued is
inherently fluid and ambiguous.96

Small Talk and the Big Picture

The more than forty interviews that I conducted with Dominican women
in Santo Domingo inform my research and analysis of the diversity and
specificities of Dominican women’s identities.97 The majority of my
interviewees were in their early and mid-twenties.98 The socioeconomic
backgrounds of the women I chose to interview, and their access to education,
had for the most part prepared them to critique their own subject positions.
Interviewees generally wanted to help me accomplish my research goals;
one said the reason she took time to meet with me was that she wanted her
“fifteen minutes of fame.” As savvy transnational consumers connected to
people, products, and cultures abroad, they constantly negotiate raced and
gendered expectations about their national identity and their mixed-race
bodies, which are produced and reinforced by transnational media flows, a
paternalistic state, and the misogyny of romantic partners. Opportunities for
travel abroad, regular internet access, college and sometimes graduate-level
education, as well as sustained contact with family and friends overseas, all
inform their transnational perspectives.
By handing out business card-sized flyers that carried the Facebook logo,
I was able to draw volunteers from several university campuses in Santo Do-
mingo to participate in an online survey I constructed about existing stereo-
types of the “authentic” Dominican woman. “La dominicana,” I confirmed,
was seen as a “fighter,” who is strong (meaning solid or sturdy), a hard worker,
a good cook, talkative, friendly, and extroverted. She is a “well-put-together”
 Introduction · 25

morena (brown-skinned woman), with her hair, makeup, and nails done.
She is sexy, with “a lot of ass,” and typically with “pelo malo [bad hair],” they
told me, suggesting that “true” Dominican women have hair that requires
straightening in order to be socially acceptable.99 Then, through a Facebook
group I created called “Un proyecto sobre la mujer dominicana (A project
about the Dominican woman),” potential interviewees were able to self-
identify and contact me there to learn about the topic of my research. Those
who participated also referred their friends. In 2010–11, I sat down with thirty
Dominican women in Santo Domingo, ages eighteen to thirty-eight during
my initial research; and in 2016, I completed ten additional interviews to
sharpen my analysis.
Stereotypes of Dominican womanhood perpetually overshadow the
realities of complex contemporary identities informed by a constant
engagement with global culture and networks online. Without a doubt,
transgender Dominican women would have many insights into the lived
experiences of race, gender, and sexuality that I explore in Santo Domingo;
however, I did not pursue that possibility. In 2010, trans women were not
especially visible in Santo Domingo, something that has shifted with the
growth and investment in resources around LGBTQ+ activism in the capital.
Young trans women did not self-select to participate in interviews with me
nor were they to my knowledge a part of the relatively privileged networks
of college students I connected with in Santo Domingo.100 For some time,
social networks for transgender women have remained distinct from that of
queer and heterosexual cisgender Dominican women in the circles to which
I had access; however, a decade later this is changing.
Interviews, participant observation, and detailed notes on ethnographic
observations have allowed me to examine the influence that racial malleability
and a culture of the visual has on Dominican women’s processes of identity
formation. As transnational subjects, Dominican women construct their
identities—exterior and interior—from what are often disparate cultural
influences. Rather than feeling torn across constructed boundaries, they
articulate themselves as whole, yet made up of many cross-cultural signifiers
and cultures, even as they exist in fragmented global formations that take
the shape of a dynamic “constellation,” or multi-sited collage (or pastiche).101
Doing so through tools of visual culture in producing Dominican identity
and as a form of resistance is no way a new phenomenon, but it does look
different with the advent of social media.
Throughout this text, I include myself as an example in moments of cul-
tural observation and unwitting exchanges around what the mixed-race body
26 . Introduction

signifies in Santo Domingo. I engage with Dominican women’s ongoing ne-

gotiations of the body throughout this text because “it is impossible to think
about cultural memory and identity as disembodied. The bodies participating
in the transmission of knowledge and memory are themselves a product of
certain taxonomic, disciplinary mnemonic systems. Gender impacts how
these bodies participate as does ethnicity.”102 Constant remarks about color
are a part of daily life in Dominican society and continually produce racial
meaning. As one interviewee assured me, after a third stranger on the street
told me that my natural hairstyle was a mess: “Yes, here el dominicano feels
at liberty to comment on these things . . . because it’s part of the of our cul-
ture. El dominicano is very extraverted, likes to make commentary. You can
get in a guagua [bus] next to a person that you don’t know and they feel at
liberty to comment on your clothes, your hair, que crema you should put on
your face porque el dominicano es así, porque la dominicana es . . . ,” she then
paused, thoughtfully. “Nosotros somos así,” We are like that, she explained.
In fact, the constant discourse around racial difference is one of the things
that drew me to study identity in the Dominican Republic. It is a stark con-
trast to the dominant culture of the United States of the 1980s and 1990s in
which a notion of “colorblindness” among those who saw themselves as the
most liberal silenced comments about difference. To tell a story about Do-
minican women, I must tell it with and through ongoing negotiations of the
body under global capitalism and my own reflexivity is a tool of knowledge
production. I must also tell it in terms of blackness that is constructed in
relationship to whiteness as much as it is constructed in relation to Haitian
Otherness.
Early in my research, I identified four Dominican celebrities who were
transnationally recognizable and whose images were available through
popular media both online and off: Zoe Saldaña, Martha Heredia, Rita
Indiana, and Michelle Rodriguez. All exist within the visual discourse and
transnational imaginary of Dominicans on the island and each interviewee
drew on existing narratives about these women’s identities in order to make
sense of what they saw in their photographs. It was not until I arrived in
Santo Domingo that I got to know the work of Rita Indiana, though I had
been told to keep an eye out for her locally. I also did not know anything at all
about Martha Heredia, who had won the singing competition TV series Latin
American Idol the year before. Rita Indiana appeared to be at the height of her
popularity as a musician in 2010 while Heredia was already on the decline.
Meanwhile, that year images of Hollywood actress Zoe Saldaña could be
seen all around town and circulated in the press. Actress Michelle Rodriguez
 Introduction · 27

was the person I added last to my study at the urging of the sixteen-year-old
daughter of the family hosting me. Though not particularly popular among
the women I interviewed, she was recognizable because of her role in the
Fast and Furious films, and in 2010 she would star as Minerva Mirabal in her
only Dominican film. I gathered their photographs off the internet for the
purpose of photo elicitation: everyday images of these four women speaking
or singing in front of live audiences.
My use of these four images was critical to inciting a more nuanced
discussion of differences in skin color, hair type, and class aesthetic. The
photographs allowed interviewees to engage both their visual eye and their
narrative eye in deciphering the women’s embodied identities. Symbolic
references within each celebrity’s photographs were also critical to how
interviewees read them in terms of class and color. The Dominican women
I spoke with volunteered their thoughts and opinions on the many nuances
of phenotype that North American researchers talk about broadly as racial
difference. Consistently in conversation they would seek points of reference
to explain color, saying something like, “She’s darker than you but lighter than
me.” Images seemed to capture what we shared as common knowledge—to
which we could jointly refer—and allowed me to get people to open up about
race and color, leading to conversations about experiences of racial ambiguity
in their daily lives.

Ay/I/Eye
As a black transnational feminist scholar, I aimed to produce a text through
which the women I interviewed might have space to define themselves,
thereby disrupting power dynamics between the researcher and interviewees
as subjects. They are most certainly my interlocutors. I ask readers to privi-
lege these women’s words and cultural productions and the stories they tell.
Interviews were conversational in style, with the dynamics of relationship-
building. Each woman acted as a “cultural informant,” educating me about
details of Dominican culture that I could not have initially understood. The
themes that I explore exist as part of the scopic regime of race and gender
in the Dominican Republic and reflect the ways that communities are or-
ganized across an extensive diversity of hierarchies, undergirded by specific
structures of power.103
“I thought she was going to be morenita,” my friend’s father says to her
in front of me when they pick me up from the airport in Santo Domingo.
Presumably, this is what she had told her parents about me, but after one
28 . Introduction

long winter in Michigan I had grown many shades lighter. I had only just
met her parents, but they sized me up in terms of my phenotype in the first
fifteen minutes of our drive into the capital. They remarked on the color of
my eyes and said that I had a pretty face; my eyes they said were the color of
. . . I can’t remember the word. It was something different than “ojos de miel
[eyes like honey]” that I had heard time and again. As I expected, people I
knew in the Dominican Republic were surprised to see me now so pale in
color; they also remarked that I looked better than before. My friend from
the neighborhood would soon ask me why it was that I identified as “negra,”
especially since now I look “casi rubia [almost fair-skinned],” she said. It was
difficult for me to explain it to her, but I tried.104
My ability to offer self-reflexive insight about the experiences of women
of African descent in the diaspora is essential to the praxis of my feminist
ethnographic research, as many scholars have argued.105 My own body
offers me insights into what it means to shapeshift across the permeable
boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and culture, experiences that my
interviewees describe. Since many Dominicans are racially mixed of West
African and Eastern European descent, my own body is legible to them when
we encounter one another on the island. In fact, the Dominican Republic
is the only place I have ever lived in which I can visually blend in as part of
the majority; in the United States, I am considered black like my Ghanaian
father and in West Africa I am understood as white, like my Jewish-American
mother. Interviewees tell me that because of my color, because of my mixed-
race background, they are more willing to share. “Well, you understand,” they
say to me, punctuating their response to my inquiry. My brown skin, light
brown eyes, and curly hair seem to place me there, allowing me to move in
many spaces undetected, even as my status as a foreigner kept me feeling
just out of place enough to provide an outsider’s observation.
My precarious position as participant observer and researcher—building
meaningful relationships with those about whom I write—actively disrupts a
simpler binary of insider/outsider.106 As a transnational Black feminist queer
scholar, I do share a reality of diaspora experience with Afro-Dominican
feminist lesbian activist interviewees and peers that involves having my body
read as black and as queer. I also now share in common with the women
I interviewed intimate ties to Dominican culture and the geographies of
the island; beneath this emotional attachment lies a deep frustration with
the racism, sexism, heteropatriarchy, corruption, and bureaucracy. I also
empathize with their experiences of diaspora longing, as feelings that align
with my experiences as part of a Ghanaian diaspora.107
 Introduction · 29

“Why did you stay away so long?” a friend organizing for the Santo
Domingo Pride Parade asked me. “You are part of us.” In those moments,
I shed my feelings of outsiderness. I take on the role of “insider,” having
worked my way into the lives and communities of these Dominican women
not only in hopes of a better understanding of some kind of truth about their
lives but also because for short time I made my life in their world as well.
My own epistemic knowledge has informed each question I have asked, each
space I have had access to, and the conclusions I have drawn. I have inserted
myself into many different contexts in order to gain a firsthand experience
of the worlds my interviewees inhabit. Although I am neither Dominican
nor Latinx, time and again friends and acquaintances on the island have
encouraged me to claim Dominicanness: “Ya estás bien aplatana’o [you are
already Dominicanized],” they assure me, willing to include me despite my
Otherness.
The methodologies of transnational feminism that I embrace center col-
laboration.108 I have taken on the responsibility of engaging interviewees as
collaborators with ownership over their own words. My task has been to draw
out narratives and themes embedded in Dominican women’s daily lives. In
reality, I have failed frequently in my efforts to build feminist solidarities,
and this project about Dominican women may not necessarily look the way
my interviewees would want. Some suggested that my research should focus
more on rural Dominican women, since they imagined them to be more
“authentic.” While I agree that they too would have valuable critiques of
their own social conditions, in this project my interest lies in working-class
and middle-class women with the privileges of education that allow them
greater global media consumption, transnational movement, and transna-
tional connectivities. At the same time, educational privilege (my own and
that of my interlocutors) has significantly shaped my project. It has provided
those whom I chose to interview with a greater understanding of my work
and thus diffused a layer of unequal power dynamics between us, as did a
shared understanding of the geography of Santo Domingo and the landscape
of its artist and activist community.
There are a great many spaces into which as an outsider I remain uninvited:
activist spaces, religious spaces, and sacred spaces. Those who chose to sit
down with me, a “gringa researcher,” expressed some faith in my intentions.
Others were comfortable enough to convey their distrust, feeling that I would
use their words for my benefit alone. I understand the possibilities of friend-
ship between us as reflecting “our resistance to the divisive and fragmenting
lies of structural power.”109 Cross-cultural and transnational friendship as a
30 . Introduction

collaborative project always remain in a state of possibility. I learned repeat-

edly that interview conversations with strangers could become in-depth and
personal over one or two hours and turn into lasting friendships. Early on
in Santo Domingo, I cast my net wide not solely to find interviewees, but in
an effort to make community and to build a life. For several young women
I interviewed, I would become as much a part of their world over the last
decade as the many other non-Dominican friends they had met online.
 1
Sites of Identity
Facebook, Murals, and Vernacular Images

He watched me for a moment, then whispered, “Who are you?”

I didn’t say anything. I just stared at him in the dark for a
moment, thinking of all the different answers to this question
I had already given. You know how it goes. The disclosure,
followed by the edifying speech. My body the lesson.
Danzy Senna, Symptomatic

When a snapshot of two young Dominican women appears in my Facebook

feed, I glance at it in passing. But something about it sticks with me and
I return to look again at the image. Penélope’s photograph is a deliberate
critique of the medium.1 It is an image squared by Instagram’s stylistic format
but she has posted it simultaneously onto her Facebook page: two young
brown-skinned women in the Caribbean standing side by side outdoors
in late afternoon light. Penélope, standing on the right, is dressed in shiny
black Doc Martin–esque boots, a white T-shirt and hoodie, and torn jeans
reminiscent of the 1980s. Her short hair—recently dyed green—is a shock.
She points her left index finger at her friend standing close beside her while at
the same time she curls her tongue (à la Miley Cyrus circa 2014) and strikes a
pose for the camera. Her friend Álida Reyes purses her lips, chin tilted up at
the photographer. You can almost hear the sound of disapproval that might
accompany this expression. Álida is wearing a baseball cap, a Wu-Tang Clan
T-shirt cut to a high midriff, and high-waisted shorts (the fashion of the
moment) hitched up with a narrow belt. Her feet are clad in the type of thin
faux-leather sandals in metallic colors that are common across the island.
As a visual artist, Penélope Collado has used social media to share many
images from her daily life. Because of her self-conscious awareness of the
ways that images signify, the photographs Penélope shares often act as what
32 . CHAP TER 1

Figure 1. Instagram photo of Penélope Collado and Álida Reyes. Photo

composed by Penélope Collado.

Deborah Willis refers to as “frozen racial metaphors.”2 Penélope posted this

photograph online with the text: “Con la Jíbara en #SantoDomingoParadise.”
Her comment makes cynical reference to things being not quite as one ex-
pects them to be in the Caribbean and sarcastically names her friend “Jíbara,”
which, in Dominican terms, would imply that she is rural, uncivilized, and
perhaps uncouth.3 Penélope’s hashtag in English serves as a sardonic reference
to the ways that the reality of Santo Domingo does not conform to foreign
viewers’ imagined paradise of the Caribbean. Rather, if you take another
look at the photograph, you see that the two young women are standing in
front of four or five oil barrel trash cans overflowing with garbage—a far
more common sight on the island than a pristine beach. Comments written
in colloquial English and Dominican Spanish below the photo range from
shocked to supportive, encouraging to teasing, capturing the ways that com-
munity response is a part of posting curated images online.4 Penélope, who
has much experience modeling her thin, racially mixed Dominican body in
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