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April J. Mayes The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race, and Dominican National Identity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014. xiii + 195 pp. (Cloth us$69.95)
As a mixed-race nation that, in the eyes of many outsiders, stubbornly refuses to acknowledge its blackness, the Dominican Republic is often cast as a Caribbean conundrum. How is it that a predominantly African-descended people could perceive itself as mixed-race creole, Hispanic, or "constitutionally white"? Scholars have considered this issue from various angles, including the nation's economic formation outside of the plantation nexus of sugar and slavery, the early emergence of a freedmen majority, and the role of the United States, which invidiously cast the Dominican Republic as higher than Haiti on the evolutionary scale.1
April Mayes's book traces the articulation of race and nation in Dominican thought from the 1860s to 1940, the period when hispanismo and antiblack racism became dominant political discourses. The study focuses on San Pedro de Macorís, a town that experienced rapid social change when it became a sugar enclave in the early twentieth century, drawing Spaniards, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans en masse; it forged a multinational society that only began to meld together after the Depression when Antillean migrants were forced to remain since their travel subsidies were curtailed. Mayes shows how liberal thought whitened over time from the War of the Restoration (1863-65), which won independence from Spain (led and fought largely by African-descended men to produce a more inclusive model of dominicanidad), to the vision articulated by late nineteenth-century liberal statesmen such as Eugenio María de Hostos and Américo Lugo, who cultivated a model of state formation and...