Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo
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THE DICTATOR’S SEDUCTION AMERICAN ENCOUNTERS/GLOBAL INTERACTIONS A series edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Emily S. Rosenberg This series aims to stimulate critical perspectives and fresh inter- pretive frameworks for scholarship on the history of the imposing global presence of the United States. Its primary concerns include the deployment and contestation of power, the construction and decon- struction of cultural and political borders, the fluid meanings of inter- cultural encounters, and the complex interplay between the global and the local. American Encounters seeks to strengthen dialogue and collaboration between historians of U.S. international relations and area studies specialists. The series encourages scholarship based on multiarchival histori- cal research. At the same time, it supports a recognition of the repre- sentational character of all stories about the past and promotes crit- ical inquiry into issues of subjectivity and narrative. In the process, American Encounters strives to understand the context in which meanings related to nations, cultures, and political economy are con- tinually produced, challenged, and reshaped. THE DICTATOR’S SEDUCTION Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo LAUREN DERBY Duke University Press Durham and London 2009 ∫ 2009 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Warnock Pro by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data and republication acknowledgments appear on the last printed pages of this book. Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Department of History, the Latin American Institute, and the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. FOR l.h.d. and r.a.d. CONTENTS Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii INTRODUCTION Populism as Vernacular Practice 1 ONE The Dominican Belle Époque, 1922 25 TWO San Zenón and the Making of Ciudad Trujillo 66 THREE The Master of Ceremonies 109 FOUR Compatriotas! El Jefe Calls 135 FIVE Clothes Make the Man 173 SIX Trujillo’s Two Bodies 204 SEVEN Papá Liborio and the Morality of Rule 227 CONCLUSION Charisma and the Gift of Recognition 257 Notes 267 Bibliography 351 Index 391 PREFACE This study presents a cultural history of the Trujillo regime as seen through the microcosm of Santo Domingo, since this was the official stage for national civic life. Furthermore, public life in the provinces was largely modeled after policies first created for Ciudad Trujillo. The focus on how the regime was experienced has created a different event history or emplot- ment than that composed by some scholars. The exile invasions and the infamous Mirabal sister assassination—the key crises—are overlooked in favor of incidents people remember as central—the hurricane of San Ze- nón, the 1955 World’s Fair, and denunciation as a political practice and form of terror. Although the violence of the regime has inspired accounts of heroes and villains, this study enters a more murky quotidian terrain where most people lived in a space of ambivalence and complicity, of passive action in the subjunctive mood—what Blanchot has called ‘‘equivocal dis- simulation.’’∞ Indeed, when one listens to how individuals narrate the re- gime, they do so embedded within their respective social ‘‘fields of force,’’ to use E. P. Thompson’s image—in terms of fellow family, neighbors, and friends—not the regime as an abstraction. Social webs of affinity knitted them to people on either side of the Trujillista divide—those who needed jobs to feed large families, for example, and whose political affinities were more pragmatic than ideological. The story commences with the prelude to the Trujillo period, the period of U.S. military government of 1916–24. Chapter 1 explores the mass cul- ture of consumption introduced during the 1920s, which threatened tradi- tional modes of distinction and elicited fears of the democratization of social class. I demonstrate how the perceived challenge to national sovereignty and aristocratic identity was countered with a resurgence of cultural nationalism in the form of hispanicism and Catholicism, and fomented the crisis of liberalism which helped set the stage for Trujillo’s assumption of power; it also considers how the crisis of liberalism was also a crisis of Dominican manhood. Chapter 2 treats the hurricane of San Zenón, which in 1930 razed the physical and social space of the capital city of Santo Domingo, rendering social distinctions illegible, and giving Trujillo the perfect opportunity to take control. I explore how the discourse of social disorder came to focus on the itinerant shanty dwelling, and how elites gave Trujillo free reign to eliminate this scourge, a move which entailed a far wider infringement on civil liberties than they had originally intended. In the aftermath, housing policy became a key element of state patronage during the regime. Trujillo’s populist agenda championed state efforts to make Dominican peasants into citizens through the creation of new forms of urban space and civic ritual. In chapter 3, through an exploration of the largest festival of the Trujillo era—the Free World’s Fair of Peace and Confraternity in 1955—I examine the hidden class, race, and gendered meanings smuggled into state ritual. I consider how gender operated within official iconography and how the spectacle of women was used to augment the masculinity and aura of the presidential persona of Trujillo as he displayed his daughters and lovers in official rites. Chapter 4 explores official oratory, in particular denunciation and panegyric, and how the political economy of discursive exchange shaped politics within the inner circle. It considers how the officialization of denunciation as a political practice was a form of domination and popu- lism since it deployed a popular practice—gossip—in the political arena. The following chapters analyze various aspects of state fetishism under the regime. Chapter 5 examines Trujillo’s approximation of the popular bar- rio antihero, the tíguere (literally tiger)—an underdog figure with deep roots in Dominican popular culture that embodies a form of upward mobility via the audacious conquest of women of higher status—and how Trujillo and his onetime son-in-law Porfirio Rubirosa came to represent a fantasy of upward mobility with much appeal to many Dominicans. Chapter 6 consid- ers the intersection of the religious and the political in popular narratives of Trujillo’s extraordinary power, his mana. There is much lore in the Domini- can Republic that Trujillo used the services of several curanderas or healers for divination and protection.≤ This chapter treats a lesser-known story that he had a personal muchachito or guardian angel, which provided him with occult power and thus gave him a kind of omniscience that protected him from his enemies. Chapter 7 examines a popular healing cult, Olivorismo, which emerged in full force in the southwest region of San Juan de la Maguana after Trujillo’s death; I argue that this cult represented the complex yet contradictory impact of the Trujillato in popular culture since it reflected and refracted the dense ritualization of public life that was a hallmark of that x preface period, yet simultaneously sought to purge the nation of many attributes of corruption and modernity associated with the dictatorship. Oral history was an important source for this project, and I collected more than sixty hours of interviews on a range of subjects to get a sense of how policy making, planning, and implementation operated under the re- gime, as well as how people experienced and understood everyday life over the course of 1992 and early 1993. These interviews were enriched by previous fieldwork funded by a collaborative iie Fulbright Grant with Richard Turits on the 1937 Haitian massacre, which had initially piqued my interest in the hegemony of the regime, yet most of those testimonies were collected in the frontier provinces. I interviewed architects and engineers who worked for the regime such as Margot Taule, Jose Ramón Baez López- Peña, and Ramón Vargas Mera, and contemporary architects such as Wil- liam Reid Cabral, Amparo Chantada, Gustavo Moré, and Erwin Cott. I also spoke with individuals who received houses from the state in the popular barrios built by the Trujillo regime, including Ensanche Luperón, Ensanche Espaillat, Maria Auxiliadora, and Mejoramiento Social. In addition, I sought out life histories from people in other neighborhoods across the class spectrum—from the Zona Colonial and Gazcue to San Carlos, Villa Duarte, Capotillo, and La Cienaga in Santo Domingo, as well as in San Cristóbal since this was Trujillo’s birthplace and residence. I also looked for those who could speak to how politics operated within the civil service, including Arístides Incháustegui, Francisco Elpidio Beras and his family, Julián Pérez, Virgilio Díaz Ordóñez, José Antinoe Fiallo, Max Uribe, An- tonio Zaglul, and Jesús Torres Tejeda. My quest to understand Dominican religiosity launched me into another set of networks and social spaces altogether. For these issues, I interviewed priests such as Santiago Erujo, Fathers Vargas of Bayaguana, Antonio Camilo, and José Luis Saez, as well as scholars of popular religosity such as Fradique Lizardo, Dagoberto Tejeda, June Rosenberg, and Martha Ellen Davis. I visited healers in Santo Domingo and Baní, and followed four in Villa Duarte, Capotillo, La Cienaga, and La Feria. I also attended major national patron saint festivities for the Virgin of Altagracia at Higüey and the Virgin of Las Mercedes at La Vega, as well as regional events hosted by the hermandad for the miraculous Christ of Bayaguana and the cofradia del Espiritu Santo in San Juan de la Maguana and Las Matas de Farfán; cere- monies for Dios Olivorio Mateo at Maguana Arriba and Media Luna at the home of Don León Ventura Rodríguez with Lusitania Martínez; several preface xi celebrations for the misterios in Villa Mella with Martha Ellen Davis; and a feast for Gran Bwa in the bateyes of La Romana with Carlos Andújar.