“Rayano”: una nueva metáfora para explicar la dominicanidad by Ramón Antonio Victoriano-Martínez A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Spanish and Portuguese University of Toronto © Copyright by Ramón Antonio Victoriano-Martínez 2010 “Rayano”: una nueva metáfora para explicar la dominicanidad Ramón Antonio Victoriano-Martínez Doctor of Philosophy Department of Spanish and Portuguese University of Toronto 2010 Abstract Through close readings of various texts that deal with issues of border, identity and the relationship between Haiti and Dominican Republic as well as with the flow of immigrants between Dominican Republic and the United States, this study introduce the trope of the “rayano” (the one that was born, lives or comes from the border) as an apt metaphor to explain the identity of Dominicans in the twenty-first century — an identity that should be viewed as one born out of movements, translations and interstices. The primary texts that this study will focus on will cover the Haitian-Dominican and Dominican-American experiences. In terms of the former, El Masacre se pasa a pie (1973) by Freddy Prestol Castillo and The Farming of Bones (1998) by Edwidge Danticat are useful for analyzing the defining moment of the relationship between Haiti and Dominican Republic in the twentieth century: the 1937 border massacre of Haitians and Dominican-Haitians ordered by Dominican dictator Rafael L. Trujillo. In the case of the Dominican-American relationship, Dominicanish (2000) by Josefina Báez, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Junot Díaz will be the texts through which it will be analyzed the Dominican diaspora and its relationship with the two defining spaces of ii Dominicanness in the twenty-first century: Santo Domingo and New York City. In addition to these texts, this study also will engage with the theoretical production regarding the triangular relationship between Dominican Republic, Haiti and the United States through an analysis of the different metaphors used by Lucía M. Suárez in The Tears of Hispaniola: Haitian and Dominican Diaspora Memory, Eugenio Matibag in Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint: Nation, State and Race in Hispaniola, and Michele Wucker in Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola. iii Summary Abstract The border that separates the Dominican Republic and Haiti is known in Dominican Spanish as la raya, from which the noun rayano comes from. Rayano means “the one that comes from the border,” and it designates those individuals born in the border region that have at least one parent of Haitian origin, although the name has also been extended to people with both parents of Dominican descent but who are born in the region. Departing from the physical fact of the border, this study proposes rayano as an apt metaphor to explain the identity of Dominicans in the twenty-first century — an identity that I contend should be viewed as one borne out of movements, translations and interstices. This study will engage primarily with texts that deal with the issues outlined above: El Masacre se pasa a pie (1973) by Freddy Prestol Castillo, a canonical Dominican testimonial text that narrates the horror of the 1937 border massacre of Dominican-Haitians, and The Farming of Bones (1998) by Edwidge Danticat, a better-known text from the Haitian Diaspora in the United States that also deals with the 1937 massacre. In focusing on these two particular books, I want to draw attention to the literary representations of both the Haitian individual in Dominican literature and the Dominican person in Haitian literature. The other two texts that will be analyzed here are Dominicanish (2000) by Josefina Báez and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Junot Díaz. Both texts refer to the experience of the Dominican Diaspora in the United States in a period that started in the last decades of the 20th century. iv Through the lens of this corpus, I will theorize the trope of the rayano in order to approach the socio-cultural reality of the Dominican Republic in the twenty first century. Rayano; therefore, emerges as the ideal concept through which one can explore the contemporary identity of the Dominican person: an identity marked by the tensions that are the result of the triangular relationship between Haiti, Dominican Republic and the United States of America. Border studies are a well established, albeit recent, academic tradition, but its main focus has been, at least within the North American academy, the border between Mexico and the United States. The border that separates the Dominican Republic from Haiti seems to me a fertile ground on which to try a new approach. The economic differences between Dominican Republic and Haiti are not as pronounced as the ones that separate Mexico and the United States, but, at the same time, the most affluent country depends heavily on the cheap labor supply by the poorer neighbor. In the case of the Caribbean island, Haitian workers have been the backbone of the economic life of the Dominican Republic for at least 150 years, especially in the sugar cane industry. Historically, another difference emerges: the United States have always been seen as the aggressor in its relationship with Mexico; whereas, the Dominican Republic obtained its independence from Haiti in 1844 and then repelled successive invasions from the East (1844-1856) in order to maintain its status as an independent political entity. This factor has been used to feed the prejudices against the Haitians and its descendents in the Dominican Republic. In both borders the crossing of immigrants in one direction (to the United States from Mexico, to the Dominican Republic from Haiti) is repelled by an aggressive discourse against those who trespass the line, la raya. One key difference is the political status of the people that are of v immigrant descent: despite the recent backlash against illegal immigrants in the United States, Mexican-Americans and Latinos in general, have political and constitutional rights and its representatives can be found in all strata of government, judiciary, politics, culture and society. In contrast, in the Dominican Republic, and as a product of high-level judicial decisions, the Dominican-Haitians and the Haitians that reside in Dominican territory lack civil documentation and therefore their civil rights are drastically curtailed. In Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics (1997), the authors recognize the existence of two types of borders: a hard border, which is the physical border with walls, guards, boundary stones; and a soft border, comprised of the national discourses and cultural essentialisms that provide the intellectual support of the former. Both types of borders are complementary and they act together upon all the individuals that inhabit a territory. Therefore, the actions that are performed at the hard border are reflected in the speech, texts and discourses that conform the soft border and, at the same time these discourses serve as a justification for the aforementioned actions. In the case of the Dominican Republic, and due to the main peculiarity of Hispaniola (a small island occupied by two independent nations), the border has always been seen as the place from which an image of what is and what is not a Dominican person has been constructed. Due to the Dominican urbanization processes, the border is portrayed as a far away place, distant from the cities. Nonetheless, the reality of the border as a contact zone, in which goods and services, persons and customs, attitudes and discourses are exchanged, imposed itself and seeps through texts like El Masacre se pasa a pie or is explicitly acknowledged as is the case in The Farming of Bones. For the traditional Dominican cultural production the border is always an vi immutable dividing line; a line that cannot be crossed by any inclusive discourse, either. This ideology will acquire academic consistency, and it will manifest itself in public policies, during the Trujillo Era (1930-1961). Fernando Valerio-Holguín has dubbed the base of the nationalist Trujillo ideology as primitivist; by this the Dominican critic means a discourse that depicts the Haitian person as the embodiment of a “primitive African being” in opposition to the “civilized Dominican/Western person.” After the 1937 massacre, the Trujillo government started to indoctrinate the Dominican people towards a negative concept of Dominican identity: to be Dominican was not to be Haitian. This anti-Haitian discourse manifested itself through the tropes of Hispanism, Catholicism and Whiteness. Anti-Haitian doctrine became the main ideology of the Trujillo regime through an absolute control of the education system, propaganda and the appropriation of the 19th century definition of the American travel writers that described the Dominican Republic as an “almost white country” in opposition to a “black Haiti.” It is in contrast to this monolithic vision that the rayano comes into play. It is important to highlight that the border person is not considered part of the nation by both nationalistic narratives, which marks them as suspect mainly due to the ability of the rayano to straddle the divides of the border and, especially, to switch between Haitian Kreyol and Dominican Spanish. This bilingualism is the point of departure from which I proposed a new framework to view contemporary Dominican culture. Rayano is a very useful paradigm to analyze the Dominican relationship with both Haiti and the Dominican-Haitians, and the United States and the Dominican-American diaspora. This new concept allows one to approach, in a new way, the tensions that exists between the binary terms: Dominican/Haitian; Dominican/American, masculine/feminine; inside/outside. All these tensions, and many others, are in fact hardened in vii their place by the traditional Dominican discourse on identity.