Intertwined Trajectories: Race, Peasantry, and the Political Imagination in Haitian and Dominican Histories

What follows is another attempt to use Chatgpt to draft a short essay based on typed notes I fed it. Take everything with a grain of salt, and note that I definitely did not properly have it cite sources or use quotations from my copious notes it was fed. 

The histories of Haiti and the Dominican Republic are often narrated as oppositional: one Black, one Hispanic; one revolutionary, one colonial and postcolonial; one peasant and decentralized, the other imagined as Hispanic and European. Yet a comprehensive reading of scholarship across Caribbean history, anthropology, political thought, and cultural studies reveals a far more interconnected reality. Rather than two neatly divided national trajectories, Haiti and the Dominican Republic emerge as deeply intertwined societies shaped by shared agrarian structures, cross-border cultural continuities, mutually constitutive racial ideologies, and overlapping intellectual traditions. Examining the works of historians, anthropologists, political theorists, and literary scholars—including Mayes, Bosch, Moya Pons, Candelario, Matibag, Price-Mars, Firmin, Derby, Howard, Nicholls, and many others—demonstrates that the apparent divergence of these societies is the product of political projects, intellectual constructions, and historical contingencies rather than of any innate civilizational differences. This paper argues that the contrasting national trajectories of Haiti and the Dominican Republic emerge from divergent agrarian formations, racial ideologies, and elite political strategies, yet their histories remain fundamentally intertwined through shared peasant economies, border cultures, and Pan-Antillean intellectual thought. The Caribbean, and Hispaniola in particular, cannot be understood through narratives of isolation but must instead be read as a space of relational histories, mutual influence, and entangled imaginaries.

The Dominican Republic’s nationalist mythology positions the nation as culturally Hispanic, racially non-Black, and civilizationally distinct from Haiti. Yet as April Mayes demonstrates, the discourse of latinidad that became dominant in Dominican national ideology was neither natural nor inevitable. It was a strategic invention of elites in the early twentieth century, especially during and after the U.S. Occupation of 1916–1924. In San Pedro de Macorís—a region marked by sugar production, Black migrant labor from the Anglophone Caribbean, and substantial Haitian presence—Dominican elites selected whiteness, Catholicism, and the Spanish language as the cultural foundations of their nationhood precisely because these traits marked them as closer to Europe and further from Blackness (Mayes, 1–2). This choice was not accidental. It responded to fears of racial contamination, anxieties over U.S. imperial racial hierarchies, and a desire to distinguish Dominicans from Haitians during a moment when the United States was imposing Jim Crow–inflected governance across the island. Mayes’s work highlights how Dominican elites “oscillated” between various racial narratives, sometimes embracing African or Afro-Antillean identity but ultimately codifying Hispanicity as racialized distance from Haiti (Mayes, 1–2).

This process of identity formation parallels Candelario’s argument that Dominican racial identity relies on the category of “indio” as a conceptual escape hatch from Blackness. Candelario demonstrates that museums, beauty culture, census categories, and travel narratives all participated in constructing an identity that repressed African ancestry and elevated an imagined Indigenous past (Candelario, 21–22) . The effect is not simply racial but geopolitical: Dominican identity positions the nation “between” Haiti and the United States, rejecting Africanity on one side and resisting U.S. Blackness on the other (Candelario, 12). David Howard further reinforces that Dominican racial ideology is rooted in subtle, pervasive forms of anti-Blackness and in the instrumentalization of Haiti as national scapegoat (Howard, 15–18). Together, these works reveal that Dominican racial ideology is a modern construction shaped by domestic class politics and international racial orders, rather than an essential cultural inheritance.

Meanwhile, Haitian intellectual traditions present a contrasting yet equally complex negotiation of race, nation, and modernity. Anténor Firmin, writing in the late nineteenth century, is exemplary. In De l’égalité des races humaines, Firmin offered an early antiracist critique grounded in scientific reasoning, opposing European racial hierarchies with a universalist, cosmopolitan vision of human potential (Firmin, 30–31). As J. Michael Dash notes, Firmin’s political imagination was not narrowly nationalist but Caribbean and global, imagining Haiti as part of a connected archipelago rather than an isolated Black republic (Dash, 30–31). Jean Price-Mars, writing in the early twentieth century, similarly critiqued the Haitian elite’s embrace of French cultural superiority and argued for the legitimacy of Afro-Haitian cultural forms through the concept of collective bovarysme (Price-Mars, 30). Price-Mars and Firmin thus represent a long-standing Haitian tradition of intellectual resistance to racial essentialism and colonial ideology.

Yet Haitian political thought was not monolithic. Figures such as Louis-Joseph Janvier and Dantès Bellegarde exemplify a more assimilationist current. Janvier sought to establish Haiti as culturally European, downplayed Vodou, and argued that Haitian civilization was fully compatible with French modernity (Janvier, 49). Bellegarde, similarly, opposed Negritude and socialism, viewing Haiti’s path forward through Westernization, constitutional liberalism, and education reform (Bellegarde-Smith, 31–33). These divergent ideological strands reveal that Haiti’s postrevolutionary intellectual landscape was animated by a deep tension between Afro-Caribbean cultural affirmation and Western cosmopolitan universalism. Haitian thinkers continually debated whether Haiti’s exceptional origins should be grounded in African heritage, Enlightenment universalism, or a hybrid synthesis.

Despite their apparent differences, Dominican and Haitian trajectories were deeply connected through shared agrarian and peasant formations, which played a central role in shaping political cultures on both sides of the island. As your notes synthesize, the Haitian and Dominican peasantries exhibit remarkable parallels in their economic functions, gender structures, labor arrangements, and vulnerabilities to global market fluctuations (notes 6–8). Both societies were founded upon smallholder agricultural production, each tied to a principal export crop: coffee in Haiti and tobacco in the Dominican Republic. In both cases, peasant producers maintained relative autonomy from large landowners, controlled important aspects of their labor process, engaged in communal work systems (counbit, convite), and navigated unequal commercial markets through intermediaries. Women participated heavily in processing and marketing, and both peasantries experienced limited infrastructural support and susceptibility to global commodity prices.

However, the differences are equally significant. Haitian peasantry emerged from the crucible of plantation collapse and revolutionary land redistribution, making landholding a symbol of emancipation and autonomy. Dominican peasantry, by contrast, developed earlier under Spanish colonial neglect and the prevalence of extensive cattle ranching (Bosch, 4–6). These origins shaped political consciousness. Haitian peasants historically resisted state attempts to impose compulsory labor or plantation revival—whether under Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, Christophe, or Boyer—while Dominican peasants were integrated into a ranching frontier where elite control was more decentralized. Moya Pons highlights how Haitian policies under Boyer—such as land redistribution, the confiscation of church property, and attempts to regulate labor through the Code Rural—ironically strengthened Dominican smallholders, who resisted plantation discipline just as Haitian peasants did (Moya Pons, 187–195). As a result, both sides of the island entered the nineteenth century not as plantation societies but as peasant nations, a fact that destabilizes simplistic contrasts between Haiti as “peasant” and the DR as “European.”

This shared agrarian world also shaped the dynamics of Haitian unification of Hispaniola (1822–1844). Historiographically, Dominican nationalist traditions interpret the period as one of Haitian “occupation” characterized by racial antagonism and economic decline. But the readings surveyed here complicate that narrative. Juan Bosch argues that Haitian unification was driven partly by internal Haitian land pressures and the need to distribute property to soldiers of Christophe and Boyer (Bosch, 144–148). Boyer’s state, facing internal contradictions and resistance to plantation revival in Haiti, saw the eastern territory as an opportunity to stabilize its political coalition. From this perspective, unification was not an act of racial domination but a political response to structural pressures.

Mackenzie’s travel narrative from the 1820s confirms the regional variability of Dominican responses to Haitian governance. In Santiago, some Black residents referred to Haitians as “aquellos negros,” reflecting local hierarchies and attachments to white elites, but not necessarily a racial animosity rooted in Haitian policy (Mackenzie, 215). In other regions, Haitians were welcomed as liberators from slavery, and former slaves remained loyal to former masters as a result of paternalistic relations rather than anti-Haitian sentiment (Mackenzie, 214). Mackenzie also details Haitian efforts to maintain hospitals, administrative order, and printing presses—contradicting depictions of Haitian rule as barbaric—while acknowledging abuses and resentment caused by military conscription and linguistic imposition (Mackenzie, 267–291). Logan’s geopolitical analysis reinforces that Haitian leaders faced European threats that shaped their policies toward the DR (Logan, 34–36). Together, these accounts reveal that unification cannot be reduced to nationalistic caricature but must be understood within a broader Caribbean and imperial context.

Cross-border connections also shaped cultural and social worlds. As Matibag demonstrates, the Haitian-Dominican border was historically a zone of fusion, not separation (Matibag, 21–28). The frontier facilitated trade, intermarriage, shared religious practices, cattle grazing, and bilingual or bicultural life. People baptized children across the border, attended markets on both sides, and viewed Port-au-Prince as an aspirational economic center (Matibag, 147–149). These everyday practices contradict the nationalist image of an impermeable ethnic division and instead reveal a historically entangled Hispaniola.

This border culture persisted well into the twentieth century, even as political elites intensified discourses of racial difference. Lauren Derby’s study of the Trujillo regime shows how the Dominican dictator appropriated Afro-Caribbean symbols, aesthetics, and performative styles even as his regime perpetrated the 1937 massacre of thousands of Haitians (Derby, 189–199). The figure of the tíguere—a streetwise, hypermasculine archetype with Afro-Caribbean roots—became part of Trujillo’s political persona, demonstrating how Dominican identity draws from the very cultural traditions it publicly disavows (Derby, 266). Thus, Dominican nationalism’s disavowal of Haitian influence coexists with deep cultural borrowing, revealing once again the relational nature of identity formation on the island.

Pan-Antillean political thought provides another avenue through which the entanglement of Haitian and Dominican histories becomes visible. Ramón Emeterio Betances, a leading figure in Puerto Rican and Caribbean anti-colonialism, repeatedly invoked the Haitian Revolution as proof of racial equality and Caribbean unity (Betances, 23–26). His admiration for Toussaint Louverture and Pétion was part of a broader vision of Antillean federation. Dominican leaders such as Gregorio Luperón, himself of Haitian descent, also supported projects of Caribbean unity grounded in shared anti-imperial struggle (Reyes-Santos, 45). Eugenio María de Hostos likewise imagined the Antilles as a cultural entity defined not by colonial national boundaries but by shared histories, racial mixtures, and intellectual traditions (Reyes-Santos, 65) . Firmin, as noted earlier, extended this vision to include cosmopolitan globalism. Together, these thinkers articulated a counter-narrative to nationalist division—one in which Haiti and the Dominican Republic appear not as eternal adversaries but as potential partners in anti-colonial federation.

Cultural history further reveals the entangled nature of Hispaniola. Paul Austerlitz’s study of merengue demonstrates that Dominican national music emerged from Afro-Caribbean rhythmic traditions shaped by rural Cibaeño life, U.S. Occupation, and Trujilloist cultural engineering (Austerlitz, 37–38). Merengue’s evolution—from rural accordion music to national orchestral symbol—exemplifies how cultural expressions can simultaneously encode African heritage, regional pride, and authoritarian spectacle. The genre’s connections to Haitian musical forms, revealed through shared rhythms and mutual influence, further undermine nationalist narratives of cultural purity.

All of these strands—racial ideology, peasant structure, unification history, border culture, Pan-Antillean thought, and cultural expression—point to a single conclusion: the histories of Haiti and the Dominican Republic are not opposites but mirrors, refracting each other through the lenses of colonialism, capitalism, race, and political imagination. Their differences emerge not from civilizational incompatibility but from political choices, ideological constructions, and unequal positioning within global systems of power. Dominican elites constructed Latinidad in opposition to Haiti; Haitian elites debated Westernization versus African affirmation; both societies navigated the pressures of empire, foreign capital, and internal class conflict. Their peasants shared labor patterns, market vulnerabilities, and communal traditions. Their borderlands reveal daily interdependence, even in periods of political hostility. Their intellectuals envisioned federation even as national boundaries hardened.

To speak of Haiti and the Dominican Republic solely in terms of difference obscures the profound relational processes that produced their divergent nationalisms. A relational approach—one that foregrounds entanglement rather than isolation—better captures the complexity of Caribbean modernity. Hispaniola’s two nations, born of shared geography and intertwined histories, offer an exemplary case of how race, agriculture, culture, and political thought shape national identity not through isolation but through mutual construction.

The sense that Haiti and the Dominican Republic occupy opposing civilizational positions is thus not a historical truth but a political invention. When one examines the deeper structures of peasant lifeworlds, cross-border economies, adversarial yet intertwined intellectual traditions, and the cultural expressions that flow across the island, an alternative picture emerges: Hispaniola as a single historical space fractured by power, but united by experience. Understanding that complexity challenges nationalist mythologies and opens space for imagining futures grounded not in division, but in the long, rich tradition of Pan-Antillean solidarity.

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Works Cited (Option A Formatting)

(Listed exactly as they appear in your notes)

• Mayes, April. The Mulatto Republic.
• Candelario, Ginetta. Black Behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops.
• Howard, David. Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic.
• Bosch, Juan. The Social Composition of the Dominican Republic.
• Moya Pons, Frank. “The Land Question in Haiti and Santo Domingo: The Sociopolitical Context of the Transition from Slavery to Free Labor, 1801–1843.”
• Matibag, Eugenio. Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint.
• Derby, Lauren. The Dictator’s Seduction.
• Betances, Ramón Emeterio. Las Antillas Para Los Antillanos.
• Reyes-Santos, Alaí. Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles.
• Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick. In the Shadow of Powers: Dantès Bellegarde in Haitian Social Thought.
• Austerlitz, Paul. Merengue.
• Logan, Rayford W. “Haiti and the Dominican Republic.”
• Nicholls, David. Haiti in Caribbean Context.
• Dash, J. Michael. Haiti and the Letters from Saint Thomas (as cited in notes).