Nation and Citizen in the Dominican Republic, 1880-1916 - by Teresita Martínez-Vergne (Paperback)

About the Book

Nation and Citizen in the Dominican Republic, 1880-1916

Book Synopsis

Combining intellectual and social history, Teresita Martinez-Vergne explores the processes by which people in the Dominican Republic began to hammer out a common sense of purpose and a modern national identity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

Hoping to build a nation of hardworking, peaceful, voting citizens, the Dominican intelligentsia impressed on the rest of society a discourse of modernity based on secular education, private property, modern agricultural techniques, and an open political process. Black immigrants, bourgeois women, and working-class men and women in the capital city of Santo Domingo and in the booming sugar town of San Pedro de Macoris, however, formed their own surprisingly modern notions of citizenship in daily interactions with city officials.

Martinez-Vergne shows just how difficult it was to reconcile the lived realities of people of color, women, and the working poor with elite notions of citizenship, entitlement, and identity. She concludes that the urban setting, rather than defusing the impact of race, class, and gender within a collective sense of belonging, as intellectuals had envisioned, instead contributed to keeping these distinctions intact, thus limiting what could be considered Dominican.

Review Quotes

[A] monumental contribution to the historical literature. . . . Offer[s] highly sophisticated insights into the complex process of state formation and nation-building.--Journal of Latin American Studies

A thought-provoking combination of intellectual and social history. . . . An extremely well-researched and well-documented study.--Latin Americanist

Compelling. . . . This book makes a significant contribution to two underdeveloped fields of inquiry. . . . Martinez-Vergne's valuable analysis of this formative period in Dominican history will undoubtedly direct scholarly attention away from the dominant, political narrative to local archives that reveal the daily struggles and social interactions that have given meaning to and continue to shape Dominican national identity and citizenship.--Urban History

About the Author

Teresita Martinez-Vergne is professor of history at Macalester College. She is author of two previous books and coeditor of "Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context."