El sur dominicano (1680 - 1795)

This study explores the transformation of Dominican society during the long eighteenth century, a period often described as one of abandonment by Spain and thus extreme poverty as official trade evaporated. As agriculture was reduced to subsistence levels and pirates ravaged the few extant slaves, the crown was forced to allow the use of free labor in agriculture. The Dominican economy reoriented toward provisioning the sugar plantation economy of neighboring Saint Domingue as it rose to become the largest sugar producer in the Americas. Drawing upon cabildo and notarial records, Manuel Hernández González describes in intricate detail a society in transition from slavery and piracy to become an extensive ranching economy of predominantly freedmen provisioning meat and hides to Saint Domingue. The free-range ranching economy that emerged during this period has not received much scholarly attention. This book documents how ranching came to articulate the entire southern area.An important issue in this account is the importance of migration from the Canary Islands, which had a formative impact on many features of Dominican society, from cuisine and festive rites to elite formation, animal husbandry, and speech patterns. Hernández González carefully culls ecclesiastical records to provide data on baptisms, marriages, and religious festivities. One of the signal contributions of this text is a rich portrait of Catholic devotional practice and especially the “infinite cofradías,” creole lay brotherhoods which organized burials and pilgrimages, and burial rites of Kikongo origin known as bancos, which enabled the transmigration of souls.As trade with Spain slowed to a standstill, involution gave rise to a truly creole culture. Dominican slavery ended earlier than in neighboring countries and did not conform to the plantation society model. By the eighteenth century freedmen constituted a majority, and as a result, the issue of racial purity became irrelevant in this society of predominantly mixed-race mestizos and matrifocal families. This text provides some important data on the nature of slavery and the lives of freedmen during this transition period. It confirms that in these small farms, conditions were far better for slaves than elsewhere, since the tools of discipline such as stocks and shackles were virtually absent, and most farms and ranches had ten slaves or fewer. San Lorenzo de los Minas was founded as an autonomous township north of the capital in an official effort to isolate a group of Saint Domingue runaways so they would not spur slave insurrection. They were given land grants to encourage agriculture, which was not a common practice among freedmen. Yet officials worried about how to control this growing multitude of mixed-race freedmen. Notwithstanding efforts to constrain mulattos through legal restrictions on occupation and dress, individuals found the means, licit and illicit, to be upwardly mobile. Freedmen had a major role to play in the contraband economy, and under the guise of fishing expeditions they bought and sold products in Puerto Rico, Curaçao, and Havana. Indeed, during this period Santo Domingo became the regional corsair center, and visitors remarked on the unusual presence of mulatto nuns. Authorities also complained of the packs of wild boars that sustained the freedmen in their hunting expeditions but hampered agricultural expansion. These concerns came to a head as the slave revolt commenced in Saint Domingue by the 1780s, and a crackdown ensued upon urban freedmen as well as black day laborers on the grounds that they were taking jobs away from whites and mulattos.Canary Island migration was very important in the Dominican Republic. A full 14 towns were founded by Canary Islanders, including the municipality close to the capital, appropriately named San Carlos de Tenerife, which exported mules to Saint Domingue as well as food products to the capital, even though its municipal autonomy was a thorn in the side of Santo Domingo elites. With their claim to whiteness in the Dominican context (since many were of North African heritage), endogamy and preponderance may help explain in part the whitening tendency of Dominican racial identity. Most slaves were acquired via barter during this period, as potential masters were too poor to acquire them. And many Canary Islanders were poor subsistence farmers or small ranchers, a factor which also helped disarticulate whiteness and status.Given the dearth of literature on this period, this book is a resource of great value to historians seeking primary documentation on issues such as elites, trade, kinship, and slavery. The author reproduces his data exhaustively with little or no interpretive frame, such as in his discussion of elite property transmission, which includes over ten pages of direct transcriptions of wills (vol. 1, pp. 51 – 64). The book’s scholarly value is primarily that of a primary source, but as such it should inspire scholars to further explore this formative period in Dominican history. The book was simultaneously published as Manuel Vicente Hernández González, El sur dominicano (1680 – 1795): Cambios sociales y transformaciones económicos (Santo Domingo: Archivo General de la Nación, 2008)

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• The Devil Wears Dockers

  Open Access•Lauren Derby, Marion Werner•New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe…•2013

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