An Anatomy of Racism
Márquez, Roberto
DOMINICAN PRESIDENT JOA- quin Balaguer has, surely, never been in any serious danger of being mistaken for a man of even moderately liberal ideology or opinions. The octo- genarian dean of...
...Except for the enthusiasm with which he draws on the noirisme of Jean Price Mars, Lorimer Denis, Jean Dorsainvil, and Franqois Duvalier to enhance his own dubious credibility, Balaguer appears to be wholly ignorant of the work of even a single Haitian intellectual from among the multitude of those active during the last 50 years...
...136) directed by those already of "raza selecta" (p...
...It is also an articulate, if offensive, delineation of the racist ideology that permeates a significant portion of Dominican society...
...76, 97)-leaves no doubt that he is not beyond contemplating a policy ofdeliberate genocide...
...To the extent they may be said to possess any culture at all, it is a derivative veneer, the result of mimetic assimilation...
...He dismisses out of hand as plain treachery a considerable body of annexationist and abolitionist Dominican sentiment, which he regards as racially suspect or out of place in a Spanish colony in which he contends slavery was "more benign" (p...
...His notion of the Republic's proper destiny can, in effect, be reduced "to mak[ing] the entire Dominican population a community like Ban"' (p...
...This allows him conveniently to elide their nearly unanimous critique of his chosen sources and what, with a keen sense of political irony, Ren6 Depestre bitingly calls their "Adventures of Negritude...
...35...
...At least he does not make reference to any...
...I for all of hi and the ethnically mixed population of ordinary Dominicans have every reason to view so unexpected a gift of unity with at least as much skepticism (which the Greek who bears it inspires) as Balaguer's protestations that he is no racist...
...His recent book, La isla al revs: Haiti y el destino dominicano ("The Island Turned on its Head: Haiti and Dominican Destiny," Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio, 1989) is a self-contradictory pastiche of the would-be aristocracy's most shopworn and flatulent bromides...
...H AITI, ADMITTEDLY, NO longer poses any political or military threat to the sovereignty or territorial integrity of the Dominican Republic...
...I I V- , X, g a: rr~p~~rt' pagan and primitive, foreign penetra- tion and its inevitable train of ominous effects...
...197) and "racism has never existed" (pp...
...The least de-nationalized section of the country, we are told, the one that best conserves "the spirit of nobility that survives in Santo Domingo like an inheritance from the colonial golden age," is Bani, an isolated rural community of "whites...
...Race, predictably enough, gradually emerges as synonymous with nationality...
...99...
...Crosscultural exchange and interracial contact becomes, under the circumstances, virtually synonymous with sedition...
...This country has now, alas, fallen victim to a "progressive ethnic decadence" (p...
...Haiti's comparative vulnerability, it appears, and, no doubt, the Duvalieristes' politicalconsanguinity, now make such a compact particularly attractive...
...Balaguer holds Haitian immigration responsible for everything from the deterioration of his homo dominicans' sense of loyalty to traditional Christian family values, the native working class's increasing lack of nationalist solidarity, and the middle class's meager strength, to the discouraging state of the country's overall health, its economic instability, and the general failure of current development strategies...
...Balaguer's methodological triad of race, demography, and eugenics-the cornerstone of his argument-betrays a distinctively anachronistic, nineteenthcentury slaveholder's anxiety: the allconsuming fear of an "Africanization" of "our nation," whose social-darwinist and patrician temper is only too apparent...
...The state regularly recruits Haitian workers for the plantations of the State Sugar Council, offering ex-ploitative terms and living conditions which ensure the migrants' isolation and relative powerlessness and preclude their ability to exercise anything like the nefarious omnipotence attributed to them by El Sefior Presidente...
...Certainly, Haitians A Haitian s Republic...
...It comes finally as somewhat of a surprise when, against the force of its own pernicious logic, La isla al revis concludes by proposing a conciliatory confederation of the Dominican and Haitian states to ensure the independence of each and, after a century and a half, put an end to their tension-fraught relations...
...Balaguer's undisguised apologia of Trujillo's October 1937 massacre of more than 17,000 Haitians-as a measure leveled at "the very causes...of our ethnic regression" (pp...
...188, 198...
...61-62), Banf is Balaguer's wistfully nostalgic, emblematically ideal polity...
...36), ferally and incestuously promiscuous, "vegetally fertile" (p...
...49...
...37), and a "contagion" (p...
...Negroes are all "instinct-governed" (p...
...Consistent with his dim view of blacks in general and "Haitians" in particular, the president invokes a phobic vocabulary of elemental sexuality, primeval excess, social pathology, and enervating disease...
...40), "generators of indolence" (p...
...Their dreams are, in truth, the stuff of nightmares...
...For all its pretense to scientific objectivity and broad-mindedness, Balaguer's thesis has the delusive partiality of a planter's fallacious syllogism...
...Balaguer's tacit supposition is that, under such an arrangement, the Dominican nation he envisions would emerge as first among "equals...
...23), "obviously" marginal and unrepresentative portion of the population, he argues, the black presence in the Dominican Republic constitutes a foreign intrusion, something alien to the authentic national spirit of the place: in a word, something actually or effectively "Haitian...
...Balaguer, evidently, sees no contradiction in the fact that successive Dominican governments-and most notably his own-both directly profited from and significantly encouraged that immigration...
...The Dominican Republic, he ahistorically postulates, has always been a "white and Christian" country...
...Those few Haitians whose intellectual stature Balaguer favorably singles out as exceptional are finally redeemed, with condescending paternalism, as oblique tributes to the civilizing force of their European educations...
...La isla al revis adds another volume to the already monumental library ofraceologist tracts which includes texts by such notables as Ernest Renan (18231892), the Spaniard Marcelino Mendndez Pelayo(1856-1912), the Argentines Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888), Carlos Octavio Bunge ( 1875-1918)and Jos Ingenieros( 18771925), the Bolivian Alcides Arguedas (1879-1946), and the Peruvian FranciscoGarciaCalder6n( 1883-1953...
...But, Balaguer insists, "Haitian imperialism is now an even greater threat to our country than before for biological reasons" (p...
...What a less jaundiced observer of the frontier zones might have recognized as an ordinary example of reciprocal adaptation and cultural exchange, Balaguer invariably regards as evidence of the corrupting subtlety and malevolent ingenuity of "Haitians" intent on sabotaging the locals' sense of moral rectitude and patriotic purpose...
...The octogenarian dean of the most pusillanimously colonial and racially pretentious wing of the Dominican Right, Balaguer has devoted more than half a century to the rationalization and defense of its most jejune orthodoxies and cliches...
...45) and gradual disappearance of the nation's somatic characteristics that threaten the imminent loss of "its Spanish physiognomy" (p...
...The offer, in any case, rings hollow and is wholly suspect...
...Holyoke College, and is a member of NACLA's Editorial Board...
...DOMINICAN PRESIDENT JOAquin Balaguer has, surely, never been in any serious danger of being mistaken for a man of even moderately liberal ideology or opinions...
...143) of white capitalists from abroad and entrusting the future to "a vast eugenic plan" (p...
...Principal among these is the regressive genetic impact and cultural influence that are a consequence of miscegenation and "the vegetative increase of the African race" (p...
...To make a people free," he maintains, "is less important than to regenerate it" (p...
...Tlhe least miscegenated zone in the country...where the [white] race has the best sense of its capacities...a firmer notion of its culture...and its dignity" (pp...
...If the government continues to ignore the problem of race," Balaguer writes, "the white race will eventually be absorbed by the African" (p...
...Genuine patriotism requires "our" unrelenting resistance to this exotic, I REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Roberto Mdrquez teaches Caribbean and Latin American Studies at Mt...
...The impertinent presumption and terrified consciousness Balaguer shares with these supposed paragons of humanism is a barometer of the intensity of their mutual distrust of democracy's egalitarian impulse and of the racially heterogeneous masses of theirown peoples...
...Save for a "minuscule" (p...
...36) while, consonant with their ancestral inheritance, "Haitians" are "heathens" (p...
...The twentieth-century personification of that dread possibility-and the manifest villains of the book-are Haitian immigrants and "guest workers...
...148...
...52), "of primitive mentality" (p...
...B ALAGUER'S REMEDIES TO inhibit any further spread of the Haitian "blight" include a Malthusian free-marketeering, broadening of the rural base and centrality of Catholic instruction, bringing the borderlands under tighter government control, promoting the "spontaneous immigration" (p...
...The trouble, Balaguer tellingly suggests, originates and is symbolically embodied in the final triumph of the 1791 uprising of slaves in Haiti and the Black Republic's "imperialist" occupation (1822-1844) of the eastern half of Hispaniola...
Vol. 25 • February 1992 • No. 4
