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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History by Richard Lee Turits (2004)

by Brian Stauffer

For decades scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America had paid close attention to individual states and their relationship to national peasantries. This abiding interest stemmed from long-term academic investment in agrarian conflict and popular revolution in places like Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua.  If social science and history could convincingly describe the social forces that produced revolutions in those places, however, they lacked broader explanatory power, since much of Latin America had toiled under similar conditions of state oppression and capitalist exploitation without exploding into peasant revolution.  The years between the 1970s and the 1990s witnessed a gradual shift to comparative studies of the people who rebelled and those who did not.  Richard Lee Turits’ fine new monograph, Foundations of Despotism, which examines state-peasant relations in the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, belongs to this latter trend.

FOD_0In this extensively researched and cogently written work, Turits argues that the notoriously brutal Trujillo regime created lasting links with peasant communities in the rural hinterlands, which helped to solidify his thirty-year rule. Drawing on recent approaches to state-formation in Latin America that emphasize both political culture and contingency, Turits makes a compelling argument against the prevalent portrayals of the Trujillo regime as totalizing and “sultanistic.” Rather, Turits sees the Domincan state as improvisational, often internally incoherent, and legitimized largely through its symbolic and material investment in peasant land holding and independent farming.  The author demonstrates that Dominican peasants received tangible benefits from their loyalty to the Trujillo regime (most importantly access to land, but also infrastructure, health care, education, etc.), and that they also used the state’s paternalist discourse in order to press their claims. Viewed this way, the over-the-top personalism of the regime and the relative “quiescence” of the rural majority make more sense. Turits explains the gradual crumbling of the Trujillo government between 1950 and 1961 as a result of the dictator’s sudden turn away from paternalist peasantism toward state sugar capitalism, along with a loss of support from both the Catholic Church and the U.S. government.

Turits shows that the Trujillo regime established its legitimacy among peasants through broadly cultural means.  To do so, he lays out the longue durée history of the nation’s rural people, mainly descendants of enslaved Africans who carved out an independent, pastoral existence in the Dominican hinterlands after the colonial sugar economy went bust in the late-sixteenth century. The unique structural and environmental conditions in the Dominican Republic—which suffered from little agrarian pressure and was spared the horrors of large-scale plantation agriculture after the initial bust—worked to produce a mobile, independent, and pastoral peasant population which consistently thwarted Dominican elites’ attempts to form a modern nation-state.  Unlike his predecessors, though, Trujillo successfully integrated this troublesome element through a strategic mix of land distribution, authoritarian rule and state terror, and cultural politics. Carefully deployed carrots and sticks, then, turned pastoral nomads into sedentary, modernized peasant communities, which produced agricultural surpluses for sale on the world market. It should be noted, too, that Truijllo’s peasant-centered modernity required negotiations with both peasants and private landowners—foreign and domestic.  Turits’ explorations of these negotiations reveal a regime that pursued an ad-hoc, equivocating policy of support of the peasantry and often failed the latter when it was up against powerful U.S. sugar interests.

RTA young Raphael Trujillo (Image courtest of Wikimedia Commons)

Nevertheless, Turits’ shows that the Trujillo state created lasting, though ambivalent, bonds with rural people that served to preserve an especially undemocratic regime for three decades.  In many ways, this paradoxical support for a widely reviled and unquestionably ruthless dictator, which has lingered into contemporary memories of the trujillato, provided the impetus for the work in the first place.  Indeed, Turits utilizes oral histories of elderly peasants in order to build a more nuanced cultural component to his otherwise materially oriented explanation.  Here, he argues that Trujillo’s policies resonated with peasant traditions of “respeto,” or patriarchal order, and independence. While compelling in this light, these combined material and cultural factors seem less suitable to explain the role of the 1937 “Parsley Massacre”, in which the Trujillo regime turned suddenly and violently against Haitian immigrants on the frontier.  In a work as carefully structured and logically argued as Foundations of Despotism, the section on the massacre seems to find Turits in a stretch to make the reckless incoherence of the massacre fit into a coherent framework.  The same criticism may apply, as well, to the book’s final chapter, which attempts to explain the rapid and seemingly self-defeating fragmentation of the regime in terms of the broader argument about state formation and paternalist populism.  That is, it seems that the “insanity” of the Trujillo state’s twilight years continues to defy systematic explanation.

Nevertheless, Turits has offered us a compelling and nuanced understanding of why Domincan peasants not only did not rebel, but actively endorsed the “sultanistic” rule of Rafael Trujillo throughout the bulk of his reign.  His attention to material conditions, state terror, and cultural politics, while not entirely novel, could certainly translate to other settings and help us understand how “despotic” regimes more broadly have historically reproduced their power and negotiated popular acceptance.

You may also like:

Lauren Hammond’s reviewon Trujillo’s Dominican Republic: “Tropical Zion.”

Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa by Allen Wells (2009)

by Lauren Hammond

In October 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered his troops to slaughter Haitians living in the Dominican frontier and the Cibao.imageThe horrific violence left as many as 15,000 dead. Trujillo apologists managed to justify the action nationally, but the massacre created an international public relations nightmare for the regime. Newspapers cited Trujillo’s ruthlessness and compared him to Hitler and Mussolini. Trujillo quickly moved to restore his credentials as an anti-fascist ally of the United States by offering refuge to 100,000 European Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.  In Tropical Zion, Allen Wells tells the story of the establishment and decline of the small Jewish agricultural colony at Sosúa in the Dominican Republic and illustrates the significance of the colony in the international sphere. While only a handful of Jews migrated to the Dominican Republic during the Holocaust, Wells argues that ultimately, Sosúa saved lives and that its history uncovers the complex intersection of Zionism, U.S.-Dominican relations, American and Europe anti-Semitism, and the racism of the Trujillo regime.

In 1938, following the violent attacks on Jews throughout Germany and parts of Austria that came to be known as Kristallnacht, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt organized a conference at Évian-les-Bains, France in hopes of developing a strategy to handle the massive Jewish flight from Germany and Austria.   However, American and European anti-Semitism prevented the United States, England, France, and many other countries from offering Jews a place of refuge.  Moreover, they refused to consider Palestine as a resettlement site.  At Évian, Trujillo’s brother Virgilio, stepped into the gap and offered Jewish refugees a safe haven in the Dominican Republic.  Wells emphasizes that although Trujillo sought to use the offer to repair his image after the massacre and as a means of whitening the Dominican population, he remained the only one to volunteer his country for Jewish resettlement. Conference participants considered and rejected a variety of locations, including Angola and British Guiana, but in the end the Dominican Republic emerged as the only settlement site.  Wells details the immigrant selection process, the immigrants’ movement from countries of transit to the Dominican Republic, and the complicated process of community formation after their arrival.  While the settlement faced several difficulties from the outset, the biggest source of contention remained the nature of the colony – would it be a temporary place to await the end of the war or a true farming community?  Although Jewish-American philanthropists, the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DORSA), and Trujillo imagined the colony as an agricultural settlement, DORSA approved the migration of settlers and non-settlers alike.  Non-settlers expressed little interest in farming, preferring a town existence dependent on DORSA stipends that diverted the colony’s funds from its growing dairy industry.  This became a major source of tension between settlers and non-settlers.  As the war came to an end, non-settlers, derisively referred to as “America-Leavers,” quickly moved to secure U.S. visas and leave the Dominican Republic.  This initiated the colony’s decline, which worsened as dairy farmers also left the island for the United States in order to provide a better future for their children.

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Wells demonstrates that Trujillo used the practice of gift-giving and highly ritualized public ceremonies to create circuits of exchange between himself, the Roosevelt administration, DORSA, and the colony at Sosúa.  First, Trujillo’s Évian offer presented a solution for President Roosevelt who faced critiques from powerful Jewish-Americans regarding the U.S.’s strict immigration policies and the rising tide of U.S. anti-Semitism.  Second, Trujillo, who owned the prospective Sosúa settlement site, generously donated the property to the colony in a symbolic act of friendship that would cement patron-client ties between himself, DORSA, and the Jewish settlers.  The regime then hosted a large public ceremony to celebrate the signing of a contract between the Dominican government and DORSA that guaranteed settlers religious freedom and civil and legal rights.  Wells argues that as clients of Trujillo, DORSA and Jewish settlers were expected to support the regime by lobbying the Roosevelt administration on Trujillo’s behalf, participating in state rituals, and refraining from criticism.  These actions helped confer legitimacy on the dictatorship and minimize Trujillo’s reputation for brutality.  Moreover, he suggests that Trujillo’s offer and the lobbying of DORSA officials helped create an environment conducive to the renegotiation of the U.S. receivership of Dominican customs and allowed Trujillo to re-establish Dominican financial independence.  The successful re-institution of Dominican control over its customs receipts remains one of the hallmarks of the Trujillo regime.

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The son of Sosúa settler Heinrich Wasservogel, Wells has intimate knowledge of life in the small tropical sanctuary.  His masterful narrative is a must read for those interested in the Jewish Diaspora, dictatorship in Latin America and the Caribbean, and U.S.-Dominican relations during the Trujillo era.

Photo credits:

Harris & Ewing, “Gen. Trujillo given luncheon at Capitol. Visiting Washington on a goodwill tour is former Dominican Republic President Gen. Rafael Trujillo. The general was accorded a luncheon today at the Capitol by Sen. Theodore Green Rhode Island. Avidly talking to the General, who speaks no English, are Senators Green and Guy Gillette while Minister Andres[?] Pastoriza rapidly interprets. Left to right: Trujillo, Sen. Green, Pastoriza, Sen. Gillette,” Washington, DC, 7 July 1939.

Harris & Ewing via The Library of Congress

Colin Rose, “Jewish Museum in Sosua,” 24 December 2006

Author’s own via Flickr Creative Commons

Flickr user muckster, “Sosua Jewish Museum: Children of Immigrants,” 9 February 2007

Author’s own via Flickr Creative Commons

You may also like:

This interview, conducted in May 2011, with General Imbert, one of the men who assassinated Rafael Trujillo in 1961. (BBC News)

Adrian Masters’ review of The Doubtful Strait, Ernesto Cardenal’s poem chronicling the history of Nicaragua from colonial discovery to the Somoza dictatorship.

 

The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo by Lauren Derby (2009)

by Lauren Hammond

Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961, remains a figure of mythic proportions in the popular Dominican imagination. imageA light-skinned mulatto with Haitian ancestry, Trujillo rose from obscurity as a sugar plantation guard to establish one of Latin America’s most enduring dictatorships.  His appetite for women was legendary and common belief held that he never sweated.  Trujillo’s minions, and even foreign governments, lavished him with praise and an array of titles from Generalissimo to Benefactor of the Fatherland to Restorer of Financial Independence.  However, outside portrayals of Trujillo as a make-up wearing megalomaniac and revelations of his regime’s oppression, many questions remain about the mechanisms of state power and relations between the Dominican populace, Trujillo, and the state.  In The Dictator’s Seduction, Lauren Derby uncovers the cultural economy “that bound Dominicans to the regime.”  She reinterprets the regime’s theatricality – pageants, parades, and the practices of denunciation and public praise – as critical in obscuring the inner workings of the regime and argues that the Trujillato gained and maintained the support of the masses, albeit in attenuated form, by creating a new middle class and co-opting Dominican understandings about the embodiment of race, gender, sexuality, and the process of community formation.

Derby’s most salient observations of the populist dynamics of the Trujillo regime come through her examination of the ritualized practices of denunciation and praise and the tensions between the Dominican Party and an expanded state bureaucracy.  Amongst ordinary citizens, state workers, and party officials, accusation reflected the Caribbean practice of gossip as a means of social control, while panegyric was used for personal gain.  The conflict between the Dominican Party and an expanded state bureaucracy reflected this dynamic. Founded in 1930, the massive Dominican Party created a new, darker middle-class indebted to the regime for its new identity.  State workers, on the other hand, continued to hail from lighter-skinned elite families.  While this divide played on pre-existing socio-racial tensions, Derby demonstrates that Trujillo and his proxies also encouraged a culture of enmity between state and party officials.  This left members of both groups vulnerable to charges of corruption, disloyalty, and moral failings, which could result in social death.  In a culture sensitive to the loss of personal honor and respect, Dominicans lived in fear of social isolation.  Moreover, state bureaucrats and Dominican Party workers used praise of Trujillo and their efforts on his behalf to improve their positions within the Trujillato and as a means of defense against condemnation.

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The book’s most interesting claims emerge from Derby’s exploration of popular belief surrounding Trujillo’s invulnerability, which Dominicans attribute to his muchachito, or spiritual guide.  After the assassination of Trujillo on the highway between Ciudad Trujillo and San Cristobal, the arranged coup failed to take place because conspirators inside the regime hesitated to believe that Trujillo, who had survived three previous assassination attempts, was dead.  Derby shows that Dominicans attributed Trujillo’s invulnerability to his muchachito who purportedly visited Trujillo in his sleep.  The muchachito found its roots in a popular mixture of Haitian voodun and Afro-Dominican vodú and was associated with black magic.  It told Trujillo how to invest and about plots against him, providing a popular explanation of the apparatus of power.  Popular Dominican religiosity viewed the duality of Trujillo and his spirit guide as extremely dangerous and unstable.  Many believe that in the end Trujillo lost trust in his muchachito and challenged it.  This loss of confianza led to Trujillo’s undoing.  Derby also examines the rebuilding of Santo Domingo following Hurricane San Zenón, the coronations of his daughter at the Free World’s Fair of Peace and Confraternity in 1955 and his mistress at the Dominican Republic’s 1937 Carnival, clothing and tiguerage, and the growth of a grassroots religious movement called Olivorismo following Trujillo’s assassination.

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Lauren Derby’s monograph makes a significant contribution to Dominican historiography and scholarship on populism, Latin American and Caribbean dictatorship, and gender and sexuality.  However, while many of her conclusions are based on a series of oral histories, the voices of her subjects remain largely absent from the text.  In addition, at times the work would have benefitted from a more in depth analysis of the complexity of race and national identity in the Dominican Republic.  Overall, the text offers much needed assessment of popular culture in the Dominican Republic during and after the Trujillo regime.

Photo credits:

Harris & Ewing, “Former President [of] San Domingo arrives in Capital. Washington, D.C., July 6. A close-up of General Rafael L. Trujillo, former President of the Dominican Republic, made as he stood at attention while the national anthem was being played upon his arrival today,” 6 July, 1939.

via The Library of Congress

Unknown artist, “Insignia of the Dominican Party, the party founded by the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo on 16 August, 1931.”

via Wikipedia

You may also like:

This interview, conducted in May 2011, with General Imbert, one of the men who assassinated Rafael Trujillo in 1961. (BBC News)

Adrian Masters’ review of The Doubtful Strait, Ernesto Cardenal’s poem chronicling the history of Nicaragua from colonial discovery to the Somoza dictatorship.

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