Introduction: From Negation to the Enunciative Cry

The Dominican Republic is erected upon a deafening silence. Despite being a nation forged in the Caribbean experience, with an undeniable African heritage, its official historical narrative has been marked by decades of denial and ideological whitewashing. Thus, this text addresses the urgent need to confront the unofficial Black history—the accounts that the state deliberately omits, disguises, or stigmatizes, thereby violating the cultural rights of the Afro-descendant population.

This is not a simple matter of forgetting, but a conscious, officialized act of amnesia that seeks to maintain a racial and cultural hierarchy.¹ This denial is an ideological defense mechanism that projects Blackness onto a feared “other”: the Haitian.

The work converges at the crossroads of the geographical and imagined Caribbean and implies exploring the power of enunciating Black existence from the perspective and desires of Black people themselves. As Frantz Fanon points out, decolonization is a violent process that must dismantle the psychological and cultural structures imposed by the colonizer.² Cultural violence translates into persistent anti-Haitianism—the self-denial mechanism of Dominican Blackness.

In my research, I have argued that Dominican national history has been built upon a painful paradox: the denial of the other as a strategy for denying oneself. Within this analysis, I have conceptualized the figure of the “imaginary Haitian,” an ideological construct that displaces Blackness onto the other in an attempt to preserve a whitewashed and artificial official identity.³ This architecture of forgetting not only seeks to stigmatize our neighbors but also sever the African roots of our Dominican identity. Contemplating this reality, I find profound kindredness in the poetry of Pedro Mir: when he describes a country cloaked in invisibility and pain, he denounces, through his lines, that same foundational trauma that I continue to trace today, that of a nation that silences its true history to inhabit a shadow self.⁴

In the following text, I intend to question the hegemonic view upon which the perception of the Caribbean has been built—a space where, as Fernando Ortiz affirms when speaking of Cuban transculturation, African roots are inevitable.⁵ The aim is to transcend the Caribbean cliché and explore the deep decolonial sentiment that pulsates in daily practices, rituals, and ancestral knowledge.

The five thematic axes that will guide this exploration are: (1) Afro-descendant cultural history, (2) food and cooking, (3) the contributions of Black women, (4) rituals and ancestral knowledge, and (5) the denied living heritage.

The Enunciation of Decolonial Blackness

From my perspective, the enunciation of decolonial Blackness is not simply an exercise in ethnic self-recognition, but also a political and existential tool for the shattering of historical silence. With this tool, Afro-descendants reclaim their right to name reality as they see it, displacing the colonial gaze that has defined them for centuries. As I argue in my research, in the Dominican context this enunciation is an act of insurgency against the “imaginary Haitian,” since by saying “I am Black,” one dismantles the fiction of the state-led whitewashing that attempts to conceal African embodiments within racial euphemisms.

In practice, this tool operates through the politicization of the quotidian and the revaluation of what the powers that be have labeled “marginal.” For example, when a community defends drumming—not as a folkloric spectacle, but as a representation of life and an apparatus of spiritual communication—it is practicing decolonial enunciation. This tool also operates in aesthetics and the body; the rejection of Eurocentric beauty standards is a manifestation of what Fanon describes as the process of stripping away the “white masks” imposed by the colonizer.⁶ It is a faculty that transforms the chaos-world of the Caribbean into a sovereign space where ancestral memory is indispensable to the reconstruction of selfhood.

Decolonial scholars argue that this type of enunciation is fundamental to what is known as epistemic disobedience. Authors such as Walter Mignolo suggest that knowledge is not universal, but rather situated; therefore, enunciating from a Black perspective allows us to question who holds the power to produce historical “truths.”⁷

Similarly, Rita Segato argues that this reaffirmation is vital to counteracting the “colonial cruelty” that strips people of their sensitivity and roots.⁸ Ultimately, decolonial enunciation is the axis that allows the Afro-Dominican population to go from a silenced object of study to the architect of its own historical and cultural reparations.

This text delves into five interconnected themes that, together, map Black persistence upon the Dominican social fabric and challenge the official narrative.

Afro-Descendant Cultural History: Reclaiming Buried Memories

1. History as an archive of resistance: Dominican history begins with the foundational violence of African slavery. The official narrative has privileged the myth of Hispanicity, a mechanism that, according to Franklin Franco Pichardo, has historically served to justify racial exclusion and denial.⁹ Through this mechanism, subaltern historical memories persist outside the official archives. The uprising, resistance, and escape of enslaved people, as documented by critical historiography, are the true milestones of freedom, even if the state keeps them in the shadows.
2. From folklore to way of life: Denial operates through naming. What is labeled “folklore” is to Black people a way of life, a ritual, or an identity. The concept of official culture seeks to aestheticize Blackness, depoliticizing it. Fanon insisted on the importance of the past for liberation. From this perspective, Afro-descendant history is an archive of resistance and cultural creation.¹⁰
3. Musicality as sonic documentation: Black musicality, with its drums and rhythms, is the intangible sonic document of an unwritten history. Ethnomusicologist Martha Ellen Davis has documented the complexity of these musical systems, in which percussion is not mere accompaniment, but also a language of social and spiritual communication.¹¹ Black aesthetics, rejected by colonial standards, become a political act of self-affirmation. This cultural resistance is enunciated in the insular Caribbean in the way that Édouard Glissant describes through his concepts of relation and the complexity of Caribbean identity.¹²

Food and Cooking: Memory Stored in Pots and Pans 

1. The gastronomic archive of the diaspora: Dominican cuisine is fundamentally a gastronomic archive of the African diaspora. This section argues that food is an act of living heritage and a practice of cultural survival. Reinforcing this thesis are the studies of Manuel Zapata Olivella on the African diaspora in Latin America, which demonstrate how cuisine is one of the most significant repositories of identity.¹³
2. In this section, I consider the banana as a symbol of transference: a central element in our diet that represents cultural exchange, agricultural resilience, and adaptability. My analysis is based on my own research, which explores how the centrality of this fruit demonstrates the continuity of cultivation and processing techniques brought from Africa.¹⁴ I believe that this food, along with others, not only defines our identity but also establishes a deep connection with the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean.
3. Homestyle meals and community expression: Manners of cooking and sharing, like sancocho or the art of stewing, represent techniques and knowledge that crossed the Atlantic. Homestyle meals safeguard ancestral flavors and offer a space for Black expression and community. This knowledge is denied when cuisine gets labeled as “poor people’s food” or “rustic,” stripping it of its historical value—an act of exclusion that Segato identifies as part of the mechanisms of colonial cruelty upon everyday life.¹⁵

The Contributions of Black Women: Custodians of Knowledge and Healing Practices

1. Silent and resilient leadership: Black and Afro-descendant women are the silent custodians of Dominican culture and memory. The role of Black women in Dominican history, as described by Lourdes N.¹⁶, is one of cultural leadership and specialized knowledge. They embody a double resistance: against structural racism and against the patriarchy.
2. “The Black woman of the hospital” and healing knowledge: The figure of the “Black woman of the hospital,” or the caretaker, represents the women who, since colonial times, have led healing practices based on ancestral pharmacopoeia on the island. They are the midwives, the healers, the wise ones. Their practices are directly connected to those of Haitian mambos and other women healers throughout Latin America. Their knowledge is an act of self-determination, maintaining the health of the community despite institutional inadequacies.
3. Authority in kinship communities: In the realm of rituals, women are the pillars of Afro-Catholic religious institutions. In Holy Spirit kinships (cofradías)¹⁷ they act as stewards and “kinship mothers,” taking care of altars and enacting the salve song and dance. Kinships led by Black women are patriarchal counterpowers. Black women’s persistence in these spaces is a decolonial act, affirming their authority in the face of hegemonic discourse. Fanon¹⁸ argues that women play a crucial role in the struggle to dismantle imposed colonial structures.

Rituals and Ancestral Knowledge: The Power of the Black Cosmos

1. Cosmologies and systems of knowledge: Black rituals are at the heart of Dominican spiritual and community life. What the hegemonic narrative classifies as “superstition” or “witchcraft” are, in reality, complex knowledge systems. Leslie Desmangles’s studies on Haitian Vodou (which shares cultural similarities with Dominican practices) demonstrate the philosophical sophistication of these cosmologies.¹⁹  This section takes us into the world of an exploration into the world of altars, Black knowledge, and healing.
2. Dominican Vodou and Caribbean Santería: While the Dominican State has attempted to draw a hard line between the two practices, Dominican Vodou is a distinct religious and philosophical system, intimately linked to Caribbean spiritual expressions such as Cuban Santería and Brazilian Candomblé. Its living heritage lies in the practice of drumming and in celebrations, in which possession is a direct interaction with the ancestors. Art and faith converge in altars: spaces of memory and power.
3. Persecution and clandestinity: The historical persecution of these practices is an attempt to dismantle Black social cohesion. Those who possess ritualistic knowledge are cultural intellectuals, guardians of traditional medicine and oral histories. Denial forces these practices to operate clandestinely or under a strong syncretic guise, which Segato identifies as the pressure that whiteness exerts on beliefs.²⁰ This phenomenon runs parallel to the marginalization of African expression throughout Latin America.

Denied Living Heritage: The Case of Blackness

1. Folklorization and depoliticization: The concept of a living heritage with African roots lives in a state of institutional denial. Isolated and folklorized elements are recognized, but complex knowledge systems, such as kinships or healing practices, do not receive the same seal of approval or official protections. Folklorization is a mechanism of control by which a form is accepted without its content.
2. The violation of cultural rights: The denial of Black heritage is an example of how the state fails to recognize cultural rights. Black heritage is constantly criticized and persecuted, forcing communities to routinely defend their existence. This reflects the racism that operates within cultural epistemology and that determines which knowledge is valid.
3. Anti-Haitianism as a cultural guardian: The denial of a living Black heritage is intimately linked to the projects of whitewashing and anti-Haitianism that prevail in the national narrative. I have observed and analyzed how any cultural manifestation that evokes a deep African connection is immediately demonized as “Haitian” or “foreign,” serving as an ideological justification for rejecting our own heritage.²¹ I look to the theories of historian Franklin Franco, who demonstrated that the Dominican elite forged its identity from a systematic opposition to Haiti.²² Therefore, I argue that the struggle for the recognition of Black heritage is, ultimately, a dispute over the full citizenship, humanity, and cultural validity of our people.

This comparative analysis reveals the profound epistemic and structural gap that exists between the hegemonic cultural narrative and the lived experiences of the Afro-descendant population in the Dominican Republic. While the official narrative (state denial)—shaped by Segato’s ideas of the mandates of whiteness²⁴—reduces history to folklore, gastronomy to “rustic food,” and ritual to “superstition,” decolonial enunciation affirms the rich complexity of these elements.

In this popular view, Black culture is a complex cosmological system, Black women are custodians of memory, and living heritage is an inalienable right. Given this duality, I argue that state denial not only renders ancestral knowledge invisible but also criminalizes and devalues ​​it. From my perspective, this pressure forces Black practices to operate within a space of constant resistance, representing what Fanon defines as the struggle for the cultural rehumanization of the colonized.²⁵

Conclusion: A Call for Reparations and Valorization

The persistence of unofficial Black history in the Dominican Republic is an act of cultural sovereignty and irrefutable proof of the tenacity of the African diaspora. The state’s denial of this living heritage is not unintentional, but rather the continuation of an ideological project of symbolic dispossession that has shaped national identity since the country’s independence.

Through this analysis, I have demonstrated that the enunciation of Black existence by the community itself is an essential decolonial force. I believe that Black knowledge and rituals constitute the living archives that Fanon urged the colonized to reclaim in order to forge a new, free consciousness.²⁶

By naming and valorizing the resistance’s chaos-world, I seek to dismantle the fiction of homogeneity and Hispanicity that has marked our historical discourse.

Therefore, I call for necessary historical and symbolic reparations. I maintain that the Dominican Republic must dismantle anti-Haitianism as a mechanism of cultural and racial self-denial, a phenomenon that, as Segato reminds us, hinders social healing.²⁷

From my perspective, the recognition of Blackness is an ethical imperative and an essential step toward achieving true cultural sovereignty, enabling the nation to stop persecuting and criminalizing its own roots.

Regional Examples of Recognition and Appreciation

The Dominican Republic can look to clear regional examples of those who have embraced and valued their Black history and are working toward a more inclusive and just present, such as:

1. Colombia: Law 70 of 1993 (Black Communities Law), which provides specific territorial and cultural rights for the Afro-descendant population and recognizes the culture of the Pacific region and San Basilio de Palenque with UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity designations. This legal framework is an example of how the state can move from denial to affirmative action.
2. Brazil: The constitutional recognition of Candomblé and other religions of African origin, with policies that appreciate and protect terreiros (temples); the inclusion of African history in school curriculum (such as in Law 10.639/03). Brazil has taken steps toward valorizing Afro-Brazilian culture as a central part of its national identity.
3. Cuba: The adoption of Santería (Regla de Ocha) and Palo as integral and valued aspects of the national identity has profoundly influenced art, music, and film. Through this recognition, Cuban Black culture has become one of the most globally widespread and respected.

The Dominican Republic has the opportunity to embrace its complexity and understand that Black existence is not a threat to Dominican identity, but instead, its deepest and most resilient foundation. Embracing this history and honoring the women who safeguarded it and the knowledge that sustained it is the only path to cultural decolonization and the true consolidation of a state that fully respects the rights of all its citizens. Blackness, expressed from the perspective of its people, is the key to leaving behind the chaos-world and building a genuinely pluralistic nation.

1 Rita Segato, Contra-pedagogías de la crueldad (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2018), 25.
2 Frantz Fanon, Los condenados de la tierra, trans. Julieta Campos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1961), 31.
3 Jonathan De Oleo Ramos, “El haitiano imaginario en el colectivo dominicano y el antihaitianismo desbordado,” Acento, November 10, 2024, https://acento.com.do/cultura/el-haitiano-imaginario-en-el-colectivo-dominicano-y-el-antihaitianismo-desbordado-9419787.html.
4 Pedro Mir, Hay un país en el mundo (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1949), 11-15.
5 Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Havana: Jesús Montero, 1940), 98-102.
6 Frantz Fanon, Piel negra, máscaras blancas (Buenos Aires: Abraxas, 1952), 45-50.
7 Walter Mignolo, Desobediencia epistémica: Retórica de la modernidad, lógica de la colonialidad y gramática de la descolonialidad (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Signo, 2010), 12-15.
8 Segato, op. cit., 26.
9 Franklin Franco Pichardo, Historia de las ideas políticas en la República Dominicana (Santo Domingo: Editora Nacional, 1975), 112-115.
10 Fanon, Los condenados, 33.
11 Martha Ellen Davis, La otra historia: Estudios de entomusicología dominicana (Santo Domingo: Editora de UASD, 1987), 89-94.
12 Édouard Glissant, Poética de la relación, trans. Linda María G. (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2017), 42-45.
13 Manuel Zapata Olivella, Changó, el gran putas (Bogotá: Editorial Oveja Negra, 1983), 210-215.
14 Jonathan De Oleo Ramos, Antropología del plátano (Santo Domingo: Platón Ediciones, 2024), 22.
15 Segato, op. cit., 27.
16 Editor’s note: Information provided on the basis of an unpublished ethnography conducted by the author.
17 Jonathan del Oleo Ramos, Cofradías dominicanas del espíritu santo, self-published, 2023.
18 Fanon, Los condenados.
19 Leslie G. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 62-65.
20 Segato, op. cit., 35.
21 Jonathan De Oleo Ramos, “El haitiano imaginario en el colectivo dominicano y el antihaitianismo desbordado,” Acento, November 10, 2024,https://acento.com.do/cultura/el-haitiano-imaginario-en-el-colectivo-dominicano-y-el-antihaitianismo-desbordado-9419787.html.
22 Franklin Franco Pichardo, Los negros, los mulatos y la nación dominicana, (Edición Independiente), 114.
23 Author’s contribution.
24 Segato, op. cit,.
25 Fanon, Op.Cit., 34.
26 Fanon, Los condenados de la tierra., 35.
27 Segato, Op.Cit., 27.