“My book joins a conversation about blackness and Dominican identity that has been ongoing in Dominican studies, among scholars such as Silvio Torres-Saillant, Lorgia García Peña, Frank Moya Pons, Milagros Ricourt, Carlos Andújar, Ginetta Candelario, April Mayes, Dixa Ramírez to name just a few. ”
By Emmanuel Espinal
November 1, 2021
Cover artwork based on the work "La Espera" by Dominican artist Lucía Méndez Rivas.
Photo: Courtesy of Heather Gernenz, University of Illinois Press 2021
In her first published book, Being la Dominicana: Race and identity in the visual culture of Santo Domingo, Dr. Rachel Afi Quinn explores the Dominican female construct through the visual content produced by young women navigating through transnational influences that reach the island. Dr. Quinn is associate professor in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies and the Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston.
Among the richness found within Being la Dominicana are Dr. Quinn's use of interviews she conducted on a group of young, educated, middle-class women while living in Santo Domingo in the 2010s. Esendom interviewed Dr. Quinn as to her interest in studying Dominican societal culture and her findings with regard to the Dominican female construct.
What attracted you to the study of Dominican society through the lens of its cultural production?
I came to study Dominican culture and society because of my interest in the experiences of other black women, particularly those who (like me) are racially mixed of African descent and living transnational lives. Because Dominican society on the island is so mixed and because racial identity is heavily constructed through the visual, I realized it was important to analyze the visual culture of the context in which Dominican women were forming identities. When I was living there in 2010, I was looking at the use of selfies and Facebook, new advertising, and social media consumption, and learning about the legacy of art schools Altos de Chavón and Bellas Artes and the many young visual culture producers in Santo Domingo. I found that there were these other archives beyond the National Archives, through which I could learn about race and gender in Dominican life: murals on the campus of la UASD, art in the Museo de Art Moderno and at the Bellapart Museum on la Kennedy. While looking at the tourist souvenir the “muñeca sin rostro [doll without a face]” I could see how it so effectively captures the idea that there is not one set of features of the Dominican woman but rather, as Dominican venders explain, “she is a mix of European, Indigenous and black.” In Being La Dominicana, I consider Dominican visual culture in the form of contemporary theater, music videos, films and even advertising—fantastic works being produced by artists and performers who are working within and against existing stereotypes about the Caribbean.
My book joins a conversation about blackness and Dominican identity that has been ongoing in Dominican studies, among scholars such as Silvio Torres-Saillant, Lorgia García Peña, Frank Moya Pons, Milagros Ricourt, Carlos Andújar, Ginetta Candelario, April Mayes, Dixa Ramírez to name just a few. But I approached the question of race by interviewing college-educated and class-privileged Dominican women in Santo Domingo about their everyday experiences. Living in Santo Domingo and coming back and forth from the island, I ended up learning a whole lot more about Dominican society than I might have anticipated. I was attending concerts, theater, palos, and performance pieces in the park. I was learning about Dominican society with and among Dominican women who were themselves challenging many of the things they had been taught about who they were supposed to be. I tried to craft a book that is compelling for readers and helps them to see more of the nuance and the details of the contemporary moment.
“As you identify in Esendom, there is so much that is underexamined about Dominican culture on and beyond the island.”
Could there have been a loss in translation from either part, the interviewees that have English as a second language or your translations of Spanish to English that could change this construct of «la dominicana»?
With the interviews I include in the book (out of the 40+ research interviews I conducted) I do hint at what may get lost in translation, particularly around ideas about color and blackness. I mainly conducted interviews in Spanish but the young Dominicans I was meeting in the capital often read or watched films in English and mobilized English at times to clarify things for me. I had spent enough time in the DR to understand the social context of our conversations as well as what I was translating into English for the book. For example, the term “moyeta” came up in an interview conducted and I had not heard the word before but I registered the discomfort that my interviewee had when her much lighter-skinned friend referred to her in that way. I asked several people to give me their definition of the term, which they told me, meant brawny and tough—and is associated with dark skin. Artists I include in my project like Michelle Ricardo, Dulcina Abreu, Isabel Spencer, Yaneris Gonzáles Gómez, in conversation over the years, directly informed my analysis, making it possible for me better understand their work, with no assumption that I would understand everything. In fact, as Xiomara Fortuna was quick to remind me in an interview, “no tienes que entenderlo” referring to various traditional cultural practices that I may have had the privilege of witnessing but as outsider it is not my place to know more about all of their meaning.
With this book I argue that the possibility of misinterpretation is also true for how we see and understand the world visually. We assume others are seeing the same things that we are seeing, that they interpret social signifiers in the same ways that we do but this is not the case. For example, the concepts of “la morena, la jíbara, la india,” do not directly translate into English because they come from a particular racial context and they also imply visual codes. My research shows that Spanish and English cannot always hold all the meanings around race that we want them to; visual language is also necessary to understand and decode. In Santo Domingo, beyond learning Dominican Spanish, I had to learn a new language around race and color hierarchy and be able to think in new ways about these things. In writing an academic text the book, I also had to learn the language of academia, so my work could be taken up in university classrooms. But I also worked to write it in ways that might be accessible and of interest to broader audiences wanting to think in more complex ways about race and gender. I guess what I am saying is that doing ethnography requires a lot of code switching and there is always the danger of misunderstanding.
What is, in your view, the lexicon of Dominican visual culture?
Dominicans on the island are engaging with popular culture from abroad, from Europe, the US, Japan, India and elsewhere, as they always have, but more rapidly thanks to the internet. In Being La Dominicana, I explore how the identities of Dominican women are far more complex than what is portrayed in popular media on and beyond the island. Likewise there is broad lexicon for making sense of the visual culture of Santo Domingo, one that is always changing. I can’t say that I have my finger on the pulse of contemporary visual discourse but it was important for me to document what kinds of representations were circulating on Facebook and YouTube at the time and how people used those representations to define themselves. There are whole sets of symbols that become shorthand for Dominican women, stereotypes that emerge in the visual culture (think rollos/curlers, la MegaDiva, the hypersexualization of particular women’s body parts, hierarchies of color), and I was interested in knowing whether young women were internalizing and/or challenging these stereotypes. I argue for the importance of naming the specificities around Dominican women’s identities; showing how it is essential to read for the details of class, color, and context. To have more grounded dialogue with interviewees I used images of Martha Heredia, Zoe Saldaña, Rita Indiana and Michelle Rodríguez as a shared lexicon and starting point to talk about what it is we are reading for visually when we are interpreting what we see in Dominican women’s bodies.
“In Being La Dominicana, as an ethnographer I wrestle with being an outsider in the DR and also finding my way as an insider there, much in the same ways that Dominican women live transnational lives there, whether or not they leave the island.”
Did you find any commonalities between Dominican visual culture and culture made elsewhere, say, the Caribbean, Africa or North America?
What I sought to show with this project is that there is a legacy of Dominican visual culture used to organize and mobilize activism. Las vallas used on the campus of la UASD, large movable hand painted political sign boards used in student protests were produced to incite dialogue, similar to the ways that images and videos shared on social networks in the contemporary moment have been used by Dominican youth. I also trace a trajectory of visual culture from artists trained in Europe who then returned to the DR and those who go to Mexico for their studies today and then return, as well as those influenced by Haitian art and artists on the island and those trained at the Dominican Republic’s finest arts schools and who are on transnational artist trajectories. Many of these contemporary movements are shaping cultural production in new ways and I have learned that Dominican artists, writers, and poets equally inspired by the beat poets and grunge music as they are by surrealism from Europe that shaped an earlier wave of Dominican artists.
Your take on Dominican surrealism is quite unique because contrary to other authors, you explore its continuity into the present and apply a feminist lens to it. Can you explain more about this part of your work?
Being La Dominicana urges further exploration of surrealism as it appears in Dominican society and culture, suggesting that it can be a way to see contemporary work as well as an arts movement. I think I’m able to bring to light some of the Afro-Surrealism that is often overlooked and how themes of surrealism from the early twentieth century resonate a century later. Bringing a feminist lens to my analysis demands that we ask questions about gender, race and power, too often overlooked in the study some of the more celebrated European surrealists. I dedicate one chapter to a 2013 Dominican production of La Casa de Bernarda Alba by Teatro Maleducadas, examining what about Federico García Lorca’s vision of the world was so resonant today in contemporary Santo Domingo.
I am critical of a replication of a Surrealist approach to curiosities of the world, in which people and cultures designated as foreign and exotic become fodder for artists’ work without critical analysis of these dynamics of power that include anti-blackness. At the same time, there are many ways that the visual lexicon and legacy of Surrealism as a avant-garde movement—as legible in Rita Indiana’s music video for “La Hora de Volvé” for example—re-emerges today in Dominican society. The theme of Surrealism is threaded throughout my book as an additional way of looking at the cultural productions that I engage with and I explore identifying it as Afro-surrealism to draw new concerns and be more specific about the work created. In the final chapter, I argue that a surrealist rage is visible in the activism of Dominican women as cultural producers who necessarily respond to the prevalence of violence against women and girls in Dominican society.
Within the "snapshot" you did your research in, which would you say was more influential in the construct of «la dominicana», the cultural societal norms (i.e. Catholicism, patriarchy, economic status, etc.) or the transnationalization (i.e. feminism, consumerism, individuality)?
I can’t say that there is one aspect of Dominican culture that is more influential on Dominican women’s constructions of self in the capital city in the early part of the twentieth century. But as a gender studies professor I am paying more attention to patriarchy, feminism and neoliberalism (in the form of hyper-consumerism). What I can say, and what I try to show with my work in cultural studies and through ethnography, is that we must pay closer attention to how neoliberal values shape our worldviews. Malls are all over the island as places to gather and Dominicans are encouraged to be good consumers, even as difficult as it is to have disposable income to participate in capitalism. And, as the Dominican term “consumismo” highlights, these values of consumerism make us more self-centered and superficial.
What is your personal take as someone from outside of the culture who immersed themselves in Dominican culture living in DR while researching, as to the construct of «la dominicana» compared to its transnational counterpart in the US?
I think if you talk to Dominican women throughout the diaspora they will tell you that they have a unique experience of identity based on where they have grown up and how they have grown up with varying ties to the island. Some of my friends have not had the opportunity to spend time living in Santo Domingo as an adult in the way that I did, or make return trips to the place they call “home”. But still they are forming their sense of self in relation to an existing image and narrative that they learn in their communities about “la dominicana.” I use this construction to explore and explode gender stereotypes and racialized gender identities in the context of the Caribbean where black and brown bodies are treated as a consumable good. There will always be social pressures that inform how we perform our gender, sexuality, and class identities, but my research shows these are very specific to our location, who is around us, and how we are understood in relation to them.
In Being La Dominicana, as an ethnographer I wrestle with being an outsider in the DR and also finding my way as an insider there, much in the same ways that Dominican women live transnational lives there, whether or not they leave the island (though the folks I focused on learning from had had opportunities to come and go for education or work). I am curious to hear what Dominican women growing up in the diaspora or in Santo Domingo make of my take on things. I was regularly in conversation with the folks I interviewed and with the community I was writing about and together we were able to name things about Dominican society—some of those things I could at times see more readily because I was coming from outside of it.
As you identify in Esendom, there is so much that is underexamined about Dominican culture on and beyond the island. I think that alongside artistic productions, contemporary research and cultural criticism it is essential to shifting the “dominant narrative,” about who Dominicans are today; new stories of identity and experience are emerging from Dominican cultural producers today. Is there room for alternate ways of thinking about race, gender and sexuality that a next generation of Dominicans in Santo Domingo wants to bring to the table? Are they engaging with Afro-surrealism in this moment where seeds of surrealism have already been sown? And where might they lead us as part of a global Afro-futurist cultural movement? Much of this cultural moment is being archived through social media, which has allowed us to learn from, respond to, and better name complex Dominican identities in a transnational world.
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Amaury Rodríguez contributed to this interview
Dr, Rachel Afi Quinn
Dr. Quinn is associate professor in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies and the Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston. Being la Dominicana: Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo, is Dr. Quinn’s first published book under University of Illinois Press. For more information on Dr. Quinn you can visit her personal webpage by clicking here.
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