Culture and Ethnic Heritage The island's indigenous inhabitants were the Taino Indians (Arawaks) group and a small settlement of Caribs around the Bahía de Samaná. These Indians, estimated
to number perhaps 1 million at the time of their initial contact with Europeans, had almost died off by the 1550s. The importation of African slaves began in 1503. By the nineteenth century, the population was roughly 150,000: 40,000 of Spanish descent, an equal number of black slaves, and the remainder of freed blacks or mulattos. In the mid-1980s, approximately 16 percent of the population was considered white and 11 percent black; the remainder were mulattos (mixte black and white).
Contemporary Dominican society and culture are overwhelmingly Spanish in origin. Taino influence is limited to cultigens and to a few vocabulary words, such as huracán (hurricane) and hamaca (hammock). The African influence has been largely ignored, although it is kept alive in certain religious brotherhoods that seem to have the same African roots than religions practiced all over the Caribbean by people of African origin
There is a preference in Dominican
society for light skin and "white" racial features.. Dominicans traditionally preferred to think of themselves as descendants of the island's Indians and the Spanish, ignoring their African heritage. In reality, the Dominican Republic is a nation composed mainly of mulattos. It will probably, some time in the future psycho cultural evolution, integrate its African heritage in the governing image of the Dominican person without decreasing the importance of its Spanish roots.
Such an integration will be an ecclectic creolisation of the nation which will lead to its complete reconciliation with itself and allows it to build an effective modern cultural template based on its Spanish, Arawak and African roots.
The music of the Dominican Republic reflects the African background of the nation. The drum beats of the Meringue and the Tipico are fundamentally African. back to the top back to Dominican Republic index
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The early grants of land without obligation under the repartimiento system resulted in a rapid decentralization of power. Each landowner possessed virtually sovereign authority. Power was diffused because of the tendency of the capital city, Santo Domingo (which also served as the seat of government for the entire Spanish Indies), to orient itself toward the continental Americas, which provided gold for the crown, and toward
Spain, which provided administrators, supplies, and immigrants for the colonies. Local government was doomed to ineffectiveness because there was little contact between the capital and the hinterland; for practical purposes, the countryside fell under the sway of the large landowners. Throughout Dominican history, this sociopolitical order was a major factor in the development of some of the distinctive characteristics of the nation's political culture such as paternalism, personalism, and
the tendency toward strong, even authoritarian, leadership
As early as the 1495s, the landowners demonstrated their power by successfully conspiring against Columbus.
The image of this white "macho" paternalistic Dominican of Spanish descent dominates the psycopolitic context of the Dominican soul. It is the core of the dominering social figure of the Dominican experience called: the "Blanco de la tierra". It controls the vision of the nation of itself within all the
strata of society and fermented, in the past, the emergence of authoritarian leaders who would proclaimed, openly or implicitly, their whiteness and their status of wealthy landowners. The quintessential actor of the "Blanco de la tierra" complex of the Dominican Republic was Raphael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. Although he was a mulatto, Trujillo wanted to portray himself as white and of pure Spanish descent. There has been a recent revelation that, in order to project a pure"
Blanco de la tierra" image, he used make up to make himself look white.
The kind of macho, paternalistic persona which is the core of the "Blanco de la tierra" complex of the Dominican republic, is also found in the neighbor nation of Haiti which has created a similar national psycho social figure. However, because of the emergence in power of the blacks and mulattos in Haiti, and the dispossession and massacre of the whites land owners, the image of
the "Grand Blanc" (Great White, the french equivalent of the "Blanco de la tierra") was transformed by cultural assimilation/integration into the "Grand Nègre" (french) or "Gran Nèg" (creole) which means: a rich, powerful Haitian (person) that can be of any race because in Haitian creole the word "Nèg" means a person. The lexical equivalent of the word "nèg" is the word "moun" which also means a person. |
