ETERNAL VIGILANCE

Hispaniola: A Case History in Multicultural Madness

Since the immigration law of 1965, which nullified and even reversed the quotas of the 1921 law, the United States is rapidly becoming a multicultural, or more exactly, a multi-racial nation. Many problems have ensued from the new policy, most of them unforeseen and based on ethnic differences. Perhaps, before another immigration law is passed, America should examine life in already existing multicultural nations and consider a revision in its quota allotments.

By Robert Logan
September 1, 2003, The Barnes Review

After Franz Boas had set the desired politically correct course for American anthropology,(1) and Margaret Mead, one of his first students, had applied the indicated approach and disgraced the discipline,(2) much of subsequent anthropological studies were very much aligned with tendentious sociological concerns with which most women anthropologists seemed very comfortable. That is why a recent study on the peoples of Hispaniola, Why the Cocks Fight, by anthropologist Michele Wucker,(3) is such a pleasant surprise.

While it is true that Ms Wucker spends too much time discussing political and sociological matters on that perpetually troubled island, especially the darker half, her notable contributions to anthropology in this book are:

• In analyzing the significance of cockfights and the “strutting rooster” image to the blacks and mulattos of Hispaniola;

• In providing a sound background in the racial history of the island; and

• Recognizing the importance of racial considerations in discussing human behavior. In brief, she blends physical anthropology in neatly with cultural matters.

Although cockfights are strictly in the male domain, Ms Wucker, who to her credit recognizes that fact, manages to gain a true appreciation of the cockfighters (galleros), the arenas (galleras, gagaires), and even the triumphant strutting cock (gallo), and to convey that understanding and appreciation to her readers. Equally popular in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the cockfights are very symbolic of the history of violence between the two peoples.

Moreover, Ms Wucker treats her material most carefully and with respect for the peoples she discusses. For example, when referring to Haiti’s folk religion, a mixture of African animism and Roman Catholicism, she uses the spelling “Vodou” to distinguish it from what she calls Hollywood’s grotesque portrayal of “Voodoo.”(4) Likewise she uses the term “Kreyol” when referring to Haiti’s language, better suggesting its origin as one of the group of languages called creoles and reflecting that they are a mixture of African and European languages.

A glossary of Haitian and Dominican terms relating to cockfights, race, Vodou and other words unique to Hispaniola enhances the usefulness of the study and provides a handy reference for native terms.

Haiti is roughly considered a black country, while the Dominican Republic is essentially a mulatto nation. The two distinct countries, fated to be located on the same island of Hispaniola, generally despise each other. The dividing line separating the two peoples runs along Rio Massacre, so named because of the thousands of Haitians and Dominicans slaughtered at the border for infringing on the wrong side.

However, the rough classification of black and mulatto is an oversimplification. Both countries, initially at least, shared the same racial composition, consisting of French, Spanish, English, African, Arawak Indian and Taino Indian blood. Only after the African element revolted against their French rulers, first slaughtering all whites and then most mulattos, did the complexion of Haiti darken. Their racial histories are fascinating, reflecting their colonial beginnings, genocidal outbursts, and subsequent racial amalgamation. The peoples of Haiti, for example, classify each other by color, fluency in Kreyol and hair texture.

Drawing upon the research of Dominican, French and French Canadian scholars, Michele Wucker provides a fine racial history of Hispaniola, excerpts of which follow:

In the early 16th century, even before the Africans arrived, Nicolas de Ovando, the Spanish colonial governor, had forced many of the colonists to marry Indians. . . . [M]any of the men, according to Dominican historian Roberto Cassá(5), were already living with Taino women. In the late 16th century, desperate to keep up the dwindling Spanish population as a last defense against French and English aspirations to shrink Spain’s territory on Hispaniola, the colonial government went so far as to encourage white colonists to marry the former slaves. These mixed-race children were treated as Spanish and white, and brought up with a strong sense of Roman Catholic identity to strengthen their resolve in fighting off Protestant (English) invaders. . . .

Over the centuries, the racial lines within Dominican society blurred, and it became, as it still largely is, mulatto. . . .

As early as 1549, according to the Dominican historian Franklin J. Franco(6), Santo Domingo’s colonial government defined seven racial types: black, or “negro,” slaves brought from Africa; white, Spaniards; mulatto, offspring of black and white; mestizo, descended from Indian and white; tercerón, child of a mulatto and a white; cuarterón, child of a tercerón and white; and grifo, mixed Indian and black.(7)

In the early 1970s the Dominican sociologist Daysi Josefina Guzmán(8) identified nine hair colors and 15 main kinds of hair texture on a spectrum between bueno (good) for soft, Caucasian hair and malo (bad) for kinky, Negroid hair. [Among these were] lacio for straight and smooth; achinado for straight, stiff hair; espeso, thick, abundant and very slightly wavy; macho, thick and strong, abundant but without luster; rizado, thick and fine with small waves but dull; muerto, thin and greasy; ondulado, wavy; vivo, thick, dry, and out of control; variable, indescribable; crespo, thick and frizzy; de pimienta, peppery, growing slow and tight to the skull in small balls; motica, like peppery hair but thin, wavy; and pegaíto, so close to the skull that it is impossible to comb. . . .

She identified 12 skin colors: lochoso, “too white,” like milk; blanco, white; cenizo, ashen; descolorido, “without color”; pálido, so pale as to appear sick, desteñido, jaundiced; pecoso, freckled; pinto, mostly light but with large freckles or moles; trigueño, light, with a very slight dark touch; manchado, dark, with light streaks; “negro,” very dark; morado, so black as to be “almost purple.” In addition, there were 10 facial structures, six physical types and five general racial types.

Each category could be used as a guide to where any Dominican stood on the social scale. . . . In the Dominican Republic, calling someone “Haitian” is on the surface synonymous with describing them as negro or morado, but with an added psychological weight of fear and hatred. Haitians are generally darker than Dominicans [owing to the slaughter of whites and many mulattos during the struggle for independence]. . . .

The early French colonists in Saint-Domingue identified 128 different racial types, defined quite precisely along a mathematical scale determined by simple calculations of ancestral contributions. They ranged from the “true” mulatto (half white, half black), through the spectrum of marabou, sacatra, quarterón, all the way to the sang-mêlé (mixed blood: 127 parts white and one part black. . . . The sociologist Micheline Labelle(9) has counted 22 main racial categories and 98 subcategories (for varying hair types, facial structure, color and other distinguishing factors) used among Haiti’s middle class in Port-au-Prince in the 1970s. Within each category, the words are often as imaginative as they are descriptive: café au lait (“coffee with milk”), bonbon siro (“candy syrup”), ti canel (“little cinnamon”), ravet blanch (“white cockroach”), soley levan (“rising Sun”), banane mûre (“ripe banana”), brun pistache (“peanut brown”), mulâtre dix-huit carats (“18-carat mulatto”). . . .

The decidedly darker complexion of the Haitians (on average) dates back to 1804, when dictator Jean Jacques Dessalines decided to slaughter all the “whites” still residing in Haiti. Because some of the “French colonists” already had African blood, Dessalines devised a language test to weed out “whites” who could pass for black on the basis of skin color. The test was simple and effective. Since the colonists spoke continental French, rather than Haiti’s Kreyol, suspected colonists were asked to sing a country tune containing the line, “Nanett alé nan fontain, cheche dlo, crich-a li cassé” (“Nanette went to the fountain, looking for water, but her jug broke”). The “French,” meaning anyone who gave themselves away when they could not reproduce the Kreyol sounds or African cadences of the melody, were summarily bayoneted.

After Toussaint had been removed, his successor Henri Christophe mimicked the vanquished French by crowning himself King Henri I, building a magnificent palace and the massive Citadele La Ferrière, and appointing Afro-Haitian dukes and lords to rule over his domain.

Haiti soon began its rapid descent from the richest colony in the Caribbean to the absolute poorest (TBR, October 1994). Lothrop Stoddard, famed American scholar whose views very much influenced the U.S. immigration law of 1922, described these early events in his famed The French Revolution in San Domingo, published in 1914.

During the years of U.S. dominance in the Caribbean, American presidents and politicians have referred to Haitians and Dominicans with varying degrees of sophistication. Shortly before the U.S. Marines invaded Haiti in 1915, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, when briefed on the situation there, commented crudely in the idiom of the day: “Dear me, think of it! Niggers speaking French.”

Franklin Roosevelt, himself a duplicitous individual, recognized another slick operator when he saw one, but had the good sense to utilize him. Commenting on the extravagances and excesses of Dominican leader Rafael Trujillo, the president remarked: “He may be an S.O.B., but at least he’s our S.O.B.”

Early in World War II, President Roosevelt, to aid Jewish refugees from Europe without the need of congressional consent, made a deal with Rafael Trujillo in which the Dominican leader agreed to take in Jewish refugees from Europe. Trujillo, who had just recently slaughtered about 20,000 Haitians along the Rio Massacre, was under the impression that by admitting the Jews he would be infusing new “white” blood into the Dominican racial stock. As it turned out, however, most of the Jews subsequently entered the United States, and the Dominican Republic remained mostly mulatto.

In recent years, U.S. President Bill Clinton was so captivated by the charms of a renegade priest, the defrocked Jean-Bertrand Aristide, that he used 20,000 U.S. troops to reinstate the expelled demagogue to power. It is not surprising, however, that today, despite an infusion of billions of American dollars, Haiti has returned to its natural state, i.e., chaos, lawlessness, postponed or phony elections, corruption, drugs, filth, poverty and the rest. Haiti has yet to find her native leader, wise and strong enough to institute a just and effective government. Moreover, as writer Wucker notes, in the last two decades one out of every eight Haitians and Dominicans has moved to and now resides in the United States.

The French critic and playwright Aimé Césaire(10) once described Haiti as follows: “Poor Africa! I say poor Haiti! It is the same thing. Over there, tribe, languages, rivers, the castes, forest, village against village, hamlet against hamlet. Here, blacks, mulattos, griffes, marabouts, what-have-you, clan, caste, color, defiance and conspiracy, fights between cocks, between dogs over a bone, the combat of fleas!” His observation remains true today.

Although it was not her intention at all, Wucker’s fine study once again demonstrates the importance of ethnicity as a determining factor in societal matters and the futility of attempting racial classifications after miscegenation has progressed through several generations.

ENDNOTES:

(1) Franz Boas played a key role in developing modern cultural anthropology which holds that all races of humans have an equal capacity to develop cultural forms. The differences among peoples, he preached, resulted from cultural not racial or genetic causes. To a very great extent he undermined physical anthropological studies in America. Boas also encouraged women, including Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, to enter the field of anthropology.

(2) Her most famous work, Coming of Age in Samoa (Blue Ribbon Books, 1928), dealing with sex and love on the islands, has been shown by Derek Freeman (Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, Harvard University Press, 1983) to have been a complete fabrication.

(3) Wucker, Michele. Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians and the Struggle for Hispaniola. Hill and Wang, New York, 1999.

(4) As one example, in depicting Vodou (Voodoo) practice, Hollywood cannot refrain from including a scene in which the priest or priestess drives a needle (nail, spike, or whatever) into the part of a doll image of an individual the priest intends to harm. In reality, the doll piercing is very much like Chinese acupuncture, in which the practice is aimed at healing, not harming, the targeted area.

(5) Roberto Cassá. Historia social y economica de la República Dominicana. Santo Domingo, Editora Buho, 1987.

(6) Franklin L. Franco. Los negros, los mulatos y la Nacion Dominicana. Santo Domingo, Editora Nacional, 1969.

(7) Oddly, there does not seem to be a term for tri-racial (black-white-Indian) hybrids.—Ed.

(8) Daysi Josefina Guzmán. Raza y lenguaje en el Cibao. Eme Eme, Estudios Dominicanos 2, No. 11.

(9) Micheline Labelle. Idéologie de couleur et classes sociales en Haïti. Montreal, University of Montreal Press, 1978.

(10) Aimé Césaire. Une Tempête: D’après La Tempête de Shakespeare. Adaptation pour un théatre nègre. Paris: Seuil, 1969.

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Editor's comment: A blast from the past for your edification and enjoyment.

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