Criollo archival recoveries after independence

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines Dominican criollo archive-building during the country’s Second Republic (1865–1916). I investigate the 1889 Historical Controversy, a prolonged dispute over the role general Pedro Santana would play in the national mythology, calling attention to the elite’s nineteenth-century debates over the meaning of emancipation records and the political value of archive-making. Building on Chelsea Stieber’s research on post-independence Haitian writing, I contrast what I call the controversy’s “archival wars” to the lives of Rosa Duarte’s archive in 1890s periodical culture. I focus on the figure of Federico Henríquez y Carvajal to demonstrate how, after the historical controversy, among criollo intellectuals the normalists routinely collected emancipation records in the press to institutionalize white supremacist nationalist narratives. The two cases reveal how criollo intellectuals pursued Ibero-Americanism on the basis of “fact,” thereby opening studies on Caribbean nationalisms to inquiries into elite archival recoveries.