Founding the Archive

This chapter examines the discursive process through which the literary elite facilitated the erasure of Dominican blackness from the Archive of Dominicanidad. Through a reading of multiple literary representations of the Galindo Virgins (1860–1940), which contradict historical documents of the Galindo Murders (1822), the chapter proposes Galindo as foundational to anti-Haitianism and anti-blackness in the Dominican Republic. The chapter shows how, through a process of silencing and rhetorical manipulation, the murder of the Andújar family by common Dominican criminals came to be remembered as a crime of barbaric black Haitians against white Dominican virgins. In their renditions of the Galindo elite, writers imposed a history of violence that furthered border making and civilizing in the new republic and that satisfied colonial desire for white supremacy. With Trujillo, this nineteenth-century rhetoric became law, serving as the basis for violence against black Dominicans, rayanos, and ethnic Haitians.