Leasing Columbus: Holy Relics, Public Ridicule, and the Reconstruction of Two Americas

This chapter considers traditional Dominican Spanish-Catholic nationalism through a close study of Henry C. C. Astwood’s most infamous scheme: his attempt to facilitate the lease of Christopher Columbus’s exhumed remains to a US businessman in 1888. The Dominican Republic’s transatlantic debate with Spain over which nation possessed the true bones not only cast doubt on Dominican officials’ integrity but also challenged the nation’s symbolic claim on Columbus, a figure of Western modernity and whiteness. In 1888, Astwood argued that by leasing the remains and exhibiting them in the United States, the Dominican Republic would gain ground in its dispute with Spain. This proposal, however, violated Western notions of social morality, specifically the divide between the sacred and the secular. This chapter demonstrates how both US and Dominican reactions to the proposal reinscribed symbolic racial and national borders through racialized moral discourse.