Teresita Martínez-Vergne successfully combines intellectual and social history in this analysis of nation building, national identity, and citizenship in the Dominican Republic during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She focuses on the efforts of a group of liberal intellectuals and their political allies to modernize and develop the nation, examining their ideology, the endemic problems that prompted their proposed reforms, attempts to implement them following the 1899 assassination of dictator Ulises Heureaux (“Lilís”), and the many obstacles and contradictions that impeded their progress.
This well-written and skillfully argued study rests on a thorough examination of Dominican archival records, contemporary newspapers and popular periodicals, and secondary sources that include useful comparative material from Latin America and elsewhere. This comparative perspective allows Martínez-Vergne to challenge some traditional concepts in Dominican historiography, such as the idea that Dominican identity was somehow fixed in the past by certain historical, geographical, or cultural...
