The Beams and Bricks of the Palacio de Borgella: Property Sales and the Haitian State in Santo Domingo, 1822–26

In September 1823, over a year into the Haitian unification of Hispaniola under president Jean-Pierre Boyer, the ciudadana Josefa Pepin sold a two-story brick house on the Plaza de la Catedral in Santo Domingo. The buyer was General Jérôme Maximilien Borgella, the provisional commander of what was now the arrondissement of Santo Domingo. Due to its location in the city’s colonial center, the Palacio de Borgella has generated debates in the contemporary Dominican Republic about the Haitian period and its impact on the “Spanish” architecture of Santo Domingo.

Starting with the original sale of the palacio, this paper examines the stakes of Haitian officials’ property acquisitions in Santo Domingo at the outset of unification. The historiography of the period has emphasized Boyer’s promises of land for former slaves as well as the reports of his “special commissioners,” who argued that the state could confiscate the property of absent individuals or convents. Notarial records from Santo Domingo between 1822 and 1826 reveal another story: military officers and civil servants charged with executing these projects purchased property of their own. For his part, Borgella bought houses, plantations, and bohíos, several of which were situated on state land. Since the commissioners had only authorized the state to claim the soil beneath homes that had been mortgaged to churches and not the houses themselves, Borgella was able to procure titles to these properties through payments to private vendors and mortgage-holding convents. This paper questions how such real estate sales from local landowners to Haitian administrators (many of whom were from Santo Domingo) departed from larger state property reforms. I argue that individual title transfers strengthened both groups’ shared interests in the unification at the expense of putative beneficiaries of reforms, including freedpeople and peasants.