Negotiating Dominican Citizenship: Guardians and the 1916 US Occupation

In 1919, a father in Santiago, Dominican Republic wrote to the regional superintendent declaring, “A family man as I am, fully aware of my deberes, I have never allowed my children to stop fulfilling their deber to attend school.” During the US occupation between 1916 to 1924, Dominican guardians argued it was their deber, or duty, to ensure their children received an education, whether through schools funded with resources from the national government or their local community, or within their own homes. This paper examines how non-elite Dominican guardians and community members across the Dominican Republic tied notions of responsibility and education to offer counternarratives of Dominican citizenship in this period of US military control. Using a regional approach, this paper explores how non-elite Dominican guardians and community members in both urban and rural areas practiced community-based notions of civic duty in their demands to the US and Dominican officials and their efforts to sustain schools without government assistance. This was in stark contrast to paternalistic arguments made by US and Dominican education officials about the government’s responsibility in providing schools to educate Dominicans on how to be citizens. Since many parents and guardians wrote to education administrators and US officials about the policies, this paper uses correspondence preserved in the Dominican National Archives to highlight their perspectives.