The Body of the Dictator and the Body of the Flag: Gender Discipline and Nation-Making in the Dominican Republic, 1933–58

This paper traces Rafael Trujillo’s relationship to and use of the Dominican national flag during his dictatorship. The Trujillo flag laws passed between 1933 and 1958 turned the Dominican national flag into a central instrument of control in the dictator’s arsenal. Through a series of laws, Trujillo strategically linked the flag to himself, the Dominican military and policing institutions, and the religious symbol of the Virgin of Altagracia. The flag’s legal and symbolic remaking was central to the structural reorganization of the Dominican nation-state under his regime. Through legal and social recodification, the flag became a register for the regime’s gender vision. Trujillo’s flag laws also granted the banner legal protection against irrespeto (disrespect), outlining the consequences for those who infringed upon the flag’s dignity. By his assassination in 1961, the flag had become so closely identified with Trujillo that its very “body” was synonymous with that of the dictator. Although Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, the socio-symbolic and legal elements of the Trujillato endure in the fabric of the Dominican national flag into the twenty-first century.