Lexicons of Survival: Formulating Caribbean Feminisms

This paper will showcase the centrality of the Dominican Republic to the development of human rights and feminist articulations in Latin America and the Caribbean during the 1960s. I utilize the intersection of the Catholic Church and the Organization of American States Inter-American Committee for Human Rights (IACHR) to demonstrate how competing definitions of “womanhood,” and “feminisms,” became critical theater as the country prepared to hold their first elections after decades of dictatorship.

I pose larger questions of the role of the Caribbean, which sits at the epicenter of denials of Black humanity and the creation of modern definitions of human rights. In this case, the work of Lorgia Garcia Peña and Silvio Torres Saillant, interspersed with theorizations of Slyvia Wynter and Carole Anderson on the relationships between Blackness and modern conceptions of human rights help to undergird the significance of the Dominican women and Caribbean formulations of feminism and human rights. Dominican women overwhelmingly submitted the majority of allegations of human rights abuses to the IACHR. Thus, what lessons of Black humanity can be learned through the actions of Dominican women during the 1960s? How does centering the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean more broadly in the history of human rights in the Western Hemisphere allow us to reconsider the potential and limitations of human rights? The actions of Dominican women allows us to consider how lived experiences impacted the potentialities of feminism and human rights during one of the most pivotal moments in both Dominican and Caribbean history.