In our contemporary moment, there has been no dearth of comparisons to historical periods of dictatorship and authoritarian rule. While most examples tend to come from 1930s Germany and the years preceding World War II in Europe, the Dominican Republic holds significant lessons relative to the dangers of encroaching human rights abuses, of the abrogation of constitutional law and principles, and of the uses and abuses of nationalist symbols to create false dichotomies between law-abiding citizen and criminal. Plagued by dictatorship both during the thirty-year regime of Rafael Trujillo (1930-1961) and in the authoritarian years of his successor Joaquín Balaguer, the country lives with an inescapable legacy of authoritarianism, but also with the powerful memories of those who resisted. In this panel, three scholars will present new interpretations and understandings of some of the challenges and survivals of those years, providing insight into the processes and practices of authoritarian rule, as well as the ways ordinary citizens resisted such dehumanizing techniques. All three papers pay particular attention to the most marginalized, looking closely at the ways gender and race hierarchies were weaponized by regimes like those of Trujillo and Balaguer, and how those formulations hold lasting power through their powerful imprints on the definitions of human rights, citizenship, and belonging.

In the first paper, Mónica Espaillat Lizardo will discuss the use of symbolism during the Trujillo era to police a gendered order of acceptable citizenship. Focusing on the use of the flag as nationalist symbol, Espaillat Lizardo analyzes the ways the regime connected the flag with the dictator’s actual body and used that link as a form of social control. In the second paper, Génesis Lara will provide insight into the ways individuals, channeling through the Catholic Church and the OAS, protested human rights abuses in the wake of the dictatorship. Specifically focusing on the engagement of conceptions of womanhood, feminism, and humanity, her work demonstrates how Dominicans called attention to the country’s widespread violations of basic human rights and the lasting implications of their efforts. In the final paper, Alexa Rodríguez will move to a place of memory and memorializing, discussing an innovative digital humanities project working to document the experiences of those who were children during the early twentieth century. By looking to formative memories of education during the dictatorship, Rodríguez shows the importance of narrating the previously silenced stories of Dominican childhood but also the lessons imparted in a project to reclaim Black humanity.

Taken together, these papers seek to combat the dehumanization and marginalization that occurred across the regimes of Rafael Trujillo and Joaquín Balaguer in the Dominican Republic and subsequently in the historical record by amplifying and extending the narratives that comprise their histories. However, in creating a more inclusive set of stories that we tell about dictatorship, they also seek to remind us of the lessons and legacies that reverberate from periods such as this to illuminate how and in what ways we might apply those lessons to the present.