In a perceptive challenge to longstanding assumptions about Dominican anti-Haitianism,
April J. Mayes finds fresh ways to think about the production of race in late 19th and 20th century Dominican Republic. Combining intellectual history with fine-grained social history,
The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race and Dominican National Identity (
University Press of Florida, 2014) argues that Dominican thinking about race was conditioned by West Indian migration, by considerations about both Spanish and US imperialism, and by shifting understandings of gender and of whiteness. This is an important contribution to the recent rethinking of the history of the island of Hispaniola.