Reimagining the Community Archive: Lizania Cruz's Investigation of the Dominican Racial Imaginary
Courtesy of the CUE Art Foundation.
Upon entering the gallery space I was drawn towards a desk reminiscent of government offices in the late 20th century. On its aged surface, a typewriter, some folders, and a shuffle of texts all hinted towards an ongoing investigation: a yellow notepad listing dates from the second half of the 1800s, a cutout of a magazine article headlined, “Busloads of Rebels Careen through Town”, an essay with yellow highlighter marks titled, “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity,” and a newspaper spread with an ad asking a poignant question in Spanish, “Do you believe that the border wall is just?” As I began to connect the dots between all these clues, a stack of business cards with its department logo and a Whatsapp number completed the puzzle. The detective on the case is Lizania Cruz, who invites us to reimagine archival structures as collaborative endeavors in search of answers that uncover and better represent the histories of her communities. Presented at CUE Art Foundation, “Gathering Evidence: Santo Domingo & New York City,” displayed the current state of affairs of her project Investigation of the Dominican Racial Imaginary, which explores how Black identity has been undermined and erased from the country’s collective consciousness.
In an introductory text Cruz wrote for the exhibition catalog, she recalls a conversation with her grandmother as a starting point. Reminiscing about Andrés, Boca Chica, the town she spent most of her childhood in the DR, Cruz asks her grandmother where the batey was located in that area. In the Dominican Republic, a batey is a town of sugarcane cutters, typically formed by Haitian workers and Dominicans of Haitian descent as part of the sugar mill plantation. Dating back to the creation of the Dominican Republic in 1844, many Haitians were brought into the country to work sugar cane jobs as a result of the agreements between the Haitian and Dominican governments. Cruz’s grandmother responds that Andrés is the batey, moving her to analyze her remembrance; images of a place she could see through the fence that separated her home from it, “...the batey felt distant to me, but I was part of it.” Although generations of Dominicans have consequently been born and raised in these towns, their lives within the Dominican experience indicate a social and political agenda seeking to devalue their claim to the collective identity of the nation.
In this space, the participatory artist and designer offered various iterations of the Investigation’s key components. “¡Se Buscan Testigos!” [Looking for Witnesses!], amasses responses to questions asked to the general public, both in Santo Domingo and New York City, on themes related to her research. Cruz engaged with fellow Dominicans using the material vernaculars found on the streets of Santiago and NYC: flyers inside bodegas, audio announcements playing through loudspeakers mounted on a pickup truck, newspaper ads, and hand-painted signs all prompted the audience to send their responses via WhatsApp. Questions included:
“Who are the founding fathers of our country?”
“What about Christopher Columbus did you learn in school that you find to be true history?”
“When and where do you dance music with African influences; salsa, merengue, bachata?”
Images and videos of these encounters with participants accompanied the hand-painted signs throughout the gallery walls, with QR codes placed at various points lead to an online application designed by the artist asking questions in order to qualify as a “Civilian Reviewer” of all the information gathered in this exhibition. At the center of the main room, 20 books of 10,000 blank pages stand as testament to the 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent who were stripped of their citizenship as a result of La Sentencia (The Sentence), a ruling issued by the Constitutional Tribunal in 2013. Titled “The Plaintiffs Records,” each blank page within these tall stacks represents a birth certificate that was revoked by the Dominican government. And with each book, a QR code leads to a profile of one of these expatriate citizens.
While recent events such as La Sentencia attest to the current socio-political climate in the DR and its diaspora, Cruz traces the government’s racist practices and its repercussions within the racial imaginary back to various points in history. As a result of nationalistic differences after colonial rule and slavery, the Dominican Republic positioned itself as a Hispanic nation that was made up of people of European decent. This motivated many to adopt conflated notions of identity, to the point that being Dominican meant being Catholic, of mainly Spanish descent, and most importantly, white; whereas the erroneous antithesis to this set of characteristics was to be Haitian, meaning voodoo practitioner, of African descent, and Black. In his book, A Case of Mistaken Identity: Antihaitianismo in Dominican Culture, Ernesto Sagas writes, “The black and the mulatto masses had but two choices: to ‘lighten’ themselves by assuming the indio identity and Hispanic culture, or to be ostracized and excluded from the national mainstream.” Most notably under his rule, the dictator Rafael Trujillo implemented various strategies to solidify these beliefs, all striving towards a white, eurocentric society: from using makeup to whiten his skin, to committing the seldom known Parsley Massacre. It comes as no surprise that when Cruz asks participants how they identify themselves racially, few to none will say Black. And with questions around class and reasons for maintaining the border, responses often reflect beliefs that Haitians are inherently primitive or poor when in reality there are hidden, systemic efforts working in the background to determine these people’s lives to this day.
So for thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent, what does it mean when the institutions in power dictate you’re from neither here nor there? If sharing notions of identity creates a sense of belonging to a greater community, whether it be based on cultural elements or lived experiences, what comfort or validation comes from a national identity when the nation-state denies this to your neighbor? Through this project Cruz challenges the state for its corruption and false narratives because they are at the center of all this injustice. If the nation as a construct is made to realize a sense of unity through various manifestations of identity, history has taught us that it can also be violent and divisive in becoming such a body.
In her most recent book Potential History, Ariella Azoulay argues that institutions considered essential to the construction of society and its image, namely archives and museums, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. She discusses that imperialism has divided populations into differentially governed bodies, always pushing for “progress” while it tries to destroy or erase true realities of the past. By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can refuse these violent acts that have fomented the divisions we see globally. To exemplify this practice, Azoulay considers archival images and texts regarding the geographical region Palestine encompassed right before the implementation of the Israeli state. She analyzes the descriptions given to Palestinian citizens during this specific time, where terms such as “refugees” and “illegals” were used in order to make official the settler’s narrative (the nation-state of Israel) as reality through the archive, blanketing the realities of displacement and expatriation.
Over time, the Domincan state has labeled these citizens as such, despite many of these people’s ancestors having lived and worked on Dominican sugar cane fields. And yet racist narratives were imposed on their existence and reality, then made official as “history.” These narratives have destructive effects on the material conditions of these communities, actively present as official policies and laws governing the land and passed down through generations. Recently, the government resorted to giving out residencies to those of Haitian descent, but these will expire soon enough, forcing these citizens to work against the current to survive where they’ve always called home. Because without proper papers, they cannot work, receive benefits, have access to public services, nor exercise their rights—a continuation of systemic slavery.
Akin to Azoullay's proposal, Cruz invites her participants to revisit their shared memories and interpretations of canonical history. The newspaper cutouts and images she offers in the space lead her participants and viewers to reconsider the use of terms such as “invaders” and “expats” when talking about Dominicans of Haitian descent. Using various approaches, Cruz has fostered a dynamic ecology where the vital participation of community members and data sets pertaining to them intersect to bring about a new perspective. Producing these types of engagements with participants activates various processes: by elevating these accounts to that of archival value, these personal narratives challenge the validity, authority, and linear axiom of state-sanctioned “history,” proposing a non-linear understanding of a collective’s past. This, in turn, positions the project to put the participant’s understanding of their own remembrance in question, considering that their collected answers make evident the state’s influence on their notions of reality: their rhetoric regarding Blackness, their relationship to their nation (and its borders) as citizens, and how they conceive their own identities as intertextual formations. The exchanges create a new landscape of memory, driven by Cruz’ search to uncover this potential history.
In the case of the Investigation of the Dominican Racial Imaginary, the presented archive not only represents the community it concerns, but it is directly composed by said community; making the space a living repository of information that is continuously growing. The invitation begins with the desk at the space’s entrance, pulling the curtain to reveal her thoughts. Cruz’ placement of the scannable questions, in accordance with the different components of the body of work, shows a masterful design of the space as an experience and exemplifies her insistence on what drives the work. As Alex Santana cites Cruz in the catalog’s essay, “Art can be a catalyst for change, but there are material conditions that art can never really provide for.” Considering the bodies of work she has produced over the past years, it is evident that Cruz wholly believes in the process, with the time it takes and the collaborations it asks for, to reach an end product. This latest investigation comes as the next step within the analogous, macro-scaled process of her oeuvre.
Sebastián Meltz-Collazo is a writer, visual artist, and musician working towards new experiences through the intersection of narratives. Connecting personal with collective histories, he explores iterations of visual culture and representation with the intention of raising questions around identity and its various manifestations. He is a graduate of Image Text Ithaca and is based in New York & Puerto Rico.