ABSTRACT
While a more comprehensive treatment of the African legacy in the formation of Dominican culture will appear in later chapters, this present focus continues the exploration of the second of the two basic transfrontier cultural groups—the renegades or marginal people. These, of course, are the groups that, in a most determined fashion, elected to function well outside the ordinary confines of regulated colonial society in Hispaniola. Like the buccaneers and pirates, this second important group, called maroons (or cimarrones in Spanish), also symbolized an alternative to the rigidity of Spanish colonial authority. The cimarrones were escaped runaway slaves, yes. But at the same time, they were much more than mere slaves who had managed ingeniously to escape from the shackles of plantation oppression.
