ABSTRACT
The era of La España Boba did manage to produce a spirited national consciousness and was able to lend impetus to the development of an aggressively active mercantile class. This dynamic sector held new and rather progressive economic theories. Even so, Dominican society as a whole still lacked a single-purpose social class capable or strong enough to serve as the nation’s spearhead of resistance against the ever-present threat of outside invasion. The earlier heroic actions of Sánchez Ramírez and his hatero resistance fighters notwithstanding, there was still a void of societal cohesiveness as well as a vacuum of sociopolitical leadership. The result was a profound weakness of Dominican society at the precise moment of the new Haitian invasion of 1822. This circumstance was a consistently debilitating flaw that would have indelible sociopsychological consequences for el pueblo dominicano for many years beyond that historical date. 1 The Haitian invasion and occupation of 1822 under Haitian President Boyer is one of the most controversial and bitterly argued incidents (second or maybe third in importance to the Era of Trujillo or, as some individuals would continue to argue, to the United States military invasion of 1965) in the history of La República Dominicana. A tremendous amount of emotionalism invariably accompanies any sincere attempts to analyze the events in question. More than an isolated cadre of the country’s historical analysts and commentators, as well as ordinary citizens today, have concluded that much of the contemporary Haitian phobia has its genesis in Boyer’s invasion. As has been noted elsewhere in this work, an observer of today’s Dominican society frequently hears a Dominican or a Haitian quickly exclaim, “Oh, but we’re so entirely different; we’re not the same; everything about us is so different.” However, the more significant reality is that one cannot possibly view or begin to understand Dominican history and culture without fully realizing or recognizing the intricately interwoven textures and threads flowing between the two neighboring cultures, Dominican and Haitian. Their evolving societies on the jointly shared island of Hispaniola have been quite intimately interconnected since the earliest periods in the island’s history. Therefore, any analysis of the twenty-two-year Haitian occupation of Santo Domingo, beginning in 1822, will tend to depend largely upon the particular social orientation (biased, perhaps?) and personal agenda of the observer. Some observations will casually comment upon Boyer’s nobler enactments such as abolishing slavery or the questions of church-state separation or attempts at agrarian reform, while other depictions of Boyer will attempt to vilify the occupying Haitians by describing them as savages, rapists, and murderers. Without any dispute, however, is the one fact of lasting visibility: the population of the eastern end of Hispaniola was made considerably más oscura (darker) as a result of both increased Haitian-Dominican intermarriages and the White flight of greater numbers of Spanish colonists from the invaded territory.
