Colonial Ruins as Intervened Sites: La Zona, the US Occupation, and Dominican Racialised Sovereignty (1870–1924)

Abstract

This article traces the transformation of Dominican colonial ruins into racialised and mediated symbols of “the nation” in consumer culture from the emergence of local nation-building in the 1870s through the country’s first US occupation (1916–1924). It re-examines the work of renowned criollo painter Alejandro Bonilla to show that while the nationalisation of ruins through consumer culture in La Zona (the present-day name for colonial Santo Domingo) fuelled a fin-de-siècle cultural effervescence, this visuality made no effort to conceal the racial difference in the Dominican elite’s fragmented nationalism. Contrasting the elite vision of colonial ruins in La Zona with that of US imperial commodity racism in print culture, the article reveals how after 1916 local intellectuals reframed La Zona’s colonial ruins into an anti-colonial, anti-Black, and Hispanicised state optic for mass consumption. Yet La Zona also allows us to see the histories of Black freedom and resistance inscribed in its colonial ruins, which still stand as records attesting to settler colonialism’s racialised and gendered liminal experiences.