Ayleen Paola Correa

In the Dominican Republic, the transformation of La Cuarenta – Trujillo’s notorious torture site (1930-1961) – into the barrio of Cristo Rey reveals how physical spaces become contested sites where past atrocities and ongoing structural violence converge, yet care and life can emerge. Specifically, I ask: How do women and youth in Cristo Rey negotiate belonging and make community in a neighborhood shaped by ongoing forms of overlapping and haunting violence? My dissertation centers on Las Fundadoras, intergenerational women who witnessed Trujillo’s dictatorship while living near La Cuarenta. They became Cristo Rey’s first teachers, caregivers, and community organizers despite enforced silence wielded as needed for re-democratization. I also focus on the neighborhood youth who embody and transform these legacies. Their intergenerational relationships demonstrate how history is not buried in transformed ruins. Instead, it haunts, surfacing in the everyday. Using feminist and decolonial ethnographic methods, I examine how everyday practices of care and place-making shaped and continue to construct women’s and youth’s belonging both to the nation-state and to the barrio. By attending to the embodied, relational, and spatial practices through which life is affirmed, this project contributes to anthropological theories of community, care, and the afterlives of state violence.