Noelia Maria Santana

NOELIA SANTANA, then a graduate student at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, was granted funding in April 2021 to aid research on “Hablar Bien: Language and Race in the Dominican Republic,” supervised by Dr. Barbara Meek. Since the rise of Dominican nationalism, “Dominicanness” has been predicated on the exclusion of Blackness with the inclusion of Indigeneity as adjunct to Whiteness. Focusing on linguistic practices and the ways that language can be both racializing and racialized, this project asks: how do Haitian Dominicans contest nationalist discourses of what it means to be Dominican and of their non-belonging in the country? And at the same time, how do practitioners of el misterio (voodoo and spiritism) challenge the historical narratives of Indigenous extinction that persist? Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork funded by Wenner-Gren, this project attends to how ways of speaking Spanish become semiotically and racially linked to forms of personhood, senses of belonging, and deservingness of citizenship. Understanding the ways that social actors challenge these racialized boundaries that prevent them from existing socially, legally, racially, and culturally means teasing apart how “Haitianness,” “Dominicanness,” and “Indianness” can be articulated in everyday linguistic performances within interaction.