Seeing Jamaica made something that had felt like a vague unease in the Dominican Republic suddenly come into focus.

From the series: Bricolage of Thoughts

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What surfaced was not a matter of cultural preference or atmosphere, but a difference in the legitimacy narrative a society relies on—more specifically, in how its origin narrative is constructed.

In Jamaica, Africanness and Blackness are taken up as the subject of the origin narrative. Movements such as Rastafari and cultural forms like reggae are not merely expressions of identity; they function as challenges to colonialism and white domination, as attempts to retell origins from the standpoint of those who were subordinated. The violent origins of slavery and colonial rule are not erased or overwritten, but confronted and reinterpreted.

In the Dominican Republic, by contrast, African origin—despite its demographic and historical significance—has been placed outside the origin narrative. At the core of this configuration lies the concept of mestizo.

Mestizo does not describe mixture in general. It is a selectively adopted origin narrative centered on the mixture of Europeans and Taíno Indigenous peoples. Through this framing, European origin is retained as the core of civilization and legitimacy, Indigenous origin is incorporated as an innocent and “safe” past, and African origin—as well as mixture involving Africans—is excluded from the very framework of origins.

As a result, the centrality of slavery to social formation, the decisive demographic and economic role of Afro-descendant populations, the fact that much racial mixture emerged through violence and coercion, and the persistence of racialized inequality into the present are rendered structurally invisible. The issue is not whether mixture is affirmed or denied, but which mixtures are permitted to count as origins, and which are denied that status from the outset.

To stabilize this origin narrative, Taíno Indigenous peoples are mobilized as a third term. They are not engaged as historical realities in their full complexity, but abstracted into symbolic figures that secure narrative coherence. Enriquillo, for example, is celebrated as a resister of Spanish rule, yet that resistance is framed in a way that does not implicate Black slavery or contemporary racial hierarchies—a form of “safe resistance.”

Within this configuration emerges the racialized label “Haitian.” This term operates not as a marker of nationality, but as a device that collapses legal status, lived history, and individual identity into a single category of Blackness subject to exclusion. The 1937 massacre under the Trujillo regime was not an act of immigration control, but the eruption of this legitimacy narrative at the point where exceptional violence became permissible—an attempt to eliminate those positioned as external to the origin narrative.

The Columbus Lighthouse functions as a visual apparatus that fixes this origin narrative in place. By commemorating, without critical framing, a figure who stands at the origin of colonialism and slavery, it anchors European origin as the unquestioned starting point of legitimacy. The physical violence of massacre and the symbolic overwriting performed by monuments are different expressions of the same narrative logic.

Seen from Jamaica, this structure in the Dominican Republic becomes legible. The difference is not moral in a simplistic sense, but it is asymmetrical. An origin narrative articulated as a challenge to dominant power is not equivalent to an origin narrative designed to legitimate the exclusion of those below.

This pattern is not unique to the Caribbean. A similar gradient can be observed across Central America, from Costa Rica through Nicaragua to Guatemala. Across this spectrum, European and Indigenous origins are foregrounded to varying degrees, while Africanness is increasingly marginalized or rendered invisible.

The question, then, is not which culture is affirmed, but how much silence, exclusion, and violence a society requires to sustain its claim to legitimacy. By seeing Jamaica, what had felt like an inarticulate discomfort in the Dominican Republic became intelligible—not as a personal reaction, but as a difference in the design of legitimacy narratives themselves.

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This article will also be posted on Medium soon.

If it resonates with you, I’d be grateful to hear your thoughts there.