Margins : A Journal of Literature and Culture
Reclaiming Caribbean Labor from the Global
Marketplace: Sugar, Tourism, and Textiles in Alan
Cambeira’s Azúcar Trilogy1
Alison Van Nyhuis
Fayetteville State University
Abstract: The Dominican-born Alan Cambeira synthesizes the critical
elements of sugar realism novels, the racy elements of romance novels and
yard fiction, the informative elements of travel literature, and the human
rights rhetoric and logic of critically acclaimed women’s memoirs in the
Azúcar trilogy. In the Azúcar trilogy, Cambeira narrates the Dominican
Republic’s declining sugar industry, expanding tourism industry, and
transitional textile industry in terms of the personal and professional
development of Azúcar Solange Ferrand, a young female sugarcane worker
who is born and raised on the Dominican sugarcane plantation Esperanza
Dulce.
Narrating the bitter-sweet story of sugar production alongside the
migration, education, and socioeconomic advancement of a Dominicanborn female sugarcane worker emphasizes the material and symbolic
elements of sugar, tourism and textiles, especially the ways in which these
increasingly modern industries unevenly exploit female workers in the
Dominican Republic. In addition, the trilogy explores how to restructure
Dominican society in order toreclaim Caribbean labor from the global
marketplace and restore human rights in the Dominican Republic.
Keyw
or
ds: Caribbean literature, Dominican Republic, Human Rights,
eywor
ords
Migration, Slavery, Sugar,Textiles and Tourism.
The Dominican-born Alan Cambeira’s twenty-first-century
Azúcar trilogy narrates the Dominican Republic’s declining sugar
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industry in Azúcar! The Story of Sugar, the nation’s expanding
tourist economy in Azúcar’s Sweet Hope, and the island’s
fluctuating textile industry in Tattered Paradise... Azúcar’s Trilogy
Ends! Although “American critical attention towards a certain
kind of Dominican literature (written as [Janira] Bonilla notes,
in English) has increased over the last few years” (Méndez 2012:
18),2 academic articles have not been published on the Azúcar
trilogy. Caribbean authors, newspapers, and magazines, however,
have published positive reviews of the trilogy.3 These reviews praise
the novels’ visionary history of the Dominican Republic, masterful
representation of the island’s reality, and unique artistry.
According to the Jamaican-based Observer, Azúcar! is “‘boldly
lyrical, reflecting Caribbean sensuousness, rhythms and mysticism;
this is an energetic, very unusual, and above all, enlightening novel’”
(qtd. in Azúcar!). Indeed, the trilogy synthesizes the analytical
elements of sugar realism novels,4 the racy elements of romance
novels and yard fiction,5 the informative elements of travel
literature, and the human rights rhetoric of critically acclaimed
women’s memoirs, such as the Guatemalan-born Rigoberta
Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchú and the Iranian-born Shirin
Ebadi’s Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope.6
The trilogy personalizes the mass exploitation of sugar,
tourism, and textile workers by tracing the personal and
professional development of Azúcar, a young female sugarcane
worker who was raised on the sugarcane plantation Esperanza
Dulce (“Sweet Hope”).7 In the trilogy’s first novel, Azúcar!, the
sugar plantation owner’s son, Mario Montalvo, brutally rapes
and impregnates Azúcar. Mario’s brother, Marcello Montalvo
and his Canadian-born life-partner, Harold Capps, aim to protect
Azúcar from additional human rights abuses: they sponsor her
migration and postsecondary education in Canada. After Azúcar
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67
achieves socioeconomic advancement in Canada, she returns home
as an upper-level employee for a Canadian-based multinational
corporation invested in expanding the Dominican Republic’s
tourism industry. In the trilogy’s second novel, Azúcar’s Sweet Hope,
Azúcar continues to work on expanding the tourism industry in
the Dominican Republic. In the trilogy’s final novel, Tattered
Paradise, Azúcar uses her political position as a labor party senator
to support the local economy. In effect, the trilogy demonstrates
why and how people should work together to reclaim Caribbean
labor from the dehumanizing global marketplace.
The Azúcar trilogy initially bombards readers with the
material reality of the sugarcane plantation Esperanza Dulce,
where Azúcar was born and raised. The torrid heat, stench of
urine and excrement, and “a bone-crushing shriek” evoke a history
of grim realities that tourism brochures often conceal from
affluent foreigners by advertising the Caribbean as an eternal
paradise. The narrator grounds the hellish twentieth-century
present of Esperanza Dulce in slavery by informing readers that
slaves constructed the “century-old” plantation in 1839
(Cambeira 2001: 4). The narrator blurs the distinctions between
a past and present Esperanza Dulce by equating the “subhuman”
living and working conditions of enslaved sugar workers with
sugarcane workers on Esperanza Dulce (78): “Nothing much
had changed here since the era of plantation slavery” (2). Both
enslaved and free sugarcane cutters have “substandard dwellings”
and “precarious” living conditions: they lack electricity, drinkable
water, medical treatment, education, and nutrition (2). Enslaved
and free sugarcane workers endure extreme working conditions:
they are forced to work without adequate rest, even when ill or
young; they cannot move freely beyond work; and they do not
receive adequate remuneration. In other words, the narrator speaks
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of centuries of sugarcane cutters in the terms of modern human
rights documents, such as the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. Mario’s brutal rape of Azúcar propels her to the forefront
of the trilogy’s international human rights framework.
Since Azúcar is the Spanish word for sugar, her name
emphasizes the deeply personal and material reality of a frequently
historicized and narrated topic: the bitter-sweet story of sugar.
The narrator generally refers to the protagonist as Azúcar and
the sweetener refined from sugarcane as sugar, even though the
narrator uses Spanish, French, and Kreyól words throughout the
trilogy; however, the translation of Azúcar into sugar in the pages
preceding chapter one and the definition of Azúcar/sugar in
terms of the African slave trade foreshadow the polysemeic role
Azúcar, sugar, and their referents play in the trilogy. As Keith
Sandiford notes in “Vertices and Horizons with Sugar: A
Tropology of Colonial Power,” sugar has the “symbolic power
to embody the antitheses of history and to trope extremes of human
desire: sweetness, value, and power on the appetitive or upside;
displacement, disease, and death on the negative or downside”
(Sandiford 2001: 148). The Azúcar trilogy shuttles the entangled
terms Azúcar and sugar back and forth between the “appetitive or
upside” and the “negative or downside” of human desire. In this
sense, the Azúcar trilogy differs from many novels written about
sugar, such as Masters of the Dew, Black Shack Alley, and The
Chosen Place, the Timeless People (Lockard 1994: 95). The Azúcar
trilogy romanticizes sugar vis-à-vis Azúcar.
In Azúcar!, the narrator traces Azúcar’s movement from the
sweet or “appetitive” side of the sugarcane spectrum down towards
the “negative” side of the spectrum (Sandiford 2001: 148). Azúcar’s
movement down this spectrum is loosely paralleled with an inverse
movement from her position as a worker on a sugarcane plantation
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owned by a multinational corporation towards a much more
dominant position as an administrative employee for the same
Canadian-based corporation. Azúcar initially exemplifies an ideal
Dominican female, that is, innocent, youthful, natural, and pure:
“some would describe her as delicate like the flamboyán petals; she
was certainly just as beautiful and frail” (Cambeira 2001: 7).
Consequently, she was the plantation overseer’s son’s prime victim,
for “Mario was a predator of the worst sort”; “only those women
who weren’t the least bit sexually attracted to or perversely curious
about him. . . . were fearful of him” (8). Mario repeatedly refers to
Azúcar as desirable and edible objects while brutally raping and
abusing her, calling her “‘sweet little thing,’” “‘sweet sugar’” and
“‘Sweet sugarcane’” (9).
Azúcar begs for mercy, fights back, cries for help, and prays
for death, but Mario basically bangs Azúcar’s sweetness or
goodness out of her. As Amalia L. Cabezas notes in her discussion
of dominant ideologies of sex and gender in the Dominican
Republic, “A woman’s virginity is said to be the most important
carrier of her value. Sex outside of marriage taints her honor and
dignity” (Cabezas 1999: 110). Mario does not leave Azúcar until
he is “thoroughly satisfied that he had become the victor of yet
another of his shameless quests” (Cambeira 2001: 10). After
satisfying his sexual appetite, Mario does not even attempt to hide
the bloody damage he has done to Azúcar or the physical damage
he has done to her grandmother’s cabin on Esperanza Dulce.
Mario’s switching from Azúcar to sugar and vice versa during
the rape scene gestures towards reading his production of a bittersweet Azúcar as a reenactment of the long and abusive history of
“black slavery and Creole desire” bound up with sugarcane
production (Sandiford 2001: 156). Blackness is, of course,
subjective. While the workers perceive Azúcar as having a lighter
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“brown sugar” complexion like “unrefined, raw sugar” (Cambeira
2001: 21, 260), Mario’s wife refers to his adulterous actions in the
batey as “black” “whoring” (36)8. In this sense, members of the
planter aristocracy blur the distinction between wealthy Hispanic
males’ rape of sugarcane workers and their paid sex with sugarcane
workers, and therefore, group Azúcar and other working-class
females on the batey with sex workers (36). The Azúcar trilogy
clarifies that these kinds of attitudes towards sugarcane workers in
the Dominican Republic stem from slavery.
In the era of plantation slavery, Mario’s grandfather “was
caught in the heinous act of brutally raping one of the young
girls who worked” in the mill house at Esperanza Dulce; he then
shot her husband dead before shooting his victim, too (Cambeira
2001: 135-36). Local authorities never arrested or tried him for
this “double murder” and therefore, implicitly confirmed his
violent abuse on the plantation (136). Historically, slave owners
on sugarcane plantations perceived a “‘right to total sexual access
to [all the female] slaves’” (Beckles 141 quoted in Kempadoo
1999: 5), and “slave owners made ample use of this ‘right’: rape
and sexual abuse were commonplace, and concubine and
prostitution quickly became an institutional part of Caribbean
societies” (Kempadoo 1999: 5).
Mario’s brutal rape of Azúcar indicates his perceived
inheritance of his grandfather’s perceived “‘right to total sexual
access to [female] slaves.’” By presenting Mario and his grandfather’s
rape of young girls as a perceived “‘right’” the narrative roots their
actions in the patriarchal and racist ideologies and actions of
colonizers and slave owners (Beckles 141 quoted in Kempadoo
1999: 5). Indeed, the trilogy shows how the historically oppressive
“social codes of the plantation” as the narrator says, prevail in the
Dominican Republic for workers in the sugar, tourism, and textile
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industries despite the presence of national and international human
rights laws that criminalize the exploitative actions of upper-level
male employers (Cambeira 2001: 81).
Initially, it seems as if Azúcar’s rape generates enough shock
and outrage to incite organized action against the widespread
exploitation on Esperanza Dulce. Mario’s treatment of Azúcar
shocks the cane cutters out of their daily routines, “the regimented
patterns and requirements of the Island’s plantation agriculture
that had reigned supreme for centuries” and revives a collective
consciousness of the workers’ current and past oppression on
Esperanza Dulce (Cambeira 2001: 13). Azúcar’s grandmother,
for example, feels “the strain of her many years of slave-like
confinement to the sugarcane fields” when she embraces her
bloodied granddaughter after the rape (22). Azúcar’s rape
repeatedly generates a similar two-pronged response in the other
sugar workers on Esperanza Dulce.
The frequency and depth of workers’ response to Azúcar’s
rape hinge on her purity as well as the workers’ appreciation of
morality. As the elder sugarcane worker Don Anselmo
passionately tells a crowd of listeners, “‘the filthy bush hogs rob
us of our loveliest of gifts of all – the only pure symbol of our
collective worth here in this perpetual cesspool of life as we been
knowin’ it on these murderous plantations’” (Cambeira 2001:
69). The workers’ collective anger and growing realization of
higher-ranking sugarcane officials’ repeated depreciation of their
most valued members’ esteemed qualities prompts the workers
to amend sexual social laws that perpetuate violence against
workers like Azúcar.
More specifically, the workers attempt to maintain the sexual
social law for ideal Dominican females by revising the sexual social
law for males. Cabezas summarizes two crucial constants of the
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sexual social law in the Dominican Republic: “the repression of
female sexuality and the creation of an insatiable sexual appetite in
men.” Within this ideological construct of Marianismo and
Machismo, a “woman’s virginity is said to be the most important
carrier of her value,” even as men are expected to “master” women’s
sexuality (Cabezas 1999: 110). Don Anselmo’s and other workers’
outrage over Azúcar’s rape exemplifies how they value female
workers’ virginity, and therefore, despise Mario’s and other higherranking sugarcane employees’ insatiable appetite for the female
sugarcane workers. Azúcar’s grandmother’s respected status as the
workers’ “saintly mother” intensifies the collective outrage at Mario
and Diego Montalvo (Cambeira 2001: 15, 51).
The sugarcane workers rename sexually assertive men like
Mario “‘swine’” and “‘filthy bush hogs’” in response to a history
of violence against female workers in the Dominican Republic
(Cambeira 2001: 25, 69). In addition, the workers venerate male
workers like Estimé, a migrant Haitian worker who remains
faithful to his wife and dies protecting his family from Mario. In
other words, the workers erode the double standards undergirding
the conventions of Marianismo and Machismo in Dominican
society. The sugarcane workers cultivate a more equitable society
by devaluing men’s sexual conquests and revaluing men’s protection
of women.
In the Azúcar trilogy, sugar, tourism, and textile workers
repeatedly overcome cultural differences to protect and support
one another, and the workers’ solidarity emerges as a powerful model
for change within the Dominican Republic. On Esperanza Dulce,
for example, the workers were born in various Caribbean nations,
including the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, St. Kitts; they
speak multiple languages, including “Spanish, English, pidgin
English, St. Lucian, Guadeloupean and Martiniquean patois,
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Haitian Kreyòl, Domínico-Haitian nagô”; and they have divergent
“beliefs like Catholic, Protestant, Haitian Vodou, Santería, Regla
de Ocha, Obeah, Changó” (Cambeira 2001: 61). But the workers
still cultivate a heightened sense of “familial warmth,”
interdependence, and collectivity after Azúcar’s rape (60).
Throughout the trilogy, the cross-cultural solidarity also
crosses socioeconomic lines. Beginning in Azúcar!, people in the
lower and upper echelons of Dominican industries work together
to restore workers’ rights. On the one hand, three of the most
respected elder workers on Esperanza Dulce perform the “sacred”
and “ancient ritual of the Marasa Bwa, ‘Twins of the Forest,’” in
order to avenge Mario’s rape and impregnation of Azúcar with
twins and also to purify Azúcar (Cambeira 2001: 172). Azúcar’s
grandmother, Doña Fela, and their Haitian-born friends, Don
Anselmo and Mamá Lola, drown and bury Azúcar’s twins,
Felicidad and Caridad (“Happiness” and “Charity”). Azúcar’s
grandmother explains the ritual as her “‘duty to have the powerful
spirits of our ancestors protect’” Azúcar and her children (173).
Azúcar initially cannot forgive her elders for their actions; however,
by the trilogy’s conclusion, she restores her connection with her
ancestral spirits. Throughout the trilogy, an allegiance to ancestral
spirits, rituals, and beliefs is associated with social justice.
On the other hand, Canadian-educated “humanitarians,”
such as the Dominican-born Marcelo and his Canadian-born
partner, Harold, condemn Azúcar’s elders’ intervention into the
birth and death of Felicidad and Caridad. The transnational,
interracial, and homosexual couple interpret the ritual drowning
of Azúcar’s first-born twin daughters as a sign of “the degree of
retrograde thinking that provided the very solid and
uncompromising foundation for the amalgam of beliefs and
practices at Esperanza Dulce” (Cambeira 2001: 175). Marcelo
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and Harold fear the ways in which the workers’ allegiance to
ancestral spirits might further threaten Azúcar’s life. In other
words, Marcelo and Harold primarily invite Azúcar to move in
with them in order to protect her from future damage from the
spiritual beliefs and practices circulating among the sugar workers
on Esperanza Dulce. But their removal of Azúcar from the batey
also protects her from members of the planter aristocracy, who
historically have abused the sugarcane workers.
The repeated description of the planter aristocracy’s
treatment of sugarcane workers in terms of human rights
violations clarifies that the planter aristocracy and the sugar
industry pose a much greater risk to Azúcar and other sugarcane
workers than the beliefs and actions of fellow workers. This
pattern of representation continues throughout the trilogy as
the focus shifts to the tourism industry in Azúcar’s Sweet Hope
and to the textile industry in Tattered Paradise. A variety of people
use human rights rhetoric and logic to discuss the poor living
and working conditions of sugar, tourism, and textile workers in
the Dominican Republic. The elderly Haitian-born sugar worker
Don Anselmo rants about the Montalvo men’s “random liberties,
abuses of authority, inhuman cruelty” after Azúcar’s rape in
Azúcar! (Cambeira 2001: 51). The twenty-something
Dominican-born Marcelo similarly describes “‘the culture of
sugar’” as “‘a system that denies all human dignity . . . all human
rights to human beings whom it has subdued by violence’” (197,
197-98). Although the Azúcar trilogy repeatedly describes the
wide-reaching violation of sugar, tourism, and textile workers’
human rights in the Dominican Republic, the trilogy specifically
emphasizes the exploitation of Haitians, including migrant sugar,
tourism, and textile workers in the Dominican Republic as well
as workers near the border in expanding Haitian textile plants.
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In this sense, the trilogy remaps the “geography of good and
evil” that has glorified Dominican culture and demonized Haitian
culture on the island of Hispaniola (Krohn-Hansen 1997: 55).
Haitians have a long history of mistreatment in the
Dominican Republic. Thousands of Haitians were massacred by
Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s troops in 1937 (López-Calvo 2005:
12), and various authors have narrated the massacre and Trujillo’s
regime in literature (xv). Prior to the massacre, Trujillo tried to
“de-Haitianize” Dominican sugarcane fields (Chancy 2012: 87).
As Ignacio López-Calvo notes in “God and Trujillo”: Literary
and Cultural Representations of the Dominican Dictator, “the
literature that has emerged as a foreseeable reaction to these three
decades of terror and corruption has received much less critical
attention” (2005: xv). In Azúcar’s Sweet Hope Don Anselmo
states, “‘I remember bein’ made a’ orphan when my mamá an’
papá, also two of my brothers and two uncles was all slaughtered
by ‘El Jefe’ The Chief. That’s when the evil goat Rafael Leónidas
Trujillo ordered all us black folk killed just for bein’ black’”
(Cambeira 2004: 142). In addition to emphasizing the ways in
which Trujillo’s abuse of Haitians extends to blacks living in the
Dominican Republic, the trilogy emphasizes widespread
violations of female Haitian workers’ human rights in the
Dominican Republic.
In Azúcar! the narrator uses human rights rhetoric to clarify
“the unconscionable plight of female Haitian laborers” on
sugarcane plantations in the Dominican Republic (Cambeira
2001: 79). For instance, the narrator states that the female Haitian
worker, “given her status of ‘non-person,’ could not hope to obtain
official documentation of any kind nor any other types of
benefits. She was thus condemned to a circumstance of ‘illegality’
and as a consequence, to permanent exploitation” (Cambeira
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2001: 79-80). In addition, the narrator emphasizes that female
Haitian workers lack equal pay, medical benefits, and housing.
Since Haitian female workers lack these rights, they also are “cast
to the whims of random assault from every possible angle” (80).
In other words, female Haitian workers in the Dominican
Republic are not receiving adequate protection from the
Dominican government or other governing bodies.
The similar representation of other past and present
workers’ living and working conditions in the Dominican
Republic extends the deplorable violations of female Haitian
sugarcane workers’ rights to others living in the Dominican
Republic. In Tattered Paradise. . ., for example, Azúcar admits
the following while discussing textile work near the border: “‘I
can’t possibly begin to justify what we all see very plainly as abuse,
unfair wages, absolutely unacceptable working conditions _ gross
barbaric exploitation from every conceivable angle’” (Cambeira
2007: 198). The epilogue clarifies that Grupo Omega abruptly
moves across the border for even cheaper labor in Haiti (222).
The trilogy’s repeated use of human rights rhetoric encourages
sweeping analyses of people’s living and working conditions in
the Dominican Republic. As Rosa Briceño explains in
“Reclaiming Women’s Human Rights,” “The Universal
Declaration remains the most widely recognized statement of
the rights to which every person on the planet is entitled” (49).
Even though national and international human rights documents
articulate workers’ entitlement to modern human rights and
freedoms, workers in the Dominican Republic’s sugar, tourism,
and textile industries do not fully experience these human rights
and freedoms in the Azúcar trilogy.
Throughout the trilogy, a combination of discursive and
economic support improves workers’ living and working
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conditions in the Dominican Republic. Harold and Marcelo,
for example, explain the death of Azúcar’s children as a human
rights violation, and they pool their resources to reduce the
violation of Azúcar’s rights. The couple invites Azúcar into their
home as their housekeeper. Cynthia Enloe notes that often
“domestic workers are women of color from less privileged
communities within their employers’ country or from abroad”:
“these women are more susceptible to loneliness, economic
exploitation, [and] sexual harassment by men in the household,”
and thus, “[t]hey are especially dependent on the sensitivity and
fairness of their employers” (Enloe 2000: 180). Fortunately for
Azúcar, Harold and Marcelo do not follow the Dominican ideals
of Marianismo and Machismo, which stem from Catholic
conventions for subservient females and dominant males. Harold
and Marcelo’s homosexual partnership, which results in their
“immediately experiencing the hurtful scorn and scandal” of other
Dominicans, further ensures their benevolent treatment of Azúcar
(Cambeira 2004: 50).
Harold and Marcelo treat Azúcar as a pupil, not a sexual
object. After learning the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic
from Marcelo’s “almost around-the-clock academic remediation
and tutoring,” Azúcar garners the breadth of a liberal arts
education, with lessons ranging from science and mathematics
to history, literature, and speech (Cambeira 2001: 176). Azúcar’s
education frees her from Esperanza Dulce’s “subhuman” living
and working conditions, but it also problematically disconnects
her from her past on Esperanza Dulce and others’ continuing
oppression in the batey (78). In the narrator’s words, “Azúcar
may well have been on the other side of the globe— so far removed
was she from her former circumstances” (176). Azúcar returns
to the batey only after Marcelo and Harold urge her to at least
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maintain ties with her grandmother, one of the workers’ most
respected matriarchs.
Azúcar’s material and linguistic markers of socioeconomic
advancement, such as her newly acquired outfit and grammatically
standard speech, make “those individuals who dearly loved and
cared about Azúcar [display] a very unique sense of pride, ‘orgullo’
that ‘one of their own’ had managed to leave the batey!” (Cambeira
2001: 184). As Gary R. Butler notes, “Language variety has long
been a marker of relative social identity and status in hierarchal
societies, and the case is no different in the Caribbean” (Butler
1996: 20). Azúcar’s movement beyond the batey empowers others
to consider the possibility of also escaping the batey, a significant
development considering the degree to which workers describe
the batey in terms of imprisonment. Since the iron entrance gate
to Esperanza Dulce is “usually padlocked at night,” workers
justifiably think of the batey in inside/outside terms, with the
goal of moving oneself outside and beyond the batey (Cambeira
2001: 71).
Azúcar further disassociates herself from the batey after
she migrates to Canada. She primarily interprets her Canadian
migration on a personal scale as the “birth of an entirely new
dimension of life” (Cambeira 2001: 201). As Azúcar flies over
Esperanza Dulce, she literally and symbolically sees the plantation
as those holding higher positions in the sugar industry; she loses
sight of the people who work “the acres and acres” of sugarcane
(218). Arriving and living in Toronto, which the narrator
contextualizes in geopolitical terms as “the third largest financial
sector in North America,” with two affluent men generates an
even more heightened sense of freedom “from limitations and
restrictions of the batey, of Esperanza Dulce. . . ultimately of
the Island itself!” (207). Harold and Marcelo continue to invest
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in Azúcar’s future in Canada, enrolling her in the Faculty of Arts
and Sciences at Victoria College. Azúcar’s academic advisor
encourages her to pursue a career in the tourist industry, because
her “career options in the fledging tourist industry would be
limitless” (232). With the approval of her mentors and advisor,
Azúcar pursues a career in the tourism industry. Azúcar’s
geographical distance from the batey correlates with her
psychological detachment from her economic, filial, folk,
historical and spiritual roots in the Dominican Republic.
More specifically, Azúcar’s psychological detachment from
the island and its inhabitants enables her to work for “one of
Canada’s most influential multinational corporations,” the same
corporation that owns Esperanza Dulce and dominates the
Dominican sugarcane industry (Cambeira 2001: 228). While
living in Canada, Azúcar regards her prestigious GlobeNet
internship as a sign of her grandmother’s approving presence in
her life and a valuable gift from her loas (Cambeira 2001: 249),
which according to George Brandon, “include among their
number Catholic saints, Catholic saints syncretized with African
deities and non-Catholic deities such as native Americans, plus
the spirits of the dead” (Brandon 1989-90: 214). Azúcar
originally works with the Canadian-based multinational
corporation GlobeNet Ltd. as an intern to “determine the
profitability of tourism for corporate investment in the
Caribbean” (Cambeira 2001: 249). Historically, Canadians have
played a significant role in the expansion of the tourism industry
in the Dominican Republic (Jiménez 1999: 29, 40-41).
As a young intern, Azúcar only superficially questions the
ways in which GlobeNet’s expansion of the Dominican tourism
industry could jeopardize workers in the Dominican Republic.
Azúcar regards “‘tourism as a possible future benefit or, at worst,
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a necessary evil’” (Cambeira 2001: 251), and therefore, she plays
a significant role in shifting the Dominican Republic’s economy
from sugar towards tourism:
Under her aggressive marketing strategies, overall
exchange earnings from the Island’s tourism revenues
grew steadily from about $220 million in one year to
over $800 million in just a three-year period, with net
corporate earnings of more than half that amount. By
the end of a five-year period, because of tourism’s
dazzling success and sugar’s miserable decline, net foreign
exchange earnings from tourism easily surpassed those
from any remaining sugar exports. (286)
These economic developments ground Azúcar’s story in the
1960s through the 1980s. Foreign exchange from tourism first
exceeds sugar exports in the Dominican Republic in 1984 (Jiménez
1999: 36), when high fructose corn syrup claims 75% of the
international sweetener market with Coke and Pepsi’s switch from
sugar to corn syrup (Lockard 1994: 83). Whereas Azúcar primarily
focuses on increasing tourism revenues while managing GlobeNet’s
Dominican tourism ventures from Canada, Don Anselmo, primarily
focuses on the ways in which the nation’s transition from sugar
towards tourism might affect workers.
After Don Anselmo sees the ways in which the tourism
industry comparably exploits those living and working within the
Dominican Republic’s socio-economic base, Don Anselmo
supports restructuring rather than reforming Dominican society.
Don Anselmo states, “‘Restructurin’ the whole goddamn society
is the true solution, not jus’ reformin’ it’” (Cambeira 2001: 284).
He sees the degree to which the bateyes are transformed into a
different form of the same oppressive multinational system: the
bateyes become the residences for cheap migrant laborers who work
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under North American white males at all-inclusive resorts and other
tourism-related attractions in Azúcar’s Sweet Hope. The recurring
images of nameless, faceless, workers standing in line and under
the supervision of white foreign men extends the chain of human
rights abuses linking the sugar industry back to slavery forward to
the developing tourism industry. In each of these institutions people
are treated as “cargo” when they are transported to work (Cambeira,
Azúcar! 2001: 71), where they are “herded” (71), or “corralled”
(13), and caged like animals or property. The treatment of sugar
workers in the twentieth century and slaves in the nineteenth century
is so similar that a picture of the former could be interpreted as a
picture of the latter:
Armed guards mounted on horseback accompanied this
rag-tag multitude. Some of the weaponry was
unmistakably of the semi-automatic variety. . . and very
menacing . . . The scene looked like a bizar re
daguerreotype that had been made in the last century,
showing African captives shackled together, fresh from
the slave auction, being marched into the plantation
compound by their triumphant new owners. (72)
This image barely changes when the tourism industry begins
to displace the sugar industry. In fact, the arrival and dispersion
of a “‘new load’” of workers throughout a “mammoth tourist
complex” (288) generates an “illusive feeling of déjà vu” in Don
Anselmo (289).
In slavery, the sugarcane industry, the tourism industry,
and the textile industry in the Azúcar trilogy, workers are treated
as “cheap labor to fuel the industry, assuring an efficiently running
and maintained operation” (Cambeira 2001: 289). Azúcar!
concludes with Don Anselmo angrily responding to the arrival
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of new tourism workers at the all-inclusive Cañaveral Resort,
formerly known as Esperanza Dulce, because the “‘bastards won’t
even call out the names of those poor souls; they’re just numbers
on a fuckin’ clipboard. Oh, mi Azúcar, m’hita morenita, if you
only realized what you done! Maldita caña!. . .’” (290). In other
words, the tourism workers experience the same kinds of
dehumanizing exploitation as the sugar workers and their
ancestors during the era of plantation slavery.
Azúcar’s Sweet Hope affirms Don Anselmo’s criticism of
the expanding Dominican tourism industry. Since the conclusion
of Azúcar! , Azúcar has worked for the Canadian-based
multinational corporation GlobeNet with other Caribbean-born
professionals who were educated in Canada. As GlobeNet’s senior
regional director of tourism, Azúcar played an important role in
converting Esperanza Dulce into Cañaveral Resort, which means
“‘sugarcane fields’” (Cambeira 2001: 286). Cañaveral Resort
includes a forty-five acre Flower Forest that has become “one of
the most popular tourist sites on the carefully planned sightseeing
excursions on the island” (Cambeira 2004: 7-8). Azúcar’s
conversion of sugarcane fields into a tourist resort exemplifies
the industrial developments taking place in the “island’s eastern
zone – formerly acres and acres of productive sugarcane fields –
into a vast pleasure playground for foreign tourists” (46), not
the undocumented and documented workers who historically have
cultivated and maintained the land.
In Azúcar’s Sweet Hope the Dominican government
facilitates the expanding tourism industry through the
construction of a “newly enlarged, renovated [airport] terminal”
for affluent tourists (Cambeira 2004: 48), including travelers
from the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia (55). Although Azúcar
succeeds at improving her own socioeconomic status and
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Esperanza Dulce’s appearance as GlobeNet’s senior regional
director of tourism, she fails at improving workers’ access to
human rights in the Dominican Republic through tourism
expansion. In other words, Azúcar and her Caribbean-born and
Canadian-educated colleagues misplace their hope in GlobeNet’s
ability to improve Dominican society by displacing extractive
agriculture with tourism.
During the expansion of the Dominican tourism industry,
Toussaint Roumain and JérômeValcin act to avenge the Montalvo
family’s violation of one of the workers’ most basic human rights:
life. On Esperanza Dulce, Mario Montalvo murdered Toussaint’s
Haitian-born father, Estíme, and Miguel and Manolo Montalvo
murdered the Haitian-born Jérôme’s older brother, Césaire, and
their Panamanian friend, Ramón (Cambeira 2004: 14). Since
the local police did not prosecute the guilty Montalvo men,
Jérôme uses his position as a grounds-keeper on the Montalvo
estate to murder and deface Manolo and Sofía Montalvo in their
bed with a machete; Azúcar’s rapist, Mario Montalvo, already
had been murdered in this ritualistic fashion on Esperanza Dulce.
Three years later while working as a grounds-keeper at Cañaveral
Beach Club and Resort, Jérôme murders and defaces Miguel and
Gabriela Montalvo in the resort’s Flower Forest, a popular tourist
destination. The narrator clarifies Jérôme’s “belief that the ritual
he was now performing” on Gabriela “would prevent a proper
burial for a person who had done so much evil in life by trapping
the individual’s spirit in a suspended state of eternal suffering”
(Cambeira 2004: 12). After Jérôme performs what the narrator
describes as the “same ancient ritual” on Gabriela’s husband,
Miguel, in the Flower Forest, he recites a traditional Krèyol phrase
that was circulated on Esperanza Dulce: “‘Bay koubliye, pot
maksonje,’” meaning “‘those who give out the blows forget, while
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those who bear the scars remember’” (13). After the murders,
Toussaint helps Jérôme leave the Dominican Republic for Cuba
on a cruise ship. In a sense, the trilogy is a recitation of the
human rights violations experienced by numerous workers in
sugar, tourism, and textile industries in the Dominican Republic.
The murders’ association with traditional Haitian peasant
rituals in Azúcar! and Azúcar’s Sweet Hope contextualizes the
violent reaction to the affluent, Hispanic, and orthodox Catholic
Montalvo family’s human rights violations on Esperanza Dulce.
The murders facilitate the end of the Montalvo’s patrilineal family
line and jeopardize GlobeNet’s investments in the nation’s
expanding tourism industry. Harold is the life partner of Marcelo,
the last surviving son of Diego Montalvo. The Flower Forest
murders endanger GlobeNet’s Pleasure Trust expansion project
by tarnishing the resort’s edenic image. Whereas Marcelo and
Harold use human rights rhetoric and logic to advocate for
reforming multinational corporations and Dominican society
according to humanitarian principles in Azúcar!, Tomás Polanco,
Jr. and Toussaint’s youngest brother, Silvio Roumain, use
revolutionary rhetoric and logic in Azúcar’s Sweet Hope to
restructure labor and society.
In the Azúcar trilogy, radical societal change begins with
those who share economic ties to Hispaniola’s sugarcane industry,
racial ties to Africa, national ties to Haiti, and spiritual ties to
Haitian peasant worship. Tomás Jr. And Silvio grew up with
Azúcar on Esperanza Dulce. In a letter to Azúcar following her
departure from Esperanza Dulce, Tomás, Jr. admits that she
“‘served as a model of strength and desire to survive; inspired
him to chase a dream and not to stop until he caught it; to attempt
to achieve something’” (Cambeira 2004: 160).Tomás, Jr. left
Esperanza Dulce with Mario Montalvo’s daughter, Cécile, for
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85
Cuba, where according to the narrator, “for the first time there
was a state-sanctioned promotion and celebration of a
community’s African roots” (62). In Cuba, Tomás and Cécile’s
collective revolutionary dreams notably diverge from Azúcar’s
individualistic capitalist dreams in Canada. Whereas Tomás works
as Cuba’s Party Director of State Communication and becomes
a naturalized Cuban citizen with his wife, Cécile, Azúcar works
for a multinational Canadian company to expand the tourism
industry in the Dominican Republic.
After leaving Esperanza Dulce, Silvio also worked outside
the Dominican Republic before returning during the expansion
of the nation’s tourism industry. Silvio worked in the construction
industry in Barbados and Guyana before working as a construction
overseer at Cañaveral resort. After Tomás, Jr. inquires about
“‘workers’ dissent’” at Cañaveral (Cambeira 2004: 82), Silvio
confirms the “‘genuine solidarity among workers’” (84).Tomás’s
and Silvio’s Cuban and Haitian affiliations evoke what the Trinidadborn C.L.R. James has referred to in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint
L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution as two of the most
important rebellions in Caribbean history: Fidel Castro’s revolution
in Cuba and Toussaint-L’Ouverture’s pursuit of national
independence in Haiti (James 1963: ix).
Tomás and Cécile’s marriage, family, and revolutionary
beliefs also meaningfully unite the class, racial, religious, and
national affiliations that traditionally have separated Haitians
and Dominicans on Hispaniola:
. . . Rasul and Jasmina, their two beautiful children of
visibly mixed ethnicity – children, who, along with many,
many more, would come to symbolize that future of
crossed boundaries and borders . . . truly characteristic
of the Caribbean. The children of Cécile and Tomás
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would symbolize the ‘transgressive identity of
hybridization.’ They would represent the realistic new
definition of the Caribbean self. (Cambeira 2004: 102)
After returning to the Dominican Republic, Tomás, Jr. and Cécile
discuss restructuring Dominican society for the historically
exploited workers. Cécile specifically mentions Bolivia’s Che
Guevara, Nicaragua’s Sandanistas, Guatemala’s guerrilla resistance,
and Mexico’s Zapatistas as “‘beautiful models’” for organizing
local workers “‘against an excessive and abusive capitalism that I
see in place here on the island’” (98). In Azúcar’s Sweet Hope
Cécile and Tomás, Jr. collective, revolutionary dreams for exploited
workers on the island surpass Azúcar and her husband Lucien’s
corporate, capitalistic dreams for GlobeNet’s affluent and
predominantly foreign investors.
The workers’ subsequent organization and strike on the
Dominican Republic’s National Day of Protest emerges
organically and from Haitian cultural traditions. Silvio uses a
Haitian saying articulated on Esperanza Dulce to explain workers’
growing organization at Cañaveral resort:
'se non ki pou mété lod lan sa.' It means basically that
we’re the ones who will straighten things out. My father
used to always say this to us; I never forgot that. Well,
you see, the workers we’re all one single family. We all
need to work together in unison, with one person
depending on the other. (Cambeira 2004: 83)
In response to Silvio’s description of “‘what we, as workers, all
see as a calculated system of abuse and unfair treatment and
dangerous working conditions,’” Tomás Jr. apparently draws on
his political experience in Cuba and raises the possibility of
unionizing workers (84). Silvio subsequently states workers’
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87
“‘right to protest,’” and he joins workers from a variety of the
island’s industries to organize a massive twenty-four hour strike against
the Dominican president on the National Day of Protest (88).
Azúcar’s Sweet Hope concludes with workers’ organization
on the Dominican Republic’s National Day of Protest. The
narrator notes that the “strike organizers,” who represented “the
island’s entire labor force,” “guaranteed that this collective action
would be the most convulsive and daring protest ever against a
modern-day president” (Cambeira 2004: 129). The workers make
clear demands, including the following:
an immediate price reduction in the basic necessities;
lower gasoline prices; an end to the constant power
outages or apagones, increased public spending for health
care, education and housing; an immediate change in
the president’s ruinous economic policies; an end to all
foreign debt payments and IMF agreements; an
immediate end to police repression and the right of
workers to unionize. (134)
These demands, articulated by the transport guild leader,
allude to the effects of falling sugar prices in the 1980s (Wucker
1999: 110-11). In 1983, the Dominican government asked the
International Monetary Fund for more that $450 million dollars
in order to pay foreign bills (Wucker 1999: 111), resulting in
protests’ against the IMF and food riots in 1984 (Espinal 1995:
67, 71). By 1989, the Dominican president had raised gasoline
prices by 100 percent (68).
In Azúcar’s Sweet Hope the workers’ solidarity,
unionization, protest, and demands function as a pragmatic road
map for restructuring Dominican society. Glossing over of the
historical threats to workers’ unionization, such as the
fragmentation of labor confederations according to political
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parties in the early 1980s (Espinal 1995: 70), as well as distinct
constituencies among the workers according to professional
associations, organized labor, and nonlabor popular groups in
the late 1980s (72), bolsters the trilogy’s representation of
working-class solidarity and protest as an effective means of
restructuring Dominican society. The highest-ranking GlobeNet
and government officials’ responses to workers on the National
Day of Protest even cause Azúcar to reconsider her, GlobeNet,
and the government’s roles in developing the tourism industry in
the Dominican Republic.
Whereas the government made “mass ar rests,”
“accusations,” and threats of deportation in order to obscure the
appearance of danger or inconvenience from tourists (Cambeira
2004: 130), GlobeNet aimed at shielding the labor unrest from
tourists with “the opulence of their exclusive surroundings and
the nonstop silliness of the beach games, dance lessons, the
frivolity of the bars and nightclubs. . . .perhaps most especially
by their amazing winning streaks at the casinos—or most of
them thought—but all ingeniously concocted by the
management” (136). The government’s and GlobeNet’s disregard
of the workers causes Azúcar to return to her mother-in-law
Mamá Lola’s altar room, replete with wooden statues of Papa
Ogou, Danbala Vedo, St. Jake Mejè, and Ezili Feda.
In the presence of the loas, or “deities” (Dash 2000: 67),
Azúcar sees the expanding tourism industry and the protestors’
organization in a significantly different light: “She was suddenly
beginning to see tourism as a rather capricious benefactor,” and
she also was recognizing the degree to which the workers’
collective strike “fostered a perception of the people’s collective
invincibility and reaffirmed all notions of basic humanitarian
principles” (Cambeira 2004: 137, 138). As the narrator notes,
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“And most ironically, Azúcar’s own vision for tourism in large
measure had made it all possible” (138). In other words, Azúcar’s
developmentof the Dominican tourism industry unevenly
benefits affluent investors to such a degree that workers organize
against GlobeNet and the Dominican government. In this sense,
Azúcar’s Sweet Hope refutes Azúcar and her Canadian-educated
colleagues’ hopes that the Canadian-based multinational
corporation’s investment in the Dominican tourism industry
would dramatically improve Dominican society.
Azúcar’s Sweet Hope ultimately encourages those born
within and beyond the Dominican Republic to unite and
restructure Dominican society for the humane treatment of all
people, regardless of class, race, nationality, religion, or sexual
orientation. In Marcelo’s words, “‘Each one of us must become
involved. It’s not just up to the governments to try to make a
better world; it’s all of us working together that is the real hope
for a better life’” (Cambeira 2004: 169). Tomás, Jr. also adds the
importance of an overarching “vision” or “dream” for social
change in the Dominican Republic: “‘Intention is not just about
will’”; “‘It’s also about our overall everyday vision, what we dream
about, what we believe is possible for us and for other people as
well’” (170). By the conclusion of Azúcar’s Sweet Hope both
the humanitarian, Hispanic, Marcelo, who only returned to the
Dominican Republic from Canada for Azúcar’s anniversary, and
the revolutionary Haitian, Tomás, who primarily returned to the
Dominican Republic from his forced exile in Cuba to reunite with
family, strongly favor increasing the Dominican Republic’s
independence from global capitalism (166).
The trilogy’s final novel, Tattered Paradise, reaffirms that
rupturing the Dominican Republic’s dependence on global
capitalism is a key factor in breaking the cycle of violence that has
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been repeating through the increasingly modern yet comparably
exploitative sugar, tourism, and textile industries. In Tattered
Paradise the focus shifts from extractive agriculture and tourism
on the eastern side of the island to the expanding textile industries
in the free trade zones near the Haitian-Dominican border:
The workers in the zona franca, were all but
invisible to outside eyes and subsequently were easily
forgotten; they were locked throughout the long,
blistering days, six days a-week, behind the high chainlinked fences. These would be the workers at the center
of the unfinished task; they would need to be liberated
from the gruesome and humiliating shackles of the
contemporary slavery that is the well-concealed shame
among the island’s work force.
(Cambeira 2007: 43)
As the focus shifts from the expanded tourism industry to
the developing textile industry, the trilogy’s multinational focus
shifts from Canadian academic institutions’ and multinational
corporations’ indoctrination of Dominican exiles for the
economic interests of Canadian-based multinational corporations
to the American government’s suppression of anti-capitalist
organizations and American-based multinational corporations’
exploitation of workers in Hispaniola, especially in the island’s
zona franca. Indeed, in the endnotes of Azúcar’s Sweet Hope,
zona franca is defined in specifically American terms as “a dutyfree area where American-owned apparel makers assemble clothing
for export, using local cheap labor – mainly women” (187).
Whereas Azúcar had been a victim of human rights
violations on Esperanza Dulce in Azúcar!, and she participated
in the extension of human rights violations through the expansion
of the Dominican tourism industry in Azúcar’s Sweet Hope, she
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ultimately unites with workers to restore human rights in
Hispaniola. More specifically, in Tattered Paradise Azúcar works
to restore textile workers’ rights as a National Labor Coalition
Senator (Cambeira 2007: 25). After learning of the human rights
abuses at a textile plant near the border from a young female
textile worker, Dilcia Yean, Azúcar states the following in a toast:
“‘Let us all here tonight forever remember that wherever there is
oppression, there shall be resistance. Dilcia Yean, you have truly
become an inspiration for resistance’” (83). After the textile
workers strike, they are laid off by Grupo Omega, which the
narrator describes as “the largest employer in the Dominican
Republic” (54). According to Dilcia, “‘Dominican soldiers
dressed in civilian clothes and carrying assault weapons were called
in to enforce the will of the company’” (184). In other words,
the Dominican government continues to privilege economic issues
over workers’ rights.
Azúcar solidifies her alliances with workers in the
Dominican Republic earlier than her husband, Lucien, who
secretly invests their money in the island’s textile industry. After
the strike, Azúcar learns of their economic ties to Grupo Omega
from her friend Marie Chauvet. When Azúcar and Lucien
openly discuss his economic investments in Grupo Omega,
Lucien shares his knowledge of the changing textile industry
on the island:
“The island is facing the very real and immediate threat
of being priced completely out of the assembly business
by much cheaper suppliers of labor, most importantly. .
.China. This is precisely the dilemma that Mexico and
the Central American countries find themselves in today.
Azcar, my shame has led me not to go along with the
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plan for Grupo Omega to set up operations inside Haiti.”
(Cambeira 2007: 199)
Lucien’s descriptions of Grupo Omega’s plans to move across
the border for cheaper labor strengthens Azúcar’s commitment
to use her new role as Senator to “‘put more pressure on the
President and the leadership to invest more heavily and redirect
resources more sensibly to the social and other infrastructure
that will be seriously needed if this country is to achieve a level
of development beyond its current state.(200) In addition, Lucien
and Azúcar withdraw their investments from Grupo Omega and
contribute to “Batay Ouvriye, the new union activists’ group”
(200). Following protests and layoffs, Grupo Omega leaves the
Dominican Republic for Haiti.
By the trilogy’s conclusion, the Dominican Republic’s
transnational sugar, tourism, and textile industries are replaced with
local businesses committed to partnerships among workers.
Whereas the sugarcane plantation Esperanza Dulce was
transformed into the Cañaveral Beach Club and Resort in the
eastern side of the Dominican Republic in Azúcar’s Sweet Hope,
Grupo Omega’s textile plant was transformed into a national
resource center near the national border in Tattered Paradise. With
friends, Azúcar and Lucien fund ‘‘ ‘Esperanza Dulce Centro de
Recursos: El Instituto Silvio Roumain y Dilcia Yean Payán Para La
Justicia Económica, Política y Social ’ ’’ which commemorates two
workers who facilitated workers’ rights, and therefore, human rights
in the Dominican Republic. As a Senator, Azúcar also proposes a
national program “to help start up native small businesses, pledged
to change the traditional workplace and develop new ways of
thinking about the world of work. The pledge was also to work
toward improving local labor laws and general conditions that would
ensure safety, fairness and the right to unionize in the workplace”
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(Cambeira 2007: 227). The labor organization, economic
donations, and political changes significantly increase the workers’
access to human rights as well as the Dominican Republic’s
independence from global capital.
But the trilogy’s conclusion is not utopic. Azúcar’s hope in
the island’s future is tempered by Don Anselmo’s anger over
learning of the arrival of American troops on Dominican soil
near the Haitian border. The island’s U. S. Ambassador explains,
“‘The troops are here as part of the ‘New Horizons’ program, an
experimental exercise with a humanitarian mission that includes
the building of health clinics and schools for this desperately
poor and often neglected region of the island’” (Cambeira 2007:
228). According to the narrator, “for most people who knew
better, this was just another tropical deception (229) Indeed,
the narrator reveals that “a precondition of this ‘humanitarian
deployment of U. S. troops’ was the Dominican government’s
signing of a waiver granting U. S. troops immunity from
prosecution for war crimes or other offenses before the
International Criminal Court” (229). The trilogy concludes with
Don Anselmo’s critical, questioning voice rather than Azúcar’s
hopeful one. Although Caribbean labor is meaningfully reclaimed
from global capital in the Dominican Republic by the trilogy’s
conclusion, the story of human rights violations on the island
of Hispaniola apparently will continue in the twenty-first century.
The human rights rhetoric and logic pervading the Azúcar
trilogy enable the narration of a systemic chain of oppression
across the declining sugar industry, the expanding tourism
industry, and the transitional textile industry through the body
and actions of Azúcar. Narrating the bitter-sweet story of sugar
alongside the development of a young female embedded within
an international human rights framework emphasizes the material
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and symbolic elements of sugar, tourism, and textiles, especially
the ways in these increasingly modern industrial developments
unevenly exploit young female workers. Although Azúcar serves
as the workers’ model and inspiration for pursuing a better life
outside of Esperanza Dulce in Azúcar!, Tomás and Cécile serve
as the workers’ model and inspiration for creating a better society
in the Dominican Republic in Azúcar’s Sweet Hope. In the
trilogy’s concluding novel, Tattered Paradise, Azúcar joins with
workers to restore additional human rights in the Dominican
Republic, especially by decreasing dependence on global capital
and growing the local economy.
In conclusion, the Azúcar trilogy facilitates the process of
breaking the cycle of human rights violations that have reoccurred
in sugar, tourism, and textile industries in the Dominican
Republic. The trilogy represents drastic structural changes as a
real possibility with a collective redistribution of power within,
between, and beyond nations, as exemplified by a Canadian-based
multinational corporation’s expansion of the Dominican tourism
industry in Azúcar’s Sweet Hope and American-based
multinational corporations’ expansion of textile plants in Tattered
Paradise. The incorporation of key historical events and economic
developments in the trilogy increases the believability of the
novels’ formulations for restructuring Dominican society through
education, unionization, and politics. In effect, narrating the
bitter-sweet story of sugar vis-à-vis Azúcar’s personal and
professional development, human rights rhetoric and logic, and
revolutionary Caribbean history represents restructuring
Dominican society as desirable and attainable, albeit problematic,
due to the island’s geopolitics.
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95
Notes
1
The author would like to thank Fayetteville State University’s
Office of Academic Affairs for providing course releases, research
funding, and travel funding to support the completion of this article
and the presentation of an earlier version of this article at the College
English Association Conference in Savannah, Georgia. In addition,
the author would like to thank Leah Rosenberg, Marsha Bryant, Susan
Hegeman, and Berta Esperanza Hernández-Truyol for their comments
on earlier versions of this article.
2
For additional information, see Bonilla’s essay, “Transnational
Consciousness: Negotiating Identity in the Works of Julia Alvarez
and Junot Díaz,” in Dominican Migration: Transnational Perspectives.
3
For further reading, see Azúcar! for excerpts of reviews from
France-Antille, Sept Magazine, Trinidad Express, Primera Hora, The
Nation,The Observer, Últimal Hora and Listín Diario.
4
As Joe Lockard notes, novels written about sugar from the
1940s through the 1960s portray “an unappreciating familiarity”
with sugar and a “common strain of anti-sugar sentiment” (1994:
85, 95).
5
The Beacon Group developed yard fiction during the late
1920s and early 1930s in Trinidad and Tobago (Ramchand 1974:
65). Their realist fiction focuses on the Afro-Trinidadian urban poor
and the yard and is known for its candid portrayals of sex and violence.
For further reading, see C.L.R. James’s “Triumph” and Alfred H.
Mendes’s “Sweetman.”
6
In Azúcar’s Sweet Hope Cambeira specifically mentions
Rigoberta Menchú and Shirin Ebadi, who have earned substantial
critical acclaim for their human rights-related memoirs and work
(140).
7
According to Frank Moya Pons, an Ingenio Esperanza, a Batey
Esperanza in the Ingenio Porvenir, and a Batey Esperanza in Ingenio
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Río Haina are registered with the national office of statistics in the
Dominican Republic (1986: 608-09).
8
Batey is defined as follows in the pages preceding Chapter
One in Azúcar! The Story of Sugar: “a word of pre-Columbian
Amerindian (Taíno) origin that referred to the area in the indigenous
settlement used alternately as a ceremonial ball-court and open market
space. In the Spanish-speaking Caribbean the word came to mean the
area of a large sugarcane plantation occupied by living
accommodations for workers, grocery stores or bodegas, as well as
the sugar factory operations and related buildings. Today. [T]he batey
is now widely synonymous with the squalid, often substandard living
quarters of the contract sugarcane workers regularly recruited from
around the Caribbean” (Cambeira 2001).
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