Black behind the Ears

Black behind the Ears is an innovative historical and ethnographic examination of Dominican identity formation in the Dominican Republic and the United States. For much of the Dominican Republic's history, the national body has been defined as "not black," even as black ancestry has been grudgingly acknowledged. Dominicans tend to understand and represent themselves as racially Indian and culturally Hispanic. Scholars have proposed "Negrophobia," anti-Haitianism, and indigenism as reasons for Dominicans' apparent denial of their own blackness. Rejecting these explanations as simplistic, Ginetta E. B. Candelario suggests that it is not a desire for whiteness that guides Dominican identity discourses and displays. Instead, it is an ideal norm of what it means to be and look "Hispanic." Candelario draws on her participant observation in a Dominican beauty shop in Washington Heights, a New York City neighborhood with the oldest and largest Dominican community outside the Republic; interviews with Dominicans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Santo Domingo; and historical documents, literary texts, archival photographs, and newspaper accounts. Her analysis encompasses portrayals of Dominicans in nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European and American travel narratives, displays in the Museo del Hombre Dominicano and the Smithsonian Institution, and the visible role that women play as symbols and reproducers of Dominican identity. Candelario shows that most Dominican immigrants privilege hair texture over skin color, facial features, and ancestry in defining race.