FROM EL CAMPO TO EL BARRIO: MEMORY AND SOCIAL IMAGINARIES IN SANTO DOMINGO

Abstract

In the social imaginaries of the Dominican Republic, national culture has its origins in el campo, the countryside. Country spaces and country people are viewed as embodying the past in the present, making them authentic contemporary carriers of national culture and moral order. By contrast, the city has long been viewed as the site of a modernity that takes its inspiration from outside of the nation but also as a site of social degeneration. In recent decades, representations of poor barrios as a threat to the city's moral order have intensified in reaction to rising crime rates and a series of economic crises. First generation migrants from the country to the city find that their status as carriers of culture and morality is compromised. They evoke positive memories of their rural pasts to position themselves as moral beings transposed to a corrupt urban milieu. At the same time, they develop urban identities that incorporate aspects of rural life while rejecting others. I argue that migrants' memories of their rural past resist their emplacement while allowing for the transformation of their present structural position.

Key Words:

• Memory
• migration
• social imaginaries
• moral order
• modernity

This paper was produced with the assistance of a University Postgraduate Award at The University of Sydney, Australia. All data were collected during fieldwork from September 2004 to November 2005, which was supported by the Carlyle Greenwell Research Fund from The University of Sydney. My thanks to the Centro de Estudios Sociales Padre Juan Montalvo, S.J., in Santo Domingo, for the use of their media library, which was the source of the newspaper articles referred to throughout the paper. I also thank Yoselyn Espinal and Marco Quiroz Rodríguez for their assistance in carrying out the survey of the barrio. All names of barrio residents have been changed.

Notes

1. My concern is not to critique the many uses of the term “memory” but rather to explore the social uses of individual memory. By memory, I mean information stored in a human subject; by remembrance, I mean the act of recalling that information. I treat memory as specifically human: An object such as a book may serve as a carrier of information but it cannot remember.

2. For a good discussion of the creation of a racialized Dominican identity by its elites see Baud (1996).

3. See, for example, Calder (1985), Cassá (1995), Cuddington and Asilis (1990), ECLAC (2004), Fay and Wllenstein (2005), Ferguson (2003), Gregory (2007), and many others.

4. Most incomes tended to range from 1,500 to 5,000 pesos per month (US$45–150). The highest salary reported to me was 15,000 pesos per month (US$440) by a carpenter and a grocery store owner.

5. For an elaboration of the racial aspects of urban identities, see Taylor (forthcoming 2009), “Poverty as Danger: Fear of Crime in Santo Domingo.”

6. For a discussion of movimiento as metaphor and the limitations to movement posed by neoliberal economic policies, see Steven Gregory (2007).

7. The original school was subject to frequent flooding and has since been replaced by a four-story composite school constructed by the government on higher ground.