"Notice again how Balaguer makes indistinct use of the terms "race" and "nation," so as to pretend that Haitians and Dominicans not only belong to different nations, but also to completely different races."
To pretend? They are different in race and are separate nations, has been the case from the origins of them both.
"The extinction of the indian race gave way for the population of Santo Domingo to be integrally constituted by European families, especially Spanish and French. Before the Treaty of Basel (1795), the colony's population was formed by the best of the families that had migrated to America, attracted by gold or by the fascinating mystery of remote expeditions [Balaguer 1984, 59].
In this brief passage, Balaguer helps to perpetuate the myth of the white Dominican by ignoring the fact that there was a considerable number of blacks and mulattoes in the colony before 1795 (Moya Pons 1977, 378-379). Balaguer's romantic notion of Dominican history is, unfortunately, shared by many Dominicans."
Myth?
The island was discovered and populated by Spaniards PRIOR to any slaves trades or blacks/mulattoes being in the picture.
Its not really a myth, its that the vast majority of the population was composed by whites and lighter skin mulattoes and this was the case all the way to 1871, when Samuel Hazard (an American, BTW) visited both Dominican Republic and Haiti and a year later published his book
Santo Domingo Past and Present with a Glance at Haiti and described the Dominican population as follows:
"
White blood preponderates largely in Dominican Republic, but pure whites, in the popular sense of the word, are not numerous. The majority are of a mixed race, much nearer white than black."
"
The great majority, especially along the coast, are neither pure black nor pure white; they are mixed in every conceivable degree. In some parts of the interior considerable numbers of the white race are to be found, and generally in the mixed race the white blood predominates."
Both quotes are on page 485.
Keep in mind that when he visited the country the immigration of cocolos had not taken place yet and neither had the immigration of Haitian sugar workers. Also, he never mentioned the presence of Haitian colonies in any of the Dominican towns or rural areas visited, but he did mentioned that some blacks from the British Islands had settled in Puerto Plata, that there were some blacks from the British Islands in Santo Domingo, and also the African Americans in Saman?.
This is all from an eyewitness and you can buy copies of the original book on Amazon.
So, with a population composed mostly by whites and mulattoes, and in the mulatto population the white heritage predominated in people's appearances even though the 22 year Haitian Occupation of 1822-1844 ended just 27 years before his visit; it should go without saying why there has been an emphasis on the white/light appearance of the average Dominican for centuries. That's because it was probably the case and the population began to darken starting at the end of the 1800s with the upsurge in black immigration from other parts of the Caribbean and through out the 20th Century as their kids began to mix with the local original Dominican population.
Notice that in the parts of the DR where much of this new black Caribbean immigration didn't took place are predominantly a very white/light skin populations (go to San Jos? de las Matas if you want to see an example of this.)
I've been saying that every time Balaguer mentioned things such as the rapid growth of the black population and the darkening of the average Dominican, that he was simply expressing what he witnessed through out the 20th Century. That man was born in the first decades of the 20th Century and died in 2001 (or was it 2002?)! The DR he was born in was completely changed in almost every aspect by the time he died!
Many people simply like to pretend this is not true, but there's eyewitness accounts from the 1800s and early 20th Centuries, written by foreigners, that simply helps explains many things about this country.
Another thing that is often ignored by some people is that the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo received the least amount of slaves (similar to Puerto Rico.) The estimates for imports of slaves through the first colonial period (1492-1801) is of only 30,000!!!
Cuba had a similar history regarding the import of slaves, very few until the last century when the French planters from Haiti settled in eastern Cuba and began to develop the sugar industry over there. That's when the paltry imports of slaves that had taken place in Cuba during the previous 400 years (it didn't even reached 100,000 total for all those centuries combined), in the 1800s the numbers of slaves imported into Cuba swelled to something like 400,000 or perhaps many hundreds of thousands more.