Yes, this long post is a throw back to the old days on DR1, but read it!
Here we go again!
There are many factors that are being ignored on all sides of the arguments by everyone here.
Pichardo is claiming that the darkening of the average person in the DR is due to the heavy Haitian migration of the past 30 years. Hidalgo is claiming that most dark Dominicans today are descendants of slaves that were brought to the island, so on and so forth.
Folks, keep the following in mind:
1. Few, extremely few Dominicans are descendants of anyone that migrated to the island (or was forced to migrate) prior to the 1700s.
2. The DR was a severly underpopulated country/colony for much of its existence. In fact, when Trujillo was assassinated, the country barely had 3 million people, most of whom were children thanks to the extremely high birth rate among the rural population that encompassed the majority of the population at that time. The country didn't even reached 1 million in the early 1900s.
With those two factors in mind, the following must be taken into account:
1. The country went through three periods of increasing white population, first in the 1700s with the forced migration of Canary Islanders; then after independence with the arrival of large numbers of white Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Italians, Arabs/Middle Easterners in the mid to late 1800s and then during the Trujillo dictatorship with the arrival of more Spaniards and whites from other places like the Jews, the Hungarians, Italians, etc.
The Canary Islanders formed the original populations of most provincial towns in the country, given that many of those towns were established to house the influx of Canary Islanders (ie. Saman?, Ban?, etc).
The second wave of whites/light skin people settled mostly in SDQ, Puerto Plata, and the Cibao valley. The Arabs/Middle Easterners for the most part settled in the east, especially in San Pedro de Macoris.
The third wave of whites/light skin people settled mostly in SDQ.
2. The country went through several waves of black migration, the bulk being
voluntary, as in arriving to the DR as free men/women.
The first sizable influx occurred during the Haitian occupation of the country, with the Haitian authorities implementing a campaign of incentive for white emigration and, simultaneously, black immigration to the eastern part of the island that they had conquered. The number of people in total that had arrived the DR prior to the early 1800s was very small, regardless if they were white, black, whatever.
During the Haitian occupation sizable number of blacks were arrived to the country, many of whom were descendants of African American slaves that lived in the American south and once getting their freedom opted to take advantage of Haiti's incentive. Most of these black Americans were settled along the north coast and in Saman?.
Once the DR got its independence, the growth of blacks was stifled because the incentive the Haitian government provided to support such was not continued by the newly independent Dominican government. In fact, after independence the opposite occurred; the black population stifled while the white population grew. This was the case until the end of the 1800s when Cuban and American investors began to develop the sugar industry in the practically uninhabited Eastern DR.
Keep in mind that up until this point, the eastern and southern part of the DR was practically without people with only a few tiny villages. The most heavily populated part of the country was the Cibao valley composed mostly of white and light skin people and even there with the elevated population density, it was high in relation to the desolate rest of the country; but it was still a small population.
Once the sugar industry was in process of being developed in the east, particularly in San Pedro and La Romana, the growth of blacks in the country resumed. This time, instead of black Americans, the influx was composed overwhelmingly of blacks from the English-speaking Caribbean known as Cocolos. They formed the labor force in the sugarcane plantations that began to develop in the late 1800s early 1900s.
After the American invasion in 1920s, Haitian labor began to be used in the sugarcane industry and supplanted the Cocolos. This immigration was under strict control during the Trujillo dictatorship.
After Trujillo's death it remain in control until the 1980s when all hell broke loose in Haiti and the mass influx of illegal Haitian immigrants began. From the 1980s forward is when the vast majority of the Haitians currently seen in the DR arrived, with a relatively few being in the DR since before the 1980s and most of these are tied to the sugar industry, something the Haitian immigrants from the 1980s forward are not really tied to.
Now, with the large influx of whites and blacks at the end of the colonial era, and especially after independence from Spain; it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the vast majority of the people in the DR today are NOT descendants of people that arrived or were brought in the 1500s. Hence, data from that time period can't be used to justify today's population or to even assume that most of the blacks/mulattoes in the DR are descendants of slaves that were brought to the DR. Most are descendants of free blacks/mulattoes that arrived to the DR upon their own will.
Most Dominicans, regardless of color/race, are descendants of the population boom that started under the Trujillo dictatorship due to the political agenda of the regime to populate the island, hence encouraging people to have more kids and encouraging foreigners to move to the country. The boom took even greater momentum after the dictatorship, much of it being confined among the lower classes composed of sugarcane workers and manual laborers.
Last but not least, the small population of the country and the small number of people that migrated in absolute terms, leads to certainly incongruities in the way some people interpret data from long ago to justify today's population. Such incongruities can be seen by reading reports written by foreign visitors to the DR in times past.
Here are a two good examples. In both examples, the first photo is the source and the latter is the passage you should read regarding how they described the population of the DR in the early 1900s, via anecdotal evidence.
Example 1 (essay was published in 1905):
Please notice the part that the author on his 1905 visit to the DR said "the inhabitants are, with very few exceptions, white".
Example 2 (essay was published in the 1920s):
Start to read the last paragraph on the right and then continue on the other page:
So, my advice to people interested in studying the evolution of the Dominican population through the years is to analyze everything within context and then, read articles/journals that were written by travelers from yesteryear and see how they describe the Dominican population. You will notice what I have noticed, the average Dominican looks different in different time periods.
-NALs
