DominiRicanDH is an initiative composed of thematically curated research, programming, pedagogy, and publications. This website aims to be an interactive digital hub that archives resources of public scholarship, cultural content, maps, exhibits, and pedagogical resources. Our project aims to recover and re-integrate the importance of these cultural productions into an interdisciplinary field of study that broadens how we think of Blackness, Latinidad, nationhood, gender/sexuality, and diasporic communities. Our project tells a story that is often invisibilized–the tensions, solidarities, and re-imaginings of these inter-Caribbean diasporic communities through forming an archive of music, art, performance, and activism that highlights the diasporic Dominican and Puerto Rican, as well as DominiRican, diaspora communities in the U.S. Hence, much of the historical and cultural archive pertinent to this project must be highlighted through 20th century U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, the narratives of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and xenophobia from the Trujillo dictatorship to anti-Blackness in Puerto Rico. Furthermore, the solidarities built through the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. East Coast Dominican and Puerto Rican diaspora communities. We are interested in tracing the ways that contact zones between and created by Puerto Rican and Dominican diaspora communities together create archives that tell the story of the relationship between these communities.

Mapping DominiRican Histories

This project is dedicated to mapping literary and cultural productions that emerge out of the coexistence of Dominican and Puerto Rican diaspora communities in the U.S. Mapping takes on a dual meaning here as we are tracing the origins and movement – across the Caribbean Sea between DR and PR – and through the Atlantic Ocean as Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and DominiRicans travel and migrate to the United States and also participate in back and forth movements throughout these places that contribute to transcultural changes, community building, intellectual exchanges in scholarship and literature, and identity formations expressed through literature, food, music, dance, art, and visual culture.