El Militarismo japonés y la glorificación de la guerra

This is a familiar pre-occupation for the JCE, which until 201431 _{determined the}

skin color categories on the cédula. Although such cases may not be new, they gained national and international attention in 2014, given two recent developments in racial politics on the island: the growth of the natural hair movement, a loose collective, mostly women, who promote the acceptance of afro-diasporic hairstyles; and the 2013 policies that denationalize Dominicans of Haitian descent.

While not all made the connection between their treatment by the JCE and state- based policies of discrimination, some saw the obstacles to cedulación as another manifestation of the denial of citizenship rights—either legal or cultural—to Black Dominicans. Although the disenfranchisement of Dominico-Haitians reached the highest levels of government, it too had started with the refusal of the JCE to emit documents to the descendants of Haitians, often identified by the color of their skin alone.

The screen print appearing below documents these incidents to audiences in New York and Santo Domingo. Figure 6 appeared in the exhibition titled “Consequential Translations”, which framed New York as a diasporic space where Dominicans and Haitians can bridge racial, ethnic, and national difference. The print features a light-skinned woman with visible African features, whose large afro takes up most of the print’s space. Below a frame in which the woman’s face barely fits is the same phrase from the El País article.

The massive proportion and asymmetry of the woman’s afro are in direct contradiction with the same white square that fails to contain it. In contrast to the manicured

round shapes of the afros from the 1960s/1970s era, the woman in the screen print has hair that grows freely in all directions, paying homage to, but suggesting a break from, the militant discipline of previous generations and disciplined beauty practices.

The determination that natural haired women “do not fit” reinforces a limited vision of the national body that excludes cultural and aesthetic representations of blackness. The rejection the afro as an appropriate national image is a refusal to recognize the place of the afro as a representation of Black politics and identity within the national body. Its regulation also reflects its power and potential danger to uproot a White supremacist political order.

Figure 6 Alex Guerrero. Tu afro no cabe en la foto, 2015 Screen print. 22” x 30”.

http://www.laluchaoneisland.com/alex-guerrero?lightbox=dataItem-iq863e3v, accessed September 28. 2016.

In this chapter, I examine the radical potential of the afro in the contemporary Dominican space, given the ways that Afro-textured hair is coded as Haitian in the

Dominican Republic. To that end, I examine how the afro destabilizes the boundaries between blackness and the ideal citizen with attention to whether and how the afro can be read as embodied resistance. Given the virtual absence of an anti-racist, Black social movement in the Dominican Republic (see Simmons 2009), the natural hair movement offers the opportunity to explore how the efforts of ordinary Dominicans to navigate blackness may create spaces for Haitian belonging. An examination of the natural hair movement acts as a bridge, linking the concerns of Dominico-Haitian activists with those of other groups who promote Black identity.

Race, Beauty, and Hair

Mary Douglas’s Natural Symbols (1970[1996]) is the primary anthropological text to situate the body as a socially determined site where cultural meanings can be read. Douglas argues that bodily presentations communicate symbols which are “restricted by the demands of the social system” (76) reflecting sites of social struggle. Pierre Bourdieu (1979[2010]) applied this approach to the study of class, developing the concept of habitus to index the ways class identity is embodied including aesthetic choice, posture, and mannerisms. Michel Foucault’s development of the concept of biopower (1979) situates bodies not just as sites to be read, but as key agents in the execution of the governmentality of populations.

Approaches to beauty cultures, relevant to the present analysis, have drawn on the concept of biopower to examine how female bodies are disciplined and women often make extreme efforts at “self-improvement” to meet beauty norms (Bordo 1993; Nichter and Nichter 1991; Wolf 1991). Beauty ideals are tied to social functions such as work,

reproduction, and the production of women’s subordination. The central preoccupation of this literature is the location of agency in women’s beauty cultures. Therefore, these works make practices of resistance and refusal more visible than in Foucault’s original articulation of biopower, insisting that women employ embodied strategies in ways that challenge and derive benefit from dominant systems of power.

Scholarship on beauty pageants return to the question of governmentality, focusing on the judgment and performance of beauty as a public spectacle. Pageants are civic events where elites crown queens who represent the “ideal female citizen,” conforming to race and gender standards (Banet-Weiser 1999; Craig 2002; Rahier 1998). At the same time, they increasingly are avenues for women to stake a claim to civic life through the public communication of career and public aspirations (Banet-Weiser 1999) and can be a critical tool for communicating new racial, national, ethnic, and gender aspirations. This work has documented that beauty ideals are indispensable to the national imaginary by offering public displays to which citizens can aspire.

Black feminist scholars have made significant contributions to this scholarship, particularly emphasizing racialized aesthetics. Focusing on physical attributes such as hair, shade, nose and body shape, they have sought to locate the origins and effects of a beauty ideal that preclude Black bodies. As in earlier work on women and beauty, this literature has gradually moved from an examination of the ways that Black women reproduce and internalize their domination by ascribing to these ideals and are making efforts to recognize and make visible distinct modes of agency (see Banks 2000; Mercer 1987; Tate 2009).

The work on hair in the Black community has followed this pattern of moving its focus from internalized oppression to a more attentive examination of hair as it reflects

domination and resistance. Hair straightening practices date back to slavery, when women used oils and plant resins to modify the texture of their hair (de Sá Dias et al. 2007, 2). Black communities in the the Americas and Europe still designate hair as “good” and “bad” and have high rates of hair straightening and relaxation. Alongside shade, skin color, and nose shape, these works have examined the racist origins and negative effects of “good hair” and “bad hair” designations (Collins 1990[2009]; hooks 1993). Efforts to de- psychologize choices over haircare have placed more emphasis on how women navigate embodied strategies of accommodation and resistance. Therefore, this work rejects the unproductive line of questioning that places the burden of representation on women by claiming that hair straightening is a manifestation of self-hatred and portrays women as acting on the knowledge of a system that values whiteness. Instead, scholars evaluate these choices in the context of a multitude of strategies, some aimed at self-care and others at navigating racially hostile environments such as the workplace.

Kobena Mercer (1987) argues that hair straightening must be understood as historically situated. Straightening practices took on new connotations after the rise of the afro during the 1960s. In the “post-liberated” era of hair that succeeded the afro, Black hairstyling cannot be read as a mimicry of the White cultural form (which has been dethroned with the validation of the Black aesthetic) but should be seen “as creative responses to the experience of oppression and dispassion” (34) that include a variety of elements to form “new configurations of cultural expression” (51). Three decades after the publication of “Black hair/style politics,” hair straightening continues to be popular among African diaspora communities as one option among a repertoire of “authentic” African American styles (Banks 2000; Tate 2009). As women of color whose bodies are regulated

from all sides, choice becomes empowering whether between straight or natural styles (Banks 2000, 74). Therefore, “authentic” Black hair culture is an inherently hybrid culture that embraces mixture.

Natural hair has received far less attention beyond the 1960s/1970s Black power politics of the afro (Weekes 1997). Once a potent symbol of rejection of White supremacy, the afro has since become a fashion, devoid of any real connection to revolutionary politics (Davis 1994; Morrison 2006; Walker 2000). The contemporary revival of natural hair in the United States appears to follow the trend toward commercialization over politics (Byrd and Tharps 2014).

Previous discussions of Dominican hair have all addressed the relationship between hair and the acceptance/denial of blackness. The most thorough of these is Gerald Murray and Marina Ortiz’s 2012 study of the role of the salon in Dominican culture. This investigation challenges what the authors see as a discourse demonizing Dominican racism, identifying several myths within the existing scholarship that uncritically denigrate Dominican racial formations. Further, they disavow the role of racism in promoting desire for straight hair, arguing that the popularity of hair straightening is due to its ability to make hair more manageable.

While Ginetta Candelario’s 2007 study dwelt on the Dominican diaspora in the US, it can be extended to the relationship between race and beauty in Dominican culture. Candelario’s work focused less on the actual practices of haircare and more broadly on racial aesthetics and attitudes among the workers and customers of the establishment where she conducted her fieldwork in New York City. She challenges the tendency to evaluate Dominican racial configurations within a Black/White binary found in the US, supplanting

the binary for a tripartite model that privileges a mixed-race aesthetic. Dominicans, she argues, do not simply mimic a European racial aesthetic, but adopt the national racial construction of mestizaje. This assertion adds complexity to Cassandra Badillo’s (2001) short discussion of natural hair. Badillo also challenges the idea that hair straightening changes one’s racial identity, insisting that its major function is to signal acceptance of a system of white supremacy. To this date, no scholarship has seriously considered the potential role of the natural hair movement to pose a challenge to a racialized aesthetic that devalues blackness.

Social science research on beauty, and especially hair, provides ample evidence that bodily aesthetics can both reflect and resist domination. Women’s bodies are enmeshed in discourses of power articulated through bodily aesthetics, given the Cartesian division of women into the realm of the body and men into the realm of the mind. Beyond gender relations, the representations of women’s bodies are implicated in the construction of the ideal citizen, which is also classed and raced. Few have studied the significance of hair in determining racial/social hierarchies in the Dominican Republic. However, the scholarship based on US and British contexts provides a useful starting point for considering agency in Dominican haircare practices that emanate from within distinct racial classification systems. Further, at a historical juncture where citizenship is being redefined and reexamined in the public sphere due to the publicized policies regarding Dominicans of Haitian descent, challenging the dominant racialized aesthetic in the Dominican Republic carries with it the potential to challenge exclusionary nationalism.

“They Say Dominicans Do the Best Hair”: Straightening as Slavery

In her seminal book on Dominican racial identity, Candelario (2007) argues that hair texture, not skin color, is the primary racial identifier in the Dominican Republic. She is not alone in arguing that hair is a palimpsest on which society’s racial ideologies can be read. Hair is often privileged in everyday conversations about blackness because hair is “the most tangible sign of racial difference” (Mercer 2013, 101). Unlike skin color, hair texture is more readily manipulated, making it a powerful tool for examining the effects of racial ideologies. Murray and Ortiz (2012) describe Dominican society as a pelocracia (literally, a government based on hair), given the central role of hair in determining social position and the declining importance of skin color (9). Their 2012 study on hair salons found that their numbers rival that of colmados, the ubiquitous Dominican corner stores, with only 10,000 fewer beauty salons, totaling around 55,000 establishments with 150,000 employees. There are no available statistics on the prevalence of hair straightening in the Dominican Republic, but it is a widespread global phenomenon. An estimated 80 percent of African American women have chemically straightened their hair at some point, along with 49.2 percent of black women in Cape Town, South Africa. In a 2007 study, 59 percent of African American women had relaxed hair (Aryiku et al. 2015, 1692). At an event about the politics of natural hair in Santo Domingo, one woman who spoke estimated that “98.99999… percent” of Dominican women straighten their hair.

Haircare is also an important economic factor in the lives of Dominican women. Women spend between 10 and 12 percent of their gross income on haircare. Those who earn more, invest more in these services and products (Murray and Ortiz 2012). A Listín

up to 30 percent of their income on haircare services (185). Women who wear straightened or relaxed hair, or hair with extensions, can spend anywhere between $30 and $80 USD per month, depending on whether they purchase their own products and the frequency of their visits, which can be up to twice a week (Murray and Ortiz 2012). These services are not limited to the wealthy sectors, but women at all socioeconomic levels are expected to visit the salon to cultivate socially accepted hair styles. It is a common practice that women rely on a romantic partner to pay for costly salon services (Saunders 2013), given that only half of all Dominican women participate in the paid labor force (Lugo 2012).

Salon visits also require a significant investment of time. It is common for women to form queues at salons at 9 AM, most of which do not accept appointments, and not leave the salon until the late afternoon. The day before a major holiday or on the weekend is especially busy with waits extending up to four hours and treatments lasting a minimum of two hours for a wash, setting in rollers, and blow dry. Straight hair styles are typically accomplished by applying chemicals or heat, both of which can be painful and traumatic processes. This is especially true for young women whose first experience with hair straightening is often for a special occasion, such as a communion or primary school graduation, instilling in them the idea that natural hairstyles are inappropriate in such venues. The salon plays such an integral role in women’s lives that most never wash their hair at home, given the difficulties of reproducing “aesthetically acceptable” styles without the aid of an expert (Murray and Ortiz 2012, 116).

Many women are enculturated into this beauty culture that emphasizes straight hair at a young age. bell hook’s (1993) narrative of her experience with hair straightening as a child shows it as a social practice that, while both painful and traumatic, facilitates bonding

and sharing between generations of women. Although some Dominicans have naturally straight hair, it appeared as if most didn’t. Beyond my own observations, during intermittent rains, strangers and friends were often concerned about my naturally straight hair getting wet, assuming that it had been blow-dryed straight. In another instance, at a community event in Los Mina, three young girls from 7-9 years old were especially curious about my hair and one girl cautiously stroked it. Some Dominican girls begin hair straightening as early as four (Rodríguez G. 2007), often for a special occasion, cementing straightened hair’s hold on idealized standards of beauty. However, young women’s hair is less closely regulated and Minerva, an interdisciplinary artist in her early 30s, told me that as a girl, she was not conscious of her hair, despite being the only member of her family with curls. Later in life, her decision to wear her hair natural posed professional and educational barriers.

The thermal and chemical methods of straightening are both damaging to hair. With the thermal method, an oil protectant is first applied and the hair is brushed and blow-dried straight, often set in large curlers and dried under a hood dryer or passed through an electric flat iron. Chemical methods, often called relaxers, cause more permanent damage to hair as they employ alkaline agents to penetrate and break down the keratin complex in the hair shaft (de Sá Dias 2007, 4). The application of these chemicals is frequently painful, causing a burning sensation on the scalp. If used improperly, they can cause permanent scarring to the skin. Regular hair straightening carries several other medical consequences and has been linked to long-term hair loss, dandruff, and alopecia (Aryiku et al. 2015, 1694). Given the potential dangers associated with these substances, women are obligated to seek professional services. For critics of hair straightening, evidence of its damaging effects

bolsters their claims that women are victims. Eva, a Reconoci.do member, describes the multiple burdens of hair straightening:

Después de que yo terminé el bachillerato y mi graduación, fui y mi desricé y dije a poco no vuelvo. Veo que cuando yo me lavo la cabeza y veo que mi crecimiento sigue igualito. Entonces pa’ tu desrizarte … tanto dinero … y el tiempo que tú pasas, y el dolor de cabeza que te da, y ya, en los quince días tú tienes que volver. Es una esclavitud.

After I finished high school and my graduation, I went and I straightened my hair and I said, I won’t come for a bit. I see that when I wash my hair and I see that my growth comes out the same. So, for you to straighten … so much money … and the time it takes, and the headache that it gives you and, fifteen day later you have to go back. That’s slavery.32

Slavery is a useful metaphor that captures the relationship between the exacting pressures of hair straightening and a White supremacist racial order. This statement places these practices firmly within a system of racial oppression, invalidating interpretations of hair straightening that place the practice outside of dominant White supremacist structures and consequently pathologizing women who partake in the practice.

When not in the salon, women with straightened hair take steps to maintain the style, sporting tubis and satin head wraps to prevent disturbing their hair and to preserve its natural oils. Women who manage their haircare at home or in a friend’s house, a minority, often wear their hair piled on their head in rolos (curlers) to help set their straightened styles. During the Dominican summers, a concern is the frequent Caribbean downpours that threaten to undo straight hair dos. Unexpected showers often force women to run for cover, wrap their heads in plastic, and be trapped inside to avoid another trip to the salon. These measures to protect straightened hair are not only economic

considerations, but reflect the fear women have of appearing in public with their natural hair textures.

A popular saying warns male suitors that they should not marry a woman before taking her to the beach (Murray and Ortiz 2012, 2) because when in contact with water, straightened hair regains most of its former structure. This anecdote contributes to social pressures to “marry well,” with appropriate partners resulting in potentially lighter skinned