The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo

Studying the logic and social bases of twentieth-century dictatorships in the Caribbean and Central America recently has attracted a small coterie of sophisticated historians. Some of the most innovative focus on the “sultanic” regime of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic (Eric Roorda, 1998; Richard Turits, 2003; Christian Krohn-Hansen, 2009). Lauren Derby’s long-awaited study of the symbolic cultural politics of Trujillo’s rule greatly enhances our understanding of the construction of hegemony and the meshing of coercion and consent during his 30 years in power. This is a pathbreaking work in the cultural history of politics that should be read by all scholars interested in approaches to analyzing the state and expressions of authoritarian populism.Derby focuses on how Trujillo endeavored to establish legitimacy and communi cate with his subjects through the idioms of patronage and social mobility with gender and race connotations. Trujillo arose out of problematic circumstances to which he offered solutions: the US military occupation and the hurricane of 1930 that destroyed the capital city. Derby offers innovative interpretations of how the US occupation of 1916 – 24 undermined liberal ideals and how Trujillo’s post-hurricane reconstruction project shaped urban space and class relations as well as his reputation as a strong man forging a strong, tutelary nation-state.A central theme is that Trujillo’s authority and many Dominicans’ consent to his rule stemmed from his use of “vernacular politics.” Trujillo’s rule was embedded in Dominican concepts of authority, masculinity, exchange, confianza, and stigma. Adoption of popular cultural forms made Trujillo seem “of the people,” creating familiarity and complicity and making it “difficult to step outside the bounds of state power” (p. 12). The author takes seriously aspects of Trujillo’s rule that most previous scholars have dismissed as irrelevant, even ridiculous: the over-the-top praise from sycophants, the incessant ceremonial displays, his elegant military dress, the logic of his constant sexual conquests, and the jet-set cavorting of his daughter and her consort.Derby shows how the dual elements of domination and attraction were constantly played out in symbolic terms: the 1937 Carnival and the 1955 Free World’s Fair of Peace and Confraternity emphasizing hierarchical order and control, the military uniform resonating with monarchical associations from Europe and Haiti, the sexual “consumption” of bourgeois women playing on a certain masculine power. She indicates too how Trujillo extended the promise of social mobility to mulattos from the popular classes, some of whom found respectable posts in the bureaucracy of Trujillo’s political party and who identified with Trujillo’s self-presentation as a “tiger” (tíguere), an upstart, barrio style of masculinity that challenged elite norms. While Derby emphasizes patronage (gift giving) as a major foundation of the despot’s rule, her work is particularly exciting in its exploration of gender representation in politics. She also has interesting things to say about the social significations of race in a mulatto society without a history of slavery. To her multifaceted exploration of Trujillo’s cultural politics, Derby adds a fascinating essay on Dominican practices of denunciation and praise within the state and party bureaucracies, which not only shows how Trujillo played newly arrived Dominican party functionaries off against the old civil service, but also how denunciations both provided a safety valve for dissention and bound the expanded bureaucracy to him.Based on close reading of histories from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the Trujillo archives, newspapers, visual images, novels, and interviews, these chapters provide new insights into everyday state formation during the Trujillato and how people in various locations experienced the dictatorship. Derby maintains that poor mulattos in urban and rural settings tended to feel “the illusion of upward mobility” and a new centrality and identification with Trujillo in his developmentalist and “civilizing” national project. Thus Derby raises the issue of what citizenship means in a dictatorship. Trujillo’s great power, which penetrated civil society, was not solely based on the use of violence or control of the economy. This work is convincing in its argument that the cultural realm — which Trujillo used to generate admiration, fear, and compliance — is of utmost importance.In later chapters, Derby directly addresses Trujillo in the popular imagination from two vantage points. First, she analyzes stories she collected about state fetishism, centering on the belief that Trujillo had a “muchachito,” a spirit double who accounted for his omnipotence. Then she moves on to a political reading of the Olivarista community at Palma Sola, where a millenarian movement erupted among peasants in the southwest in 1961, just after Trujillo’s murder. She interprets its ideology, which she gleaned in part through interviews with leaders, as a popular political cosmology that both critiqued the Trujillo regime and imitated its forms and practices. Derby has a remarkable knowledge of popular religion in the Dominican Republic, informed by vodú, healing practices, and popular Catholicism, and her political reinterpretations are compelling.Because of the complexity of the book’s arguments, this reader would have appreciated a stronger conclusion, clarifying the arguments made with regard to Trujillo’s relation to various social groups and whether Derby sees significant change over time during the long dictatorship. Occasionally, too, one would like to know more about the sources, for instance, in the section on Trujillo’s spirit double. But these are quibbles.In sum, this is an ambitious historical ethnography of the state by an accomplished cultural historian cum anthropologist that opens new paths to studying dictatorships and other political regimes. It is notable for the author’s extraordinary grasp of social theory and comparative cases from the Caribbean, Latin America, and elsewhere, which she uses to make sense of this particular regime in its social and cultural context. The Dictator’s Seduction contributes to the study of masculinity and symbolic politics, populism, nationalism, links between the public and private, and race as a social marker in mestizo societies. It also sheds light on consumption and dress, the social significance of urban space, Dominican perceptions of the United States and Haiti, and the outcomes of hurricanes. Not least important, it is engagingly written.

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