A Praxis of the River: Ozama River’s Lominero Ecologies

• In Event: Black and Indigenous Ecologies: Race, Place, and the Politics of Water

Description for Program

The Ozama River in Santo Domingo is the site of the first permanent colonial european
settlement in the Americas. Dominican nationalist writers have embraced the river as the site of
the birth of a Dominicanidad grounded in hispanic values, disavowing counterhistories of indigeneity and Black maroonage on the rivershore. This disavowal, furthermore, is tied to an ecological insensibility that obscures the epistemological potentials of a reading of history through the materiality of the river. Engaging the material call of the Ozama, believed to have been named after the Taino Arawak expression O sama, O cama, or Hosama, which means to listen, to pay attention, I propose a historical reassessment of Dominicanidad which centers Black maroons on the Ozama shore through the example of San Lorenzo de los Negros Mina (Los Mina) and their permanence in the area since the seventeenth century. I argue that paying attention to the disavowed history of Los Mina and how they care for and build communion with the river through their modes of life, community, worship, loving and rebelling help us find avenues to resist and dissent to Dominicanidad’s anti-Black and ecocidal settler foundations. Furthermore, the Los Mina social ecologies of the Ozama River lend us a transdisciplinary analytic that challenges contemporary humanistic scholarship that has reproduced imaginaries of the Ozama as a zone of ecological devastation and precarity. Los Mina reminds us that the Ozama is a dynamic, ungovernable river that has always nurtured and protected Indigenous and Black freedom.

Author

• Massiel Torres Ulloa