Mujeres Mariposas: Lessons from Afro-Descendant Women’s Histories in the Time of the Butterflies

• In Event: Resisting Erasure and Reclaiming Identity in Ayiti: The History and Experiences of the African Diaspora in Haiti and the Dominican Republic

Description for Program

In the 1930s and 40s, the Afro-Dominican activist and doctor Evangelina Rodríguez faced exclusion from the first national feminist organization in the Dominican Republic: Acción Feminista Dominicana (AFD). Due to her resistance against the despotic dictator Rafael Trujillo, she was not only expelled from AFD–she was also redacted from mainstream history books, seized, tortured and killed without receiving recognition for her outstanding public contributions to healthcare and political growth. Despite the vital role Dominican and Haitian women of African descent have played in shaping history, politics and life in the Dominican Republic, their stories face an erasure that is often intentionally-done to perpetuate false narratives of white superiority and silence the immense impacts of Afro-Dominican people. Afro-Dominican women rarely receive the recognition they deserve in public education and common bodies of archival knowledge, their stories either dissolved from the archives or watered down. The following research aims to highlight the political lessons we can learn from the narratives of women like Evangelina Rodríguez who, despite being prevented from participating in mainstream political movements and facing exclusion from the archives, found ways to continue existing and building regardless. This paper draws from archival and oral history resources to learn historical and political lessons from their stories.

Author

• Sophia De La Cruz, University of Florida