Page 326 - Arte e Historia
P. 326
Notes on History and Dominican Art:
Drawing, Sculpture, Painting and Photography
Our national art, in all its expressions, was born as the conquest and colonization undertaken by Spain. The
our homeland: with Altagracia and Duarte’s ideals, Do- result of the encounter between the Europeans invaders
minican, liberal, feisty, tricolor …It is the art of a Carib- and the Natives invaded is encapsulated in Neruda’s vers-
bean nation with territory in the sun, and multiracial es: «Spaniard conquerors / who came from Spain with what
population, regularly surprised by the quakes of its faults they were wearing / searched for gold and they searched it so
and the hurricane seasons characteristic of the tropics. much / as if it served as food. / Upholding Christ with his cross
/ the blows were arguments / or so, that the living Indians /
The Antillean nature, being insular, is a condition became Christians living dead».
in itself, it is a primal nature. Centuries before becom-
ing a country, homeland or nation, it was a pristine geo- The process of seeking and obtaining gold enslaved
graphical landscape followed by historical cycles forming and almost completely annihilated the native popula-
a society determined by four major times: the Aboriginal tion, replaced by African slaves who turned into the
Pre-Columbian, the Hispanic colonial and the African main support for the sugar production that eventually
presence; Creole proto-nationalists subversion cycle, and led to the development of livestock holdings. The slave
the Republican cycle, extended from the 4th decade of the trade and the territorial expansion defined the Spanish
nineteenth century to the process of this millennium. colonial regime, whose imprint included Catholic evan-
gelization, the imposition of Castilian language, and the
In this «implausible country,» as the poet Pedro Mir transplanting of political, legal, ecclesiastical and edu-
describes it, its first inhabitants were Arawak Amerindians cational institutions. The building of territorial villages
who came, almost all of them, from the South American that included convents, chapels and churches with their
tropical forest. These aborigines called «ayti» the entire is- shrines, saints, virgins, and ritual observances, erased
land, but usually that general term is applied to the high in principle the «sinful» mythological beliefs and ritual
and mountainous land of the West, which is distinguished practices of the Amerindians and Africans, although the
from the name used in the East. The natives of the East cimarronaje and the pilfering survived with the spiritual,
called it «Kiskea,» according to Pané, which is also the racial or mixed blood hybridization, in this first encoun-
name of a goddess. By idiomatic manipulation it becomes ter of socio-colonial formation.
Quisqueia or Quisqueya.
As the fundamental rooting stage for this period,
The Taino society, whose regime was interrupted by there were diverse virgins representing the Immaculate
the Columbian expedition in1492, was developed by the Mother of the Son of our Heavenly Father. But none
primal Amerindian migration. The discoverer Admiral as Our Lady of Altagracia, whose image appeared in an
gave a new name to the island, «Hispaniola,» beginning
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