Redeeming Santo Domingo: North Atlantic Missionaries and the Racial Conversion of a Nation

• Published in: Church History
• Main Author: Davidson, Christina Cecelia
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 2020
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009640720000013; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0009640720000013

Abstract This article examines North Atlantic views of Protestant missions and race in the Dominican Republic between 1905 and 1911, a brief period of political stability in the years leading up to the U.S. Occupation (1916–1924). Although Protestant missions during this period remained small in scale on the Catholic island, the views of British and American missionaries evidence how international perceptions of Dominicans transformed in the early twentieth century. Thus, this article makes two key interventions within the literature on Caribbean race and religion. First, it shows how outsiders’ ideas about the Dominican Republic's racial composition aimed to change the Dominican Republic from a “black” country into a racially ambiguous “Latin” one on the international stage. Second, in using North Atlantic missionaries’ perspectives to track this shift, it argues that black-led Protestant congregations represented a possible alternative future that both elite Dominicans and white North Atlantic missionaries rejected.