Haiti & The Dominican Republic: An Island Divided

Hispaniola (Saint-Domingue: modern day Haiti) is the first place the colonizers imported Africans as slaves.

“Haiti is the Foundation of the Black Experience in the Americas.”

“Haitians are proud to be Black.”
“Dominicans are proud to be of a mixed-race, Spanish ancestry society.”—The “Me No Black” society.

Indio:
“By 19 century, we didn’t have any indigenous peoples on the island, like other parts of South America. So we came up with (invented) the word “Indo” to negate (masked) our African ancestry and identity and to become something else.”
—Dominican Republican Anthropologist