I. The Dominican Republic on the International Stage

In recent years, the Dominican Republic has garnered international media attention for the 2013 court ruling that revoked citizenship from Dominicans of Haitian descent retroactively to the year 1929.Footnote ⁸ Human rights activists and influential writers and scholars have decried the nation's institutionalized anti-Haitian/anti-black racism and race denial.Footnote ⁹ While Dominican activists have staged protests and continue to work for the rights of Haitian-Dominicans, the opinions of foreigners—especially those from Europe and the United States—have mattered the most on the international stage.Footnote ¹⁰

Indeed, North Atlantic perceptions of race relations in the Dominican Republic and Dominicans’ racial status have always mattered for the country which exists alongside Haiti, a nation born out of revolution carried out by the enslaved. For nearly two decades after the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), people living on the eastern side of the island remained under European rule while various Haitian leaders ruled in the west. Then, after a short-lived declaration of independence in 1821, the Dominican Republic became unified with Haiti for twenty-two years (1822–1844). During this period, the United States refused to recognize Haiti as a nation. When Dominicans gained independence in 1844, the same racist attitudes prevailed. The United States did not formally recognize Haiti until 1862. Dominican recognition came later, in 1866, after the country became annexed to Spain (1861–1865) and then regained independence in the War of Restoration (1863–1865).Footnote ¹¹ When the United States attempted its own annexation of the Dominican Republic in the late 1860s, the bill was defeated on racial grounds.Footnote ¹²

The racist attitudes that prevented the United States and European nations from interacting with the two nations on the island of Hispaniola on an equal basis persisted into the later decades of the nineteenth century. However, these attitudes affected the two nations in distinct ways. There is no mistaking Haiti and its revolution, a war that undermined a hegemonic Western world system of racial capitalism and consequently garnered the ire of Western nations.Footnote ¹³ However, the same could not be said of the Dominican Republic. Throughout Dominican history, foreigners have often confused the Dominican Republic with Haiti or have ignored the historical and cultural distinctions between the two nations.Footnote ¹⁴ Moreover, the fact that a majority of the Dominican population is of mixed European and African descent caused additional confusion for people accustomed to the British and American racial systems of hypodescent. Indeed, while some travelers recognized racial distinctions between Haitians and Dominicans, others, like Reverend Smith (quoted above), categorized both of the countries as “black republics.”Footnote ¹⁵

This “misrecognition” of the Dominican Republic inspired a concerted effort among elite Dominicans of European descent to discursively separate their country from Haiti in both racial and cultural terms.Footnote ¹⁶ They did this by demonizing Haiti and linking Dominican national identity to the country's Spanish heritage. As Dixa Ramírez has argued: “Dominican lettered nationalists forestalled full confrontations with being denied a seat at the global table by mythologizing Columbus and the early colonial past, as well as by consecrating the ideal of a white male patriot.”Footnote ¹⁷ In the twentieth century, the hispanophilia and anti-black/anti-Haitian racism of nineteenth-century elites became institutionalized during the thirty-one-year dictatorship of Rafael L. Trujillo (1930–1961), during which Trujillo orchestrated the massacre of over 10,000 suspected Haitians at the Haiti-Dominican border in 1937. The anti-Haitian state-sponsored violence during the Trujillo era lives on in contemporary politics and especially in the 2013 decision that has retroactively revoked citizenship from Haitian-Dominicans.Footnote ¹⁸ While the international community has denounced the Dominican Republic's racist policies, it rarely recognizes its own hand in the historical making of Dominican racial attitudes.Footnote ¹⁹

Scholarly literature, on the other hand, has condemned both anti-Haitianism and the essential role that North Atlantic powers have played in the making of Dominican racial politics. Since the 1970s, a new wave of scholars of Dominican history has critiqued traditional anti-Haitianism and has set out to document the country's African legacy.Footnote ²⁰ Additionally, various studies have tracked the transformations of foreigners’ views of Dominicans over time.Footnote ²¹ Few works, however, have considered the opinions and goals of North Atlantic Protestant missionaries. There are two main reasons for this lacuna. First, Protestant missions during the turn of the twentieth century were limited. Large-scale missionary activity did not take place until after the establishment of the American-backed ecumenical church, the Iglesia Evangélica Domincana, in 1921. Second, it is commonly held that early Protestant churches only served black, Anglophone immigrants and migrants from other Caribbean countries who were already Protestant. However, as this article demonstrates, a few black ministers operating in the Dominican southeast did not limit themselves to the migrant population but ran bilingual congregations and schools during the first decade of the twentieth century. White North Atlantic missionaries, however, generally ignored this model of bilingual missionary work and linked the country to Latin America instead of the black Caribbean. Their perceptions helped to solidify the idea that the Dominican Republic was not a black country after all.

II. Historical Background

In Dominican history, the years 1905–1911 mark the presidency of Ramón Cáceres and the first sustained period of political stability in the twentieth century after the assassination of Afro-Dominican president Ulises Heureaux in 1899. This period is also characterized by the impact of the drastic economic, social, and political transformations in the country that had taken place during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, including the rise of the sugar industry, the immigration of thousands of agricultural laborers from other regions of the Caribbean, and the emergence of the United States as a dominant economic and political aggressor in the region.Footnote ²² These changes influenced North Atlantic views of Dominicans’ religion and race by bringing the Dominican Republic to the center of international politics and into a closer relationship with the United States. Within Protestant circles, it became clear that unlike Cuba and Puerto Rico, where American Protestant missions had made inroads since the Spanish American War (1898), Protestantism had not reached many Spanish-speaking Dominicans.

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, changes in the Dominican export economy attracted foreign investors and transformed the country's relationship with European countries and the United States. In the 1870s, tobacco was the most important export crop, and Dominican peasants in the northern Cibao valley produced their crops primarily for a European market. Their farming techniques relied on small-scale agriculture in which a single family cultivated tobacco that was then sold to foreign markets.Footnote ²³ The rise of the sugar industry in the southeast during the 1870s–1890s, however, shifted these dynamics.Footnote ²⁴ The United States instead of Europe became the chief consumer of Dominican exports. The cultivation of sugar also required a plantation system in which one owner employed hundreds of laborers. Unlike the tobacco industry, in which Dominicans owned the crop they produced, the main investors in Dominican sugar plantations were foreign. Cuban émigrés and Americans became the most prominent investors, while British, Italian, and French businessmen also invested capital in the industry.Footnote ²⁵ Land was fertile, readily available, and cheap, and the Dominican government offered additional tax incentives for investors.Footnote ²⁶ Consequently, the southeastern region of the country, particularly San Pedro de Macorís and La Romana, quickly became sugar enclaves. When sugar prices plummeted in 1884, however, American investors began to consolidate their interests in Dominican sugar by buying out other owners.Footnote ²⁷ Americans soon came to dominate the sugar industry, which had outgrown the tobacco exports in the north, thus shifting the power of the Dominican economy to the foreign-dominated south.Footnote ²⁸

The 1884 crack in the sugar market also led to a demographic shift in the sugar-exporting regions of the country. Prior to that moment, plantation owners employed a majority Dominican labor force for the sugarcane harvest. The wages offered for work in the sugar fields attracted Dominican peasants, and other industries suffered for lack of workers.Footnote ²⁹ However, when planters responded to the 1884 crisis by cutting wages, Dominican day laborers returned to subsistence living.Footnote ³⁰ Unable to induce Dominicans to work for low wages, plantation owners began to recruit laborers from other regions of the Caribbean. Facing their own financial crisis because of natural disasters and the rise of beet sugar in Europe, thousands of islanders from the Lesser Antilles flocked to the Dominican Republic and other Spanish Caribbean regions in search of work; over 4,000 migrants arrived in the first years of the twentieth century.Footnote ³¹ The steady increase of non-Spanish-speaking black laborers in the Dominican southeast alarmed Dominican intellectuals and politicians, who preferred white immigration from Europe but were powerless in the face of the influential planter class dominated by Americans in the southeast.Footnote ³²

In general, the North Atlantic perception of the Dominican Republic as a nonwhite country caused the U.S. government and American business interests to disregard the Dominican lettered class's hispanophile vision of the nation. Indeed, during Heureaux's presidency (1882–1889), Americans’ racial attitudes influenced U.S. diplomatic relations with the country. As Silvio Torres-Saillant and Ramona Hernández have argued in their book, The Dominican Americans: “Perhaps the most salient feature of the rapport between the two countries at the time was the U.S. government's choice of black Americans to serve as diplomatic representatives in the Dominican Republic.”Footnote ³³ During Heureaux's rule, four African American men were appointed as U.S. Consul in Santo Domingo—Henry Astwood, John S. Durham, Archibald Grimke, and Campbell Maxwell; these men were all prominent politicians, journalists, and “race leaders” in the United States. While U.S. presidents reluctantly appointed black men abroad as diplomats, they did so with the understanding that such men would be sent to nonwhite countries.Footnote ³⁴ This practice ended, however, as diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic became more significant and Americans’ views about the Dominican Republic began to shift. After Campbell Maxwell, a white diplomat took charge of the U.S. consul in Santo Domingo in 1904, a year before Cáceres took office and the same year as Roosevelt's corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

The Roosevelt corollary, which stated that the United States had the power to use military force to keep European nations out of Latin America, led to a drastic shift in the U.S. policy toward the Dominican Republic. Prior to 1904, the Dominican president, Ulises Heureaux, took loans from various European, American, and Dominican creditors. The loans were in the name of the Dominican government even though Heureaux used them to pay off his political supporters and to run an elaborate network of spies that enabled him to thwart plans to topple his dictatorial regime.Footnote ³⁵ By 1893, the national debt totaled seventeen million pesos, of which a large fraction represented debts to the Dutch enterprise Westendorp and Company.Footnote ³⁶ That same year, the Santo Domingo Improvement Company (SDIC), an American enterprise made up of U.S. government officials, assumed Westendorp and Company's debt. Since Westendorp and Company also managed the Dominican Republic's customs receipts, the transfer of debt held by the company to American hands also meant the transfer of control over the nation's greatest source of income. Then, between 1893 and 1907, the United States consolidated its control over the national debt, resulting in the United States’ “complete control over Dominican finances.”Footnote ³⁷ From 1893 until his death in 1899, Heureaux continued to arrange secret loans with the SDIC and foreign businesses. By 1900, the nation's debt totaled over thirty-four million, with creditors in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Britain. Conflict between the SDIC and the Dominican government over payments for loans caused the U.S. government to intervene.Footnote ³⁸ In 1905, a new agreement between the U.S. and the Cáceres administration gave the United States control over the customs houses and payments to European creditors. Then, in 1907, the Dominican-American Convention extended this agreement when a U.S. bank consolidated the Dominican Republic's debt and paid off its European creditors. Under this treaty, the United States enforced the same stipulations as it had in 1905. It additionally maintained “the right to interfere in Dominican politics whenever it considered that the operations of the customs receivership or the compliance with the convention were threatened,” a stipulation that set the stage for the U.S. Occupation in 1916 and U.S. intervention across Latin America.Footnote ³⁹

Although the Dominican Republic under Cáceres lost substantial control over its sovereignty as a nation, the United States’ control over its customs actually increased revenue for the government. U.S. officials cracked down on contraband and delivered regular payments to the government. These payments increased yearly during Cáceres's administration, and the government then directed the surplus funds to public works. As historian Frank Moya Pons claims, under Cáceres, the government began to build and repair roads, including a connection between the capital and the northern Cibao region.Footnote ⁴⁰ It also constructed railroads, lighthouses, ports, and docks and invested in schools, which “increased from some 200 in 1904 to 526 in 1910.”Footnote ⁴¹ These improvements drew the attention of North Atlantic visitors to the island. Americans especially viewed the changes as evidence of the country's progress under U.S. influence.

In view of these transformations, some British and American Protestants began to express concern that they had not yet evangelized the Catholic country. In their minds, the history of Protestantism on the island left much to be desired.Footnote ⁴² The first Protestants to settle in eastern Hispaniola were black emigrants from the United States who fled the United States for Haiti in the 1820s because of slavery and the discrimination that plagued free blacks in the U.S. North.Footnote ⁴³ Many of these emigrants were members of the AME Church in the United States and they established AME societies during the Haitian Unification period (1822–1844).Footnote ⁴⁴ In the 1830s, British Wesleyan missionaries took over these societies in eastern Hispaniola and also established missionary outposts in Port-au-Prince and the northern regions of Haiti.Footnote ⁴⁵ When the Dominican Republic gained independence from Haiti in 1844, these Wesleyan societies maintained their Haitian-Dominican circuit, thus connecting the two sides of the island through their religious networks.Footnote ⁴⁶ The AME Church reestablished contact with descendants of black emigrants in 1882 when AME minister and U.S. Consul Henry Astwood reorganized the AME Church in the capital.Footnote ⁴⁷ By 1900, two other denominations had founded missions in the Dominican Republic: the American Free Methodists in 1889 and the Anglicans in 1897.Footnote ⁴⁸ Stationed in Santiago and San Pedro de Macorís, respectively, these missions remained small throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. Thus, during 1905–1911, the Dominican Republic appeared as a blank field to North Atlantic Protestants, who viewed the Catholic Church as insufficient in its spiritual work among the Dominican people.

The Catholic Church, however, was deeply entrenched in Dominican cultural and national life while official Dominican history construed Protestants as outsiders.Footnote ⁴⁹ Consequently, the Dominican government generally ignored the Protestant communities that existed on the island. The Dominican constitution protected the freedom of religion, but Catholicism was the official state religion. In isolated moments, Protestants faced persecution for their beliefs.Footnote ⁵⁰ This was particularly true during Spanish annexation (1861–1865) when the Spanish archbishop, Bienvenido Monzón, closed Protestant churches in the capital, Samaná, and Puerto Plata and many Protestants fled from these towns.Footnote ⁵¹ Yet, after the War of Restoration (1863–1865), when the Dominican Republic regained independence, Protestants who had fought as Dominicans in the war claimed Dominican nationality. The lettered class, the majority of whom did not perceive the Protestants as a threat to the traditional power of the Catholic Church, tacitly supported their claim. Indeed, instead of Protestantism, the Catholic Church found its greatest threat in the liberal reforms to education put forth by the Puerto Rican philosopher Eugenio María de Hostos in the late nineteenth century. The presidential term of the Catholic priest Fernando Arturo de Meriño (1882–1884), however, curtailed such reforms.Footnote ⁵² Then, during Heureaux's presidency, Meriño became the archbishop of Santo Domingo (1885–1906), and the Catholic Church gained greater influence over politics as Heureaux worked to align his regime with the church in order to gain the support of the Dominican populace.Footnote ⁵³ Thus, as Luis Martínez-Fernández has argued, throughout the nineteenth century (and into the present), “the Catholic Church remained a bastion of Dominican nationality, which it sought to define on the bases of religious purity, anti-Haitianism, and Europhilia.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Meanwhile, the Dominican government generally ignored Protestants, who held little sway over national politics.

While all North Atlantic missionaries—both black and white—recognized the influence of the Catholic Church as a key barrier to Protestant conversion in the Dominican Republic, only white British and American ministers linked the supposed solution to race. As Mears's comments above and below demonstrate, British Wesleyan and white American church leaders believed that only white missionaries would be able to decouple the strong tie between nationalism and Catholicism, and thus prove that Dominican nationality existed independently of religious affiliation to the Catholic Church. This perspective, however, depended on an elite vision of Dominican national identity and an alienation from the poorest class of Dominicans who, because of their poverty and phenotypically darker complexion, had more direct contact with African American and black British Protestant people already living on the island. To white North Atlantic ministers, winning the hearts of Dominicans meant targeting the lettered elite Dominican class. Black Protestant ministers, however, took a different view. The perspectives of various Protestant leaders—the British Wesleyan clergyman Emerson Mears; the black pastors Benjamin Wilson, Charles E. Goodin, and Jacob Paul James; and the American missionaries Philo W. Drury and Nathan H. Huffman—provide further insight on North Atlantic religious leaders’ perceptions of Dominican religiosity and race, and evidence the distinctions.

III. Negro Migrants versus Spanish Dominicans: A British Missionary's Viewpoint

Emerson Mears had lived in the Dominican Republic for over a decade when he communicated candidly with his superiors in Jamaica and London about the state of the British Wesleyan missions in the Dominican Republic in 1905.Footnote ⁵⁵ From his perspective, the method of British missionary work in this Spanish-speaking country did not make sense. The British Wesleyan mission had operated in Puerto Plata since the early 1830s, and in the seventy-some years since its inception, the character of the mission had completely changed. Mears informed the London society that at first the mission served “American coloured immigrants,” but by 1905, the congregation consisted of mostly “English colonials of the poorer working classes.” These British Caribbean migrants seemed “non-progressive and spiritually decadent,” in Mears's eyes, and Mears judged that such a church could “exert little or no influence upon the nation at large.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Mears believed that Anglophone black migrants could not mix with Dominicans, and therefore, the Wesleyan mission had missed an opportunity to minister to people who would otherwise be receptive to the Protestant church despite the prevalence of Catholicism.

The problem, according to Mears, lay in the bureaucracy of the British Wesleyan Church's Western West Indian Conference, which from 1885 until 1904 included Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The physical distance of the conference, which was headquartered in Jamaica, meant that the highest-ranking officer of the church lived miles away on an English-speaking island where the missionary concerns differed from those in Hispaniola. Furthermore, the British missionaries had done little to build up Spanish-language missions. The Dominican Republic made up part of a joint synod with Haiti, a francophone country. Per tradition, Haitian missions held priority over the stations in Dominican territory, and the superintendent of the district always lived in Port-au-Prince, isolated from events on the eastern side of the island in Puerto Plata, Samaná, and Santo Domingo. Most of the British missionaries stationed in the Dominican Republic spoke English or French, not Spanish. Moreover, the Missionary Society designated the greater part of its funds for other countries in the Caribbean. Perhaps these conditions would have made sense when Haiti governed the whole island (1822–1844) or when the Wesleyan missionaries began their work in eastern Hispaniola and served only English-speaking immigrants from the United States and the surrounding islands. Yet now, in the first decade of the twentieth century, such circumstances produced an unusual situation: “Our present position is this,” Mears assessed in 1907, “in Hayti we form a national church, whilst here we do not, and are to some extent out of the current of the national life.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In short, British Wesleyan missionaries in the Dominican Republic did not serve the local population, as they did in Jamaica and Haiti. In Mears's mind, this fact contradicted the idea of evangelical Protestant missions.

A true missionary church, according to Mears, would target a broader base of the Dominican population. From his experiences in Puerto Plata, Mears perceived the Dominican population as consisting of three primary classes: First, he identified a class made up of the “English speaking negroes” from surrounding islands. Second, he listed a class which consisted of “descendants of Protestants who are the children of white and coloured parentage who have risen in the social scale, or who have intermarried with natives and are now practically Dominicans.” Mears explained that this class was Spanish speaking and “not attached to Rome in sentiment.” Last, Mears listed “the mass of the Dominicans who are Spanish speaking Roman Catholics of a liberal type, of the nominally free thinking or anti-clerical” as the final class. It was this last class of people who were in the greatest need of missionary work. Yet instead of evangelizing classes two and three—which “form the nation proper” according to Mears—the Wesleyans concerned themselves with the first class of transient Anglophone Protestant blacks. “Our work is now almost exclusively composed of class one; for class two we do not cater, & class three continues untouched almost,” Mears clarified. Thus, he advised that the British Wesleyans change their missionary focus and target the Spanish-speaking Dominican population.Footnote ⁵⁸

Mears's description of the Dominican population demonstrates the degree to which he both racially separated himself and other European migrants from Dominicans and applied his perception of racial division in Puerto Plata to the whole country. The fact that Mears divided the Dominican population into three classes, including black migrants as the first class and descendants of black Protestants as the second class, reflects his experiences in Puerto Plata where large numbers of people representing these categories existed.Footnote ⁵⁹ This was not the case elsewhere in the country, since mixed-race Protestant populations (“class two”) existed in large numbers only in a few regions.Footnote ⁶⁰ Similarly, black Anglophone migrants from the surrounding islands did not represent the sum of the foreign population living in the Dominican Republic, which also received immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, and elsewhere.Footnote ⁶¹ Mears did not include such people in his description of the Dominican population or portray other such migrants as possible recipients of British Wesleyan missionary work. Instead, he created a scaled racial categorization in which Dominicans existed as a racial “other,” despite their position at the top of the hierarchy. This conceptualization ignored the diversity of people living in Puerto Plata and Dominican society in general. It also demonstrated the racial ambiguity that Dominicans possessed in the minds of white missionaries such as Mears. In his letters, “Spanish” became a referent to a liminal category that was not black but also not white. While Mears used racial terminology for black Anglophone migrants and characterized descendants of black Protestants as mixed race, he did not use skin color terminology to denote the Dominican majority. According to Mears's categorization, Spanish language and native birth denoted one's place at the top of the hierarchy of nonwhite people in the Dominican Republic, apparently without regard to color.

In order to convert this dominant echelon of Dominican society, Mears believed that Wesleyans missionaries would have to do more than merely provide Spanish religious services. Adaptation of missionary methods required a total change in how the British thought about Dominicans’ racial status. Reflecting the views and values of elite Dominicans, Mears perceived a racial divide between the black Anglophone migrants and Spanish-speaking Dominicans. He asserted that: “Dominican public opinion is only tolerant of class one [“English-speaking negroes”] & is opposed to any augmentation of it.”Footnote ⁶² Mears also divulged that: “The Dominicans to an extent resent the presence of the English blacks.”Footnote ⁶³ Due to this sentiment, Mears believed that grouping the Dominican Republic under the western conference in Jamaica proved problematic. “The Dominican Republic is not connected with Jamaica in any way, nor is the ordinary Jamaican at all welcome here,” he justified.Footnote ⁶⁴ In Mears's mind, the fact that black Anglophone Caribbeans made up the majority of the Wesleyan congregation in Puerto Plata drove away the Dominicans who did not want to associate themselves with black migrants.

Mears's viewpoint reflected the Dominican elites’ racist views of black migrants, thousands of whom had migrated to the Dominican Republic to work in the growing sugar industry during the last three decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Dominican elite interpreted the mass immigration of these migrants and the increasingly American-dominated sugar industry as antithetical to their national aims of “whitening” the nation through European immigration and maintaining national sovereignty over the export economy.Footnote ⁶⁶ They articulated their protests in racialized terms that shunned black foreigners, “marginaliz[ing them] because of their ‘strange’ practices” and referring to them as “degraded, low-status workers [in order to associate] blackness with foreignness.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Black migration from Jamaica and the eastern Caribbean challenged elites’ notions of the Dominican Republic as a mixed-race, culturally European space more closely related to Spain and France than Haiti or the former slave societies of the British, French, and Dutch islands. Within this mindset, the idea of possible Anglophone black migrants’ integration into the Dominican nation did not hold water. Mears's letters captured this general sentiment.

Yet Mears's ideas did not just reflect of Dominican elites’ concerns, they also matched other white North Atlantic assessments of Latin American countries. Mears underscored the salience of his ideas by pointing to common missionary practices. “Mixed services are of little practical use in this country,” he warned, “and this is the opinion of all workers in Spanish countries.” Highlighting the work of white American missionaries in Puerto Rico and Cuba, he noted their success after the Spanish American War of 1898 and indicated that they had found the same racial divisions to hold true. In order to grow a native church, missionaries had to take into account the “peculiar conditions that prevail” in each country. In other words, they had to consider race relations in the host country. Raising an Anglophone black church among migrants who were already Protestant, or even a bilingual English-Spanish church, in the Dominican Republic was an impractical path for a nation that claimed to be Spanish, Catholic, and culturally white. Thus, Mears asked the missionary board to finance special training for both Englishmen and “high class” European Dominicans in order to cater to the public's supposed desire for white, Spanish-speaking clergy.Footnote ⁶⁸

Mears's plans for missionary work also included an assessment of the current missionary field on the island. He believed that the British Wesleyans could have a monopoly on the missionary field in the Dominican Republic because, in his mind, there were “no evangelical churches of importance working here.” Moreover, the Catholic Church was “losing hold of the people.” In Mears's biased opinion, “liberal ideas are more prevalent” in the Dominican Republic than in Haiti. The Dominican people supposedly seemed more interested in education and opposed the influence of the Catholic Church over politics. Moreover, the Catholic Church could not dominate every part of the island. According to Mears, the Dominican Catholic Church “in comparison with Hayti is undermanned and not so efficiently worked.” Consequently, he believed that the British Wesleyan Church had an opportunity to gain numbers within their ranks. The fact that Wesleyan congregations already existed in important, highly populated port towns meant that the British could easily expand toward the interior once they converted a large number of Dominicans. According to Mears: “The number of men required [would] be relatively small in regard to the large influence we may exert.” Given the prevailing conditions, Mears believed that the time was ripe for Protestant evangelical missions in the Dominican Republic. He thus urged the London Missionary Society to “do for the Dominican native work what was done for the Haytian work three quarters of a century ago.” If the British Wesleyan Church cared at all for its work in the Dominican Republic, it would act quickly.Footnote ⁶⁹

Yet, action would require “men and means,” which the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society had struggled to provide for its Caribbean missionary stations since the mid-nineteenth century. By the end of the same century, straitened finances had caused the church leadership to cancel annual meetings of the General West Indian Conference (of which the Dominican Republic formed part) and lower ministerial salaries.Footnote ⁷⁰ Then, facing further difficulty in 1903, the leaders of the eastern and western divisions of the West Indian Conference declared themselves incapable of continuing the work, resigned their commission, and requested that the London-based missionary society take charge of Caribbean missions; the British West Indian Conference once again came under the British yearly conference in 1904.Footnote ⁷¹ At that time, debts for the whole region totaled ₤62,000, with deficits on accounts consisting of another ₤3,000. As George Gillanders Findlay and William West Holdsworth claim: “With its existing income pledged to the support of the work in other fields, the Missionary Society had no funds available to meet the burden.”Footnote ⁷² Still, Mears believed that to fulfill its potential in the Dominican Republic, the Wesleyan missions would have to be fully supported financially. To this end, Mears advocated for the separation of the Dominican Republic from the Haitian synod. This division would not only correspond to the political and supposed racial divisions between the two countries, but he argued that it would also prove more economical because it would eliminate the need for leaders such as himself to travel between the two territories. Mears also suggested that “aid must be given to place our buildings in fair order, and to provide schoolrooms etc. . . . Each minister [should be able] to receive his salary without deduction.”Footnote ⁷³ These changes would supposedly enable Dominican-based missionaries to strategically adapt to both the social and economic realities of the country. Likely aware of the dire financial situation of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, Mears's words demonstrate his attempt to secure limited funds. They also reveal his profound racial calculus; by separating the Dominican Republic from the Haitian synod, the country could be positioned as a Latin nation and would be disassociated from Haitian blackness, which could possibly engender greater financial support from Britain.

Although Mears hoped that his words would convince the committee to invest in Dominican missionary work, Mears presented one caveat. If the British Wesleyans were not prepared to commit to Dominican missions, the denomination should hand over the work to another white Protestant sect, such as the Methodist Episcopal Church of the United States, which would equip its missionaries with, “men, money, & method.” Indeed, by the early 1900s, the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society had far fewer financial resources than the American Methodist Episcopal Church. Mears openly disclosed his position: “If we are not prepared to go forward, to change our [mode] of working for a more logical and apostolic one; or if our problems in the English islands are more than sufficient for us, let us have the grace to ask our brethren of the M.E. church, north, to take over our present stations in the Dominican Republic.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In Mears's mind, it was better to leave the work with the Americans or another white denomination than to continue to deter Dominicans from converting to Protestantism. By doing so, Mears concluded, the Wesleyan Church would “cease to be an impediment in the way of the evangelization of this country.” The solution was a simple one, although it posed a moral question to the British Wesleyan missionary committee. Would the British denomination set aside its pride to do what was best for the Dominican people? If not, would it stand by its commitment and properly finance its missions? “If we can grapple with the Dominican problem successfully, we shall then be able to do our part in preaching Christ in the numerous Spanish countries of the Western world,” Mears entreated.Footnote ⁷⁵ The Dominican Republic—a Spanish (as in Latin) country—could become the British Wesleyan Church's primary station in Latin America.

IV. “Mixed” Congregations: Black Ministers in the Dominican Southeast

Miles away in the southeastern region of the country, bilingual congregations led by black ministers of various denominations continued their work amid the impoverished classes of black Anglophone migrants and Spanish-speaking Dominicans. These “mixed,” bilingual congregations, albeit poorly funded, existed as counter models to Mears's perspective. In 1907, Revered Charles E. Goodin, a minister from Jamaica affiliated with the British Wesleyan Church, reported that: “Services are generally carried out in English and Spanish. Many natives are interested and we have two helpers among them.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Reverend Jacob Paul James of the African Methodist Episcopal Church also noted Dominican interest and the potential of growing his congregation in the initial years after his arrival in January 1899. In San Pedro de Macorís, Reverend Benjamin Wilson, an Episcopal priest associated with the well-known African American bishop James T. Holly of Haiti, offered bilingual services and ran a bilingual school for migrant and Dominican children. The fact that black pastors led these congregations, operated in both English and Spanish, and united black Protestant migrants with Spanish-speaking Dominicans contradicted Mears's notion that Dominicans would only accept white ministers and that mixed congregations could not work in the Dominican Republic. Thus, these bilingual congregations existed as spaces where a poorer class of people could imagine a different missionary future for the Dominican Republic than the one that Mears proposed.

Between 1905 and 1911, however, the possibility of bilingual congregations led by black ministers faded quickly. While the aforementioned black ministers continued in their bilingual work initially, their marginalized status within Dominican society and the lack of foreign financial support for their work resulted in their eventual demise. Consequently, few documents remain regarding the bilingual congregations that existed in the Dominican Republic at the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, a profile of the ministers and their congregations indicates their aims and reveals the hope that they had for mixed-ethnic, bilingual Protestant missionary work in the Catholic country.

Of the three men, Goodin had the most experience in the Dominican capital. He arrived in Santo Domingo in 1888 after spending time in the United States and becoming affiliated with the AME Church there. Once in Santo Domingo, Goodin began to work among the descendants of black American immigrants who had formed an AME congregation under the leadership of the U.S. Consul Henry Astwood in 1882. After a bitter legal dispute in 1892, Goodin and other members of the congregation broke from the AME denomination and joined the British Wesleyan Church. The new Wesleyan congregation in the capital gained some Spanish-speaking members (including descendants of black Americans), and Goodin became well respected in the capital for his work. Aware of Goodin's congregation, Mears wrote in a 1907 report to the British Wesleyan Church that Goodin “does good Spanish work.” The black preacher had learned Spanish “at some expense to himself,” and Mears informed the church that Goodin “teaches and preaches regularly in the language.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Yet, despite this positive report, Goodin received no financial assistance from the British Wesleyan Church. Instead, his limited funding came from the Christian and Missionary Alliance of New York, which had supported Goodin since 1892. Such an arrangement with an American institution could have set British Wesleyan leaders against Goodin if it had formed on a British island, but in the Dominican Republic, where the Catholic Church predominated, foreign Protestant missionary agents and societies historically cooperated with each other. Throughout the nineteenth century, local Protestants affiliated with distinct institutions (or switched easily between them) in order to gain material benefits. Thus, Mears likely saw Goodin's affiliation with the American group as a boon. The British minister, however, stopped short of recommending that the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society fund Goodin, a black preacher, instead of sending white missionaries from abroad.

Reverend Benjamin Wilson found himself in a similar situation regarding the lack of funds. Born and raised in Saint Croix, Wilson studied religion with the Christian and Missionary Alliance in New York. He then moved with his family to Samaná, the northeastern peninsula of the Dominican Republic, in the late 1880s. In 1891, he moved to San Pedro de Macorís. Between 1891 and 1897, Wilson affiliated with Bishop James T. Holly's independent Anglican church in Port-au-Prince where he visited Holly on various occasions to continue his religious training. During this time, he also began a missionary church in San Pedro de Macorís: Santa Trinidad, named after Holly's Haitian congregation. In 1897, Santa Trinidad came under the auspices of the Holly's Haitian church, L'Eglise Ortodoxe Apostolique Haitienne. The conditions for their union indicate Holly and Wilson's vision for the San Pedro mission, as articulated by historians Philip E. Wheaton and William L. Wipfer: “That the Episcopal Church in the Dominican Republic would expand until it became a national and independent church.”Footnote ⁷⁸ To this end, Wilson “envisioned an integrated church—Antillean and Dominican.”Footnote ⁷⁹ He held services in Spanish and English. He also ran a day school with thirty-seven pupils and “taught in English and Spanish to pupils speaking those languages respectively.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Yet, since the Haitian Episcopal Church depended on financial support from the United States, it was too poor to assist the San Pedro congregation in the Dominican Republic. This fact, according to Wheaton and Wipfer, “would become the Achilles heel for Wilson's missionary work since in the future it would suffer because of the lack of financial support from abroad.”Footnote ⁸¹ Like Goodin's work, financial issues hindered the progress of Wilson's church.

The same was no less true for Reverend Jacob Paul James, who revitalized the AME missionary church in Santo Domingo in 1898. Like Goodin and Wilson, James maintained ties to a foreign Protestant institution. Yet, unlike the other pastors, James was born in the Dominican Republic, the son of the well-known black preacher of the British Wesleyan Church, Reverend Jacob James of Samaná. James (junior) intended to follow in his father's footsteps, but when the Wesleyan Church refused to accept him at its seminary school—likely due to his race—he left Samaná to pursue education in the United States. Beginning in 1882, James attended the Beloit Academy in Wisconsin, joined the AME Church, and pastored various congregations in the U.S. Midwest before returning to the Dominican Republic in 1899. Once in Santo Domingo, James took hold of the AME congregation in the capital. He preached in both English and Spanish, and like Wilson, he began a day school where he taught both languages. James, however, constantly petitioned the AME missionary department in the United States for aid. He believed that the AME Church could grow in the Dominican Republic if it had the proper support, but without financial help and additional missionaries, he could not compete with the Catholic Church or white Protestant missionaries.Footnote ⁸²

Despite their bilingual evangelism, by 1905, Goodin's, Wilson's, and James's congregations had not grown much among Dominicans. While Mears most likely saw their failure as evidence of the racial divide between Anglophone Afro-Caribbean Protestants and Dominican Catholics, James and Goodin discussed the difficulties they faced in terms of finances and not race. On October 26, 1905, James penned a report on the church in Santo Domingo to the AME missionary department in New York. “The work of the missions have [sic] steadily and quietly gone on,” he informed them, “but the results are not all that we expected.” He explained: “We put forth great efforts and expected great results.”Footnote ⁸³ Yet, the congregation faced two principle difficulties: “The continual removals of our people . . . to other places, and the almost impoverished condition of our people.”Footnote ⁸⁴ James could not ask the people to give more to the church when they did not have the money to give, and he continued to receive very little financial support from the impoverished African American denomination. Similarly, Goodin's congregation was also not faring well. In 1907, Goodin disclosed to Mears that he had worked as an independent missionary for the Christian and Missionary Alliance of New York since 1894 and had not received any financial help from the British Wesleyan Church, although he was also affiliated with them. Explaining the particulars of his situation, he wrote: “My family of 7 with myself and wife cannot be supported by the allowance the Alliance gives ($30 a month, sometimes $20 and sometimes $15). I have therefore and do a great deal of teaching in the city to make existence possible.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The lack of financial support from the AME Church, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Episcopal Church, and the British Wesleyan Church meant that James, Goodin, and Wilson could not provide for themselves or their parishioners’ needs, and their evangelistic work suffered as a result. Ultimately, the financial constraints that they experienced prevented them from expanding their churches through missionary engagements and relegated them to working with the most marginalized of Dominican society: Anglophone black migrants from the surrounding islands, the majority of whom were already Protestants.

Significantly, although all missionary institutions at this point could not adequately provide for their stations in the Dominican Republic, only the AME Church and Holly's Haitian Episcopal Church advocated for black ecclesiastical leadership. This distinction highlights the fact that white missionaries and their organizations lacked imagination regarding black leadership potential and that their biases influenced their distribution of limited missionary funds. The British Wesleyan Methodist Church, for example, depended upon black preachers like Goodin to maintain congregations on the island. Yet such preachers remained in a liminal state vis-à-vis white missionaries like Mears, who wrote from a position of relative privilege even while the Dominican Republic existed on the sidelines of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society's operations. The refusal of white missionaries to recommend or employ the bilingual mixed-congregation techniques that black missionaries like Holly, Goodin, and James used in the south of the country indicates white missionaries’ historical bias, which ultimately deterred the growth of bilingual, black-led congregations. It also signaled a refusal to recognize the cross-ethnic ties formed in bilingual Protestant churches.

The story of the AME Church in the capital provides greater insight on the decline of bilingual missionary work and the relegation of black ministers to homogeneous black migrant congregations. When James took over the church in the capital in 1899, it was only a shell of what it had been in the 1880s when over one hundred people attended the weekly services and the Dominican government aided in the reconstruction of its church building. The two properties that Henry Astwood had acquired for the AME Church in 1882 were “valuable church lots in the City of Santo Domingo,” but the church building was once again in disrepair and James could not raise enough money among the few dozen congregants to reconstruct it.Footnote ⁸⁶ His resources spread even thinner when a group of men and women in his hometown of Samaná asked him to begin the AME denomination on the northern peninsula in October 1899.Footnote ⁸⁷ A year later, James also took hold of missionary stations in Monte Cristi and San Pedro de Macorís. Although James took it upon himself to guide these groups in the AME discipline, he could not adequately serve four AME societies at once. The Sunday school and congregation of forty-five members that he had established in the capital in 1898 consequently suffered.

Like other ministers working in foreign countries on behalf of home missionary boards in the North Atlantic, James requested help from his denomination's missionary department. His first letters were bold in their requests for aid. On August 23, 1900, James explained to the missionary department that the AME societies in Monte Cristi, Samaná, and San Pedro de Macorís all needed places of worship. The parishioners in Samaná and San Pedro found it especially hard to rent property due to discrimination from Catholics. “This makes our own place of worship that much greater,” reasoned James.Footnote ⁸⁸ He requested $600 to build chapels in these two towns and urged the missionary department and church to “first assist the missionaries already organized . . . and then send to them pastors.” Regarding pastors, James suggested that such men “be acquainted with the Spanish language,” indicating his intention to minister to the Spanish-speaking Dominican population. James, moreover, felt “opposed to [the] Church sending missionaries to any part of the work in [the republic] unless [the] missionary department can give support regularly for at least two years.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Based on James's experience, a failed mission without support from the missionary department would do more harm than good.Footnote ⁹⁰ The establishment of four AME societies in less than two years was a promising advancement, but unless the missionary department could support these stations, the progress would soon cease.

By 1901, it became clear that the AME missionary department could not send the needed funds to the Dominican Republic. James moved his headquarters from Santo Domingo to Samaná, where he believed that the church would thrive better than in the capital—the seat of Catholic power in the country. Over the next decade, James worked more closely with the black American population in Samaná than he did with the AME Church in Santo Domingo, and consequently, the Samaná mission grew at a greater rate than the church in the capital city. While the Santo Domingo congregation suffered from a lack of financial aid and from its proximity to the archdiocese of the Catholic Church, James's congregation in the north built a church, a parsonage, and a farm. By 1908, the property in Samaná valued $6,000 while in Santo Domingo it amounted to $2,000. The Samaná congregation also made up the majority of the members of the AME Church (135) as the few members in Santo Domingo (50) still waited for an ordained pastor to permanently lead the mission.Footnote ⁹¹

James faced other limitations in the capital. Instead of receiving government aid as in former decades, the Protestants faced pressure from the Catholic Church and the government. In a 1910 letter to the AME missionary department, James explained: “Our work in Santo Domingo City is in the midst of a purely Roman Catholic population, and the power of the Roman Catholic clergy is vigilantly exercised. Our work there is confined to narrow limits.” He additionally complained that the government put pressure on the mission to comply with city ordinances in the capital, which required “that all buildings built in the city must be either stone or iron, especially public buildings.” He begged the AME missionary department to send aid so that they could rebuild the church. “In this Catholic community where outward appearance has so much to do with religion a suitable church edifice would add much strength to our work,” James implored. James's words indicate that the problems he faced had two principle roots: On the one hand, systematic discrimination from the people in power limited the spread of Protestantism. On the other hand, the poor classes could not afford to convert to Protestantism and thus give up the benefits of the Catholic Church, which ran the charities in the city. The impoverished, dilapidated AME building simply could not compete.Footnote ⁹²

The existence of black missionaries and their intentions and struggles to raise bilingual congregations in the southeast suggest that Mears's observations about the racial divisions in Dominican society were not as entrenched among some Dominicans, a handful of whom joined Goodin's, Wilson's, and James's Protestant churches. As late as 1910, James was still optimistic. “There is a future for the A.M.E. Church in this republic,” he encouraged. “With a suitable church edifice at Santo Domingo City we could have in that city, in the midst of the deep-rooted Romanist institutions, a flourishing work.”Footnote ⁹³ Despite missionaries’ tendencies toward optimism in order to secure funds, modern historians should consider seriously such declarations from African American missionaries whose opinions have too often been dismissed. If black ministers like James had received adequate financial support from abroad, it is possible that their bilingual work would have made inroads. The dark faces of African-descendant Protestant preachers could not have seemed too strange to poor Dominicans who had lived under Afro-Dominican president Heureaux's administration or had fought under black military leadership in the last century. Black missionaries like James, Goodin, and Wilson not only experienced this truism but foresaw its possibilities as they labored among the poorest sectors of Dominican society.

Yet, for white missionaries to see black missionaries as equals and suggest a missionary model in which black ministers led Dominican missionary stations funded by white denominations would have required them to express radical, even anachronistic, attitudes. In the early twentieth century, white supremacist attitudes led white clergy to generally ignore the marginal success of black ministers and to cling to what they knew to be true: only well-funded white missionary work could succeed in converting Dominicans to Protestantism. For this reason, Mears perceived the possible entry of other white denominations, like the American Methodist Episcopal Church, as a solution to the British Wesleyan Church's financial problems, while James viewed it as a threat. “The white Methodists from Porto Rico, the Moravians, and the Wesleyans from the neighboring islands are here looking over the field, ready to take the advantage of the opportunities offered,” James warned in a letter to the AME missionary department in 1911.Footnote ⁹⁴ He cautioned that without help from abroad, his impoverished congregation would lose its membership and the small progress the AME Church had made in the Dominican capital would regress.

V. White American Assessments: Plans for Occupancy via Puerto Rico

In early September 1911, Philo W. Drury and Nathan H. Huffman, American missionaries in Puerto Rico, surveyed the Dominican Republic on behalf of the interdenominational Evangelical Union of Puerto Rico. In their report, entitled “Occupancy of Santo Domingo by Evangelical Missions,” Drury and Huffman proposed that (white) American churches take a strong stand in favor of Dominican missions, which they perceived as an open Protestant missionary field. “It is in harmony with the facts to state that Protestant Christianity is not being fairly represented before the Dominican people,” they informed.Footnote ⁹⁵ Beyond presenting the multiple reasons for American missions and the foreseen challenges, Drury and Huffman developed a “General Plan for Occupancy.” American missionary forces would enter the Dominican Republic via missionary work they were already doing in Puerto Rico, an island whose population shared the same Spanish language and “Latin race” as Dominicans.

Drury and Huffman's report was the first step in an American ecumenical missionary movement in the Dominican Republic and it connected the country to similar activity in the Spanish Caribbean. Prior to the 1910s, a united U.S. missionary effort did not exist in the Caribbean. In Cuba and Puerto Rico, for example, U.S. denominations divided the islands into regional territories in order to limit competition between denominations. By 1910, however, missionaries’ local experiences and the inadequate attention paid to the region of Latin America at the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland inspired a new sense of ecumenical cooperation among American Protestants.Footnote ⁹⁶ Interdenominational Protestant collaboration in Puerto Rico became a key goal of American missionaries, and ecumenical work on the island led white American and Puerto Rican pastors to discuss “the possibility of sending missionaries to their nearest neighbor, Santo Domingo.”Footnote ⁹⁷ This interest motivated Drury and Huffman's visit, which for the first time connected the Dominican Republic to the work of white American missionaries in Puerto Rico. Their report on the Dominican Republic thus fell in line with the general pattern of increased American evangelical activity in Latin America as the U.S. government's influence expanded in the region.

When Drury and Huffman arrived in the Dominican Republic, the United States had already made its mark on the island's politics. The missionaries perceived the United States’ involvement as a stabilizing force that made missionary work both feasible and urgent. Regarding the 1907 Dominican-American Convention, in which the U.S. government assumed the public debt of the country and took over the customhouses, Drury and Huffman observed: “This has given the country good financial credit, and at the same time has largely eliminated the possibility of the repetition of the revolutions that in the past have so frequently interrupted the progress of the country.” A “new era of political stability and material progress,” had been inaugurated, they argued, and the country could now turn to building its public infrastructure. During the Cáceres presidency, the Dominican government had repaired buildings and refurbished roads. Drury and Huffman noted the improvements, reporting: “The streets of the Capital and other cities are in excellent condition. Other public works of considerable importance are in the process of execution, and still larger plans are being laid for the future.” This progress, they believed, would make the Dominican people more willing to accept Protestantism, a religion that stood in opposition to the supposedly backward Catholic Church.Footnote ⁹⁸

Like Mears, Drury and Huffman perceived Dominicans as forward thinking but held back by the Catholic Church, which was tightly aligned to national sentiment. “The Catholics have a strong hold on the country,” they explained. “The number of churches in the Capitol [sic] would indicate that they are a very religious people.” Indeed, Drury and Huffman noted the “close interlacing of religious and patriotic sentiments” by providing an example. On the Sunday that they spent in the capital, the authorities publicly displayed Christopher Columbus's remains in the Cathedral where the remains of the founding fathers of the Dominican nation—Juan Pablo Duarte, Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, and Matías Ramón Mella—also rested. It seemed that nationalism and Catholicism were one in the same. The missionaries, however, blamed the Catholic Church for the “low standard of morals” that reminded them of the state of Puerto Rico and the Philippines before the United States had taken over governance and Protestant Christianity had supposedly improved the people. “Our observation of the practice of [Catholicism] in the Republic confirmed our impression that it is wholly inadequate to lead men to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ,” they underscored in their biased comparison of the country to Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Adherents to Protestant supremacy, they viewed the Catholic Church as nothing more than a cultural institution that did not spiritually uplift the people but instead limited the progress of the nation. The Catholic Church, they accused, “systematically [opposed] the introduction of modern civilization in Santo Domingo.”Footnote ⁹⁹

According to Drury and Huffman, the changes already taking place on the island would advance Protestantism in the Dominican Republic. To this end, they noted: “There is complete religious freedom in the Republic” which would facilitate “a breaking away from the domination of the Catholic Church.” For proof of this potential shift, they turned to Dominican law, which prohibited clergy from protesting the liberty of worship. They also cited the “modernizing of the school system” as a development that demonstrated the country's advancement. In 1911, there were 482 schools and 15,586 scholars across the nation. These factors indicated to Drury and Huffman that “the people of Santo Domingo have entered with determination on the struggle upward.” This perceived progress made the Dominican people “deserving of the best help, such as will come from the introduction of evangelical Christianity.” Drury and Huffman believed that introducing evangelical Christianity at a time when more people were seeking education and questioning the Catholic Church would prove advantageous. By beginning missionary work in the country, American Protestants would be “getting into the current of improvements and progress, and thus grow up with the country.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The apparently stable government under Cáceres seemed to them to signal a new era for the Dominican Republic which opened the country to American interests beyond the business and political spheres. By making these statements, Drury and Huffman tapped into American notions of the Protestant work ethic and racist imagery that infantilized the Caribbean region and depicted it as being in need of U.S. guidance. Such discourse masked the violence associated with the U.S. imperial enterprise and made it palatable for white America to dominate foreign territories politically, economically, and culturally.

Even so, Drury and Huffman noted that Protestant missions in the Dominican Republic would not be an easy pursuit. Besides the entrenched Catholic culture, the high cost of operation and anti-American sentiment posed two additional barriers to entry. In 1911, tariffs and the costs of traveling to and living in the Dominican Republic were higher than in Puerto Rico. The missionaries also noted that construction and maintenance costs for a church building would be “fifty to seventy percent more” than in Puerto Rico. On top of financial concerns, the American government had become increasingly unpopular in the Dominican Republic as it sought to protect American business interest in Santo Domingo and assumed control of the Dominican customhouses. This encroachment on Dominican sovereignty had “awaken[ed] antipathy in the minds of the Dominicans against the Americans.” Many Dominicans, Drury and Hoffman asserted, feared that the United States “may have designs against the political independence of the Republic” as had been the case in Puerto Rico. The U.S. Minister to Santo Domingo, William W. Russell, reassured the missionaries that anti-American sentiment was not universal. Yet the U.S. government's constant intervention in Dominican politics and finances unnerved both Dominican elites and the larger public.Footnote ¹⁰¹

To counter anti-American sentiment, the missionaries suggested a “General Plan for Occupancy” that took advantage of the historical, lingual, and racial ties between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. The two islands had a long history of connections throughout the nineteenth century when political exiles from either island took refuge on the other. More recently, the sugar industry had led to a mass migration of Puerto Ricans to the Dominican southeast.Footnote ¹⁰² The missionaries suggested that “at least 15,000 Puerto Ricans [live] in Santo Domingo,” employed on sugar plantations. Unlike black Anglophone Protestant cane workers from the greater Caribbean, these Spanish-speaking migrants usually worked higher-skilled jobs on the planation. While in the Dominican southeast, Drury and Huffman saw a number of people whom they had known in Puerto Rico. The Puerto Ricans “invariably greeted us with great cordiality, and many expressed their desire to see evangelical missions opened in Santo Domingo,” they preened. Based on this relationship, the Americans would already have a base for their evangelical operations, and Drury and Huffman suggested that Protestant churches in the Dominican Republic could first serve Puerto Ricans. These churches would then attract Dominicans, Drury and Huffman argued, because “the inhabitants of the two islands are of the same race, with like customs and language.” The perceived racial and lingual tie between Puerto Ricans and Dominicans “would help to overcome prejudice, and would induce the Dominicans to attend the services.” By convincing the Dominican people that Protestant evangelical Christianity belonged as much to their “race” as it did to the white American and black Anglophone migrants in their midst, the Puerto Rican connection would demonstrate that American missions had nothing to do with the U.S. government's intervention.Footnote ¹⁰³

Economic incentives also facilitated the link between Puerto Rican and Dominican missions. Considering the physical proximity of the two islands, Drury and Huffman proposed that Dominican missions be administered as “an extension” of Puerto Rican missions. They pointed to the fact that the two islands are only fifty-five miles apart at their nearest point, and “the time required to travel between the two islands varies from fourteen to twenty-four hours.” They also cited the fact that at least five steamships ran monthly, connecting San Juan, Ponce, and Mayaguez to different Dominican ports. The traffic between the two islands would make it easy for Dominican missions to be administered in Puerto Rico. “This would result in economy in administration,” they reasoned. Moreover, if the two fields were under one administration, the same training institutions and Spanish-language print materials, such as church newspapers and evangelical pamphlets, could be used on both islands, further reducing the costs of operation. The Dominican link to Puerto Rico thus proved the most logical and economical route, especially since the ecumenical movement in the United States and Puerto Rico would provide a vast source of monetary funds through their various missionary boards.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The American missionaries also believed that forging ecumenical cooperation among white denominations would prove more successful than the missionary work already established on the island. In their visit to the capital, Drury and Huffman had come across James's and Goodin's congregations. They did not note anything about these churches other than that they were “small” and had “colored pastors.” “There is work of a similar character in three or four other points of the republic,” they imparted, most likely referring to Wilson's congregation in San Pedro de Macorís and the British Wesleyan Church's work in the north (despite the fact that Wesleyan missionaries were white). These underfunded efforts, they noted, could not evangelize Dominicans because of their poverty and close contact with black Anglophone migrants. The only other denomination that Drury and Huffman mentioned was the Moravian Church which had organized in San Pedro de Macorís. The two American missionaries believed that “this Church,” like the others, “will limit its activities to the English-speaking negro population.” Like Mears, Drury and Huffman cited the contact that current Protestant missionaries had with black Anglophone migrants as a detriment. “The relations that the English-speaking negro and Dominican maintain are such as to put without the realm of possibility the evangelization of the Dominicans by the agencies now at work, even [if] they were sufficiently well equipped,” they stressed. From their viewpoint, efforts to evangelize Dominicans had been “of an independent character, and in the main unsuccessful.” Considering the lack of funds dedicated to Protestant missionary work in the Dominican Republic and the poor state of missionary stations across the country, Drury and Huffman suggested that only white American missionaries and their Puerto Rican partners could accurately represent Protestantism to the Dominican people.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

VI. Conclusion

Two months after Drury and Huffman made their report, the Dominican president Ramón Cáceres was assassinated, and the period of political stability that lasted during his presidency abruptly ended. The war that ensued led white American Protestants to postpone their plans for missions. It was not until 1916, when the United States invaded the Dominican Republic and established a military occupation, that white American missionaries in Puerto Rico renewed their interest in the Dominican Republic. That year, the ecumenical board of the Evangelical Union in Puerto Rico (EUPR) voted to raise the question of Dominican missions to various church boards in the United States.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ At the same time, the Foreign Missionary Conference of North America organized an ecumenical conference in Panama that examined Latin American and Caribbean countries in order to prepare for large-scale missionary work in the region.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Consequently, white American church leaders formed the ecumenical Committee on Cooperation in Latin America (CCLA). Together the CCLA and the EUPR led to the founding of the Board for Christian Work in Santo Domingo, which in 1922 established the Iglesia Evangélica Dominicana (IED), the first ecumenical white-led Protestant church on the island commissioned to target the Dominican people in the Spanish language.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In the lead up to the IED's founding, church leaders reread and cited Drury and Huffman's 1911 report in addition to other surveys of the island. The evangelical plan that they had developed—in which U.S. Protestant missions would spread to the Dominican Republic by way of Puerto Rico—had finally come to fruition.

In fact, Drury and Huffman's 1911 survey of the Dominican Republic “was the beginning of [a] new approach” that clearly identified Latin America as the new target of American evangelism and served as a cultural parallel to U.S. government's action in the region.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Going forward, the white missionary establishment fully embraced the idea of a racial divide between Dominicans and black Anglophone migrants. Consequently, Protestant missions proceeded on that basis in subsequent years and helped to bolster the claims that high-class Dominicans of European descent had made about Dominicans’ cultural (and racial) whiteness in prior decades. American ecumenical Protestant groups categorized the Dominican Republic with other Spanish-speaking Latin American nations in their meeting minutes, reports, budgets, and missionary plans. When the British Wesleyan Church finally gave up its Dominican missions in 1931, it handed its church property over to the IED. The prior nineteenth-century links to Haiti and the British Caribbean through black congregations continued to exist at the margins of society, but by the late 1910s, few people in the international community, least of all missionaries, would group the Dominican Republic among the “black republics” of the world.

Protestants operating in the Dominican Republic during 1905–1911, however, did not know of the changes to come in the post-Cáceres period. In the first decade of the twentieth century, they speculated about the future and considered the “peculiar conditions that prevailed” in the country. White North Atlantic ministers called for missions on the Spanish-speaking eastern side of Hispaniola by emphasizing the racial division between Dominicans and black migrants. Black ministers’ bilingual congregations suffered from the lack of support and became increasingly homogenized and marginalized, operating only among the black Anglophone Protestant communities on the island. Cut off from the ecumenical organization of white denominations in the 1910s, these bilingual congregations faded from historical accounts of Protestantism in the Spanish Caribbean. As church historian Edward Odell asserted, incorrectly, in 1952: “The Wesleyans . . . were respected and loved for their exemplary lives and their devoted service among the people on the north shore, but no work had been done along the southern shore, in the capital, or in the west.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

The idea of the Dominican Republic as a blank slate for Protestant missionary work was based on a perceived racial distinction between Dominicans and black Anglophone peoples. African-descendant missionaries did not take such distinctions for granted. Indeed, the history of Protestant missions in the Dominican Republic elucidates the tensions between traditional racist lines of thought and radically different visions of the future based on the black evangelical experience. The heretofore unrecognized history of black-led, mixed-ethnic bilingual Protestant congregations in the Dominican Republic reveals important contradictions in the historical record on Caribbean race and religion.Footnote ¹¹¹ It additionally shows that racial distinctions within both religious spaces and secular society at times required purposeful construction. Black-led bilingual congregations existed as an alternative model of Protestant missionary work that linked the Dominican Republic to the African diaspora. The association between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic after 1911 emphasized another racial alternative: the Latin race.