Spanish

As a result of General Rafael Trujillo’s desire to “whiten” the Dominican society during his regime (1930-61), various immigration incentives were placed into effect in
order to attract Europeans and Asians to the small country in the Antilles from the 1930s
to the 1950s. In a period when Europe was ravaged by wars, numerous Europeans
accepted the refuge offered by the small country. However, it was not until the mid-1950s
when Asians, particularly Japanese people, accepted to relocate to the Dominican
Republic. As a result, Trujillo accomplished repopulating the Dominican-Haitian border
with people of non-African descent and growing the agriculture sector with the
perseverance of the Japanese immigrants. In my research, I explore the process of
assimilation and hybridization of this important community that counts for approximately
550 Dominican-Japanese.

Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1891-1961), the ruthless Dominican Republic ruler
dominated his island’s politics for over thirty years. In his acclaimed 2000 novel, The
Feast of the Goat, Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa creates Urania Cabral, a
49-year-old émigrée who at 14 left her nation after becoming Trujillo’s sexual victim.
The novel, told from many perspectives, focuses on her return, the dictator’s last day, and
the story of the four conspirators waiting to ambush him the night of May 30th 1961.
My study analyzes the complex narrative structures of the novel as masterful
“rupturing” techniques. Through these the reader pieces together the broken body politic
of a traumatized nation as Urania reconstructs in painful detail how the impotent dictator
digitally rapes her to ensure her body bears the mark of his brutal anger and frustration.