Joaquín Balaguer, Memory, and Diaspora : The Lasting Political Legacies of an American Protege

Joaquín Balaguer, Memory, and Diaspora draws on the growing interest in the legacies of authoritarianism and state violence and its interplay with migration and memory. Ana S. Q. Liberato discusses the relationship between memory and government pedagogy—or the meanings constructed and disseminated by Joaquín Balaguer in political ads and public speeches and through public policy and autobiographical work. Liberato argues that there is a revival of memory in the Dominican Republic today, including pro-Balaguer memorialization efforts, and that Balaguer’s political pedagogy had an effect on public memory. The influence of his political pedagogy on memory transpires in memorializations which reproduce notions of Balaguer''s political and moral exceptionalism. This book shows that Balaguer’s authoritarian pedagogy has been consumed, anchored, and shared among different Dominican publics, in the island and overseas, through the prism he created. Liberato also reveals Balaguer as a contested political character who provokes particular emotions and well-defined experiences and notions of the past. She demonstrates how his legacy was legitimized and contested by comparing him to caudillos José Francisco Peña Gómez and Juan Bosch, as well as through instances when he is praised or questioned for being an American protégée.

This book exhibits how diasporic Dominicans maintain and transplant their political knowledge after migration. In particular, notions of democracy, political trust, political accountability, human rights, and sovereignty associated with authoritarian pedagogy accumulate in their narratives of the past and in their accounts of politics and history. Key roles are played by shared historical, cultural, and linguistic symbols associated with the legacy of authoritarianism. Liberato demonstrates how Balaguer influenced the Dominican nation through implementing effective political pedagogies, which in turn helped reinforce and reinscribe some aspects of the pedagogies implemented by Dictator Trujillo and previous authoritarian leaders. Joaquín Balaguer, Memory, and Diaspora will be of particular interest to Caribbean and Latin American Studies students and scholars, as well as anyone working in the areas of migration studies, sociology, Latin American politics, U.S. foreign policy, Latina/o studies, Caribbean studies, and the sociology of knowledge.