Un mundo destruido, una nación impuesta: La masacre haitiana de 1937 en la República Dominicana

What did the massacre of Haitians in 1937 mean for the constitution of the Dominican identity and nationality? This is the question to which the author responds in an essay whieh analyzes the tragedy in light of the memories, condemned to oblivion, of a bicultural and ethnieally plural society which had existed without problems on the Dominican border, and to which the massacre put an end. The enthroning of the elitist and official eonception about the Dominiean being, before realities and perceptíons which in the facts denied it, would be one of the fundamental consequences of an event which not only has a connotation of conflict between two peoples, but also represents the bursting of an internal tension between different ways of being seeing oneself as Dominican.