As part of the course “Global Hispaniola: Empire to Exodus,” taught by Dr. Karen Richman, students created a Día de los Muertos altar at the Institute for Latino Studies.
Bright, colorful butterflies adorned the tablecloth above a display filled with tropical fruits, food offerings, Dominican Republic flags, photographs, and the books the class read.
Below is a brief reflection written by the class describing the significance of the altar:
This altar commemorates the anniversary of the ethnic cleansing of Haitians in the Dominican Republic in October 1937, when an estimated 15,000 people were murdered. The atrocity, which took place during the Trujillo dictatorship (1930-1961), is known as the "Parsley Massacre." The parsley on the table represents how the word perejil was used as a litmus test. The Haitian Kreyòl term for parsley, a staple of Haitian cuisine, is pèsi. Native Creole speakers' difficulty pronouncing perejil was allegedly determinant of who would live or die.
Our class read In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, a novel centered around the lives of the Mirabal sisters, three Dominican women who resisted the Trujillo regime and were murdered in 1960. The butterflies flying above the altar invoke the code name of the Mirabal sisters “Las Mariposas.” Our class had the honor of meeting with Julia Alvarez in September, and she told us about Border of Lights, a project she co-founded with Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat to bring attention to the history of the 1937 massacre and to build solidarity across the border dividing the two nations of the island. Danticat's novel The Farming of Bones recounts the atrocity in October 1937 and it is one of the main sources for poet Jasmine Mendez's play, City Without Altar, which we also read in class. At the end of the script, Mendez entreats readers to build an altar, so we did.
