Unsettling Dominican Sovereignty: U.S. Imperialism and the Territorialization of a Black Geography

This paper examines the uneven implementation and enduring contradictions of the Torrens land titling system in Cabarete, Dominican Republic, as an architectural and territorial project of U.S. imperialism. Beginning with the nineteenth-century Kingsley plantation as a foundational platform, I trace how enclosure and privatization unfolded with the incorporation of the United Fruit Company on the island in 1899. Entering the Dominican Republic through the purchase of land from the Kingsleys, a mixed-race Black Floridian family who, despite their mid-century wealth upon arrival to Boyer’s Haiti, lost control of their land with the U.S. militarily-imposed Torrens system. Given racist spatial legacies of this time on the island, this transfer of land raises fundamental questions about the role of enclosure and privatization in the legacy of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean.

Drawing on Dominican studies and Black Geographies, I highlight planning logics specific to the Caribbean—particularly the cyclical retreat between state and capital, foreign and domestic—that structured Cabarete’s transformation. The archival correspondence I examine, both domestic and international, parallel and intersecting, reveals the enduring contradictions of Dominican sovereignty: loudly proclaimed in opposition to Haitian presence yet routinely compromised through U.S. and corporate intervention. Sources include Brookings Institution refugee settlement reports, United Fruit Company archives, and Dominican land registries. Through the case of Cabarete, I call for more critical architectural histories that anchor a decolonial epistemology attentive to how racialized infrastructures of empire persist in Caribbean geographies, and unsettle the presumed relationship between sovereignty and land in nationalist discourse.