Sugar's metropolis: The politics and culture of progress in San Pedro de Macoris, Dominican Republic, 1870--1930.

In this dissertation I examine the political, social, and cultural history of San Pedro de Macorfs, Dominican Republic from 1870 until 1930. This was a momentous period in Dominican history when industrialized sugar production erupted in the southern and eastern regions of the country and occasioned dramatic changes, particularly in San Pedro. During this period, immigrants arrived from all over the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe to labor on sugar estates or to make their fortunes from cane cultivation, trade, and sugar production. Native Dominicans also poured into the city, attracted by San Pedro's flourishing literary societies and cultural organizations which nourished a generation of petromacorisano poets and writers. As the city grew into a provincial capital, local elites pieced together a system of municipal governance that was headed by a city council which was also responsible for establishing civic institutions. I argue that San Pedro's political, cultural, and social development between 1870 and 1930 has important implications for our understanding of Dominican nation-state formation during this period. I interpret locally-derived sources to argue that the ideal of progress, which centered on ensuring social order, political stability, and economic prosperity for this city and its citizens, provided San Pedro's dominant groups with an attractive ideological framework with which they developed a coherent plan for transforming San Pedro into a modern city. The idea of progress also provided an important bridge between native Dominican elites who retained political power over the city's affairs and moneyed, land-owning white foreigners who became economically dominant as sugar production took hold. Most important, by embracing the progressive ideal, local elites selected a trajectory of state formation in which political stability and economic prosperity depended on maintaining a strict social order based on the hierarchies of race, class, and gender. My analysis of San Pedro suggests that the origins of Dominican authoritarianism after 1930 reside in the complex welding of economic and political imperatives with the values associated with order, stability, and prosperity that were crafted by regional elites in the late nineteenth century and in the acquiescence of lettered classes to regimes promising to bring modernity and progress.Ph.D.Latin American historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/123906/2/3106121.pd