Mobilizing Grief: Dominican Feminisms and Caribbean Human Rights

Génesis Lara
Chicano/Latino Studies
UC Irvine

“Mobilizing Grief: Dominican Feminisms and Caribbean Human Rights” argues that women’s mobilization of grief and human rights activism prevented the Dominican state from utilizing the Cold War rhetoric of the “leftist communist scapegoat” as a justification for increasing state repression. Women’s use of funerals, pleas of motherhoods, and human rights claims forced the state to engage with Dominican women directly, thereby creating small windows where the Dominican state was actually held accountable for abuses against its own citizenry. The significance of these mobilizations is that Dominican women were able to create an alternative archive of repression and resistance, which counters the continued lack of commissions of truth and reconciliation in the Dominican Republic.