Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (University of Texas Digital Repository, viewed on Sept. 9, 2009). Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Adaptation has increasingly come to be recognised as an urgent and necessary response to climate change. The ability of a system to carryout adaptation is dependent on its adaptive capacity. To date, the majority of research relating to adaptation has focused on the objective and material determinants of a system's capacity to adapt to severe and extreme weather impacts. Whereas the role that subjective factors, such as people's perceptions, beliefs and values play in that same process, has received comparatively less attention. Despite being a global phenomenon, climate change is being experienced and responded to in local places. More than just physical locations, places are often imbued with meaning by the people associated with them. This thesis argues that these meanings have implications for the ways in which people adapt, or fail to adapt, to climate change impacts. It uses the concept 'sense of place', as a means of capturing this place meaning and as a lens for exploring adaptive behaviours in three low-income urban communities in the Dominican Republic. In particular it examines the specific roles of residents' place attachment, dependence and identity in motivating and constraining adaptive behaviours. Based on qualitative research with ethnographic underpinnings, the thesis shows that the urban poor sense of place is shaped by interconnected relationships between residents and; their homes, the physical and social aspects of their communities and a range of non-community actors. These relationships are shaped by physical and social interactions with and within places, but also through the discursive construction of the locations and the inhabitants of them in public opinion. Residents continuously seek out ways to enhance their sense of place, at times as an improvement in the built environment as a means of preventing or ameliorating environmental threats and events. However, often it is enhancement, in an aesthetic sense, which is envisaged as being of equal and sometimes greater importance. Although aesthetic improvements sometimes have the resultant impact of enabling adaptation, this tends to be incidental, rather than purposeful. Despite the importance placed by the urban poor on their sense of place, these subjective determinants and adaptation in the urban environment, remain unrecognised as well as absent from local institutional and policy radars. Overall the research suggests the need for a more comprehensive approach to understanding adaptive capacities. It requires an approach which continues to measure the objective determinants but which also recognises the role of people's relationships to places in converting or failing to convert objective capacity into climate change action and in dictating the type activities that are valued and prioritised by urban poor residents themselves.

Ce travail de recherche porte sur la littérature caribéenne et plus précisément sur la narration. Le corpus littéraire sert de support pour l'étude des migrations et des métissages dans les sociétés de Cuba, Porto Rico et la République Dominicaine. L'importance de l'histoire chez les écrivains caribéens, leur attachement à décrire leur société est un phénomène constant depuis le début du XXe siècle. Dans cette thèse, nous essayerons de voir si tous les apports laissés par ces mouvements migratoires vers, dans et hors de la Caraïbe sont reconnus par les cultures d'accueil. La thèse se divise en trois parties; une première partie de présentation des concepts et des contextes des œuvres, une deuxième d'analyse littéraire et une troisième centrée sur les points de vue de trois écrivains. Marta Rojas, Luis López Nieves et Marcio Veloz Maggiolo répondent à cinq questions sur la littérature caribéenne, leur œuvre et leurs influences. Grâce à leurs réponses, nous tenterons de savoir si on peut parler aujourd'hui d'une littérature caribéenne, ou bien si elles sont multiples. / This research work deals with Caribbean literature and more precisely with the issue of narration. A literary corpus will be used to study migrations and amalgamations within societies living in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Caribbean writers have always been very concerned with History, and their attempts to describe their own society have been a constant phenomenon since the early 20th century. Thanks to this thesis, we will try to see whether all the contributions brought along via migratory movements toward, inward and outward Caribbean have been acknowledged by the culture of the host countries. The study is divided in three parts: the first will present the concepts and the historical background alluded to in the novels and short stories, the second will consist in a textual analysis, the third will focus on some authors' points of view. Marta Rojas, Luis López Nieves and Marcio Veloz Maggiolo have been asked five questions about Caribbean literature, their own oeuvre and their sources of inspiration. Thanks to their answers, we will try to figure whether nowadays Caribbean literature should be considered as one or many.

abstract: This master's thesis examines negative stereotypes of blackness in mainstream media in the Dominican Republic, and analyzes the manner in which racial identity has been reinforced and contested. Discourse analysis is utilized to analyze the language and rhetoric of editorials from Listin Diario. The rationale for this study is to assess how Dominicans have learned about blackness through the depictions in media and popular music, and therefore draw conclusions as to how Dominicans view their own racial identity. Considerable attention will be paid to the years between 2010-2013, using the Haitian earthquake disaster of 2010 and Verdict TC 0168-13 of the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal of 2013 as major historical events to frame the study. To these assumptions, this inquiry addresses the following questions: How have Haitians been portrayed in the mainstream newspaper of Listin Diario between the period of 2010-2013? How do the pedagogies in media and popular music educate Dominicans about portrayals of blackness during this period? What are the historiographical roots of these portrayals, particularly regarding the dynamics of race and citizenship? I will demonstrate that the prevailing depictions of Haitians adhere to a historically oriented construction of Dominican identity, known as "Dominicanidad" or "Dominicanness," and that these depictions largely omit African heritage as a contributor to national identity. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Social and Cultural Pedagogy 2014

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Esta dissertação apresenta uma reflexão sobre História e ficção a partir da reconstrução do massacre de haitianos, em 1937, na fronteira norte da República Dominicana e da República do Haiti, dois países que formavam a então ilha Hispaniola, quando da chegada de Cristóvão Colombo no Novo Mundo. O corpus ficcional deste trabalho é o romance El Masacre se pasa a pie, do escritor e advogado dominicano Freddy Prestol Castillo, publicado em 1978, na República Dominicana. Nossa hipótese para desenvolver este trabalho foi a de que para reconstruir o genocídio dos haitianos pela ficção, o autor denuncia a ditadura de Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930-1961), o Trujillato, focalizando o racismo, o preconceito, a violência e aspectos negativos nutridos na memória coletiva da elite dominicana para sustentar uma rejeição histórica aos haitianos. Utilizamos um referencial teórico que nos permite buscar articulações entre História e ficção no referido romance e para isso, foi necessário recorrer aos fatos históricos que registram as diversas invasões à Hispaniola, a partir dos conceitos de racismo de Memmi (1967) e de memória, de Halbwachs (1990). / This dissertation presents a reflection on history and fiction from the reconstruction of the slaughter of haitians, in 1937, on the northern border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, two countries that then formed the island of Hispaniola , when the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World. The body of this fictional work in the novel The Slaughter passed on foot, the writer and lawyer dominican Freddy Prestol Castillo, published in 1978 in the Dominican Republic. Our hypothesis to develop this work was that to rebuild the haitian genocide in fiction , the author claims the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930-1961) , the Trujillato , focusing on racism , prejudice , violence and aspects negative nourished in the collective memory of the dominican elite to support a historic rejection of haitians. We use a theoretical framework that allows us to look for links between history and fiction in the aforementioned novel and that it was necessary to seek the historical facts recorded the various invasions of Hispaniola, from the concept of racism Memmi (1967) and memory, Halbwachs (1990).

This dissertation explores the relationship between race and democratization. Through the examination of the case of the Dominican Republic, this study challenges mainstream explanations of democratic transitions. At its core, this dissertation aims at calling attention to the absence of race and ethnic allegiances as explanatory variables of the democratic processes and debates in the region. By focusing on structural variables, the analysis shies away from elite and actor-centered explanations that fall short in predicting the developments and outcomes of transitions. The central research questions of this study are: Why is there an absence of the treatment of race and ethnic allegiances during the democratic transitions in Latin America and the Caribbean? How has the absence of ethnic identities affected the nature and depth of democratic transitions? Unlike previous explanations of democratic transitions, this dissertation argues that the absence of race in democratic transitions has been a deliberate attempt to perpetuate limited citizenship by political and economic elites. Findings reveal a difficulty to overcome nationalist discourses where limited citizenship has affected the quality of democracy. Original field research data for the study has been gathered through semi-structured interviews and focus groups conducted from October 2008 to December 2009 in the Dominican Republic.

The Farming of Bones is Edwidge Danticat’s novel about Amabelle Desir, a Haitian migrant in the Dominican Republic during the 1937 Haitian massacre. The Massacre is a historical fact presented through a fictional text that acts as a testimonial. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate how Danticat, in her role as an activist, urges readers to become social justice seekers and enter the discourse of race. Through an examination of Carl Jung’s and Vodou’s shadow theories in regards to the construction of a racial identity by Haitians and Dominicans, I uncover the racial narratives in place from Haiti’s colonization and independence to our current time. Danticat, through the novel, moves the reigning racial paradigm out of the shadow and thus allows readers to reflect on its effects. Thus it is not only the characters in the novel that must confront the shadow, but the readers themselves.

Ancestry estimation of skeletonized remains by forensic anthropologists is conducted through comparative means, and a lack of population-specific data results in possible misclassifications. This is especially germane to individuals of Latin American ancestry. Generally, each country in Latin America can trace their ancestry to three parental groups: Indigenous, European, and African. However, grouping all Latin American individuals together under the broad “Hispanic” category ignores the specific genetic contributions from each parental group, which is variable and dependent on the population histories and sociocultural dynamics of each country. This study analyzes the craniometric ancestry of Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti) using the island’s history, along with 190 cranial Computed Tomography (CT) scans (f = 103; m = 87), to determine similarities and differences between the two groups. A total of 12 linear discriminant function analyses produced cross-validated classification accuracies of 75.0 – 83.3% for females, 71.8 – 87.5% for males, and 72.0 – 82.2% for pooled sexes. This study demonstrates that, despite sharing a small island, Dominican and Haitian individuals can be differentiated with a fair amount of statistical certainty, which is possible due to complex socio-cultural, -political, and –demographic factors that have maintained genetic heterogeneity. Moreover, the discriminant functions provided here can be used by the international forensic science community to identify individuals living on Hispaniola.

The present research measures the role of exchange rate changes in explaining variations of sugar and rice trade. As background for this research, monetary, fiscal, and exchange rate policies of the Dominican Republic since 1970 are reviewed. The theoretical framework describing the relationship between exchange rate changes and sugar and rice trade has been tested empirically using the Dominican Republic's annual data for the period of 1970-1987. Regression analyses on the import of rice and export of sugar are estimated. The regression results conform with the expectation that exchange rate variance is most influential for rice import demand and less so for sugar export demand. That is to be expected because the trade environment for sugar is more restricted by noneconomic conditions than the trade environment for rice. The estimated exchange rate elasticity for rice import demand is 1.92, while for sugar export demand it averages 0.098 in the short run and 0.242 in the long run. Export volume is relatively insensitive to changes in the U. S price for Caribbean sugar but is responsive to changes in the real exchange rate. Empirical results of this research also indicate that the import demand for rice is highly sensitive to the gross domestic product but less responsive to changes in domestic rice production and exchange rates. The monetary and fiscal policies review shows that the Dominican government has consistently followed an expansionary fiscal and monetary policy. Over time monetary expansion and increasing government expenditures have resulted in an increasing exchange rate with predicable change in Dominican exports and imports including sugar (exports) and rice (imports ), therefore having some effect on sugar and rice trade as well. Dramatic depreciation of the Dominican peso in the past three years relative to the first 15 years of the data period suggests that further research and reestimation of the link o f monetary and fiscal policies to exchange rates and commodity trade should be done as the data are available to support them .

With the onset of tourism growth in the Dominican Republic, particularly in the province of Samana, a unique opportunity for exploration into intercultural interactions between Dominicans and tourists exists. This thesis brings together some of the current studies on intercultural communication in regards to the tourism industry, perceived community attitudes towards tourism, and host-guest relationships in the tourism context. Two groups of Dominicans were studied, those who worked in the tourism industry and those who did not, teachers, respectively. Data was extracted from collected questionnaires and interviews which revealed positive attitudes towards tourism, interest in expanding tourism, and various positive stereotypes towards tourists and about Dominicans themselves. In conclusion, the results were consistent with past research and include present recommendations on how to make the Dominican tourism sector even more receptive to the importance of intercultural communication.