Effects Of Slavery In The Dominican Republic

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“Slavery In The Dominican Republic and How It Affected the Natives Racial Identity” By definition the Dominican Republic is a Caribbean Hispaniola Island that is shared with Haiti to the West. The Dominican Republic today is a major tourist destination and has become a major source of sugar, coffee, and other exports. But the Dominican Republic had to suffer a lot in order to prevail the way they did, undergoing being enslaved by the Spaniards while on the other side of the island the Haitians were enslaved by the french hence the obvious difference in languages and cultures. The main difference is that the Dominican Republic lost their racial identity and until the present day are unaware of their true racial identity. Slavery affects every country and person differently but in the Dominican Republic, slavery took away the nation’s identity. The Dominican Republic was colonized by Christoper Columbus who was a Spaniard and named the island “La Hispaniola” or little Spain on his first voyage in 1492. The Dominican Republic subsequently became “The first of Spain’s New World colonies” (Levine 1) according to Edwin A. Levine in “The Seed of Slavery in the New World: An Examination of the Factors Leading to the Impressment of the Indian Labor in Hispaniola”. Slavery as most people know it is the being restricted of freedom because of race or skin color. The state of being an enslaved human being is something that the average person today could simply not grasp completely,