I gave myself three roles as a Fulbright Scholar, and I fulfilled and thoroughly enjoyed all of them. The first was as a researcher. I spent several days per week working on finding documents for a book I’m writing tentatively titled Occupation and Resistance. The book is partly on the U.S. military occupation of the Dominican Republic that took place from 1916 to 1924. Most of that research was done in the national archives of my host country. The experience, however, was far more enjoyable than I expected because the Archivo had recently been taken over by the most competent historians in the Dominican Republic and enjoyed the full financial support of the President. As a result, they had the most modern equipment on hand—including air conditioning!—and their collections, while not yet preserved and catalogued with the very highest standards, were filled with nuggets of rare information. It was a hopeful lesson in the difference that professionalism can make. I have now signed a contract with a university press for Occupation and Resistance.

But Latin America being the unpredictable place that it is, I also found nuggets in unexpected places. One of the grandchildren of a man who was the Dominican president in 1916 (!) was still alive and kicking at 90 years old, and I spent several afternoons in a cafe of the old colonial city listening to stories about his famous family and rifling through his personal collection of documents. It took several hours of listening before I could see my first document, but it was another lesson to U.S. researchers abroad: good things come to those who wait.

McPherson at Academia de Historia

My second role as a Fulbright Scholar was that of a lecturer. Every week I met with about 20 undergraduates, and we explored historia dominicana at the country’s largest university, the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo (UASD), which although smaller than the typical U.S. campus had an unbelievable enrollment of 100,000! It was challenging teaching history to students who had radically different habits and resources. For instance, I taught from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., and since the power went out more often than not, we’d usually end the class staring at each other in the dark. Nevertheless, I learned a lot about the struggles of these young men and women to earn an education despite their often difficult personal circumstances. I also learned that they had different strengths in history than Americans do. While they struggled with reading and writing, each of them had large families and from them had acquired a wealth of stories passed down generation to generation. I took this opportunity to have them interview a member of their family or community as to the events of 1916-1924, and every single student found someone who recalled those events!

Cindy and Alan McPherson with Natalia Gonzalez

My experience as a teacher was made far easier by a new friend I made in the Dominican Republic, a UASD teacher named Natalia González. Natalia, or Natacha as she liked to be called, allowed me to take over her course and proved invaluable in helping me understand the needs of her students — and the hardships of their teachers, too. Natacha’s openness to learning new teaching methods was a blessing: we often exchanged teaching philosophies outside of class meetings and both benefited. It is because of devoted educators such as Natacha that the Caribbean has made great strides in preparing its population to compete in the global marketplace.

My third role, finally, was as a public lecturer. While in the Dominican Republic, I was honored to be invited by several organizations to give talks about my research. One was the Archivo itself, where I discussed documents that I had found in Europe during the summer of 2006, which put Dominicans in contact with sources that were otherwise out of reach for the majority of them. A Dominican history journal called Clío then worked with me to publish those findings in late 2006. I also lectured at the beautiful Academia de Historia in colonial Santo Domingo, a majestic villa with an open courtyard that serves as the seat of activities for a tight-knit group of Dominicans who passionately exchange ideas about their country’s past even though most can only dream of earning a living as authors or historians. Perhaps most exciting of all, I was invited by the cultural center of the U.S. embassy in Santo Domingo to accompany their attaché on a short lecture tour to several campuses of UASD outside the capital. These trips to Santiago, San Francisco, and Higüey allowed me to share my ideas about the U.S. occupation with large, passionate crowds of students and scholars, who were not afraid to share ideas of their own!

Audience at Academia de Historia

I encourage other scholars, especially those in the social sciences and the humanities, to explore the Dominican Republic and its possibilities. Because it is also a tropical paradise, we might not readily think of the country as a wellspring of ideas and history. But with the time and resources that the Fulbright Scholar Program provided, I was able to settle down into the “real” Santo Domingo and I learned that history is alive and well in the Dominican Republic.

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