Chapeo Consciousness: On Blackness, Queerness, and Marronage in Johan Mijail’s Chapeo (2021)

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Notes

1 Among the 21 divisions, each represents a spirit or “Lua,” divided by kingdoms and responsibilities within Dominican and Haitian Voodoo to form a complex pantheon with syncretic characteristics. In Caribbean Voodoo, “Loa” or “Lua” (Lu-ah) means spirit or mystery.

2 Michel Foucault coined the term heterotopia in his essay “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” (1967) to describe certain cultural, institutional, and discursive spaces that are “other”: disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory, and transforming. As worlds within worlds, heterotopias mirror and yet disturb the outside world.

3 As a result of the Constitutional Court's judgment 168/13, only Dominican citizens who were born to Dominican parents or who were legal residents are classified as citizens. Hundreds of thousands of Haitian-descended people were arbitrarily denied Dominican citizenship by this interpretation: a situation of statelessness unparalleled in the Americas was created. This interpretation was applied retroactively to everyone born between 1929 and 2010.

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Notes on contributors

Danny Méndez

Danny Méndez is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Michigan State University. He is the author of Narratives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican Literature (2012).