On February 14, 2023, a bilingual panel at Hostos Community College in the Bronx brought together historians, archivists, and poets to examine something that official Dominican history has largely left out: the role of women in shaping the country from its founding to the present. The event was part of Dominican Heritage Month, and the conversation it generated — about erasure, about what gets preserved and what gets discarded — is exactly the kind of context that changes how you understand a country when you visit it. The Bronx is home to the largest Dominican population in the United States, which makes Hostos a particularly resonant location for this kind of reckoning with history.
This article covers the Dominican women whose contributions to the country’s independence, culture, and ongoing social movements have often been underrepresented in standard historical accounts. It draws on the findings presented at the Hostos panel and on documents from the March 8 manifesto issued by organisations affiliated with CLOC-Vía Campesina in the Dominican Republic. The aim is to give readers — whether visiting the Dominican Republic, studying its history, or simply curious — a grounded account of who these women were and what their legacies mean today.
The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, founded in 1992, was established specifically to address the lack of verifiable information on Dominican history in the United States — and remains the first university-based institution in the country dedicated to studying Dominican life outside the Dominican Republic.
Dominican women have been active in the country’s independence movement, its literary and educational development, its resistance to dictatorship, and its ongoing struggle for legal and social equality. Rosa Duarte, Manuela Aybar, Salomé Ureña, Anacaona, the Mirabal sisters, and Mamá Tingó are among the figures whose contributions shaped Dominican history — many of them documented only recently through archival work. The March 8 manifesto, issued annually, reflects how much of that struggle continues today.
Women in Dominican independence and the Trinitaria movement
The story of Dominican independence from Haitian rule in 1844 is typically told through Juan Pablo Duarte and the Trinitario movement — but women were active participants, not passive observers.
Rosa Duarte, Juan Pablo Duarte’s sister, was a full member of La Trinitaria, the political and military secret society that organised the independence movement. Dr. Daisy Cocco De Filippis, speaking at the Hostos panel, detailed her role specifically: Rosa Duarte participated in events organised by the secret societies, fabricated bullets in the field in support of independence, and — crucially — preserved her brother’s papers while both were in exile in Venezuela. Those papers contained significant documentation about Juan Pablo Duarte’s leadership, and their survival was entirely due to Rosa’s care and commitment. Without her preservation of those documents, much of what is now known about the founding of the Dominican Republic would have been lost.
Dr. Cocco De Filippis argued that Rosa Duarte should be remembered as the “Mother of the Dominican Republic” — a title that has not historically been attributed to her. Rosa Duarte died in exile from dysentery at 68, without her body ever being recovered. The absence of a burial site and the relative obscurity she occupied in official historical accounts are part of what the Hostos panel was working to address. The gap between what Rosa Duarte did and how she has been remembered reflects a pattern that runs through Dominican women’s history as a whole.
What I’d do if visiting Santo Domingo with older children — Lily is seven and already starting to ask questions about why certain names appear on statues and others don’t — is look specifically for the memorials and street names that do or don’t acknowledge women like Rosa Duarte. That absence is itself informative. It tells you something about which histories a country has chosen to institutionalise.
Year the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute was founded by the Council of Dominican Educators, community activists, and academics to document Dominican history that had been largely absent from US institutions.
Women in Dominican literature, education, and the press
The 19th century produced Dominican women whose contributions to intellectual and cultural life extended well beyond what was considered the expected scope of women’s activity at the time.
Manuela Aybar and the first private press
Dr. Ramona Hernández, presenting at the Hostos panel, identified Manuela Aybar as the founder of the first privately-owned printing press in the Dominican Republic during the 19th century. Aybar was not only a press operator — she was an author, editor, and poet. The significance of founding a private press in 19th-century Dominican society is difficult to overstate: controlling a press meant controlling the production and distribution of written material at a time when print was the primary medium for political, cultural, and intellectual life. The documentation of Aybar’s role has relied heavily on archival research that was not available until relatively recently.
For visitors interested in the intersection of Dominican history and print culture, the Archivo General de la Nación in Santo Domingo holds primary source material relevant to this period. The archive is centrally located in the capital and accessible to researchers and general visitors. Getting to the archive from the Colonial Zone takes roughly 15 to 20 minutes by car — it’s worth combining with a visit to the nearby National Library if 19th-century Dominican literary history is your specific interest.
Salomé Ureña and women’s education
Salomé Ureña is identified in the research as a key figure of 19th-century Dominican literature and education, specifically noted for her advocacy for women’s education. In a society where women’s formal education was limited and largely discouraged, Ureña’s work represented a direct challenge to the structural conditions of the time. Her legacy is more visibly acknowledged in Dominican cultural memory than Rosa Duarte’s — her name appears on institutions, and her poetry is part of the national literary canon — but the reasons for this relative visibility are worth examining. Ureña was from an educated elite background, and the forms of recognition extended to women of her class were not equally available to women from other social positions.
The comparison between Ureña’s recognition and the obscurity of figures like Rosa Duarte and Manuela Aybar is a useful illustration of how Dominican women’s history has been selectively preserved. What gets institutionalised as heritage reflects choices made by subsequent generations about whose stories are worth telling.
The “First Blacks in the Americas” database, launched by the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute and highlighted by Chief Librarian Sarah Aponte at the Hostos panel, includes a section on enslaved people in Hispaniola during the early years of Spanish and French colonisation. It has helped surface documented information about women whose histories had previously been inaccessible or unknown.
Afro-Dominican history and the challenge to racial erasure
Fernanda Berihuete, described at the Hostos panel as an Afro-Dominican historian, has focused specifically on challenging the erasure of African heritage and Blackness in the Dominican Republic. This is not a marginal academic concern: historians cited in the research identify the Dominican Republic as the birthplace of both slavery and the first enslaved people’s uprising in the Americas. They also identify the 19th century as a period when elite Dominican leaders increasingly portrayed themselves as mixed race rather than Black — a political repositioning with lasting consequences for how the country has understood and represented its own population. That history shapes the current landscape in ways that are relevant to visitors trying to understand what they’re seeing.
Understanding this dimension of Dominican history gives context to a pattern that travellers encounter across the Caribbean and Latin America: the selective visibility of African and indigenous contributions to cultures that were built substantially on enslaved and colonised labour. The research available through the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute and the work of scholars like Berihuete is making that history more accessible than it has previously been. For travellers interested in how slave history is memorialised and preserved across the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic’s particular relationship with this history is worth engaging with before visiting.
The Mirabal sisters, Mamá Tingó, and living resistance
The March 8 manifesto issued by Dominican social movement organisations names four women as having planted the seeds of rebellion in the country: Anacaona, María Trinidad Sánchez, the Mirabal sisters, and Mamá Tingó.
The Mirabal sisters — Patria, Dedé, Minerva, and María Teresa — were assassinated on November 25, 1960, on the orders of dictator Rafael Trujillo. Their deaths became a turning point in opposition to the Trujillo regime and are memorialised internationally: November 25 is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Their story is comparatively well-documented in English-language sources, which makes it a useful entry point for visitors who want to understand the intersection of women’s rights and political resistance in the Dominican Republic. The Mirabal sisters’ museum is in the Cibao region, in Salcedo (now renamed Hermanas Mirabal province), several hours north of Santo Domingo — a dedicated visit rather than a day trip from the capital.
Mamá Tingó — Florinda Soriano Muñoz — was a peasant activist who fought for land rights in rural Dominican communities and was killed in 1974. Her name appears alongside the Mirabal sisters in the March 8 manifesto, which places women’s land rights and rural struggles alongside political resistance as part of the same continuum. The fact that both a political assassination under a dictatorship and the killing of a rural land rights activist are cited together in the same document reflects how broadly the manifesto defines the history of women’s struggle in the Dominican Republic.
Current demands and the ongoing struggle for equality
The March 8 manifesto, issued by organisations affiliated with CLOC-Vía Campesina following a march through the streets of Santo Domingo, makes the distance between historical recognition and present-day legal reality concrete.
Legal and structural demands
The manifesto’s demands are specific: a Comprehensive Law on Gender Violence, ratification of ILO Convention 190 against workplace violence, equal pay, and a National Care System. It also calls for a law prohibiting discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation, and for social protection for older women, women with disabilities, and peasant women. The manifesto notes that the Dominican Republic maintains one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, and demands legal access in cases of rape, incest, and life-threatening conditions. These are not aspirational statements — they describe the specific legal deficits that exist in 2023.
The #NiUnaMenos movement, which originated in Argentina and spread through Latin America, has gained support in the Dominican Republic as a challenge to violence against women. This regional dimension matters: the Dominican Republic’s women’s rights situation is part of a broader pattern across the hemisphere, and the demands in the manifesto reflect both local specifics and shared regional struggles. Travellers who have encountered #NiUnaMenos demonstrations or murals in other Latin American countries will recognise the continuity.
Land rights, environment, and Dominican-Haitian women
The manifesto also addresses issues that connect women’s rights to environmental and racial justice. It opposes mining activities that it says impoverish communities and destroy territories, calls for cancellation of extractive projects, and demands recognition of the human right to water in the Constitution. These demands reflect the position of rural and peasant women — the constituency that Mamá Tingó represented — in a country where resource extraction continues to affect agricultural communities directly.
The manifesto’s specific statement that Dominican-Haitian women are persecuted, detained, and deported without guarantees of their rights is one of the most pointed passages in the document. It places the rights of undocumented and binational women within the same framework as the broader struggle — not as a separate issue but as an integral part of it.
| Figure | Period / context | Contribution or significance |
|---|---|---|
| Anacaona | Pre-colonial / Taíno | Named in March 8 manifesto as a seed of rebellion; Taíno leader |
| Rosa Duarte | 19th century / independence | La Trinitaria member; preserved Juan Pablo Duarte’s papers; argued by historians to deserve the title “Mother of the Dominican Republic” |
| Manuela Aybar | 19th century / press and literature | Founded the first privately-owned printing press in the Dominican Republic; author, editor, poet |
| Salomé Ureña | 19th century / education | Poet and educator who advocated for women’s formal education |
| María Trinidad Sánchez | 19th century / independence | Named in March 8 manifesto as a seed of rebellion |
| The Mirabal sisters | 20th century / anti-Trujillo resistance | Assassinated 1960; internationally commemorated on November 25 |
| Mamá Tingó (Florinda Soriano) | 20th century / land rights | Peasant activist for land rights; killed 1974; named in March 8 manifesto |
- Rosa Duarte’s active role in La Trinitaria and her preservation of the founding documents of Dominican independence has been largely absent from mainstream accounts — her case illustrates the broader pattern of women’s erasure from Dominican historical memory.
- The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute and the “First Blacks in the Americas” database have made previously inaccessible archival material about Dominican women — particularly Afro-Dominican and enslaved women — available for the first time.
- The March 8 manifesto’s specific legal demands — on abortion, gender violence, ILO Convention 190, and the rights of Dominican-Haitian women — show the distance between historical recognition of women’s contributions and current legal and social realities in the Dominican Republic.
Questions readers ask about Dominican women’s history
Who was Rosa Duarte and what did she do?
Rosa Duarte was the sister of Juan Pablo Duarte and an active member of La Trinitaria, the secret independence movement that led to Dominican independence from Haitian rule in 1844. She participated in events organised by the society, fabricated bullets in the field, and preserved her brother’s papers while in exile in Venezuela.
She died in exile from dysentery at 68, without her body ever being recovered. Historian Dr. Daisy Cocco De Filippis has argued that Rosa Duarte should be remembered as the “Mother of the Dominican Republic” — a title not historically attributed to her.
Who were the Mirabal sisters and why are they significant?
The Mirabal sisters — Patria, Dedé, Minerva, and María Teresa — were Dominican activists assassinated in 1960 on the orders of dictator Rafael Trujillo. Their deaths became a landmark in the resistance to Trujillo’s regime and in the broader history of violence against women in Latin America.
November 25, the date of their assassination, is now the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Their museum is located in Salcedo, in the Cibao region of the Dominican Republic — several hours north of Santo Domingo.
What is the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute?
The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute was founded in 1992 by the Council of Dominican Educators, community activists, and academics. It is the first university-based research institution in the United States dedicated to the study of Dominican life outside the Dominican Republic, and was established specifically to address the lack of verifiable information on Dominican history in US institutions.
Among its ongoing projects is the “First Blacks in the Americas” database, which includes documented records of enslaved people in Hispaniola during the early years of colonisation and has helped recover information about women who had previously been absent from the historical record.
What does the March 8 manifesto say about women in the Dominican Republic?
The manifesto, issued by organisations affiliated with CLOC-Vía Campesina after a march through Santo Domingo, makes specific legal and structural demands: a Comprehensive Law on Gender Violence, equal pay, legal abortion in cases of rape and life-threatening conditions, and ratification of ILO Convention 190.
It also names historical figures — Anacaona, María Trinidad Sánchez, the Mirabal sisters, and Mamá Tingó — as the roots of the current struggle, and specifically addresses the rights of Dominican-Haitian women, rural and peasant women, and women facing environmental destruction from extractive industries.
How has Afro-Dominican women’s history been documented?
Afro-Dominican women’s history has been particularly hard to document because of deliberate political choices in the 19th century to reframe Dominican identity away from Blackness. Historians identify this as a systematic erasure that shaped both official records and national memory.
Scholars like Fernanda Berihuete have focused specifically on recovering this history, and the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute’s “First Blacks in the Americas” database has made primary source material about enslaved women in Hispaniola accessible to researchers and the public for the first time.
Dominican women’s history spans from Taíno leadership through independence, from 19th-century print culture to 20th-century resistance to dictatorship, and from rural land rights struggles to the current legal campaigns documented in the March 8 manifesto. The figures covered here represent different social positions, different historical moments, and different kinds of contribution — which is part of what makes the full picture more interesting than any single heroic narrative. Travellers visiting the Dominican Republic who want to engage with this history will find the most accessible points of entry in Santo Domingo’s archives and institutions, with the Mirabal sisters’ museum in Salcedo requiring a dedicated journey north. For travellers interested in how Caribbean cultures have grappled with colonial history and the preservation of indigenous and African heritage, exploring indigenous cultural survival elsewhere in the Caribbean offers a useful point of comparison. If this was useful, you might also enjoy reading how Dominican communities have rebuilt and preserved their identity after disaster.
Sources and further reading
CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. The City University of New York. Information on the institute’s founding, mission, and ongoing research projects including the “First Blacks in the Americas” database.
Dominican Republic March 8 Manifesto. La Vía Campesina. Full text of the manifesto issued by organisations affiliated with CLOC-Vía Campesina, including its demands on gender violence, abortion law, labour rights, and the rights of Dominican-Haitian women.
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