Excerpts from Richard Turits, Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), with permission of the publishers. This essay is based on fieldwork conducted jointly with Lauren Derby, and many of its ideas were developed in discussion with her. It forms part of a larger work we are completing on Dominican-Haitian relations, anti-Haitianism, and histories and representations of the 1937 Haitian massacre. This research was generously funded by an IIE Fulbright Grant for Collaborative Research. Versions of this article were presented at the New Series in Politics, History, and Culture at the University of Michigan, the Princeton Latin American History Workshop, the New York Latin American History Workshop, University of Michigan’s Evening Seminar Series in Ethnicity and Migration in the Caribbean, and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. I thank all the participants for their helpful comments. I am also grateful to Jeremy Adelman, Michiel Baud, Bruce Calder, Sueann Caulfield, Miguel Centeno, John Coatsworth, Fernando Coronil, Alejandro de la Fuente, Ada Ferrer, Julie Franks, Lowell Gudmundson, Thomas Holt, Friedrich Katz, Mark Mazower, Kenneth Mills, Julie Skurski, Stanley Stein, George Steinmetz, and HAHR’s anonymous reviewer for their critical suggestions on the essay and to Lauren Derby, Jean Ghasmann Bissainthe, Raymundo González, Edward Jean Baptiste, Hannah Rosen, and Ciprián Soler for their invaluable contributions to this work. Hispanic American Historical Review 82:3 Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press A World Destroyed, A Nation Imposed: The 1937 Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic Richard Lee Turits Forgetting, I would go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle] of nationality. —Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” (1882) In October 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina com- manded his army to kill all “Haitians” living in the Dominican Republic’s northwestern frontier, which borders on Haiti, and in certain parts of the con- tiguous Cibao region. Between 2 October and 8 October, hundreds of Domini-