The Latina/o Cultures Speakers Series Presents: “Hispaniola Without Borders: Migrancy and Liberation in ‘Theresa—A Haytien Tale'” with Ayendy Bonifacio

Join us for our first Cultures Speaker Series of the 2025-2026 school year. This digital talk will take place via Zoom on November 5th at 3:30 pm. To RSVP, follow this link.

This talk examines “Theresa—A Haytien Tale” (1828), widely considered the first short story published in an African American newspaper, situating it within the contested geography and cultural politics of Hispaniola during and after the Haitian Revolution. Serialized in Freedom’s Journal, “Theresa” dramatizes the plight of Madame Paulina and her daughters as they navigate displacement, disguise, and survival amidst French imperial violence. While scholars often analyze the text within the context of Haitian revolutionary history or African American print culture, I argue that Theresa also unsettles dominant notions of the Haiti–Dominican Republic border by depicting a pre-border Hispaniola in which migrancy emerges as both a natural consequence of war and a mode of resistance. In doing so, the narrative foregrounds the liberatory function of exile, situating migrancy within a Romantic landscape that is at once perilous, generative, and deeply entwined with traditions of marronage.

By tracing the family’s movement across a borderless island, “Theresa” reveals how early Black print culture engaged Hispaniola as a unified body, rather than a fractured territory. The story’s Romanticized descriptions of Haitian landscapes—verdant plains, crimsoned battlefields, and impenetrable mountains—frame the natural world as an active agent in the struggle for liberation, echoing both the historical practices of maroon communities and broader Atlantic traditions of viewing wilderness as sanctuary. Moreover, the serial challenges colonial racial logics by reversing associations of “barbarity” and “civilization,” attributing cruelty to French invaders while aligning Haitians with divine creation, natural beauty, and self-determination.

Ultimately, this article contends that “Theresa” provides a critical counter-narrative to Euro-American representations of Hispaniola as divided by race and nation. By foregrounding movement, exile, and the indigenization of Black characters, the tale envisions Haitian liberation not as a bounded national project but as part of a broader, borderless emancipation of Hispaniola.

Ayendy Bonifacio is a Dominican American writer, poet, and scholar whose work explores memory, migration, race, and the legacies of colonialism in the Americas. He is the author of Dique Dominican: A Memoir; To the River, We Are Migrants: Poems/Poemas; and the scholarly monograph Paratextuality in Anglophone and Hispanophone Poems in the U.S. Press, 1855–1901. His debut novel, Bless Me, Papi, is forthcoming in 2026. Bonifacio’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other outlets. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Toledo in Ohio where he lives with his partner and daughter.