Bound for Freedom—Fraught Conscription: Mapping Cabarete as an Ideal Type of Racial Capitalism

Elizabeth Alvarez, Columbia University

What kinds of historical narratives become legible when we center the built environment and land tenure as spatial evidence of racial capitalism in the Caribbean? This paper examines Cabarete, a coastal town in the Dominican Republic, as an “ideal type” of racial capitalism’s territorial afterlives, unfolding across the longue durée from the Unified Haiti to the rise of neoliberal tourism. Founded by the Black descendants of a Florida planter under Haitian sovereignty, Cabarete offers a rare case of free Black landholding, and its erasure in the shadow of state-building and capital extraction. Through legal fragments, oral histories, and spatial memory, I trace how distinct land and property regimes in the Black Atlantic render Cabarete essential to the mutation of plantation histories. Drawing on Wacquant’s typology of racial domination and Trouillot’s theory of state effects, I present a two-axis framework: vertically, from symbolic classification to legal legibility; horizontally, across spatialized mechanisms of racial rule: categorization, discrimination, segregation, seclusion, and violence. This discussion asks how do we translate oral histories, family archives, and colonial cartographies into GIS-compatible formats without flattening their epistemic particularities? What does it mean to treat historical GIS and spatial methods not merely as visual or technical tools, but as methods of spatial storytelling, especially in places shaped by the temporal contradictions between state-led development plans and intergenerational claims to land? I argue for a counter-cartographic approach that centers absence, silence, and refusal—particularly as they surround Black women, children, and unrecorded landscapes. This way, Cabarete emerges not as a footnote to planning history but as its speculative origin: a geography that planned itself through Black spatial experimentation and diasporic memory. By reading the Caribbean not as an outlier but as a founding terrain of modern planning, this paper reclaims planning as a racial project, and remaps its archive accordingly.

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 Presented in Session 128. Spatializing Race