Hispaniola

It was not always called this.

Before Columbus, before conquest, before the names of European kings were pressed onto its soil, this island had other names—Ayiti, Bohio, Quisqueya. Names spoken by the Taíno, the first to claim it, the first to cultivate it, the first to carve their stories into its mountains and riverbanks. To them, it was a vast, abundant land, one where the sea kissed the shore with offerings of fish, where the forests stretched wide and deep, where maize, cassava, and sweet potatoes fed entire villages.

Then came 1492.

Then came Hispaniola, a name foreign to the land, a name forced onto it by men in armor, by men with flags, by men with God and greed in their mouths. Columbus landed, saw its riches, saw its people, and claimed it—not as a place already inhabited, not as a land with its own history, but as a possession, a jewel in the Spanish crown.

Hispaniola was where the New World experiment began. It was here that the Spanish first planted the seeds of empire, and with it, the twin curses of enslavement and extermination. The Taíno, whose hands had shaped the land for generations, were crushed beneath the weight of European violence and disease. Within decades, they were almost entirely gone—not vanished, not erased, but absorbed, buried in the bloodlines of those who came next.

And the land, fertile and unyielding, became a machine for empire. Sugarcane, coffee, tobacco—these were the crops that turned the island into wealth. But wealth demands labor, and so the slavers came, dragging with them millions of souls ripped from Africa, forced into the brutal fields of Saint-Domingue in the west, into the Spanish-controlled plantations of Santo Domingo in the east. The island split in its suffering, one half becoming the wealthiest colony in the Americas, the other left to the slow decay of Spanish neglect.

But Hispaniola is also where empire was undone. It was here that Haiti, forged in blood and fire, shattered the chains of slavery and declared itself free, the first Black republic, the first nation to tell Europe no. The east, Santo Domingo, would struggle for its own identity, caught between Spain, France, and Haiti, before becoming the Dominican Republic, always tethered to its past, always wrestling with the shadow of what came before.

Today, Hispaniola remains two nations bound by history and tension, by shared land and divided memory. The border is both real and imagined, both political and personal. The past lingers in the language, in the food, in the faces of its people. The names Haiti and Dominican Republic endure, but the island beneath them remains the same—one land, once whole, once free, long before it was ever called Hispaniola.

Update: On Hispaniola, and the Names We Inherit. Dr. Sophie Maríñez schools me.

Dr. Sophie Maríñez, scholar of language, of the weight it carries and the wounds it sometimes inflicts, read what I wrote on Hispaniola above—and offered a reminder. A correction not of facts, but of the subtle violence that lingers in the names we speak.

She said: “Good job on the entry on Hispaniola. I would only add that Columbus named it ‘La Española,’ and that later, U.S. geographers Latinized the name and made it ‘Hispaniola.’ I avoid using that term because none of its residents self-identify as ‘Hispaniolans.’”

And she is right.

She reminded me that names are not neutral. That names are a kind of inheritance, a kind of violence. “We never say that we are ‘traveling to Hispaniola for our summer vacations,’ right?” she said. And I heard the echo in that question—the distance between what is said about a people and what a people say about themselves.

There is power in her refusal. “As I decolonize my language, I avoid using ‘Hispaniola.’ I’d instead use ‘the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic.’ I’d rather keep it nameless than reproduce the colonizer’s name.”

Let that linger for a moment.

Because what she’s naming isn’t just an island. She’s naming the shadow of conquest. She’s naming the erasure that happens when language is imposed, when the cartographer’s pen replaces the name whispered by generations of mouths who lived on the land before it was ever mapped.

In my original entry, I traced the word “Hispaniola” to its collision with history—to the arrival of Columbus, to the violence that came cloaked in flags and crosses. I spoke of Ayiti, Bohio, Quisqueya—the names the Taíno gave this place long before it was carved in the colonizer’s tongue. I wrote of empire’s reach, of how one island was split in two and set to war against itself. I tried to hold the weight of that fracture, to pull the reader into the ache of it. And yet, in using the name Hispaniola, I let empire speak first.

Dr. Maríñez reminds us that even in the most decolonized telling, the words themselves can betray. That even as we resist, we must be vigilant. That naming is power—and sometimes the most radical act is to refuse the name.

So let us say it differently.

Not Hispaniola—but the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. An island not of conquest, but of resistance. Not a thing to be named by others, but a place still naming itself.

Synonyms:

La Española