White elites across Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico spent two centuries invoking Haiti as a warning, proof of barbarism and a reason to refuse black populations any larger share of civic life. Valdés gathers essays tracing how writers and artists in those three countries answered back, turning Haiti into a figure for liberation instead.

The premise is that language never kept these populations apart: exchange has been continuous since 1804, whatever the region's school curricula and the fields of Latin American and Caribbean studies have implied by silence or caricature. Contributors follow that exchange through Cuban film and poetry, Ana Lydia Vega's story of three men adrift in a raft, Edwidge Danticat on the killings of 1937, and Dominican fiction that keeps the old hostility alive.

A closing essay supplies a syllabus for teaching Hispaniola's two nations together, written after the 2013 ruling that stripped Dominicans of Haitian descent of citizenship.