Two centuries of Dominican hostility toward Haiti rest, Yingling argues, on a past that was edited after the fact. Across the Age of Revolutions the people of Hispaniola cooperated far more often than they fought, joining together in antislavery and anti-imperial revolt and arriving in 1822 at a cross-island unification that was among the least violent settlements of independence anywhere in Latin America.

Reading the archive for kinship, belief and belonging rather than for fixed racial or political labels, the book follows Dominicans who went on calling themselves Haitian long after independence, and who wanted the citizenship and the markets that the hemisphere's first universally free country offered.

Later insistence on permanent incompatibility is treated as a whitewashing with consequences: elites who had once welcomed Haitians recast them as an antimodern threat, and that story was then used to excuse persecution. The epilogue carries the argument into present-day cultural politics.