Pedro L. San Miguel reads Dominican historiography as storytelling and asks what its plots accomplish. Working through Sanchez Valverde, Pedro Francisco Bono, Jose Gabriel Garcia, Pena Batlle, Balaguer and Juan Bosch, and borrowing Hayden White's account of emplotment, he shows that the colonial past has repeatedly been narrated as tragedy, a form that made Dominican misfortune look fated and, under Trujillo, made the dictator look like deliverance. The regime financed archives, document anthologies and research on a scale that let sheer assertion pass for proof. A second argument concerns Haiti, which in this literature works less as a neighbour than as the figure against which Dominican whiteness, Catholicism and Hispanic descent are defined. Identity and utopia are treated as one question, since every account of where the nation came from also proposes where it should go. The closing pages ask whether recognising the other in oneself could support different island futures.