Dominican national identity has long been built on a negative: Dominicans are what Haitians are not. Wigginton and Middleton trace how that construction, sharpened under Trujillo, whose regime encouraged European immigration, ordered the 1937 border massacre and coined the term dominicanization, has been carried into the classroom.

Their method is to read primary-school social science textbooks through critical race theory, a framework developed for the United States that they argue travels, pointing to Freire's own Latin American grounding. Curricula on this view are never neutral. They transmit a pigmentocracy in which lighter skin confers standing, and the profusion of available colour terms lets people of visible African descent avoid ever calling themselves black.

What the textbooks actually show, though, is not flat anti-Haitianism. The script is under pressure, and the materials register a slow and uneven movement toward a Dominican identity willing to acknowledge its African inheritance.