60 Years Since the April Revolution in Santo Domingo

Sixty years ago, on April 24, 1965, tens of thousands of ordinary people in Santo Domingo (also known as the Dominican Republic) joined a popular revolt which sought to restore President Juan Bosch to power after he was overthrown in a US-backed, right-wing military coup in September, 1963. Posing a threat to both local elites and Washington’s geopolitical expansion in the Caribbean, the April Revolution, and the subsequent anti-imperialist resistance that sprang up against US military occupation, contributed to the development of anti-imperialist politics in Santo Domingo and beyond.

Join us on May 3 for a panel to commemorate the 6oth anniversary of the April Revolution and discuss its political implications, the role of working-class Afro-Dominicans, women, LGBTQ people, Haitian internationalist fighters, socialists, writers and artists, as well as the worldwide international solidarity movement that ensued in the face of imperialist onslaught.

Génesis Lara is a scholar of Caribbean and Afro-Latinx Studies. Raised in both the Bronx and Miami, her research focuses on gender, Blackness, social movements, human rights, and diaspora world making. She explores the ways Afro-Caribbean women mobilized grief and mourning as ways to contest state violence in the twentieth century. Her work poses larger questions of ways Black people have conceived and fought for human rights. Génesis Lara completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Florida and her PhD at the University of California, Davis.

Gina Goico is a multidisciplinary artist, scholar, and self-proclaimed necia. Goico navigates their identity and the spaces where they exist in the Dominican Republic and the United States through their work, which ranges from embroidery to installations, ink drawings, and performances. Goico’s research focuses on how the aesthetics, performances, and organizing of self-identifying black Dominican artists and organizers operate as strategies that queer state-circulated identity in the Dominican Republic and its New York City diaspora. Goico was a Van Lier Fellow and artist in residence with Smack Mellon. They also participated in the AIM fellowship at The Bronx Museum of the Arts and were artist-in-residence at The Laundromat Project Kelly Street. Goico holds an AAS in Fine Arts and Illustration from Altos de Chavón and a BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design. They also have an MA in Arts Politics from NYU and are PhD candidate in Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University.

Amaury Rodriguez has been involved in Haitian-Dominican solidarity activism for more than two decades. His writing has appeared in NACLA, El Salto, Esendom and Jacobin. He is co-editor, with Raj Chetty, of a special issue of The Black Scholar journal dedicated to Dominican Black Studies.

Matías Bosch Carcuro studied Environmental Sciences and Arts at the Central University of Chile. He has a MA in Social Sciences with a minor in Politics and a MA in Public Management and Policy from the University of Chile. He is also a University professor and researcher on political economy, labor, development models, social rights, social protection and security systems, as well as state policies targeting discriminated and overexploited working people.