Origins of Black Feminist Thought in the Americas: An Interview with Sophia Monegro
In today’s post, Ashley Everson, a managing editor of Global Black Thought (the official journal of AAIHS), interviews Sophia Monegro about her new article, “Origins of Black Feminist Thought in the Americas: La Negra del Hospital in Colonial Santo Domingo.” Recent Black feminist scholars are crafting new directions within Atlantic Studies by reimagining the lives of seldom studied Black women using interdisciplinary methodologies. This article integrates Black feminist, archival, Black geography, and literary methods to reconstruct the life and thinking of a healer known only as La Negra del Hospital. As a frontline worker during the viral pandemic and military conquest of Hispaniola, La Negra del Hospital was an African woman who owned her dwelling where she cured the sick before 1501. Through close and critical readings of the extant archival material, this essay shows how primary sources about La Negra del Hospital contain unexplored subtexts that help chart a map of her proto-Black feminist ideas.
Dr. Monegro is a literary scholar working at the intersection of Black Women’s Intellectual History, Dominican Studies, and Digital Humanities. She earned her PhD in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin and served as a Fulbright Researcher in the Dominican Republic. Currently, Dr. Monegro is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity at Washington University in St. Louis and the Primary Investigator on an ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant for the creation of Cimarronas: A Black Women’s Archive of Ayiti-Quisqueya, a trilingual digital platform that narrates the histories of ten Black women across colonial Ayiti, today’s Haiti and the Dominican Republic using digital mapping tools, post-custodial archiving, animations, biographical narrations, and site visits. Dr. Monegro’s research agenda is grounded in the community-based and material needs of Black Dominicans and African American descendants in the Dominican Republic and its diaspora.
Ashley Everson (AE): You define intellectualism as action guided by knowledge, recognizing the intellect embedded in labor and the methods developed through toil. How does this redefinition challenge the traditional intellectual history of the early Atlantic world, and what possibilities does it open for identifying other overlooked intellectual figures?
Sophia Monegro (SM): Focusing on the intersection of Black and Latinx Studies, the intellectual history of the early Atlantic world often studies familiar literate thinkers, such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Miguel de Cervantes, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano, among others. My redefinition of intellectualism encourages scholars to engage the diversity of thought and modalities through which Atlantic ideas, political philosophies, and methodologies evolved. Written records have never been the sole intellectual medium. Intellectual historians Hillary Beckles, Laurent Dubois, and James Sweet have made similar critiques about the “Atlantic” thought being in exclusive dialogue with literate European American ideas, devoid of African knowledge production and the intellectual acumen of free and enslaved diasporans. Oral history, political action, and labor are underutilized texts in traditional intellectual history.
I believe that redefining intellectualism can help Atlantic scholars identify the overlooked intellectuals of our early Black Latinx past by diversifying what constitutes an intellectual text and what an intellectual looks like.
AE: Given the unknowns about La Negra’s life—such as the circumstances under which she arrived in Santo Domingo—what kinds of archival work, interdisciplinary collaboration or methodological innovation do you think are most necessary to uncover more about her and other early African-descended women in the Americas?
SM: To identify when La Negra del Hospital arrived in Santo Domingo, comprehensive transcriptions of all the passenger lists from 1492 to 1502 are needed. However, the Contratación bundles containing these manifests in the archives of Seville are delicate and notoriously out of order. Gaining access to these manifests is one feat; transcribing them is a larger one. Reading these documents requires fifteenth-century Spanish paleography, which is the slow process of deciphering 1400s Spanish script. AI innovations, such as the Transkribus platform, can now transcribe eighteenth and nineteenth century documents. However, the technology has yet to reach the early Atlantic scripts of cortesana and procesal encadenada, which hold the stories of La Negra and other early African-descended women in the Americas.
I aim to make some strides toward unlocking this AI potential. I am currently the Primary Investigator for an ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant to develop Cimarronas: A Black Woman’s Archive of Ayiti/Quisqueya, a trilingual digital platform that narrates the histories of ten radical Black women across the Indigenous island of Ayiti, today’s Republic of Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Using digital mapping tools, post-custodial archiving, animations, biographical narrations, and site visits, the Cimarronas platform will be accessible, multimodal, and public facing. To transcribe the primary sources that will be housed in the platform, we are working with data scientists at Washington University in St. Louis to train AI models to read cortesana and procesal encadenada. We aim to develop a model that can assist with the initial transcription, which we can verify through a double peer-review process.
AE: You mention that this piece aims to expand teaching materials for the Dominican Studies curriculum. How do you see this work contributing to the field, and what do you hope students—particularly students of Dominican descent—will take away from engaging with La Negra’s story?
SM: In 2016, I collaborated with Dr. Ramona Hernández, Director of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, to develop the curriculum for the United States’s first-ever Master’s specialization in Dominican Studies. I researched course topics, compiled reading lists, and wrote the syllabi for two courses, “Dominican Society: From African Black Slavery to the Advent of Trujillo, 1492 -1930” and “Dominican Migration to the United States, 1930 – present,” which are now required for the degree. The hardest part about making this curriculum was the lack of English language scholarship and primary texts about Ayiti and Santo Domingo’s early Atlantic period. There is an Atlantic-wide lacuna when it comes to English language production about Ayiti and Santo Domingo before 1790.
I see my work as a small building block towards making this early Black history accessible. I hope that by learning about La Negra del Hospital’s healthcare activism for local and likely Indigenous communities, students will gain new perspectives on who cared for their ancestors.
This understanding can help students challenge the prevalent Hispanophile narratives that credit Spaniards like Fray Antonio de Montesino and Bartolomé de las Casas as the first Indigenous defenders. I want this article to be a resource for students of Dominican and Haitian descent who wish to learn about our shared island history and unlearn the anti-Black nationalist histories that reinforce social hierarchy more than they reflect majority opinion.
AE: The archival record leaves La Negra without an official name, and you retain this absence in your narrative. Was this a rhetorical decision aligned with your shadow intellectual framework? How do you see this choice engaging with questions of historical violence, erasure, and representation?
SM: I wish I knew her name. Yet, I did not want the fact that I could not find her name to stop us from crediting her for the intellectual legacies she created. I decided to reinscribe the racialized name the archive ceded her for a few reasons. First, it is my form of reckoning with what the document does not grant me and respecting its limits. Secondly, from a metadata standpoint, I want scholars and researchers who may someday encounter her name to access established knowledge about La Negra del Hospital easily. I feared that if I fabulated a name or used “Micaela,” as activist Maribel Nuñez of Acción Afro-Dominicana has, I would inhibit what to me is an active archival search. Moreover, I’ve yet to ascertain whether La Negra wants us to know her name. One of the most significant contributions of this article is that Spaniards had not yet colonized the locality where La Negra established her healthcare center.
I believe that in establishing herself outside of the current colonial center, La Negra was deploying maroon, or rather, cimarrona methods by operating covertly on the outskirts of colonial power. To be a maroon, a cimarrona is a political choice, amongst them a choice against surveillance. I think about my great-great-grandmother Sofia, who spent her life as a peanut farmer on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, refusing her family’s many requests to migrate to Santo Domingo city and New York City. I am still working through the ethics of representing cimarronas who spent lifetimes mastering stealth and choosing to remain secluded. As I continue to weave together the fragments of La Negra’s story for my book, I seek to find the best ways to practice Black feminist care for this formative caregiver. For now, this article is an initial step towards undoing centuries of her historical erasure, and I strive that with more research, the book will do more restorative justice work towards interrupting the archives’ many violences against her.
AE: You read along the archival grain rather than against it to reconstruct La Negra’s healing enterprise. How does this methodological choice, in conversation with Marisa Fuentes’ approach, allow for a more holistic understanding of her life and work? How might it reframe how future scholars navigate the colonial archive?
SM: Using the metaphor of textiles, Fuentes invites us to engage with historical records in a manner that allows for greater elasticity and depth of interpretation by reading along the bias grain of history. Building on this framework, my article explores what seamstresses refer to as the true bias grain, the 45-degree angle where the fabric is at its most ample. I equate the true bias grain with interdisciplinary methods. To reconstruct the legacy of La Negra, I combined archival, Black feminist, Black geography, and literary studies methods. Drawing on the teachings of Katherine McKittrick, I comprehensively transplanted the literary studies method of reading for subtext to how I read La Negra’s liminal archival documents. The implications, silences, and tone of these archival letters informed my research on the built environment of the era, enabling me to make discoveries about her life.
As a literary scholar who reads archival texts, there is always something new to discover, even when examining the same primary document that historians have cited time and again. In addition to rigorous research, I believe that interdisciplinary lenses are our greatest asset towards highlighting the overshadowed intellectuals of our Black past.
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