Once, in the middle of the night, my grandmother Prudencia heard a loud thud from an impact on the corrugated tin roof of the small wooden house she lived in with her children and her husband. She heard footsteps and other strange noises above her as she lay in bed. She tried to persuade her husband to go check, but he refused. The next morning, she found a large, strangely shaped clump of what looked like organs or skin outside her house, and a faint trail of blood dotting the bedsheets of her children’s bed. My mother, who was a newborn baby, had a tiny wound on her navel.
Joiri Minaya, Cotton Bolls #1, 2024; Courtesy of Joiri Minaya
Not bearing any scars on her belly other than the stretch marks from her own subsequent pregnancies, my mother has said jokingly that imagination flourished in the countryside back when people could look out the window into the pitch-black night. She believes it waned once electricity finally arrived to the then-remote and neglected region of the Dominican Republic’s south, bringing clarity to the previously obscured contours of the nighttime view. But my grandmother swears my mother was chupada por una bruja—sucked by a witch. She also says she knows who the witch was—a neighbor, the midwife whose herbs and knowledge had helped to bring my mother into this world just a few weeks earlier.
Prudencia converted to the Pentecostal faith in the 1960s at the church erected in front of the plot where she rebuilt her house in Barahona with the materials from the one she tore down in Caletón following her separation from a cheating husband. The supernatural stories she shares—her dreams, encounters, and premonitions—are revelations that led to her faith and continue to confirm it.
Unlike the overwhelming Catholicism that has defined the Dominican Republic’s religious identity since the days of Spanish colonization, the denominations of Protestantism, fast spreading in the last decades, are much less porous to the syncretism and creolization that allowed Afrodiasporic deities to survive in the Americas under the guise of Catholic saints. Protestantism was introduced to the island at various points in time—by smugglers through the north coast near the end of the sixteenth century, by free Black people relocating from the United States and Anglophone colonies in the Caribbean in the 1820s, by white US and Puerto Rican missionaries in the context of the first US occupation between 1916 and 1924.
Excerpt from Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt | The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)
Althea McNish, Golden Harvest textile, designed late 1950s, printed early 1960s; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; Museum purchase from General Acquisitions Endowment Fund, 2021-1-1; Photo by Matt Flynn © Smithsonian Institution
Still of Minaya’s mother and grandmother, from her film The Promise of Progress, 2023; Courtesy of Joiri Minaya
See related authors
Joiri Minaya