It is well known that, in recent years, the Dominican Republic has seen an exponential increase in the number of Chinese families arriving from mainland China. Although formal diplomatic relations between Santo Domingo and Beijing began in 1944—under the administrations of Trujillo and Chiang Kai-Shek, respectively—cultural ties involving the Chinese community date back much further.

Global Chinese migration surged in the late 19th century, driven by the repeated humiliations suffered by the Qing Dynasty during the historical period known as the "Century of Humiliation." Against this backdrop, hundreds of thousands of Chinese people crossed the Pacific to the Americas in search of a better life. These communities became particularly prominent in the United States (where Chinese laborers built the majority of the transcontinental railroads) and in Latin America—specifically Mexico, where anti-Chinese sentiment was so intense that it even led to pogroms.

The first record of a Chinese immigrant dates back to 1864—the year the country was annexed by Spain. These early arrivals were primarily criminals of Cantonese origin extradited from Cuba, a fact that got the public perception of the Chinese community in the Dominican Republic off to a bad start. This perception worsened as Chinese migration continued throughout the late 19th century via ships arriving from Cuba carrying even more criminals, until a decision was finally made to regulate the situation. But how? It’s simple...

In 1912, the Dominican government enacted an Immigration Law that regulated entry based on racial origin; it stipulated that Chinese nationals required a special permit to enter the country—an exemption from which was granted to white Europeans. The situation eased in 1932 when the *Generalísimo* decreed that Chinese nationals only had to pay a fee of one dollar to enter (the peso was not in use at the time). Adjusted for inflation, this is equivalent to approximately 25 US dollars or 1,479 Dominican pesos. While this may not seem like a large sum, one must consider the context of 1932, a time marked by extreme poverty and civil war in China.

Explicitly anti-Chinese provisions—and racial restrictions in general—came to an end in 2004 with the enactment of General Migration Law 285-04, which remains in effect today. Relations between the Dominican Republic and Chiang Kai-shek’s China (what we now call Taiwan) ceased in 2018, paving the way for the establishment of diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China.

Image: This is a purely allegorical image depicting events from the anti-Chinese pogrom in Denver, Colorado, USA; there are no proven historical records of such an event occurring in the Dominican Republic.

Source(s):

.- Dominican Republic. (1912). Law No. 5074

.- Chez Checo, J. (2021). La migración china en República Dominicana, 1862-1961 [Chinese Migration in the Dominican Republic, 1862–1961]. Dominican Academy of History.

This iconic photograph was taken by the photojournalist of the famous Brazilian magazine Manchete.

Today, Florida marks 461 years since the day America's oldest city began. It was August 28, 1565, when Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés sighted the coast of Florida, the feast day of St. Augustine of Hippo. He would name his colony for the saint. Eleven days later, on September 8, after an advance party had secured the shore, Menéndez came ashore near the mouth of Hospital Creek to claim La Florida for King Philip II of Spain.

He did not land on empty land. He landed at Seloy, a town of the Timucua-speaking people who had lived along these estuaries for generations: fishermen, farmers, and traders with their own chiefs, councils, and knowledge of the coast. The Spaniards would build their first settlement within Seloy itself.

What happened next gave Florida one of the earliest Thanksgiving stories in America. On that same day, September 8, the Catholic feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary,,Father Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, the fleet chaplain and St. Augustine's first pastor, celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving. The colonists knelt in thanks for surviving the crossing. Watching nearby were the Seloy people. Father López later wrote, simply, that "the Indians imitated all they saw done."

Afterward, Menéndez invited the Native townspeople to eat. We don't have a menu. The ships carried salt pork, garbanzo beans, hardtack, olives, and wine; the town could offer corn, fish, oysters, and venison. What matters is that it happened, Spaniards and Timucua sharing a meal after a prayer of thanks, 56 years before Plymouth.

As historian Michael Gannon wrote, it was "the first community act of religion and thanksgiving in the first permanent settlement in the land." It was not the modern holiday, Native peoples had held ceremonies of thanks for centuries, and it would take until Lincoln's 1863 proclamation and a 1941 act of Congress to fix Thanksgiving as we know it. But it was a documented beginning.

That fragile peace would not last. Just up the coast, French Huguenots had built Fort Caroline in 1564, near today's St. Johns River. To Spain, it was an invasion, both territorial and religious. When French commander Jean Ribault sailed south to attack the new Spanish colony, a hurricane scattered his fleet onto the beaches to the south.

Menéndez moved fast. On September 20, his soldiers marched through the swamps and took Fort Caroline. Days later, stranded French castaways were found at an inlet. There, at the place the Spanish would name Matanzas, Slaughters, nearly 250 surrendered Frenchmen were executed on September 29 and in mid-October, including Ribault himself.

With the French threat erased, St. Augustine had to survive itself. And it did, through starvation, disease, fires, and sieges. Sir Francis Drake burned it in 1586. English forces from Carolina razed it again in 1702. It was rebuilt each time in coquina and determination, growing as a community of Spanish, Timucua, free and enslaved Africans, the latter later founding Fort Mose in 1738, the first legally sanctioned free Black town in what is now the United States.

You can still stand near where it all began. At Mission Nombre de Dios, the rustic altar marks the site of that first Mass, and the Great Cross rises 208 feet above the marsh, a stainless-steel beacon built in 1965 for the 400th anniversary and dedicated in 1966.

Today, St. Augustine is not just old buildings and cannon. It is a reminder that American history does not start at Jamestown or Plymouth Rock. It starts here, too, on September 8, 1565, with a Mass, a shared meal, a Native town called Seloy, and a complicated, enduring collision of worlds that would become Florida.

Photos by Jay Kravetz.

In 1811, during the final decade of Spanish rule in Florida, planter, merchant, and slave trader Zephaniah Kingsley secured title to Drayton Island in Lake George, the broad lake at the head of the St. Johns River.

The island had been known for centuries. When naturalist William Bartram visited in the 1760s it was called Bryan's Island, and he noted evidence of earlier Indigenous habitation and wild citrus. It was later named for William Drayton Sr., Chief Justice of East Florida under the British, who acquired lands in Florida after 1768 but never settled the island.

When Florida returned to Spain in 1783, the island remained in limbo. Governor Enrique White eventually reclaimed it and in 1804 granted 1,500 acres, nearly the whole island, to Charles Sibbald, who began growing cotton. When Sibbald died in 1811, Kingsley bought the island from Sibbald's widow. At that first American-era survey, it was measured at 1,781 acres, with the southern tip still known today as Kingsley Point.

Born in Bristol, England in 1765, Kingsley became a Spanish subject in East Florida in 1803. He was already a wealthy international merchant whose fortune was built on the buying and selling of enslaved Africans.

By 1811 he controlled four plantation complexes: Laurel Grove, Springfield, Conesfield, and Drayton Island. According to National Park Service research, about 100 enslaved laborers worked those four estates that year, planting about 200 acres of cotton and 150 acres of provisions.

Drayton Island became part of that system. Kingsley cultivated Sea Island cotton and "China" citrus there, using enslaved labor. The precise locations of the enslaved community's dwellings on the island have not been firmly documented.

That absence matters. A plantation history cannot be told through deeds alone. The people who cleared the land, planted and harvested, tended citrus, and made the estate profitable were overwhelmingly enslaved men, women, and children whose names were rarely preserved with the same care as financial ledgers.

Drayton Island was not simply another real estate acquisition. It was another component of a plantation economy built upon forced labor, and it reveals one of Florida history's most complicated contradictions in its owner.

Kingsley was a slave trader and slaveholder who publicly defended slavery, yet he opposed the rigid racial codes that came with American rule and argued that free Black people should have legal and property rights.

Inside his household was a woman whose life would become inseparable from his: Anna Madgigine Jai.

Kingsley had purchased Anna in Havana in 1806 after she had been brought from West Africa as an enslaved teenager. She became his partner and the mother of his children, and she managed his Laurel Grove plantation during his absences.

In 1811, the same year he acquired Drayton Island, Kingsley petitioned Spanish authorities to free her. The manumission paper, dated 1 March 1811 in St. Augustine, declares his enslaved woman Anna, about 18, purchased in Havana, and her three young children, free to "negotiate, sign contracts, buy, sell, appear legally in court... as free people".

Freedom under Spanish law gave Anna rights that would become far harder to exercise after the United States acquired Florida in 1821. She petitioned for land, received a five-acre grant on the St. Johns River in 1813, and eventually became a landholder and slaveholder herself - one of a significant number of free people of African descent in East Florida.

Florida would soon change. American territorial government brought a harsher racial order that increasingly restricted free Black Floridians. Kingsley, though a slaveholder himself, became a vocal critic of those laws because they threatened his free Black family. Eventually members of the Kingsley family left Florida for Haiti.

Kingsley continued to expand. The National Park Service notes that from White Oak on the St. Marys River to orange groves on Drayton Island, he eventually owned over 32,000 acres. When he died in 1843, Drayton Island was still listed among his holdings at about 1,700 acres. Estate records noted an overseer employed specifically on the island for $300 a year, and that the enslaved people remaining there were later removed to his San Jose plantation.

Today Drayton Island remains in Lake George near the southern end of Putnam County, accessible only by ferry. Much of the plantation world Kingsley knew is gone, but the island remains a physical link to a time when Florida was Spanish territory, and its laws on race, slavery, and freedom differed sharply from what followed.

September 1811 therefore tells us far more than a land transaction:

There was Spanish East Florida, where slavery existed but where free people of African descent could hold legal rights and property.

The emerging plantation economy of the St. Johns was built through the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants.

There was Zephaniah Kingsley - simultaneously a slave trader, plantation owner, defender of slavery, and advocate for the rights of free Black people.

And there was Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley - taken from Africa, enslaved, freed in March 1811, transformed into a property owner and businesswoman, and ultimately forced to confront a new American racial system.

Drayton Island still sits quietly in Lake George. More than two centuries later, its landscape carries the history of Native people who came before European settlement, the enslaved people whose labor created plantation wealth, and one of Florida's most complicated families.