UCLA International Institute, May 12, 2026 — UCLA historian Robin Derby’s second monograph, “Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands” (Duke, 2025), explores the baka/bacá (Haitian Creole and Spanish spellings, respectively): errant spirits on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola that turn humans into animals through sorcery.
Not just any animals, mind you, but the animals brought to the island by successive Spanish colonial invasions: cows, horses, mules, pigs and dogs. Baka both empower people and do bad things to them. The shape-shifting demons are part of a larger belief in the “curse” (fuku) of Columbus among the island’s residents, especially Dominicans, who believe the curse has brought them centuries of suffering. (Both Haiti and the Dominican Republic are located on Hispaniola.)
In a recent interview, Derby explained, “These monsters are part of a culture of the miraculous that is a very important part of Latin American popular culture. Bánica [the town in the Dominican-Haitian borderlands where she did extensive field work] has what I believe is the only pre-Columbian pilgrimage site on the island, now dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi. And during one of my visits, the Catholic Church blessed a water tank where the Virgin of Altagracia, the national patron saint of the Dominican Republic, appeared.”
The author, who is also the Dr. E. Bradford Burns Professor in Latin American Studies and former director of the UCLA Program on Caribbean Studies, uses an array of interdisciplinary methodologies to tease out the social and historical functions of the baka/bacá, including ethnography; historical research (e.g., on the origins of the word “bacá,” as well as the Taíno origins of many handicrafts, agricultural practices and food of Hispaniola); comparative folklore and multiple theoretical paradigms.
A social historian of the Caribbean, Derby’s first monograph was “The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo” (Duke, 2009; and Academic of History of the Dominican Republic, 2016 — in Spanish). Her other works include award-winning journal articles, book chapters and two edited volumes: “The Dominican Republic Reader,” with Eric Rooda and Raymundo González (Duke, 2014) and “Activating the Past: Historical Memory in the Black Atlantic,” with Andrew Apter (Cambridge Scholars, 2010).
Photo of the central borderlands between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, taken in Banica,
Elías Piña Province, Dominican Republic. (Photo: Adrian Michael via Wikimedia Commons; altered.
CC BY-SA 3.0.)
Bringing the bacá into the light
Derby first became interested in the bacá in 1989 when she and fellow historian Richard Lee Truits went to the central borderlands that divide Haiti and the Dominican Republic to collect oral histories about the massacre of Dominicans of Haitian descent in 1937.* Two decades of field work in the central borderlands, as well as in Haiti, ensued before she would write an entire book about the spirit demons.**
The book argues that the bacá and the drinking tales about them are an expression of Dominicans’ experience of authoritarianism and modern capitalist exploitation, as well as of the unspoken trauma of Hispaniola’s colonial history, which includes genocide of the Taíno indigenous people, brutal violence, slavery, the trade of enslaved Indigenous and African people, post-colonial plantation exploitation and human-animal co-dependencies.
The latter, she emphasizes, figured in the highly profitable, illicit trade in cattle, mules and oxen that took place between the original Spanish and French parts of the island. This illicit trade peaked in the 18th century when the French colony of St. Domingue took over the entire island and built a booming sugar plantation economy based on enslaved West African labor.
Animals on Hispaniola were essential in enabling escaped slaves (both indigenous Taíno and Africans) to survive in remote areas of the mountain ranges of eastern Hispaniola (today’s Dominican Republic, or DR). Animals also made possible a backwoods hunting culture in those mountains, which helped people resist colonial subjugation and, later, post-colonial campaigns to turn them into plantation laborers in Haiti.
The tall tales told about these animal spirits transform Dominican men into trickster heroes doing battle with inexplicable foes, preserving a psychic and cultural space for resistance in their lives which, Derby contends, continue to be largely governed by forces outside of their control — as they were during the colonial era.
Although the central borderlands serve as a frontier between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, they lack any border demarcation, installations or personnel. Belief in the baka/bacá permeates both parts of the island, but in the DR it is believed that only Haitian sorcery can create or get rid of one. Both Dominicans and Haitians know about the bacá and many report having encounters with them, but this knowledge is considered taboo and not discussed in public.
Soon after she published her book, which puts a spotlight on spirits who prefer to be invisible, Derby fell during a walk and broke three fingers. “I joke that I was being punished by the bacá, but that is a completely plausible story to Haitians and Dominicans,” she said.
“One of the points in the book is that the nation states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic have had moments of official enmity since the Haitian Revolution in the 19th century,” she remarked. “But these stories knit Haitians and Dominicans together, and they also are the same stories… Intimate encounters with these spirit demons are like a stamp of being Haitian or Dominican.”
People commonly associate bacá with ill-gotten wealth. Writing in the introduction to “Bêtes Noires,” Derby says, “I characterize baka as ‘commodity familiars,’ an analytic that reduces them to one singular defining motif of the stories — profit as theft — since the elusive creature enables the stealth acquisition of wealth, albeit at a grave cost...
“Secrecy is a key aspect of this phenomenon, which one might say is actually a characteristic feature of Latin American capitalism, since the motor of capitalist investment and its profits has long been invisible to locals on the ground.”
Currently, Derby is doing a series of talks about the book in both university and public settings where she can introduce her research to Dominican immigrant communities in the U.S. The latter have included an event at a bookstore in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City in late April and another scheduled for a Dominican restaurant in Los Angeles in late May.
Caribbean scholars weigh in on “Bêtes Noires”
Derby presented her book at UCLA at an April 10 event cosponsored by the department of history, social sciences division, African Studies Center and Latin American Institute, at which three scholars of the Caribbean served as commentators.
“One of the things I really admire about the book is its ability to shine a spotlight on bacá storytelling as conveying [a] sort of spiritual and material assemblage of colonial origins and Indigenous origins wagging their long tails into the present, while observing the transatlantic, the diasporic and the local histories that informed these contours,” said Gabriel de Aviles Rocha, Vasco de Gama Assistant Professor of History and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University.
He stressed that Derby’s book “recovers… a really clear narrative of four different species that comprise the baca canon, each in their own way, corralling Taino, African, Black Diasporic and Iberian elements via concrete historical processes.
“[The book] shows us a set of social, material, cultural processes that were incrementally built up over a long duration, and I think this is key, continually reactivated through acts of storytelling.”
Génesis Lara, assistant professor of Chicano and Latino studies at University of California Riverside, remarked, “One of the things that Robin, I thought, emphasized so beautifully in the text is Hispaniola as the site that sits at a central point in our understanding of modern history. [It’s] the first island that’s colonized, the first place where Christopher Columbus [was]: this assassination of a colony in the Americas, this place [where] we’re going to see Indigenous genocide on a mass scale for the first time,and the origins of African-based slavery and genocide in the region.
“What Robin’s work asks of us is to not only consider the history of regimes as historical events, but also perhaps on a deeper level, to consider how the lived experiences of these moments of intense turmoil need to be understood through the belief systems of people on the island. Specifically, looking through sorcery and Afro-Caribbean religions as re-lived, understood and created in these moments of turmoil, resistance and also repression.
“Regimes like that of Trujillo represent one of the most repressive and violent dictatorships in Latin American history, one that [sees] thousands of people disappeared and murdered over its 31-year rule. How do you reconcile with that kind of violence?” (Rafael Trujillo ruled the DR from 1934 until 1961, when he was assassinated.)
Tracing post-Trujillo politics in the DR (a short-lived period of democratic promise, followed by a coup, then a counter-coup seeking to establish a democratic system and, finally, the U.S. invasion of 1965), Lara pointed out that the principal architect of Trujillo's Web of Terror, Joaquin Balaguer, was eventually installed as president and ruled for 12 years. Another period of terror ensued that resulted in the large Dominican diaspora in the U.S. today.
“In my own research with survivors of this time period, you see the efforts of Dominicans to regain justice [and] accountability, to have army and police officials that conducted this torture be held accountable. They wanted these folks to be named. They wanted human rights on accountability on an official level. And that has never happened.”
“One of the things that Robin proposes in her work is that the power of the bacá, of a magic that’s so enormous that folks [use it as a way] to achieve justice in spaces of abuse, also [justice for] deforestation,” she said. “[The bacá] remain powerful forces in attempts to resist an ever-evolving fuku.”
Alexander Huezo, assistant professor of global and international studies at UCI, addressed, among other things, the idea of the bacá as a trauma affixed on the psyche, as well as symbol of something strange or unnatural.
“The surreptitious bacá thievery narratives are part of a larger corpus of haunting stories that hinge upon a domestic invasion by these phantasmal abhorrent creatures; specifically, they are stories of a familiar place rendered ghastly by being overrun by infernal creatures… [T]he bacá invades the workplace or the home, familiar spaces that one frequents daily and knows intimately,” he read from the book.
“Capitalism is also, in a sense, this kind of esoteric phenomenon for a peasantry that’s being forced into factories, where the wealth that’s being accrued is taking [a] form of concealed wealth and power that they just don't understand,” he remarked.
As much as tales of the bacá channel histories of trauma and fear, Huezo affirmed that they are also “a veiled assertion of a clandestine counter-memory and a modern-age, unsanctioned form of power… [These tales] have become a source of empowerment and delight for Haitian and Dominican men alike, who need this cultural object as an identity prop that keeps alive the promise of freedom. [T]he bacá is necessary for the articulation of masculinity and… resistance.” |
*Derby’s research with Turits, for which they both learned Créole, was eventually published in Haiti in French as a collection of essays and survivor testimonies, “Terreurs de frontière: le massacre des Haïtiens en République dominicaine en 1937” (Centre Challenges, 2021; trans. Elise Finelz and Hélène Cardona). Plans are currently afoot to republish the French collection in Canada in time for the Montréal Book Fair in November 2026.
** Derby previously wrote about the bacá in her 2009 book on Trujillo and in the 2013 article, “The Devil Wore Dockers” (with Marion Werner) in New West Indian Guide 84 (3–4): 294–321, but both of these works concern bacá in urban Dominican settings, where the errant spirit appears as a little black man.
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