Hispanic Review

The Dominican literary journal Brigadas Dominicanas published ten issues between December 1961 and March 1963. Its director, the Dominican poet and intellectual, Aída Cartagena Portalatín, affirmed her journal as a space open to compatriots committed to artistic and political freedom following the May 1961 assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo. Although its pages serve as an important repository for testimonial literature about the Trujillato, it is more than a simple anthology. While historians maintain that literary discourse played a negligible role during the postdictatorship moment, Brigadas reveals an intense social and political engagement by artists and intellectuals in the political and social life of the nation. Thus, rather than a time bereft of literary activity, Brigadas shows 1961–1965 as a period during which Dominican artists and intellectuals began what would be a long and continuing struggle to define the role of art and literature in a free society.