My book is about the miracle economy of the Virgin of Altagracia in late eighteenth-century Hispaniola. I argue that the devotion’s visual and material culture of wonders helped shape Indigeneity into a concept that supported the political formation of an imagined community of local whites, the criollo. The point of departure is the recent musealization of a series of miracle paintings that were made for the sanctuary of the Virgin in Higuey, the easternmost province of Hispaniola, in the late eighteenth century. Through them, I trace the Virgin’s unknown colonial origin story and its entanglement today in nativist or “criollo” politics in The Dominican Republic. At issue is how the sonic and material traits of these paintings have been mobilized to transform myth into fact and enflesh the criollo.

Situating the book’s argument within a critical criollo discourse that centers Black Latin America, Miraculous Altagracia analyzes maps, wondrous ephemera, devotional prints, icons, Afro-syncretic Marian chants, and sacred landscapes to foreground the potent industry of miracles that forged Antillean communities into being.