Mart nez-Vergne examines the development of a sense of nationhood in the Dominican Republic, with particular focus on the cities of Santo Domingo (the capital) and San Pedro de Macor's (a booming sugar town) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She argues that the Dominican intelligentsia impressed on the rest of society a discourse based on modern agricultural techniques, secular education, private property, and an open political process, but black immigrants from the West Indies, bourgeois women, and working class men and women developed their own--suprisingly modern--notions of citizenship in their daily interactions with city officials.