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THE ITALIAN LEGACY IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
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The ancestors, descendants, and relatives of Marcio Enrique Veloz Maggiolo, according to the most au-
thoritative genealogy, cover a wide spectrum of Dominican history; however, in this chapter we are interested
in their direct ancestors of Italian origin. Marcio Enrique is the great-grandson of Bartolomeo Maggiolo Pelle-
rano, who was born in Genoa in 1825 and who arrived in the country along with his maternal uncle Giovanni
Battista Pellerano Costa, the founding members of the Pellerano family in the Dominican Republic. Barto-
lomeo had a son with Carmen Ravelo named Manuel Américo Maggiolo Ravelo who in turn married María
Rafael Hipólita Núñez Cabral, from San Cristóbal, on April 5, 1888. The daughter of this couple was Mercedes
Rosa Maggiolo Núñez, who became the wife of Francisco Javier Veloz Molina, who then became the parents
of Marcio Enrique Veloz Maggiolo, born in Santo Domingo on August 13, 1936.
16
Marcio is among the most knowledgeable, versatile, and renowned of the Dominican men of letters. He
has cultivated and produced works of anthropology, history, theater, poetry, and journalism, as well as novels
and essays. Although he does contribute to newspapers, he is more of an essayist.
As a journalist, he has experienced a full career. He started as a proofreader and then worked as a copy
editor. He went on to become a street reporter until becoming a cultural editor for the newspaper
El Caribe
.
He has worked on the literary supplements
Isla Abierta
(in the newspaper
Hoy
) and
Colloquio
(in
El Siglo
) and
the magazine
Ahora
.
17
His first works are two biblically inspired novels,
El Buen robo
(1960) and
Judas
(1962), the latter of which
earned him his first national literature prize in the same year it was published. He won other national awards—
for novels in 1962, 1981, and 1999; for a short story in 1981; and for poetry in 1961.
In the opinion of critics, his best work on anthropology is
Arqueología prehistórica de Santo Domingo
(Prehis-
toric Archeology of Santo Domingo). But aside from a focus on antiquities, quasi-contemporary history has
formed the principal inspiration for his works, in a saga that includes the neighborhood of Villa Francisca, the
Trujillo dictatorship, and the 1965 Revolution. These are his works:
La vida no tiene nombre
(1965),
De abril en
Adelante
(1975),
Materia prima
(1988),
Ritos de Cabaret
(1991),
Trujillo, Villa Francisca y otros fantasmas
(1996),
El
Jefe iba descalzo
(1999), and
Memoria Tremens
(2009). The neighborhood adds “local color” to his narratives. He
once confessed to Luis Martin Gómez that “it is a phenomenon that I call
barrialidad
[neighborhoodness].”
18
Over the years, Marcio has gained a considerable reputation, and he is often consulted and widely dis-
cussed in the press and in academia. He is constantly reimagining himself and expanding his horizons. As he
recently stated, “I am a narrator of my own memory and that of someone else, and these two sometimes inter-
twine to form another.” He has cast his gaze outward and often given his opinion on a much more expansive
neighborhood—Latin America.
The characteristic of Latin America is that it is still looking for a unifying identity that it will not find, be-
cause the existing identities are various; and they are also impacted by the effects of globalization and transna-
tionalization. […] [However], we seek an identity with a unifying sense of nationalistic appearance such as the
one that Europe once showed us was necessary and possible.
19
Not like the nationalism typical of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, but a spiritual identity that express-
es the identity of the peoples.
20
A future portrait gallery. In the absence of broader and more specific information, other Dominicans of
Italian origin who have participated in the field of journalism have yet to receive their due recognition, yet we
wish to acknowledge their contributions in this note.
21