I am proud to say that the first time I came to the Dominican Republic, it was for 10 days, the second time for four months, the third time… forever," says Dr. Lynne Guitar, continuing: 

A "late bloomer," I went back to university in 1989, after raising my daughter single-handedly (today Eileen is a high-school teacher with an M.A. in Education) and after writing two as-yet-unpublished historical-fiction novels: 1) The Legacy of Christopher Columbus, which explores how and why Ferdinand Columbus came to write his famous father's biography; 2) Tiba Balboa, the Great Sun Warrior, the story of Balboa and his discovery of the Pacific Ocean, as seen through the eyes of his Indian wife, Anayansi. 

It was research for the Columbus novel that brought me here to Santo Domingo the first time, in 1985--that was also when I first became interested in the Taínos. 

At Michigan State University, I earned dual B.A.'s (History and Anthropology) with a Certificate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, graduating suma cum laude in 1992. Thanks to Michigan State's active international program, I returned to the Dominican Republic for a 3-month overseas study in early 1992, during which I toured the island with two veteran geography professors, Dr. Robert Thomas and Dr. Oscar Horst. I stayed on an extra month in the capital after the program ended, conducting research on the Taíno Indians and making connections with Dominican scholars. Before beginning the graduate program in History at Vanderbilt University in 1993 (where I was given a 4-year teaching fellowship), I lived in San Juan, Puerto Rico for 10 months, working, practicing my Spanish, and continuing my research on the pre-colonial and early colonial Spanish Caribbean. 

At Vanderbilt University, I had the great pleasure of studying under one of the foremost scholars of Afro-Caribbean History and Culture, Dr. Jane Landers, whose work combines the best methods of History and Anthropology-Archaeology.  While my primary interest has remained the history and culture of the Caribbean's indigenous peoples, particularly the Taínos, Jane's studies and methods clearly influenced both my Master's Thesis ("La Herencia Taína: The Role of Gender in the Preservation of Taíno Culture on Hispaniola") and my doctoral dissertation ("Cultural Genesis: Relationships among Indians, Africans and Spaniards in rural Hispaniola, first half of the sixteenth century"). The latter is a study of changing relationships and cultural transition among people in the gold mines, early sugarcane plantations, and runaway slave communities of Hispaniola, rural areas where Spanish influence was not as great as it was in the capital. It was in these rural areas that popular Dominican culture, criollo culture, was born. Criollo culture, like the Dominican criollos themselves, is a dynamic, eclectic blend of Indian, African and European elements.