Felicita Carrasco was born in a slatted wooden house in a village so small it doesn’t appear on maps of the Dominican Republic. Saladillo, with its single paved road, is essentially a subdivision of Las Salinas, a larger town of six thousand. The two isolated communities sit on the cusp of a mountain ridge covered with Creolean pines that stretches almost to the border with Haiti.

The family’s third child, Felicita had light skin, electric hazel eyes, and a head of dark curls flecked with blond. Most of this she inherited from her mother, Claribel, who loved Felicita’s thick…