Research

Racialized Statelessness: Human Rights and People of Haitian Descent in the Dominican Republic

Random, mass deportations of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent from the Dominican Republic to Haiti are increasing: 20,000 and 30,000 are now expelled per year. During these forced relocations, which violate the Dominican Republic’s obligations under international conventions, children are separated from parents, workers are forced to leave behind their wages and belongings, thousands are held for days without food, some are brutalized by the Dominican military, and people who speak no Haitian creole find themselves peremptorily dumped across the border dividing the island of Hispaniola.

These expulsions are possible because of a systematic denial of citizenship to the black children born to Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Article 11 of the Dominican constitution guarantees citizenship to all born within its territory save for those "in transit" and the children of foreign diplomats; the government has chosen to interpret Haitian-descent populations as “in transit,” despite their long tenure in the country. As a result, 200,000-800,000 individuals of Haitian origin are left in a state of “permanent illegality.”

Since 1999, a U.S.-based alliance of human rights advocates have pursued cases against the Dominican Republic before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IAHCR); the cases allege that expulsions have been race-based and therefore inherently discriminatory. Though in 2001 the Dominican government agreed to curtail such events, mass expulsions continue apace.

Research Questions:

This project asks: How has the statelessness of Haitians and people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic become racialized, and with what consequences? This question stems from my conviction, informed by the fields of anthropology and history, that “it is possible and productive to track the ways in which the notion of race is (or has been) exported, the ways it is (or has been) consumed, and the ways it becomes—but need not be—doxa” (Dominguez 1998, p. 376). This study examines how the category of race shifts as it travels through different geopolitical and institutional realms.

The first phase of the project focuses on the historical evolution of race ideas and practices in international law. I ask how human rights work uses and potentially reifies the concept of race in an effort to protect stateless people. Like anthropologist Liisa Malkki, I am interested in the “construction of the refugee as an object of concern and knowledge for the international community and for a particular variety of humanism” (1997, p. 224). Drawing on historians who have examined how race defines citizenship in specific nation-states (e.g., Davila 2003; Ferrer 1999; Gould 1998) and the emerging field of anthropology of human rights (e.g., Goodale and Merry, 2007; Merry 2006), Phase I considers how particular concepts of culture, race, and rights are developed as an influential discourse and a form of global law. I will focus on the racial basis for the legal cases brought before the IAHCR regarding deportations and denial of citizenship.

Drawing on the anthropology of race (e.g., de la Cadena 200; Dominguez 1993) and of the state (especially Trouillot 2001), Phase II traces how citizenship has become racialized in the contemporary Dominican Republic. As Trouillot suggests, ethnographers are perfectly positioned to examine “the state is a set of practices and processes and their effects” (2001, p. 127). I will investigate how non-governmental organizations based in the Dominican Republic dedicated to the defense of Haitian human rights construct race. In addition, I will study ethnographically how this stateless population negotiates racialized experiences with the state and with Dominican peers. Haitians and Dominico-Haitians are regularly refused basic education beyond the fourth grade; they cannot access health care services, open a bank account, get a driver’s license, vote, get a good job, marry, own land, or claim a pension. Through interviews with children, life history interviews with adults, and participant observation in Haitian neighborhoods in Santo Domingo (the capital city) and Dajabón (on the border with Haiti) over a period of nine months, this multi-sited ethnography examines how their stateless status contributes to their daily experiences of racial discrimination, labor exploitation, and vulnerability. To challenge essentialist pronouncements of generalized anti-Haitianism, it is also important to document, ethnographically, how this black population interacts with Dominican citizens (Martínez 2003).

Background--Racialized Citizenship:

Historically, Haitian and Haitian-descent populations were concentrated in the bateyes, or workers’ barracks on sugar plantations. Today, however, Haitians also work on construction sites, in the tourist industry, in hotels and restaurants, in free trade zones, on the streets of Santo Domingo, and (as more and more women immigrate) as domestic workers. The urbanization of immigrants has given greater visibility to this vulnerable population, creating a backlash in recent years (Alfonso & Cedano, 2006; Evertsz, 2001; Gavigan, 1996; Lozano, 1997; Silie et al, 2002; Wooding & Moseley-Williams, 2004).

The Dominican racial classification system rests upon a distinction between Dominicans and Haitians in what Itzigsohn and Dore-Cabral call “a superposition of racial and national categories” (2000, p. 232). This distinction is based on a long history of antagonism between the countries, exacerbated by Haitian rule of the Dominican Republic between 1822 and 1844 (Martínez 2003). As social historians have shown, the Trujillo regime garnered political support from peasants and elite alike through not only favorable agrarian policies and the strengthening of national boundaries but an anti-Haitian ideology most gruesomely illustrated (and, as Turits suggests, fueled) by the 1937 massacre of fifteen thousand Haitians in the northern frontier (Derby 1994; Turits 2003, 2002). The Trujillo regime elevated the already-popular term indio [Indian] as an official category on the national identification card (Torres-Saillant 1998). The indio category rests upon a denial of African heritage and the embrace of a mythic mixture of European/Hispanic and Taino Indian blood. The contemporary racial classification system in the Dominican Republic identifies 75% of the population as indio; 15% as blanco [white],and 10% as negro [black]; the term negro is generally reserved for Haitians and Dominico-Haitians (Duany 1998).

The overlap of race and nation compels a racialization of citizenship, with implications for social relations and economic opportunities. Because formal work in the economically viable sectors requires the national identity card (see, e.g., Gregory 2007), citizenship sets up a particular political economy of race (Lozano 1993; Turits 2003). I posit that the intersection of international, national, and local notions of race and citizenship that bear upon Haitian-descent residents in the DR is a fruitful context to examine the continuous production of flexible citizenship, which Ong defines as “a dual process of self-making and being-made within webs of power linked to the nation-state and civil society” (1996, p. 742).

Research Design and Work Plan:

This project investigates how poor Haitians and Dominico-Haitians are racialized, in different realms and for different purposes, and with what consequences. Phase I investigates how race has figured, over time, in key legal frameworks in the field of human rights. In May 2008, I aim to complete the literature review I have already begun of historical and anthropological texts that analyze the evolution of international human rights frameworks (see, e.g., Cowan et al 2001; Hunt 2007; Ignatieff, 2001; Lauren, 2003; Merry 2006; Wilson 1997) and their impact on social movements and national-level politics (e.g., Rajagopal 2003). In June, I will focus on the racial basis for the legal cases brought before the IAHCR regarding deportations and denial of citizenship: I will collect case files, legal briefs, transcripts of oral arguments, court resolutions, and related documents, analyzing them to trace how race is constructed in international human rights legal discourse. I will also identify and interview relevant actors, including lawyers arguing for and against the case.

During Phase II, beginning July 2008, I will relocate to Santo Domingo, where I will remain for seven months. In the first three months I will conduct participant observation with the non-governmental organizations dedicated to protecting the human rights of Haitian-descent populations to examine how they socially construct race in the DR. I will also interview key figures in the government and judicial system who have been involved in shaping policies that govern migrant populations, and I will collect and analyze relevant policy and legal documents that reveal how discourses of race travel and are re-made in the national realm. During this period I will be living and doing participant observation in a popular community with a large Haitian-descent population, frequenting neighborhood religious and social organizations to expand my social networks. From October 2008-January 2009, I will interview stateless residents of Santo Domingo to see how they negotiate state-established racial categories and how race is made significant in their daily lives, with the goal of completing 30 life history interviews with adults and 30 formal interviews with children. In this period I will continue participant observation with community groups. In February I will relocate to Dajabón, a border city of 25,000 through which hundreds travel on market days. There, for two months, I will conduct participant observation and interviews with 15 Haitian or Dominico-Haitian adults and 15 children from this same population. It is important to include the experiences of these residents because, as scholars have shown, the border area is significantly “bicultural and transnational” (Turits 2002, p. 594).

From April-August 2009, I will dedicate my time to completing a first draft of an ethnography that considers how different constructions of race both protect and increase the vulnerability of stateless people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic.

Significance:

This research project promises a number of significant contributions. First, this study will interrupt common yet essentialist discourses of anti-Haitianism and racism by documenting the ways in which race is made to matter at various levels as well as the ways that people negotiate that social fact locally. Second, my study fruitfully marries historical studies of race with histories of international human rights frameworks. Third, in exploring the racialization of citizenship, I am extending key work in contemporary political anthropology; specifically, I build on Aihwa Ong’s notion of “flexible citizenship,” which examines how race becomes embedded in notions of citizenship in the context of changing political-economic conditions (1999; 2006). This study expands that approach to investigate how local social and less proximate governmental and legal forces interact to produce racialized statelessness and how social relations and identities at various intersecting levels are influenced by displacement and vulnerability. Finally, by examining the role international humanitarian associations play in adapting notions of race and helping them travel across different geopolitical spheres, I contribute to the anthropology of human rights, which examines how human rights language gets reshaped on the local level, often in contradictory ways.

Bibliography

Alfonso, H. D. and Cedano, S. (eds). (2006). Frontera en Transición. Santo Domingo: Ford Foundation.

Cowan, J, Dembour, M. & Wilson, R. (eds.). 2001. Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Davila, J. (2003). Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917-1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

De la Cadena, M. (2000). Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru. Durham: Duke University Press.

De la Fuente, A. (2001). A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Derby, L. (1994). Haitians, magic, and money: Raza and society in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands, 1900-1937. Comparative Studies in Society and History 36(3), 488-526.

Dominguez, V. (1998). Exporting U.S. concepts of race: Are there limits to the U.S. model? Social Research 65(2), 369-399.

Dominguez, V. (1993). A taste for ‘the Other’: Intellectual complicity in racializing practices. Current Anthropology 35(4), 333-348.

Duany, J. (1998). Reconstructing racial identity: Ethnicity, color, and class among Dominicans in the United States and Puerto Rico. Latin American Perspectives, 25(3), 147-172.

Ferrer, A. (1999). Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-98. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Gavigan, P. (1996). Beyond the Bateyes: Haitian Immigrants in the Dominican Republic. New York: National Coalition for Haitian Rights.

Goodale, M. and Merry, S.E. (eds). (2007). The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gould, J. (1998). To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indian Communities and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Gregory, S. (2007). The Devil Behind the Mirror: Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ignatieff, Michael. (2001). Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hunt, L. (2007). Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W.W. Norton.

Itzigsohn, J., and Dore-Cabral, C. (2000). Competing identities: Race, ethnicity and panethnicity among Dominicans in the United States. Sociological Forum, 15(2), 225-247.

Lauren, P.G. (2003). The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lozano, W. (ed.) (1993). La cuestion haitiana en Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo: FLASCO.

Lozano, W. (1997). La urbanización de la pobreza. Santo Domingo: FLACSO.

Malkki, L. (1997). Speechless emissaries: Refugees, humanitarianism and dehistoricization. Pp. 223-254 in K.F. Olwig and K. Hastrup (eds) Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object. New York: Routledge.

Martínez, S. (2003). Not a Cockfight: Rethinking Haitian-Dominican Relations. Latin American Perspectives 30(3), pp. 80-101.

Merry, S.E. (2006). Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ong, A. (2006). Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.

Ong, A. (1999). Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press.

Ong, A. (1996). Cultural citizenship as subject-making: Immigrants negotiate racial and cultural boundaries in the United States. Current Anthropology 37, 5, 737-762.

Rajagopal, B. (2003). International Law From Below: Development, Social Movements, and Third World Resistance.  New York: Cambridge University Press.

Silie, R. and Segura, C. (2002). Una Isla para Dos. Santo Domingo: FLACSO.

Silie, R., Segura, C. and Dore Cabral, C. (2002). La Nueva Inmigración Haitiana. Santo Domingo: FLACSO.

Torres-Saillant, S. (2000). The tribulations of blackness: Stages in Dominican racial identity. Latin American Perspectives, 25(3), 126-146.

Trouillot, M.R. (2001). The anthropology of the state in the age of globalization: Close encounters of the deceptive kind. Current Anthropology 42, 1, 125-137.

Trouillot, M.R. (1990). Haiti: State against Nation. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Turits, Richard. (2003). Foundations of Despotism:  Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.

Turits, R. (2002). A World Destroyed, A Nation Imposed:  The 1937 Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic. Hispanic American Historical Review 82 (3), 589-635.

Wilson, R. (ed) (1997). Human Rights, Culture and Context: Anthropological Perspectives. Pluto Press.

Wooding, B. and Moseley-Williams, R. (2004). Inmigrantes haitianos y dominicanos de ascendencia haitiana en la República Dominicana. Santo Domingo: Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo y el Servicio Jesuita a Refugiados y Migrantes.

The National Coalition of Haitian Rights, accessed on 20 July 2007 at http://www.nchr.org/hrp/dr/report_overview.htm.  

See Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Situation of Haitian migrant workers and their families in the Dominican Republic. Washington, DC: Organization of American States. Accessed 15 July 2007 at http://www.cidh.org/countryrep/DominicanRep99/Chapter9.htm.

Aide-et-Action, Centro Montalvo, El Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico-Haitiana (MUDHA), El Servicio Jesuita a Refugiados y Migrantes, and others.

Teachers College, Columbia University.