Rivers, Borders, Colonialism, and an Island’s Evolution

• In Event: Place, Space, and Black Life

Description for Program

The 1697 Treaty of Ryswick divided the colonial jewel of Saint Domingüe into a Spanish side, later the Dominican Republic, and a French side, later Haiti. The first border consisted of the Dajabón River from the north, continuing to the Artibonite River, before the once colonial and now national boundary moves to land.
In precolonial times, French colonialists murdered 30 Spanish colonialists at the Dajabón River, which earned the river the name “Massacre River.”
In 1929, as the United States was ending its 19-year occupation of Hispañiola, a treaty ended the previously amorphous border to the south, leaving the boundaries where they are today. One Dominican leader, in the aftermath of the United States leaving the Dominican Republic, which first achieved independence from Haiti in 1844, sought to cement social and political boundaries by force.
In 1937, Rafael Trujillo, ruler of the Dominican Republic from 1930-1961, undertook a campaign to get all Haitians out of the Dominican Republic, using pronunciation of the translation of the English word “parsley” to determine who was Haitian and who was Dominican. Estimates of those killed in the “Parsley Massacre” range from 1,000 to 30,000. With records hard to obtain, what’s known is bodies were dumped in the Dajabón River; therefore, Trujillo’s military’s killings of Haitians, throughout the island, is the more famous – or infamous -- massacre at the river, given the postcolonial character of the island’s two nations. When the indigenous population was no longer, Africans were abducted by the Spanish to till crops in both the Spanish and French portions of Saint-Domingüe, which later became independent. Thus, Trujillo, of some Haitian ancestry, was murdering his own ancestry in an island comprised almost entirely of African Diaspora.
My presentation will discuss the rivers and island borders.

Author

• Michael Walters, New Jersey City University