Haitian behind the ears: Racial and national identities along the Haitian-Dominican border

• In Event: En el ojo del huracán “Precariedad”: hacia una nueva conciencia dominicana fronteriza caribeña.

Abstract

This paper examines the construction of race and nation on the Haitian-Dominican border. Traditionally, Hispaniolan race scholars have described the Dominican racial worldview as negrophobic, Hispanophile, and anti-Haitian. These studies, however, have often been based on the views held by elites and have overlooked the experiences of Afro-Dominicans and of Dominicans of Haitian descent.

This paper expands the conversation on Dominican identity by examining notions of race and nation in Comendador, Elias Pina, a place where Haitians and Dominicans are not only bound by historical, sociocultural, economic, and genealogical ties, but also share somewhat similar conditions of exclusion and marginality.

The border region is of central importance in the construction of Dominican national identity. It is perceived as the country’s first line of defense against Haitian threats. As such, it has come to be perceived as the country’s area of weakness; the site where Haiti and all the misfortune that is associated with it, seeps into the Dominican Republic. In this paper, I analyze how border residents negotiate their own identities within a context in which the Dominican state imposes notions of Dominicanness and Haitianness that often contradict their own local realities.

Author

• Tess M Kulstad Gonzalez, Grinnell College