State-Making and Status-Making in the Eighteenth Century Hispaniola Borderland

• In Event: Mapping Routes Through the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands

Abstract

Through an analysis of the mapping practices of Hispaniola’s colonial border, this presentation shows how status and racialized subjecthood revolved heavily around territorial possession and sovereignty. The French and Spanish attempts to delimit the border, whether on the island or across the Atlantic, paradoxically reveal a series of important dialogues – sometimes cooperative, sometimes violent – between both sides. This presentation provides a glimpse into this border’s deeply violent history; what lay behind the official treaties and mapping practices of the border was a volatile reality on the ground ridden with anxiety and instability over the control for territorial possession. Whether actively crossing the border themselves or having the limits redrawn around them, people have been crossing this border since its inception; in doing so some had the power to transform their status from enslaved to free through the adoption of a new nationality. The present-day struggles between the Dominican State’s belief in its right to sovereignty and the basic human rights to a nationality for those Haitian migrants living across the border must be viewed in conjunction with this island’s complicated colonial history. The French and Spanish diplomatic correspondence over border issues dating back to the eighteenth century shows a history of the island that cannot isolate one side from the other.

Author

• Nathalie Bragadir, University of Southern California