Between the Dead and the Living: The Significance of Zombies, Ghosts and 'Muertos Civiles' for Black Haitian-Dominican Activists in the Dominican Republic

• In Event: Interdiction, Terror, and Resistance: On The Structural Positionality of Blackness in the Americas

Abstract

Over the past two decades the Dominican government has implemented a series of laws stripping Dominicans of Haitian descent of their Dominican nationality, rendering them stateless. Black Dominicans of Haitian descent who form part of the Reconoci.do movement often state that they are civically dead, describing themselves as muertos civiles, zombies or ghosts living in legal limbo and not fully recognized as human beings. Reconoci.do’s members organize to fight against their figurative deaths, but their struggles are not limited to a fight for legal recognition. It is also about survival in the context of higher rates of death as a direct result of systemic racism and social exclusion. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research in the Dominican Republic this paper explores the role of zombies, ghosts and muertos civiles in resisting against the figurative and literal deaths of Black individuals who form part of a large-scale movement against statelessness. Through an analysis of Reconoci.do’s activism this paper highlights how the members of this particular movement are constantly living with death and the forms of resistance developed in the process. This paper asks how might Sharpe’s (2016) analysis of “wake work” and “Black people’s ability to everywhere and anywhere…produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence on existing” (Sharpe 2016) allow for the interpretation of this movement’s different manifestations of resistance to death by racism?

Author

• Amarilys Estrella, New York University