Borders of Visibility: Haitian Migrant Women and the Dominican Nation-State

By Jennifer L. Shoaff

An anthropological study of Haitian migrant women’s mobility in the Dominican Republic.

Borders of Visibility offers extremely timely insight into the Dominican Republic’s racist treatment of Haitian descendants within its borders. Jennifer L. Shoaff employs multisited feminist research to focus on the geographies of power that intersect to inform the opportunities and constraints that migrant women must navigate to labor and live within a context that largely denies their human rights, access to citizenship, and a sense of security and belonging.
 
Paradoxically, these women are both hypervisible because of the blackness that they embody and invisible because they are marginalized by intersecting power inequalities. Haitian women must contend with diffuse legal, bureaucratic and discursive state-local practices across “border” sites that situate them as a specific kind of threat that must be contained. Shoaff examines this dialectic of mobility and containment across various sites in the northwest Dominican Republic, including the official border crossing, transborder and regional used-clothing markets, migrant settlements (bateyes), and other rural-urban contexts.
 
Shoaff combines ethnographic interviews, participant observation, institutional analyses of state structures and nongovernmental agencies, and archival documentation to bring this human rights issue to the fore. Although primarily grounded in critical ethnographic practice, this work contributes to the larger fields of transnational feminism, black studies, migration and border studies, political economy, and cultural geography. Borders of Visibility brings much needed attention to Haitian migrant women’s economic ingenuity and entrepreneurial savvy, their ability to survive and thrive, their often impossible choices whether to move or to stay, returning them to a place of visibility, while exposing the very structures that continue to render them invisible and, thus, expendable over time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Nov 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9780817391584

Book preview

BORDERS OF VISIBILITY

BORDERS OF VISIBILITY

HAITIAN MIGRANT WOMEN AND THE DOMINICAN NATION-STATE

JENNIFER L. SHOAFF

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2017 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Minion and Helvetica

Cover image: Haitian woman walking in front of temporary shelter; iStock © 1001nights

Cover design: Erin Bradley Dangar / Dangar Design

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-1967-0

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9158-4

An earlier version of chapter 5 was published in Feminist Studies, Volume 43, Number 2 (2017)

This book is dedicated to Fanm Vanyan: To the valiant and courageous women at the center of this book and to those at the center of my life—those who have come before and those who continue to walk alongside me

—In Memory of Mislin Yuasen Fiseme (Fifa)

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Paradox of (In)Visibility

PART I. MOBILITY

1. Afro-Caribbean Women On the Move: Historiographies of Gender, Race, and Trade

2. Mobile Livelihoods, Transborder Markets, and Gendered Geographies of Power

3. Fanm Vanyan: Making Place, Making Home in Batey Sol

PART II. CONTAINMENT

4. The Book of Foreigners: The Race/Gender Contours of Documentation and Citizenship

5. The Beggar Mother: Discursive Formations of Deviant Black Motherhood and the Racial Intimacies of Anti-Haitian Nationalism

6. A Politics of Expendability: Deportation, Nativism, and State-Local Control

Epilogue: When the Ground Falls Out Beneath Her: Reflections on the (In)Visibility of Privilege

Notes

Glossary

References

Index

Illustrations

1.1. Tourist street art for sale

1.2. Fruit vendor at Cabarete Beach

2.1. Official border crossing at Dajabón-Ouanaminthe

2.2. Footbridge at border crossing

2.3. Inspections on footbridge by border agent

2.4. State monitor regulating transport with whip

2.5. Human rights monitors

2.6. Anadina at Mamachia’s house in Ouanaminthe

2.7. Military checkpoint (eastbound from the border to Santiago)

2.8. Military checkpoint (westbound from Santiago to border)

3.1. Batey Sol

3.2. Fanm Vanyan proyecto de las velas (candle project)

3.3. Fila with her father’s ficha and family documents in Batey Sol

3.4. Etté washing clothes outside her home in Batey Sol

3.5. Women outside batey barracks

3.6. Makeshift storefront in Batey Sol

4.1. MUDHA seminario, December 11, 2005, Santo Domingo

E.1 Amalia with Love in Batey Sol

E.2. Dominican-based activist groups plan one-year anniversary protest against la sentencia

Acknowledgments

This book has been in process for over twenty years and was arguably first conceived when I was a student participant in a service-learning program abroad in Santiago, Dominican Republic. As a young woman, this experience was pivotal to the growth of my consciousness, my nascent critical thinking and knowledge of the deeply complex and messy realities of poverty, racism, gender oppression, and global inequality. It also offered me the first lessons of how my privilege as a white citizen of the United States functioned and my unequivocal accountability to speak truth to power, expose injustice, fight against silence and complacency, and work toward a more just and humane world. This transformative awareness set me on a path, and along my journey I have been profoundly graced with innumerous partners in the struggle who teach, challenge, question, mentor, guide, incite, support, and rage with me. This book would be impossible without them.

First and foremost, I would like to thank the community of Batey Sol. While the community’s leaders provided me with ongoing approval for and assistance with my research, everyone whom I have encountered over the years has graciously opened their community and their homes to me. I owe this work primarily to the women and their families who agreed to share their lives with me: the storytellers who artfully and selflessly, both verbally and nonverbally, gave shape to the contours of their daily lives in ways that I could better know and understand them. With a sense of urgency and intentionality, with courage and pride, with a mindful and self-aware conviction, they engage one another in rich dialogue and provocative debate and allow me to participate and learn from them along the way. This has been a heart-wrenching, difficult, and infuriating ethnography to write, but their strength, tenacity, and purpose only inspire me to work harder for them with a deep sense of responsibility—to honor them, their stories, their experiences, and their wisdom.

I have a profound sense of gratitude for Thomas Drexler who first introduced me to the batey in the spring of 1995 as director of Creighton University’s Semester Abroad program in the Dominican Republic. The partnerships he created with local scholars, activists, and community leaders exemplified the best practices of service-learning. For me, Tom was an early role model and inspiration who continues to embody the empathy, passion, humility, wisdom, critical thought, and commitment necessary for social justice work. It has been a privilege to work with individuals whose affiliation with this program over the years created opportunities for partnerships, friendships, and safe spaces of encouragement for me, particularly Kaela Volkmer; Justin and Sarah Lampe; Kate Barrett; Paul and Rosa Burson; Father John Montag, SJ; Karen Knickerbocker; and Amber Norgaard. I would also like to thank Krissy Hudgins, David Simmons, and Gerald McElroy for their insights, perspectives, and solidarity through our shared commitment to the batey.

Many Dominican-based scholars and activists and grassroots organizations have contributed, directly and indirectly, to this research over time. They work tirelessly toward the eradication of anti-Haitian racism and the promotion of civil and human rights for Haitian migrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent. The following have taken time out of their busy schedules over the years to talk with me about their work, introduce me to folks, provide me with access to an array of resources and institutions, and, literally and figuratively, carried me on the back of their motos so that I might better observe the impact of their ongoing efforts, including Oné Respe, Movimiento de las Mujeres Dominico-Haitiana (MUDHA), Solidaridad Fronteriza, Centro Cultural Dominico-Haitiano (CCDH), Groupe d’Appui aux Rapatriés et aux Réfugiés (GARR), Reconoci.do, Centro Bono, The Mariposa Center for Girls, and The Dream Project. Americo Catucho Badillo, his wife, Natasha, and Oné Respe have provided me with unparalleled perspective on Haitian-Dominican relations. Bridget Wooding, Samuel Martínez, and Eddy Tejeda provided me with early contacts and resources—their prolific scholarship and engagement in the Dominican Republic continues to influence the questions that I ask. Kees Kodde, Altagracia Tapia, Padre Regino, Patricia Suriel, and Yanlico Munesi have provided me with invaluable insights and assistance over the years. I would also like to thank Lazaro Perez and the staff at Hotel Colonial for always making sure I have a home base, a hot meal, and a safe haven from which to travel. And last but certainly not least, Sonia Pierre and the leadership at MUDHA opened their doors to me as early as my preliminary research in 2002 and allowed me to walk, talk, and march alongside them through the communities in which they serve and the events and seminarios they organize. Sonia’s commitment to the youth in the batey and beyond, her struggle for the dignity of Haitian women, and her enduring spirit and example forever changed me, my heart, and my work. She lives on in the pages of this book.

I know with certainty that this project has meant almost as much to my mentor, Arlene Torres, as it has to me—her voice is so strong within my mind and thus is woven into the pages of this book. With an unmatched degree of commitment and support, Arlene has read countless versions of this manuscript, discussed my ideas at length with me, challenged me to dig deeper and look further, offered her artful eye and prose, and even opened her home to me as I completed the final manuscript draft. She epitomizes the beauty and necessity of mentorship, and her friendship is irreplaceable in my life.

The first version of the manuscript took shape during my time in the Anthropology Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There additional mentors, Martin Manalansan, Alejandro Lugo, and Norman Whitten, brought their expertise to inform the theoretical and ethnographic directions this book would eventually take. Martin especially continues to bring my focus back to the heart of the work by reminding me of the significance of bringing these women’s lives to the page—always through a critical transnational feminist lens. Alejandro offers me unparalleled insight into the multifaceted workings of borders. Both Arlene’s and Norman’s deep commitments to the study of blackness and the complexities of power, structure, and agency in Latin America and the Caribbean continue to shape my work. Each exemplifies the best of anthropological practice.

I could not have completed this project without the uniquely generous and fierce Gina Athena Ulysse. I first met Gina on the pages of her own book nearly a decade ago, and there have been few other scholars and poets who so consistently speak to my spirit and incite me to action. Gina brings that same passion and insight to our friendship and is relentless in reminding me of the importance of this work, as well as the importance of self-care. I am also deeply grateful to both Arlene and Gina for inviting me into their larger intellectual lineages and introducing me over the years, either in person or on the page, to the Caribbeanist, black and Latina feminist, and antiracist scholars who remain so influential to my scholarship. To name some: Faye Venetia Harrison, Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Samuel Martínez, Carolle Charles, Claudine Michel, Sidney Mintz, Richard and Sally Price, Sybille Fischer, Jonathan Xavier Inda, Ana Yolanda Ramos y Zayas, Cheryl Rodriguez, A. Lynn Bolles, Ruth Behar, Arlene Dávila, Inderpal Grewal, Lisa Malkki, Stephen Gregory, Nina Glick-Schiller, Mimi Sheller, Ginetta Candelario, David and Kimberly Simmons, Aimee Marie Cox, and Robin D. G. Kelly.

I would most certainly not have thought to pursue a PhD without the unwavering encouragement of Thomas Davies Jr., then director of the Latin American studies program at San Diego State University. Tom helped expand my growing knowledge of Haitian-Dominican relations by introducing me to the comparative historical and imperial borders that span Latin America. His daughter, my friend Jenny, quite literally navigated the challenging terrain of the US-Mexico border with me, while offering her sharply intelligent insights. At Illinois, I benefited from the anthropological training of groundbreaking and critical scholars, alongside a cohort of colleagues, each of whom I feel very fortunate to have learned from by their example. I want to especially thank Andrew Orta, Janet Keller, Alma Gottlieb, Steve Leigh, Zsuzsa Gille, Virginia Dominguez, Nancy Abelman, Ellen Moodie, Gilberto Rosas, and Matti Bunzl. A special thank you to Janet Keller who provided her exceptional editorial eye to the final version of this manuscript. I am eternally grateful for the enduring friendships and camaraderie of my graduate cohort who continue to inspire and challenge me through their own critical praxis, especially Alyssa Garcia, Joy Sather-Wagstaff, Pilar Egüez Guevara, Jason Ritchie, Brian Montes, Karin Berkhoudt, Petra Jelinek, Jill Wightman, Nicole Tami, Allison Goebel, Aide Acosta, Teresa Ramos, and Timothy Landry.

This book shifted, changed, and altered shape and substance during my tenure as a professor of gender and race studies at the University of Alabama. The opportunity to teach an array of feminist and antiracist scholarship to cohorts of graduate and undergraduate students, those who have so much at stake in their own lives within the social and historical context of the Deep South, has been one of my most rewarding experiences. I especially want to thank Kiara Hill, Tina Thomas, Kate Hendricks Thomas, Tia Simone Gardner, Aneesa Baboolal, Jennifer Barnett, Briana Royster, Raisa Parnell, Sarah Thomas, Brittany Jordan, Elizabeth Rogers, Amanda Reyes, Jennifer Joines, Amanda Bennett, Bre Swims, Momo Olugbode, Jeffrey Jones, Maury Holliman, and Michelle de la Guardia. Their profound passion and enthusiasm for learning both in the classroom and on the streets have profoundly influenced my development as a scholar-activist. I could not have thrived in such a challenging environment without the integrity and support of the following colleagues, many of whom helped me to work through and share my ideas as I wrote the final version of the book: Kristen Warner, Cassie Smith, Lucy Curzon, Barbara Jane Brickman, Brittney Cooper, Meredith Bagley, Alex Davenport, Marysia Galbraith, Russell McKutcheon, Kathy Oths, Simanti Lahiri, Merinda Simmons, Sharony Green, Steven Ramey, Michelle Robinson, Jenny Shaw, Rachel Raimist, and Julia Cherry. I am also especially grateful to Gwendolyn Ferretti, whose ethnographic engagement with immigrant activism in Alabama has fortified my commitments time and again.

My long-term ethnographic research was made possible by funding and institutional support from the following: The Wenner Gren Foundation; Fulbright-Hays; The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and the Research Grants Council, College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama. I would also like to thank the University of Alabama Press, particularly Wendi Schnaufer, as well as publisher in residence George Thompson, whose wisdom and know-how helped to bring this book to fruition.

Through innumerous natural and unnatural disasters in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and in my own backyard in the United States, I have been blessed with a tribe of colleagues and friends who strengthened this work by strengthening me. From the beginning, however, my biggest cheerleaders have been my parents, Paula and Phil Shoaff. There exist too few words to thank them for their love, compassion, patience, and dedication to me, or for their limitless encouragement, understanding, and tough love during the completion of this book. Countless times they reignited the fire I required through their own tenacious spirits and by being the voice inside my head (and ear) reminding me what this work means to me and why I continue to choose and rechoose it again and again. My parents have also given me loving siblings, Phillip and Mary, and a larger family network who continue to cheer me on, shelter me, and help remind me of who I am. To my girls and to my kiddos: you enrich my life, you are my heart and my home. My niece Allison, a burgeoning social justice warrior and intellectual in her own right, helped me to word the title of the manuscript. A special thank you to my grandmothers, Pauline Gagliano Ierisi and Elizabeth Bryan Shoaff—in their respective ways, they exemplified strength, character, independent thinking, and the fierceness of womanhood. Most importantly they taught me, through the wisdom of their own ancestors, about grace in the face of struggle and the importance of nurturing the bonds of sisterhood.

Unless noted otherwise, English translations are mine.

Introduction

The Paradox of (In)Visibility

Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism

—Audre Lorde 2007, 42

The chant "Basta ya de Exclusión; Sí a la Inclusión" (Enough Exclusion; Yes to Inclusion) echoed against the old fortified walls of the Parque Independencia.¹ Haitian migrant men and women and Dominicans of Haitian descent were joined by hundreds of advocates and scholars from across the globe to discuss the central tenets of the Inter-American Human Rights Court’s (IAHRC) ruling in Yean and Bosico v. Dominican Republic,² specifically, the rights and entitlements guaranteed under national, constitutional, and international law. The march—in honor of international human rights day on December 11, 2005—marked the culmination of the annual seminar of el Movimiento de las Mujeres Dominico-Haitiana (MUDHA): For the Respect of the Right to a Name and Nationality of Dominicans of Haitian Descent. MUDHA’s director Sonia Pierre sent buses across the country to ensure an unprecedented number of Haitian descendants could attend this particular annual gathering. The occasion was an outward expression of solidarity and a demonstration of the strategic work being done at both the grassroots and transnational levels to promote the empowerment of women, families, and children of Haitian descent. Indeed, it had been an unprecedented year for the large network of individuals who have long struggled against the discriminatory practices of the Dominican state.

As I marched alongside the participants, I could not ignore that the symbolism of the space marked a site of conquest, resistance, and struggle, and were part of the contested terrain of a divided island that bears the historical scars of colonialism, slavery, nation-building, imperial occupation, and neoliberal globalization. I could not ignore the bodies inhabiting the space who are marked as illegal nonbelongers within a racialized system of power that denies them their full humanity. I could not ignore the complex meanings of freedom that collided within the landscape across which the protesters marched. And there I was, positioned both as a white American and a scholar-activist, moving in tandem with the entrenched race, class, and gender hierarchies that derive from and transcend national borders across the region.

The contradictions on that day mirrored those that individuals in attendance have been grappling with for over a century in the Dominican Republic. While energized by the watershed victory in the Inter-American Court, feelings of fear cast a shadow onto the crowd in a year marked by an intensification of state violence, a palpable resurgence of nativist sentiment and vigilantism, and the constriction of access to the legal rights and entitlements of full citizenship. The hostile and contemptible response by the government³ in its disavowal of the IAHRC ruling left those in attendance and their loved ones back home with a deep sense of disappointment and uncertainty for what lay ahead.

As I completed writing this book, their worst fears have become a reality. On September 23, 2013, the Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling (TC186-13)—the infamous la sentencia—effectively stripped citizenship from all Dominicans of Haitian descent born in the country since 1929. The tremendous impact of such an extreme assault on the right to national membership and belonging of approximately one-quarter million individuals is yet to be comprehended fully. In the face of local and transnational outcries, the Dominican government offered a misdirected resolution to la sentencia with the Special Naturalization Law 169-14 and the National Plan for the Regularization of Foreigners. Official state discourse claims that these laws offer a path to regularization for unauthorized migrants and a route to citizenship for those stripped of their nationality as a result of the TC ruling. A decade of legislative rulings and changes to the constitution exacerbate the risk of statelessness for all Haitians in the country, including Dominicans of Haitian descent. Moreover, the obstacles to acquiring necessary paperwork and monetary resources to authorize status changes remain insurmountable for the majority of long-term residents, many of whom live in abject poverty. In effect, this legislative construction of the stateless creates frightening vulnerability for those already unable to believe that they have ever truly, fully, and safely crossed the border (Stephen 2007, 99).

Dominicanidad and the Problem of Race: Bringing Gender In

Intellectual treatises have longed attempted to site the origin of Dominican anti-Haitian racism and xenophobia in historical eras of national transition and the political economy of migration, placing particular emphasis on the state-sponsored ideological propaganda that both phenomenon have left in their wake. Produced in the wings of occupation by the United States and, in some perceptions, an earlier occupying Haiti, Dominican nationalism gave new racialized significance to the idea of a timeless Haitian threat (e.g., Chavez 2008; Derby 1994; Turits 2003; Sagás 2000) to the integrity of the national body.

Under the dictatorship of General Rafael Trujillo (1936–66), official Dominican nationalism was first and foremost an assault against blackness and its affirmation in the Dominican historical and cultural imagination. The regime and its successors forwarded an ideology of hispanidad⁴ to claim whiteness, Spanish (that is, European) descent, and Catholicism as immanent qualifiers of Dominican national essence (Sagás 2000). This cultural/racial logic, however, acts to deny blackness by devalorizing the African influence (to the extent of denying its existence) in Dominican history, culture, and identity, while at the same time privileging whiteness and the process of blanqueamiento (social and cultural lightening) (Whitten and Torres 1998). Complementing this ideology is the myth of the Dominican indio and the cultural/racial category that derives from it (Sagás 2000; Simmons 2011; Sorensen 1997). According to Silvio Torres-Saillant (1998), despite the near eradication of the indigenous Taínos during Spanish colonization, the Dominican population has historically identified with the socially constructed indio: a category typified by nonwhiteness [or levels of approximation to whiteness] as well as nonblackness, which could easily accommodate the racial in-betweenness of the Dominican mulatto (140). In this sense, Trujillo and his successors would use the myth of hispanidad and the category of indio to create a Dominican national identity framed primarily against what it was not: the embodied blackness of Haitians. The blackness ascribed to Haitians, therefore, would further buttress their enemy status as outsiders to the Dominican nation.

Whereas the Trujillo regime implemented state policies that prioritized the spread of anti-Haitianism, the Trujillo intellectuals⁵ provided the ideas that would bolster it in the national imagination (Sagás 2000, 55). Joaquín Balaguer, the infamous apologist for Trujillo who would later become his successor, stated: The Haitian immigrant has been a generator of sloth in Santo Domingo. The Ethiopian race is indolent by nature and applies no special efforts to anything useful unless it is forced to obtain its subsistence by that means (cited in Sagás 2000, 51). The intelligentsia also gave new ideological significance to the Haitian invasions of Toussaint and Dessalines after the Haitian Revolution of 1804 and the Haitian occupation of the Dominican Republic (1821–44) by using it to frame perceptions of a timeless Haitian threat to the integrity of the nation-state, not only in territorial terms but