He even became the mayor of his local community. He is proud of his mixed heritage. He sees anti-Haitianism as a tool wielded by politicians like Castillo. It is hard for an outsider to understand these racial divides that are all but invisible to the eye. But looking back at the history of both nations, back to when each country took its turn at oppressing the other, healing wounds that are still fresh may seem impossible.
But the offspring of the original sugar-cane cutters are eager for change. Their parents worked under inhuman conditions to give them a chance for a better life. All they can do now is fight injustice and dream. During the ride, they had a lively conversation in Spanish, and for those brief moments, the hope for peaceful coexistence seemed within reach. This story was produced with support from Round Earth Media.
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The tragic story of a young dark-skinned girl named Moraime bookends the film. Her life is told through a voiceover, while viewers see other children in the bateyes and sugarcane fields. It describes the Perejil Massacre that executed thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian decent living in the Dominican Republic. The article also said the Dominican State Department dismissed Haitian reports of slayings as fantasies.
More than 80 years later, the film shows footage of Dominican President Danilo Medina who served from to denying accusations of racism against Haitians.
How can Dominicans be accused of being racist towards Haitians when they live and coexist with us everywhere in our country? This is a story about what happens when you limit birthright citizenship and stir up hate against a certain class of immigrants.
It takes place in the Dominican Republic. And like most other peoples in the Americas, Dominicans have had a more complicated relationship with immigration than the framers of that constitution might have anticipated. The Dominican Republic has long been dependent on a steady stream of cheap immigrant labor that cuts its sugar cane, builds its buildings, and staffs the beach resorts that draw in billions of foreign dollars a year. Almost all of that labor comes from the only country close enough, and poor enough, to have people who want to immigrate in large numbers to the Dominican Republic: its Hispaniolan twin, Haiti.
Some working-class Dominicans without clear Haitian roots resent poorer neighbors willing to accept lower wages and tough conditions. Many wealthy Dominicans who profit wildly off the cheap labor supply are eager to have strict immigration laws in place, too—not because they want less immigration, but because they want a freer hand.
Immigrants in the country illegally have no protection from workplace regulations and can be rounded up, deported, and replaced whenever convenient—including right before payday. Sound familiar? The Dominican Republic also has a long, brutal history of anti-Haitian racism. During his rule from to , the fascist dictator Rafael Trujillo built a racialized concept of Dominican national identity on the fuzzy idea that the descendants of Spanish slavery on the eastern part of the island had higher levels of European ancestry than, and thus were superior to, the descendants of French slavery on the western part of the island.
This rhetoric led to a rampage in which Dominican soldiers and allied citizens massacred thousands of people who they identified as Haitians. Martha S. Jones: The real origins of birthright citizenship. In the decades that followed, Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic remained largely confined to isolated company towns in the cane fields, known as bateyes. But in the late 20th century, Haitian immigrants and their Dominican-born children left to work in other parts of the Dominican economy.
In the s and early s, right-wing Dominican politicians tried to stretch a tiny loophole in birthright citizenship into a chasm big enough to swallow anyone of Haitian descent. Sympathetic local media helped make synonymous the words ilegal, inmigrante immigrant , extranjero foreigner , and haitiano. Courts did not like this. Dominican presidents ignored the rulings, and ultimately pulled out of the treaty establishing the court.
She played halfback for the national team because, she says, her Haitian roots made her stronger than her teammates. Her toughness and attitude surely was reflected on the field; records show that Cherlina played in five games representing the Dominican Republic, drawing a red card in one match and a yellow card in another.
The dream began unraveling when she had to renew her Dominican passport to travel with the team. She had been issued a passport as a child, but now that she was no longer a minor, she needed a cedula to renew it. Although this was before the court ruling, it was not uncommon for authorities to demand proof of a person's birthplace before issuing a cedula -- let alone a passport. Because her birth had not been recorded in the civil registry, she faced an uphill climb, and had to forfeit her dream.
Children play soccer in a dirt lot in Ouanaminthe, Haiti. She wore the Dominican jersey on her back, but the country it represented considered her a foreigner. It confounded her. She is proud of her Haitian heritage but considers herself a proud Dominican as well.
An official at Fedefutbol, the Dominican Republic's governing body for soccer, told me that Cherlina's name didn't ring a bell and that the Dominican team would never have a Haitian on it. I sent the federation the records of Cherlina's matches and asked for more details, but got no response.
Cherlina now works at a restaurant in Imbert and, since , has been among the stateless. Because her birth was not recorded in the civil registry, the law to "fix" her status would require multiple identification documents, notarized testimonies of Dominicans to vouch for her birthplace, and a two-year wait to apply for citizenship. Her father passed away, Cherlina says, and she has no idea where he kept the documents that may prove her identity and place of birth to the satisfaction of Dominican authorities.
Bernard Teillon is an undocumented Haitian immigrant who has lived in the Dominican Republic for decades. A wheelbarrow and a dream. Bernard Teillon says he has lived in the Dominican Republic for 50 years. And he wants to go back to his native Haiti, as soon as he can afford it.
A long-time laborer in the fields -- sowing and harvesting crops -- Bernard would qualify for legal work status under a recent Dominican law to address the population of undocumented immigrants.
The National Regularization Plan was the government's answer to the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants already living in the Dominican Republic, some for decades. A census of migrants found that about , Haitian immigrants live in the Dominican Republic. The requirements to get right with the law sound reasonable enough :. Prove your identity and provide evidence of how long you've been in the country, your ties to Dominican society, and your work and socioeconomic condition.
It's an invitation to "come out of the shadows," to borrow a phrase from the U. These apparently simple requirements, however, proved for many to be a bureaucratic nightmare, a hell brimming with red tape.
Bernard, for instance, struggled to get a copy of his Haitian passport or birth certificate to prove his identity.
He said he couldn't afford the time or money to put together the required paperwork. It is not impossible to get legal status without a birth certificate or passport.
Some 20, undocumented immigrants registered without them, according to the Dominican Interior Ministry, but the alternate routes are not easy. It might require Bernard getting seven sworn statements from Dominicans who would attest to his life in the country. Bernard found it too daunting. His neighbors are mostly Haitian. What Dominicans would vouch for him? Do the Dominicans he has worked for or interacted with remember him or know him well enough to write a testimony on his behalf?
The immigration controversy is red hot, so many Dominicans might not want to put their name as a reference for an undocumented immigrant. Bernard rents a small room in the Hato Mayor neighborhood of Santiago, the country's second-largest city. Immigration raids have snared neighboring tenants, and he knows it could happen to him. Timeline: A brief history of Hispaniola. Still, he wants to leave. All this has taken me to a place of consciousness to go back to my country.
He wants to depart the Dominican Republic on his own terms. But he says he is too poor; even saving money to pay for transportation to the border is out of reach. Next to his room, a wheelbarrow is locked to a post with a chain.
It's an old wheelbarrow, and it is the one asset Bernard owns that helps him earn money doing small jobs. Bernard remembers it as a place of permanent persecution during the rule of strongman Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Though times have changed in Haiti, it made me wonder about the effects of trying to solve a country's immigration problem without talking to the nation of origin.
Can taking a unilateral, hard-line stance against Haitians work if there is no future in Haiti either? Bernard says his health is failing. The stress makes him feel that his age has caught up to him.
Mirlande Saint Jean waits to get her national ID card after sleeping in line on the sidewalk. Long lines -- and longer waits. The sun was past its highest point in the sky in Puerto Plata, the historic port city on the Dominican Republic's northern coast, when I met Mirlande Saint Jean. She was outside the city's main government office, waiting in line to try to get her immigration status "regularized. She had been waiting since before the sun came up -- actually, since before the sun went down the day before.
But Mirlande says she really has been waiting for much longer. The authorities tell her she is missing this document, or that document. This is her fourth trip to city hall.
Everyone slept on the street," she said. In the city of Santiago, the line of immigrants waiting at city hall stretches for blocks. There was no dire situation that pulled her to emigrate, she just felt too closed-in in Haiti.
She wanted to be somewhere with more possibilities. She settled in Puerto Plata, working first in a restaurant and now at a villa. Politically, she is not opposed to the government's immigration controls. Every country needs to have its residents documented properly, she says. Technically, the process doesn't cost money, but Mirlande and others have had to hire attorneys to help sort through the law.
The scene in Puerto Plata is repeated in other cities around the Dominican Republic. At dawn the next morning in Santiago, a line of migrants stretches around the block containing city hall and continues across the street along a park. He says that better life never materialized. He has a job as a doorman, he says, but "I'm still struggling. My job doesn't pay well. The man, a native of Gonaives, Haiti, doesn't hold much hope that his life will improve with legal status, but after 14 years in the Dominican Republic, it's home now.
Surprisingly, many of the immigrants I meet in line aren't opposed to the idea of registering the undocumented. It's only fair, they said, that a nation should know who is living within its borders.
But this isn't the way to do it. The laws, they say, need to be carried out fairly. It left me wondering: How can a nation tackle the issue of illegal immigration -- by asking migrants to trust the government's proposals -- when the same government has not addressed its own legacy of racism? Prejudice on Hispaniola dates back to the first colonies and intensified as Dominican leaders portrayed Haitians as inferior to those with Spanish and indigenous roots.
How can immigrants give the government the benefit of the doubt that there are no ulterior, xenophobic motives behind the new policies, when they have suffered discrimination from the same government for generations? A Dominican taxi driver contends with Santo Domingo traffic.
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