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The Borders of Hispaniola

By Alexa

A Spaniard I was born yesterday
In the afternoon I became French
And an Ethiopian during the night
Today they say I am British
What shall I be tomorrow? --from Haiti, c. 1900; author unknown.

In The Farming of the Bones, Haitian-American Edwidge Danticat vividly detailed the 1937 mass murder of at least 30,000 Haitians at the behest of the Dominican Republic's el maximo jefe Rafael Trujillo.

Tragedy, not geography, forms the real border. Its name, as any Dominican or Haitian can tell you, is the same as that of the deceptively calm northern river: The Massacre. During just a few weeks in October 1937, Dominican soldiers killed 30,000 Haitians along the border because the victims' skin was dark, even though Dominicans were just a few shades lighter. The events still divide the Dominican Republic and Haiti so deeply that there may as well be an ocean not only around them but between them.

Rio Masacre wasn't the beginning of antihaitianismo, nor was it the end.  Haitians are despised in this country - look no further than immigration policies over the years. Haitians are turned away; Cubans are by and large accepted through the "wet foot, dry foot" policy. Haitians are the butt of a thousand lame jokes, referred to as "boat people," "HIV carriers," or "voodoo worshippers," and I have a clear memory of my Tio Jose's first wife, loud and shrill and unapologetic, probably drunk, attesting that "not even God loves a Haitian."

I was 4 or 5 years old at the time, and the memory stays with me because in the laughter that followed, there were mild protests of what tia had said, but my mother's face became still and she led my out of the room without a word. My mother was half-Haitian and "passed for" chabina (light-skinned Kreyol) or island Caribbean. Twenty-three years later, I am my mother's daughter and still I wonder how she kept her composure when antihaitianismo showed its ugly face in her own home.
In the Book of Judges, forty thousand Ephraimites were killed at the River Jordan because their inability to pronounce "Shibboleth" identified them as foreigners.

On the Dominican border, Trujillo's men asked anyone with dark skin to identify the sprigs of parsley they held up. Haitians, whose Kreyol uses a wide, flat "R", could not pronounce the trilled "R" in the Spanish word for parsley, "perejil." Dominicans still refer to the massacre as El Corte, the cutting, alluding to the machetes the Dominican soldiers used so they could say the carnage was the work of peasants defending themselves; only the government could afford to kill with bullets. El Corte also suggested to the Haitians' work of harvesting sugar cane (ironically, soldiers did not touch the Haitians who stayed on the Americans' sugar plantations).

Veteran Dominican diplomat Lil Despradel wrote in 1970: "The Dominican worker or peasant, mulatto or black, who hears frequently about his Spanish and Indian ancestors and who is qualified as 'Indio' in official documents, slowly adopts the racial ideology of the dominant classes and considers himself of Indian origin." (In denial about their African ancestry, many Dominican "Indios" are not even aware that they are abetting the cover-up of the Western Hemisphere's first genocide.)

Voudoun is condemned as a religion of savages, and Haitian culture is denigrated as "a disgusting mixture of French corruption and the loose customs of the African slaves." It is ironic that in a country where the majority of the population has African lineage, civilization is equated with Europe and whiteness. The Dominican Republic is the only country during World War II that welcomed Nazis and Jews with equal enthusiasm.

Dominicans typically do not describe the Rio Masacre as the result of popular hatred against Haitians, but instead imply that Dominicans dislike Haitians because of the massacre. This sounds odd but is not far from the truth, which is that for six decades nationalist Dominican governments distorted history and promoted dissent to defend the madman dictator Rafael Trujillo.

Trujillo was openly inspired by Hitler's racial theories and ordered the massacre as a way of "whitening" his country. To quiet critics, Trujillo deployed an intense "Dominicanization" propaganda campaign portraying his racist mania as a paternal act to save his people from Haiti.

History gives a far more complex version of Dominican-Haitian relations. The Massacre River got its name from a colonial-era Spanish slaughter of French pirate buccaneers. As a result of different socialization strategies on the part of these European rivals, Dominicans are mostly of mixed African and European race  while Haitians have much darker skin. Spanish Santo Domingo encouraged its criollo descendants of European settlers and African slaves to intermarry.

Kiskeya, or criolla in Spanish, the Haitian children of the Taino, were Free People of Color in colonial New Orleans.

Thousands of free people of color arrived in New Orleans from Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) after the Slave revolts in the late 1700's and early 1800's. Many also came to New Orleans by way of Cuba after 1809. Although they did not have all of the rights of their white counterparts, many free people of color prospered in 19th century New Orleans.

Gens de Couleur Libres contributed to the unique personality of New Orleans, which still attracts tourists today. When tourists and natives alike visit the French quarter, they may not realize that much of what they see and taste is due to the Creoles of Color.

Although my mother died in 1993, only a few years older than I am now, I remember well her longing to be with others of Haitian descent, and the music of their voices (no more beautiful sound in the world existed for me), the gentle, courteous manners that I realized only later in life were very deliberate, with full expectation of being shunned, ridiculed as a "boat person" or denigrated as "high yellow," even in her own safe haven.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on October 12, 2008 (boomark / email).