Mobility, Labor Management and Citizenship Regimes: The Denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian Descent

Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Masters of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Laura E. Rivas, B.A.

Graduate Program in Geography

The Ohio State University

2018

Thesis Committee:

Mathew Coleman, Advisor

Joel Wainwright

Stephanie Smith

1

Copyrighted by

Laura E. Rivas

2018

2

Abstract

In 2013 the constitutional court of the (D.R.) issued the controversial ruling TC 168-13, retroactively stripping away the citizenship of all

Dominicans born to undocumented immigrants going back to 1929. TC 168-13 denationalizes tens of thousands of Dominican citizens. Given long-established patterns of migration, the majority affected by the ruling were Dominicans of Haitian descent, many of whom had never been to . My research aims at historicizing the denationalization event, focusing mainly on the sentiments of antihaitianismo that emerged with the genesis of the Dominican nation-state in 1844 and how capitalist transformations experienced from 1875 to 1924 set the stage for contemporary politics around Haitian migration and citizenship policies. My claim is that only through an analysis of the formation of the capitalist state in this period can we grasp the essential role of Haitian labor to the D.R. Sentiments of antihaitianismo date to the genesis of the

Dominican nation-state in 1844. The processes that consolidated capitalist relations and the ensuing need for labor that led en masse Haitian migration to the D.R. intensified these sentiments. I contend that denationalization is in effect a stubborn drive to garner a coherent national identity while upholding a labor model instituted during the process of capitalist state formation in the D.R.—one where the elite profits from racialized Haitian bodies. The materialization of Dominican national narratives in opposition to Haiti and

ii the constitution of a national labor force at the expense of Haitian bodies do not indicate a contradiction for the Dominican capitalist state, but drive its operation. Indeed, the real problem for the Dominican state lies in the processes that can potentially disrupt the racialized composition of labor in the D.R. In this case: citizenship.

iii

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my excellent advisor Mathew Coleman for pushing me to engage with theoretical work in creative ways and for providing invaluable advice, insightful comments and numerous edits. I thank him for his unwavering support and for always advocating on my behalf. I am also indebted to Joel Wainwright for crafting seminar rooms into spaces where to dissect texts and conduct careful analysis. He has played a vital role in helping me build a strong foundation in Marxist scholarship, and always found time to provide pointed commentary on my work. I thank Stephanie Smith for meeting with me to discuss my project and providing important feedback; and Becky

Mansfield and Kendra McSweeney for helping me refine my ideas and methodologies at the early stage of the research process. I especially thank Sara Riva, Gabriel Zeballos and

Rohit Mukherjee for moral support. And most importantly, I owe thanks to my parents for equipping me with everything I could possibly need to overcome whatever obstacle.

Gracias por tanto.

iv

Vita

2017-2018 Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of Geography, The Ohio State University

2016-2017 Graduate Fellow, Department of Geography, The Ohio State University

2012-2016 Research Assistant, The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute

2014 B.A. International Studies Magna Cum Laude The City College of New York, CUNY

2008 Colegio De La Salle, Santiago, Dominican Republic

Fields of Study

Major Field: Geography

v

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Acknowledgments ...... iv Vita ...... v Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 1. State Power, Denationalization and the Difficulty of Substantiating Legal Violence ...... 7 The criminalization of belonging: The case of Juliana Deguis Pierre ...... 11 The legal violations of TC 168-13 ...... 20 The liberal conception of the law: A critique ...... 25 The conjugation of state power and meditations for new methodologies ...... 34 Chapter 2. Capital-Nation-State: The Commodification and Stratification of Labor Power ...... 42 Historical background ...... 46 The consolidation of the Dominican nation ...... 56 The formation of the Dominican capitalist state ...... 63 Inclusion > belonging: The intersection of capital-nation-state ...... 76 Conclusion ...... 86 Bibliography ...... 95

vi

Introduction

In 2013 the constitutional court of the Dominican Republic (D.R.) issued the controversial ruling TC 168-13, retroactively stripping away the citizenship of all

Dominicans born to undocumented immigrants going back to 1929 (Gaestel 2014). Given long-standing patterns of migration, the majority among the tens of thousands of citizens affected by the ruling were Dominicans of Haitian descent. My research focuses on the sentiments of antihaitianismo that emerged with the genesis of the Dominican nation- state in 1844 and how capitalist transformations experienced from 1875 to 1924 set the stage for contemporary politics around Haitian migration and citizenship policies in the

D.R. My claim is that only through an analysis of the formation of the capitalist state in this period can we grasp the essential role of Haitian labor to the D.R., illuminating in turn some of the motivations behind the ruling.

The processes that consolidated capitalist relations and the ensuing need for labor that led en masse Haitian migration to the D.R. converged with and intensified the anti-

Haitian discourse upon which the Dominican nation-state was built. One could intuitively assert that the Dominican capitalist state was established to manage (or mismanage) the dynamics of Haitian labor and migration. However, throughout this work I will point to the ways in which these tensions have worked in productive ways for the state. Indeed, I contend that denationalization is in effect a stubborn drive to garner a coherent national

1 identity while upholding a labor model instituted during the process of capitalist state formation in the D.R.—one where the elite profits from racialized Haitian bodies.

The denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent did not originate from thin air. This phenomenon cannot be properly understood without tracing back the ensembles of power that unfolded through time to get us to the implementation of this practice in the Dominican context today. The contrast and distinction between Haiti and the D.R. has been fundamental to the constitution of the D.R. nationhood and statehood since its inception. Historicizing the denationalization event is the analytical task at hand.

A genealogy of denationalization should accordingly explore the processes and power- relations that manifest within the Dominican nation-state and beyond to institutionalize the otherness of the Haitian. For that reason, the historical episodes that document the evolution of territorial management in the island, as well as the events, tendencies and policies that contributed to spatially and conceptually bordering La into the contemporary mapping of Haiti and the D.R., are of the utmost importance to this discussion.

After twenty-two years of Haitian occupation and over three centuries of colonial rule, the D.R. achieved its independence on February 27, 1844. Dominicans’ efforts to defend their territory were inspired by the policies of the Haitian administration, which jeopardize the economic security of the elite in Santo Domingo (Martínez Vergne 1989).

Haitian and Dominican independence need to be understood in geopolitical and historical context, and considering the difficulties of securing the economic, military and political base necessary for the consolidation of the state apparatus. Betances (1995) argued that

2 the modern state in the D.R. was created in response to the global capitalist economy’s need for national states to establish capitalist relations and organize an export economy.

As such, the process of state formation in the D.R. was unavoidably entangled with larger imperialist pursuits. Towards the end of the 19th century, La Hispaniola entered the imperial orbit of the (U.S.) displacing European powers. The resurgence of the sugar industry in the D.R. required large capital investments that were mostly undertaken by U.S. capitalists (Lozano 1976). Accordingly, the failure of Dominican leaders to organize such a state under the polarized politics of caudillos in the 19th century resulted in the U.S. military intervention of 1916.

While anti-Haitianism has long been reflected in Dominican national narratives, it is in no way exclusive to the D.R. context and cannot be domestically contained. Indeed, anti-Haitianism should be properly understood as the product of a racist global context.

The and declaration of independence was a cataclysm for the western power structure, especially for states dependent on slave economies such as the U.S. My research illuminates how in the international scenario of the 19th century, particularly as the U.S. becomes a hegemonic power in the region, anti-Haitianism becomes a tool for the legitimization of Dominican statehood; and how these world-making processes in turn demarcated the Dominican national imaginary at the expense of racialized bodies deemed foreign. The Dominican elite found in this conjuncture the necessary allies to validate the collective racial identity that Hispanophiles advanced in their narratives.

Similarly, these dynamics were clearly reflected in the labor model instituted in the D.R. during the 1916 U.S. Occupation.

3

The development of a labor-intensive sugar industry encouraged Haitian migration into the D.R. The bilateral agreements between the D.R. and Haiti to bring

Haitian labor to work in Dominican sugarcane fields from 1952-1986 are often cited in the debate around denationalization and migratory policies (Wooding and Mosely-

Williams 2004). But the origins of these practices can be traced farther back, to the beginning of the 20th century when both Haiti (1915-1934) and the D.R. (1916-1924) were under U.S. military interventions, and temporary labor programs brought to work in U.S.-owned sugar plantations in the D.R. (Lozano 2014; García-Peña 2016a).

The retroactive application of the constitutional ruling TC 168-13 takes us back to this period. As capitalism transformed these spaces, the material consequences—precarious livelihoods, precarious citizenship—transcended the seemingly stable Dominican-Haitian border. Indeed, despite offering some important clues about the current politics of denationalization in the D.R., these matters have received far less attention. This historical analysis aims to identify the living legacies of these processes that linger in

Dominican society today and why different appendages of the state have designed a legal infrastructure that racially profiles and criminalizes belonging for specific Dominican citizens.

Given the socio-historical and political context that led to the Dominican declaration of independence, the policies implemented by the U.S. significantly challenged the Dominican national discourse that materialized in opposition to Haiti at the turn of the 19th century. The trope of ‘peaceful invasion’ in 20th century texts typically does not problematize the apparent contradiction that emerged between the capitalist and

4 national projects. The ‘peaceful invasion’ trope is used to establish a link between the territorial conflicts of the 19th century and the migratory processes of the 20th century, but in linking the present to the politics of the past the analysis excludes the emerging capitalist dynamics that motivated Haitian migration and how the Dominican state profits from it to this day. All the while, “…the Haitian presence is seen as a denationalizing element; the Haitian is the ‘other’ who is establishing himself, threateningly, in the nation” (San Miguel 2005: 64, emphasis added).

The crystallization of the antagonism between these two identities in Dominican national sagas has been instrumental for the division and demarcation of the island’s territory. Eventually, the movement between these different territorialities and the subjectivities attached to border crossing would also prove to be productive in establishing capitalist social relations and maximizing capital in the D.R. Falling outside of the citizen-worker dyad, the subjectivities that peopled the racialized composition of labor in the D.R. cannot be exclusively sustained by gendered processes of social reproduction, but call for the state to incorporate and institutionalize policies to guarantee its maintenance. Thus, I theorize that the denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent is one of such policies. TC 168-13 is mobilized to defend the Dominican nation in the face of the Haitian other while institutionalizing a legal mechanism rooted in citizenship policies that criminalizes and undoes the legitimate belonging of Haitian elements under the umbrella of dominicanidad in retrospect and perpetuity.

The first chapter of this thesis presents an overview and textual analysis of the denationalization legislation TC 168-13. Building on the theoretical contributions of Carl

5

Schmitt (1996) and Giorgio Agamben (2005), I problematize liberal accounts of the law to question its role as a social arbiter and explore its biopolitical function. I also build on

Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2011) work and draw on my fieldwork experiences to theorize the use of tense and temporality as a discursive tool that not only helps constitute state power but complicates its substantiation.

The second chapter seeks to provide a rationale behind the ruling TC 168-13 that is grounded in the commodification and stratification of labor power. I point to the theoretical contributions of Gavin Walker (2016), Uno Kozo, and Sandro Mezzadra and

Brett Neilson (2012) to knit together how the establishment of the international system of states systematizes difference and generate subjectivities in a way that is not only productive but imperative for capitalist development. I explore the historical processes that contributed to the consolidation of the Dominican nation in opposition to Haiti and the establishment of the Dominican capitalist state at the expense of Haitian bodies to illuminate how the (inter)national, racialized composition of labor in the D.R. profits from the subjectivities generated by undocumented border crossing.

6

Chapter 1. State Power, Denationalization and the Difficulty of Substantiating legal Violence

This chapter explores the legal practices and conversations that constitute the politics and practice of denationalization in the Dominican Republic (D.R.). I focus specifically on the case of Juliana Deguis Pierre, a Dominican-born national of Haitian descent whose citizenship was revoked in 2013. The events that led to the revocation of

Deguis Pierre’s citizenship began at a local state office where Deguis Pierre requested an identification card. At that time, state officials confiscated her birth certificate and told

Deguis Pierre that she was born from undocumented Haitian immigrants and thus irregularly enrolled in the civil registry. After a lengthy back-and-forth with the courts, the Dominican Constitutional Court ruled to strip away her citizenship; the Court then retroactively applied the ruling to all those born under the same circumstances going back

1929 (Gaestel 2014).

The following pages feature a discussion of state power and the law as it relates to denationalization. It is paramount to consider why among all existing practices of population management that are regularly adopted by the state—deportation, non- admission, incarceration, , etc.—the modality of state power at play in this situation is denationalization. Denationalization, at least here, is a tactic leveled at specific bodies, which does not originate from any explicit wrongdoing or criminal act.

7

On the contrary, denationalization is, again in this specific case, hitched to mundane encounters with state-based public offices which citizens visit in order to acquire documentation, register vehicles, pay fees and so on. From this perspective, denationalization appears as a novel mechanism of control that has received little academic attention in comparison to other state-based practices of population management. It arises, however, in quotidian fashion.

Denationalization severs the link between citizens and the place they have called home, thereby limiting access to the most basic rights and services granted by citizenship.

Perhaps for this reason Deguis Pierre’s case received so much attention by groups who criticized the procedural aspects of the ruling. However, in this chapter I approach the problem of denationalization differently. I am not interested in explaining away denationalization as a legal aberration or contravention, but in exploring how it is that denationalization should be possible within a legal framework. In fact, many commentators on the Deguis Pierre case seem to ignore that the ruling itself is a legal product. And as I hope to show in this chapter, the liberal international establishment that decries denationalization, and that shames countries like the D.R. that practice it, is complicit in its perpetuation. By virtue of labeling cases like this one as outside of the norm, these organizations effectively suspend the practice of denationalization from the regular order under the guise of an exception, and thereby exempt the liberal framework of law from well-deserved scrutiny. In short, I seek to ground the practice of denationalization—and its deliberate enforcement of precarity— in the law, and not somehow beyond it.

8

In addition, it is important to bring attention to the circumstances that make such an event plausible in the D.R. My thesis examines how state power manifests itself through historical and national narratives to perpetuate violence and trauma in transhistorical ways. The denationalization event is the institutionalization of mechanisms of othering that have been implemented at crucial moments in the processes of state formation and nation building. I will elaborate on the connection of time and temporality to governance and statecraft at the end of this chapter.

I argue that denationalization is paradigmatic of state power in the modern D.R. by way of mechanisms, such as the law and the conjugation of tense, which work in tandem to repackage the injustice behind denationalization as a rightful and necessary measure to mend unrelated issues such as the overflow of Haitian migration. In order for this argument to be true, several things would have to be demonstrated: first, that the practice of denationalization has become pervasive and institutionalized in the D.R.; second, the non-relation between law and justice; and third, the importance of tense and temporality to legitimize this practice by way of deviating the present time of the suffering of the denationalized population and projecting it onto a distant past or an ideal future.

In the first section below I review the basics of Juliana Deguis Pierre’s case, which threatens to entirely rewrite how the country understands and practices citizenship and belonging. Alienage was not a common thread among the denationalized population, but a made up quality. This section will describe what I refer to as the ‘criminalization of national belonging.’ By this phrase I mean to coin an expression that encapsulates the

9 inscription of alienage onto racialized bodies. In a second section, I briefly provide a review of the legal criticism that the denationalization event has received from a liberal perspective based on an interview I conducted during my fieldwork. In a third section, I read Carl Schmitt (1996) and Giorgio Agamben’s (2005) critiques of the law in order to explore the ways in which denationalization is an element of control sponsored by a liberal legal framework. I am particularly interested in how denationalization is a form of violence lodged in the law. In approaching law and violence in this way, I contest a dominant liberal lens that sees law as a remedy to violence. And in a fourth and final section, I read the anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) on what she calls the

“durative present” of state-based violence to explore the centrality of tense and temporality to the politics and practice of denationalization. Povinelli’s work lays the basis for me to theorize the discourse behind denationalization as a legitimizing mechanism, which obliterates violence in the present. Her work also allows me to build on my experiences as a researcher.

When I started graduate school, I wanted to learn how to take something as abstract as power and ground it positively it in the concrete consequences and lived experiences through which it becomes palpable. Power and its effects are real and one should be able to document them. So perhaps somewhat naïvely, I set out to do just that.

There are three generations of denationalized Dominicans of Haitian descent on the ground and a good grasp of the historical narratives and discourses of power that put them there. All I had to do was apply the social science methodologies at my disposal to capture this on paper. As such, I planned to conduct archival research to historicize the

10 ruling around the constitution of the Dominican state as well as interview academics, legal experts and public officials on the rationale behind the ruling in order to materialize this project. And while I have accomplished my initial goal in some extents, I could not convince you, my reader, of my success without re-conceptualizing what it means to

‘succeed’ in this way—and in particular without learning to embrace silence and absence in lieu of data collection (in a conventional social scientific sense).

In contrast to a Pyrrhic victory, what I encountered as I engaged with these methods can be referred to as a productive failure. You will not find many quotations in the pages where I discuss the interviews I conducted, because my interviews did not produce the empirical data that my methodology was supposed to yield. To the contrary, the data is conspicuous by its absence. This chapter is not about my journey as a geographer and social scientist in the making. But, on occasion, I do make use of my insights on this process to expose how academic disciplines with their embedded authority and the trust we place in them as scholars can sometimes restrict us in the task of substantiating state power.

The criminalization of belonging: The case of Juliana Deguis Pierre

Some of the most important expressions of state power start in the most mundane, unlikely ways. Juliana Deguis Pierre was born in Yamasá, Monte Plata, D.R., on April 1,

1984, an hour north of Santo Domingo, the capital city of the D.R. Her parents, Blanco

Deguis and Marie Pierre, were Haitian workers who had migrated to the D.R. for work.

In 2008, Deguis Pierre went to a local office of the Junta Central Electoral (JCE) to

11 obtain an identification (I.D.) card, which can also be used as a voter registration card.

Unexpectedly, the state officials who she spoke with confiscated her birth certificate and then informed Deguis Pierre that an I.D. card could not be issued due to her French language surnames—which were understood as a marker of Haitian origins. In turn, the

Oficialía del Estado Civil1 refused to issue a new birth certificate for Deguis Pierre, arguing that she had been irregularly enrolled in the civil registry. In response, Deguis

Pierre filed a suit against the JCE in the court of Monte Plata2 in 2012. But because she could only produce a photocopy of her birth certificate and was unable to obtain her confiscated documents, her claim was declared inadmissible. Deguis Pierre appealed the court’s decision and the Dominican Constitutional Court picked up her case a year later.

And as a result of Deguis Pierre’s case came the controversial ruling TC 168-13, which retroactively stripped away the citizenship of Dominicans born to undocumented immigrants going back as far as 1929 (Gaestel 2014). Given established patterns of migration, the majority of those affected by the ruling, like Deguis Pierre, are

Dominicans of Haitian descent. In short, the ruling TC 168-13 denationalized generations of Dominicans who today find themselves in a legal limbo of potential statelessness— despite having been born in the D.R.—with limited avenues for petition and/or regularization.

1This institution is in charge of managing the civil registry, and recording and issuing certificates for births, deaths, marriages, divorces, etc. This body falls under the institutional umbrella of the Junta Central Electoral. 2Tribunal de la Cámara Civil y Comercial del Juzgado de Primera Instancia del Distrito Judicial de Monte Plata [English trans.]. 3 From this point forward, all translations from materials written and interviews conducted in languages other2Tribunal than de English la Cámara throughout Civil y this Comercial thesis are del my Juzgado own, unless de Primera otherwise Instancia indicated. del Distrito Judicial de Monte Plata4 Patente [English de corso trans.]. is a term and expression that refers to obtaining authorization to commit wrongdoing. 12

The Dominican Constitutional Court is a legal body established as recently as

2010 by an amended version of the Dominican Constitution introduced the same year.

Crucially, the 2010 constitution included a subtle modification of how birthright would be legally defined and recognized. In this version, jus soli—the right to nationality for anyone born in Dominican territory—does not apply to individuals born to foreign diplomats and foreigners who are “in transit” or “residing illegally in Dominican territory.” The constitution then specifies that by “in transit” it refers to “any foreigner defined as such by Dominican law” (Constitución de la Rep. Dom. 2010, Art. 18.3; emphasis added). According to the ruling (TC 168-13: 51), since 1929, the Dominican

Constitution denied birthright to individuals born to foreign diplomats and people otherwise “in transit,” but it was not until 2005 that a definition for this term was provided and legally codified in the letter of the law (La Ley General de Migración No.

285-04).

The ambiguity around the term ‘in transit’ generated much discussion. Perhaps most controversial is the law’s expansive temporal reach, such that Dominican-born individuals can be denationalized on account of the apparent fact that their parents were not legally resident in the country, but instead temporarily in transit. But indeed, this fact is itself an object of critique. If we accept the reality of irregular migration, when does being ‘in transit’ end and ‘residency’ begin? Can someone really be ‘in transit’ for the duration of their irregular residency in a country? At what point do the anchors that people put in place—by sending their kids to school, working, buying property, renting, developing long term friendships, etc.—invalidate the claim of transitoriness? Is

13 transitoriness even applicable when mobility between two places stops? Can a generation of citizen children—that is, individuals born in the D.R.—be tethered legally to their parents’ temporary status and made stateless as a result? As some have persuasively argued, individuals who have indefinitely resided in the country are clearly not in transit

(Caso de las niñas Jean y Bosico v. Rep. Dom. 2005: 52; Tolentino Dipp 2013).

Moreover, individuals born in the country are clearly residents in the strongest way in the sense that they have never been in transit from the place their parents came from. But in

Deguis Pierre’s case, her parents’ temporary status was retroactively affirmed as if the term ‘in transit’ is entirely self-evident at the time of her birth in order to delegitimize her claim to Dominican citizenship and, as it turned out, that of numerous others.

In order to make sense of Deguis Pierre’s case, and indeed in order to make an object of critique out of the case, we have to dive into the language and logic presented by the Court which effectively set the groundwork for the Court to deny Deguis-Pierre’s ability to petition the ruling. First, the Court argued that Deguis Pierre’s parents are

Haitian foreigners who “‘illegally and irregularly registered their children in the civil registry books, in clear violation of the constitutional text in force at the time of the declaration’” (TC 168-13: 6; translated by author)3. Through the review resource “the plaintiff has tried to obtain a ruling with patente de corso4 to validate the violation of the

Law…” (TC 168-13: 7). The Court further stated that “the respondent reiterates its

3 From this point forward, all translations from materials written and interviews conducted in languages other than English throughout this thesis are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 4 Patente de corso is a term and expression that refers to obtaining authorization to commit wrongdoing. Historically, the term originates in the practice of European governments who authorized privateers to attack enemy vessels in the 19th century, a sort of licensed piracy. The literal English translation of this practice is ‘letter of marque and reprisal.’ However, used in a figurative sense, as above, the terms ‘carte blanche’ or ‘blank check’ would be more accurate. 14 commitment to comply with and enforce the mandate of the Constitution and the law, while guaranteeing that national identity will be safeguarded and jealously guarded by this institution…” and that the Court is implementing “a rescue and clearance program of the Registry of Civil Status in order to shield it from the fraudulent and malicious actions, falsifications and impersonations that have long affected the Dominican Civil Registry system” in order to provide “an efficient and safe service regarding the vital acts that are the support and the basis of the national identity” (TC 168-13: 9; emphasis added).

Lastly, the Court argued that the “fraudulent acquisition... of an inscription does not grant citizenship or any other right to the plaintiff or to any person, since it is only making an improper, illegal and inadmissible use of said inscription…” (TC 168-13: 10). By this logic, anyone who acquired a birth certificate from the hand of public officials is at fault.

This represents a shameless shift of responsibility from the state, and the functionaries who allegedly and illicitly provided documentation to ineligible recipients, to the people, who naïvely acquired documentation they thought to be legitimate.

The ruling ordered the JCE not to issue documentation to others who appear to have been irregularly enrolled in the civil registry, or to do so only for “judicial means”

(TC 168-13: 38). That means that, in similar cases, documentation could only be issued in order to be delivered to a competent body to determine the validity or nullity of the documents, with no indication of how long this process should take. In Deguis Pierre’s case, the Court granted a period of ten days for the JCE to issue her documentation and send it out for judicial review. In any case, the outcome had already been foretold by the ruling. So as opposed to obtaining her birth certificate, the Court ordered, remarkably,

15 that she be granted a temporary migration card. In this way her status as a citizen was altered to that of a non-citizen with permission for temporary residence only.

The Court called for a meticulous audit of the civil registry from 1929 to date to transfer the names of those “irregularly” enrolled to a new separate list or, if post-2007, to a separate record book for children born to non-resident foreign mothers that came into force on that year (TC 168-13: 99). Deguis Pierre is one among many, claimed the

Constitutional Court in the ruling (TC 168-13, §1.1.3: 23). As such, the Court extended the same courtesy to the nearly 700,000 Haitian foreigners cited in the ruling who now share a common fate. This number reflects only foreigners of Haitian origin who were unambiguously disaggregated from the total number of foreigners (768,783). However, the Court does not differentiate Haitian migrants (documented or otherwise) from second

(+) generation Dominicans of Haitian descent, essentially grouping them into a single category of foreignness (TC 168-13: 24). More than a legal bond, the ruling states that nationality is also determined by “sociological” and “political” factors that are within the discretion of the state to determine. These include "historical, linguistic, racial and geopolitical features, among others, that make up and sustain a particular idiosyncrasy and collective aspirations" (TC 168-13, §1.1.4: 24; emphasis added). Accordingly, the ruling reaffirms that “All that concerns the determination and regulation of migration issues corresponds to the National Congress, in its legislative function” (TC 168-13,

§1.1.5: 24). Essentially, the legal system in the D.R. can determine who ceases to be

Dominican to become Haitian and migrant by blurring these last two categories with one

16 another, thus snatching away the guarantees of citizenship and rendering these bodies as always potentially deportable.

The Court laid out these arguments in order to establish its competence and prerogative to regulate nationality and adhere to domestic law. In contrast, the following section of the ruling indicates instances in which public international law has established that states are to determine who is entitled to a nationality (TC 168-13, §2: 25-29). The document cites the Permanent Court of International Justice in its advisory opinion on nationality decrees in Tunisia and Morocco (1923); the International Court of Justice in its Nottebohm case (1955); and Castillo Petruzzi and others v. Perú (1999). The last case is in reference to obtaining nationality via naturalization. The Court cited an excerpt of the latter ruling, emphasizing the following text:

The acquisition of this link by a foreigner, supposes that said foreigner fulfills the conditions that the state has established with the purpose of ensuring that the applicant is effectively linked to the value system and interests of the society to which said foreigner intends to belong; what has been said supposes that the conditions and procedures for that acquisition [are] predominantly of domestic law (cited in TC 168-13: 27; emphasis added).

Up to this point it seems irrelevant to cite legal literature to uphold the state’s jurisdiction and authority to dictate nationality rights. After all, Dominican law substantiated Deguis Pierre’s claim to Dominican citizenship by virtue of being born before 2005 when the term ‘in transit’ was clearly, albeit contentiously, defined. The succeeding citations in this section are more problematic. The Court cites five instances where the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in favor of the of states to decide on the acquisition or loss of nationality (TC 168-13: 27-28). The document then references Código Bustamante, a set of laws approved at an international 17 convention in La Habana in 1928 and ratified by the Dominican Congress in 1929.

Specifically, article 9: “Each contracting state shall apply its own right to the determination of the nationality of origin of any individual or juridical person and of its subsequent acquisition, loss or reintegration, which have been carried out within or outside its territory…” (cited in TC 168-13: 28; emphasis added). The document notes that both the D.R. and Haiti are signatory to Código Bustamante, perhaps an unnecessary comment on the particular point of sovereign integrity. The language and the narrative advanced by the ruling does not afford a distinction between Dominicans born to undocumented immigrants and foreigners. The text claims that Deguis Pierre et al. are not Dominicans: they never were, not rightfully so. You cannot lose what you never had.

The discussed section closes by referencing a bilateral agreement between the

D.R. and Haiti to regulate migratory relations, Modus Operandi de la República

Dominicana con la República de Haití. The treaty was signed in 1939 and is still in force today. Article 4 of said treaty states that “The interpretations of the term ‘immigrant’ will be determined exclusively by each state and in accordance with its laws, decrees and regulations” (cited in TC 168-13: 29; emphasis added). Dominican analysts attribute the ruling to the disorganized migratory processes that have been carried out at the

Dominican border for years (Monegro 2015) and the international community generally attributes the ruling to structural based on racial and ethnic criteria against people of Haitian origin (CIDH 2015). Both conclusions ring true; they are certainly not mutually exclusive. But there is an underlying pattern that must also be noted. Though they are clearly not one and the same, the issue of statelessness and migration are actively

18 conflated in this labyrinthine text, rendering analysis around the ruling increasingly difficult.

The Court concluded that there was no denationalization in Deguis Pierre’s case, since she should be entitled to Haitian citizenship according to the principle of jus sanguinis—the right to citizenship based on the parents’ nationality rather than birthplace—afforded by the Haitian Constitution (TC 168-13: 138). In this way the Court displaced their responsibility towards the denationalized population and relegated it to

Haiti. It is effectively, and ironically, speaking legally for another country while making a legal statement about Dominican sovereignty. As such, the Court attempted to brush under the carpet the issue of statelessness all together, embracing in turn the historical necessity to regulate undocumented Haitian migrants across time and space. This conclusion not only ignored the legal shortcomings in Deguis Pierre’s case and the

Court’s responsibility to serve the justice that the liberal legal framework promises to deliver, but it blatantly disregarded how the ruling rendered vulnerable thousands of others who are possibly underserving of this “loophole.” The ruling has a marked retroactive effect, affecting people who had long thought to overcome the trauma behind the undocumented migratory experience of their families. Arguably, second (+) generation Dominicans of Haitian descent who are affected by this ruling might not be able to scape statelessness through this avenue. And after being born and having lived in the D.R. all their lives, they might understandingly choose not to.

As the language of the Court reveals, denationalization is predicated on maintaining an authentic Dominican national identity, one in which the otherness of the

19

Haitian is always already implicated. The ruling TC 168-13 institutionalizes the denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent in the D.R. Official national narratives have imbued the overall population with this conceptualization of dominicanidad since the 19th century. As such, citizenship qua legal bond becomes citizenship qua nationality. Citizenship ceases to be a bundle of rights and duties that are legally guaranteed, as in the liberal conception; rather it to becomes an ontological condition unaltered by birthrights or place of birth: a political condition that, in the

Dominican case, includes Haitians through exclusion. The seriousness of this issue not only derives from the unjust consequences affecting the ever-increasing presence of

Dominicans of Haitian descent in the D.R., but that this indoctrination religiously renders the injustice unfathomable to a majority of fellow (national) citizens. The denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent constitutes dominicanidad, thus illuminating the abuses perpetuated in the name of the nation and the urgency to re- conceptualize its inclusionary/exclusionary logic.

The legal violations of TC 168-13

From a legal standpoint, the retroactive application of the law has been the most criticized legal principle that was neglected by the ruling. In conversation with a constitutional expert during fieldwork (anonymous interview with the author, July, 2017),

I inquired about what other ways due process might have been compromised according to

Dominican and international law.

20

I traveled out of town to a small city to conduct the interview. The courthouse where I was received was modest in size and humble in resources. The secretary asked me to wait a few minutes so I took a seat in a small waiting room by the front door. It was a hot summer day and the ceiling fans were on high speed, making squeaking noises while the warm airflow tried blowing newspapers around. I held on to my notes tightly until I was called into my interviewee’s office. Once there, he politely asked me not to record our conversation then confessed that he was intimidated by my email and the formal language that the IRB requires researchers to use. I handed him the consent form.

I explained that the option of anonymity is granted to all as a general practice to protect interviewees from any possible risks that shared content might cause them. As a state official and legal expert, I understood his overall discomfort and anxiety and thought these feelings to carry the burden of having to justify the unjustifiable, i.e. having to defend the position of the Dominican state on the issue of denationalization knowing that the ruling falls short on certain legal principles. Indeed, he shared stories of the difficult position he has found himself in when participating in international conferences. Even when discussing unrelated topics, the questions always arrived on the topic of denationalization. I sympathized and thanked him for being one of the few people to agree to be interviewed, or to even respond to my emails, and we started to chat.

He told me that the ruling resulted from the overflow of foreign migration in the country and the objective reality of a numerous population that the receiving country has to deal with. From a procedural point of view, he expressed concern regarding how the ruling came about and how it was handled. He was worried that the ruling generated

21 collateral effects for people who were not involved in the case. He saw this as violating the extensive nature of the law—a legal principle that extends the application of a ruling to people in the same circumstances strictly as a protective mechanism, not one of condemnation. In this instance the ruling of a particular case extends to a whole population group to make it more vulnerable.

He further suggested that the ruling compromised the legal principle of favorability. This principle establishes that public authorities must use the most favorable norms when interpreting law that relates to human rights, even if these norms are infra constitutional (i.e. a norm that is not included in the constitution and hence considered inferior). This principle is included both in article 74 of the Dominican Constitution and international law (including the Inter-American Court, of which the DR is a member country). Moreover, the burden of proof and audi alteram partem were overlooked. This

Latin phrase translates to ‘listen to the other side.’ These principles refer to the duty to produce evidence in a trial and the right to a fair hearing where each party has the opportunity to present and contest evidence. The Dominican Constitutional Court treated this case as an administrative case; it reached the Court through a review action by amparo proceedings, a common resource in the Latin American legal system for the protection of constitutional rights. In such situations the Court reserves the right to decide whether it is necessary to open a hearing or not. No such hearing was opened for Deguis

Pierre.

Moreover, the legal principle of ex post facto was clearly neglected. The law cannot be applied retroactively whereas the application of the ruling TC 168-13 extends

22 to 1929. And lastly, there was a legal precedent to this case that was not taken into account. The Inter American Court of Human Rights tried the Dominican state in 2005 in the case Jean and Bosico Children v. the Dominican Republic. The court petitioned in favor of two Dominican girls of Haitian descent who had been denied documentation by state officials, thus denying citizenship and access to education. The court ruled for their respective documents to be delivered and for compensation to be paid.

In light of the humanitarian crisis brought about by the ruling and the expressed criticism of the international community, Dominican president Danilo Medina issued the executive order 169-14 in 2014, also referred to in this paper as the Regularization Plan.

This special legislation opened an avenue to regularize the status of Dominicans who were retroactively affected by TC 168-13. The regularization plan did not automatically restitute citizenship to the denationalized population. The plan distinguishes Dominicans born to undocumented immigrants whose birth had been registered in the Dominican civil registry (group A); and those who had not been previously registered but can prove that they were born in Dominican territory and have no link to their parents’ country of origin

(group B). Under this plan, Dominicans in group A are subjected to a regularization process led by the JCE through which nationals may be accredited as Dominicans and furnished proper documentation. In turn, Dominicans in group B would register as foreigners and be provided temporary documentation that allows them to stay in the country and, after a period of two years, request the option of naturalization (Amnesty

International 2015: 28).

23

The Regularization Plan has been criticized for not taking into account the many costs and obstacles that the denationalized population has to confront in order to comply with all the requirements imposed by the Dominican government. Only 1.8% of those registered in the national regularization plan were able to present all the required documents (“El final del Plan Nacional…” 2015; Guzmán 2017).

I am appreciative of the legal commentary and the time afforded to me by my interviewee. I thought the comments were pointed and most importantly objective, given such a politicized topic. In order to challenge the official discourse behind the ruling, I was never afraid to state my position against it whenever asked, or whenever appropriate.

My questions were often perceived to have an accusatory tone, perhaps giving away my standpoint even when my perspective on the issue was not discussed. After answering my last question, my interviewee had a question for me. “Have you ever been to the border?” he asked while I finished gathering my stuff. I told him I once crossed the border through

Pedernales, at the southern end of the country. “Well, that is just not the same,” he affirmed and then shared an anecdote of his first visit to the border market in Dajabón, the busiest part of the border. He talked of the insalubrity of the place, the unsanitary conditions in which food was kept and sold, and the never-ending stench that could not be washed off his clothes. He encouraged me to visit one day, assuring me that it might change the way I see things. Unsettled by the , I simply smiled and responded,

“maybe it will.” With this final anecdote, the issue of migration unsurprisingly surfaced again, along with the civilizational narrative that Haitians are inferior to Dominicans.

Perhaps you can justify the unjustifiable after all.

24

The liberal conception of the law: A critique

TC 168-13 contains a series of legal violations that, in the eyes of those who critique it—international organizations and legal institutions working for human rights— invalidate the ruling. Despite these criticisms. In this section, I read Carl Schmitt and

Giorgio Agamben’s critiques of the law in order to address these contradictions within the legal structure.

In The Concept of the Political Schmitt (1996) provided a clear-cut definition for this term, which rested on the distinction between friend and enemy (Schmitt 1996: 26).

By assigning a public and collective quality to this distinction (Schmitt 1996: 29), one can infer that Schmitt’s analysis is most applicable to international relations between states, but the truth is that the friend-enemy distinction is not exclusive to the state. In fact, revisionist literature on Schmitt’s work in political geography concluded that the

(geo)political is always pervasive and as such not necessarily attached to the spatial unit of the state within international conflict. Indeed, the (geo)political could even destabilize the seeming stability of the state—along with the foreign/domestic polarity—insofar as conflict is bounded within it: “the enmity hews to no particular spatiality” (Coleman

2011: 128). “Every state provides… some kind of formula for the declaration of an internal enemy… whether ostracism, expulsion, proscription, or outlawry are provided for in special laws or in explicit or general descriptions, the aim is always the same, namely to declare an enemy” (Schmitt 1996: 46-47). More generally, this work aimed to produce a critique that exposes the naiveté and the hypocrisy of utopian and universalist

25 political doctrines, especially liberalism, that claim to do away with ‘the political’ or reduce the friend-enemy distinction to ethical debates and economic interests (Schmitt

1996: 69-79). By equating depoliticization with , Schmitt affirmed that

‘the political’ is a quality inseparable from human nature, rendering attempts to subdue it as a sham by default. According to him, the political is so ubiquitous a category that ostensibly neutral arenas such as religion, culture, economics, science and the law are always potential breeders of the political (Schmitt 1996: 25; 38). Schmitt’s point is to uncover the liberal conceit of substituting the political with allegedly non-violent mechanisms such as the law.

The worst confusion arises when concepts such as justice and freedom are used to legitimize one’s own political ambitions and to disqualify or demoralize the enemy. In the shadow of an embracing political decision and in the security of a stable political state organization, law, whether private or public, has its own relatively independent domain. As with every domain of human endeavor and thought, it can be utilized to support or refute other domains. But it is necessary to pay attention to the political meaning of such utilizations of law and morality, and above all of the word rule or sovereignty of law (Schmitt 1996: 66).

The Concept of the Political is a damning critique of liberalism for its diplomatic repackaging of violence into articles, norms, and sanctions, and its dilution of differences under the guise of coalitions. Referencing the League of Nations, for instance, Schmitt mocked talk of “economic sanctions and severance of the food supply from the civilian population” (Schmitt 1996: 79) as “peaceful means of force.” In the liberal context, the enemy is no longer the enemy but “a disturber of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity” (Schmitt 1996: 79).

While effective and certainly critical, it is important to note that his appraisal is inspired by a troubling, proto-fascist ideology that ultimately renders his work non- 26 progressive. Nonetheless, Schmitt’s theoretical contributions are helpful to contextualize

TC 168-13 in the following ways. First, it dismantles the liberal assumption of the law as a pacifier, showing how the concept of the law is in fact divorced from the idea of justice and legitimacy and is in turn enmeshed with power dynamics and violence. Upon such realization, the Constitutional Court’s decisions and the event of denationalization itself cease to be a senseless legal violation to regain political meaning à la Schmitt. It illuminates the political nature of the denationalization legislation, which aims to reassert the historical design of the Dominican independence and state: the deployment of the border between Dominicans and Haitians—the original enemy. And in this particular case, also the multiplication of the border via its adherence to racialized bodies like

Deguis Pierre’s—black, with French surnames, and particular dictions—that now constitute and embody it. In this light, more than a legal infringement, TC 168-13 is an ethno-territorial attempt to manage populations that is explicitly legally organized, thus calling into question the law as an arbiter of social conflict.

Rendering TC 168-13 as a means to manage bodies calls to mind Agamben’s claim in State of Exception (2005) concerning the intersection between public law and political fact, and juridical order and life. Originate in the French Democratic-

Revolutionary tradition as a space reserved for extra-juridical action, he observed that the state of exception has become a practice fundamental to contemporary politics. The term is often associated with emergency laws, such as the concept of martial law in the Anglo-

Saxon juridical practice. Agamben claimed: “The state of exception is not a special kind of law (like the law of war); rather, insofar as it is a suspension of the juridical order

27 itself, it defines law’s threshold or limit concept” (Agamben 2005: 4). Theorizations of the state of exception that fall under emergency laws, however, have been useful for

Agamben’s theory insofar as they demonstrate the haziness between fact and law. These situations involve factual scenarios that require actions that are not framed within the realm of possibilities offered by the law, as such extra-juridical procedures. Conversely, procedures in which the law comes in the way of acting on an emergency. In such cases, actions cannot be carried out inasmuch as existing legislation, or lack thereof, would render such actions illegal. In both cases, there is juridical language to justify and legitimate these procedures, such that the existence or absence of applicable laws does not constitute an obstacle. These procedures come into being and are legitimated through juridical avenues, calling into question the distinction between law and fact (Agamben

2005: 29).

Agamben rejected attempts to theorize the state of exception that have focused on topographically locating it either inside or outside of the realm of the law. “In truth, the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other” (Agamben 2005: 23).

Revisiting Schmitt’s Political Theology, Agamben explored the containment of the suspension of the juridical order within itself, a seemingly contradictory dynamic that illuminates a much more complex topological relation where the state of exception is

“outside” of the law and “yet belonging” (Agamben 2005: 35). Schmitt presented this as a theory of sovereignty in Political Theology because it is the sovereign, a supreme leader

28 with vested power, who gets to declare the state of exception: “the sovereign stands outside… of the normally valid juridical order, and yet belongs… to it, for it is he who is responsible for deciding whether the constitution can be suspended in toto” (cited in

Agamben 2005: 35). Here there is a fundamental distinction between the norm in the abstract and its application, which in turn establishes their respective autonomy. This distinction is also present in Dictatorship, where Schmitt first elaborated on the state of exception. “We can, then, define the state of exception in Schmitt’s theory as the place where the opposition between the norm and its realization reaches its greatest intensity… a field of juridical tensions in which a minimum of formal being-in-force… coincide with a maximum of real application, and vice versa” (Agamben 2005: 36).

More importantly for Agamben, however, was the separation of the force of law from the law that is evinced and prevalent in the state of exception where they cease to be one and the same, if they were ever a unity at all. “It defines a ‘state of the law’ in which, on the one hand, the norm is in force [vige] but is not applied (it has no ‘force’ [forza]) and, on the other, acts that do not have the value [valore] of law acquire its ‘force’”

(Agamben 2005: 38). Essentially, a bifurcation takes place at the heart of the law, splitting the concept into the norm that it represents and a sort of engine that propels its power and signification. Schmitt grounded this separation in the persona of a sovereign or dictator who effectively applies this force; Agamben abstracted these two components.

As such, the force of law may very well be personified by sovereign power, but not necessarily and that is the point; that is the subtlety that escaped Schmitt’s prior theorizations of the state of exception. It does not exclusively take on the form of an

29 apparent exception engineered by a presupposed agent. In fact, it is not about the agent at all but the relational structure. And once you lose sight of the former it becomes evident that the latter is always at play; that the state of exception is in the norm.

Perhaps for this reason and in contrast to Schmitt, who developed his theory about the state of exception within the framework of dictatorship, Agamben located its provenance in the Iustitium, a Roman institution that called for the suspension of the law.

By virtue of this “juridical void,” Agamben concludes that “the state of exception is not defined as a fullness of powers, a pleromatic state of law, as in the dictatorial model, but as a kenomatic state, an emptiness and standstill of the law” (Agamben 2005: 48). The term pleromatic comes from the verb pleróo in Greek, which means ‘to fill.’ It refers to plenitude and is commonly used in philosophy and religion to reference divine power, in this case associated with totalitarianism. Kenomatic, in contrast, refers to an emptiness of law via its suspension, hence its relation to the Iustitium. As such, the state of exception is a space devoid of law. What was important to Agamben was to figure out how the state of anomie that manifests by the suspension of the law is seemingly overcome by way of its relation to the juridical order.

It is important to note that the emptiness of law does not render this space an absolute vacuum. In fact, building on Walter Benjamin’s thought, particularly his reading of Kafka’s novella The Castle, Agamben unearthed what is concealed in the apparent void of the state of exception: “According to Benjamin, this law—or rather, this force-of- law [as per the phrasing Agamben assigns to the problematic of the “force of law without law”]—is no longer law but life, ‘life as it is lived’…it ceases to be law and blurs at all

30 points with life” (Agamben 2005: 63). It is a space where human action and the specter of the law interact until it is successfully appropriated by humanity and turned into juridical matter, i.e. restoring the law in the force of law. Restoring in this case does not mean that law was somehow there a priori, but alludes to the cyclic nature of manufacturing law to appropriate life. But the cycle can be broken. By drawing attention to the human agency involved in this process, the state of exception suddenly reclaims political importance.

Therein lies the potentiality for change, a possible passageway to true justice, not by way of bringing the specter of law back to life but putting it to rest forever and birthing new meaning (Agamben 2005: 64). Agamben denaturalized the legal system that we take for granted and entrust with the task of settling conflicts and delivering justice to expose the violence it conceals. Needless to say, law is not a medium for justice for Agamben; these terms not only bear no connection to one another but they are fundamentally antagonistic.

This analysis also reveals a more complex, dialectical relation between life and law. Law cannot capture life without anomie. Thus, the state of exception becomes the vehicle through which life is included in the juridico-political machine of modernity. To evince this relationship, Agamben explored the interplay between the traditions of auctoritas and potestas in ancient Rome. Auctoritas makes reference to socially recognized authority that does not originate from legality, whereas potestas represents the unquestionable power of the law. In Agamben’s theory, auctoritas and potestas encapsulate the ‘anomic-extra-juridical’ element that suspends and reactivate the law, and the ‘normative-juridical’ element, respectively. In tandem, these elements enable the biopolitical operation of the law. In the state of exception these two traditions co-exist as

31 a fictional albeit productive unity that results in the creation of bare life (Agamben 2005:

86-87). Our task is then to separate what has been violently brought together; to strip law of its biopolitical function.

There is one particular instance of auctoritas cited in Agamben’s book that cannot go unnoticed for its relevance to the case at hand and that I will cite at length.

A third institution in which auctoritas shows its specific function of suspending law is the hostis iudicatio. In exceptional situations where a Roman citizen threatened the security of the Republic by conspiracy or treason, he could be declared hostis, “public enemy,” by the Senate. The hostis iudicatus was not simply likened to a foreign enemy, the hostis alienigena, because the latter was always protected by the ius gentium [law of peoples] (Nissen 1877, 27); he was, rather, radically deprived of any legal status and could therefore be stripped of his belongings and put to death at any moment. What auctoritas suspends here is not simply the juridical order, but the ius civis, the very status of the Roman citizen (Agamben 2005: 80).

In this sense, the paradoxical promotion of unconstitutionality by the Dominican

Constitutional Court and the denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent epitomize an attempt to legally codify the capturing of life to turn it into an object of control that can be managed and potentially eliminated.

Coleman’s (2007) discussion about the evolution of the spatiality of sovereign power in Agamben’s oeuvre is useful to ground this theoretical discussion in the context of the denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent. In Homo Sacer, the camp is often defined as a demarcated space outside of the normal order. As such, the camp is sometimes presented as the epitome of the state of exception and is generally interpreted as such by scholars. However, the idea behind the camp relies on a specific logic rather than actually bounded space (Coleman 2007: 188). In State of Exception Agamben explicitly undoes the lawlessness/lawfulness dichotomy attached to the concept of the 32 camp with respect to the juridical order to show that anomie is always already at play in the juridical order more broadly in order to secure a nexus between life and law, as above. In a similar fashion, the trajectory of control over racialized Haitian bodies in the

D.R. and their descendants born in Dominican territory historically expands from the confinement of el batey—poor workers’ communities located near sugar mills and exempted from state’s labor regulations—to a more complex spatiality that is today grounded on issues of citizenship. So in Agambian terms, one could refer to Dominicans of Haitian descent as bearers of the consequences that the state of exception perpetuates, an embodied violence that renders the law illocalizable.

Why is this important? The non-place of the law renders evidence meaningless. A new has been birthed, a status of under-citizenry. What I set out to document is there, but the testimony of their pain—the infortune of those who experience it and those who witness and can corroborate it—does not mean a thing. There is no crime scene to investigate but a court of law emptied thereof, a ‘force of law.’ So, law is neither the original problem nor the solution; it is a manufactured medium. The problem lies in the reason behind why the law is suspended, changed and reactivated, and that is a question of being. Indeed, denationalization and the national are co-constitutive. We need to stop looking for loopholes in the constitution and ask ourselves: why is the essence of our being and our republic be predicated in the making and the suffering of the other? And why are we not alone in the perpetuation of this scheme?

33

The conjugation of state power and meditations for new methodologies

This last section features some of my methodological reflections and experiences during fieldwork. I tell the story of an encounter I had with an interviewee (anonymous interview with the author, July, 2017) that I believe exemplifies one of the many ways in which state power is constituted in the everyday. I then delve into a theoretical discussion about the importance of temporality and tense to justify and perpetuate violence.

I arrived at a law office on a summer morning to conduct another interview during my fieldwork. As I walked through the front door, I noticed two dark-skinned women in the room. One cleaned the floors, the other sat behind a desk. I greeted both and proceeded to the desk for my appointment. The secretary informed me that an emergency meeting had come up and kindly asked if I could wait a few minutes. “Of course,” I said, as I tiptoed to the couch, careful not to dirty the recently cleaned and still wet floors. I sat on the couch and picked up one of the newspapers that were on the coffee table to read while I waited. “Solo 3% de regulados está al día,”5 read an article in the front page.

After 40 minutes, I heard footsteps coming down the stairs, raised my head away from the newspaper, and saw my interviewee approach me. He introduced himself, explained that the meeting was taking longer than expected, and apologized. He was welcoming and asked if I was comfortable, if I had been offered coffee and such. Then assured me that it should not take much longer and that, once it is over, we would walk to his office to chat, though he did not know what about.

5 The title translates to: “Only 3% of regulated are up to date.” It alludes to the fact that merely 3% of the dossiers of those enrolled in the regularization plan implemented by the Dominican government had been processed to date. The article also comments on the lack of initiative and political infrastructure, especially on the part of Haitian institutions, to provide the required documentation: https://www.listindiario.com/la- republica/2017/07/21/475012/solo-3-de-regulados-esta-al-dia 34

This first encounter puzzled me. The topic of the interview—the denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent—had been discussed at the time the interview was scheduled and was the primary reason I chose to interview him, given his experience as a legal aid for the state when the ruling was dictated. I was sure we were on the same page since he jokingly uttered a comment in passing at the time, thinking of people to call for reinforcements. So I did not assume much by his apparent confusion and continued to wait…for another two hours.

As I debated whether to leave or keep waiting, he finally returned and showed me to the office of a colleague, since he had briefly walked out of the meeting to see me. I insisted that I was happy to reschedule, but he kept walking and I followed. Once inside the office, his demeanor changed. I was asked not to use recording devices or even take notes. The issue of anonymity was stressed as he hoped to be appointed to a post that was politically sensitive to these kinds of issues. Then he asked me to read him my questions.

Halfway through dictating my questionnaire, I was interrupted. He acknowledged that legal principles were compromised in the ruling TC 168-13, but attempted to provide a justification and disqualify the international attention and criticism that the D.R. had received on this matter. Without proper contextualization, legal principles such as

‘estoppel’ and events such as the 1928 Pan-American Convention in La Havana were mentioned. I was not sure how to tie this together. As far as I could gather, I was being schooled on the concept of sovereignty. Despite my stance against the liberal legal framework that I exposed in previous sections, I thought it ironic. A discussion (or monologue) substantiating claims based on international law in order to arrive at the

35 concept of sovereignty broadly ignoring international law on the topic of denationalization in order to defend it—sovereignty, that is. It is a complicated concept.

But we, as in a gross mischaracterization of the pronoun, did not dwell on it.

“No one has been denationalized,” he affirmed at one point during our brief meeting, alluding to the fact that the Haitian constitution grants citizenship to people born to Haitian parents6. To this he added: “the D.R. is a poor country and it cannot take care of everybody.” He not only approved of the ruling but also openly criticized the regularization plan, as it opened up a path to citizenship for a population that should have never been there in the first place. “Something good cannot come out of something bad,” he repeatedly stated. At this point, he cut the interview short. I was asked to leave and referred to the secretary to reschedule the interview for a more appropriate time. I was assured that everything would make more sense then and that I would be handed a fact sheet and research backing up every claim. I walked out, rushed to write down my notes, and proceeded to reschedule the interview then and, as it turned out, two additional times afterwards. Each time, I received a call on the day the interview was scheduled to cancel.

I have since reflected much on my frustration. Conned into a dead end and suddenly disillusioned by the ‘methods’ section of my research proposal, I no longer expected to arrive at meaningful answers through these interactions. The content of the interview hardly scratched the surface of the few questions I was able to speak aloud.

And more broadly, it was virtually impossible to pencil in these interviews at all. I had

6 This claim, while true, needs to be problematized. It ignores that citizenship is not granted automatically; that it is not granted once Haitian citizenship has been renounced, as the constitution does not admit dual citizenship; and that, in any case, this would not be an option for second (+) generation Dominicans of Haitian descent born in Dominican territory and affected by the ruling: http://elnacional.com.do/doble- nacionalidad-la-constitucion-haitiana-en-la-diaspora/ 36 anticipated the unfeasibility of researching this topic divorced from historical analysis. I expected archival research to be the most challenging part of fieldwork, but the present turned out to be more inaccessible than the past. It could not be singled out as its own tense in the same way that the issues of statelessness, migration and nationalism could not be disjointed for the sake of analysis.

Why must the present be staged as such? This interview does not disclose the concealed and already well-formed account of state power that is often expected, but an archive-in-the-making where silences are constantly in the process of being inscribed onto an official narrative that is yet to be settled. In Silencing the Past, Michel Rolph

Trouillot (1995) meditated about the ways in which power operates to craft space for specific silences in historical narratives. As such we are trained to decipher these voids and silences while conducting archival work and to be aware of the archives’ role in constituting state power. What my experience overall signifies is that this methodology, largely mainstream and accepted for historical inquiry, must be adopted trans-temporally.

“Power does not enter the story once and for all, but at different times and from different angles. It precedes the narrative proper, contributing to its creation and to its interpretation” (Trouillot 1995, p.28).

What the myriad rejections to calls for interviews and the apparent fiasco of my interview that day tell me is that researching the perpetually polarizing topic of

Dominicans and Haitians in a critical way is an ontological impossibility. And this is precisely the challenge. The aporia of the denationalization event consists on the failure to substantiate an empirical reality that is based on an ontological, thus anti-empirical,

37 truth. Without methodologies in place to address the disconnect between empirics and metaphysics, I must wonder about how might the social sciences that overvalue positive data be implicated in shadowing possible solutions to this problem? I was naïve to expect my applied methodology to yield the answers I was looking for and even more so to expect my interviewees to hand me these answers in so many words.

This kind of work unsettles the discourse upon which the Dominican state was built and requires innovative methodological tools that anticipate the power dynamics at play, where carving access is to simultaneously disintegrate it. This kind of frustrating, seemingly uneventful encounters is one of the many ways in which state power materializes. The content of my interview could not tell you that, but my experience as an interviewer attests to it. To ponder on the ways I can bare witness to such a deceitful display of violence and intimidation seemed to be all I could do at the time. There is something to be learned about my failure to substantiate denationalization and the positive truth that I can produce for myself by not being able to conduct this interview.

Coleman (2016) reflected on his research about the practices of police officers around immigration enforcement to suggest how one might productively engage with methodological failure in the social sciences. He built on feminist political geography scholarship on power and practice, and particularly Elizabeth Povinelli’s work on “power as cruddy” and “state power as a mode of slow, chronic killing” (Coleman 2016: 77), to challenge basic social science methodologies that treat the effects of state power as something easily substantiated. Coleman suggests that the methodological tools at our disposal often fail to capture the non-catastrophic ways in which state power manifest in

38 the everyday. In turn, he asserted, “…accepted ways of generating data about the police, and assessing it, in [his] experience constitute the ‘blue wall’—that is, a hard to qualify, or quantify, uneventful landscape of weak state killing with no definite address or authorship” (Coleman 2016: 85). Akin to my short-lived captivity within the bureaucratic state machine to his experience of documenting police practice is intuitive and helpful in some ways. The documentation of the direct effects of state power on the denationalized population, arguably the goal of the interview, derails attention from the ways that I, in my quest to do just that, became an object of state power myself; and how problematizing my experience, as opposed to using the empty content of an interview as a building block to tell a story, can aid in destabilizing that power.

More importantly, however, my experience also evinced some of the ways in which state power percolates through the use of tense. Povinelli’s (2011) discussion of tense, eventfulness and ethical substance in Economies of Abandonment has much to contribute to this reflection. In conversation with Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk

Away from Omelas,” Povinelli used the story of the child in the broom closet to demonstrate that the way we understand and perceive temporality, eventfulness and ethics are often used to justify harm. Le Guin tells the story of the residents of the town of Omelas where everybody lives happily ever after, but whose happiness is dependent on the misery and confinement of a mistreated child. Everyone in Omelas is aware of this fact, but the majority finds a way of justifying this suffering while a perturbed minority chooses to walk away. This story serves to highlight the contrast between the ways ethical predicaments must be dealt with in Omelas to how they are dealt with in actuality.

39

The people of Omelas cannot possibly imagine a better future without compromising their privilege and what is good in their lives, because they are made to understand through the misfortune of this child that happiness and suffering are co-constitutive. As such, “…the ethical relationship that links the citizens of Omelas to the child in the broom closet cannot be removed from the durative present of her suffering” (Povinelli

2011: 3). However, in late liberalism—the chronotope used by Povinelli to describe the time in which we live in now—ethics are generally approached from the perspective of the future anterior, i.e. “what will have been the positive outcome of this suffering from the perspective of a future interpreter…The child’s suffering disappears when seen from the perspective of what it will have been—or been for” (Povinelli 2011: 3). What she describes in this passage is the active adjournment of morality from the durative present, which reflects incomplete or continued action, to a distant and most ideal future.

So what is the rationale behind the conglomeration and ambiguity of tenses attached to the discourse of the denationalization event? In spite of the legal inconsistencies that have been exposed throughout this chapter and well-established reasons to mistrust legal mechanisms for the sake of justice, many justify the perpetuation of violence in the present for the good that will come from it in the form of the regulated migration of undocumented Haitians. But this future will never come, or at least not through this avenue. While TC 168-13 might deter migration to some extent, it certainly does not entail a comprehensive plan for immigration law enforcement. Similarly, this narrative echoes and romanticizes the declaration of Dominican independence that put an end to the unification of the island under Haitian rule. The politicization of the discourse

40 behind the ruling renders these different tenses unintelligible and, in the dissipating present, one is left not knowing what weights more, the past that inspires these actions or the future that is aspired through them.

41

Chapter 2. Capital-Nation-State: The Commodification and Stratification of Labor Power

TC 168-13 is inseparable from the materialization of a Dominican national discourse and the exploitation of Haitian workers by the Dominican capitalist state. In this chapter, I work in retrospect to uncover the genesis of anti-Haitian sentiment in the

Dominican Republic (D.R.) and beyond, and the consolidation of the Dominican capitalist nation-state.

The Dominican nation-state was mapped and produced in conversation with the country’s relation with Haiti and the United States (U.S.). The Haitian Revolution and the proclamation of Haiti as the first independent black republic in the world in 1804 was the beginning of the end of the colonial system. Perhaps more than any other former colony,

Haiti suffered the consequences that their actions brought upon the existing power structure of the time. The indemnification debt imposed on Haiti by the French, for instance, greatly contributed to the economic demise of the young republic as well as— though not exclusively—to separatist ideas among the occupants of the former Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, a territory under Haitian jurisdiction from 1822 until the proclamation of independence of the D.R. in 1844 (Moya Pons 2013).

The end of European rule in the Americas did not signify the decolonization of spaces of governance and social structures. In the U.S. for instance, remained an

42 important institution for most of the 19th century. The emancipation of slavery advanced by Haiti and eventually the D.R. was not well received by many in the U.S. In turn, the hegemonic position that the U.S. achieved at the turn of the 19th century influenced the geopolitical scenario of the time with the civilizational narrative around race prevalent in

U.S. society (Torres-Saillant 2010; Martínez-Fernández 1994). It also allowed the U.S. to dominate the process of capitalist development in the region. In the D.R., this process unfolded shortly after the Dominican proclamation of independence from Haiti. Thus, the international conjuncture in which Dominican nationhood and statehood was negotiated encapsulated the transition from colonial rule to the neo-colonial system instituted by the

U.S. in the region—a system that promoted the displacement of blackness to the margins of the nation. The imperial gaze of the U.S. was influential to the process of nation building, state formation and capitalist development in the D.R.

The crystallization of the Dominican nation-state needs to be understood contextually, as a result of the different imperialisms and interests that came to affect

Dominican national narratives; and theoretically, within the nation-state’s role to ensure a transition to a capitalist system. The Dominican nation materialized in opposition to Haiti while the Dominican capitalist state was established as a product of global capitalism and the demands of the sugar industry that brought Haitian labor to work in the D.R., both processes in which the U.S. played a major role. I argue that the clash between the national and capitalist projects in the D.R. is not a problem that the Dominican capitalist state was established to mismanage. On the contrary, the tension generated worked

43 productively for the establishment of the Dominican capitalist state by facilitating the commodification and stratification of labor power.

The transition into a capitalist system necessitates the enclosure of space into nation-states to produce specific differences (Walker 2016) and subjectivities that facilitate capitalist production (Mezzadra and Neilson 2012). These differences and subjectivities inform the othering mechanisms of the nation and manifest in the composition of the labor power commodity. In the case of the D.R., Haitian labor and migration have been at the heart of the process of commodification of labor power since the inception of the capitalist state in the D.R. (Brea 1983), inscribing a racial divide onto the labor force and generating subjectivities beyond the citizen-worker dyad.

I initially perceived the inherent contradictions between the Dominican capitalist state and nation as a problem particular to the D.R., especially when rooted in the reality of the denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent. The historical trajectories and singularities that resulted in the specific contradiction of an anti-Haitian national discourse and a capitalist state contingent on cheap Haitian labor are particular to the

D.R. case. However, the stratifying effect and the subjectivities that result from the processes of nation building and state formation are parallel to similar patterns pervasive in the composition of labor worldwide. The fixation of space that capitalist development entailed cannot be paired with the retention of bodies and subjectivities within said spaces, especially under capitalist regimes that are constantly pushing workers out. The contradictions and tensions located at the intersection of capital-nation-state, and the

44 divides these inflict, in turn, facilitate the commodification and stratification of labor power.

In the first section of this chapter, I provide a brief historical background to shed light on the differing colonial backgrounds of the colonies of Santo Domingo and Saint

Domingue; and how their different economic and social systems impacted their respective ideas behind the independence struggles and revolutions that resulted in the establishment of present day Haiti and D.R.

In a second section, I explore the national discourse that materialized in the D.R. post-independence. The geopolitical scenario in which Haiti and the D.R. established themselves as independent nations would come to affect racial discourses in the D.R., particularly as the U.S. became a hegemon in the region. As such, anti-Haitian sentiment and the manipulation of a black identity became tools for the legitimization of Dominican statehood. This trend was clearly manifested in the writing of hispanophiles during the

19th century, who sought to demarcate the Dominican national imaginary at the expense of racialized bodies deemed foreign (García-Peña 2016b).

In a third section, I look at the intricacies of the process of state formation in the

D.R., where the capitalist state apparatus came as the result of a process of externalization carried out under U.S. influence at the beginning of the twentieth century and ultimately completed with the U.S. occupation of La Hispaniola. As such, the commodification of labor power in the D.R. transcends national boundaries to incorporate Haitian labor (Brea 1983). This practice was kept in place by the Dominican

45 state after the U.S. occupation of the country came to an end and by the private sector to this day.

The final section builds on the work of Gavin Walker (2016) on labor commodification and the national question, and the work of Sandro Mezzadra and Brett

Neilson (2012) on migration regimes and labor. In this section, I put these authors in conversation to explore how the contradiction that develops between the processes of

Dominican state formation and nation building work as a productive tension for capitalist development in the D.R. The commodification of labor power in the D.R. transcends the enclosure of the nation-state to comprise the whole island. As such, the model of the citizen-worker dyad never fully nor exclusively crystallizes, inscribing a racial divide in the labor model from the inception of the capitalist state and illuminating what is at stake in recognizing blackness and Dominicans of Haitian descent as legitimate components of dominicanidad.

Historical background

Territorial management in La Hispaniola has been historically complex and unstable. Dating back to 1492, La Hispaniola was the first territory that Christopher

Columbus encountered and conquered in the name of the Spanish , becoming the first colonial settlement in the Americas. For a long time, it was one of the most prosperous colonial administrations and the port of Santo Domingo became a point of strategic importance for trade between Spain and its American colonies (Cassá 1989: 72).

In the early days of the colony, the taino or indigenous population was subjected to

46 severe working conditions for the extraction of gold, basically leading to their extermination. Many got sick and many fled to the mountains as a form of rebellion. The virtual annihilation of the indigenous population brought about the early presence of people of African ancestry in the island (Cassá 1989: 46-63)7. Once the gold reserves of the colony were depleted, farming and livestock became important economic activities, but the sugar industry became the fundamental pillar of the island’s economy, leading to the development of an intensive slave system. However, the prosperity of the colony and its territorial integrity would eventually be threatened by the retrograde measures imposed by the Spanish Crown, an empire that established itself in opposition to

Protestantism and (proto) capitalist societies laying waste to the remnants of feudalism in

Europe.

Spain imposed a monopoly over its colonies, precluding the development of merchant capital, and prioritized other colonies producing precious metals, such as

Mexico and Peru (Cassá 1989: 76). By the end of the 16th century sugar production in the island would nearly collapse due to the limited markets available for trade, fostering a favorable environment for the practice of piracy, smuggling and illegal trade. In turn, the decline of the sugar industry would have a number of consequences, especially as it pertained to the social and spatial reorganization of the island. First, it led to the partial disintegration of the material base behind the institution of slavery in colonial Santo

Domingo and to the emergence of less labor-intensive economic activities. The development of cattle ranches and small rural communities replaced sugar mills to a large

7 In fact, it is the earliest ever recorded presence of people of African ancestry in the Americas, according to archival sources: http://firstblacks.org/en/ 47 extent. Accordingly, smuggling led to the establishment of communities in the north, away from the capital and colonial administrative center, effectively decentralizing and undermining colonial authority. It was not uncommon to see free blacks settle in these communities and become smugglers (Moya Pons 1977: 112). The different interests and the spatial reorganization of these communities led to the development of contrasting mentalities between those in the south who were part of the colonial bureaucracy and therefore loyal to it, and the merchants that settled in the north because smuggling proved to be more profitable than trade with the Metropolis.

The social and political scenario of colonial Santo Domingo at the turn of the 16th century inspired a series of mandates by the Spanish crown with respect to the geographic reorganization of the colony. In 1605, as a means to prevent smuggling and illegal trade, the Spanish crown ordered the governor of Santo Domingo to relocate the population of the island from coastal towns in the northern and westernmost areas to other towns in the interior and closer to the capital. The people protested and resisted as the governor depopulated and burnt coastal towns in the north. Many were hanged. Buildings were destroyed, including sugar mills and churches. “The land was plowed with salt so that crops would not sprout. The north coast was devastated and its four cities, the most prosperous of the colony, disappeared” (Mir 1981: 128). But it did not stop there. The destruction continued to other towns under the assumption that they too were engaging in illegal trade to the point that the territory of the colony was reduced to a third of the island. As Mir pointedly noted, “This event,” commonly referred to as las devastaciones8

8 Translates to ‘devastations.’ 48 in Dominican historiography, “is the result of the confrontation in the economic plane and the violence in the political plane of two great historical forces—the agonizing feudalism and the nascent capitalism—that at that moment disputed the destiny of humanity. Its first encounter on the American stage” (Mir 1981: 129).

To contextualize the general state of misery experienced by all in the colony, Mir cites a thread of letters sent by the archbishop of Santo Domingo to a number of different authorities in Spain in the aftermath of las devastaciones. In them he pled to be removed from his post, expressing with distress the absence of bread. “Even cassava bread9,” he wrote, “the sustenance of those who do not eat bread, has lacked these days amounting those who do not have a real10 to buy it to those who never eat it for lack thereof, compensating this shortage with plantains. Is there misery like this one!” (Mir 1981:

148). One cannot over-stress the importance of these lines. Cassava bread was a staple in the taino diet as were plantains for people of African ancestry living in the island and considered slave food. These were the people “who [did] not eat bread,” as bread was reserved for the Spaniards, those who could previously afford it. The referenced document paints a clear picture of the squalor conditions in which the colony stood after las devastaciones and the neutralizing effect they had against the social hierarchies established by the colonial regime.

The economic collapse brought about during this period bore transformative consequences for Santo Domingo’s colonial society. As Mir noted, the state of

9 The term in the original document is pan de palo, which Mir noted to probably refer to cassava bread, a food historically associated with the taino diet. 10 A silver coin; currency with varying value depending on time and place, as defined by the dictionary of Real Academia Española (RAE). 49 devastation resulted in the volatilization of private property and led to the emergence of a subsistence economy, the common use of land, and the official decline of the plantation slave system, which came to be replaced by domestic slavery (Mir 1981: 161-162). The process of deterritorialization carried out by Spain between 1605 and 1606 further undermined the political infrastructure of the colonial regime and their ability to control lands distant to the capital. But more importantly, by eradicating the black market it destabilized the main source of prosperity and dynamism in an otherwise stagnant economy, not only laying waste to the livelihoods of northerners but to the whole internal market. “The mass migration of the wealthy inhabitants of the island as well as the consequent volatilization of private property caused by las devastaciones, left on the island a precarious population of poor whites and former black slaves that...gave rise to a new society…characterized by the common and undisturbed exploitation of the abandoned lands” (Mir 1981: 20). The colonial administration left nothing but livestock behind in the depopulated areas, which reproduced disproportionately. Accordingly, in this new society, cattle ranchers soon became the dominant social group. But for the same reasons, the territory also became an attracting destination for pirates and buccaneers. By

1625, French adventurers had settled in the western part of the island, founding the

French colony of Saint Domingue.

This colonial administration became known for the massive importation, dehumanizing treatment and exploitation of African slaves. Constituting barely a third of the Caribbean island, the French colony supplied nearly one third of the world’s sugar demand (Eller 2016: 2). Standing in stark contrast to Spanish Santo Domingo—a

50 primitive and lethargic colony that showed but vestiges of what it once was—Saint

Domingue epitomized a reinvigorated and excessively productive slave plantation system. Noting the metamorphosis that the institution of slavery suffered in Santo

Domingo at the turn of the 16th century and the bloody version of it reinstituted in Saint

Domingue renders the colonial experience of slaves in these colonies a difficult comparison given their disparity in terms of labor intensity and the number of slaves residing in each side—approximately 15,000 in Santo Domingo vs. 400,000 in Saint

Domingue (Mir 1981: 174).

It would be a matter of time before slaves in Saint Domingue rebelled against their imperial masters in one of the goriest anti-slavery and anti-colonial insurrections in history. The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 and culminated in 1804 with the Haitian proclamation of independence. At the time, the whole island was under French jurisdiction by way of the treaty of Basel signed between France and Spain in 1795, but the Haitian Revolution impeded the unification of the island under French rule. Thus, at the time of Haitian independence the fate of the eastern part became increasingly important for French imperial forces as to the newly declared republic of Haiti that feared a French invasion through the east. With the help of Haitian and British forces, criollos in

Santo Domingo revolted against French rule in the name of the Spanish crown culminating in the Spanish reconquest of Santo Domingo in 1809 (Moya Pons 2013: 202-

205). Much like before, however, colonial authority in the Spanish side remained practically symbolic.

51

The Haitian Revolution brought ideas of republicanism to the eastern part of the island and plots for independence began materializing among different factions of the population. One block favored the unification of the island under Haitian rule; a second block composed mainly by members of the civil and military bureaucracy wished to join the independent projects of La Gran Colombia; and lastly, a third block, decidedly anti- slavery, wished for the proclamation of an independent republic (Moya Pons 2013: 261-

273). Upon increased support for the unification of the island under Haitian rule in the north, José Nuñez de Cáceres hurriedly led an anti-Haitian, elitist independence project that resulted in the proclamation of the republic of Spanish Haiti on December 1, 1821.

Santo Domingo had long fallen out of Spain’s radar and as such, the metropolis did not take any military action against Nuñez de Cáceres’ manifestation, mainly due to Spain’s involvement in the Peninsular War and their prioritization of other independent wars in the Americas (Moya Pons 2013: 215-217). This proclamation of independence, denominated as ephemeral independence (independencia efímera) in Dominican historiography given its short duration, marked a break with colonial domination, a fundamental element in the process of Latin American independence. However, as this independence movement maintained slavery, it did not fully constitute a break with the

European colonial system of rule. As such, and having a converse effect, this event led many more to favor the unification of the island under Haitian rule. As a result, Haitian troops marched into Santo Domingo where a welcoming crowd witnessed the declaration of the island’s unification on February 9, 1822 (Moya Pons 2013: 217-219).

52

The Haitian occupation of the eastern part of the island marked the social, political and economic situation of the former Spanish colony. The Haitian constitution was well received by the masses for its liberal content, most notably the abolition of slavery and the introduction of meritocracy (Franco 1981:14). However, there was also discontent around the indemnification debt imposed on Haiti by the French to compensate former slave-owners for their losses. This debt became a major economic burden for the Haitians and increasingly to their neighbors to the east. Accordingly, the measures implemented by the Haitians in response were very unpopular, thus contributing to the development of separatist’s ideas: the Código Rural of 1825 established mandatory labor, eastern land was being distributed to the Haitian army and freedmen, and the implementation of racial discriminatory policies against whites’ ability to own property or acquire citizenship (Franco 1981: 43).

The document entitled, “Manifestación de los pueblos de la parte del este de la isla antes Española o de Santo Domingo, sobre las causas de su separación de la

República haitiana,” written on January 16, 1844 by a sector of the Dominican elite, expressed their discontent with the Haitian administration and advocated for the separation of the island. The document stressed the dire economic situation of the eastern part, condemned the dispossession of Dominican land by Haitian leaders, the limited opportunities for progress that drove prominent families to migrate, and the absolutist policies implemented. Dominicans’ independence struggles were inspired by the economic re-organization that the Haitians imposed, which threatened the material base of the Dominican elite that was in charge of the mobilizations (Martínez Vergne 1989).

53

Political discontent continued to rise and the D.R. eventually proclaimed its independence from Haiti on February 27, 1844, putting an end to a twenty-two year period of island unification under Haitian rule (Moya Pons 2013: 271-273).

The policies that the Haitians implemented during the unification period, particularly the question of land management, came into direct conflict with the interests of the elite in Santo Domingo, whose power and wealth as cattle ranchers came to depend on the practice of common land-use institutionalized after las devastaciones. However, there were different wings within the independent movement that resulted in the birth of the D.R.: on the one hand, liberals led by Juan Pablo Duarte and endorsing a bourgeois revolution rooted on the principles of republicanism; and on the other, conservatives led by and clinging on to the common land system that was threatened under

Haitian rule (Mir 1981: 42-44). During the independence war, these two factions joined arms against a common enemy but did not share a common cause. Shortly after independence, conservatives took power and displaced Duarte’s wing along with many of their ideas. The clash between liberals and conservatives continued to manifest and create conflicts throughout the first years of the republic. Conservatives developed annexationist tendencies, auctioning the republic to foreign powers on several occasions in order to uphold the interests of particulars; liberals thought of the state as the materialized institutional manifestation of the proto bourgeois desires subsumed in their independence struggle. The hegemony of conservatives and the social sectors associated with the common land system would culminate in 1874 with the end of the Six Year War,

54 displacing the territorial conceit of conservatives and introducing the D.R. to more liberal political tendencies (Mir 1981: 47-48).

Conservative governments in the past often portrayed Haiti in a negative light and manipulated scares of a Haitian invasion to their advantage (Vásquez Frías 2013). 1874 marked a shift in this narrative. In that year, a treaty of peace, friendship, commerce, navigation and extradition was signed between the D.R. and Haiti, which led to the official opening of the frontier for the transit of people. Article 14 of the treaty, for instance, stipulated that “the citizens of the contracting parties may enter, dwell, settle and reside in all parts of said territories, and those who wish to engage in business will have the right to freely exercise their profession or industry…” (Colección de leyes 1928:

217). This treaty, however, did not put an end to conflicts between the two countries.

The existence of two colonial societies in the island contributed to the development of different interests that impeded the unification of the island under the same flag and credo. But in addition to this, in the geopolitical scenario of the 19th century, Haiti came to represent a site of political contestation that sparked fear and similar movements of liberation across the colonial world (García Peña 2016b). The impending image of the Haitian, combined with the racial discourses inherited from colonization, birthed anti-Haitian narratives that resonated with the Dominican elite and in turn bolstered their own idealized versions of dominicanidad. These narratives naturalized the otherness and foreignness of the Haitian and removed blackness from

Dominicans’ collective identity, arguably the cornerstone of TC 168-13.

55

The consolidation of the Dominican nation

The denationalization legislation claims to safeguard Dominican national identity and values. Scholarship discussing the process of nation building in the D.R., as well as the events and affairs that contributed to the physical and conceptual mapping of the

Dominican nation, are an essential piece of the puzzle. This section analyzes the process of nation building in the D.R., particularly in relation to the development of a discourse of anti-blackness and anti-Haitian sentiment within the national imaginary, and looking at the writing of hispanophiles and the diplomatic transactions in the 19th century.

Torres-Saillant (2010) identified particular historical events that have affected the

Dominican racial imaginary in different ways. One of such events is the declaration of independence of 1844. Juan Pablo Duarte was the main leader of the 1844 independence movement. Duarte did not promote a negative view of Haitians or a racial hierarchy. On the contrary, his writings advanced a conceptualization of Dominican national identity around racial unity and an adherence to that was more amicable than the fierce Haitian discourse of Black nationalism. However, the separation of the island implied a differentiation between the two republics. Haiti had self-proclaimed itself as a black republic; the D.R., therefore, must not be (Torres-Saillant 2010: 28).

San Miguel (2005) explored the writings of Pedro Francisco Bonó (1828-1906), an intellectual whose work dealt with matters of development and the consolidation of the Dominican nation—two deeply interconnected issues in his view. Bonó always highlighted the importance of the masses and their role in the formation of a national identity. Perhaps for this reason, he stressed the positive aspects that came from the

56 unification of La Hispaniola, especially the abolition of slavery and the repartition of land to former slaves. However, Bonó noted that there were differences between the two peoples that could not be reconciled and that were mostly rooted in their respective colonial experiences. There were differences in language, religion and customs, but more importantly, he maintained that slaves in the eastern part of La Hispaniola did not endure the “unthinkable suffering borne by the slave race in the French colony” (Cited in San

Miguel 2005: 48). For Bonó, the policies implemented by the Haitians tried to suppress these differences, perhaps making them more evident in the process. In addition,

Haitian’s racial policies in the island elevated the black race over all others. “with respect to the racial question…Far from lamenting mestizaje11, Bonó came to think of it as an original element, not only of Dominican society but also all of Hispanic America” (San

Miguel 2005: 52).

The writings of Gregorio Luperón (1839-1897) and Eugenio María de Hostos

(1839-1903), according to April Mayes (2014), also displayed that “neither anti- blackness nor anti-Hatianism was a central concept in competing ideas about dominicanidad.” Instead, she argued, their writings “complemented the optimistic, democratic, and anti-imperialist impulses of men who had long been critical of Spanish colonialism and growing U.S. power in the region” (Mayes 2014: 17). Like Bonó,

Luperón’s and Hostos’s notion of Dominican racial identity revolved around the concept of hispanidad and, according to Mayes, were in direct response to the national project,

11 Miscegenation. 57 which needed to propagate a sense of unity to justify Dominican sovereignty in the face of imperialism, especially as the U.S. gained ground in the region (Mayes 2014: 17).

The social and political texts discussed above, while critical of policies implemented by Haitians during the unification of the island, were not inherently anti-

Haitian or anti-black. However, the criollo elite found a refuge in literature to manifest their colonial desires and the romanticized version of dominicanidad that they envisioned. García-Peña (2016b) identified literary texts as the cause of the “myopic” interpretations that condemn Dominican independence as a manifestation of antihaitianismo and anti-blackness more broadly (García-Peña 2016b: 30). To make her argument, García-Peña focused on texts produced in the 19th century. I will feature two among these, which are considered important pillars of the Dominican literary cannon and that are taught to this day in the public education system: Manuel de Jesús Galván’s

Enriquillo, published in 1879, and César Nicolás Pensón’s Vírgenes de Galindo, published in 1891. Enriquillo is a novel about the uprising of taínos against the Spaniards during colonization, which emphasizes mestizaje and the indigenous roots of dominicanidad. Virgenes de Galindo, on the other hand, is a ten-line stanza recounting the story of the murder of three young women and their father during the early stages of the unification of the island. The poem portrays Haitians as the perpetrators of the murder. However, after going back to read the court statements, García-Peña found that the men who were found guilty of the crime were actually three bandits who had escaped prison during the political transition from criollo to Haitian rule (García-Peña 2016b: 23-

58

25). Nevertheless, the story has been repeated, reproduced and internalized as part of the narrative about the Haitian occupation.

In these narratives, the notion of blackness goes beyond the description of the color of one’s skin. There is a clear civilizational narrative that assumes black as a synonym of barbarism. As García-Peña concluded, hispanophiles such as Galván and

Pensón writing at the turn of the 19th century “equated the affirmative diction ‘We are

Indians’ to national belonging, while negating the diction ‘African’ by displacing it in haitianismo and therefore rendering black bodies foreign.” Therefore, “[a]ffirming both dominicanidad and blackness became… an ontological impossibility and a semantic contradiction” (García-Peña 2016b: 39). In these stories, Haitians were portrayed as the harmful ‘other’ and blackness was obliterated as part of the Dominican racial composition. Thus, while conflicts between the D.R. and Haiti were a recurring event during the first years of the Republic, 19th century hispanophiles contributed a great deal to the materialization of a Dominican national discourse in opposition to Haiti.

The analysis of social and political texts produced on the verge of independence or shortly thereafter and the writing of hispanophiles at the turn of the 19th century present contrasting views of dominicanidad and indicate a shift in the depiction of the nation and the place of blackness within it. This shift is further accentuated by the changing geopolitical scenario of the region during the 19th century and the increasing involvement of the U.S. in Dominican affairs. During this period, the weaponization of race as a tool to navigate an unequal geopolitical scenario and materialize the imperial pursuits of the U.S. becomes evident.

59

The geopolitical transformations in the region that resulted in the shift from

European to U.S. imperialism during the 19th century would further accentuate this dynamic. The Monroe Doctrine (1823) was one of the first manifestations from the U.S. against the intervention of European power in the Americas. The Doctrine condemned colonial rule and declared any European attempt to interfere in the affairs of the Americas an act of aggression (Mechan 1965). Arguably, The trope of América para los

Americanos12 was not merely a tool against European imperialism but in favor of the

U.S.’ In the case of the D.R., the transition into the U.S. imperial orbit was a major factor in defining Dominican racial politics and identity.

Haiti and the D.R. experienced many obstacles in their isolated positions as independent republics in the Caribbean for most of the 19th century. European imperial interest on the island persisted after Haitian and Dominican independence. Prior to

Dominican independence, when the island was still unified under Haitian rule, the French proposed to pardon the indemnification debt imposed on Haiti in return for the territorial concession of the Samaná Bay, a peninsula in the eastern part of the island. France’s aggressions continued after Dominican independence as it tried to expand the Haitian debt to the D.R. (Martínez-Fernández 1994: 19). Similarly, Great Britain tried to force the young republic into a loan while Spain opted to maximize their political leverage by bringing issues of recognition to the table at their convenience. “In May 1847 the captain- general of Puerto Rico advised Spanish minister of state Antonio de Benavides to use

12 America for the Americans [English trans.]. 60 appropriate timing in granting recognition to the Dominican Republic” (Martínez-

Fernández 1994: 19).

Meanwhile, U.S. interest in the D.R. was carefully debated as many in the U.S. frowned upon the racial politics of the country, where slavery had been abolished since

1822 and the majority of the population was made up of free blacks and mulattoes. Still, many U.S. state agents visited the country during the and 50s. The D.R.’s relatively under-populated territory represented an opportunity for U.S. capitalists who orchestrated plans of mass migration into the country to tap its full economic potential

(Marte 1984: 61). However, given the racial sensibilities that predominated in U.S. society, plans of that nature had to be entertained with caution and rarely materialized.

These dynamics were evident in the way that diplomatic missions were carried out. As

Martínez-Fernández noted, “Whereas most U.S. consuls and consular agents in Cuba were southerners, many of them plantation owners, those serving in the Dominican

Republic were predominantly Northeast-based speculators linked to commercial and shipping interests” (Martínez-Fernández 1994: 29). Accordingly, the more evident the

U.S. diplomats’ desires to expand U.S. imperial pursuits to the D.R., the whiter

Dominicans were portrayed in their reports describing the racial dynamics of the country.

Southerners who stood to gain from slavery worried about the political implications of acknowledging or annexing the territory of a republic with a majority free black population, whereas northern capitalists magnified the white element in Dominicans’ racial composition, as they would benefit from U.S. imperial and economic expansion

(Martínez-Fernández 1994: 40-44).

61

This perceptual game would in turn further politicize the Dominican-Haitian relationship and racial discourse in the D.R. Americans often advanced a notion of

Dominican whiteness, but these references were made in comparison to Haitians. This practice is best exemplified by the commentaries of U.S. representatives: “One contended unambiguously that the inhabitants of the small Caribbean republic ‘with very few exceptions’ were white and cited racial hostility, that is, ‘the refusal of the white

Dominican to be governed by the black Haitian,’ as the cause of the partition of

Hispaniola into two countries” (Torres-Saillant 1999: 4; emphasis added). Similarly,

American Envoy and Minister Plenipotentiary Summer Welles affirmed that “one of the most noteworthy peculiarities of the Dominican people [is] that among all shades, there is a universal desire that the black be obliterated by the white. The stimulation of white immigration has become a general demand” (cited in Torres-Saillant 1999: 4). In his analysis of race in the D.R., Torres-Saillant asserted that Dominican identity was constituted not only by the way Dominicans thought of themselves, but were also informed by the way powerful nations perceived them, especially those with whom the

D.R. interacted the most. “Both the United States and the European naval powers promoted and manipulated differences in the racial composition and leadership of the

Dominican Republic” (Martínez-Fernández 1994: 43-44). In 1849 then Haitian president

Faustin Soulouque led a Haitian invasion into the D.R. Great Britain, France and the U.S. mediated the conflict and reached a 10-year truce in the same year. In spite of this, the threat of a Haitian invasion did not disappear. The British supported the abolition of slavery and maintained close ties with Haiti while the pro-slavery position of the U.S.

62 strengthened a politics of antihaitianismo and U.S.’ ties with the Dominican elite.

European powers plotted to involve Haitian forces on another invasion to Dominican territory in light of an official plan set in motion in 1854 to concede the Samaná Bay to the U.S. The French and the British convinced Haiti that to allow territorial concessions in the D.R. to a slave-holding power such as the U.S. was a direct threat to the Haitian state. At the same time, the European nations hoped that the prospect of unification in the island would deterred U.S. interest in Dominican territory given that it would significantly alter the overall racial composition of the country (Martínez-Fernández

1994: 47). The racial element emerged as a political tool manipulated by imperial powers and Dominican political leaders alike. Arguably, it granted politicians some leverage to maneuver a racially polarized international scenario. The implications of these practices affected the formation of the collective racial identity of Dominicans as there was an important distinction between the color of their skin and how that color was perceived. But more importantly, these discourses and practices officialized national narratives that counterpointed the D.R. to Haiti, depreciating blackness and condemning anti-Haitianism to be a leitmotif in Dominican history.

The formation of the Dominican capitalist state

Ramonina Brea’s (1983) work explored the emergence of the capitalist states in the D.R. and Haiti. Brea adopted a Marxist framework and posed the state as a political unit essential to the consolidation of the capitalist mode of production inasmuch as it establishes the conditions for the reproduction of capitalist relations. Primarily, the state

63 legitimizes the separation of men from the means of production, through law and other mechanisms of coercion, while creating and maintaining a favorable environment for the commodification of labor power (Brea 1983: 27-29). The constitution of the state in the

D.R., however, displayed a hybrid composition of power where the rule of law had not completely replaced the anarchy of the pre-modern state. She observed that the tension between the law and the mandate of the despot is present in both the Dominican and

Haitian states that emerge from independence. In the midst of the political turmoil that such a political structure perpetuates, neither country developed the mechanisms to effectively centralize power, create political subjectivities or commodify labor power

(Brea 1983: 69).

The transition of Santo Domingo into an independent nation was characterized by the rule of strongmen, or caudillos, and acute economic crises that repeatedly translated into political leverage for outside powers and foreign meddling. Since its inception, the

Republic was founded on an extreme state of economic crisis. “Within a few days, the

Dominican government was without any ready cash and had to seek loans from the large landowners and the local merchants, especially those of foreign affiliation” (Moya Pons

1995: 188). Political leadership soon became equivalent to the ability to secure resources and to military experience to defend the country against the possibility of a Haitian invasion. During this phase, “…borrowing became a common practice and was combined with the printing of paper money without backing to keep the bureaucracy functioning”

(Moya Pons 1995: 188). However, the U.S. imperialist project would soon intersect with

64 the development of a stronger Dominican state apparatus to promote capitalist development in the D.R.

Cassá (1979) identified two modes of production that characterized the D.R. economy at the turn of the 19th century. The first and most prominent one, given the system of subsistence economy in place in the D.R., was small mercantile production. It generally consisted of farm products—such as coffee, cacao and tobacco—which fueled the export sector while perpetuating pre-capitalist or, at most, semi-capitalist economic relations. The second was a capitalist mode of production that was gradually being established with the resurgence of the sugar industry (Cassá 1979: 5). According to Moya

Pons, a Cuban immigrant founded the first sugar mill in 1875. Soon thereafter the industry started to bloom as foreign investors, primarily from the U.S., poured money into this sector (Moya Pons 2013: 396-397). The expansion of the sugar industry at the hands of U.S. foreign capital simultaneously encouraged the incorporation of imports that favored the U.S. market. This affected the internal production of manufactured goods, displacing the national elite from the production process and forming a class of merchants instead. Only a small fraction of the national elite remained involved in the export/import sector, supplying agricultural products—with the obvious exception of sugar. Nevertheless, the sugar industry also experienced certain limitations. Agricultural products continued to be supplied directly by farmers, as such preventing the formation of a working class to be incorporated in the sugar sector (Cassá 1979: 33). Similarly, the structure of small mercantile production and the common land tenure system that was in place complicated the acquisition of land for the expansion of the sugar industry.

65

According to Brea, the investment of foreign capital and the dispossession it entailed did not result in the proletarianization of the population due to the failure of the

Dominican state to safeguard and perpetuate the separation of workers from their means of subsistence during much of the 19th century. Accordingly, the state also failed to

“...promote a social discipline that would enable the subordination of the labor force around an abstract and impersonal domination” (Brea 1983: 127). While state incentives to advance industrialization in the country did exist, there was not a system establishing the necessary conditions and the coercive mechanisms to ensure the expansion of the labor pool. Given workers’ lack of dependence to capital, entrepreneurs involved in the sugar business were forced to offer relatively high salaries, which complemented—but in no way fully constituted—their means of subsistence. As such, “…by maintaining non- capitalist labor relations and processes, the capacity for resistance and passive struggle against the decrease in remuneration increased” (Brea 1983: 132).

Primarily for this reason, capitalists promoted the immigration of workers from other territories—a successful alternative given that the crises of the sugar industry in the

Windward Islands left behind a regional pool of unemployed workers. Capitalists became avid advocates of migration, opening debates about migratory policies and procedures and often requesting permits for the immigration of workers to the executive branch of government. To quote William Bass, owner of one of the most innovative sugar mills at the time, “it cannot be argued that a foreigner working at a sugar farm, prevents a child of the country, who only wants to work in a conuco13, to earn a living” (cited in Brea 1983:

13 A small plot of land for cultivation usually managed by a single farmer. 66

185). Futhermore, capitalists also implemented the privatization of coercive mechanisms through the creation of guardas campestres—or rural guards—in 1907. The rural guards were a surveillance body within the jurisdiction of the sugar companies but amalgamated both private and public authority. Whereas the guardas were appointed and employed by the owner of the company, the governor or communal chief had to ratify their post, extending to them the same rights and duties of the public police (Brea 1983: 157).

In addition to the lack of a Dominican labor force, the political instability that characterized the Dominican state since its inception was a major imposition for capitalist production. This instability was evinced in the institutional fragility of a state whose sovereignty dissipated on three different occasions—1822 to Haiti, 1865 to Spain and

1916 to the U.S. Or else, by the fact that the country was mostly ruled by caudillos who failed to consolidate the different pockets of power that emerged post-independence in order to achieve territorialization. The country was deeply divided and poorly connected.

“Most Dominicans… lived far from the capital, independent and dispersed. No export bonanza or internal migration brought them in closer contact, nor could authorities in

Santo Domingo generate resources with which to extend their administration” (Eller

2016: 22).

In the meantime, acute economic crises became an important avenue for expanding U.S. imperial pursuits in the D.R. Political leaders in dire need of funds would even resort to leasing parts of the Dominican territory. One such example was a treaty signed in 1869 between the U.S. and the Dominican governments to annex the D.R. to the U.S. in exchange of $100,000 in cash and $50,000 in armaments to secure the

67 presidency of Buenaventura Báez. This treaty, however, was never ratified due to complaints raised by Dominican exiles and internal opposition in the U.S. Congress.

Shortly thereafter, and also under the leadership of Báez, the Bay of Samaná was rented by a U.S. company in 1872, and again later in the 1890s under the dictatorship of Ulises

Hereaux (Moya Pons 2010: 229-230).

Dollar diplomacy became a popular U.S. foreign policy approach to keep

European powers out of the Western hemisphere and gain political influence by buying off the debts of Latin American and East Asian countries. “…Washington encouraged

U.S. banking concerns to assume the debts of these countries, usually in conformance with explicit treaties, and promised to assist the financiers in the collection of their payments” (Smith 2000: 54). The accrual of foreign debt turned the D.R. into an easy target for foreign meddling. In 1906, the San Domingo Improvement Company, a consortium of New York businessmen, bought a Dominican national debt that was owed to the Netherlands. Eventually, the U.S. government consolidated the Dominican debt for the establishment of a single creditor and so, by 1906, a $20 million loan was granted to the D.R. by the brokerage firm of Kuhn, Loeb, & Co.—a New York City bank. $17 million of this sum was to be allocated for the payment of pending debts while the rest was to be used for the construction of public work projects (Moya Pons 2010: 294). By

1907, the D.R. officially became a protectorate of the U.S. The latter took full control over the Dominican customs in order to secure the repayment of the external debt. Being an outward oriented economy, this concession guaranteed the U.S. government leverage over important political decisions. Accordingly, the U.S. sought to impose strong

68 governments that would be able to protect the direct investments of U.S. capitalists

(Cassá 1979: 33). In 1916, however, the provisional presidency of Francisco Henríquez y

Carvajal opposed the signing of a new treaty granting the U.S. complete control, not only over the customhouse, but also the treasury, the army, and the police. In response to this,

Captain H. S. Knapp from the U.S. Marines ordered the dissolution of the Henríquez y

Carvajal administration and assumed absolute control of the government in November of the same year (Smith 2000: 55). The new military administration soon fired the cabinet members that were in place and set itself a number of long-term goals in order to construct a more stable political, economic, and social order in the D.R. Among some of the goals and measures adopted were: the disarmament of the population, the completion of public work projects that had been suspended, the “reorganization of the public administration, the creation of a system of internal taxation, the establishment of a more modern system of public accounting and the creation of a national guard…” (Moya Pons

2010: 322-3). In addition, the occupying forces completed a network of highways, created a primary education system and formally put an end to the common land tenure system through land registration laws (Moya Pons 2010: 324). Before these transformations, the public institutions of the Dominican state were significantly decentralized. Arguably, the regionalization of power was a characteristic of Dominican society that was addressed by improving the country’s central infrastructure, creating access to formerly isolated communities and facilitating movement within the country and U.S. monitoring.

69

In short: the modern state in the D.R. emerged from the demands of the global capitalist structure and its need for national states to discipline labor and facilitate commodity flows (Betances 1995). Investments in the sugar industry demanded that a more effective process of territorialization be carried out. This entailed a spatial restructuration to facilitate the circulation of raw material, merchandise and workers. The failure of the political leadership in the D.R. to organize such a state resulted in the U.S. military intervention of 1916. The strengthening of the Dominican state apparatus as an externalized project by U.S. forces, however, entailed a series of contradictions. Stripped of its sovereignty, the formation of the modern state in the D.R. paradoxically came at the expense of its denationalization. The Occupation contributed to the centralization of power and finance in the country, but incentives for capitalist development such as the exoneration of taxes to companies despite their place of origin advanced the perception that capitalists were independent from the state, promoting private capital over common interest (Brea 1983: 161-164). As Brea pointed out, the commodification of labor power as a corollary of the dynamics of state formation in the D.R. did not respect the boundaries of the national territory.

In 1912, the first Dominican migration law (No. 5074) was created. This law was supplemented by three executive orders issued by the U.S. military governor in Santo

Domingo in 1919 in relation to the specific immigrations of braceros or sugarcane workers. During the U.S. occupations of the D.R. and Haiti, 1916-1924 and 1915-1934 respectively, the U.S. administration promoted the migration of Haitian workers into the

D.R. to work in U.S. owned sugar plantations. En masse Haitian migration to the D.R.

70 was thus a result of U.S. capital’s demand for workers (Vásquez Frías 2013: 68).

Accordingly, the commodification of labor power in the D.R. consolidated around U.S.- occupied Hispaniola. As such, the nation-state of the D.R. formed at the expense of two seemingly diametrically opposed processes: a nation that materializes in opposition to

Haiti, and a state that materializes upon the demands of foreign capital, resulting in the import of Haitian labor to work in the sugar industry.

The first big waves of Haitian migration to the D.R began when the Americans reinstated an old law called la corvée, a system of forced labor that consisted of assigning six days of free work to the State in order to improve infrastructure in Haiti. Many

Haitian farmers were losing their land to American companies. In the meantime, the

Dominican economy was booming with the emergence of great agricultural plantations and the apogee of the modern sugar industry. Admiral Erick K. Cole, Naval Commander of the United States Occupation force noted in a correspondence with Washington the flux of Haitian migrants to the D.R. and attributed it to the corvée system and the higher wages paid in the D.R. (Vásquez Frías 2013: 70).

Besides the wage disparity, it could be argued that the U.S. showed a relatively preferential treatement to the D.R. more broadly. In fact, there was a system in place to send insubordinate U.S. marines stationed in the D.R. to Haiti as a discipline mechanism

(García-Peña 2016b: 78). In addition, during the occupation, the criminalization of Afro- religious practices in the D.R. was strongly enforced. Most notably, perhaps, was the of Olivorio Mateo, or Papá Liborio, a prominent spiritual leader whose body was exposed by the U.S. military in front of the City Hall of San Juan. Shortly after his

71 death, “The local paper, El Cable, published an obituary that read: ‘With the death of

Olivorio, we consider his coarse religion to be finished forever. It constituted a disgrace for this municipality, particularly since the majority of its followers were foreign elements’” (García-Peña 2016b: 64). The traditions of the Afro-descending populations, particularly Afro-religious practices and practicioners were often profiled as Haitian, further accentuating blackness as a marker of foreigness and in opposition to dominicanidad. Other portrayals of Papá Liborio in the local newspaper described him as

“The pestilent fake leader who fools the poor… The uneducated Haitian voodoer” (cited in García-Peña 2016b: 79; emphasis added). This depiction is parallel to the one made by one of my interviewees in chapter one as he reminisced of “the stench of the border” nearly a century later. The anti-Haitian and anti-blackness discourse that informed the geopolitical practices of much of the 19th century, as exposed in the previous section, clearly materialized in U.S.-occupied Hispaniola, where contrasting views of D.R. and

Haiti under the U.S. gaze served as a conceptual and literal bordering method. The first bordering patrol in the island was in fact established during the U.S. occupation (García-

Peña 2016b: 78). And even today, CESFRONT14, a body established in 2006 to regulate border security in the D.R., came as a result of the border externalization practices of the

U.S. during the War of Terror (Miller 2013), suggesting that the anxiety around Haiti and racialized bodies has not only lingered, but was never exclussive to the D.R.

Though not to the same degree, Haitian migration existed prior to the U.S. occupation and would continue long after the occupying forces left the D.R. and Haiti.

14 This acronym stands for ‘Cuerpo Especializado en Seguridad Fronteriza Terrestre’ and translates to ‘Specialized Border Security Corps.’ 72

Haitians migrated to work in the sugarcane fields as early as 1887, as noted in the newspaper, El Eco de la Opinión, published on May 14 of that year. Accordingly, a system of bilateral agreements between the D.R. and Haiti to bring Haitian labor to work in Dominican sugarcane fields existed from 1952-1986 (Wooding and Moseley-Williams

2004). By 1920, the number of Haitians recorded by the Dominican census reaches

28,258; 52,652 by 1935; 18,772 in 1950; 29,350 by 1960; and 42,160 by 1970. But this data is not reliable and it is intuited that the numbers were probably much higher, since they do not include irregular migrants (Vásquez Frías 2013: 78-79). The intra- governmental agreements ceased after the 1980s. However, this practice is still enforced through other avenues and encouraged by the private sector in the D.R. today.

With the decay of the sugar industry in the D.R. in the 1990s, Haitians started to move out of bateyes, which are secluded communities near sugar plantations, and coming into cities and tourist towns. Dominican economist and historian Bernardo Vega maintained that, because of the spatial structure of bateyes, Dominicans did not have as much contact with Haitians until the last thirty years. “As the country has become more urbanized and the economy more diversified,” he stated, “Haitians have moved to the cities, finding jobs in construction, the tourism industry and other labor-intensive fields.

Only 20 percent of Haitian migrants now work in the sugar fields” (Voltz n.d.).

The political conjuncture of the time would result in a further politicization of

Haitian migration. On three different occasions (1990, 1994 and 1996), José Francisco

Peña Gómez, a popular Dominican politician of Haitian descent ran for the presidency of the Republic against Dr. Joaquín Balaguer. The latter was an important right-wing

73 ideologue and cabinet member during the thirty-year dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas

Trujillo (1930-1961). During his dictatorship one of the most atrocious acts of violence took place between Dominicans and Haitians. Trujillo, an adamant proponent of racist anti-Haitian politics, ordered the genocide of all Haitians residing in the border towns of the D.R. Historians estimate that the 1937 massacre resulted in the death of approximately 15,000 to 18,000 Haitians, Dominicans of Haitian descent, and dark- skinned Dominicans (Torres-Saillant 2010: 27; Moya Pons 2010: 368). Born to Haitian parents in the D.R., Peña Gómez was just a baby when the genocide took place. His parents fled back to Haiti while a Dominican family of farmers adopted him and raised him (“Hoy se conmemora el 18…” 2016). Later, Peña Gómez played a pivotal role in the

April Revolution against conservative sectors in the D.R. and the U.S. Occupation of

1965 (Moya Pons 2013: 518). Balaguer, on the other hand, inherited the presidency after

Trujillo’s death and was the presidential candidate sponsored by the U.S. government for the 1966 elections, a year after the occupation came to an end. Thanks to U.S. government and military support, Balaguer won and governed the country for the next twelve years; and would do so once more upon the defeat of Peña Gómez in the 1990 and

1994 elections. In 1996, Peña Gómez was defeated again but this time by Leonel

Fernández, a candidate backed by Balaguer after both political parties agreed to form a

‘patriotic front’ (Moya Pons 2013: 517; 549). It is of paramount importance to mention that Balaguer was the author of the trope of a ‘peaceful invasion,’ which advances

Haitian migration as a problematic inseparable from—and in fact rooted in—the military conflicts of the 19th century that put an end to the unification of the island (Balaguer

74

1995). This thesis was first published in his book, La isla al revés: Haiti y el destino dominicano (1983). Since, Haitian migration has been a popular political tool that is periodically deployed to the advantage of the political and conservative sectors of the

Dominican elite. Public opinion towards Haitian migration has been affected by this amalgam of politics and nationalism, polarizing the population into two camps: those who defend the rights of immigrants and workers, and those who define themselves as defenders of the motherland (Vásquez Frías 2013: 199).

The conflation of migration and statelessness prevalent in the ruling TC 168-13 mirrors the problematic of Haitian migration in the face of the fervent nationalist rhetoric ubiquitous in contemporary Dominican history. The complication arises from the realization that the hiatus separating mobility and citizenship and the bridge blurring their distinction are embodied in the same historical figure: the Haitian worker. The ongoing process of bordering La Hispaniola conceals the political expediency and exploitable tensions subsumed in the coming together of the nation and the state in this conjuncture, as well as the productivity of its topographical demarcation and hierarchized subjectivities. The U.S. occupation marked the establishment of a labor model that adjudicates ethnic Haitians to slave-like working conditions in the D.R. This model continues. It redeems the colonial design by reproducing its spatial dynamics around belonging and identity, but these racialized bodies are not exclusively the product of undocumented border crossing and processes of mobility. The difference between an undocumented worker and a citizen is a generation. Or used to be. TC 168-13 eliminates the consequences of the extended presence of Haitian workers in the D.R. and the threat

75 that citizenship and legitimization could bring upon a labor model that the Dominican capitalist state is contingent upon. But as I have argued, this labor model is the product of the generic structuring of global space to uphold the universality of capitalist production.

Inclusion > belonging: The intersection of capital-nation-state

In The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan (2016), Gavin Walker revisited pivotal discussions in Japanese

Marxists’ debates that took place between 1920 and 1930. What Walker refers to by capital’s “sublime perversion” is capital’s capacity to overcome the limitations and contradictions of its internal logic without resolving them. Capital cannot produce the most important elements of production, namely the labor power commodity and land.

Similarly, the capitalist production process invariably leads to the exploitation of workers without whom value production cannot be generated, thus causing an inherent tension between the production process and the productive forces (Walker 2016: 11). In spite of the fact that these limitations and contradictions have always existed in capitalism, the capitalist system is alive and well. In this study, Walker disambiguated the relationship between the national question and the capitalist mode of production to illuminate the centrality of the nation for the continual reproduction of capitalism. Focusing primarily on the theoretical contributions of Kozo Uno, Walker established an intricate relation between capitalist production, the nation-form, and the subject—a relation that is crystallized in the process of primitive accumulation and the commodification of labor power.

76

Kozo Uno’s work, as discussed by Walker, revolved around the creation and reproduction of the labor power commodity and the social processes and mechanisms of control employed to enable this commodification. Primitive accumulation is generally understood as a historical event through which capital creates the necessary conditions for capitalist production by means of the violent separation of the means of subsistence from the would-be worker (Marx 1867). However, Uno identified a fundamental flaw in the internal logic of the circuit of capital that pushes us to re-conceptualize primitive accumulation as a structure that must be reproduced in perpetuity for the sake of the capitalist mode of production. He referred to this as capital’s muri, or aporia: the necessity/impossibility of the commodification of labor power.

The worker’s capacity to continuously encounter the capitalist in the labor market is not only contingent on the initial act of violence that divorces him from the means of production, but also on the maintenance and reproduction of the labor power commodity through access to the means of subsistence. However, the means of subsistence are in turn an outcome of the production process. By implication, the production process, somehow, already presupposes the presence of the labor power commodity: a presence that capital requires yet remains external to its internal circuit and jurisdiction (Walker

2016: 116-120). As such, the capitalist circuit is interrupted by consumption. This theoretical aporia renders the labor power commodity as necessary yet defective, for it can never be fully commodified. “Capital is consistently concerned with the ‘industry’ that produces labor power—life—and, because it cannot directly appropriate this

‘industry’ or ‘social factory,’ forms and deploys mechanisms that exert control over, and

77 internalize, it such that it appears to be an endogenous function…” (Walker 2016: 133).

This muri invites us to reconsider the processes of coercion that are often thought of as

‘extra-economic’ and that allow capital to apparently overcome this impossibility. The process of primitive accumulation ostensive transcends the economic realm to develop and deploy the mechanisms that render workers’ presence manageable. This is essentially a question of biopower and the state’s role to mobilize political and juridical means to allow for a reliable supply of the labor power commodity (Walker 2016: 123-124).

Walker cited Marx to unpack the idea that the establishment of a capitalist system depends on “two very different kinds of commodity possessors [who] must come face to face and into contact” (Walker 2016: 79). I will quote Walker at length on this matter:

…what Marx describes here is not just a process of ‘freeing’ the peasantry to become the wage labor required for the formation and rotation of the circuit of capitalist accumulation, it is also at the same time the inverse: it is the closure of heterogeneity—the simple and pure space of difference as such—in order to produce specific differences, equivalences that can then ‘encounter’ each other. This ‘face-to-face’ encounter discussed by Marx is predicated on the possibility that the two parties in question can in fact encounter each other at all, a moment made possible only by the process of primitive accumulation understood as a process of capturing, gathering, and recombining of difference into units capable of a relation (Walker 2016: 79).

In conversation with Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth, Walker presented a parallel between the processes of the enclosure of difference that the commodification of labor power entails with the emergence of its spatial manifestation in today’s contemporary world: the unit of the nation-state. “…Schmitt finds the key to the process by which something diffuse and in flux (‘tribe, retinue, or people’) becomes something fixed, something ‘historically situated or located’… in the ‘appropriation of land and in the

78 founding of a city or colony’” (Walker 2016: 88). Nomos refers to the original act of measuring, dividing and locating land. “All subsequent developments are… either a continuation on the same basis or a disintegration and departure from the constitutive act of the spatial order established by land-appropriation, the founding of cities, or colonization” (Walker 2016: 88). The problematic of enclosing and systematizing difference in order to commodify labor power is rooted in the historical appearance of the nation-form and the international systems of states.

The co-production of the world vis-à-vis the labor power commodity manifests through the inclusionary/exclusionary logic of citizenship attached to the nation-state system, which produces the citizen-worker subjectivities.

…[W]e are alerted immediately to the chain of signification between the logic of the citizen as image of the state, and the logic of property (Locke’s ‘property in his own person’ or labor power) as a microphysics of capitalist development as a whole. This dual homology traces for us the inscriptions of power that irreparably condition the modern regimes of citizenship and that continue to show us what is at stake in the state’s policing of the figure of the citizen (Walker 2016: 22-3).

However, the citizen-worker dyad that Walker identified as the “microphysics of capitalist development as a whole” does not adequately represent the dynamics of the global labor market, or the process of the commodification of labor power in the D.R. for that matter. It could be argued that space has been successfully enclosed in the form of the nation-state and these units have remained relatively stable throughout capital’s deployment. However, the processes of mobility that are inherent to the capitalist system have not been halted or regulated to the same extent. “This is why the question of migration, of displacement, of statelessness, is so crucial to new methods of historical

79 inquiry. Such sites do not constitute spaces ‘free’ from capital but rather those spaces that are permanently located in the border” (Walker 2016: 139).

Mezzadra and Neilson (2012) help us better understand the disarticulation of the citizen-worker dyad, pointing to the flexibilization of the labor market built on the production and reproduction of precarity and the multiplication of subjectivities, of labor power, that are neither fully included nor excluded (Mezzadra and Neilson 2012: 62).

They used the concept of ‘differential inclusion’ to explain this dynamic. This concept describes “…how inclusion in a sphere or realm can be subject to varying degrees of subordination, rule, discrimination and segmentation,” and specifically with regards to migration regimes, how “…migrant inclusion through illegalization… creates the conditions under which a racial divide is inscribed within the composition of labour and citizenship” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2012: 67-68). The stratification of legal statuses and subjectivities not only allow for a more effective policing of spaces and subjects, but also reconceptualize the border as something that can be constantly redeployed and multiplied.

Walker analogized solving the muri to an act of constant folding and unfolding.

“By folding something, one takes a plane or surface (a continuous space without depth) and creates an interior out of a single exterior. But this folded interior…is not thereby separated from the exterior: rather it is coextensive with it in a mutually constitutive relation” (Walker 2016: 121). One can envision the exterior as global space and the fabricated pockets as the different nation-states that account for its heterogeneity. This is an essential point. The formation of national states was instrumental to the global

80 capitalist economy to facilitate commodity flows and discipline labor under the umbrella of the citizen-worker dyad. The industrial reserve army’s role in the minimization of wages for capitalist gain theorized by Marx in Capital Volume I (1867) is magnified when this army is set in motion. Dispossessed of their means to sustain life, bodies cannot be contained within their place of origin. The displacement of the industrial reserve army across different states disrupts the citizen-worker dyad and establishes a hierarchy among the proliferated subjectivities that result from mobility (undocumented, migrant, other, etc.), effectively stratifying the composition of the labor force while national reasoning closes space for them to ever belong. This space of internal externalities is created through state power, border crossing and the logic of the nation form.

The framework of differential inclusion that Mezzadra and Neilson described is a dynamic that has been at play in the Dominican context for a long time, most notably through the presence of Haitian workers—an invariable pattern throughout the history of the modern capitalist state in the D.R. Meanwhile, we have seen in previous discussions how the Dominican national imaginary was demarcated at the expense of racialized bodies deemed foreign and anti-Haitian politics. As such, the presence of Haitian workers in the D.R. has been characterized by a dialectic of inclusion and exclusion that erases the prospect of belonging, illuminating a rationale behind the criminalization of belonging that TC 168-13 perpetuates.

The stereotypical profile of the Haitian worker in the D.R.—black, poor and undocumented—renders them more exploitable, reducing their options to labor-intensive

81 and poorly paid jobs, from working in sugarcane fields to the construction sector. The racial divide that plagues the composition of labor and citizenship that Mezzadra and

Neilson pointed out is evinced in the situation of Haitian workers in the D.R. and has been evident for quite some time. It is precisely their historical presence that potentially threatens to eliminate that racial divide and throw the model of differential inclusion that the Dominican capitalist state has come to depend on off balance. The offspring of this population group, before the constitutional amendments of 2010, was entitled to the full range of rights that citizenship confers. As such, the denationalization of Dominicans of

Haitian descent can be explained by situating it within the framework of Uno’s muri and

Mezzadra and Neilson’s differential inclusion. Both frameworks emphasize the world- making processes that turn the space of the nation-state into the necessary threshold for capital’s deployment, as advanced by Walker. The material and existential conditions of dispossession that TC 168-13 propagates the reproduction of the circumstances of primitive accumulation that are necessary to overcome Uno’s muri, facilitated by state power. Similarly, the stratification of the labor power commodity that Mezzadra and

Neilson described, facilitated by the structuring of the international system of states and the logic of the nation-form; the inclusionary and exclusionary logic and derived legal statuses that the nation and the state advance and proliferate in tandem. The topology of capital is then contingent on the topography of the nation-state form, a hierarchized yet commensurable system of political units. The nation-state system organizes and encloses difference in a seemingly homogeneous way while producing the subjectivities that sustain the capitalist production process, subjectivities that are multiplied and

82 transformed through the movement of bodies across space and time. Brea’s work speaks to this dynamic by describing how the establishment of the capitalist state in the D.R. was a product of the demand of global capital and how the commodification of labor power extended across the whole island and the U.S. However, she portrayed this as a defective particularity of the process of state formation in the D.R. Brea therefore failed to present the tension between externalizing and endogenous dynamics as productive. Looking at the historical case that institutionalizes this (inter)national composition of labor in the

D.R.—the modern sugar industry—it becomes evident that far from negating the nation, the batey comes to reinforce it. It became a place where the national economy bifurcated into its two categories: the economy, which includes Haitians into its sphere; and the nation, which simultaneously expels them—a nation building enterprise at the mercy of the capitalist state.

The nation-state system of spatial enclosure appears to contradict the flow of migrant workers that constitute the global labor market. Yet, to the contrary, it opens up avenues for the commodification and stratification of labor power. In the case of the

D.R., it is evident that the nation form is historically mobilized as a sort of sentinel to condition the internal externalization or differential inclusion of racialized bodies. In turn,

TC 168-13 eliminates access to the state and the social rights of citizenship for

Dominicans of Haitian descent, hindering their ability to live dignified lives and significantly restricting their social mobility. But more importantly, it reproduces the

83 paradoxical image of the Haitian worker as a worthless outsider, as a presence perceived to devalue space while in fact boosting value-production15.

What is at stake in advancing an image of Dominicans of Haitian descent as legitimate citizens? Doing so challenges a model that the Dominican capitalist state has come to depend on and that the national imaginary is not ready to accept. In turn, the opposite dynamic strategically facilitates their commodification as workers and their stratification within the labor force to ensure a supply to specific industries. TC 168-13 works to maintain and perpetually reproduce this social status16. The Haitian migrant worker is the proto-subject of Dominicans of Haitian descent. If one follows the trajectory of Haitian workers in the D.R. on a single plane, one finds that these subjectivities inevitably join together in time. In an ideal world, this would happen under the umbrella of dominicanidad and Dominican citizenship. The stubborn fixation of defending and maintaining dominicanidad in the face of haitianismo even when these categories have been embodied as a unity and can no longer be physically nor existentially separated is problematic to say the least. Ironically, the prioritization of the us/them dichotomy, even when these categories no longer hold true, actively degrades the inside/outside dichotomy. In this way, the transition from territorial to geopolitically

15 The latest study (2005) analyzing the contributions of Haitian labor to the D.R.’s GDP found that it contributes 2.54% in the sugar sector; 24% and 30% to the production of coffee and agricultural products, respectively; and 6.8% to the construction sector (Vásquez Frías 2013: 279; 283). 16 For instance, Wendy Benoit Yan is one among the many affected by the sentence. He works as a motorcycle-taxi driver in the informal sector, afraid of being detained by the police and asked for documentation. “I finished high school and even though I have friends who could get me a job, I do not have an I.D. card,” he stated, “I could be working at a hotel, studying, but unfortunately, having been denied my I.D. card I cannot continue” (Arroyo 2013). Another denationalized Dominican of Haitian descent stated, “I wanted my children to have a better future than me, but without papers it cannot be” (“Ciudadanos y ciudadanas fantasmas” n.d.).

84 embodied borders obliterates the deep-rooted conflicts over territorial management and the ‘peaceful invasion’ trope that are so often regarded and invoked as the genesis of anti-

Haitian sentiment in the D.R. If law and its application can be considered a mapping mechanism that speaks to the consistency and homogeneity of the space of the nation- state, the multiplication of the border that TC 168-13 perpetuates are but pinholes in the cartography of its territorial integrity. In a similar manner, the entanglement of citizenship and migratory policies pervasive in TC 168-13 severs the link between belonging and state territorial boundaries, effectively displacing the centrality of territory.

By erasing space for Dominicans of Haitian descent, the state is creating phantom-like subjects through a vetting citizenship process. Their nativity and ongoing presence in

Dominican territory is rendered meaningless. On the contrary, their presence and existence is problematized but, despite their legal exclusion, continuously allowed.

85

Conclusion

The language of TC 168-13 illuminates the centrality of official national narratives and the conjuncture of the state of Haitian migration in the Dominican

Republic (D.R.). As such, it became crucial to understand the processes and events that resulted in the consolidation of these official national narratives, the pattern of Haitian migration established by the Dominican capitalist state, and how and why citizenship comes into play.

The opposing interests and socio-political structures of the post-colonial societies of Saint Domingue and Santo Domingo rendered the unification of the island under

Haitian rule an unsustainable reality. Moreover, the changing geopolitical scenario of the

19th century, where the United States (U.S.) emerged as a hegemonic power, rejected the discourse of liberation introduced in the Americas by the Haitian Revolution, conversely advancing a politics of anti-Haitianism in the region. The crystallization of anti-Haitian politics at an international scale proved a propitious environment for the Dominican elite to entertain and, in fact, exaggerate narratives against their Haitian neighbors, building the foundation of the nation in direct opposition to Haiti as to separate and distinguish

Dominican nationhood and statehood from the Haitian other. This dynamic of disassociation, in turn, resulted in the negation of cultural elements around black identity, which became a marker of foreignness that official narratives traced back to haitianismo.

86

Similarly, the process of state formation in the D.R. can be located within the broader process of capitalist development at a global scale. The investment of U.S. capital in the sugar industry in the D.R. led to the need of a strong state apparatus to protect investments and encourage commodity flows and proletarianization to supply this industry. The political instability of the D.R. resulted in the externalization of state formation at the hands of the U.S. military forces during U.S.-occupied Hispaniola.

While the conditions that allowed the existence of a subsistence economy were gradually eliminated during this process, its prevalence in Dominican society hindered the commodification of labor power at a national scale and led to the incorporation of Haitian workers into this process. But the 1916 U.S. occupation also contributed to the development of bordering mechanisms between the two countries, officializing and further contrasting the difference between the two peoples. This process was not limited to the militarization of the border, but the criminalization of Afro-religious practices and customs. As such, the inclusion of Haitian workers into the national economy was accompanied by a racial stigma evinced in the exploitative conditions in which they worked (and continue to work) and marking the inscription of a racial divide within the

Dominican labor force.

The materialization of Dominican national narratives in opposition to Haiti and the constitution of a national labor force at the expense of Haitian bodies do not indicate a contradiction or a problem for the Dominican capitalist state, but a fundamental motor for its operation. Indeed, the real problem for the Dominican state lies in the processes that disrupt the functioning of the machine. In this case: citizenship.

87

The disarticulation of the citizen-worker dyad is not a contemporary characteristic of the Dominican labor force that gradually took place with the advent of globalization, but its singular founding trait. Without access to citizenship, the flexibilization of the subjectivities that constitute the global labor market today has generally worked in favor of the maximization of capitalist gains because they are usually divorced from political representation and other rights and protections. In a converse dynamic, Dominicans of

Haitian descent work to reconstitute a citizen-worker dyad in the D.R. that is, at least in theory, devoid of racial divides and opening avenues, albeit slow and torturous, to recast the profile of ethnic Haitians in Dominican society.

As established by Uno, the commodification of labor power is inseparable from the process of primitive accumulation, a structure to maintain and reproduce the conditions of dispossession that separate workers from the means of production; to overcome the muri and drag workers into the circuit of capital. As such, this process introduces one of the pieces knitting together the trinity17 (capital-nation-state) as an articulate system. It illuminates the role of the state in institutionalizing proletarianization. Mezzadra and Neilson bring our attention to the second piece by documenting and systematizing the model of differential inclusion, which evinces the role of the logic of the nation vis-à-vis citizenship regimes to commodify and stratify labor power. And lastly, Walker prodigiously brings it all together by pointing to the

17 Borrowing Kojin Karatani’s language to refer to the intersection of capital-nation-state, or mode of exchange C, and to whom I am indebted for generating the foundational epistemological and methodological tools to conduct this mode of historical inquiry within a Marxist framework. Indeed, the transition from modes of production to modes of exchange advanced in Structures of World History opens up avenues to analyze the roles that the idea of the nation and the institution of the state have historically played for capitalist development. 88 spatial and conceptual manifestations of the codification of difference that the state and the nation encapsulate and signaling to its importance for capitalist development. In other words, how the enclosure of space and the production of subjectivities (citizen-worker dyad and beyond) that the international system of nation-states engenders enable capital to overcome its limitation to incorporate the labor power commodity into the circuit of capital.

The infliction and organization of difference enclosed in nation-states and the subjectivities around them created crucial mechanisms of control that allowed for the effective commodification of labor power to take place. Not exclusively by fixing the spaces where processes around commodification become institutionalized, but creating a system of in-betweens and border crossing for bodies to navigate, to be held captive, to be criminalized; to dispose of old subjectivities, acquire new ones and negotiate their multiplicity. An interstice. TC 168-13 hauls Dominicans of Haitian descent back into that space. Accustomed to think within the citizen-worker dyad, one can easily overlook or fail to identify the coercive mechanisms implemented to maintain the conditions of dispossession of workers that fall outside of these subjectivities. But considering the importance of Haitian labor to the Dominican capitalist state and how the racial divide in the composition of labor hierarchizes the division of labor and works performed, this point is crucial. The social reproduction of workers that fall outside of the citizen-worker dyad but remain static in place introduces the possibility of upward mobility by the acquisition of citizenship and the rights and opportunities it confers. Denationalization can thus be theorized as a multigenerational coercive mechanism for the retention of

89 workers outside the dyad, in the space of in between the topographies that enable the topology of capital.

The migrant generally embodies the conditions of dispossession that primitive accumulation perpetuates. Most times, the sole purpose of crossing the border is selling the labor power commodity. The racialization that results from border crossing and the othering mechanisms of the nation-form produce different subjectivities to people the racialized categories that are inscribed onto the labor force upon workers’ movement and inclusion. TC 168-13 crystallizes this status in perpetuity, sustaining the existing racial categories that exist in the Dominican composition of labor and workers’ conditions of dispossession. An irregular legal status deprives workers from the possibility to ever own land and property.

As the Dominican case demonstrates, the processes and tensions located at the intersection of capital-nation-state are a productive force for the commodification and stratification of labor power. The inclusion of Haitian workers in the Dominican national economy was crucial for the establishment of capitalist social relations and generated a tear in the national fabric of Dominican society that enduringly rules out Haitians’ possibility to belong. Inclusion in this context loses all positive connotations and becomes an easy excuse for punishment. TC 168-13 is an institutional manifestation of the impossibility to belong. Inclusion and belonging illustrate in this case the topological quality of capital and the topographic logic of the nation-state, respectively. While these are contrasting dynamics, there is a certain harmony and equilibrium to them. Contrary to the commonsensical depiction of topological and topographical processes as antagonistic,

90 the symbiotic and productive relation between the two suggests that this opposition be challenged. Borders are points of connection and transactions among the different building blocs that constitute the heterogeneity of global space, working to pave the way for the uninterrupted flow of capital.

The strong resistance against the unification of the island and the need of distinction upon which the Dominican national archive was built birthed the existential impossibility of ever recognizing the embodiment of the D.R. and Haiti as a unity. But within that impossibility lays the open secret of a national labor force built precisely on that unity and the logical consequences of the ongoing presence of Haitians in Dominican territory. The offspring of Haitian workers born in the D.R. embody the unification of La

Hispaniola, a unity that threatens to undo the episode of Dominican independence in the national imaginary. The territorial anxieties of the 19th century were rooted in the geopolitical reality in which the Haitian republic was born. It was originally a product of an existential threat, the fear of the elimination of the Haitian. Their presence in

Dominican soil today, in turn, is seen as a threat to the elimination of dominicanidad.

The trope of a ‘peaceful invasion’ advanced by Balaguer, and adopted and amplified by xenophobes, rekindles the issues around territorial management of the 19th century to claim in a fervent ultra-nationalist tone that anti-Haitian and anti-immigrant politics equal the defense of national territory. Consequently, territorial integrity is still perceived to be at the heart of denationalization. This premise, however, is not true. The eradication of jus soli from the Dominican constitution for people “in transit” is seen as a national defense mechanism. Once established that the Dominican nation materializes in

91 opposition to Haiti, one can see how that can be. However, TC 168-13 also evinces that the defense of the nation and territory, respectively, are not mutually constitutive thus revealing the autonomy of these elements that, despite having historically worked in tandem in the Dominican context, are in the process of being disarticulated. Indeed, if the threat is the Haitian element, its presence in Dominican territory should not be tolerated.

But what the denationalization legislation does is to institutionalize a legal mechanism to void the prospect of the legitimization of the Haitian element forever. The anxiety is not around inclusion, but belonging. TC 168-13 selectively disassociates specific bodies from their bond to Dominican territory. The loyalty to the segregated geographic imaginaries of modern day Hispaniola (Haiti-D.R.) is prioritized over belonging to place, displacing the importance of territory and elevating the nation at its expense. Accordingly, the retroactive application of the ruling eliminates traces of this unity across time because the presence of Haitian labor has not only existed since the inception of the Dominican capitalist state, but was instrumental for the establishment thereof.

This has been the single most criticized aspect of the denationalization legislation.

Showing no genuine regard for understanding the possible motivations behind TC 168-

13, the international community was quick to criticize, and stubbornly fixated on, the retroactive application and procedural violations of the ruling. The myriad reports on the aggravating problem of statelessness in the D.R. really demonstrate the limitations of the liberal legal framework. Indeed, the unlawfulness and arbitration of the ruling TC 168-13 disintegrates in the absence thereof. As Schmitt and Agamben help contextualize, the law is but a medium for control that works to legitimize violence and that can be abstracted

92 from its application to be recodified as to ensure the realization of its biopolitical function. The ruling TC 168-13 confirms that denationalization and criminalization are paradigmatic manifestations of state power in modernity. Aided by mechanisms of governance such as the law, the state is able to submit, manage and criminalize a section of the population whose foreign quality, in this case, was politically manufactured and institutionalized. The precarity attached to the new social status of those affected is instituted through a legal practice that acknowledges their presence while simultaneously disavowing it. In this way, the law can no longer be considered a peacekeeper or the social conciliator that is usually made out to be, but a violent apparatus that is deployed for the benefit of the capitalist state.

Similarly, Povinelli’s theorizations around the use of the future anterior helped scrutinized the discursive nature of the denationalization event. Temporality and the conjugation of tense are crucial to understanding, justifying and executing state violence.

Denationalization is a way of reinstituting the nation-form and redeploying official national narratives. As such, the turbulences of the past (Haitian invasions) and the pretenses of the future (segregation, orderly Haitian migration, etc.) are often evoked in different ways to legitimize present actions. The play of tenses involved in ‘what was’ and ‘what could be’ displaces attention from ‘what is’ while justifying current measures implemented to avoid the reoccurrence of past crisis events or prevent the befall of unprecedented ones deemed equally catastrophic. This temporal discourse helps constitute state power, thus bearing great significance for statecraft. Insofar as state power is conjugated in the future anterior, the perpetual, slow burn of the present inflicted

93 on those affected by state power will continue to be allowed and ignored. But more importantly, drawing back to my fieldwork experiences and the methodologies at my disposal, this use of tense and temporality also hinders our ability as researchers to substantiate state power and violence in the present time. We need new methodologies that validate what we read between the lines.

This thesis sought to bring attention to the problematic of the denationalization of

Dominicans of Haitian descent in the D.R. through a historical and textual analysis of TC

168-13. To the extent that this pages help better identify and understand overt and not so apparent displays of violence expressed through the nation-form; and kindle the curiosity of fellow nationals as to why dominicanidad must be rigidly upheld at the cost of the perpetration, infliction and witnessing of injustice, this work would have been important.

Nonetheless, it leaves many avenues unexplored. Indeed, there was not enough time to investigate the ways in which the capital-nation-state trinity can be challenged by the same subjectivities that it births and exploits. This matter, in turn, is tremendously relevant to answer what is perhaps a more urgent question: Can the nation be redeemed?

94

Bibliography

Academic References

Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception (Kevin Attell, Trans). Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Amnesty International. 2015. “Sin papeles no soy nadie” Personas apátridas en la República Dominicana. (Report No. AMR 27/2755/2015). London, UK: Amnesty International Publications.

Archivo General de la Nación. 1944. “Manifestación de los pueblos de la parte del este de la isla antes Española o de Santo Domingo, sobre las causas de su separación de la República haitiana,” in Documentos para la historia de la República Dominicana Vol. I . Ciudad Trujillo: Montalvo.

Arroyo, Lorena. 2013, October 4. R. Dominicana: la sentencia que abre la puerta a miles de apátridas. BBC Mundo. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2013/10/131002_republica_dominicana_haitianos_a patridas_polemica_lav.shtml

Balaguer, Joaquín. 1983. La isla al revéz: Haiti y el destino dominicano. Santo Domingo: Fundación José Antonio Caro.

Betances, Emelio. 1995. Social classes and the origin of the modern state: The Dominican Republic, 1844-1930. Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 22, No.3, pp. 20-40.

Bosch, Juan. 1970. Composición social dominicana. Santo Domingo: Colección Pensamiento y Cultura.

Brea, Ramonina. 1983. Ensayo sobre la formación del estado capitalista en la República Dominicana y Haití. Santo Domingo: Editora Taller.

Cassá, Roberto. 1979. Modos de producción, clases sociales y luchas políticas: República Dominicana, siglo XX. Santo Domingo: Alfa y Omega.

95

Cassá, Roberto. 1989. Historia social y económica de la República Dominicana, tomo I. Santo Domingo: Editora Buho.

“Ciudadanos y ciudadanas fantasmas” en la República Dominicana. n.d. Amnesty International. Retrieved from https://www.amnesty.org/es/latest/news/2015/11/ghost- citizens-in-the-dominican-republic/

Código del trabajo de la República Dominicana. 2012. Ministerio de Trabajo. Santo Domingo, República Dominicana. Retreived from http://www.ministeriodetrabajo.gob.do/images/docs/biblioteca/codigo_de_trabajo.pdf

Colección de leyes, decretos y resoluciones emanadas de los poderes legislativo y ejecutivo de la República Dominicana. 1928. Edición oficial. 6to tomo. Santo Domingo: Listin Diario.

Coleman, Mathew. 2007. Review of the book State of Exception by Giorgio Agamben (K. Attell, trans.). Environment and Panning D: Society and Space, volume 25, pp. 187- 190.

Coleman, Mathew. 2011. Colonial War: Carl Schmitt’s Deterritorialization of Enmity in Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos. Edited by Stephen Legg. Routledge: London and New York.

Coleman, Mathew. 2012. Immigrant il-legality: Geopolitical and legal borders in the US, 1882-present. Geopolitics, 17, pp. 402-422.

Coleman, Mathew. 2016. State Power in Blue. Political Geography 51, pp. 76-86.

Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (CIDH). 2015, December 31. Situación de derechos humanos en República Dominicana. Organización de los Estados Americanos (OEA), Doc 45/15.

Franco, Franklin. 1981. Historia de las ideas políticas en la República Dominicana. Santo Domingo: Editora Nacional.

El final del Plan Nacional de Regularización de Extranjeros. 2015, June 17. Acento. Retreived from https://acento.com.do/2015/opinion/editorial/8258697-el-final-del-plan- nacional-de-regularizacion-de-extranjeros/

Eller, Anne. 2016. We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom. Durham and London: University Press.

Gaestel, Allyn. 2014, May 24. Stateless in the Dominican Republic: Residents stripped of citizenship. Aljazeera America. Retreived from 96 http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/4/stateless-in- thedominicanrepublicresidentsstrippedofcitizenship.html

García-Peña, Lorgia. 2016a. One Hundred Years After the Occupation. Cielo Naranja. Retrieved from http://www.cielonaranja.com/lorgiagarcia-occupation.pdf

García-Peña, Lorgia. 2016b. The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Guzmán, Emilio. 2017, October 9. La ley 169-14 no ha resuelto problemas de sentencia 168-13. Hoy. Retrieved from http://hoy.com.do/la-ley-169-14-no-ha-resuelto-problemas- de-sentencia-168-13/

Hoy se conmemora el 18 aniversario de la muerte del líder José Francisco Peña Gómez. 2016, May 10. El Día. Retrieved from http://eldia.com.do/el-18-aniversario-de-la-muerte- de-jose-francisco-pena-gomez/

Lozano, Wilfredo. 1976. La dominación imperialista en la República Dominicana, 1900- 1930. Santo Domingo: Editora de la Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo.

Lozano, Wilfredo. Mayo – Junio 2014. República Dominicana en la mira. Inmigración, exclusión social y despojo ciudadano. Nueva Sociedad: Democracia y Política en América Latina. Retrieved from: http://nuso.org/articulo/republica-dominicana-en-la- mira-inmigracion-exclusion-social-y-despojo-ciudadano/

Marte, Roberto. 1984. Estadísticas y documentos históricos sobre Santo Domingo (1805- 1890). Santo Domingo: Museo Nacional de Historia y Geografía.

Martínez-Fernández, Luis. 1994. Torn between Empires: Economy, Society, and Patterns of Political Thought in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1840-1878. Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press.

Martínez Vergne, Teresita. 1989. Politics and society in the Spanish Caribbean during the nineteenth century in Franklin W. and Colin A. Palmer, eds. The Modern Caribbean, pp. 185-202. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina.

Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital Volume I. England: Penguin Classics.

Mayes, April. 2014. The Republic. Gainsville: University Press of Florida.

Mecham, J. Lloyd. 1965. A Survey of United States-Latin American Relations. USA: Houghton Mifflin Company.

97

Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. 2012. Between inclusion and exclusion: On the topology of global space and borders. Theory, Culture and Society 29(4/5), pp. 58-75.

Miller, Todd. 2013, November 20. Border Patrol International: “The American Homeland Is the Planet.” The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA). Retrieved from https://nacla.org/blog/2013/11/20/border-patrol-international-%25E2%2580%259C- american-homeland-planet%25E2%2580%259D

Mir, Pedro. 1981. La noción de período en la historia dominicana. Santo Domingo: Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo.

Monegro, José. 2015, June 1. Sentencia 168-13 impulsó una profunda reforma migratoria. El Día. Retreived from http://eldia.com.do/sentencia-168-13-impulso-una- profunda-reforma-migratoria/

Moya Pons, Frank. 1977. Historia colonial de Santo Domingo. 3rd edition. Barcelona: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra.

Moya Pons, Frank. 1995. The Dominican Republic: A National History. New Rochelle: Hispaniola Books.

Moya Pons, Frank. 2010. The Dominican Republic: A National History. 3rd edition. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers.

Moya Pons, Frank. 2013. Manual de Historia Dominicana. 15th edition. Santo Domingo: Ediciones Librería La Trinitaria.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. San Miguel, Pedro. 2005. The Imagined Island: History, Identity and Utopia in Hispaniola. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Schmitt, Carl. 1996. The Concept of the Political (George Schwab, trans.). Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Smith, Peter. 2000. Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tolentino Dipp, Hugo. 2013, 17 October. El fallo y la historia del “tránsito.” El Nacional. Retrieved from: http://elnacional.com.do/el-fallo-y-la-historia-del-transito/

Torres-Saillant, Silvio. 1999. Introduction to Dominican Blackness. Dominican Studies Working Papers Series 1. New York: The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute.

98

Torres-Saillant, Silvio. 2010. Introduction to Dominican Blackness. Dominican Studies Research Monograph Series. New York: The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute.

Trouillot, Michel Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.

Vásquez Frías, Pastor. 2013. Exodo: Un siglo de migración haitiana hacia la República Dominicana. Santo Domingo: Editorial Santuario.

Volz, Dustin. n.d. Illegal Haitian Workers in Demand. Retrieved from http://cronkite.asu.edu/buffett/dr/labor.html

Walker, Gavin. 2016. The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Wooding, Bridget and Richard Moseley-Williams (2004). Needed but Unwanted: Haitian Immigrants and their Descendants in the Dominican Republic. Catholic Institute for International Relations. Retrieved from http://www.progressio.org.uk/sites/default/files/Needed_but_unwanted.pdf

Legislations

Caso de las niñas Jean y Bosico v. República Dominicana. Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos: 8 September 2005, available at: http://www.corteidh.or.cr/docs/casos/articulos/seriec_130_esp.pdf [accessed on 14 April 2018].

Constitución de la República Dominicana, art. 18.3, Dominican Republic: 26 January 2010, available at: http://observatorioserviciospublicos.gob.do/baselegal/constitucion2010.pdf [accessed 14 April 2018].

La Ley General de Migración, No. 285-04, Dominican Republic: 15 August 2004, available at: https://www.dgii.gov.do/tarjetaTuristica/legislacion/Documents/Ley285- 04.pdf [accessed 14 April 2018].

Ley No. 5074, Dominican Republic: 11 May 1912, available at: http://www.consultoria.gov.do/consulta/ [Accessed 14 April 2018].

Ley No. 169-14, Dominican Republic: 23 May 2014, available at: https://presidencia.gob.do/themes/custom/presidency/docs/gobplan/gobplan-15/Ley-No- 169-14.pdf [accessed 14 April 2018].

99

Sentencia TC/0168/13, Dominican Republic: Constitutional Court, 23 September 2013, available at: https://presidencia.gob.do/themes/custom/presidency/docs/gobplan/gobplan- 15/Sentencia-TC-0168-13-C.pdf [accessed 14 April 2018].

Field References

Author’s anonymous interview with legal expert in Dominican Republic, July, 2017.

Author’s anonymous interview with state bureaucrat in Dominican Republic, July, 2017.

100