Pondering on the intermingling of exo and endogenous processes rooted in external recognition and territorialization, respectively, to link historical and contemporary politics in the D.R.

The Dominican nation-state emerges embedded in a wider, racially charged, geopolitical setting where sovereignty is subjected to regional, neocolonial dynamics; and, relatedly, with the urgency of consolidating the state through the territorialization of political power in a place where authority had been decentralized for at least two centuries prior to the emergence of the state.

Out of this political decentralization emerge the conditions of possibility for (1) the establishment of another colony and later state on the island (Saint Domingue/Haiti) with a vastly different socio, political and economic development; (2) fugitive geographies and the emergence of a free, necessarily mobile, self-sufficient peasantry in Santo Domingo outside the purview of the colonial and later state administration; and (3) a climate of political instability and endless coups as the next strongman or caudillo claimed control of the state.

The second point represented a great obstacle for proletarianization, introducing the need of importing foreign labor (particularly Haitian) for the development of the modern sugar industry in the DR, an enclave capitalist formation revitalized through foreign (particularly US) capital. And the third point prevented the protection of these investments. The inability of establishing a strong central state in the DR eventually resulted in the first US occupation, during a time when Haiti was also US-occupied territory, facilitating the establishment of a binational labor system supplying Haitian labor to work in the sugar industry, and doing some of the work of institutionalizing the border.

One of the things that I have failed to consider or emphasized on previous personal reflections is how localized—how gradual and partial—the development of a capitalist mode of production was through the case of the sugar industry. The consolidation of the territorial, centralized state and its role of incorporating a mobile, self-sufficient peasantry into the national project intersects or complements this story in interesting ways.

This population and space [el monte]—rooted in colonial fugitive geographies and “empty,” unoccupied, unproductive, untamed land/nature—were considered a problem before the nation-state. Indeed, the reason why the colony—often compared to neighboring and prosperous Saint Domingue—and later the nation would not progress according to colonial and early state intelligentsia. The need to control this unruly population by anticipating the need for labor and creating the conditions for capitalism to function in the state more broadly, seemed an apparently necessary requirement to safeguard sovereignty (official sovereignty at the very least) in the context of foreign and U.S. capital investment. The process of dispossessing and trying to fix the peasantry in space started during the U.S. occupation by way of a land registration system, but it wasn’t until the Trujillo dictatorship that the process of consolidating the territorial state and incorporating the peasantry into the national project took place. Trujillo built his basis of support during the first years of his regime through the peasantry by reconciling the restructuring of rural life that had been waiting to happen for a long time, with an alternative project of modernity that afforded certain concessions to the peasantry [policies of land distribution, agricultural assistance, and property reform] integrating them—unevenly, and not always successfully, but to the largest extent to date—into the national project as “men of work.” Trujillo is also known for being the most ruthless advocate of anti-Haitian sentiment, a textbook example of which is the 1937 Massacre, when he ordered to kill Haitians at the border.

Given the contrasting realities of Saint Domingue and Santo Domingo, the east’s precarious administration and land availability provided refuge for enslaved peoples and folks escaping the colonial structure on both sides of the island. As such, I see the border as a mechanism that not always reproduced a neocolonial logic in this setting. In fact, one that even facilitated emancipatory politics, opening avenues for the realization of liberated futures. The border, an area of historically fluctuating imperial and postcolonial jurisdictions was a squatter ground as isolated and separate from the nation as el monte had been. Trujillo’s orders are part of an effort to “dominicanize” or nationalize the border and come in the context of localized resistance against the central state’s decision to carry out deportations in the border zone transnational communities. As these ‘unofficial spaces’ were increasingly disrupted by the central state, in the border zone and throughout, bateyes became one of the few legal spaces for Haitians and ethnic Haitians to reside. As economic restructuring and increasing waves of migration would pushed them out of these secluded spaces and the restructuring and colonization (rather than incorporation) of dissident communities, state and elite crafted anti-Haitian discourse becomes hegemonic in the space of an increasingly all-encompassing nation.

The legalistic and constitutional foundation of the ruling represents a novelty, a sophisticated change in the strategy of the ultranationalist right against the political recognition of ethnic Haitians, seeking to institutionalize policies that were previously enacted through violent, extra-legal, and arbitrary means.

In 2010, the Dominican constitution was modified, eradicating birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented parents. So, if someone was to give birth in the Dominican Republic but their migratory status was considered irregular, the legal ambiguity of the parents is automatically transferred to the child, effectively creating a new category of under-citizenry for people born in the country. This constitutional change is preceded by unofficial state practices that arbitrarily denied state documents to Dominicans of Hatian descent. The case of Juliana Deguis Pierre is an often cited case for what would be a very consequential outcome: as she headed to a local state office to request an identification card in 2008, state officials confiscated her birth certificate, informing Juliana that an I.D. card could not be issued due to her French surnames—a marker of Haitian origins indicating to state officials that she was irregularly enrolled in the civil registry. Juliana filed a suit with a local court in 2012, but because she could only produce a photocopy of her birth certificate, her claim was declared inadmissible. She appealed the court’s decision and the Dominican Constitutional Court—also a byproduct of the 2010 Constitution—picked up her case a year later. Upon reviewing Juliana’s case, the Court stated that the Dominican Constitution denied birthright to individuals born to foreign diplomats and people “in transit” since 1929. While the language of “in transit” first appeared then, it was not until 2005 that a definition for this term was provided and legally codified through migration law No. 285-04. Before then, the term was loosely defined and inconsistently applied. But despite the ambiguity behind the term “in transit,” that was the excuse that allowed the Court to delegitimize Juliana’s claim to citizenship, and as it turned out, that of so many others. As a result of Juliana’s case, the Court ruled the controversial legislation TC 168-13, which retroactively stripped away the citizenship of Dominicans born to undocumented immigrants going back as far as 1929.

What crises are folded into this crisis? This is a question I have been pondering about as I think about a scenario in which denationalization is possible, and whether it represents a moment within a larger conjuncture. What cumulative tensions, spaces, and temporalities are condensed into this moment? I would like to spend time during what is left of this semester doing some of the preliminary thinking and assembling necessary to decide whether conjunctural analysis is a useful lens to analyze this case.

The ruling and constitutional change has often been perceived as a solution to a problem, a necessary evil of sorts to begin to manage undocumented Haitian migration. The new citizenship policies could surely have the effect of discouraging immigrants to settle in the country, and its discriminatory nature and retroactive application has already proven to have catastrophic effects in the lives of the denationalized population. However, the ruling itself does nothing to regulate border flows or put an end to the circular migration that furnishes cheap labor to the agricultural industry, construction sector, and domestic work, primarily. It reaffirms, through exclusion, the power of the state to decide who belongs or does not belong to the nation as a legitimate legal authority guaranteed by sovereignty in a framework of national v. international law.

The language of sovereignty and constitutionality—despite its legal violations—are useful mechanisms to legitimize and position the ruling in the service of law, order and non-intervention. It taps into what I recognize to be two central anxieties present throughout the history of the Dominican nation-state: Sovereignty or lack thereof as the nation carved space for itself in the racialized climate of 19^th century geopolitics as postcolonial independence seriously threatened the colonial power structure; and the political instability that would follow, often in the form of undemocratic rule,carrying the nation into the twentieth century at the mercy of coups, foreign interventions and dictatorships. These anxieties have often manifested in tandem, or rather in an entangled manner in which undemocratic rule—associated with a weak institutional state—could justify an assault against sovereignty that generally concealed and served foreign (though not exclusively) socio-political and economic interests at the expense of popular wellbeing. Given this history, the affective register around questions of sovereignty and procedural protocol are generally regarded as something to be defended and respected at all cost. It also interweaves, in my view, questions of sovereignty as an abstract political principle of external recognition with a grounded analysis of internal territorialization encapsulating the process and obstacles to state modernization and centralization, and the discourses of security attached to both of these concerns. As I reflect, I find myself thinking about different moments in which this discursive architecture might be at play, resulting—as with denationalization—in the erasure of the political recognition of racialized subjects, through the dual motion of state expansion and nation shrinkage. In subsequent blog posts, I will seek to elaborate on these different moments to test the explanatory power of this line of thought, and benefit, whether it proves to be an appropriate analytical lens or not, of the generative stimulus it has provided thus far.