Sunday, 14 August 2022; Bordertown of Dajabón, Dominican Republic
I am invited for lunch at María's1 house. When I arrive, her two daughters are playing in the courtyard between two houses. Besides them, a Haitian woman is washing clothes. When they see me, they cheerfully call out “Hola, Daniela!” and lead me to the house. María is in the kitchen talking to a woman. She greets me warmly and introduces me to the other woman. Her name is Rosa and she is from Wanament,2 Haiti. “Rosa helps me with the household,” María explains tiredly. She has dark rings under her eyes after an exhausting six-day week in which she works from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in one of the 22 different garment processing factories at CODEVI, the free trade zone3 on the Dominican-Haitian border. María hands me a bowl of sancocho4 that she has prepared together with Rosa and another plate with rice and a piece of avocado. Then she distributes the food to her daughters, to Rosa and to Melinda, the woman doing laundry. We sit down on chairs under the big tree in the courtyard and enjoy our meal. As soon as we finish eating, a Haitian street vendor enters the yard. She carries a huge sack on her head, which she heaves onto the ground. “Hi, my dear. How are you, Belle?” María gives a friendly welcome to the woman, hugging her. “Belle is pepecera.5 I always buy from her,” she explains to me. Asking Belle if she has new pepe, she curiously opens the bag and looks through the clothes. She buys six pieces for six hundred pesos (12 Euros) and gives one shirt to Rosa. After the purchase, she brings the pepecera a plate of soup. Another vendor comes through the door. She has a large pushcart filled with vegetables and asks María if she needs any. María takes some pieces and brings them into the house. She returns with another plate of sancocho for the woman. “Sit down, Teresa,” María says and offers the woman her chair while she herself sits down on the root of the big tree. Teresa smiles shyly at me and spoons her soup. Since I have an appointment at 3:00 p.m., I say goodbye. I promise to come back in the evening. Leaving the house, I pass Melinda, who is continuing to do the laundry. When I return in the evening around 8:00 p.m., I am surprised to find Melinda, Teresa, and Belle sitting in the darkness under the tree in the yard. Together, they talk in Haitian Kreyòl while eating a plate of rice with beans. I wonder how the three Haitian women can stay so long in Dajabón as the border gate closes at 4:00 p.m.
Introduction
In the Dominican borderland, Haitians, predominantly women (and in several cases also their children) often cohabit with Dominican families on a yard or plot of land and cook for the family, take care of the household or look after the children. At first glance, Haitian women appear to be mere domestic laborers who enter work on a daily basis, and binational relationships seem utilitarian, driven by economic interests. However, over the time that I spent in different households in the Dominican provinces of Dajabón and Elias Piña, observing everyday interactions and talking to household members, I witnessed that Dominicans and Haitians in the borderland are much more intimately tied to each other by either living or growing up together, through fostering and caring or through compadrazgo (godparenthood) relationships. This more profound dimension of Dominican-Haitian relations, among the mainly poorer population, is difficult for outsiders to identify as it is obscured by the dominant everyday anti-Haitian rhetoric and the clear violence of the border regime during border crossings or deportations.6 Mixed residential communities are therefore often misinterpreted. It was only after several visits to María's house that I understood that her domestic helpers lived with her for longer periods of time or stayed with her on a regular basis, and that she did not perceive them as employees, but as family members. One day, when I found out that María kept different merchandise of her Haitian acquaintances and friends in her annex, I inquired from a misled economic perspective if she charged Teresa or Belle for storing the pushcart or the clothes or for eating and sleeping at her house. “Oh, God, no!” María answered, laughing. “They are my family! Belle is my comadre, I am the godmother of her two-year-old son, and Teresa is also family. Teresa lives with us half the week and takes care of the girls when I have to work late. When I was very sick last year, she sat outside my room for four days, she cooked and took care of me and the girls. That's how we are family! We care for another! We help each other like family.” This statement puzzled me very much, but it made clear that the relationships between Dominicans and Haitians cannot be reduced to economic terms. It also made obvious that what I understood as “family” was too narrow a concept to capture the category in the Dominican-Haitian borderland, which is determined by an extensive network of care. In the course of my fieldwork in the Dominican-Haitian borderland, carried out between 2021 and 2023 over four stays with a total of six months,7 it became apparent that these extensive family structures across state borders are the essential basis for marginalized low-income households to ensure their livelihood in the Dominican-Haitian borderland marked by structural, physical, and—as I will argue—racist and epistemic8 state violence.
For Haitians and Dominicans alike, the ability to make kin and to extend one's own family across state borders increases the existential security of the whole family. It secures their daily income and access to food, as well as to essential services such as education and medical care. Drawing on the empirical data of my fieldwork, I show through the illustration of various practices how the economically and socio-politically marginalized Dominican-Haitian borderland population builds a secure life on a place-specific form of creating “kin” and thus “family” across generations.9 I present the mixed Dominican-Haitian households, or “Lakous,”10 defined by care, solidarity, and reciprocity, as the foundation for the understanding of security and its specific discourses and practices in the borderland of the island of Hispaniola.
As Philipp Naucke and Ernst Halbmayer point out in the introduction to this volume, the embodied experience and knowledge of in(security) of marginalized or subaltern groups have rarely been addressed in anthropological studies on security. Research has long focused on security practices of state actors or national elite groups. With a critique on state-centric and top-down security concepts new fields of research, such as private security (Goldstein 2015; Grassiani and Diphoorn 2017), everyday security or vernacular security studies (Jarvis 2019; Vaughn-Williams and Stevens 2016), emerged. This shift toward non-state actors and their vernacular security practices allowed for a focus on performances of individuals and citizen groups contesting and resisting elite security performances (Vaughn-Williams and Stevens 2016: 44). With this special issue, Naucke and Halbmayer complement the recent focus on everyday security strategies and introduce the ethnographically informed concept of “security from the margins” in order to include marginalized and subaltern people and their (from the perspective of established security studies) unconventional security practices.
In the present article, I argue for the need to consider everyday kin-making strategies and the resulting security practices of the Dominican-Haitian borderland population as “Lakou security” and thus as security from the margins. I thereby draw on Naucke and Halbmayer's definition of security from the margins “as a set of discourses and practices concerned with the social reproduction of collectives who are marginalized, in which normative notions of a ‘good life’ worth living are negotiated and become visible in their performances and actions” (2024: 14). Considering the colonial origin of the Lakou structures and their intended invisibility to the state, I argue for a long history of these everyday, kin-making security strategies contested by opposing national ideologies and politics. Patricia Noxolo and David Featherstone write about the need to analyze security in the Caribbean context starting from the colonial time: “To acknowledge a longer history of in/security, taking in the genocide, slavery and colonialism that produced the Caribbean as a region, is to move beyond discrete events of terror toward forms of systemic violence, into which the everyday lives of thousands of embodied individuals were structured over five centuries” (Noxolo and Featherstone 2014: 604). Originating from the slaves’ resistance to the inhuman plantation system, Lakou security creates a secure sociality in an insecure nationality (Eriksen 2010: 11), in order to ensure the extended family's survival in the violent structures of the modern Caribbean nation states.
The Dominican-Haitian Border and the Dominican Anti-Haitian Border Regime
Since its establishment as a Spanish colony, the political administration of the island of Hispaniola was exclusively determined by political affairs in Europe. Early border demarcations on the island of Hispaniola thus were solely the effects of territorial struggles between Spain and France on the Iberian Peninsula until Haiti's independence from France on 1 January 1804. Inspired by the successful freedom struggles of Haiti and with its support, the Dominican Republic proclaimed its first independence from Spain on 1 December 1821. This first independence from the colonial power is referred to as the “ephemeral independence” due to its short duration of only a few weeks. It ended on 9 February 1822 when the new independent Haitian State occupied Santo Domingo, took over the Dominican government and unified the island under the Haitian flag. This “occupation”11 lasted 22 years until 27 February 1844, when the Dominican Republic freed itself from the Haitian rule. Since then, the Dominican elite has declared “the Haitians” as the main threat to the Dominican state and has continuously implemented measures to eliminate the undesirable mixture of Dominican and Haitian families and to counteract the bicultural border population. Thus, since the founding of the nation, two very different ideas about the future of the island have clashed. While the mostly black and rural Dominican population favored unification and peaceful coexistence with Haiti, the Dominican elite constructed a racially different white Dominicanidad through Hispanophile state politics and a nationalist anti-Haitian rhetoric. This racist and epistemic violence (Spivak 1988) of the Dominican state against the bicultural borderland population reached its peak under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo from 1930 to 1961, with his plan for a “Dominicanization of the Border.” On 4 October 1937, he ordered the complete extermination of all Haitians living in the Dominican borderland. More than 20,000 Haitians and Dominicans fell victim to the massacre, which became known as “The Cut”12 (Turits 2002). After this genocide, the border was closed until the 1990s when binational relations were officially resumed (Dilla and Carmona 2010). At the turn of the millennium the open border led once again to increased economic and personal exchanges between Dominicans and Haitians. In September 2013, the Dominican government promptly acted against this undesirable mixing. With the passing of the highly controversial law “La Sentencia—TC 168-1” that deprived two hundred thousand native-born Dominicans of Haitian descent of their Dominican citizenship overnight,13 the racial and epistemic violence against the binational community “to contain race and nation” was once again repeated (Shoaff 2016b: 59).
Lorgia García-Peña (2016) argues that the prevailing anti-Haitianism of the Dominican government is not just the result of the ruling Hispanophile elite and its Eurocentric orientation but is mainly due to the Dominican Republic's need to differentiate itself from Haiti within the international political sphere. Since its founding, in order to have its sovereignty recognized internationally, the Dominican Republic has aimed to prove its “otherness” and “racial superiority.” This necessity, dictated by external political forces, continues to influence its relationship and border regime with its neighboring country. But however violent the interventions of the Dominican government, relations between Dominicans and Haitians never ended. The more the Dominican state targeted the bicultural borderland community, the subtler were the relationships integrated into the everyday structures of the local population in order to become invisible to the Dominican state. Such mixed Dominican-Haitian families continue to challenge the segregating international geopolitics and its racist world order and power hierarchies to this day.
Everyday Life in the Dominican-Haitian Borderland
Since colonial times, the existence of borderland families has been heavily dependent on a lively formal and informal cross-border trade. In this process, everyday border crossing became a culturally embodied practice. Regular and irregular transborder trade still sustains livelihoods and is part of current survival strategies at the margins of the states. The regular closures of the border after interstate disputes or political unrest in Haiti as security measures of the Dominican state have thus a disproportionately negative impact on the borderland population. These closures are not only a threat to the food security of the Haitian population but also convey a loss of existential income for Dominican small traders. Cross-border trade is one of the few sources of income for many Dominicans living in the borderland, an economically weakly integrated region that has otherwise been strongly characterized by outmigration, particularly since the 20th century (Werner 2011: 1577).
In Haiti food self-sufficiency has been declining steadily, especially since the 1970s, as a result of various international dictates, primarily from the US government and the International Monetary Fund. The lifting of taxes on imported goods and the resulting decrease in demand for domestic food coupled with the removal of subsidies for local agriculture led to a drastic change in the Haitian economy. Many farmers abandoned their land and sought their livelihood in the new textile processing factories of foreign investors. The decrease in domestically produced nutrition meant that the population had to acquire most of the necessary basic foods, such as rice, potatoes, milk, and meat, from imported goods (Dupuy 2010). Food shortages became particularly apparent after the 2010 earthquake and have steadily worsened since the assassination of Jovenel Moïse because of increasing inflation and the interim government's overtaxation. Currently, prices for essential goods in Haiti are four-to-five times higher than in the Dominican Republic. The majority of the population is therefore no longer able to obtain basic daily goods. Apollon Aide, the head of the office of Agro Action Allemande in Wanament, explained the situation to me in August 2022 when the Haitian people started to demonstrate against Prime Minister Ariel Henry and his unwillingness to hold new presidential elections, as well as against the inflation and the soaring costs of living. “There is a big quest for security. People are starting to make more concrete actions now. They stand up for the security of the food of the people [. . .] the economic life of the people is going through a difficult moment because of the dollar that is rising very high around the country, life is too expensive, sometimes triple and sometimes quadruple the costs and their salary remains the same as before, so the population suffers and now they stand up. How we manage to survive is something that cannot be explained.”
In March 2023, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimated that currently, half of the Haitian population is facing very high levels of acute food insecurity, which are reflected in malnutrition and excess mortality (FAO 2023). Haitians living in the borderland can counteract this food insecurity with regular trips to the Dominican Republic. With the completion of an approximately two hundred-kilometer-long border wall between the Dominican Republic and Haiti currently under construction, however, the lives of the borderland population will become even more precarious.
Lakou and Lakou Security
Since colonial times, borderland dwellers have developed strong family ties across territorial boundaries to counteract their insecure living conditions. In doing so, they draw on centuries-old knowledge and well-established practices of extending consanguinity through symbolic kinship, strategies developed in resistance to the inhumane plantation system. Caribbean extended families, or Lakous, are based on a commonality of cultural and spiritual beliefs. Myriam Chancy (2020: 19) stresses the dynamism of Caribbean kinship as a possibility “allowing for a recuperation of identity that is not necessarily defined genetically.” Lakous allow for self-determination in the definition of kinship and a continual reconceptualization of who or what can be considered a “home.”
During a personal conversation in Wanament in March 2023 Haitian political scientist Gabriel Frédéric stressed the origin and history of Lakou in the context of Maroon14 resistance and emphasized the protective mechanisms of residential Lakous because of their invisibility and anonymity to outsiders: “Lakou comes from maroonage, when slaves ran away from the plantation and went to hide in the mountains. They also brought their family and relatives to the same area. They had to get rid of all the tracks that could lead to their hiding. It's the logic of protecting oneself against the colonists who came to look for them. In a Lakou nobody from the outside knows whose house it is. You find houses without numbers, there are no streets, everything is anonymous to the outside except for those who live in the Lakou.” This deliberate anonymity remains hidden to outsiders, who usually perceive the lack of an identifiable order as chaos, as Frédéric continued to explain: “Someone who does not understand will only see chaos, but it is not true, it corresponds to a certain logic, and the logic is to protect oneself against external aggressions.” Facing the cruelties of enslavement, the main goal of Lakous was to remain invisible to the colonial administration in order to secure the reproduction of the family. The achieved autonomy within plantation society leads Jean Casimir (2020) to call the Lakou the “counter-plantation system.” When the Haitian government continued to adhere to the violent plantation system after independence, the rural population maintained the establishment of Lakous to escape the government's control. The Lakou regulated inheritance and family relations, and secured landownership autonomy for the community (Casimir 2020: 351–387; Dubois 2013: 107f). The term Lakou therefore refers not only to the social space but also to the social relations therein, including to the family's ancestors and Vodou spirits, the loa (Barthélemy 1990). These social connections determine a common spiritual identity and define the extended family along the principles of equality and solidarity, based on the embodied knowledge of African-born ancestors who were kidnapped and displaced on the island of Hispaniola.
Originally a system of the rural population, migration has brought Lakou structures into the urban area of Port-au-Prince (Dubois 2013: 107f) and even to countries like Canada and the United States (Chancy 2020). (Trans)National migration flows are bringing about a new composition of Lakous. Instead of a patriarch, many women are now the heads of households composed mainly of other female relatives or friends tied together through relationships of care and affection (Moore 2021: 1318).
My ethnographic work highlights the continuities of Lakou as a security strategy from and across the margins of the Dominican and Haitian nation states in order to safeguard binational family relations and to secure the extended family's reproduction over time. Lakous are not hierarchy-free spaces but are based on patriarchal structures, and, in cross-border living communities, people with different legal status live together. Despite, or because, of these differences, common efforts are made to create a solidary and reciprocal community to build up “una vida tranquila,” a quiet life free of violent attacks and interferences by the state.15 I call these autonomous Lakou structures and their everyday security practices “Lakou security.” I define Lakou security as the power to create a common autonomous space to self-determine the family composition, regardless of racial state dictations and laws, in order to guarantee the reproduction of the extended family within the violent structures of the postcolonial nation state and its neocolonial political-economic structures. Ronald Cummings (2018) emphasizes the importance of colonial maroonage for current discussions of (in)securities in the Caribbean. He states that “questions of movement, food security, technologies of war, border control, strategies of surveillance, practices of sustainability, and ecological and land concerns, which have all become central to more recent discourses by security studies scholars and security professionals, have long been integral to the discussion and understanding of Maroon life and survival” (Cummings 2018: 53).
With Lakou security, the creation of family ties is introduced as a crucial security strategy from the margins to guarantee food security, to escape violence from the militarized border regime and to sustain the family's wellbeing. Since colonial times, Lakou security has been conceptualized for the long-term and for intergenerational purposes, and its success is based primarily on its invisibility to state authorities.
Mixed Lakous in the Dominican-Haitian borderland
On 12 August 2022, I was accompanying former migration officer Oscar from Dajabón to visit his aunt in Wanament. Arriving at her house, he introduced me to a man who he explained is his cousin. When I asked him how they are related, how his parents are related to the boy's parents, he answered that he doesn't know his cousin's parents. Quite perplexed, I asked him how it was possible that he did not know the boy's parents if he is his cousin. Confused, he looked at me saying, “Of course he is my primo (cousin). He is, because my tia (aunt) took him in and raised him. We grew up together being one family. And now that my tia is old he looks after her. He is a good boy,” he assured me, ending the conversation. Oscar's family is just one of many examples that I got to know during my fieldwork in the Dominican-Haitian borderland that demonstrates how easily children are taken in and incorporated into the family as “hijos de crianza” (foster children) and, further, into a broader network of care. Haitian families in particular place their children very often in the care of Dominican parents because of their poor economic situation. This not only protects the children from famine but also allows them to get a school education and thus have prospects for a future job. Haitian children, even those without papers, receive free education up to the sixth grade of secondary school in the Dominican Republic. If they are in possession of valid papers, they can complete secondary education. Carlos was placed in the care of a Dominican family at the age of seven by his mother to enable him to receive a school education. When asked about his experience of growing up in a Dominican family, he replied, “I have grown up in a family that has always respected me [. . .], I have not had a bad experience for being Haitian. [. . .] Juan has sent me to school. Only because of him I could study.” The father of the family that fostered him took in several other children of Haitian friends or family members in order to provide them with an education that they would not have received in their own country because of high tuition fees charged by the privatized schools. The responsibility for the people one takes care of is passed on to one's own children, to the next generation. Such relationships are, so to speak, intergenerational and show the long-term nature of these social networks. When I asked Juan how Carlos came to his family, he recounted: “Carlos, he came to live with us, with my mom, my dad had already died, when my mom died he stayed with us and we helped him stay with us so he could study at the university and thank God he even got a master's degree.” Since Carlos finished school, he has been working as a physical education teacher and is running his own pizzeria. His economic independence gained through school education allowed him to bring his biological mother from Haiti to the Dominican Republic. She is now living with him and his Dominican wife in a little house in Banica.
The logic of common housing, living and caring, and formal and informal adoptions is further complemented by the creation of kinship ties through godparenthood relationships. Juan not only raised several Haitian children with his wife, but they also chose his Haitian long-term business partners as compadres (godparents) for their children. Juan explained to me the value of such relations: “Through business you make friendships, you make friendships through business, you get to know people and you evaluate what matters and what doesn't matter and you keep the most valuable.” The Haitian pepecera Belle, when asked why she chose a Dominican comadre (godmother) for her son and not a Haitian one, stated briefly, “es de la misma sangre” (“she is of the same blood”), although she and María are not consanguine.
While many Dominican-Haitian relationships, like the one between María and Belle, begin on the basis of economic interests, they cannot be reduced to these alone. Shared households characterized by reciprocity, solidarity, and care pave the way for deeper family ties like godparenthood and adoption that endure across generations. Making kin and thus family through common housing or fostering of children is so customary in the borderland that a common family identity is easily created without being genetically related. It is a self-determined way to define family and to create kin across state borders.
Dominican State Security versus Lakou Security from and across the Margins
Friday, 8 July 2021; Dajabón, Dominican Republic
It is eight o'clock on a Friday morning. I walk from my hotel through the center of Dajabón toward the border and the building of the binational market,16 which is usually the hub of a lively border trade on this day of the week. The town seems deserted. Everything is quiet. The market is closed. In front of it are parked trucks fully loaded with tomatoes, flour, and salt that cannot cross the border. Two days ago, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in the night by (at that time) unknown perpetrators. Fearing an uprising of the Haitian population and the invasion of Haitian troops, the Dominican government has closed the border between the two countries as a security measure for an indefinite time. I ask a man who is guarding a delivery truck if it is known when the border will be reopened. He says there are rumors that it will remain closed for a month, but a nearby stationed border guard vehemently rules that out. “These people (the Haitians) won't survive that long with a closed border. They will die. They will suffer. But not only them. Dominicans also depend on trade. They both suffer. That's how it is in the borderland.” If I need anything, he advises me that I should go to the river (Río Masacre), where I could easily cross the border to make purchases. “There are no problems there,” he states. I go down to the river and, indeed, there is a lot of activity. Numerous Haitian people, mainly men, are wading through the shallow water to get to the Dominican side, where they buy eggs, chicken, and rice from waiting traders. Several men are carrying large and obviously heavy sacks on their heads. “What is this?” asks a border patrol guard, tapping the heavy load on one man's head with a wooden stick. “It is ice,” yells a Haitian behind him, explaining that at the moment, they have no electricity in Wanament, as the government has shut it off because of the unrest among the Haitian population after the assassination of the president. To prevent the food stocks from spoiling, they bring huge blocks of ice to their families. Other Haitian men come close to the border fence to hand over money to other Haitians or Dominicans, who drive off on mopeds and, after some time, return with food bags. In the hustle and bustle of the trade at the “irregular” border crossing, one completely forgets that just 150 meters away, the official crossing is closed to protect the Dominican population from a “Haitian invasion.”
Rosa who works for María is one of hundreds of Haitians who regularly cross the border, mostly through the official crossing, but also through irregular routes when the border is closed. One afternoon at María's house, she explained to me her need for frequent border crossings: “I feel terrible, imagine, in Haiti there is no work, there is nothing there. It is here [Dajabón] that I have to come to look for a life. Over there [Wanament], for example, half a gallon of oil costs one thousand gourdes [about seven euros], yes. And here I have enough to buy it [as it costs only about two euros].” Like Rosa, many Haitian people no longer find it possible to maintain family life by staying in their own country. “No hay vida en Ayiti” (“there is no life in Haiti”) was a phrase that I often heard during fieldwork, which refers to the lack of employment opportunities and food supply, and the need for daily border crossings. The possibility to live in a household with María in Dajabón guarantees Rosa and her Haitian family food security, especially in case of unforeseen border closures. This became particularly apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the border, called “el puente” (“the bridge”), was officially closed during the lockdown in 2020, Teresa and Belle lived with María all this time to maintain a food supply for their families in Haiti. Together they regularly organized care packages with essential provisions and medicines, brought them to the irregular border crossing referred to as “el puentecito” (“the small bridge”) at the river and sent them across the water for one hundred pesos “crossing fee” charged by the border guards. In turn, Rosa and Teresa helped María with household chores and provided her daughters with clothes from international donations that came to Haiti.
Besides the chance to reduce food insecurity and to receive free education for children, the Dominican borderland also provides the possibility of free medical care, as Carolina, a medical doctor from the hospital in Banica, explained to me: “The medical services there (in Haiti) are expensive and also limited, because they do not have all the necessary materials, instruments and medicines, that is why they (Haitian people) seek the service here at the hospital in Banica. The service that is given to the patients in the hospital is free, it is free to everyone, no matter the nationality. If they come to seek the service, they have never been denied, they are given the service, consultation, delivery assistance, laboratory, family planning, counseling, talk, follow up, all that we offer here.” Even when, in November 2021, the Dominican authorities ordered the removal of all health services to pregnant Haitian women after a conflict between the two governments, they continued to receive medical care in the hospitals in the Dominican borderland. It is also not only within hospitals that Dominican doctors take care of Haitians. During the month I stayed with Carolina, I observed that she is also consulted at home by many Haitians who came to her house via her Haitian domestic worker, who has been with the family for two decades. The doctor examined them, distributed medicines or applied bandages when necessary, and provided all services for free. In cases where she could not help, she contacted other doctors and ensured that the patients received further medical assistance. Juan from Banica explains the dependency on binational relations: “The border has been helping us to make a living with the exchange of business between Haitians and Dominicans, otherwise we would not have anything, in this border there is nothing to live on. You can go to a Haitian market to make an exchange […] and if we (Dominicans) organize a market and the Haitians do not come, the market has no people. The exchange is ‘la poquita bebida de la frontera’, the little drink of the border. The only source of livelihood.” Based on this understanding of mutual dependence, cross-border family ties are established and maintained and a long-term Lakou security is created.
Mitigation of the Everyday Violence of the Dominican Border Regime
Monday, 27 March 2023; Dajabón, Dominican Republic
It is 7:45 a.m. when I arrive at the border crossing in Dajabón to pick up Rosa, who spent the night in Wanament. The CESFRONT (Cuerpo Especializado en Seguridad Fronteriza Terrestre17) soldiers are preparing for the daily opening of the border at 8:00 a.m. Two of them put on balaclavas, others, gloves, caps, and jackets. I walk past them to the migration office and let them know that I am going up to the border gate to pick up a Haitian friend. An employee gives me his OK and says that there are no problems until the Haitian door. Arriving at the border gate, I can already see the mass of people on the Haitian side over the iron grille, trying to organize themselves properly to get past the Dominican soldiers without any problems. At eight o'clock sharp, the left side door of the border gate is opened to let the pedestrians into Dajabón first. A seemingly never-ending line pushes through the gate. In the crush, people try with difficulty not to lose the goods they are carrying on their heads. Some do not succeed and the cartons or bags fall to the ground, and goods are broken or scattered across the path and trampled by the rushing crowd. I observe a border guard beating one of the clumsy men with a stick. Another soldier takes the sack from the head of a Haitian woman, inspects it and finally keeps the goods under great protest of the woman and other people. Finally, I spot Rosa in the crowd. Sweaty and out of breath, she greets me and explains to me, who wants to lead her across the bridge, that she still has to line up in front of the second border gate, the migration office. I accompany her. Border guards are already busy channeling all pedestrians coming from the Haitian side through the second border gate. The Haitian people are asked to form two rows separated by gender next to the customs building in front of a small door fenced by barbed wire. They quickly form two seemingly endless rows of people. In the densely packed rows, several people are suddenly pushed out of line. A few border officials try to chastise the alleged troublemakers with a stick and forbid them to cross the border. The Haitian men react angrily and proclaim their innocence. They press several banknotes into the hand of a border official in order to get to Dajabón anyway.18 The soldiers remain firm. A great unrest ensues. Two soldiers use stun guns as a deterrent to bring the huge crowd under control and to emphasize their orders. Frightened, the crowd calms down. Shortly before nine o'clock, Rosa finally makes it through the border control and, exhausted, we walk quietly to María's house.
With the need for daily border crossings to secure livelihoods and basic food supplies for the family, Haitians are regularly exposed to arbitrary physical and psychological violence by Dominican border guards. The expanding militarization of the Dominican border under current Dominican President Luis Abinader means that many undocumented Haitians and Dominicans19 resort to unofficial routes like the border rivers, where they are confronted with even more unpredictable violence. In the thickets of the riparian vegetation, unofficial “border patrols” lie in wait and demand crossing fees. Rosa recounts that if people refuse to pay, physical force is exerted upon them. Furthermore, “if they are women, they ‘live with them’ (rape them) and take away their merchandise, take away their money, their telephone.” Rosa explains that most Haitian people want to enter legally and apply for a carné de trabajo (working permit), but the new Dominican government is making legalization increasingly difficult. During the previous government, Haitian day laborers could apply for these carnés at the border before entering big cities like Dajabón or Elias Piña, but they now must travel all the way to Santo Domingo to the General Directorate of Migration to make an application with their employers as witnesses. María, who wanted to regularize Rosa, recounts her experience with the migration authorities: “About five months ago, I spoke with the head of migration. He told me that they now were only giving out ID cards in Santo Domingo. At that moment I was a little bit. . . . I didn't answer him anything, I just said ‘OK, thank you.’ Then I analyzed, how can I go to Santo Domingo with an illegal person to get an ID card? How? That's illogical. How can I go from Dajabón to Santo Domingo on a bus with someone illegal without having a letter or permit or anything?”
Such long, risky journeys to the nation's capital are part of what Nira Yuval-Dav.is, Georgie Wemyss and Kathryn Cassidy (2019: 57) call “bureaucratic bordering campaigns” whose aim is to register and deport irregular migrants. Under the current rigorous border regime, deportations of Haitians from the Dominican Republic reached an unprecedented high of 108,436 in 2022 (Cuevas 2022). In comparison, deportations from June 2015 to December 2016 amounted to 54,510 Haitians (OBMICA 2016). Human rights organizations have criticized both the increase in deportations and the inhumane treatment of people before and during repatriations. They are particularly concerned about the overcrowded detention centers where Haitians are kept without access to food, water or toilets, before being released or deported. One day after she was deported, Rosa shared her experience with me: “Where they lock you up, there are many dirty things. And now they grab you, they throw you in the truck and you spend the whole day without food, water or anything in the fortress, you spend the whole day there. [. . .] If you are rebellious, they beat you. If you are rebellious and don't want to go up (on the truck), they beat you, even if you are pregnant, they beat you.”
María in Dajabón therefore shelters Teresa and Rosa in order to protect them from the risks of border crossing. Concerning Teresa, she explained: “I told her to stay here with me. That she wouldn't have any problems getting in (to Dajabón/the Dominican Republic). You know, el pasaje (the passage). [. . .] So as not to cross so many times, especially at night.” When it is not possible to stay in Dajabón because of family matters in Haiti, María tries to reduce the risks of border crossing for Teresa accompanying her: “I stop with my motorbike right there in the river, and I illuminate it with the head lamps. I stay there until she has crossed the river safely, and her sons come and get her.” If she is not able to escort her, she makes sure that other family members do. She also helps Teresa to reduce the economic risks of border crossing by storing her merchandise so that it is not confiscated or damaged. This also protects Teresa from being charged higher (illegal) fees (600–800 pesos [10–13 euros]) for crossing with goods by the border guards. Teresa has divided her stock among several households in Dajabón where friends guard it for free. But it is not only Haitians who store their precious goods with affiliates on the other side of the border. Juan, who operates several stores in Banica and has cross-border trade with small businesses in Haiti, keeps his goods in his compadre's warehouse in Haiti. In case of an unforeseen border closure, his Haitian compadre will take over the delivery to Juan's business clients in order to circumvent a greater income loss for the whole family.
A certain anonymity of these Lakous is a crucial factor for their effectiveness. One night that I was staying at María's house, I was worried because Teresa did not return in the evening after selling goods in the streets. While I was concerned about her safety and possible deportation, María was very confident that Teresa was safe with another family. “Don't worry,” she said to me, “she has a lot of families on this side that also support her, you know. Maybe she doesn't come at all.” When I asked for the names of the families Teresa stayed with and where they lived, to my astonishment, María replied that she does not have any idea who these people are. On another occasion, when I tried to find out where the Haitian workers lived who were working on a construction site opposite my apartment in Dajabón, one of their Dominican coworkers replied: “For many, I do not know where they live. They just appear out of nowhere. You turn around and suddenly they are there. You have no idea where they came from, where they stay and where they are going.”
Because of this anonymity, Lakous serve as a protective mechanism that reduces the violence of the Dominican border regime for Haitians, reducing their risk of deportation and the physical and psychological violence that accompanies it. Lakous enable Haitians, with the support of their Dominican kin, to reduce the frequency of unsafe border crossings and the associated bodily and economic risks. As an autonomous space invisible to the Dominican state, Lakous enable self-determined family structures that serve as an (infra)structure via which people and goods can circulate in a particular manner. People do not just live with anybody or anywhere, nor are goods simply distributed randomly; the allocation of goods and people follow clear kin relationships securing the survival of the Lakou since colonial times.
Conclusion
Due to their subtlety and ordinariness, security strategies to maintain Dominican-Haitian cross-border family ties based on solidarity, reciprocity, and care are barely perceived by outsiders. They are further obscured by overt physical state violence toward Haitians during border crossings and daily deportations and by the anti-Haitian rhetoric present in everyday language. With Lakou security, the binational border community has developed effective strategies from and across the margins to reduce the threat of violence from the racist Dominican state and its border regime in their daily lives and to ensure its continued existence. Security in the borderlands of Hispaniola is understood not only as an individual protection but also as the securing of the whole extended family's livelihood against external aggressors. It is a collective endeavor to ensure the access to basic goods and services for common survival in post-colonialist oppressive and exclusivist state structures.
The example of María's mixed Dominican-Haitian household shows how Eurocentric security concepts of the Dominican state collide with the everyday lived experiences and embodied understandings of security of the socio-economically marginalized mainly black borderland population. The Dominican state's anti-Haitian securitization discourse, racist border regime, and exclusive policies of belonging and citizenship significantly increase the daily insecurities of the borderland families that depend on regular border crossings for their livelihoods. This counter-play of security and insecurity demonstrates the constant struggle of power relations and hierarchies in the modern nation state (Bigo 2014). The loudly communicated and visible security strategies of the Dominican state, which are primarily aimed at demarcation from the neighboring Haitian state, strongly contradict the quiet and subtle everyday security strategies of inclusion of the bicultural borderland community.
Such Caribbean everyday understandings and practices of security contradict Eurocentric and state-centered notions of security and call for a “de-linking” (Mignolo 2007) from hegemonic modern concepts of security and hyper-visible state security practices. Furthermore, they challenge the linear progress-oriented understanding of time inherent in modern security discourses. Axel Morten Pedersen and Martin Holbraad (2013) have argued that security concepts have specific intrinsic times. Lakou security has its own temporality in that it is conceptualized for the long term and across generations. Making kin was the main survival strategy in the plantation system under colonial rule and it continues to be the profoundest and most important security strategy from the margins for surviving in a neocolonial economic and racist modern nation state. Lakou security thus links the past, present and future on the island of Hispaniola together. As Deborah Thomas has stated, it is a specific Caribbean experience of time “neither as linear nor cyclical, but as simultaneous, where the future, past, and present are mutually constitutive and have the potential to be coincidentally influential. This ontological alterity does not rely on a condition of being prior, outside or marginal, but instead is fully embedded within the violences of modernity” (Thomas 2016: 177). These violences of modernity are contested by Dominican-Haitian families through Lakou security strategies that demonstrate that no government policies or actions will impede the continued existence of a Dominican-Haitian borderland community. The massacre of 1937, the 2013 legislation, and the current border wall construction will not stop the desire of the people of Hispaniola to overcome racial and national boundaries as a strategy for common survival at and across the margins of the states.
Notes
To protect the identity of my interlocutors, I have changed their names in this vignette and throughout the article.
For the bordertown of Ouanaminthe (French) or Juana Mendez (Spanish), I use the less known Krèyol designation Wanament, which is used by the local borderland population. Wanament lies just opposite Dajabón on the Haitian side of the border. The two towns are separated only by the Río Masacre and are connected by a bridge, which is why the official border is referred to as “el puente.” The respective border police stations are located at the ends of this bridge.
The free trade zone is situated on Haitian territory and consists of more than 22 different garment processing factories. It is the largest employer around the two border towns of Dajabón in the Dominican Republic and Wanament in Haiti, employing more than 14,000 people. For a wide discussion on the coloniality of the local garment industry, see Werner (2011).
Sancocho is a kind of rich soup or stew made of various meats and/or poultry and vegetables like yucca (sweet manioc), platanos (plantains) and auyama (pumpkin). It is considered one of the national dishes in the Dominican Republic.
Pepeceras are female street vendors or traders that sell secondhand clothes. “Pepe” refers to all secondhand clothing that comes to Haiti as material donations, which are then sold by Haitian women to generate income. The name is derived from the popular brand Pepe jeans. For a rich account on the everyday lives of Hatian and Dominican pepeceras and their differences in mobility, see Shoaff (2016a).
My own positionality as a white and middle-class European woman with legal papers placed me in a privileged position, especially within the border regime. My legal status allowed me to cross the border safely, without being exposed to the arbitrariness and violence of the border guards or the risk of deportation. My presence and increased visibility also very often changed the behavior of border guards and border crossers alike, especially in the beginning of my research. Discussing these differences openly with my interlocutors did not eliminate them, but it did create a shared awareness of these hierarchies and paved the way for further common enriching discussions.
This article is based on empirical material I collected during six months of field work for my doctoral thesis from 2021 to 2023 in the Dominican-Haitian borderland, specifically in the Dominican provinces of Dajabón and Elias Piña and in the Haitian Provinces of Nord-Est and Centre. I collected data while I was living in different households in Dajabón and Banica through participant observation, informal conversations and semi-structured interviews. All quotes in this article are excerpts of personal conversations I had with various people in the Haitian cities of Tomasique, Hinche and Wanament, as well as in the Dominican cities of Banica, Pedro Santana and Dajabón. I informed all household members and conversation partners beforehand that my research aim was to write a publication on the everyday lives and securitiy strategies of the Dominican-Haitian borderland population.
I draw on the concept of epistemic violence defined by Spivak (1988) as a violent relational process through which hegemonic narratives suppress (post)colonial subjects and their bodies of knowledge through mechanisms of marginalization and othering. Acknowledging the entanglement of different forms of violence, I argue that epistemic violence is the basis for the everyday anti-Haitianism in the Dominican Republic and the racist border regime. In her book The Borders of Dominicanidad, Lorgia García-Peña powerfully demonstrates how, under the influence of (post)colonial and imperial forces, the African knowledge systems in Dominican culture were strategically attacked and erased by the national elite through the socio-political construction of a European-rooted, Spanish-speaking Dominican identity. Over time, this epistemic violence turned into physical violence not only against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent, but also against black Dominicans.
Describing in detail the security practices of the inhabitants in the Dominican-Haitian borderland raises concerns about the potential risks this disclosure poses to these residents and whether Dominican state authorities might use my research against them. Considering the real Political Economy of the Dominican–Haitian border that sustains irregular cross-border exchanges and business practices, it becomes obvious that Dominican state authorities are deeply involved in these mechanisms. As is widely known among the borderland population, it is the border officials who determine the flow of irregular goods and persons. “Todos los guardias tienen su precio” (“All officials have their price”) is a phrase I often heard from residents and those who are willing to pay it can cross the border without valid papers. Common illicit crossing fees for individuals were between one hundred and two hundred pesos (about two to four euros) in 2021–2023 with a corresponding surcharge for transported goods. Residents joke that being sent to the border used to be seen as a punishment for soldiers, but now it is considered a reward due to the potential for lucrative extra earnings. Rumor even has it that soldiers rewarded with work at the border have to pay a sum of ten thousand pesos (about 160 euros) in advance to their superiors (Lombert Riveron 2016: 244). Given the deep involvement of state authorities in the Dominican–Haitian illicit border economy and their knowledge of unofficial crossing points, my work does not reveal anything new to them that could endanger my interlocutors and the rest of the population.
In its most basic sense, the term Lakou refers to a common courtyard around which individual family homes are traditionally built in rural Haiti. This housing unit is constructed on a small plot of land and serves as a communal space headed around a senior male where food and other resources are shared. Based on my fieldwork observations, I argue that these family and settlement patterns extend into the Dominican side of the borderland.
The designation “occupation” obscures the fact that a great number of Dominicans supported a unification of the island under the Haitian flag (Inoa 2018: 293ff; Moya Pons 2018: 216ff).
Also called “El Corte” in Spanish or “Kout Kouto-a” in Kreyòl.
For details on the implementation process and effects on the offspring of mixed relationships, see Shoaff (2016b).
Slaves who escaped from plantations and their descendants.
Likewise, Igda E. Martínez Pincay and Peter J. Guarnaccia (2006) observed that the ability to lead “una vida tranquila” is essential for the mental health of Latino immigrants to the United States and that the centrality of this concept evolved around a peaceful life and a good family unit. Political structures that endanger these family relationships are perceived as a threat to mental health and thus to everyday security.
The construction of the binational market building in Dajabón in 2017 was part of a European Union (EU)-funded project to enhance the cooperation between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. However, all along the Dominican-Haitian border one can find regular, traditional binational open-air markets.
Specialized Land Border Security Corps
Securing the nation through the construction of a “smart fence” is a distraction from the real political economy of the border as described in endnote 8. The construction of the border wall will therefore not reduce the irregular flow of people and goods but will increase informal fees to border officials. These crossing fees also do not protect against deportation. On some days, Haitians who have paid the fee are picked up by the migration authorities immediately after entering Dominican territory, taken to the “Fortaleza”, the military base of the Dominican border police CESFRONT in Dajabón, and after a few hours deported back across the border to Haiti. This is a near daily, ritual performance that an informant of mine calls “el espectáculo de la frontera”, the spectacle of the border. This observation relates to Nicholas De Genova's (2012: 492) conceptual framing of deportations as “border spectacle,” with which he calls attention to the highly visible, staged practices of exclusion of people categorized as “illegal.”
Undocumented Dominicans are, among others, all persons who were deprived of their Dominican citizenship by La Sentencia – TC 168-1.
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