¿Ajeno Siempre Será (Foreigners Forever)?: (Un)Making Dominican/Haitian Identity and Implications of Human Rights and Modernity

This article examines Dominican state actions leading up to the September 23rd, 2013 constitutional court decision in Dominican Republic which changed the country’s citizenship policy and applied it retroactively to 1929. This amendment violates their own Constitution and several human rights laws because it creates over a quarter of a million stateless people within the Dominican Republic, a majority of whom are of Haitian descent. The court and government officials argue that this is not racist nor a human rights violation by citing the “in transit” clause in their 1929 citizenship policy, Article 9 of the Haitian constitution and espousing nativist arguments that question immigrants capacity to assimilate and to progress the nation towards Dominican ideals of “modernity.” I argue that the constitutional decision is part of a long-standing “pro urban, light-skinned non-Haitian, non-poor” tradition of Dominican governments and the minority elites which disguise power-seeking, racist and discriminatory policies that systematically disenfranchised Haitians, Dominicans of Haitian descent, the poor rural communities and ultimately the Dominican identity. These actions fall in line with generations of Dominican nationalist discourse and practice that changes the factors of Dominican identity by defining who has the right to belong to the nation-state. In this article, I will examine the case of the Japanese immigrant community in the Dominican Republic and in doing so highlight the contradictions in and implication of inherent of the 2013 Dominican Constitutional Court Amendment.