By Melisa Vargas
The following essay is built in three parts. Part One introduces the idea of Island as a radical concept that both in its theoretical and geological dimensions materializes the contradictory nature of inhabitation in relation to territory. As an expression of this paradox, the cultural construction of an insular totality in the Dominican Republic-Haiti-Island is actually only possible through its sub-division. Part Two is a narrative passage that attempts to illustrate the phenomenology of such a division right at one of its most enigmatic meeting points. Finally Part Three engages in the speculation about how difference and movement can actually reconcile a new form of citizenship within a common border place. Such a concept apprehends the island in its divided condition as well as the complex relations of power that operate within it.
Part One
The island, one and divisible
Gilles Deleuze speaks in his essay “Dessert islands” (2002) of the antagonist relationship between sea and land, both in constant repulsion of one another. He speaks of the implausibility inherent in the act of inhabiting any island. Obviously its inhabitants must have convinced themselves that this struggle, the conflict between water and territory doesn’t exist or that it somehow was resolved.
An island is synonym of separation and only in that separation the possibility of the island defining a dynamic image of itself resides. According to Deleuze only after being inhabited can the island be truly deserted. So islands can be considered as geological tropes that substantiate the unavoidable contradiction inherent in the inhabitation of land. They incarnate this tension in its most extreme form: an island is a finite piece of territory enclosed by the infinitude of the sea.
The Hispaniola Island is literally an archipelago that contains territories, landscapes and people; divided in itself and split in a continental manner, the island solved its dilemma with the sea: it inverted its frontiers towards inside.
The border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti is a 391 kilometers long line (Paez Piantini, 2007) that contains in its irregular extension rivers, lakes, and other natural physical limits; it goes through a series of towns and landscapes of varied characters, it divides the island going across it in a north-south direction and demarcates the limits of Haiti in the West side and Dominican Republic on the East.
Like any other nation-state border, even in its physical definition the Dominican-Haitian border synthesizes an ongoing history of negotiation, conflict, diplomacy, war, economic interdependence and cultural and ethnic tension that have enabled, even coerced or obstructed its cartographic delimitation.
But the partition in itself is a birth mark that distinguishes both the current republics and an insular totality that can only function within a cultural-political paradox: its division is what essentially determines the unity (and uniqueness) of the island within the Caribbean and even global contexts.
This condition is an essential particularity that provides enough bases for a still immature and clumsy relationship between the two States to evolve into one that is constructed precisely upon the embracing of the complexities and differences between each other.
Difference has been persistently treated with mistrust and fear throughout the history of both nations when actually difference is in fact the one constant factor throughout the course of their parallel existence.
A frontier in the making
“Above all, it is a border that separates and puts in contact two parts that are notably uneven in socio-economic and institutional terms and also very different in the cultural plane. This speaks of an asymmetric interdependence in which the Haitian part is more sensitive and vulnerable and is subject to an uneven exchange relation. These conditions have generated an ideological construction in which Dominican-ness and Haitian-ness relate in an antithetical way” (Dilla, 2008 p.171).
When speaking of the Dominican-Haitian frontier region it is not possible to rely on the conventional paradigms that tend to inform any debate about borders —such as the United States-Mexico or Spain-Morocco ones— since these are cases in which the border condition has reached a much more “mature” state.
The border between these two countries isn’t for instance yet populated by any “culturally mixed band that would represent the symbiosis implied in any border” (Dilla, 2008, p.172) and is still evidently caught up in a transitory and ambiguous status that manifests in a relationship that shifts from inter-dependence and a certain degree of openness (mostly of commerce, goods, services and labor) to denial and closure (in certain cultural and social terms for instance).
In the Dominican popular perception the border region is a kind of no-man’s land, a dessert, a dangerous and poor area of the country characterized by an institutional and informal porosity. This porosity allows the latent threats of HIV-AIDS, drug and human traffic, environmental degradation, prostitution and illegal immigration to infiltrate in the rest of the country. This perception is aggravated by a strong presence of ethnic stereotypes, a language difference and a history of abandonment: it contains 17% of Dominican territory that is inhabited by 4% of the population. It is not a politically attractive region since it doesn’t represent an important voting population; and historically, through its hermetic treatment, has been used as a means of defining a national identity especially during the course of the 20th century (mainly up until the 1990’s).
The border remains a space of nomadic forces that move in a loose space, a kind of war machine that determines a pure form of exteriority (Deleuze, Gauttari, 1986) and otherness.
The Haitian side of the border is completely the opposite: densely populated, the region concentrates people that are attracted by the possibility of emigrating and/or greater working and survival opportunities.
“From the morphological and spatial point of view the urban nature of the bordering Haitian cities can only be apprehended in relation to the Dominican ones. It can be asserted that the first —at least a significant part of them— operate, in many ways, as marginal sui generis barrios (districts) of the second (…) Haitians tend to behave in relation to the Dominican city following a system of quotidian urban displacement similar to the one a favela inhabitant has to a central-middle-class district of his city…”. (Dilla, 2008, p.186)
Part 2
Dajabón-Ouanaminthe, A Narrative Passage
The dead body of a young Haitian had just crossed the Masacre River a mere twenty minutes before. With a rather skeptical and un-excited manner Dominican officials stood at the east end of the bridge that connects the two Migration and Customs facilities of the two countries and warned any Dominican attempting to cross to Haiti that day about the danger embedded in such a mission: “after you cross that metal door, what happens to you will be handled by the Dominican consul in Haiti, we have nothing to do with it, even if it’s right there where we can see it… it is your responsibility to cross even if knowing that they are angry and that they just saw the dead guy that was shot by a Dominican military official being returned…”
Simultaneously, two young Haitian men that were part of the small crowd that had gathered got clearly annoyed by such claims and appeared convinced as they disagreed: shaking their heads from side to side they mumbled quietly and in Spanish “that’s not true… nothing will happen…nothing ever happens” again and again.
The towns
Dajabón is an active town in the north of the border region; full of commerce, various banks, a university, a very well kept typical central plaza and a luxurious new one not too far away from its center. Its small streets are active, densely occupied and mostly in good conditions.
Right before the official entrance of the town, where the usual arch built during the Trujillo dictatorship period in every province of the country stands, one passes beautiful green rice fields framed on their sides by the tall vernacular zinc-sheets structures that correspond to the processing mills.
Once in town people point the way to the border crossing point. It is not disconnected from the city (unlike other border towns such as Pedernales and Jimaní in the south of the island where the urbanized area is separated from the border itself by empty land and some agriculture farms).
On the other side, at approximately 500 meters distance, Ouanaminthe is found; a poorer city yet of significant importance to Haiti and Dominican Republic as well, it is one of the main recipient of export goods from the Dominican side and a link to other parts of Haiti. It has suffered an intense growth during the last 20 years especially after the 1990s surely surpassing the size of Dajabón in spatial and population terms.
The Gate
The first visual reference that appears from a distance when approaching the border check-point by car is a light yellow gate building with the inscription: “Republica Dominicana”. Haitian kids shake their arms showing the way to a parking spot and offer to keep an eye on the car while drivers are not there. Trucks, Dominicans, Haitians and military officials populate the area, moving, shouting, arguing and negotiating.
Papers are checked by the officials, they charge taxes for crossing as well as for transporting goods with vehicles.
The bridge
A plain concrete structure wide enough to let a big pick-up-truck cross through; right on its center a metal door divides it transversally. A military official keeps it closed and opens it constantly to allow the coming and going of vehicles, people carrying sacs, carriages, tricycles, bikes or simply pedestrians.
From the bridge one can observe some activity taking place around it almost indifferently to its existence. What surrounds it is a bare, ochre, flat dusty landscape. Under it the Masacre River is as deep as a puddle but significantly wide; anyone willing to get their feet wet can cross it easily, in fact, it is even possible to pay a porteador (one of the most ancient jobs) to be carried on their shoulders and be taken across safe and dry. The current is soft and dirty, trash accumulates around the clusters of stones and weeds while Haitian kids bathe naked and women wash clothes calmly in the dark running water. Colorful cloths hang on wires stretched between rustic wooden poles and can be seen in the distance.
The bridge stands as the “official” crossing structure, a gate floating in open space, a portal to the other side. A sophism, as it has been referred to by the people involved in development projects in the region, since crossing can be done all around it easily, yet not the same when through it.
Three young military officials carrying machine guns and wearing light blue caps are visible as they lean on the railings of Haitian side of the bridge: the are United Nations soldiers.
The United Nation soldiers
On the Haitian side of the bridge the United Nations soldier’s presence create a certain sense of reassurance.
The leader of the military trio says they are from Uruguay. The placement of soldiers in Ounaminthe has been a recent decision, but they specifically have been in Haiti since 2006 continuously and once before in 2004 for a shorter period right in the year when the MINUSTAH (Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haïti) began in the country.
The mission’s headquarters are based in Fort Liberté .
Regarding the United Nation mission’s relation to the Dominican Republic the soldier’s very confident statement is that the relation is none: “our job ends there” he says as he points his hand towards the door on the bridge.
The Haitians
Two men in their early twenties, both from Ouanaminthe, both fluent in Spanish, say they have been working for some years there in the border. They clarify that a lot of young Haitians cross everyday to attend primary and secondary schools as well as university, but they in particular, don’t; so far they have focused on working as tourist guides on the Dominican side.
We don’t have an official permit, we don’t need it, the guards know us and trust us to take tourists to the other side and show them around; so they let us be here”.
“In town the military officers are always killing Haitians, they shoot if they ask for money and we don’t have it, if they want something and we don’t give it to them… nothing like that happens in Haiti, nothing will happen to you if you cross” he says.
The school
In the university, two young Haitian girls studying Tourist Business Administration say they can cross using their regular student identification cards and proudly show theirs.
The local NGO
A hand-painted-sign stands out on one of the town’s small roads, the sign depicts an outline of the island and its border with a black person standing on the Haitian side of the drawing and a fairer one on the other, both hugging. The NGO’s name —also hand painted— is placed on another sign next to it: “Centro Puente” (The Bridge Center).
Inside, a female local lawyer explains eloquently what the center does. They are a collaborative institution that helps Haitian and Dominican women build legal cases and fight them whenever their labor rights are violated in Dajabón. A lot of Haitian women work as domestic employees in the town, others, in conjunction with Dominican women as well, sell used clothes in the twice-a-week open market that takes place by the side of the bridge and along the river.
The presence of the Haitian labor force is of great importance to Dajabón. “Recently with the alleged threats of bird flu having reached Haiti CESFRONT (Specialized Border Unit of the Dominican Army) closed the border and didn’t allow any movement for some days, the housewives of Dajabón were really upset that their domestic helpers were not there… they are really needed” she explains.
The cases are not selected based on the nationality of the victims but on the fact that they have enough information and basis for actually building them up. They also provide orientation and support gremial organizations, such as the clothes vendors’ one.
“With the construction of the new market by the European Union, these women have felt the need to become more organized; we are working in a project of Identification Cards in order for them to have a more formal presence once it is built and working”
The mere expectation of the new market’s presence already affects the relations and constitution of the social groups that will be directly linked to its functioning.
The European Union and the Market
The European Union’s office is set in a small house right next to the market’s construction site, which has been flattened and prepared for construction works to begin on one of its sides (on which the market facilities will stand) and already contains the foundations for the customs block on the other.
In the office, a young Dominican architect speaks to the main local contractor firm’s representative, a steel company that provides raw material for the project. The place is covered with 3D images, architectural drawings and time sheets as well as what seems to be a small fuel-engine power generator and car batteries that are essential in a country were energy service is more than precarious.
The European Union made an international competition for the project and a Spanish engineering firm was selected for the construction and supervision of it, local architects and other workers are meant to provide technical assistance.
The market has awakened criticism; a project of this kind had been done before in Pedernales (in the south end of the border) where the Spanish government had provided some infrastructure for the international market in that region. In that case, the lack of knowledge regarding the needs and commercial habits of the vendors resulted in the market’s facilities not being used other than for storage. Meanwhile people place their goods outside and around them on the floor.
Currently the international commercial fair that takes place on Fridays and Mondays is an incredible twice-a-week event where an average of approximately 10,000 Dominican and Haitian sellers and buyers fill the streets of Dajabón. There is an important spatial relation that occurs during these fairs which has a prominent outdoor character as well as a temporary dynamic that doesn’t reflect in the projected new market.
The disconnection between the project’s management and the local needs threaten its feasibility. Some predict that the outdoor multitudinous fair won’t disappear after the completion of it.
Outside, on the site, a majority of Haitian workers cut steel rods, dig, and move soil around, directed by Dominican and Spanish engineers. “…if they are the ones building in the rest of the country imagine here where they are next door” says the young local architect.
The market comes together with another bridge that will link it directly with a new Haitian highway currently under construction. This highway will connect the region with Fort Liberté, and will enhance commercial exchange with Dominican Republic’s central provinces as well.
The “Zona Franca”
A long trail linked to the highway outside of Dajabón (on the way back to the interior of Dominican Republic) connects it with CODEVI Free Trade Zone, a factory complex that occupies 400,000 square meters of Haitian territory and 150,000 of Dominican territory.
The facilities employ 1,400 workers out of which 90% are Hatians. Hanes and Levi’s clothes ready-made parts coming from the United States are assembled. Yet another bridge connects the facilities directly with Ouanaminthe and Haitian workers cross it daily mostly using bikes. The factory is run by Dominican administration. In the entrance of the complex a picturesque group of buildings house the accommodations where most of the higher rank employees stay when they visit the facilities since most of them are not residents of Dajabón but in fact come from other big cities in the Dominican Republic periodically.
In Haiti the assembly factories are not a new phenomenon. This type of production constituted a significant part of north-American clothes importations coming from the Caribbean during the 1980’s before the political disturbances and the embargo decreed by the Organization of American States (OAS) to Haiti in 1991 which literally destroyed that sector (Heron, 2004). Since the late 90’s, the three biggest firms based in the city of Santiago (north of the Dominican Republic) started to develop clothes assembly operations in Haiti. Two of the three installations acquired were in Port au Prince but the instability consequent to the second Coup d’Etat in 2004 paralyzed these efforts. Different to what the other competitors did, Textiles Dominicanos (Dominican Textiles) started developing a free trade zone in Ouanaminthe. The attempts by Dominican firms to move intensive labor processes, inherent to the clothes supply chain to Haiti correspond to the cold calculation of comparative advantages as well as to an acute comprehension of commercial and development politics. (Traub-Werner, 2008, p.212)
Part 3
A multinational territory
International institutions like the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the International Court of The Hague and countries such as the United Sates, Spain, France and Canada intervene in the border region either as legal arbitrates, as development agents or as representatives of global economic interests.
This makes the border not only a bilateral international site but a multinational one where primarily goods and labor (metaphorically and literally) embody the power struggles that are constantly at stake in it.
“To be sure, there is also a pro-capitalist politics that advocates the erasure of borders under the auspices of free-trade protocols that ease the circulation of goods and capital around the globe according to a logic in which labor is a commodity like any other. And yet, the temporary world is marked by a system of control that promotes the free passage of money and other commodities while scrutinizing and restricting the movement of human bodies and their labor, precisely because it is this potential that distinguishes labor from all other commodities.“ (Neilson, Mitropoulos. 2007 p.472)
A form of agonism
The border region is articulated institutionally in about 22 to 25 local non-governmental organizations on the Dominican side that focus on specific issues that go from local fishing to sexual education. In Haiti the development of the frontier region has incrementally been included within parliamentary concerns.
These two main forms of involvement, one at a local level and the other at a governmental one, respond to two distinct approaches within the realm of politics in both sides; a set of politics that in fact, are a reflection of the countries’ attitudes towards each other.
Simultaneously there has been a historical interest in defining and clearly demarcating the legal limits of the nations from the Dominican Republic, of developing the region in order to “dominicanize“ it hence constructing a buffer protective zone from that space of otherness that is incarnated in Haiti. A militarization of the border has taken place with the creation of the CESFRONT which stands for Cuerpo Especializado Fronterizo (Specialized Border Unit) a unit formed within the Dominican Army that has been placed in the border since September of 2007 with the mission of “controlling the traffic of illegal migrants, drugs and fire arms as well as merchandize smuggling, vehicle theft and animals in the border with Haiti”.
In contrast to the State’s imposition of a military control mechanism, the local communities have managed to establish a code of relations in which there isn’t in fact an interest for a symbiosis yet a comprehension and peaceful acceptance of reciprocal interdependence; where friendship between Haitians and Dominicans is mostly perceived as an acceptable form of interaction and others such as marriage and childcare aren’t.
In anthropological terms this form of “agonistic” (Mouffe, 2000) relation is still to evolve into a better articulated one since ethnic discrimination and abuse still take place thus becoming obstacles to more progressive ways of exchange.
These abusive tendencies have been harshly confronted by international NGO’s such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and have raised worries in the Dominican Republic of it being portrayed as an enslaving country where the rights of illegal Haitian immigrants are highly violated.
But on the other hand much more positive kinds of cultural and economic interaction start to modify the mutual perceptions of the countries, once again, specially within the local quotidian dynamic of the border regions: international fairs, religious exchange and other constructive movements do increasingly take place.
Citizenship, Difference and Movement
“Today, however, there does need to be a form of citizenship linked to transformations in the demos. Because of the processes of globalization, there is an important need for forms of democratic governance which are transnational or cosmopolitan. But this is not the same thing as a cosmopolitan citizenship…” (Mouffe, 2001 p.111)
The Greek concept of demos, a political unit that relates to a specific people and their link to a state (which in ancient Greece was at the same time always linked to a specific place) from Chantal Mouffe’s point of view doesn’t have to necessarily be linked to the Nation-State logic.
Citizenship is in fact a form of identity that has to be constructed always in relation to a group (a people) and a place but is not exclusive to countries or nationality.
Since the border region is yet to be properly articulated as a place, to think of a local form of citizenship is premature. But if its conformation were to be anticipated it would definitely have to incorporate the idea of movement and difference as dorsal elements.
In “Poetics of Relation” (1997) Edouard Glissant confronts the concepts of root identity (associated with the western tradition of occupation) and relation identity (an alternative model proposed by the author) as two possible readings of the links between community and land.
While in the first there is a transcendental definition of this link that ratifies possession of land and determination of otherness through conquest, in the second, there is an inclusion of “contradictory experiences and contacts among cultures” (Glissant, 1997, p.144)
Relation is embraced without negating its chaotic and conflictive nature which prevents the emergence of “the hidden violence of filiations” (Glissant, 1997, p.144)
Relation identity can be understood as form of local citizenship, as a form of association that implies togetherness but not necessarily total mixing; it leaves room for expansion without invasion, of conflict without war.
A kind of citizenship that defies the logic of fixation and immobility, in which movement becomes a “political register as well as a form kinetic passage” (Neilson, Mitropoulos. 2007, p.473), in which the moving bodies that currently migrate or simply move anonymously and devoid of their political character regain their capacity of action.
In the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti the formation of citizenship will have to necessarily allow or even encourage the radical opposition of difference and movement as two categories that don’t have to stand for exclusion, exploitation or alienation but that propel and catalyze the existing extraordinary dynamics of a region that represents two peoples sharing one island.
References
Deleuze, Gilles (2002) Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, Los Angeles, Semiotext (e) Foreigh Agents Series
Deleuze, Gilles; Gauttari, Félix (1986) Nomadology: The War Machine, New York, Semiotext(e)
Dilla, Alfonso Haroldo (2008), Los Complejos Urbanos Transfronterizos en la Frontera Dominico-Haitiana an essay within Ciudades en la Frontera, Aproximaciones Críticas a los Complejos Urbanos Transfronterizos edited by Alfonso Haroldo Dilla, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Editora Manatí
Glissant, Edouard (1997) Poetics of Relation, Michigan, University of Michigan Press
Heron, T. (2004), The New Political Economy of United States-Caribbean Relations: The Apparel Industry and the Politics of NAFTA Parity, Ashgate, Hampshire, United Kingdom
Mouffe, Chantal (2001) Every Form of Art Has a Political Dimension, Chantal Mouffe interviewed by Rosalyn Deutsche, Branden W. Joseph, and Thomas Keenan, within Grey Room 02, Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Mouffe, Chantal (2000), The Democratic Paradox, London, Verso
Neilson, Brett; Mitropoulos, Angela (2007) Exceptional Times, Nongovermental Spacings, and Impolitical Movements an essay within Nongovernmental Politics edited by Michel Feher, New York, Zone Books
Paez Piantini, William (2007), Relaciones Dominico-Haitianas: 300 Años de Historia, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Traub-Werner, Mrion (2008) La Globalización, el Libre Comercio y la Frontera Dominico-Haitiana an essay within Ciudades en la Frontera, Aproximaciones Críticas a los Complejos Urbanos Transfronterizos edited by Alfonso Haroldo Dilla, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Editora Manatí
Official Website of the Dominican Republic Army, http://www.ejercito.rd.mil.do 19th April, 2008
Official Website of the Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haïti (MINUSTAH) http://www.minustah.org 19th April, 2008
Goldsmiths Insitute Student Resources. Ba stylesheet for citations in Harvard (name/date) style.
Fort-Liberté (Kreyòl: Fòlibète) is the administrative centre of the Nord-Est Department, Haiti. Fort-Liberté, one of the oldest cities in the country, was founded in 1578. The French-designed town faces a bay where one can reach many forts by boat.
