In 1937, under the orders of the dictator Rafel Leoninas Trujillo Molina to “protect and maintain National Sovereignty,” the Dominican army murdered more than 20,000 Haitians using machetes, rifles, and their own ballonets. In this brutal act, the soldiers would ask any dark-skinned person to pronounce the word “Perejil.” For Creole and French speakers (the predominant languages in Haiti), the pronunciation of the word sounded different than that of the people for whom Spanish was their first language. Using language as a pretext for execution, those whose pronunciation did not correspond to Spanish were sentenced to death on the spot. 

 

The 1930s were marked by a great global economic depression that heavily affected the sugar industry in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. This caused the United States to disassociate from the management of the sugar cane plantations, leaving them in total control of the Dominican dictator Trujillo and his Haitian counterpart (Sténio Vincent) to deal in new terms with the income of cheap Haitian labor. The agreements between the two leaders of the island established the price that the Dominican state would pay for the income of each Haitian worker. However, an agreement was not established for their return to Haiti because that would have been an economic burden for the Dominican Republic. There was also no attempt to clarify the immigration status of Haitian people working in the Dominican Republic – an act that left generations of immigrants of Haitian descent in legal limbo. Today there are around 1 million people of Haitian descent born in Dominican territory. As a result of the legal negligence and the continuation of corrupt practices, and by a ruling that makes the law retroactive (TC/0168/13) dating back to 1929, all descendants of undocumented immigrants are stripped of their citizenship rights. 

 

Without ignoring the political and cultural complexity of our shared island, it is evident that “the repudiation of the Haitian people” and our own “blackness” are simple symptoms of a society viscerally torn by the perpetual conflict of sharing an island with the poorest country in the region. An indelible stain that threatens to erase our memory.