Reimagining the strange and familiar in national belonging memory, heritage, and exclusion in the Dominican republic

Abstract

Recent constitutional reforms and high court decisions in the Dominican Republic made an estimated 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless when rulings retroactive to 1929 invalidated their birthright citizenship. Some social actors—including diasporic Dominicans and Haitians—connect the crisis of exclusion to the nation’s difficult heritage—namely, the 1937 massacre of thousands of Haitians and other black bodies in the Dominican Republic borderlands dividing the two nations, and the subsequent decades of authoritarianism that constructed Haitians and blackness as the nation’s strange “other.” A new museum in Santo Domingo, and an annual binational commemoration at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic about the 1937 massacre bring attention to the historicity of present-day understandings of Dominicanidad (being Dominican), reminding the public that such definitions are rooted in state violence. This research examines how memory activism strives to transform familiar, though exclusionary, understandings of national belonging in the Dominican Republic.