This chapter analyzes the nationwide coordination and concealment of the government’s “anti-Haitian campaign.” What they called the anti-Haitian campaign was actually the beginning of a genocide that the perpetrators variously misrepresented in terms of deportation, imprisonment, forced labor, and flight. This chapter brings to light leading functionaries, including Emilio Zeller and Reynaldo Valdez who played key strategic roles as architects of the genocide. By exploring records of mass arrests, and the jailers’ own descriptions of conditions of imprisonment over the course of 1937, the chapter casts doubt on the exact fate of detainees. The anti-Haitian campaign also included racialized discourse around disease, vagrancy, and illegality. The chapter argues that not only was the 1937 Genocide planned, but that a critical appraisal of the actions that the officials were willing to write about offers one of the best windows into the killings that they deliberately concealed. It wrestles with the interpretive problem of official concealment and suggests that deportation was also a euphemistic cover for killing. This chapter interrogates the fact that military and migratory documents are completely absent for the northern border regions during the most violent months of 1937 and places the archival record into dialog with eyewitness accounts.

Executive Order 372 and its repressive application to Dominican-born people of Haitian ethnicity remains an essential historical point of reference for understanding ongoing debates over race and citizenship in the present-day Dominican Republic. On September 23, 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Constitutional Court passed judgement 168-13. This ruling established that all persons born since 1929 to immigrants in the Dominican Republic are not citizens of the country due to the fact that their parents were persons “in transit.” This particular language “in transit” has been at the crux of the legal polemics around what in the Dominican context has been known as the tema haitiano or the Haitian question. Migrants who came to the Dominican Republic from Haiti to work on sugar plantations arrived as temporary workers but frequently settled and established families in Dominican territory. Prior to the new 2010 constitution, Dominican constitutions had determined citizenship on the principle of jus soli instead of jus sanguini. Over the course of multiple decades, thousands of children of Haitian migrants had managed to obtain papers and become citizens. By turning to the constitutional language about persons “in transit” and applying this retroactively to people born on Dominican territory before 2010, the nation’s highest court reversed people’s citizenship and rendered stateless tens of thousands of ethnic Haitians. Interestingly the use of 1929, the year of a final border treaty between Haitian and the Dominican Republic concluded while Haiti was still under American occupation, draws attention back to the decades explored in the preceding chapters when the hard geographical and social border between the two nation-states was first established.

This chapter examines life along the border from the era of the American Occupation through the rise of the Trujillo regime in 1930. It reconstructs the period from the testimonies of ethnic Haitian detainees. Analysis of court and police records from the period demonstrate a stark difference between enforcement in the decades of the 1920s and the 1930s. The year 1930 was a watershed. In 1930 Dominican-born ethnic Haitians were first systematically deported to Haiti and forced to pay for immigration permits. Executive Order 372, a racialized migration law introduced during the US occupation, played a crucial role in the process by which all ethnic Haitians became classified as foreigners. Through the evolving use of this law, ethnic Haitians who had previously been recognized as citizens, property owners and legal residents in Dominican territory were deported to Haiti. Others remained in Dominican territory, but in 1930, for the first time, people born on Dominican territory were reclassified as foreigners and they were forced to pay immigration tax. Far from a harmonious, bicultural border, the chapter illuminates the increasingly vulnerable legal status of ethnic Haitians through exploring systematic deportation, imprisonment, punitive taxation, lost citizenship, lost property, and displacement prior to the genocide.

Chapter 4 recounts the most intense phase of the violence of the 1937 Genocide and it focuses on the lived experiences of the victims and the survivors. The chapter is largely based on refugee testimonies collected in 1937 as well as a range of oral histories collected since. By closely examining the survivors’ testimonies, the chapter prioritizes their own understanding of the event. It provides a detailed reconstruction of the magnitude, brutality, and premeditated nature of the state-directed violence that took place in 1937. The chapter focuses on several key features of the 1937 Haitian Massacre in considering its relationship to other genocides in the twentieth century. Elements of secrecy, local complicity, extermination, and land appropriation were key features of this genocide. The chapter argues that victims of the 1937 Genocide interpreted the massacre as a major land grab. They also explained local civilian participation in the massacre in terms of pillage. In addition to focusing on their interpretation of the genocide as a form of land grab, the chapter argues that local complicity was more important than previously acknowledged. It also carefully considers patterns of killings that survivors described that occurred months and years after October 1937.

This chapter focuses on the ideology of Dominicanization in the postgenocide period. It explains the state’s project to erase the ethnic Haitian cultural, economic, and demographic presence after 1937–1938. This project to root out the Haitian presence involved surveillance and forced relocation. The regime espoused an ideal of Hispanidad that denied the Haitian and African presence in the country. Dominicanization involved the regime’s vision for both the economic and cultural development of the border provinces. The chapter explores official correspondence to consider the politicization of language, foodways, construction methods, religious practices, as well as such symbolic material embodiments of modernity as radios, billiard tables, and zinc roofing. The chapter also highlights civilian resistance and the maintenance of old border lifeways. New levels of draconian control over culture and economic activity could not fully eradicate illegal crossing, smuggling, agricultural relations, and kinship. Though Trujillo’s government demonstrated that it had the power to kill large groups of people, it did not have the power to fully control large areas of rugged territory. The aspects of border society that Trujillo’s officials considered obstacles to their Dominicanization campaign help to both reconstruct aspects of the pre-1937 border society and further explain the 1937 Genocide.

Displacement and genocide, rather than fully eliminating the Haitian presence in Dominican territory, fomented new forms of contestation, tension, and conflict. Refugees’ prolonged patterns of contestation and resistance contributed to tense relations along the border throughout the 1940s. This chapter details ethnic Haitians’ methods of irregular resistance, which included secret farms, livestock-theft, the right of return, and in some rare cases, arson and vandalism. These incidents provide a window into some refugees’ political consciousness surrounding genocide, displacement, lost citizenship, and lost homeland. The chapter argues that ethnic Haitians challenged Trujillo’s territorial sovereignty and Dominicanization through land contestation, arson, and clandestine farming. Of these phenomena, clandestine farming was the most enduring and widespread form of resistance because it was the least dangerous and also functioned as a desperate survival strategy. The genocide continued throughout the 1940s in the form of isolated killings by which Trujillo’s government enforced the parallel policies of a closed border and Dominicanization. This chapter considers the ways in which desperate, irregular social contestation through nighttime farming and cross-border livestock-theft represented disturbing, latter-day echoes of colonial marronage.

This chapter considers the question of prejudice and ethnic consciousness by exploring anti-Haitian slurs and insults uttered amid arguments and public disturbances in 1930s border communities. The rise of Trujillo corresponded with a modest increase in ethnically charged public incidents. By 1930, Haitian ethnicity was becoming increasingly stigmatized as the act of calling someone Haitian began to appear in courtroom records of fights and public scandal. While ethnic Haitians were fully accorded the rights of residency through the 1920s, they were generally considered an ethno-national other. Despite their status as citizens according to the Dominican constitution, locally born ethnic Haitians were seen as belonging to a foreign ethnic type. From the testimonies of ethnic Haitians, it is clear that they too considered themselves an unmistakably distinct ethnic identity. Cases of “public scandal” involving ethnic Haitians record the occasionally profane and offensive ways in which Haitian ethnicity became increasingly stigmatized. Utterances such as haitiano come mierda, haitiano come gente, or negro del diablo, offer rare glimpses into popular anti-Haitian sentiment. While ethnic tension increased during the 1930s, until 1937 ethnic Haitians sometimes received protection from local officials. These contradictions exemplify the changing nature of the pre-1937 border.

This chapter reconstructs Haitian and Dominican life along the border in the years before the 1937 Genocide. It addresses the history of the old border by studying new laws and new forms of enforcement that changed border life during the 1920s and 1930s. It draws from records of migratory and non-migratory arrests of ethnic Haitians. Offenses included contraband, illegal border-crossing, sanitary laws, theft, and failure to produce national identity documents. It argues that ethnic Haitians were disproportionately targeted for the enforcement of these laws and the pattern of enforcement reflected a rising tide of official persecution. Far from being a harmonious, open, bicultural border, the chapter shows that border and migratory enforcement grew over the course of the 1920s and 1930s and the new patterns of enforcement were changing everyday life in places where people had once crossed freely. Struggles over claims to land, livestock, and crops are recorded in the remarkable testimonies from ethnic Haitians who spoke boldly against their persecution in Dominican courts. Through an analysis of excuse-making, the chapter also details the strategies ethnic Haitians employed as they struggled to maintain old ways of life amidst news legal forms of ethnic and racial discrimination.