Caribbean Matters: While the Dominican gov builds a racist wall, other people are building bridges

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This week marks the 85th anniversary of the genocide in the Dominican Republic (DR), committed against Haitians and Dominicans with Haitian ancestry. People have named that terrible series of events “the Parsley Massacre.” It was also known as el corte, the cutting, because many of the 20 to 30 thousand Haitians slain by the Dominican military under the direction of Hitler-inspired Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo were killed with machetes in order to disguise the fact that it was a military operation.

I don’t remember ever being taught about this history in high school or as an undergraduate. It wasn’t until I had a Haitian-American professor in graduate school that it was brought to my and my classmates’ horrified attention. Lest you relegate a many-decades-old atrocity to the past, vitriolic racism and antihaitianismo are alive and well in today’s DR. Ironically, the vast majority of Dominicans are African-ancestored, though the levels of denial of Blackness may be higher than the wall currently being built between the DR and Haiti.

As things stand now, the President of the Dominican Republic, Luis Abinader, is touting his Trumpian wall-building efforts to keep Haitians out of the DR. Of course, the irony in all this is the fact that there are about a half million documented Haitians in the DR, and many more who are uncounted but necessary for both the agricultural and construction industries to prosper. Sounds so familiar—reminds me of the whole hyped-up right-wing anti-immigrant hysteria here, while at the same time, we are dependent on migrant labor.

Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.

Related: Caribbean Matters: Dominican Republic builds a wall with Haiti, while dropping COVID-19 protections

Related: Caribbean Matters: A must-see film shines light on a massacre that must not be forgotten

Related: If you are black, get out: The crisis of statelessness in the Dominican Republic

Due to social media, the Parsley Massacre history no longer goes by unremarked, and links are posted to stories that may have been passed over when first written.

THE PARSLEY MASSACRE 85 years ago, 2-8 Oct 1937 up to 37,000 Haitian men, women, children murdered by Dominican soldiers on orders of President Rafael Trujillo; many based on how they pronounced ‘perejil’, Spanish word for parsley.https://t.co/kdfDWER4SUhttps://t.co/5OlDk3pnDJ pic.twitter.com/hNo58uJFD6

— Wayne Chen (@wcchen) October 2, 2022

For example, this NPR piece was written in 2017 by Marlon Bishop and photographer Tatiana Fernandez. What makes it an important read is that they interview survivors of the massacre. The nightmare of history is alive and well.

80 Years On, Dominicans And Haitians Revisit Painful Memories Of Parsley Massacre : Parallels : NPR https://t.co/AC5wBTnjwl

— CEO Billionaire Bella? (@CaribMarie) September 26, 2022

80 Years On, Dominicans And Haitians Revisit Painful Memories Of Parsley Massacre

'He hated us'

Under pressure from the United States, Mexico and Cuba, Trujillo paid an indemnity of $525,000 in 1938 (equivalent to about $9 million today) to the Haitian government, which used a portion of the money to set up colonies for refugees from the massacre. Survivor Gilbert Jean, 93, (left) lives in Dosmond, one of those colonies. He says his family was friendly with local officials, who warned them about the coming massacre so they could flee before the soldiers caught them. "Trujillo did it because he hated us, because he didn't want to see black people in his country. It was in his roots to be racist," he says.

Willy Azema, president of the Dosmond colony and a descendant of survivors, points (right) to a list of refugees and the land apportioned to them. "Our relatives came here with nothing but the clothes on their back," he says. He points out the poor housing and lack of a medical clinic and drinkable water in the colony. "Look around, we aren't living the way a human being should live, and it's the fault of the people who committed the massacre," he says.

A paragraph in the story takes you to an organization that is doing the opposite of the current Dominican government, Border of Lights:

Regino Martinez, a Jesuit priest based in the Dominican border city of Dajabon, believes that dialogue about the 1937 massacre would help Dominican-Haitian relations — which remain tense today. He is involved in an annual commemoration of the massacre in Dajabon called Border of Lights, organized by a group of international scholars and activists, including many Dominicans and Haitian-Americans.

Border of Lights states its genesis and purpose very simply on its homepage:

Border of Lights first came together to mark the 75th anniversary of the 1937 Haitian Massacre, a massacre in which thousands of Haitians and their Dominican-born descendants were murdered. The past US Ambassador in Santo Domingo, R. Henry Norweb, described the massacre as “a systematic campaign of extermination.”

Every year—in collaboration with artists, activists, students, teachers, academics, and others—Border of Lights has come together to breathe life to a tragedy long forgotten, and, for some, a tragedy unknown.

TeleSur-English posted this news report about this year's commemoration on Oct. 3:

“Dominican-Haitian organisation “Border of Lights” celebrates 10 years of existence”

The bi-national organisation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, “Border of Lights”, is 10 years old. The entity seeks respect and harmonious exchange between the two nations that share the same geographical space

YouTube Video

Seen in the video is Dr. Edward Paulino, who is Dominican-American and teaches at John Jay College in New York City.

Paulino’s personal journey is a moving story in and of itself. His discovery of a document in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s papers relating to the massacre profoundly changed his life.

For someone born and raised in New York City, the Dominican Republic had seemed an idyllic place. During Christmas holidays and summer vacations, Santo Domingo served as a peaceful refuge, where I could bask under a limoncillo (Spanish lime) fruit tree on my family’s cocoa farm in the town of San Francisco de Macorís and watch the guaraguaos (hawks) soaring high above in a royal-blue sky. It was my paradise. There, I felt at home, one of the majority — something denied me in the United States.

During my adolescence in the 1980s, when my neighborhood, like others in New York and the United States, succumbed to the ravages of the crack epidemic, I yearned to leave the United States and return to my parents’ country. It was thus disconcerting, indeed a jolting surprise, when I came across Norweb’s document in the FDR Library. The communiqué alerting FDR to the 1937 Haitian massacre forced me to see the Dominican Republic and its history in a different light. How could “my people” participate in genocidal massacres? How could a culture, which spoke to me in ways that American culture did not, especially as a politically radicalized working-class Latino undergraduate in a predominantly white college, also be the site of a mass murder not unlike the other genocides I had read about? At the time, I’d had an insatiable desire to condemn the European conquest of the Americas, the decimation of hundreds of indigenous nations, and the enslavement of Africans, thereby reaffirming my Dominican identity by romanticizing “the folk.” Yet I was unprepared to expand my anti-colonial perspective to a critique of my own heritage of violence and racialism. For me, the relevance of the Norweb document is also deeply personal.

As a Dominican-American, I realize that my legacy is not just that of the victim, but also of the perpetrator. Before, the génocidaires were Nazis, Hutus, Khmer Rouge, Serbs, Turks, Japanese, Europeans in the Americas and Africa — always the Other. Surely not me, a Dominican-American,a Latino, a New Yorker, an American. Through the Norweb communiqué, I stumbled on a heritage that forced me to reevaluate my youthful romanticism about a country in which, today, a poor, dark-skinned Dominican of Haitian descent lacks a racial, ethnic, and class privilege that I, as a light-skinned American of Dominican descent with a precious blue passport, possess but do not deserve.

Paulino became one of the founders of Border of Light. He also produced this educational video history lesson for TEDEd with animator Tomás Pichardo-Espaillat.

YouTube Video

When historians talk about the atrocities of the 20th century, we often think of those that took place during and between the two World Wars. But two months before the Rape of Nanking in China, and a year before Kristallnacht in Germany, a horrific ethnic cleansing campaign occurred on an island between the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. Edward Paulino details the 1937 Haitian Massacre.

I’d also like to suggest that you check out “The Border of Lights Reader,” edited by Megan Jeanette Myers and Edward Paulino.

Have you checked out The Border of Lights Reader yet? You can read it for free here: https://t.co/xBW59S3tD3

— Border of Lights (@border_oflights) July 15, 2022

A multimodal, multi-vocal space for activists, artists, scholars, and others connected to the BOL movement, The Border of Lights Reader provides an alternative to the dominant narrative that positions Dominicans and Haitians as eternal adversaries. This innovative anthology emphasizes cross-border and collaborative histories and asks large-scale, universal questions regarding historical memory and revisionism that countries around the world grapple with today.

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