Arroz con pollo waits on the table at Miguel Sano's duplex condo, not far from Target Field. Sano's sister is visiting from the Dominican Republic, and her husband has made the Twins slugger's favorite dish -- mounds of it, enough to feed a baseball team. "Don't worry," Sano tells me. "I eat a lot." The aroma is seductive, an anamnesis of the Caribbean. It fills the top floor of the apartment where Sano spends the major league season, more than 2,000 miles from San Pedro de Macoris, where he was raised. The coastal city is renowned for turning out big league talent, an important source for the country's baseball pipeline -- 82 Dominicans made last year's Opening Day rosters from a population of 10.6 million.

Sano stands apart from the other 81 Dominicans in one significant way: He has publicly identified as an ethnic Haitian.

Baseball is not popular in Haiti itself, but as many as a million ethnic Haitians live in the neighboring Dominican Republic, where the game is ubiquitous. As the chicken waits on the table, Sano and Franklin Johnson Mateo, who serves as Sano's adviser and facilitator, shout out examples of former and current MLB players who likely share their Haitian ancestry. They rattle off seven or eight names. The total number, Sano and Mateo agree, would shock most observers.

Many big leaguers from the Dominican, including some who are being mentioned in Sano's living room, choose to keep their backgrounds a secret. Some ethnic Haitians go so far as to actually alter their identities on the way to the majors.

"I didn't have to change my name, but there are so many that do," Felix Pie, a former big league outfielder and Haitian Dominican, had told me.

Players need birth certificates to sign with a major league team and obtain a visa. Haitians in the Dominican Republic often lack them, so a player might change his identity to get the necessary documentation. Others do it to make themselves appear younger, or simply to avoid the rampant prejudice against Haitians in the country. "Dominicans make fun of Haitians," Mateo says. "Some people feel ashamed about being Haitian."

The Caribbean's second-largest island, Hispaniola, is divided in two: French- and Creole-speaking Haiti to the west, the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic to the east. For generations, Haitians, mostly descended from African slaves, have been denigrated by lighter-skinned Dominicans descended from colonial Europeans. The Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, who used makeup to whiten his own face, murdered an estimated 20,000 émigrés during a 1937 massacre. Recent administrations have favored deportations.

The situation has lately become a human rights crisis. In 2013, a court ruling retroactively stripped some 200,000 Haitian Dominicans of their citizenship, even if they were born in the country. Those born there today are considered aliens. Tens of thousands have been deported or driven from the country by fear. Generations of Dominicans with Haitian blood are at risk. "I have a lot of friends who are scared that the government is going to send them back to Haiti," shortstop Orlando Calixte told me in November. A Haitian Dominican, he signed with the Giants this winter after seven seasons in the Royals' minor league system.

Until recently, changing an identity was easy enough to do. "If you were Haitian, you could go back and get papers from somebody," Mateo says. "'This is my mom and dad, I'm Dominican.' But really it's a fake mom and dad." Mateo himself used an assumed name to play for several years in the A's organization, though he won't say what it was. Somewhere on the island, there's a man with that name who has a minor league entry on the Baseball Reference website and probably a few thousand dollars for his trouble.

And Sano? His birth certificate reads "Miguel Jean,'' as does his listing on MLB's official Twins roster. But he goes by Sano, and that's what it says on his jersey. When we finally sit down to lunch, Sano explains why his names don't match. The story is murky, and he tells it quickly, without much detail. His mother, Melania Jean, was born in San Pedro de Macoris to legally settled Haitian parents. His father, who had the name Aponte, would come and go. So Melania put her last name on her son's birth certificate.

Later, a man named Sano started living with the family. As the young ballplayer's talent grew, that name became identified with him. "They'd call out to me in the street, 'Sano, Sano,'" he says. He shrugs. "So that's the name I started using." Now that he's famous, Sano takes pride in his ancestry, though he has never seen Haiti and can't speak more than a few words of Creole. He denies that he changed his name to help his career, but when he was a teenage prospect in the Dominican Republic, it certainly wouldn't have hurt.

Sano was lucky. When he was born, his mother insisted that the hospital provide papers. He still had to spend months fighting with Major League Baseball over their legitimacy, but in the end, they were enough. In 2009, he signed with the Twins.

But since then, a Haitian Dominican's journey from talented adolescent to big leaguer has become increasingly difficult. In fact, young Haitians these days have trouble even finding a place on competitive Dominican youth teams. "Long before you get to Major League Baseball, there's a selection process that discriminates against Haitians," says Sandy Alderson, who worked for MLB in the Dominican and now serves as GM of the Mets.

Whatever he calls himself, the next Miguel Sano is far less likely to ever get off the island.

After the 2016 season, I flew to the Dominican Republic to try to understand why some of the most talented baseball players anywhere don't play in the majors. I'd heard that Onil Joseph, a Haitian Dominican who works as an instructor at the Royals' complex near Boca Chica, had a brother who was good enough. But nobody in baseball had seen him in years.

On a November afternoon, Joseph and I rumble over the packed dirt in his SUV, headed for the village of Angelina. The one-lane road is framed by walls of sugarcane. Though it's only a 15-minute drive from the chaotic bustle of San Pedro de Macoris, it feels like a different country. It might as well be. The shantytown where Joseph was born and raised is half Haitian, he guesses.

Life is hard in Haiti. Even before the damage done by a devastating earthquake in 2010 and last year's Hurricane Matthew, which killed more than 1,000 people and left cholera in its wake, mere subsistence was difficult for many to sustain. In North America, we perceive the Dominican Republic to be poor -- and indeed, 32 percent of Dominicans live in poverty. But in Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, that number is near 60 percent. For decades, Haitians have crossed Hispaniola's porous border in search of fertile fields, decent employment, a better life. To them, the Dominican represents a promised land.

Many Haitian Dominicans live in shantytowns like Angelina, called bateyes, near the cane fields. Rico Carty, a lifetime .299 hitter who signed with the Milwaukee Braves in 1959, emerged from a batey. Plenty more players, including George Bell, Mariano Duncan and Julio Franco, have followed. Many of them, it must be assumed, have Haitian lineage.

Decades of oppression have pushed this Haitian subculture into the margins of society. Children are often born at home, with no government representative to record their existence. Hospitals can be far away -- and expensive. And for Haitians, there is risk in being exposed to an official system that already has deported thousands of longtime residents. Sometimes the church gets involved, jotting down rudimentary details of a childbirth or a baptism, usually in French. "It's just the way it happens here," Joseph explains.

One MLB executive told me the story of a contract offer his team recently made to a young Haitian Dominican. The player had a birth certificate that seemed legitimate, except that it wasn't issued until he was 10 years old. "In the U.S., you can't leave a hospital without registering your child," the executive said. "That's not the case down there." It also happened that, for unexplained reasons, the 10-year-old had been registered as the son of his aunt. That left him unable to pass a DNA test, when matched against the genes of his alleged parents. "He's a talented player," the executive said. "We're trying to figure out what to do."

Joseph's SUV bounces to a stop, and he jumps out to show me where he and plenty of others learned to play baseball. It's a rock-strewn dirt infield with a stretch of tall grass beyond. If you can field a grounder here, it seems to me, you can field one anywhere.

According to MLB rules, Dominican prospects are free agents, not subject to an entry draft. They can sign with teams any time after their 16th birthday. Notoriously, many prospects lie about their age, as Mateo did: Younger players are more valuable, and an 18-year-old posing as 16 will look more impressive to scouts. Fraud is a legitimate problem. But fraudulent documents can also serve as the only lifeline to players born without a birth certificate.

When Joseph signed with the Braves in 2000, he showed papers from somewhere. They were enough. He spent five years in the Atlanta farm system, then one with the Royals. Most of that was in Double-A or below, but it earned him enough to get food, clothes and medicine back to Angelina.

Now he drives down the village's only street. It has rained, and pools of standing water glisten in the sunshine. The smell of something burning is in the air. People of all ages are sitting in front of the shacks on folding chairs. The idea that their birth certificates are filed away somewhere inside is a fantastical one.

Onil was playing in Wichita in 2007 when his brother signed a contract with the Giants that included a $350,000 bonus. That wasn't close to the $3.15 million that Sano would get from the Twins two years later, but it was large enough to rank among the 20 biggest international signing bonuses of that season. When we arrive, Angel Joseph fills the doorway of his family's two-room shack. Now 27, he is 6-foot-2 and a muscular 170 pounds. Beside him on the bare wall is a carving of a mermaid. "I was a complete ballplayer," he says quietly. "I hit well. I ran well. I played center field."

At the time, Angel was being compared with Alfonso Soriano. A switch-hitter, he had power from the right side and a graceful swing from the left. "Of all the outfielders we saw, he was one of the top three as far as having well-rounded tools," Rick Ragazzo, who then ran the Giants' international scouting division, said after the signing.

But unlike his brother, Angel Joseph didn't have a birth certificate. There was no reason one brother had it and one didn't, other than happenstance -- who happened to be passing through that morning, perhaps, or how aggressive the parents had been in filling out a form. "I basically didn't have any documents," Angel says. "None. We looked and looked for a way to find them, but they weren't there. It isn't that they were missing, I never had them."

Ultimately, his contract with the Giants was annulled. As he tells the story now, Angel grows silent. Onil picks up the thread. "He kept playing for the talent scouts," he says. "He waited for years to have another opportunity. He kept saying he believed it would work out. He could play."

Several years later, an Indians scout offered a contract. Because Angel was older and hadn't improved as he might have with professional coaching and competition, the offer was $100,000. Again, he was asked to prove his identity. With the money Onil had earned, the family hired a lawyer. "It didn't help," Onil says.

Angel was in his early 20s by then. "I kept playing, kept trying," he says. A Rays scout approached and said he believed he could solve the problem. They had a lawyer on retainer, he boasted, for exactly that circumstance. "He came down to see me, tried to get me a visa," Angel says. But that failed too.

Angel lives in the shack with five other family members. He is the pastor of a local church and, as he approaches 30, resembles Lorenzo Cain. But he isn't a center fielder anymore. "I've stopped playing," he says. "I've lost the ambition. My life is different." He stares out at the dirt road. "Sure, I could have played in the majors," he says. "They compared me to Felix Pie."

Both brothers are silent now as thunder rumbles overhead. A woman yells something in Creole to two kids playing in the street. Angel lowers his head to lean out from the undersized doorway and looks up at the sky. The rain is coming again.