Where are the “borders of Dominicanidad”?

The borders of Dominicanidad are many and are located in many sites. They are within the geographical spaces that divide the island between two nations (La Línea Fronteriza) and in the Caribbean Sea/Atlantic Ocean that delineates the contours of that island-land space separating it from other nations. But they are also, and perhaps more importantly, in the bodies and minds of people. They are carried quite physically across spaces and shape how we experience our relationship to the island as a both a location of identity and a nation-state.

What role does bilingualism or multilingualism play in your work?

I am bilingual and I function quite literally between, within and across language. The way I experience the world is through a process of translation that at times has to do with the semantics of language and, at other times, with the cultural, political and social translation of meanings. As the youngest sibling in a family of four and as someone who was brought to the U.S. at the age of twelve, I have always been somewhat in between, as a bridge and translator between aquí and allá. That experience, and responsibility, within my family also shaped my academic path and the way in which I inhabit Latinx Studies, American Studies and Dominican Studies, in this beautiful Nié that I find so productive. So language, or languages- in terms of the multiple ways in which I communicate and understand the world- are intrinsic to my life praxis and work. Like feminist Latina scholar Gloria Anzaldúa said, “language is home.”

In your book, you caution against labeling the 1937 genocide as the Haitian genocide since the victims of that heinous crime included people from both sides of the island of Hispaniola including Dominico-Haitians and rayanos. ¿Can you elaborate more on this?

The way in which the category of “the immigrant” is being deployed in our current political climate-from the D.R. to the U.S. to Europe- is very dangerous. “Immigrant” has become another category of human exclusion, a racialized site of citizenship divestment. In many ways, we have dehumanized ‘immigrant’ and justified putting them in cages, deporting them, placing them in prisons, and concentration camps and allowing them to perish at sea, as we have seen very recently in the Mediterranean. I am very cognizant of how lack of citizenship leads to unbelonging and lack of belonging leads to dehumanization. We need to all work together to stop this violence. Now, I ask what function does the act of naming the massacre as “Haitian” serve in the process of historicizing and understanding this violence. It is simple: It distances it. It makes it a us vs. them situation. It justifies it. We know from the valuable research of scholars like Richard Turits, that the people who were attacked in 1937 were not “immigrants.” That is, we know that the violence was not aimed at sugar cane workers, temporary workers, and border crossers. Rather the violence was aimed at destroying a multi-ethnic population of people that in the strictest sense of the 1937 Dominican citizenship law would have been considered “Dominican” because they were born on Dominican soil or people who might have been born across in a location in which “across” was part of a cultural vaivén that was at the heart of a community. The 1937 massacre is the most violent episode in modern Dominican history. And it is violent not only because of the bloodbath and destruction of human lives but because of its lasting effects in the construction of a category of human exclusion based on the dichotomy of immigrant/citizen that is still sustaining anti-Haitianism in the D.R. and anti-Mexicanism in the U.S. and anti-blackness in Italy, I could, sadly, go on and on. There is a lot of important work around the massacre and I am sure we will see more in the future, but I think it is also critical to insist on the effects that naming it “Haitian” has on the continued separation of Haitian/Dominican and on the continued exclusion of ethnic Haitians from the nation. Citizenship affords important rights and protections to people and while we know that citizenship is never equal, that race, class, gender, body ability and sexual identity all play a role on how the state serves or not its citizens, until we find a better way, until we re-organize the world differently and abolish nations, and borders and national narratives, we can at least insist on pointing to the violent and hypocritical ways in which the nation—in this case, the Dominican nation—excludes, violates and murder its own citizens.

Can you name some Dominican and non-Dominican artists and writers that have marked you as a scholar?

I will always start here with Josefina Báez, whose work I encountered back when I was only 15 years old and a first year college student at Rutgers University. Josefina had come to Rutgers to present a performance along with the wonderful actor and director Claudio Mir. I went to see it and it changed my life. I had never seen a “show” that depicted what I saw as my own narrative, my mundane childhood experience as “art.” From that moment I followed her work and Claudio Mir’s very closely which in those days meant attending their rehearsals in people’s houses, going to small presentations in apartments and houses in the area and joining the tertulias de mujeres in the home of Dr. Daisy Cocco de Filippis in Queens on Sunday evenings. Josefina opened a wonderful world for me. Her work disarmed me in incredibly productive ways and has accompanied me for over two decades. She was my starting point into this path of learning. There is also, of course, the genius of Junot Díaz, the brilliance of Rita Indiana Hernández, the beauty of Rey Andújar, the wit of Aurora Arias, the magic of Nelly Rosario. In general, the post-80s Dominican and Dominican diasporic literature has been incredibly important to the development of my scholarship and teaching. And of course there is the incisive, ground-breaking, foundational work of Silvio Torres-Saillant, el profe, without whom none of us would be here. Period. Outside of Dominican studies, I have been truly guided by interdisciplinary anti-colonial work done by women of color feminists. The work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Angela Davis, bell hooks and Lisa Lowe has saved me and given me a home in academia.