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Hi there,

I have to say that your question raised my eyebrows a bit because the idea that borders don’t matter and aren’t important on the island doesn’t sit well with me because, in context, it is a bit of a privileged statement that reminds me of ‘I don’t see color’.

My sassy self would want to say something like ‘ask the Haitians living in poverty if borders don’t matter’ or ‘I wonder what Haitians and people of Haitian descent* who have been deported think about the importance of borders’. That’s not directed at you, OP, but man...it’s hard to conceive of thinking that borders on the island aren’t important.

If we were a world focused on liberation, borders wouldn’t matter because they really wouldn’t exist...but we’re not there.

All that to say that the border between Haiti and the DR is very important politically and, for many folks, personally. It can literally be seen as a line between the haves and have nots in that the DR offers a very different life for the average person than Haiti might be able to. The border has been used to batter Haitians and folks of Haitian descent for a long, long time. This includes the Parsley Massacre but that definitely wasn’t the beginning. 

The relationship between the DR and Haiti embodies a history of colorism and anti-Haitianismo, which I touched on briefly in my last post. Right now, the DR has been involved in a longer-term campaign to deport Haitians regardless of their documentation status and deport people of Haitian descent. That star next to ‘people of Haitian descent’ above is to denote that the DR uses that classification to identify and remove folks, and it is done almost solely on the basis of skin color. It is presumed that darker skinned individuals are Haitian or are Haitian-descended. This has meant that people who were born in the DR to parents who might have lived in Haiti and who have never been to Haiti, don’t speak the language, etc are being forced to leave their homes and go to a country that they have no ties to. It is literally happening every day and over 200,000 people have been sent over the border.

The DR has maintained mostly closed borders since COVID began, with randomly open short periods of time that people can enter, if they have a visa. These are desperate moments for Haitians who may be fleeing violence or who are seeking work in the DR. Visas cost money and many of the folks trying to cross at checkpoints don’t have it. Visas are a new-ish requirement from the DR, which is another measure rooted in anti-Haitianismo.

So...borders are not unimportant. Right now, the attitude that they are not important or don’t matter to Haitians is rooted in (honestly) a fantasy that the island is united and that the DR is not perpetrating abuses and human rights violations on a daily basis. On the island, it very much matters where you are from and which side of the line you descend from...there’s no getting away from that for Haitians. To think otherwise is almost a whitewashing of the current ongoing crisis.

This delineation has of course affected how culture has developed, which to bring it all back to Vodou has led to the development of very distinct religious practices on the island that are not interchangeable (would they be if borders did not exist?), which leads to another difference....it’s not unheard of for Dominicans to maintain that Haitian Vodou is more barbaric or violent, which plays into White racism assigned to how Haitian Vodou is viewed. It’s messy.

So...in an ideal world the island would be fully liberated and the border really wouldn’t matter, but the world is not ideal and the Haitians are the ones currently paying for that. Abolition should happen now, but it’s a long-term process that is not currently viable as long as the DR is committed to anti-Haitian measures.