Undocumented Lives Between Divided Landscapes in the Sonoran Desert and Ayiti

In this text, Lauda Virginia Vargas shares with us memories of her experience as an undocumented child and young adult in Arizona, which we asked her to place in dialogue with her reflection on the last decade of violence deployed by the Dominican state against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. From the Caribbean Sea to the Continent, she dreams of futures where the colonial lines no longer hold such violent power on people.

The beige carpet of our Arizona apartment mimicked the color of the rock landscaping outside, and the beige stucco of the exterior façade. In this apartment, a relatively short drive to the US–Mexico border, and thousands of miles from our tropical home in the Caribbean, my Mom would keep stories of the island we had never been able to visit since I was two years old. My memories of the island were quasi-non-existent, and my mom’s stories of the Dominican Republic in the 1960–80s became my memories of the island. Suburbia in the arid desert was a ripe place for my imagination of an island in the Caribbean, where plantain trees grew in our backyard and sounds of dominoes being slapped on plastic tables would fill public spaces. At times I struggled to grasp my parents’ reasons for leaving, trading this island that seemed full of life and love for the constant fear that we were now living under.

The hostile environment increased in 2010 when, in Arizona, the legislative act evocatively named “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods” (aka SB 1070) was voted in and implemented. It was the strictest anti-immigration law passed in the US and we felt it in our lives. This law allowed for any law enforcement official (police, border patrol, and ICE) to ask anyone they saw that looked like a potentially undocumented person, to provide proof of their documentation on the spot. Not being able to provide proof of the right to be in the US would result in a misdemeanor and ultimately, a likely deportation. Now we knew it wasn’t just a case of trying to avoid the police in the rearview mirror, but also constantly wondering whether we could speak Spanish outside our home, or whether they would take us out of school to provide proof of our status?

There was solidarity against the law through protesting and organizing. Citizens and residents of Arizona who were opposed to the law expressed their solidarity through non-compliance by actively choosing to not carry any government issued documentation and instead carry a document that read:  “I am not carrying my ID in protest and non-compliance of SB1070 because I believe in human rights and stand in solidarity with immigrants.” The Puente Movement in Arizona encouraged the use of  the non-compliance tactic, while also organizing Comités de Defensa del Barrio in various neighborhoods. Comités en Defensa del Barrio would provide courses specifically tailored to your rights when confronted with law enforcement to prevent deportation for yourself or loved ones.

Various restaurants and shops that stood against the law would place signs outside of their businesses stating “We reject racism. No to SB-1070!” The signs, while necessary and well-intentioned, also served as a small reminder of the law’s existence while I was going about my day, buying a cup of coffee or going to dinner with friends.

We were luckier than many. After nearly two decades in the country, my family and I were invited to a green card interview. Seated in a row, all four of us did the interview together. Under the fluorescent institutional light, a US Citizenship and Immigration Services officer in a fake wooden desk asked us questions about our time there. Our replies were recorded by her blue ink pen and the camera that was pointed towards us. A couple of months passed, and we got a slip in the mail with our green cards. To finally hold this card with my name and face on it felt surreal.

The thick plastic card meant that I could finally go home. Shortly after receiving my green card, my tickets were booked to go back to my birth city, Santo Domingo. The passengers erupted in claps when the plane landed. Driving out of the airport, the first thing I saw was the turquoise water. As I burst into tears my auntie laughed and yelled to my grandpa: “Mira esta llorando por el agua!”  We drove along the road that follows the coast of the Caribbean Sea to a Dominican restaurant where my abuelo insisted I order “morir soñando” (“die dreaming”). I visited my abuelo’s sisters who would teasingly greet me with a “Wow! You look just like your mom, you even have the same crooked teeth!” I spent nights talking to my aunt on the iron bar wrapped balcón, while we sat in her worn wicker rocking chairs that would leave imprints on my skin when I finally got up for bed. Our conversations were comforted by a small plastic cup wrapped with a little napkin and filled with an ice cold Présidente. My oldest cousin would take me out to dance merengue and when boys would ask me to dance, the way my feet failed to follow their quick movements would reveal me as an “Americana,” even though I insisted I didn’t consider myself one. My uncle appeared around payday to spoil me with a box of cigars and a bottle of rum. My family that lived on the island, many of whom I had never met before, found their own respective ways to welcome me back.

However, soon after I returned to the US from my first visit home, a shift began to occur on the island, one that is deeply rooted in our relationship with both our neighbors, Haiti, and our relationship with ourselves.

This reversal was enacted retroactively all the way back to 1929, the year when Haiti and the Dominican Republic formalized the border line that we have today. Generations of Dominicans—primarily Dominicans of Haitian descent—were stripped of their citizenship if they did not go through Kafkaesque bureaucratic loopholes. This legislation has led to at least 200,000 people becoming stateless, unrecognized by either the DR or Haiti. To these people rendered stateless, we can add the even more numerous undocumented Haitians living and working on the eastern side of the colonial border, who are also targeted both by the state and parts of Dominican society.

This legislation, fueled by decades of antihaitianismo, has led to an increased hostility towards Dominicans of Haitian descent and Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. The Dominican state is consciously trying to make it more difficult for Haitians to immigrate east of the border. As I write this in October 2023 the Dominican Republic has recently implemented a complete closure of the border with Haiti for an undisclosed period.

Our shared island is a micro example of the “divide and conquer” strategy. France having exploited the western side of the island and Spain the eastern, we became one of the very few islands in the world to be split between two countries, thus disrupting Martiniquan philosopher Édouard Glissant’s idea of the island as one entity. Yet, our ancestors have been moving from one side of the island to the other regardless of colonial control for centuries. Maroon communities who took refuge from French and Spanish colonizers were not concerned with what side of the island they were on but rather, on creating communities free from colonial rule and enslavement. Dominicans and Haitians have been creating communities and living together since before these notions of Dominican or Haitian were even constructed.

The border, initially drawn by France and Spain, has been continuously changing since the colonial occupation. This line divides our mountainous landscape and rivers. And in a six-day period in October 1937, the line became the location of the darkest days of the island in the 20th century. US-trained Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo ordered the massacre of all Haitians living on the Dominican side of the border area. Trujillo had internalized anti-blackness so profoundly that he would powder his face to appear whiter. Trujillo ordered the deaths of thousands upon thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. While being responsible for this massacre Trujillo welcomed refugees from Europe, in his project to “whiten” the Dominican population. His racist and murderous reign has cast a long shadow on the present Dominican psyche.

The construction of the current border wall is a literal cementing of decades of antihaitianismo. Covering over 160  kilometers and dividing our mountainous island, the border wall is set to be the second longest border wall in all of the Americas, outdone only by the border wall built by the US on its border with Mexico that I grew up near. Just like the US border patrol cars that you see lurk within one hour of the border to Mexico, a similar perimeter exists in proximity to the DR–Haiti border, one can encounter multiple militarized checkpoints. During my recent visit to the town of Pedernales at the most southern point of the border, I lost track of the number of checkpoints where we had to stop and let an armed police officer come onto the bus and look around.

We have a shared island, shared history, shared lineages, shared culture, and a shared future. The DR easily allows for Europeans and North Americans to overstay their visas in the country and come and go comfortably. Yet currently, the Dominican state is deporting more Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent than ever. Just last year, over 150,000 Haitians were deported to the western part of the island. White metal migration enforcement trucks, “las camionetas,” haunt the roads less traveled by beach and eco tourists. These white trucks brutally carry undocumented Haitians and sometimes even documented Haitians to the other side of the border, often directly, meaning that there is no legal process whatsoever and to a country some of them have never been to.

My mom told me stories about the reign of Trujillo, the imprisonment of her dad during this time. She told me about the US occupation during the revolution, the drive-by shooting of her childhood home by the Dominican government, and the murder of her cousins by US-backed Dominican troops. She said that in Haiti, people are taught that the island is one and indivisible, while the Dominican state is more concerned with oppressing any idea of relation or unity to the eastern side of the island. And today, the border first drawn by France and Spain and reinforced through multiple US invasions of both sides of the island, is now spatially articulated in concrete and systematically militarized by the Dominican Republic.

There is no other place in the world we have more in common with than Haiti. Our memories are intertwined, and our family trees connected. There is no other place that we are more intrinsically tied to. We are in constant relation to Haiti, and our fates have historically mirrored each other. We only have this island, Ayiti-Kiskeya-Bohio.

My many years of undocumentedness in the US had created a romanticized vision of my return home. Seeing my home country mirroring the terror that I was raised under, shows that the colonial fabric our island was subjected to for hundreds of years under European rule and US occupation is being replicated and expanded upon. Black Aytians fought for our island to be the first free Black Republic and the first free island in the Caribbean, yet our island today is far from free. Revoked citizenship and massive deportations have trapped the western side of the island in a neocolonial order that denies many Dominicans of Haitian descent and Haitians of the most basic rights. Violently uprooting mangroves and digging into the fertile soil, the concrete foundation of the militarized wall built on the line that Spain and France drew hundreds of years ago is becoming a physical and metaphysical reality every day. The line drawn on a map by our European colonizers to impose their respective control over territories and enslaved populations is now an open wound casted into our earth.

As I get older, my mom’s memories of this island have become distorted with my own uncovering of our past, as well as the present reality. Yet, I still like to imagine that island filled with love among the scars, because amidst the violence there are moments that remind me that resistance occurs in many ways. When I hear people mixing Spanish with Creole, or the bodega down the street blasting Haitian music, I feel like our future could be so different from our present reality. I like to imagine a train that travels through the moist tropical mountain-scape, connecting our cities and our countryside. I would get off the train at San José de las Matas, to visit my uncle and then get back on to continue to Okap. The train would cross the ruins of the currently built border wall after the destroyed mangroves have regrown. I imagine a free island without deportations or military checkpoints.

Twenty years ago, in our beige Arizona apartment, storytelling was one relief from our undocumented status that followed us outside the home. Between these walls I could imagine a place of belonging, where we express ourselves openly and boisterously, speak Spanish loudly with the laughing and teasing that often comes with Caribbean expression.  

I dreamt of this island my family had left, not of half of the island. Today that dream has evolved to an island where Dominicans embrace our Haitian neighbors and relatives with free movement for all islanders and the ability to live a dignified life. A liberated island without US-backed interventions, a place with stewardship for our shared land. An island not catered towards European and North American tourists, but rather a home for the people of Ayiti-Kiskeya-Bohio. ■