Recently, the Dominican Republic has made headlines over a controversial policy to deport Dominicans of Haitian descent to the other side of the island the two countries share. The policy has brought awareness to the complex legacy of race in the Dominican Republic—and other countries in the Latin American diaspora.
This recent headline draws concern for Dr. Silvio Torres-Saillant, who founded the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute at the City College of New York and is currently a professor of English at Syracuse University.
“The racial politics in the Dominican Republic today are made very complex by the other phenomenon, which is immigration politics, and it’s also connected with a labor-access problem. So there are many things going on at the same time,” he says. “What’s racial and what’s not is not so easily determined.”
But Torres-Saillant also says that the issue is not unique to the Dominican Republic but is an issue with the colonized nations across the Western Hemisphere.
“We understand that the problem of immigrants is everywhere. Immigrants are disempowered in most places today,” he continues.
A supreme sense of nationalism propels some of the issues surrounding the policies on Haitian-descendant Dominicans and the idea that they are “invading the country.”
Colonization spurs racism
