All she could feel was pain. The pain of walking through a historic capital leveled by nature. The pain of hearing screams from beneath the rubble. The pain of knowing an inhumane force — racism — made the tragedy worse.
Afro-Dominican activist Sergia Galvan traveled to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, just one day after the earth shook to look for her sisters in arms.
They were lost, the sisters whom for years she worked with to heal the rifts of anti-Haitianism in her native Dominican Republic, a gulf rooted in the violent history and deep racism of their shared island. As a Black Dominican feminist, she is part of a growing Latin American movement that affirms Black identity against the antagonism of negrophobic and so-called color-blind societies.
But in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated Haiti last month, an outpouring of compassion from the Spanish-speaking neighbor transcended those tensions, with the Dominican Republic becoming the first nation to respond to Haiti’s cry for help.
“The Dominican Republic is a racist nation with deep anti-Haitian sentiments, and it has amazed me to see the solidarity of the Dominican people and to see them transcend that part of themselves,” says Galvan, whose organization, The Women and Health Collective, is working to provide medical help in border hospitals. “I hope this is symbolic of a step forward toward breaking down the racial barriers and xenophobic views of Dominicans toward Haitians.”
Though they share heritage and language, the relationship between Black Latin Americans and their lighter compatriots is marred by historical denial, discrimination and denigration.
Negrophobia — or the contempt of blackness — has a long and ugly legacy in Latin American and Caribbean countries, where 90 percent of the approximately 10 million enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were taken. Only 4.6 percent were brought to the U.S.
