Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature & Art 9781477325612

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Crossing Waters

Latinx: the Future is now A series edited by Lorgia García-Peña and Nicole Guidotti-Hernández

Books in the series Kristy L. Ulibarri, Visible Borders, Invisible Economies: The Living Dead of Latinx Narratives Yajaira M. Padilla, From Threatening Guerrillas to Forever Illegals: US Central Americans and the Politics of Non-Belonging Francisco J. Galarte, Brown Trans Figurations: Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies

CROSSING WATERS Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art

Marisel C. Moreno

university oF texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2022 Epigraph from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, copyright ©1987, 1999, 2007, 2012 by Gloria Anzaldúa; reprinted by permission of Aunt Lute Books. www.auntlute.com. Epigraph from M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred, copyright ©2005 by Duke University Press, used by permission of the press. All rights reserved. www.dukeupress.edu. Excerpts from Adios, Happy Homeland!, copyright ©2011 by Ana Menéndez. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Excerpts from “Last Night in Havana” and “El Juan” from City of a Hundred Fires, by Richard Blanco, ©1998. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Excerpts from “Monstro,” first published in the New Yorker, ©2012, by Junot Díaz. Reprinted by permission of the author and Aragi, Inc. All rights reserved. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). library of Congress Cataloging-in-PubliCation Data

Names: Moreno, Marisel C., 1973– author. Title: Crossing waters : undocumented migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx literature and art / Marisel C. Moreno. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2022. | Series: Latinx: the future is now | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021053325 ISBN 978-1-4773-2559-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2560-5 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-4773-2561-2 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-4773-2562-9 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Illegal immigration in literature. | Emigration and immigration in art. | Caribbean literature (Spanish)—Themes, motives. | Art, Caribbean—Themes, motives. | Spanish American literature—Themes, motives. | Art, Latin American— Themes, motives. Classification: LCC PQ7081 .M61286 2022 | DDC 860.9/3552—dc23/eng/20220120 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053325 doi:10.7560/325599

Para toM, gabriel, y Mariana Para Mi faMilia y Puerto riCo Para nuestra/os herManas y herManos Caribeña/os Para los que DesCansan en el fonDo Del Mar

Water always remembers. M. Jacqui aLexander, Pedagogies of Crossing (2005)

We are a whole people down in ese mar caribeño, standing with our ancestors on auction blocks ayendy BoniFacio, To The river, We are MigranTs (2020)

Contents

Acknowledgments xi introDuCtion

1

ChaPter 1. Rethinking the Borders of the Caribbean Archipelago 11 ChaPter 2. Puerto Rico:

Border and Bridge to the Continental United States 70 ChaPter 3. Dominican Crossings: Displacements across Sea and Land 109 ChaPter 4. Cubans at Sea:

The Balsero Crisis in Literature and Art 178 ePilogue

237

Notes 243 Works Cited 257 Index 271

aCknoWleDgMents

This book would not exist today if it were not for the help and support of many people along the way. Looking back, I realize the seeds of this project were planted fifteen years ago, when I wrote an article on Mayra Santos Febres’s recently published collection Boat People (2005) while I was also working on my first book. All these years later, I have a lot of people to thank. I’d like to start with the authors, poets, and artists who inspired me to write these pages. I’ve had the pleasure and privilege to meet most of them throughout the years, and believe me, the world is a better place because of them. Thanks to Scherezade García, for welcoming my entire family to her home a few winters ago and for sharing with me so much about her artistic process. She was also instrumental in connecting me with the late Tony Capellán’s family in the Dominican Republic, who graciously provided me permission to use images of his work in my book. Thanks to Abel Barroso, who also welcomed our family to his La Habana home-studio and spoke to us for hours about his art. Thanks to Sandra Ramos, whom I met in Cleveland during her residency there and who later accepted my invitation to give a talk at Notre Dame in November 2017. Thanks also to her sister, Liane Ramos, who graciously received us at her home in La Habana and spoke to us about her sister’s work. I cherish the friendships I’ve made with these amazing artists and feel very lucky to have had their support throughout this process. I also want to thank Mayra Santos Febres for her unwavering support of this book and other related projects, including the interview that my husband and colleague, Thomas F. Anderson, and I conducted with her at her home in summer 2018 for the Listening to Puerto Rico digital humanities project. There are not enough words to express my gratitude for all she has done and continues to do for Puerto Rico by raising awareness about issues related to social justice and the human rights of women, LGBTQ+, undocumented, Black, and Afro-descendant people. I am thankful to Sophie Maríñez for sharing with me her poems about La Sentencia prior to their publication. I am grateful for having met Elizabeth Acevedo, Ana Maurine Lara, Pedro Cabiya, Magali García Ramis, Junot Díaz, Rita Indiana Hernández, Richard Blanco, and Achy Obejas throughout the years and for their support of this book. Your work has been a great source of inspiration, and I hope you enjoy reading these pages.

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Many others also supported me in various ways during this journey. Thanks to Tamayo and Marta for being the best Cuban hosts, for your stories, and for your deep love for our family. I’m also grateful to Tamayo for being my Cuba-based research assistant and for helping me corroborate dates and facts that enriched my project. Thanks to my colleague Tom Tweed for inspiring me, very early on, to think beyond land borders as a theoretical framework for my scholarship. For the many and various ways, big and small, in which they contributed to making this book a reality, my appreciation goes to Father Greg Haake, Pam Butler, Nicole Woods, Anne García-Romero, Daniel Alarcón, Ana Niria Albo Díaz, Francisco Rovira Rullán, and Natalie Catasús. I am grateful for the support from my Notre Dame (ND) colleagues throughout the years. The financial and logistical support of various units across campus has been central to my project. This book was made possible in part by support from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (ISLA), College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame. ISLA also supported Sandra Ramos’s visit to ND, which resulted in an interview that has been central to my analysis of her work. I am deeply indebted to the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), which has always had our backs as Latinx faculty at ND. Thanks to Francisco Aragón, poet and director of Letras Latinas, who organized the visits of most of the poets I examine in my book, for our multiple collaborations, and for working to center Latinx literature at Notre Dame and beyond. Thanks to the Kellogg Institute for International Studies for their financial and logistical support in inviting Sandra Ramos to speak on campus. I am also grateful to the Kellogg Institute for making it possible to have had three excellent undergraduate research assistants whose work has been instrumental in the process of writing the book: Nora Eder, Julie Mardini, and Alex Lewis. Many thanks to my colleagues in Gender Studies, Africana Studies, and the Center for Social Concerns. To all my students, I’ve learned so much from you over the years. I’m deeply grateful to my Latinx studies colleagues at Notre Dame and beyond. Over the years I’ve had many interlocutors, and I want to thank Marta Caminero-Santangelo, Sonia Fritz, Lorgia García-Peña, Ramona Hernández, Rebeca Hey-Colón, Ylce Irizarry, Carmen Lamas, Sobeira Latorre, Carmen Lugo Lugo, Elena Machado, Ana Patricia Rodríguez, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, Marion Rohrleitner, Maritza Stanchich, Belkys Torres, Lourdes Torres, and many more for having enriched my life and work. Thank you also to the Dominican Studies Institute, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, and Casa de las Américas in Cuba. My most heartfelt gratitude to Lorgia García-Peña and Nicole Guidotti-

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Hernández, co-editors of the series “Latinx: The Future Is Now” at the University of Texas Press. Thank you for believing in this book from the beginning, for your detailed feedback, and for your amazing support during this journey despite all the challenges we faced due to the pandemic. To my UT Press senior editor, Kerry Webb, thanks for your steadfast support through this process; to Andrew Hnatow and Ana Calle Poveda, editorial assistants, for your patience and grace answering all my questions; and to the rest of the UT Press staff involved in the creation of this book. Thanks also to the anonymous readers who provided invaluable feedback at various stages of the process. I’m very aware of the challenges we as academics faced due to the pandemic, so I am deeply grateful for your time and support during these trying times. Last but not least, I could not have done this without the support and love from my husband, Tom. Thank you for cheering me on when I needed it and for reminding me to sit down and write when I wanted to give up. Thank you to my children, Gabriel and Mariana: you’ve been an inspiration and have taught me so much. He’ll never know I said this, but thanks also to Obi, our black Lab, for making me smile and bringing me joy. Thanks to Mami, Papi, and my siblings Luli, Cristina, and Bilso, for sharing life with me. Thank you to my deceased grandparents—Abuela Neya, Abuelo Arcángel, Papa, and Mama Sonia—who taught me so much, especially to love my island. Thanks to my ancestors. Thank you, especially, to those who are no longer with us, those who passed away shortly after Hurricane María. To Papa, my grandfather, one of the greatest loves of my life, thank you for your unconditional support and for always believing in me. To Titi Elia, the most passionate independentista I’ve ever met, you embraced life despite a serious struggle with Wilson disease, and in doing so inspired me to live life to its fullest. To Tío Quiquin, the most badass jíbaro I’ve ever known, thank you for dedicating entire summers of your life to teaching your sobrinas and sobrinos everything there is to know about el campo. Thank you for taking us on wild hikes in the mountains of Yauco (the views from El Rodadero are spectacular) and to the most remote charcos to swim; thanks for giving me the first pomarrosa I ever tried; for teaching us about coffee, local history, and legends; and for telling the best scary stories at night in Las Piedras. I learned to love Puerto Rico even more because of you. Thanks to all who have helped me grow as a person and as a scholar. To my people in Puerto Rico, la lucha continúa. To our Caribbean brothers and sisters, we owe you so much and are so privileged to be your neighbors. We’re in this together, and the fight for racial, social, economic, LGBTQ+, and environmental justice will unite us until the end.

MaP 0.1. Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Map by Peter Hermes Furian.

MaP 0.2. The Greater Antilles. Map by Peter Hermes Furian.

Crossing Waters

introduction

groWing uP in Puerto riCo, I remember constantly seeing newspaper headlines about Dominicans and Haitians either dying or being captured by the US Coast Guard while trying to make it to Puerto Rico in yolas. These images haunted me. I was too young to understand the complex political, social, and economic conditions that drove waves of our Caribbean neighbors to attempt the journey, but I knew that they must have been quite desperate to risk their lives that way. In my mind, they were brave, but I had so many questions: What was happening in their countries? How bad could it be for them to risk their lives? How was the yola trip to Puerto Rico? Why did so many Puerto Ricans discriminate against them? As a child, I was surprised to witness some of my own relatives’ pejorative comments and lack of compassion toward Dominicans and Haitians (whether they were there legally or not), attitudes that seemed to mirror those of the larger society (if you ever watched Puerto Rican comedy shows in the 1980s, you get my point), which depicted them as illiterate, poor, criminals, and Black. While I lacked the language to name it then, I was beginning to see the hypocrisy and racism at the heart of Puerto Rican society. I saw how even dark-skinned Puerto Ricans were quick to disparage these migrants. The more I witnessed, the more questions I had. But answers were not easy to find. In school, they did not teach us much about our Caribbean neighbor islands, a clear indication of how the Hispanophone Caribbean “remains deeply divided” (Pérez-Rosario 27). It wasn’t until many years later, when I was in graduate school, that I began to actively seek answers to some of my questions. At first, I became interested in how undocumented migrants—mostly Dominicans—were depicted in Puerto Rican literature. What I found was that, save for a few exceptions, such as short stories by Ana Lydia Vega and Magali García Ramis, intra-Caribbean undocumented migration seemed virtually absent 1

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from Puerto Rican letters. Narratives or depictions promoting empathy and solidarity were few. In the meantime, Dominicans, and to a lesser extent Haitians (given their fewer numbers in Puerto Rico), had quickly become scapegoats of Puerto Rican society, blamed for all sorts of social ills. They were (and still are) criminalized and subjected to xenophobia, anti-Black racism, and gender violence, while at the same time they are featured as the objects of popular jokes. These problems continue today, in Puerto Rico and beyond, but the growing representation of unauthorized migration in the cultural production of the Hispanophone Caribbean and its diaspora offers new narratives as an antidote to the symbolic violence they have had to endure. In the following pages, I center intra-Caribbean undocumented migration so as to challenge the predominant image of the Caribbean as paradise. The works of literature and visual arts I examine disrupt the Global North’s imperial gaze and resist the mythification and dehistoricization of the region. They lay bare the impact of colonialism, imperialism, neoliberalism, and globalization in the region—all embodied in the phenomenon of unauthorized maritime migration. In them, fantasies of leisure travel, crystalline waters, and white sands clash against the urgency of forced displacements, sharkinfested waters, unreached shores, and sexual violence. Aquatic movements between islands (i.e., South–South displacements) unsettle South–North migration patterns, highlighting the historical, social, cultural, and racial links connecting the Hispanophone Caribbean archipelago. In these works, undocumented maritime migration is revealed in all its rawness and ugliness, raising awareness about a reality that has remained out of sight for too long. Through a focus on the rarely examined process of crossing waters in the Caribbean—the moment of in-betweenness at sea—I unsettle the centrality of the Mexico-US border in Latinx studies and invite readers to recognize the parallels between these regions. A question behind this study is why, despite the fact that thousands of lives are lost at sea every year, has Caribbean maritime undocumented migration remained largely invisible compared to unauthorized movements across the Mexico-US border? US Latina/os with roots in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean constitute 17 percent of the total US Latinx population.1 That should be enough reason to pay attention to the region, given the strong transnational ties between them and their communities in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic (DR), and Cuba. However, the fact that so many lives are lost at sea each year as unauthorized migrants try to reach Puerto Rico (a US territory) or the continental United States is perhaps the most important reason why we must consider the ebbs and flows across this “other” border. As this area is at the crux of maritime

introduction

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undocumented migration within the Global South (island–island) and to the Global North (island–continent), I argue that the representation of these movements in the region’s cultural production reveals how the process of bordering unfolds in the context of the archipelago. Simply put, this book contributes to the field of border studies via the Hispanophone Caribbean. I offer here, then, the first book-length study to examine literary and artistic representations of unauthorized maritime migration in the Hispanophone Caribbean from both insular and diasporic perspectives. For decades, intellectuals and cultural producers from the region have advanced the idea of the Caribbean as a border zone. However, the field of Latinx studies has been slow to recognize and engage with the region as such, illustrating one of the many ways in which the Hispanophone Caribbean continues to be marginalized within the field. In addition to claiming a space at the table for this region, I intend in this book to interrogate and challenge dominant understandings of “Latinidad” by insisting on centering the Hispanophone Caribbean within the larger frame of Latinx studies. Let me explain. The deep African roots of the Hispanophone Caribbean (and the region as a whole)—a product of transatlantic slavery—disrupt Latinidad as whitecentered. As products of white supremacy, Latinidad and mestizaje privilege whiteness while erasing Blackness and Indigeneity. Pushing against these exclusions, many of the works analyzed here reflect on the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and migration status in ways that complicate and unveil the fissures—or borders—of what we understand by Latinidad. Returning to the issue of borders, the idea of the Caribbean as a border has gained more traction as Caribbean Latinx scholars have been more intentional about engaging with Mexico-US border theory to rethink the Haiti-DR border, a move that challenges the former’s hegemony. Yet the region’s archipelagic condition lays bare the limits of border theory. In contrast to recent Caribbean scholarship that aims to decenter the Mexico-US border while relying on a theoretical framework—mostly inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of la frontera—that emerges from, and continues to privilege, terrestrial borders, in this book I bridge border and archipelago theories to provide a new framework that reflects the specificity of the Caribbean. Because undocumented migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean usually (though not always) requires the crossing of aquatic borders, its representation in literature and visual culture offers a critical lens through which to examine the liquid borders of the Caribbean. One of my main goals is to place archipelago and border studies in interdisciplinary dialogue to reveal how the borders of the archipelago are reinforced, challenged, and dismantled in the cultural production of the

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Hispanophone Caribbean and its diaspora. Water’s dual function as border and bridge is the main link between border and archipelago theories. While it is in line with border studies’ recent shift in focus from borders to the process of bordering—that is, how borders are imagined, experienced, and created—this study goes against the tendency to privilege land over water as the primary space that defines human experience and the reconstruction of the past (DeLoughrey, Routes; Nguyen). This is one of the main differences between this study and previous ones, such as Yolanda Martínez–San Miguel’s Caribe Two Ways, which has been central to my own analysis. Here, I examine intra-Caribbean—that is, island–island—undocumented migration in a way that privileges water crossings and the condition of in-betweenness that characterizes those journeys. By focusing on the process of maritime border crossings—what happens in that in-between space that separates the islands of the archipelago— I reveal how the sea functions as a third space, or contact zone, that connects islands. Many of the works I examine could be understood as advocating for what Mimi Sheller calls “mobility justice.” She defines it as “an overarching concept for thinking about how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement, shaping the patterns of unequal mobility and immobility in the circulation of people, resources, and information” (Sheller, Mobility 14). Examining the representation of intra-Caribbean undocumented migration reveals how mobilities are “always channeled, tracked, controlled, governed, under surveillance and unequal—striated by gender, race, ethnicity, class, caste, color, nationality, age, sexuality, disability, etc., which are all in fact experienced as effects of uneven mobilities” (10; emphasis in original). A central goal of mine in this book is to unveil how the sea connects past and present. Frequent references to the transatlantic slave trade in depictions of intra-Caribbean unauthorized migration—a forced migration that overwhelmingly impacts populations of African descent—evoke the legacy, or afterlife, of the Middle Passage. Through this subtext, many of the works I examine affirm the African roots of the Hispanophone Caribbean and its diaspora. Echoes of the Middle Passage in representations of undocumented migration resist internal and external denials of Blackness. Internally, the fact that unauthorized migration in the region mostly affects Blacks and Afro-descendants contests the historical amnesia that erases Blackness from Caribbean roots in favor of hispanismo, mestizaje, and Latinidad as whitening ideologies. Externally, the works I analyze seem to insist on centering the Hispanophone Caribbean in conversations about what has traditionally been an Anglo-centered Black Atlantic. Michelle Wright’s concept of “epi-

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phenomenal time” allows me to elucidate how these works reaffirm their correlation to Middle Passage Blackness in a twofold move that challenges the white supremacy of Hispanophone Caribbean identity discourses and insists on reclaiming a space in a narrative of Caribbean Blackness that has privileged Anglo-centeredness. The past, as I show, is of crucial importance in these works. In this book, I unveil how representations of undocumented maritime migration in the Hispanophone Caribbean contribute to shaping what Ana Lucia Araujo calls “cultural memory” and “public memory” about lives lost at sea. Reflecting the title of this series—Latinx: The Future Is Now—Crossing Waters is solidly grounded in the past and the present, but it is also futurelooking. While the Caribbean has always been a region defined by migration, in the last several decades, undocumented maritime migration has significantly increased, mirroring a global trend. A turn to water is forwardlooking because as climate change intensifies, it will lead to the displacement of more people around the globe, especially those who inhabit archipelagos and the Global South. A turn to water is also future-looking because it symbolically mirrors the fluidity ascribed to the term “Latinx” highlighted in the title of this series. Many of the works examined here reflect gender, sexual, racial, and ethnic fluidity. My study addresses these, but goes beyond these categories by centering migration status. In these works, “undocumented” becomes a category that encompasses other aspects of identity that play a role in how a person experiences migration. By focusing on the maritime crossing experience of undocumented migrants—a time and space characterized by in-betweenness—I offer in this book an important intervention in our understanding of Latinx fluidities. This book is a response to the lack of interdisciplinary studies addressing maritime intra-Caribbean undocumented migration from a humanities perspective. It is an important addition to a growing corpus of critical literature that blends—albeit to different degrees—archipelagic, border, and migration studies in the context of the Hispanophone Caribbean. As such, it is also in dialogue with texts such as Juan Flores’s The Diaspora Strikes Back, Yolanda Martínez–San Miguel’s Caribe Two Ways and Coloniality of Diasporas, and Jorge Duany’s Blurred Borders, which focus on intra-Caribbean migration to Puerto Rico and to the continental United States. While most critical works examining Caribbean Latinx undocumented migration have emphasized the continental United States (especially New York) as a final destination—mirroring the island–continent relation privileged in the study of islands—I center the island–island “nexus of relations” that has historically been neglected in the field (Stratford et al. 113). By focusing mainly

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on the representation of island–island trajectories, I propose here a new and necessary reconceptualization of undocumented migration that decenters New York, or the US East Coast, as the quintessential site of Caribbean Latinx migration. Overall, this book contributes to Latinx studies beyond traditional Caribbean Latinx scholarship, challenging the very borders of these fields. Informed by a multidisciplinary framework that incorporates research in the fields of literary studies, anthropology, history, sociology, gender studies, ethnic studies, Africana and Caribbean studies, and cultural studies, I analyze literature (novels, stories, poetry, and theater) and visual arts produced on the islands and in the diaspora through the methodology of textual analysis. By examining works produced on the islands and the diaspora side by side, I hope to contribute to a more robust transhemispheric dialogue between the fields of Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx studies. This approach ensures that the views of diverse cultural actors from Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and their respective diasporas—producing works in English and Spanish—are represented. In addition, as a trained literary critic who has recently taken initial steps toward engagement with the field of visual arts, I decided to center visual aesthetics in this book because of how deeply moved I have been by the works I analyze here. Whether the artists in question identify as Latinx (diaspora-based) or Caribbean (island-based)—or blur these categories— their works are linked by their concern with the topic of unauthorized migration in the Hispanophone Caribbean. Discussing Puerto Rican art in her book Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics, Arlene Dávila calls attention to the “gaps between island- and diaspora-based cultural work,” which reflect the wider disparities between Latin American/Caribbean and Latinx art (41). In this book, I place island- and diaspora-based art on equal footing, revealing how the theme of unauthorized migration—and its intersection with race, ethnicity, class, gender, colonialism, and globalization—connects these cultural archives. By examining works of literature and visual arts that have never been studied in relation to one another, I offer the first cultural studies interdisciplinary analysis of maritime intra-Caribbean undocumented migration. Finally, I seek to encourage dialogue about a topic that has not received enough scholarly attention to date. In her book Documenting the Undocumented, Marta Caminero-Santangelo laments the lack of academic engagement with this topic and states that “despite the ascendance of borderlands scholarship, literary criticism dealing specifically with the representation of the undocumented in Latino/a writing is significantly more scarce” (14).

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In Crossing Waters, I try to remedy some of these silences in the context of the Hispanophone Caribbean. Caminero-Santangelo observes that “border crossing and undocumented existence” are represented as “psychologically damaging, dehumanizing, and traumatic,” and the same is true in the works I examine here (28). Unveiling the violence that takes place while crossing liquid borders reveals the interconnections between poverty, anti-Blackness, neoliberalism, and globalization. Speaking about undocumented maritime migration as a worldwide phenomenon, Lynda Mannik states in Migration by Boat: “Overall, individuals who migrate by boat incur far greater risks, leave in more-desperate situations and generally arrive in a more dilapidated condition, yet are publicly discriminated against in a more dehumanizing manner” (10). Given dominant society’s tendency to dehumanize and otherize the undocumented migrant, I show how literature and art contest those narratives by rehumanizing the undocumented. Dávila has said that “art alone is not going to save us” (21). I agree, but I believe that art can lead us toward empathy, and that is the first step toward achieving social justice.

terMs and chaPter descriPtions For the sake of clarity, I would like to specify how I use certain terms throughout this study. I use the terms “undocumented migration” and “unauthorized migration” interchangeably to refer to the crossing of international borders without legal documentation. This book centers the cultural production of the insular Hispanophone Caribbean (Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Cuba) and its Caribbean Latinx diaspora, including works that depict Haitian migration. The term “Greater Antilles,” which includes Haiti and Jamaica, is not a useful category, since I do not analyze cultural works produced in these countries. I also include the Florida Keys in my usage of the terms “Caribbean” and “intra-Caribbean migration,” given the importance of this region, especially in Cuban water crossings. Finally, I use the terms “Latina/o” and “Latinx” interchangeably to refer to people of Latin American descent in the United States. I expand on Dávila’s definition of “Latinx” as a term that indexes “an openness to gender, sexual, and racial inclusivity” to include other aspects of identity such as ability and undocumented status (5). Crossing Waters is not an exhaustive study of the representation of intra-Caribbean unauthorized migration but rather a blueprint to examine cultural production that resists the erasure, invisibility, and dehumanization of undocumented migrants in the Hispanophone Caribbean. With this goal in mind, chapter 1, “Rethinking the Borders of the Caribbean Archipel-

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ago,” places border and archipelago studies in dialogue to theorize border crossings in the region. Informed by the work of Elizabeth DeLoughrey and other critics, this chapter provides a theoretical framework for the analysis of island–island movements depicted in literature and visual art as a way to reveal the archipelago. I argue that the limited attention that unauthorized intra-Caribbean migration has garnered is partly explained by the tendency to erase what I call the islanders’ agency of movement, or the power that unauthorized migrants exert when they attempt water crossings. By depicting these movements, cultural producers on the island and in the diaspora contribute to the symbolic decolonizing of the region. Michelle Wright’s concept of epiphenomenal time allows me to demonstrate how selected poems by Elizabeth Acevedo and Adrián Castro reclaim the legacy of the transatlantic passage as foundational to contest anti-Blackness, the white supremacy that undergirds Hispanophone Caribbean identity discourses, and the exclusion of the region from dominant Middle Passage epistemologies. Moreover, Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of “wasted lives” allows me to untangle the intersection between globalization, neoliberalism, and anti-Blackness in the work of the visual artist Tony Capellán. The chapter also offers an overview of intra-Caribbean unauthorized migration. Chapter 2, “Puerto Rico: Border and Bridge to the Continental United States,” examines the role of the Puerto Rican archipelago (including the often-neglected Isla de Mona) as border, borderland, and springboard to the United States, given the island’s status as a US unincorporated territory. Puerto Rico’s colonial condition affects patterns of intra-Caribbean migration by attracting migrants—legal and unauthorized—in search of survival and the so-called American Dream. Because of the key role that Puerto Rico plays in migration patterns, I argue that it is a disruptor of US Empire; it interferes with the latter’s hegemonic control of the archipelago, revealing the cracks in US Empire by stimulating the unauthorized migrant’s agency of movement. I examine Ana Lydia Vega’s “Encancaranublado” (1982), Mayra Santos Febres’s Boat People (2005), and Mayra Montero’s Viaje a Isla de Mona (2009), which depict water crossings in the Mona Passage. Tracing unauthorized movements produces revised cartographies that reveal the archipelago and resist US Empire hegemony in the region. Chapter 3, “Dominican Crossings: Displacements across Sea and Land,” focuses on the Dominican Republic, a country that has been defined by two borders: the sea and the Haiti-DR border. The first part of the chapter focuses on the representation of unauthorized water crossings by yola in Miriam Mejía’s “El viaje” (1997) and Scherezade García’s video Sabana de la Mar: Salvation Action (2002), her installation Theories of Freedom

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(2009–2011), and her painting Super Tropics: The Liquid Highway I (2015). While Mejía’s early text highlights the gender and sexual violence to which undocumented dominicanas are exposed during migration, García’s works interrogate the idea of salvation by crossing the Mona Passage in a yola and center Blackness to exalt the African heritage of Dominican culture. The second part of the chapter shifts attention to the Haiti-DR border. Although this move interrupts the focus on water crossings that frames this study, no study of intra-Caribbean unauthorized migration would be complete without an examination of the Haiti-DR border. Through my analysis of Elizabeth Acevedo’s “Regularization Plan for Foreigners, 1922” (Beastgirl and Other Origin Myths, 2016), Ana Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt (2006), Pedro Cabiya’s “Fruta de temporada” (2013), Junot Díaz’s “Monstro” (2012), and Sophie Maríñez’s “Sentencia del infierno I” and her unpublished poem “Sentencia del infierno II” (2015), I examine antihaitianismo and illustrate how the material and symbolic borders between the two nations are at times reinforced, challenged, or dismantled in the cultural production of the Dominican Republic and its diaspora. Chapter 4, “Cubans at Sea: The Balsero Crisis in Literature and Art,” examines representations of unauthorized migration from Cuba, specifically of the 1994 balsero crisis, which marked a significant turning point in US policy toward Cubans. I demonstrate how—through the depiction of water crossings—the works I analyze challenge the notion of Cuban exceptionalism. My analysis centers on selected poems by Richard Blanco and Adrián Castro, Nilo Cruz’s play A Bicycle Country (2004), selected stories from Ana Menéndez’s Adios, Happy Homeland! (2011) and Achy Obejas’s Tower of the Antilles (2017), as well as works by Miami-based artist Sandra Ramos and Cuba-based Abel Barroso and Kcho. To the best of my knowledge, this chapter provides the most comprehensive analysis of the representation of the Cuban balsero crisis in Cuban American cultural production to date. Finally, in the epilogue, I return to post–Hurricane María Puerto Rico to examine the tropes of water and drowning in recent cultural production, which ironically serve to challenge the perception of Puerto Rico as a privileged space in the Caribbean. Focusing on the late photographer Adál Maldonado’s Muerto Rico (2017), from his series Puerto Ricans Underwater, and artist Patrick McGrath Muñíz’s Diasporamus (2018), I discuss the parallels that the recent mass exodus from Puerto Rico presents in relation to previous migratory waves examined here. In this book, I seek to “bridge the divide between studies of the insular hispanophone Caribbean” by centering the representation of unauthorized migration as a link not only between Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic,

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and Cuba but also between island- and diaspora-based cultural production (Pérez-Rosario 27). By revealing the intricate connections between intraCaribbean undocumented migration and anti-Blackness, I offer an antiracist academic intervention. As Ibram X. Kendi reminds us, “The language of color blindness—like the language of ‘not racist’—is a mask to hide racism” (10). We can no longer remain blind to the fact that unauthorized migration mostly impacts Black and Afro-descendant people, not only in the Caribbean but also worldwide. One of my hopes is that this book may help build empathy. According to the psychologist Jamil Zaki, “Fiction is empathy’s gateway drug. It helps us feel for others when real-world caring is too difficult, complicated, or painful. Because of this, it can restore bonds between people even when that seems impossible” (82). Literature and art can lead to empathy, allowing us to recognize the dignity of those who have been dehumanized and rendered “wasted lives” in our midst.

ChaPter 1

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The sea cannot be fenced, el mar does not stop at borders. gLoria anzaLdúa

froM a geoPolitiCal PersPeCtive, borders are usually defined as “international boundaries between nation-states” (Robert Alvarez 449). As such, they are often seen as “unnatural” boundaries, lines traced on maps to demarcate divisions between groups, nations, and countries (Anzaldúa 2). This, however, is not how borders have always been understood. In fact, as recently as the 1960s, “from the anthropologist’s perspective, the perceived border was a real and natural boundary,” its existence was not even questioned (Robert Alvarez 453). Over time, the understandings of borders and borderlands have evolved; today we acknowledge that they are constructions. In her foundational text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa states: “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge” (25). But are borders always “set up”? Are they always dividing lines? While this definition probably applies to most terrestrial borders worldwide, it specifically reflects the Mexico-US border that is the focus of her text and the central paradigm of border and borderland studies. As Robert Alvarez affirms, “The Mexican-US border is the model of border studies and borderlands genre throughout the world” (451). The iconization of the Mexico-US border, Alvarez recognizes, has led to a serious lack of comparative studies. As he puts it: “Except for a few exceptions, anthropologists have done little work comparing international borders. In striving to focus on the local and immediate concerns of the Mexican-US border, we have failed to engage a primary anthropological 11

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tenet: comparison” (463). This same logic applies to borderlands studies, which has also focused on the Mexico-US divide. Anzaldúa defines the borderland—a central concept in Latinx studies— as “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition” (25). The borderland “normally designates the territories that extend on either side of the border between the USA and Mexico” (Allatson 39). It is a vast space characterized by the “presence of sizeable twin cities,” maquiladoras on the Mexican side, and heavy militarization (39). Ramón Gutiérrez and Elliott Young discuss how perspectives about these spaces changed from a “border separating Mexico and the United States” that was “imagined as a zone of decadence and perversion, a space where the refuse of both countries congregated” (48; my emphasis), to a “liminal zone, a space of cultural hybridity, and a place of transculturation where people, cultures, and ideas moved in complex ways” (49). The view of the borderland as a “metaphor of liminality, multiplicity, fluidity, flux, and possibility” reflects these ideas (Allatson 40). Despite its hegemonic symbolism, the iconization of the Mexico-US border is restrictive. In addition to homogenizing a two-thousand-mile border, there is also the risk of generalizing borders and borderlands, thus erasing people’s experiences. As Vanessa Pérez-Rosario observes, “Anzaldúa’s concept of the border does not fit neatly into thinking through literary and cultural production of the Caribbean and its Latino diaspora” (28). In a similar vein, Paul Allatson warns us against applying this metanarrative to all Latinx contexts: Once the US-Mexico borderlands are regarded as a paradigm of national imaginary formation and transcultural signification, the trope may potentially overdetermine the communal and personal relations to the USA of other Latino/as (notably those from the Caribbean) with no historicalmaterial relation to, or imaginative investment in, the land frontier or its adjacent terrains. Caribbean-origin Latino/as may have a different geospatial and cultural sense of their place in relation to the state in which they reside. (41)

Among Caribbean Latina/os, Cubans and Haitians might represent an exception because they have been increasingly migrating through Mexico since 2010. However, this does not mean that they are attuned to the myths, histories, and meanings associated with that border.1 Recently, Caribbean Latinx

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scholars such as Rebeca Hey-Colón, Lorgia García-Peña, Maria Cristina Fumagalli, and Megan Jeanette Myers have placed the Mexico-US border in conversation with the Haiti-DR border in a move that not only challenges the hegemonic Mexico-US border but also brings visibility to a desert border that has mostly remained outside the social imaginary of Caribbean peoples. Precisely because the Latinx population is highly heterogeneous, border and borderland theories must reflect the specificities of particular communities. A one-size-fits-all border theory is not the answer. Clearly, we need more comparative and transregional research on the topic of borders and borderlands. The field’s US-centeredness can be corrected, as Gutiérrez and Young suggest: “The study of the borderlands needs to become much more engaged with the Latin American Spanish-language literature that speaks to the central issues of the borderlands. These include the interaction among cultural groups, comparative systems of racial differentiation, the legacies of imperial rivalries and politics, and the formation of states and their place in a global economic order” (52). I will push the boundaries of the field by expanding border studies via the Hispanophone Caribbean. Weaving together the cultural production—in Spanish and English—of authors and artists on the islands and the diaspora, I challenge the US-centric model that has prevailed in border studies through its focus on a region that is rarely envisioned as a border: the insular Hispanophone Caribbean. The geographer David Newman’s understanding of borders and borderlands is useful in thinking through the Hispanophone Caribbean as a border. As he explains, geographers have “traditionally understood borders (or boundaries) as constituting the physical and highly visible lines of separation between political, social and economic spaces” (144). Only recently have they begun to understand that “it is the bordering process, rather than the border per se, which affects our lives on a daily basis” (144). Similarly, though in a different context, the critic Lorgia García-Peña posits that bordering “evokes a continuum of actions that affect human beings” and “implies an actor (one who enacts the bordering) and a recipient (they who are bordered)” (6). Following this logic, I am concerned with the way in which the bordering process is revealed in works that address undocumented migration in the Hispanophone Caribbean archipelago. Archipelagos, as Yolanda Martínez–San Miguel explains, “are defined as a group of islands usually conceived and articulated as one unit from the imperial perspective even when they can be composed by several insular units that could coexist in diverse degrees of integration and/or isolation” (Coloniality 11). Philip

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Vannini makes a similar point when he states that archipelagos “are not essential properties of space but instead are fluid cultural processes dependent on changing conditions of articulation or connection” (qtd. in Sheller, Island 17). My analysis shows that unauthorized migration connects the archipelago, disrupting the idea of isolation. Understanding that “territory and borders have their own internal dynamics” is fundamental when considering the Caribbean archipelago, where borders often remain invisible because they manifest differently, thus reflecting their own internal dynamics (Newman 146). According to Newman, there is “no single theory as such and it is futile to seek a single explanatory framework for the study of borders” (145). This partly explains the erasure of the Caribbean region within border studies, which have traditionally privileged the land-based Mexico-US border area, despite the significant flow of people, goods, money, and affects within the archipelago. Echoing Anzaldúa’s definition, Newman highlights the border’s capacity to reflect difference and impose separation “not only between states and geographical spaces, but also between the ‘us’ and ‘them,’ the ‘here’ and ‘there,’ and the ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’” (148). But more than focusing on borders, he calls for examining the process of bordering, which unfolds through the practice of demarcation. As he explains, demarcation is much more than the “drawing of a line on a map or the construction of a fence,” it is “the process through which the criteria of inclusion/exclusion are determined,” typically by “political and social élites as part of the process of societal ordering and compartmentalization” (148). Bordering, therefore, is the institutionalization of difference. The differences encoded in borders “are as much perceived in our mental maps and images as they are visible manifestations of concrete walls and barbed-wire fences” (146). I agree with Newman when he states that “it is at the level of narrative, anecdote and communication that borders come to life” (152). Narratives offer windows into the multiple meanings and experiences of borders, especially “where the physical borders have been ‘removed,’ or ‘opened,’ and are non-visible,” as is the case of the sea (152). Because borders in the Caribbean are often blurry, fluid, nondetermined, or even nonexistent, narratives and visual art provide alternative venues to think about, construct, and imagine the bordering of the Hispanophone Caribbean archipelago. Newman proposes that theorists collect and organize border narratives and “put them together in such a way that the different types of barrier or interaction functions of the border—be they visible in the landscape or not—are understood at [the] local level of daily life practices” (154). This

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observation speaks to two central points I make in these pages. First, it underscores that “borders should be seen for their potential to constitute bridges and points of contact” (143). Their potential to divide or bridge constitutes an important link between archipelago and border theory. Water, as Stratford et al. explain, can function to produce either isolation or connection; it can be a border or a bridge. As such, water constitutes the most powerful symbol of the potential of borders to be bridges. Second, Newman emphasizes the key role that narratives play in the understanding and perception of the border at the “local level of daily practices.” By emphasizing how borders affect people’s daily lives, narratives challenge more traditional views of borders. Representations of unauthorized maritime migration in the cultural production of the Hispanophone Caribbean and its diaspora reveal how borders affect migrants’ daily lives, challenging the negative stereotypes that tend to define them. Examining how they manifest as “lived experience” in literature and art can produce a more nuanced understanding of the Caribbean as border and borderland.2

crosscurrents oF the cariBBean archiPeLago In “Envisioning the Archipelago,” Stratford et  al. underscore how the study of islands has traditionally privileged land–sea and island–continent/ mainland relations, while island–island links have remained a “comparatively neglected nexus of relations” (113). For example, in Latinx literature, Caribbean migration to the United States has remained an anchoring topic, with the movement from the islands to the continental United States enjoying much more visibility than intra-Caribbean migration or the movement within the archipelago. In their study, Stratford et al. call for a reorientation of these privileged spatial coordinates: “In short, we seek to understand archipelagos: to ask how those who inhabit them or contemplate their spatialities and topological forms might view, represent, talk and write about, or otherwise experience disjuncture, connection and entanglement between and among islands” (114).3 In these pages, I seek to unveil how Hispanophone cultural production centers island–island relations in ways that challenge prevailing ideas about islands, including “singularity, isolation, dependency and peripherality; perhaps even islandness and insularity” (Stratford et al. 114). This book contributes to the reorientation of “spatial coordinates” in the Caribbean archipelago, which reflects its malleable and nonstatic nature. Depending on the context, as Martínez–San Miguel states, the Caribbean

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archipelago “se activa, redefine, expande y contrae [activates itself, redefines, expands, and contracts]” (“El archipiélago”). El Caribe no es siempre un archipiélago por el mero hecho de ser un conjunto de islas localizadas con cierta proximidad en el mar Caribe, sino que la región se consolida o no como archipiélago en momentos específicos de su historia, y esos archipiélagos incluyen subsecciones de la región de acuerdo con los proyectos simbólicos, políticos o históricos que los animan. (The Caribbean is not always an archipelago simply because it’s a group of islands located within a certain proximity in the Caribbean Sea, but rather the region consolidates itself as an archipelago or not in specific historical moments, and those archipelagoes include subsections of the region that reflect the symbolic, political, and historical projects that promote them.) (“El archipiélago”)

Some of these collective and regional political projects, as she notes, include the Liga Antillana and the Confederación Antillana that emerged in the Hispanophone Caribbean, while ideological ones include the concept of antillanité proposed by Édouard Glissant.4 In Caribbean Poetics, Silvio Torres-Saillant argues for “asserting the unity of the Caribbean on sociohistorical and cultural grounds” (10). In a similar vein, Antonio Benítez Rojo’s foundational text La isla que se repite (The Repeating Island) centers the Caribbean as a “meta-archipelago,” “having neither a boundary nor a center” (4). In this space characterized by freedom, “Antilleans,” he explains, “tend to roam the entire world in search of the centers of their Caribbeanness, constituting one of our century’s most notable migratory flows” (25). He challenges the ideas of isolation and insularity when he observes: “The Antilleans’ insularity does not impel them toward isolation, but on the contrary, toward travel, toward exploration, toward the search for fluvial and marine routes” (25). In the case of the works I analyze here, which focus on unauthorized migration, the search for “marine routes” results from the search for survival. The awareness of the Caribbean as an archipelago has often been recorded in Hispanophone Caribbean literature. For example, the Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s first chapter of his Vista del amanecer en el trópico (originally published in 1974) narrates the genesis of the Cuban archipelago. The text challenges Cuba’s insularity by affirming its condition as an archipelago rather than as a singular island. The emergence of the islands from the sea thousands of years ago highlights how they “turned

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into an archipelago.” However, when the narrator states: “Pero como la isla larga tenía una forma definida dominaba el conjunto y nadie ha visto el archipiélago” (Vista, 1) (“Since the long and narrow island had a defined form [curiously, that of a cayman], it devoured the group geographically and nobody saw the archipelago”) (View, 1), he shows how the main island (i.e., Cuba) has been privileged over smaller surrounding islands, thus obscuring the archipelago. By destabilizing the correlation between nation and territory, the text creates an archipelagic vision of Cuba that encompasses its communities across the globe. Cabrera Infante’s text reflects the dynamics that “erase or invisibilize the archipelago.” At a global scale, S. Sengupta asserts: “Every constituent of an archipelago is an island that can seem isolated in and by itself, and . . . it is only in analyzing how currents move between and among them, by locating vantage points that give one a wider horizon, that the pattern that suggests an archipelago reveals itself” (qtd. in Stratford et al. 124; my emphasis). In other words, shifting the focus toward the relation between and among islands—what Stratford et al. see as a form of “counter-mapping”—is a corrective to “not seeing” the archipelago. Elizabeth DeLoughrey proposes the concept of archipelagraphy to refer to “a re-presentation of identity, interaction, space and place that comes across in different combinations of affect, materiality, performance, things” (qtd. in Stratford et al. 114). Aware that “island-to-island relations are under-theorized,” I center these relations in my analysis of literature and the visual arts (Stratford et al. 115). Following Sengupta’s logic, I examine how currents—aquatic, material, and symbolic—move between and among islands through undocumented migration. People’s unauthorized movements decenter island–continent relations shaped by US Empire in order to, as Sengupta would say, reveal the archipelago. As such, their movements constitute an example of countermapping. Islands, as individual units that, when grouped together, constitute an archipelago, are usually defined, organized, and imagined in terms of the relation between land and water. According to Stratford et al., “The boundary marked by land and water is a critical feature of islands but by no means is it definitive, for the land and sea boundary is a shifting, fractal and paradoxical one” (115). The shifting and unstable nature of island boundaries challenges preconceived notions about borders as we understand them today. When it comes to islands, what defines them is “the complete encircling of land by water” (Stratford et al. 115; emphasis in original). Because it plays a double and often simultaneous function, water has the potential to produce isolation or connection. Isolation is often associated with islands. As DeLoughrey proposes: “In

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the Western imagination, ‘island’ and ‘islandness’ have metaphorical nuances which are contingent upon the repercussions of European colonialism and continental migration towards island spaces; of course, the colonial desire for remote islands has a concrete material basis” (“‘The litany’” 26). In other words, the discourse of remoteness and isolation cannot be disentangled from Europe’s and US Empire’s colonial projects, powers that imagined them as such, from the outside. DeLoughrey adds: “The construction of isolated island space is an implicit consequence of European colonialism and has a tremendously complex history” (“‘The litany’” 28). Remote and isolated lands were perceived as easily conquered, controlled, and colonized. Therefore, the “ideological segregation of archipelagoes into isolated islands,” as was the case with the Caribbean, was a strategy that facilitated European and US domination in the region, with repercussions to this day. “Contemporary continental discourse,” DeLoughrey explains, “associates tropical island nations with isolation and premodernity (an erasure of colonial contact)” (“‘The litany’” 24). These views “relegate islanders to a remote and primitive past, denying them entrance into the modernity of their colonial ‘motherlands’” (DeLoughrey, Routes 15). What has prevailed over the centuries is the notion of the island as “an ahistorical paradise,” a space of leisure, relaxation, and recreation (DeLoughrey, “‘The litany’” 36). This view, coupled with the perception that oceans are also “vast, ahistorical voids” (Rediker, Pybus, and Christopher 1), renders islands and their surroundings into “ahistorical” spaces. By depicting unauthorized crossings in the Caribbean, the works I analyze interrogate the notion of the island as “an ahistorical paradise” and rearticulate these spaces as important sites of history making. Reclaiming the silenced histories of unauthorized migration in the Hispanophone Caribbean region is crucial because, as DeLoughrey explains, “Closely aligned to the imposed concepts of remoteness and isolation is the colonial imperative to erase islanders’ migratory histories” (“‘The litany’” 26). That erasure is partly achieved because “islands and inhabitants are paradoxically positioned as ‘contained’ and ‘isolated’” (26). In contrast to the (colonized) islanders’ confinement and restriction (they are isolated by the fact that they live on an island), colonizers (United States/Global North) enjoy freedom and privilege of movement, and therefore, power. The Global North’s “mobility regimes,” as Sheller calls them, govern “the surrounding air and sea space” around islands and disproportionately affect “the poor, marginalized, and racialized sectors of society who already lack ‘mobility capital’” (Island 2, 4). The notion of islands and islanders as “contained” and “isolated”—which privileges continents over islands—is one of the

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main strategies through which US Empire and the Global North perpetuate their power over insular regions of the Global South, including the Caribbean archipelago. In this context, I see undocumented migration as a key strategy of decolonial resistance. By showing how people continuously move across maritime borders, unauthorized migration in the Hispanophone Caribbean challenges the continental-centered discourse that defines islands as “isolated” and “contained,” effectively dismantling the hierarchy of power imposed by US Empire and the Global North over the region. In this book, I argue that the limited attention that unauthorized intra-Caribbean migration has garnered is partly explained by the tendency to erase what I call the islanders’ agency of movement, that is, the power that unauthorized migrants exert when they engage in water crossings. This concept echoes Sheller’s statement that “movement is primary as a foundational condition of being, space, subjects, and power” (Mobility 9; emphasis in original). There is great symbolic power behind unauthorized migration. At a personal level, people who set off on the sea in makeshift vessels become agents of their own survival. More generally, their movements challenge the vision of islanders as “contained” and “isolated” (dominated) and expose the relation between islands. Similar to how currents are one way in which “an archipelago reveals itself,” migration flows also reveal the archipelago. “Seeing” the usually invisible archipelago has significant implications. For instance, referring to the works of Caribbean and Pacific writers, DeLoughrey asserts that “the remapping of small island states into larger archipelagoes is central to the process of decolonizing the balkanization of both regions” (“‘The litany’” 37). In other words, by exposing the archipelago through the depiction of unauthorized maritime migration in Hispanophone Caribbean cultural production, these works engage in the symbolic decolonizing of the region. Although water—the space between islands—can lead to isolation, it can also bring about unity. Water separates, but it also connects; it facilitates mobility and emerges as a “contact zone.” Mary Louise Pratt’s definition of contact zone as “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which people geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other” (6), traces how these are spaces where “disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (4). For this reason, paying attention to what happens in that in-between space—the sea—is crucial to revealing the archipelago. Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of “tidalectics,” referring to the “tossings, across and between seas, of people, things, processes and af-

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fects,” is useful here (qtd. in Stratford et al. 124). Bill Ashcroft explains that Brathwaite “gives to the irregular currents of culture and creativity in the Caribbean archipelago the name ‘tidalectics’—a term designed to contest the Hegelian idea of the dialectical progress of history with the concept of ebb and flow” (100). But these movements, as he points out, are not predetermined by their cyclical nature: The fascinating feature of tidalectics is that the movement of the tides is not exactly cyclical, but ebbing and flowing. Although the ocean appears to be engaged in an endless repetition of the same back and forth movement at every moment, the tide is, in fact, never exactly the same nor does it retreat or return to the same spot of “origin.” The beach is never a clear line. (102)

While movement across the ocean surface manifests the archipelago, there is unity underneath. As DeLoughrey reminds us, “If one uses the perspective of the continental peoples, islands are isolated ‘emergences’ in vast oceans, separated from their archipelagic counterparts. Yet island chains are connected subaquatically” (“‘The litany’” 40). As Brathwaite puts it, “The unity is submarine” (Contradictory 64). With the exception of the Haiti-DR land border, most unauthorized migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean is carried out by water. Water, therefore, embodies duality. It can be at once a symbol of freedom and survival, but it can also signify isolation and death. Yet water is more than a metaphor “because it is, at the same time, material” (Nguyen 67). Writing about the role of water in representations of Vietnamese maritime migration, Vinh Nguyen asserts that “the sea indexes the major and minor events that have shaped what we erroneously think of as the world occurring exclusively on land” (70). This turn to the sea is noteworthy because people have tended “to regard as real only the land—and national—spaces of the earth’s surface” (Rediker, Pybus, and Christopher 1). In contrast, the oceans have been characterized as “vast, ahistorical voids” (Rediker, Pybus, and Christopher 1). “The sea has been the backdrop for some of Western modernity’s defining moments,” Nguyen reminds us, including “the age of exploration that facilitated the expansion of European colonialism and global capitalism, the Middle Passage that brought African slaves across the Atlantic, the multiple routes that indentured laborers navigated to the Americas, and the refugee crises of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, just to name a few” (70). Nguyen’s observation shifts the focus from land to water to recognize the role that the sea has played throughout history. Also highlighting the links between the sea and history, DeLoughrey observes that tidalectics “are concerned with the fluidity of water as a shifting

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site of history and invoke the peoples who navigated or were coerced into transoceanic migrations” (Routes 52). In the Hispanophone Caribbean, the movement of undocumented migrants throughout the region lays bare the role of water as a “shifting site of history.” Land is usually privileged over water because “the ocean’s perpetual movement is radically decentering; it resists attempts to fix a locus of history” (DeLoughrey, Routes 21). However, we have much to gain from shifting our focus back to those spaces that have remained marginalized from the purview of history, as well as the people who move through those spaces. “Focusing on seascape,” DeLoughrey proposes, “rather than landscape as the fluid space of historical production allows us to complicate the nationstate, which encodes a rigid hierarchy of race, class, gender, religion, and ethnicity for its representative subjects” (Routes 21). I would argue that the sea can encode an even more rigid hierarchy when one thinks of the Middle Passage and modern-day maritime human trafficking. Brathwaite’s “tidalectics,” DeLoughrey’s “archipelagraphy,” and Nguyen’s “oceanic spatiality”—or “the waterscape of the boat and of the sea” (Nguyen 66)— are concepts that help us rethink and reimagine both past and present, not only as land-based but also as products of water crossings. As Mannik puts it, “Oceans and seas are also social (human) spaces both in terms of social constructions and in terms of geographical borders” (7). Communities and histories have been built upon the sea’s undulating surface and the ocean floor. “If geography is the first site of colonial rupture,” states DeLoughrey, “the material space where colonization takes place—then the process of decolonization must begin with revised cartographies” (“‘The litany’” 34). The Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican works examined here encode revised cartographies that resist economic, political, social, and symbolic violence exerted by colonialism and US Empire. This book’s focus on unauthorized maritime movement between and among islands contributes to a much-needed dialogue that recognizes “the importance of the ocean in the transnational imaginary and in diaspora theory in general” (DeLoughrey, Routes 30). To do this, we must first consider how borders and borderlands are established and dismantled within the Hispanophone Caribbean archipelago.

the cariBBean archiPeLago as Border(Land) “Borders of the Caribbean are fluid, literally and figuratively, and have been frequently redefined through time,” states Marco Meniketti as he ponders questions such as “Where does the Caribbean begin?” and “What is the

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Caribbean?” (46, 48). He acknowledges that while “it should appear simple to suggest the Caribbean includes all the islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles, or any other islands embraced by the Caribbean Sea, . . . even this definition foments scholarly controversy” (48). Suzette Haughton’s assertion that “the Caribbean refers to all those countries that are surrounded by the Caribbean Sea excluding Central and Latin American countries” illustrates this lack of consensus (2).5 Her statement is problematic for various reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico are also considered part of Latin America. Meniketti, on the other hand, presents a more inclusive definition of the Caribbean when he states that “if patterns of immigration are considered, New York and Miami, or perhaps London and Paris come under the sphere of Caribbean influence” (48). Martínez–San Miguel expresses a similar posture when she affirms that “El Caribe, parecería, ha ampliado sus fronteras e imaginarios, y Nueva York es otra isla más de ese archipiélago que hoy conocemos como el Caribe insular hispánico” (The Caribbean, it would seem, has widened its borders and imaginaries, and New York is another island of that archipelago that we call the Hispanic insular Caribbean) (Caribe Two Ways 37). One of the central questions I grapple with in this book is how borders and borderlands emerge in the Hispanophone Caribbean. The borders between islands are indeed natural (with the exception of the Haiti-DR land border), constituted by the sea. The trope of the Hispanophone Caribbean as a borderland—specifically Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic—has been central in the theorization of the (neo)colonial relationship between US Empire and the region. As far back as the 1930s, Antonio S. Pedreira lamented in Insularismo (1934) that in Puerto Rico “no servimos más que para la estrategia y para hacer escala” (we are only good for strategy and to serve as stepping-stone) (41). In De Cristóbal Colón a Fidel Castro: El Caribe, frontera imperial (1970), the renowned Dominican intellectual and president Juan Bosch describes the region as a “frontera de cinco siglos,” that is, a five-hundred-year-old border (9). He begins the first chapter stating that “el Caribe está entre los lugares de la Tierra que han sido destinados por su posición geográfica y su naturaleza privilegiada para ser fronteras de dos o más imperios” (the Caribbean is among the places in the world that have been destined due to their geographical position and their privileged nature to be borders of two or more empires) (9). In other words, the Caribbean’s strategic position and “privileged nature” render it a border for two or more empires. Bosch traces the region’s origin as border to the Spanish conquest: “El Caribe comenzó a ser frontera imperial cuando llegó a las costas de

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la Española la primera expedición conquistadora, que correspondió al segundo viaje de Colón” (The Caribbean became an imperial border when the first conquest expedition arrived on the shores of Hispaniola, which corresponds to Columbus’s second voyage) (19). To be sure, the Spanish Empire established itself as a dominant force in the region until its defeat by the United States in the Spanish-American-Cuban War of 1898. According to Bosch, “Los Estados Unidos fueron el último de los imperios que se lanzó a la conquista del Caribe” (The United States was the last of the empires to launch its conquest of the Caribbean) (10). The hegemonic presence of US Empire—which originally had, and continues to have, a direct impact on Puerto Rico and Cuba—also extends to Hispaniola. As he explains, “Santo Domingo es un país del Caribe y el Caribe seguía siendo en el año 1965 una frontera imperial, la frontera del imperio americano” (Santo Domingo is a country in the Caribbean, and the Caribbean continues to be an imperial border in 1965, the border of the American Empire) (11). That year marks the second invasion of the Dominican Republic by the United States, which Bosch sees as proof that the Dominican Republic is a border, a “tierra fronteriza” of US Empire (11). The Cuban intellectual Jorge Mañach also wrote about the concept of the Caribbean border in his book Teoría de la frontera (Frontiers in the Americas) in 1970. He examines various kinds of borders that emerge beyond the physical and the political, namely, borders that emerge along economic, social, and cultural lines. More importantly, he acknowledges the division of borders into two categories: “terrestrial and maritime” (4). His recognition of maritime borders is significant because it represents one of the earliest references to the Caribbean Sea as a border. As he puts it, “The body of water that separates the Antilles from the United States serves as a frontier no less than the Río Grande, across which Mexicans and North Americans look at one another’s faces, or sometimes only their backs” (5). By comparing the Caribbean Sea to the Rio Grande—the quintessential symbol of the Mexico-US border—Mañach insists on the importance of the Caribbean Sea as border. Like the river that divides Mexico from the United States across a long stretch, the waters that surround the Caribbean separate it from the continental United States. Although his analysis ignores the borders that exist between islands, Mañach’s statements signal a turn to water. Martínez–San Miguel takes a different approach when addressing the types of borders that are present in the Hispanophone Caribbean. In her study Caribe Two Ways, she coins the term fronteras intranacionales (intranational borders) to refer to the internal limits that arise within the islands as a result of intra-Caribbean migration (32). Her study examines the dynamics

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that emerge between the different Hispanophone Caribbean populations as they come into contact with one another both in the Caribbean and in the continental United States. She demonstrates how the symbolic distance that develops between different groups is often the result of anti-Blackness, xenophobia, classism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination that help sustain exclusionary nationalisms. Moreover, in her article “Bridging Islands: Gloria Anzaldúa and the Caribbean,” the critic Frances Negrón-Muntaner looks at the Caribbean through the lens of border theory. She establishes that the Caribbean’s absence from Anzaldúa’s theoretical framework is due, in part, to the fact that “the Caribbean itself is not recognized as an autonomous location outside its United States racial coordinates” (273). Underlying this statement is the recognition of US Empire’s hegemony in the region and the assumption that it has managed to maintain the islands “contained” and “isolated.” But unauthorized maritime migration disrupts this assumption, exposing the porousness of Caribbean borders and showing how through their agency of movement, undocumented migrants participate in the decolonizing of the region. This is achieved through the revised cartographies that result from their island–island movements. As should be evident by now, the specificity of the Hispanophone Caribbean archipelago rejects, destabilizes, and reimagines the concepts of borders and borderlands. In fact, I argue that they often are conflated: the Caribbean Sea is simultaneously a border and a borderland. Other times, we observe the emergence of double borders or double borderlands, such as when migrants attempt to cross by sea (first border) to Puerto Rico (second border), which often functions as a stepping-stone to the continental United States. The specificities of the Caribbean context force us to grapple with the limits of land-based border theory. Both the conflation of border and borderland and the emergence of double borderlands reveal some of the main distinctions between intra-Caribbean unauthorized migration and other patterns of land-based undocumented migration to the United States. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa marks a clear distinction between the concepts of border (“dividing line”) and borderland (“a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary”) (25). This distinction between border and borderland, which is reflective of the topographical specificity of the Mexico-US border, does not apply to the Caribbean context for a few reasons. Needless to say, the Caribbean archipelago is not a contiguous territory divided by an artificial line, but rather an area composed of islands/territories naturally

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separated by a body of water, a “liquid border,” as Eliana Rivero has called it (340). In her essay “‘Fronterisleña,’ Border Islander,” published in the groundbreaking anthology Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba (1995), Rivero reflects on the borders that have defined her identity as a Cuban-born woman residing in the US Southwest. Referring to the difference between los márgenes versus las márgenes, she states that the latter are “loose and imprecise, and point to the ebb and flow of tides,” similar to the description of island borders (339). Rivero continues, Be that as it may, I insist on grammatically engendering my borders, not precisely to make them fluid (mythically female?) but rather—more importantly—to have them evoke the coastline of an island, where ocean meets land. That is the space of my original identity: I grew up on a narrow strip of land encased by liquid borders, the narrowest portion of the island of Cuba, in the Pinar del Río province, only forty kilometers wide between Mariel on the north and Majana on the south. (339; my emphasis)

Here, island imagery coalesces with border theory, specifically with Anzaldúa’s description of the border as “a narrow strip along a steep edge” (25). One difference is that in Rivero’s case, that “narrow strip of land [is] encased by liquid borders,” and does not occur “along a steep edge.” Deviating from Anzaldúa’s land-centered definition of the border, Rivero’s reference to liquid borders bridges border theory and the insular Caribbean condition. Unlike the paradigmatic Mexico-US border and borderland, the Caribbean Sea functions both as a border and a borderland. The fusing of border and borderland—border(land)—in the Caribbean context offers a sharp contrast to the more clearly defined Mexico-US border. Double borders and borderlands are a feature of the Caribbean archipelago. The Caribbean Sea constitutes the first border(land), but Puerto Rico also plays a similar function, given that the island represents an additional space that separates—or potentially links—unauthorized migrants from/to the continental United States. Puerto Rico represents a border because it is a space that marks a geographic division between the Dominican Republic and the United States. Like Anzaldúa’s border, this is a limited space despite not being an artificial line. At the same time, Puerto Rico also functions as a borderland, since it constitutes a space of transition; it is and it is not the United States. Thus, Puerto Rico plays both roles, as border and borderland, to the extent that it marks a boundary for those who use it as a “stepping-

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stone” to the continental United States—especially undocumented Dominicans, Haitians, and Cubans—while it also becomes a sort of borderland, a transitional space. One important exception to the liquid borders that characterize the Caribbean is the Haiti-DR border that divides Hispaniola. Unlike the undefined and shifting aquatic borders that crisscross the Caribbean, the line that runs across Hispaniola resembles the Mexico-US border. Like that other frontera, it runs across both land and water. The Haiti-DR border has been the subject of influential book-length studies, including the works of Silvio Torres-Saillant, Samuel Martínez, Richard Turits, Lucía M. Suárez, Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Edward Paulino, Lorgia García-Peña, April Mayes and Kiran Jayaram, and Megan Jeanette Myers.6 More recently, we have seen increasing interest and scholarship on the parallels between the Haiti-DR and Mexico-US borders. According to García-Peña, the term rayano (or “borderer”), “invites us to think about the Haiti-DR border within the framework of border studies,” which traditionally have centered the Mexico-US border (17). Also, in her examination of the parallels between these two borders—focusing on the Río Bravo and the Río Masacre—and their representations in literature, Rebeca Hey-Colón coins the concept of “rippling borders” to refer to “borders that ripple because they are made of water, yet their rippling effect also evinces the unstable, permeable nature of these spaces” (96). She argues that “although rarely placed in conversation with each other, both Mexico and the Dominican Republic have rivers that serve as both natural and unnatural borders” (98). Hey-Colón’s argument seeks to push the “borders of border theory” by examining the parallels between the rivers that divide Haiti-DR and Mexico-US. Moreover, Myers’s rearticulation of the Haiti-DR border is firmly built upon “Chicana Gloria Anzaldúa’s ideological border construct and her understanding of nepantla,” as well as Foucault’s heterotopia and Bhabha’s “third space,” illuminating the productive ways in which Caribbean scholars are rethinking and expanding the limits of more traditional theories (3). The topic of borders in the Dominican Republic has resurfaced in the context of TC/0186/13, better known as La Sentencia, a law passed on September 23, 2013, that denationalized hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. The recent hardening of material and symbolic borders between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and its historical echoes, makes this a crucial moment to examine these borders. What emerges is a complex web of borders and borderlands operating simultaneously, albeit at different levels, within the larger context of the Caribbean archipelago.

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echoes oF the MiddLe Passage: Linking Past and Present Migration in the Caribbean has a multilayered history tied to processes of colonization, economic expansion, and survival. Intra-Caribbean migration, movements between and among the islands of the Caribbean, dates to the pre-Columbian era. According to Corinne Hofman et al., “Ever since the initial populating of the archipelago c. 7000–6000 years ago the islanders and mainlanders had the technological knowledge of seafaring that permitted them to move directly across the Caribbean Sea from South and Central America as well as between island passages” (594). The vitality and dynamism of the region prior to European conquest made the Caribbean “one of the most diverse yet intricately interconnected geo-political and cultural regions in the modern world” (Hofman et al. 590). But the Caribbean has also been the “site of the violent relocation of peoples from all over the globe” (DeLoughrey, “‘The litany’” 34). As a result of conquest, maritime movements intensified through the traffic of enslaved Africans, Maroons, and freedmen and women both before and after emancipation. In fact, the Caribbean “received nearly one-half of all Africans brought to the Americas in the 350-year span of the organized transatlantic slave trade” (Knight 111). Between 1701 and 1810 alone, “the planters of the Caribbean bought nearly 4 million African slaves, equivalent to about 60 percent of all the slaves sold throughout the Americas” during that period (112). In the end, roughly 5 million enslaved Africans were forcibly taken to the Caribbean region as a result of the transatlantic slave trade. In addition to the movement of enslaved Africans, Maroons, and emancipated slaves between islands, the constant flux that has characterized the Caribbean archipelago throughout history is also the product of the forced displacement of Chinese and Indian indentured servants, as well as European and Middle Eastern immigrants. Migration within the Caribbean today cannot be disentangled from this complex history. This book centers the role of the Hispanophone Caribbean in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, pushing against the region’s marginalization from Anglophone-centered African diaspora studies. Despite its lack of inclusion in dominant theories about the Middle Passage—and here Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic comes to mind—slavery was foundational in the construction of the Hispanophone Caribbean following the European conquest. Enslaved African people brought to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola had an immeasurable impact on every aspect of life, society, culture, religion, economics, and politics in these islands. More importantly, the

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racial hierarchies built upon white supremacy and anti-Blackness not only affected enslaved Africans during colonial times but continue to have concrete consequences up to the present. We cannot understand the Hispanophone Caribbean today without acknowledging the history of racism, oppression, violence, and inequality that resulted from the Middle Passage, “a crossing that devastated everything it touched” (Johnson 79). The common understanding of the Middle Passage “suggests the claustrophobic ‘death ships’ in the oceanic limbo between Africa and the Americas, connoting a transitional aquatic space of any given point in the 500-year history of the African slave trade” (DeLoughrey, Routes 61).7 The trauma associated with these events continues to haunt modern societies, especially Afro-descendants, whose lives have been shaped by anti-Blackness and other legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. One of those legacies is the fact that, as Habiba Ibrahim reminds us, modern Blackness “is exclusion from modern humanity” (n.p.). As this book shows, contemporary Hispanophone Caribbean cultural production, on the islands and in the diaspora, actively engages with this history, reminding us of the region’s role in it and the ways in which past and present are interconnected. Many of the works I examine contribute to shaping both cultural memory and public memory about lives lost at sea during an extended period that spans from the Middle Passage to contemporary unauthorized migration in the Caribbean. Ana Lucia Araujo proposes that cultural memory “operates through a variety of tools, such as rites, commemoration ceremonies, texts, material traces (like monuments and objects), and other mnemonic devices that activate meanings connected to what happened” (5). Public memory, she explains, “is a political instrument to build, assert, and reinforce collective identities” (5). Both cultural memory and public memory tend to be enacted as land-centered, as Araujo’s study illustrates. But what happens when events that we want to memorialize take place at sea? Literature and art—as texts—activate cultural memory by centering the (envisioned) material traces of maritime crossings. They also construct public memory by reclaiming the region’s collective identity as a product of the Middle Passage. In most of the cultural production I analyze, cultural and public memory overlap. Paradoxically, the function that these works play in the construction of cultural memory is even more crucial, given the lack of “material traces (documents and objects)” upon which this type of memory is built (Araujo 5). To put it simply, there are usually no traces of deaths at sea; those that exist remain out of reach on the seafloor. This is true of the remains of the

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“more than 1.8 million Africans [who] died crossing the Atlantic Ocean”— of which “approximately 886,000 . . . died en route to the Caribbean and Central America”—during the Middle Passage, and it is also true of the thousands who have perished during unauthorized maritime crossings in the Caribbean (Turner et al. 2). Aware that the Atlantic seabed is part of humanity’s “underwater cultural heritage,” Turner et  al. have recently called on the International Seabed Authority (ISA) to protect it and to find “a means to recognize or remember the Middle Passage and its victims at sea” before “mineral exploitation of the seabed” continues (2). To protect these spaces of African diasporic cultural memory, they propose “to place one or more virtual memorial ribbons on ISA maps to depict major slavetrade routes across the Atlantic and in memory of those who died during their Middle Passage” (1). Their request is based on the recognition that despite the protection of multiple (land-based) memorial slave trade sites along Atlantic shores, “the area where those who lost their lives at sea ultimately came to rest—the Atlantic seabed—has not yet been recognized internationally” (3). As Turner et al. suggest, it is high time to recognize and protect the Atlantic seabed, which “poetry, music, art and literature” describe as a space with “cultural significance” (3). In the absence of official recognition and protection, it falls on literature and art to memorialize this underwater cultural heritage. As I demonstrate, some of the works I examine in Crossing Waters memorialize the seafloor as the final resting place for the lives lost in the Caribbean during the Middle Passage and contemporary unauthorized crossings. The Afro-Latinx poets Elizabeth Acevedo8 (Dominican) and Adrián Castro9 (Cuban Dominican) center the transatlantic slave trade in their poetry, challenging the region’s marginalization, and sometimes exclusion, from Middle Passage epistemologies. Acevedo’s poem “La Santa Maria,” from her collection Beastgirl and Other Origin Myths, interrogates the mythology of power, dominion, and conquest associated with Christopher Columbus, considered to be “the father of modern colonialism,” “the first great symbol of modern capitalism,” and “the first European slave trader in the Americas” (Sued Badillo 24, 25). But rather than focusing on him, the poem shifts the spotlight to his ship, a “bringer of apocalypses” (ll. 17–18). The poem complicates dominant views of the three caravels—La Pinta, La Niña, and La Santa María—as central icons of European colonization. The poetic voice’s reaction upon learning about the alleged discovery of La Santa María’s wreckage off the coast of Hispaniola offers a counternarrative to official history’s glorification of Columbus and the European conquest. The poem

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exemplifies what Sharina Maillo-Pozo describes as “alternative narratives of a Dominican latinidad that drifts away from a largely hispanocentric rubric” (86). The poem’s dedication to “Hispaniola” positions it against the legacy that “La Santa María” represents. The poetic voice begins with the command, “Leave that bitch at the bottom,” rejecting the sacrosanct value ascribed to a vessel named after the Virgin Mary (ll. 1). She defends her stance against recuperating and salvaging the remains of the Santa María by explaining that “we don’t need any more museums of white men,” a statement that denounces the patriarchal whitewashing of Dominican history (l. 2). It critiques the way in which Columbus’s legacy has been celebrated at the expense of the country’s African heritage, which official discourse has virtually erased from the nation’s narrative. The exaltation of Columbus, as Dixa Ramírez explains, has led to “an identification between ideal citizenship and white masculinity” that has “excluded women and most nonwhite men” from the imagined nation (114). The prevalence of anti-Blackness and antihaitianismo (anti-Haitianism) among sectors of Dominican society—a point I revisit in chapter 3—explains why an institution such as the Museo del Hombre Dominicano in Santo Domingo has undermined or silenced the African patrimony in the nation’s history. As the critic Abigail Dardashti puts it, “With its focus on an indigenous past to represent the ‘nature’ of the Dominican, this museum marginalizes any association with African heritage” and “perpetuates the racial theories of Trujillo’s regime through ethnographic displays of Taino artifacts and ceremonies celebrating a constructed indigenous heritage” (“Embodying” 263). Conscious of how official Dominican institutions have whitewashed and erased the nation’s African heritage, the poetic voice’s comment—and the poem as a whole—represents an act of resistance against heteropatriarchal white supremacy as a legacy of colonialism. Most of the poem envisions an alternative function for the wreckage that honors the lives of enslaved Africans, the unacknowledged victims of Columbus, as he unleashed slavery and capitalism in his quest for power and European expansion. Instead of placing the wreckage in a museum—further glorifying Columbus’s mythology—the poetic voice demands that it be left untouched. Her stance reflects that of the 2001 UNESCO Convention, which “encourages in situ preservation as the first policy option” (Turner et al. 4). With more than a thousand slave trade ships wrecked along the route of the Middle Passage, according to the Slave Wrecks Project, these sites must be treated with respect, given that a “shipwreck may contain human remains and may serve as a memorial to those who died during their

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Middle Passage” (Turner et al. 3). This is what the poetic voice proposes when she declares: Leave something for our black dead to play in. The bones of their once brown bodies walking the Atlantic floor to dance around this first vessel. We don’t need his ship when he’s already given us an ocean of ghosts— imagine them in the thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Long released from their skin crawling forward on an elbow, on a knee, knuckles, all gnaw. (ll. 3–7)

Through her reference to “our black dead,” the poetic voice reclaims her Black ancestors, privileging them over Columbus’s legacy. The possessive plural “ours” underscores a shared sense of belonging that seamlessly links past and present, that is, enslaved Africans and Afro-Dominicans. By centering the thousands of lives lost at sea during the transatlantic slave trade, the poem memorializes them and urges us to respect the wreck as the final resting place of those who died during their Middle Passage. Subverting its symbolism, the speaker reimagines the wreckage of the Santa María as a sort of playground for the ghosts of the enslaved. In her book Colonial Phantoms, Ramírez argues that “dominant Western discourses have ghosted Dominican history and culture despite its central place in the architecture of the Americas” (3). The ghosts in the poem resist what she calls the “ghosting” of Dominican history by insisting both on being protagonists in the silenced history of the transatlantic slave trade and on emphasizing the role that Hispaniola played in that past. The presence of the ghosts on the vessel upends its function as a “death ship,” as DeLoughrey calls it. By rearticulating the symbol of the vessel to encode recreation, pleasure, and playfulness instead of violence and oppression, the vessel-playground evokes the ghosts’ innocence. Once denied agency and self-expression, the ghosts of the enslaved are free to “play” and “dance” now that they have been “released from their skin.” As if participating in a religious ritual, they congregate around the “first vessel” to dance in a gesture that desacralizes death, hints at revenge through the image of “spit,” and symbolically restores their humanity. The image of drowned enslaved Africans who now walk the “Atlantic floor” is a recurrent leitmotif in some of the works I analyze in this book. The reference to “hundreds of thousands” of dead underscores the magnitude of the slave trade. The metaphor of an “ocean of ghosts” shifts the attention to the sea as a space that, according to Nguyen, “indexes the major

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and minor events” that shape history (70). Although often unrecognized, history takes place at sea, too, and its traces remain beneath the surface. Shifting the focus to the sea recuperates what has remained hidden and erased from history. The images of “black dead” and “brown bodies” that walk and dance on the ocean floor highlight the function of this space as a contact zone. Brathwaite’s assertion that “the unity is submarine” aptly applies here, where the enslaved’s remains stretch widely, symbolically uniting Africa and the Caribbean/Americas across the ocean floor (Contradictory 64). Metaphorically, Africa is imagined as connected to and part of the Caribbean archipelago across the ocean floor. The description of their “brown bodies” as “Long released / from their skin crawling forward on an elbow, on a knee, knuckles, all gnaw” (ll. 6–7) challenges one-dimensional stereotypes of enslaved Africans as victims. As Rediker, Pybus, and Christopher remind us, “The people who made the [Middle Passage] voyage were acted upon, as objects of violence and discipline, but they were also actors in their own right; they were subjects of rebellion, agents of history-making” (l. 2). The ghosts in the poem have agency in their afterlife; they continue to make history. Death at sea has set them free. Now they come, “crawling” and “knocking” (l. 8), looking for something as they “stumble across the deck” and “spit on the iron fasteners” (ll. 10–11). Their actions speak of revenge; these are ghosts who have reclaimed control of the space that once enslaved them. Death, it seems, is the great equalizer. By reclaiming their subjectivity and agency, the “black dead” become humanized. A defiant poetic voice condemns celebrating the Santa María, insisting that it is “nothing but a pile of / splinters, / a great heap of wood meant to be left at the bottom” (ll. 14–15). The final verses, sell no tickets for this bringer of apocalypses . . . but if, when you pull her up, you want to make a bonfire, I’ve got the matches,

rearticulate European conquest and colonization as apocalyptic, privileging the voice of the enslaved and the colonized (ll. 16–19). The characterization of the Santa María as a “bringer of apocalypses” repudiates its glorification, recasting it as an object that stands for European imperialism, conquest, and the transatlantic slave trade. Leaving “that bitch at the bottom” guarantees that the wreckage, and thus the memory of European power and violence, remains “invisible,” while allowing the enslaved’s ghosts to control that

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space. If the Santa María were ever brought up to the surface, the voice is ready to burn it up, an act of vengeance that signals her solidarity with her African ancestors. Given the official erasure of African ancestry in Dominican society, Acevedo’s “La Santa Maria” represents an important intervention in Dominican diaspora letters. The poem challenges official history, imagining a narrative that subverts the power hierarchy by privileging the remains of African ancestors over the remains of Columbus’s ship, and the white supremacy for which it stands. The transatlantic slave trade is also central in Adrián Castro’s “In the Beginning (II)” (from his collection Cantos to Blood and Honey), a poem that contrasts with Acevedo’s “La Santa Maria.” The speaker opens with the following lines: There were wails echoing from that side of the gulf mining for hope standing at the edge of sea the desperate made everyone quietly deaf In the beginning there were chains entwined on legs like serpents on sugar cane chains spiraling out the earth bleeding syrup made the steel stick. (ll. 1–10)

Deploying a biblical registry, Castro’s poem offers a genesis of the racial, ethnic, and cultural mixtures that characterize the Hispanophone Caribbean and its diaspora. The fact that the poem’s first stanza centers the inhumane experiences of enslaved Africans in the Americas underscores the foundational role that people of African descent have played in the construction of modern Caribbean subjectivities. “Wails echoing” signal intense suffering and place violence front and center in their experience. The same can be said about the references to “chains,” “sugar cane,” and “bleeding syrup,” which establish a link between the institution of slavery, capitalism, and violence. Blood had to be spilled to produce this syrup, a product of sugarcane. The description of chains “like serpents on sugar cane” and “spiraling out of the earth” emphasize the threats that enslaved Africans faced in the new land. The serpent, a symbol of sin in the book of Genesis in the Judeo-Christian tradition, reflects the greed that fueled European conquest, colonization, and the transatlantic slave trade in the Americas. At the same time, the serpent was also “revered among practitioners

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of Afro-Cuban religions and members of the Abakuá secret society” (Anderson, Carnival 103). Thomas  F. Anderson, in his reading of Nicolás Guillén’s poem “Sensemayá,” describes the serpent as “a sacred symbol of the strength, perseverance, and enduring nature of Afro-Cuban religions and other African-derived cultural manifestations in Cuba” (103). The references to serpents in Castro’s poem symbolize the strength and perseverance of enslaved Africans who survived slavery’s “unspeakable violence,” to borrow the term from Nicole Guidotti-Hernández.10 The poem continues: There were processions of scars & snakebites rattles talkin’ ’bout the old country drops of blood trickled from ankles landed on this soil (giving birth to a new people) Crioooooollos! (ll. 12–17)

The image of processions characterized by “scars & snakebites” underscores the scope of the enslaved Africans’ suffering. Their bodies are marked by violence exerted on them by other human beings, but also by nature, as a result of their working conditions. These processions evoke the enslaved Africans’ religious rituals that connect them with “the old country.” The “drops of blood” trickling “from ankles” emphasize extreme violence and exploitation, and the image of their blood, which “landed on this soil,” suggests it is a nutrient for the land. From the violence and suffering experienced by enslaved Africans, this earth (the Caribbean and Latin America) gives “birth to a new people,” criollos. The poem challenges the whitewashed term “criollo,” originally used to refer to the Latin American–born children of Peninsular Spanish colonizers, effectively deracializing and extending it to Blacks and people of color who were not originally envisioned as part of the nation (not considered criollos under the Spanish casta system). Affirming ancestral links between Africa and the Hispanic Caribbean, the voice states that The wedding ’tween Afro y América happened long before— the sky was talking about migration mix of peoples (ll. 69–72),

suggesting a deeper, invisible connection. By centering African ancestry within Hispanophone Caribbean subjectivity, the poem pushes against the white

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supremacy that undergirds racial hierarchies in the region. In other words, the poem challenges anti-Blackness, the privileging of Spanish/European and Indigenous roots, and the systemic erasure of African heritage in the Hispanophone Caribbean. In addition, “In the Beginning (II)” reclaims the legacy of the Middle Passage as foundational to the Hispanophone Caribbean, challenging the exclusion of the region from dominant Middle Passage epistemologies. Acevedo’s and Castro’s poems also illustrate the constant mobility that characterizes the Hispanophone Caribbean archipelago, where the movement of Black people across the region was mostly coerced. “The Atlantic slave trade,” as Araujo explains, “imposed on West African and West Central African men, women, and children the most voluminous transoceanic forced migration in history” (7). In contrast to this history, some argue that “economic and voluntary migration has been a particular feature of the region for the last century” (Ferguson 6). Yet, characterizing modern Caribbean migration as “voluntary” erases the complexities behind this phenomenon, because the distinction between forced and voluntary migration has become increasingly hard to define. Frank Graziano describes forced migration as follows: In its broadest sense, forced migration results not only from the persecution, political violence, and natural disasters that cause people to flee for their lives but also from social and economic conditions that jeopardize security and well-being. The tendency in policy, law, media, and public opinion is to sharply distinguish between those who migrate voluntarily (economic migrants, “illegals”) and those who are forced to migrate because their lives are endangered (political migrants, refugees). That distinction, though valid in itself, erroneously implies that economic migrants are not to some degree forced to leave their home countries. . . . They feel compelled to migrate, the compulsion is fostered by forces beyond their control, and they literally risk their lives to escape unbearable situations. (27)

Understandings of “forced” versus “voluntary” migration determine how people view undocumented migration. When it comes to unauthorized migration from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico, from Haiti to the Dominican Republic, and from Cuba to Puerto Rico/Florida, political and economic reasons have usually pushed migrants to flee their countries of origin, calling into question the assumption of volition. Unauthorized migration is paradoxical. It is marked by a constant tension between coercion and volition. Push factors (extreme poverty, political persecution) can have coercive effects. In many of the works I analyze here,

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the connection between unauthorized maritime migration and “forced migration” is often achieved by evoking parallels with the transatlantic slave trade. At the same time, a significant level of volition is involved in unauthorized migration, as the concept of agency of movement illustrates. By choosing to attempt water crossings, undocumented migrants exert their power, enacting a sort of modern marronage. Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez defines marronage as “the process of extricating oneself from enslavement through absconding and the creation of new communities outside of colonial orders” (57). Marronage is a product of agency and the search for survival. It refers to the enslaved African’s or Afro-descendant’s displacement—through escape and hiding—from an oppressive order, similar to how Blacks and other people of color in the Caribbean have escaped the structural oppression and anti-Blackness of their countries in search for survival.11 I thus examine the tensions between the representation of unauthorized maritime migration as “forced migration,” a type of “modern maroonage,” in the cultural production of the Hispanophone Caribbean and its diaspora. By evoking parallels with the transatlantic slave trade and resistance against slavery, these works reclaim and center the Middle Passage in the archipelago’s history. The works discussed in this book—except those about the Haiti-DR border—depict unauthorized maritime migration, with many evoking the Middle Passage, albeit to different degrees. I am interested in examining these convergences and the links between past and present. Jenny Sharpe’s suggestion that forced migration can be linked—to some extent—to the conditions associated with the Middle Passage is useful in thinking through these parallels (98).12 Equally relevant is Rediker, Pybus, and Christopher’s proposition to understand the Middle Passage not only as a “maritime phrase to describe one part of an oceanic voyage” but also as a concept that signals “the structuring link between expropriation in one geographic setting and exploitation in another” (2). In the case of unauthorized intraCaribbean migration, expropriation can have economic or political roots, but almost without exception, it involves the experience of exploitation. More importantly, Rediker, Pybus, and Christopher “show how the concept of the middle passage has relevance to a range of migrations involving the coerced movement of people, sometimes simultaneously with the slave trade, as part of a worldwide process of capitalist development that spanned centuries and continues to this day” (2). A defining characteristic of unauthorized maritime migration in the Caribbean is the migrants’ racialization as Black or Afro-descendant. The late Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores observe, “As a general rule, migra-

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tory movements of poor and working-class people tend to have a larger proportion of African-descendant migrants, with the Puerto Rican, Dominican, and pre-revolutionary Cuban migrations providing clear evidence of this correlation” (12).13 As I demonstrate, the migrants’ racialization as Black or Afro-descendant amplifies the echoes of the Middle Passage. I find Michelle Wright’s concept of “epiphenomenal time” useful in thinking through the implications of the writers’ and artists’ moves to locate Blackness at the center of their works. Epiphenomenal time “denotes the current moment, a moment that is not directly borne out of another (i.e., causally created)” (Wright 4). While Wright finds the “linear progress narrative” utilized to locate Blackness useful, she cautions that it “preclude[s] a wholly inclusive definition of Blackness” (4). Middle Passage Blackness emerges as one of the prevalent “linear timelines that define the Black collective,” but as she points out, “most Black bodies are excluded from most discussions on Blackness”—such as women and LGBTTQ Blacks—because these privilege the “heteropatriarchal male body as the Black norm” (12). Moreover, I would argue that Hispanophone Caribbean Black and Afro-Latinx populations have been systematically excluded from the “main narrative,” reflecting the perception that “they are somehow not ‘normally’ Black” (12). Located outside the hierarchical Anglo-centered Black Atlantic, these populations are not seen as “normally Black” even though their ancestors were protagonists in the Middle Passage narrative. Epiphenomenal time, which “enables a wholly inclusive definition (appropriate to any moment at which one is defining Blackness),” allows us to contemplate how the “now”—unauthorized maritime migration in the Caribbean—“can certainly correlate with other moments” (i.e., Middle Passage; Wright 4). Through epiphenomenal time, the works analyzed here reaffirm their correlation to Middle Passage Blackness in a twofold move that challenges the white supremacy of Hispanophone Caribbean identity discourses and insists on reclaiming a space in a narrative of Caribbean Blackness that has privileged Anglo-centeredness. In these pages, I unveil how representations of undocumented maritime migration in the Hispanophone Caribbean imagine Blackness in transit. Coercion—fundamental to the transatlantic slave trade—is also a recurrent theme in some of the works analyzed here. While nothing compares to the brutality and violence of the Middle Passage, when it comes to unauthorized migration, “although the decision to become a migrant may have been voluntary, involving little or even no duress, the process could readily become as coercive, violent, and personally alienating as the most extreme

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form of forced labor, while conditions of work could be as brutally exploitative, with little or no choice available” (Rediker, Pybus, and Christopher 8). Undocumented migration is forced migration, resulting from a lack of resources for populations disproportionately impacted by structural racism. Because thousands still engage in water crossings around the world, Kevin Bales and Zoe Trodd assert that “the middle passage continues” to this day, clarifying that “while the transatlantic middle passage was highly racialized, today vulnerability counts for more than skin color” (224). In the case of undocumented intra-Caribbean migration, race and ethnicity continue to be determinant factors, given that Black people, other populations of color, and minoritized groups tend to be the most vulnerable. Most Cubans, Dominicans, and Haitians who set off to sea do so using makeshift vessels such as balsas (rafts) and yolas—described by Ramona Hernández as a “small, rudimentary sailboat made of wood” (Mobility 32)—that are too precarious for the journey. For instance, Cuban balsas are usually made from scrap wood, inner tubes, and other materials that people can collect to make these vessels. Because of their simplicity, the threats of dehydration, hypothermia, hunger, heatstroke, sickness, injury, disorientation, drowning, inclement weather, and shark attacks that migrants experience tend to be magnified. Although not usually acknowledged, the risks involved in this type of border crossing mirror the conditions that undocumented migrants also face along the Mexico-US border. Jason De León’s description of desert crossings illustrates these connections: Those who enter through this region must walk for long distances (e.g., over 70 miles) and often over several days. In addition, migrants must negotiate an inhospitable landscape characterized by extreme environmental conditions (e.g., summer temperatures often exceeding 100°F/38°C and winter temperatures that can reach freezing), rugged terrain, border bandits who rob and assault people, and coyotes (human smugglers) who may abandon clients in the desert. Migrants must also evade Border Patrol, who employ sophisticated ground and aerial surveillance technology to detect and capture people. (“Undocumented Migration” 2)

Hypothermia, heatstroke, and thirst are some of the afflictions that desert and border crossers in the Caribbean face due to the elements. Examining the similarities between unauthorized migrants in these distinct settings allows us to engage in comparative border and borderland studies (Alvarez 1995; Gutiérrez and Young 2010).

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Moreover, examining the connections between the Caribbean, the Mexico-US border, and the Mediterranean—an area that is experiencing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis of unauthorized maritime migration— can illuminate how global forces have unleashed the mass displacement of people across the globe. Although our US mainland–centered perspective is not conducive to thinking about the connections with the Mediterranean, scholars of the region are aware of these links. Karina Horsti, for instance, emphasizes that “for centuries the Mediterranean has been a region of crossover mobility and cultural hybridity, similar to la frontera, or the United States-Mexico border” (85). Like the Mediterranean and la frontera, the Caribbean is also a region characterized by mobility and hybridity. To be sure, the connections between the Caribbean and the Mediterranean are stronger due to the maritime nature of the crossings, but equally noteworthy is the fact that anti-Blackness has fueled the mass displacements of people in both regions. Today, the scope of the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean Sea—with hundreds of thousands of African refugees attempting to reach Europe in search of survival each year—is much more critical than the situation in the Caribbean. More than ever, it is crucial to adopt transregional and transhemispheric approaches to the study of borders and borderlands to tease out the racist ideologies, practices, and policies that have led to an increase in unauthorized maritime crossings. David Álvarez’s study of small boats used for unauthorized crossings in the Mediterranean, specifically across the Strait of Gibraltar, resonates with the situation in the Caribbean. The common use of the patera, which originally “referred solely to a small boat with a flat bottom propelled either by oars or by an outboard motor” (Álvarez, 128n2), which was typically “a fast inflatable vessel generically referred to by the brand name Zodiac” (Álvarez 116), recalls the unstable and precarious balsas and yolas used in the Caribbean. Similar to the experience of those who travel by yola, many have placed “their trust in the hands of small boat owners and trafficking mafias” (Álvarez 119). Moreover, Álvarez states, “They also placed their lives in the hands of pilots who in many cases were ill equipped to navigate the Strait’s notoriously treacherous waters, which are bedeviled by powerful winds and currents” (119). Despite the fact that the grueling and treacherous journey often leaves migrants “exhausted, often hypothermic, and frequently terrified”—if not dead—European societies tend to view these migrants as a threat (Álvarez 119). In fact, as he explains, the patera and the Zodiac have become “key symbols of the unwanted and anxiety-inducing nearness of the worlds of Islam and of Third World underdevelopment” (120). Similarly, undocumented migrants in the Hispanophone Caribbean

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also experience racism, xenophobia, and violence. Examining how their experiences are represented in literature and art can reveal the effects of global anti-Blackness and anti-immigrant sentiments. In her introduction to Migration by Boat: Discourses of Trauma, Exclusion, and Survival (2016), Mannik reminds us that “for centuries people have migrated by boat,” but the “legalities of such migrations have become increasingly contentious since World War II” (1). She describes migration by boat as “the most dangerous form of movement between nations for a variety of reasons; the scale of human tragedies associated with such migration are often overlooked or kept hidden from view” (3). Even if migrants arrive at their destinations, most “suffer illness and physical debilitation on the voyage, and all suffer psychological and emotional trauma to varying degrees” (3). To put it succinctly, it is “the most physically and emotionally devastating form of forced migration” (15). And yet, those who migrate by boat are “considered the most threatening” because “their movements are uncontrolled and often uncontrollable” and “their choice to migrate illegally is a criminal act of sorts” (2). These views, however, are often applied to other types of unauthorized migrants. Undocumented migration is a worldwide phenomenon that tends to be misunderstood due to the stigma and prejudices attached to migrants. The expression “illegal alien,” commonly used to refer to those who have entered the United States without documentation, is indicative of the level of suspicion and anxiety that undocumented migrants can provoke. As we know, the use of the term “alien” strategically dehumanizes and creates psychological distance between those who see themselves as authentic and bona fide members of the nation and those considered outsiders. Mannik proposes that we reflect on the terminology used to refer to unauthorized maritime migrants, including the term “boat people”—“currently perhaps the most derogatory term”—as such terms dehumanize people who are desperately seeking to survive (5). “Traveling via water disallows sympathy for the migrants’ plight,” Mannik states, making them more vulnerable to discrimination and exploitation (2). It is impossible to disentangle this terminology from the effort to criminalize undocumented migrants. Considering how they have been perceived in the United Kingdom, Zygmunt Bauman condemns post-9/11 tabloids, which were “quick to link and blend the two warnings into an asylum/ terrorist hysteria” based on notions of personal insecurity (54). However “unwarranted” or “fanciful” this association was, Bauman asserts it “did its job,” for “the figure of the ‘asylum seeker,’ once prompting human compassion and spurring an urge to help, has been sullied and defiled, while

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the very idea of ‘asylum,’ once a matter of civil and civilized pride, has been reclassified as a dreadful concoction of shameful naivety and criminal irresponsibility” (57). Similar dynamics are at play in the United States, where “U.S. media and public discourse tend to represent undocumented immigrants as criminals” despite the fact that “unauthorized presence in the United States is a civil, not a criminal, offense, and simple unauthorized entry is a misdemeanor” (Graziano 177). Undocumented immigrants are routinely criminalized, especially during times of national insecurity. Indeed, this has been the case since the attacks of September 11, 2001, a moment that marked a significant shift in public opinion toward the undocumented. According to Graziano, “The combination of the 9/11 attacks and the George W. Bush administration ideology was decidedly detrimental to undocumented migrants, in part because it conflated migrants with terrorists” (170).14 Christopher Rivera makes a similar point when he states: “In the post-9/11 American imagination, fears about terrorism and illegal immigration coalesce through media and public discourse in such a way that Latina/os and Middle Eastern Muslims are constructed as posing a Brown Threat” (47). The failure to distinguish between different actors is evident in the case of Dominican unauthorized migrants, as the “same packaging of migrants, terrorists, and drug smugglers sometimes has them all in the same boat” (Graziano 174). Consequently, as Jorge Duany states, the “US government has militarized its southern boundaries, not just with Mexico, but also with the Dominican Republic and Cuba” (Blurred 229). The main strategies have been interdiction and deterrence.15 While the conflation of undocumented migrants and terrorists merits more examination, it is beyond the scope of the present study. However, the roles that race and ethnicity play in the criminalization of the migrant—as suggested by the concept of the Brown Threat—are central to my analysis. This study, similar to Migration by Boat, demonstrates how literature and art challenge prevailing narratives that have criminalized and dehumanized unauthorized migrants in the Hispanophone Caribbean.

“wasted Lives” at sea: neoLiBeraLisM and unauthorized Migration Unauthorized intra-Caribbean migration cannot be disconnected from its historical roots and the legacies of colonialism, transatlantic slavery, and imperialism. At its most basic level, the phenomenon of undocumented intra-Caribbean migration is usually the result of desperation due to extreme poverty, natural disasters, and/or political persecution. Describing

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how these dynamics play out in the region, Graziano uses the analogy of a “domino of migration—Haitians to the Dominican Republic, Dominicans to Puerto Rico, and Puerto Ricans (along with Haitians and Dominicans) to the mainland United States—[that] has masses of poor people searching for work in what they view as the next step up” (13). Neoliberalism, or the “policies that promote deregulation, liberalized foreign trade and investment, and privatization of state-owned enterprises,” has unleashed mass migrations across the globe as the demand for low-skilled workers from the Global South in developed countries has soared (Graziano 6).16 Although it has been touted as beneficial to the Global South, neoliberalism “has also aggravated disparities in the distribution of wealth, both domestically and globally” (Graziano 7). “The neoliberal globalization of corporate capitalism,” argues Graziano, “yields huge profits for some while maintaining and exacerbating the poverty of others” (8). With people facing increasing poverty and deprivation, their lack of choices to improve their lives “forces workers to migrate illegally” (Graziano 8). Graziano’s assertion that “rather than protests or revolutions . . . the mobilization of poor people takes an alternate form, migration,” reflects similar dynamics across the Hispanophone Caribbean (23). In Hispaniola, Hernández explains, “Massive migration from the Dominican Republic developed in response to the socioeconomic policies implemented in the Dominican Republic after 1966” (“On the Age,” 91). One of the consequences of neoliberalism in the Dominican Republic was the proliferation of free trade zones (Hernández, Mobility). In their research on women’s undocumented migration in a Dominican coastal town, Hernández and López determined that “manufacturing was increasingly based on capital intensive production, resulting in the underuse of labor and generating chronic structural unemployment” (61). Illuminating how the intersection of gender and class foments this type of migration, they observe that “all women [they interviewed] categorically said that they were forced [to migrate] by the economic situation” (64). Most unauthorized migrants in the Hispanophone Caribbean are racialized people who are economically, politically, or socially disenfranchised by the structural racism that undergirds neoliberalism. Referring to neoliberalism, Randolph Hohle argues that to understand “the relationship between race and neoliberal policy” it is necessary to look back at “the political struggles of the American south in the 1950s” (2). As he puts it, “The language of neoliberalism was the result of the white response to the black struggle for civic inclusion. The language of neoliberalism is organized around the white-private/black-public binary” (4). While his observations

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pertain to the emergence of neoliberalism in the United States, parallels can be found worldwide. The global neoliberal turn is founded upon and continues to perpetuate anti-Blackness and the exploitation of poor people. Hohle asserts that “neoliberalism is simply not an economic project” (1). Rather, it “is a stubborn and resilient political project” (2). Evidence of this is the fact that, as he argues, a “core feature of American neoliberalism is that it redefined good white citizenship” (6): As the black [civil rights] movement secured additional rights on the basis that they were good citizens who deserved them, there was a national crisis in what it meant to be white. The language of neoliberalism reimagined good white citizenship as an achieved status. It was achieved through physical and symbolic distance from blacks and the poor through suburbanization, hard work, and personal responsibility. (6)

The conflation between whiteness and “good citizenship” reveals the logic of white supremacy. Latina/os, including legal citizens, continually face what Maya Socolovsky refers to as “unbelonging,” the “racialization of undocumented status” (10). Although her study focuses on Mexican Americans, Socolovsky’s argument applies to Caribbean Latinx people who, even if they are US citizens—such as Puerto Ricans—also share a sense of unbelonging because they do not fit squarely into the restrictive paradigm of “good citizenship” that is equated with whiteness. Without a doubt, neoliberalism and globalization have privileged the Global North while exacerbating the conditions of the racialized Global South. Those who have been forced to migrate without authorization as a result of neoliberal policies—whether they are considered political or economic refugees—also tend to be racialized in their countries of origin. Those perceptions are reaffirmed when most become racialized in the process of migration. As Kibria, Bowman, and O’Leary put it, “Those who are unauthorized are assumed to be criminals in general, engaged in a wide range of illegal activities. . . . Illegality then becomes a mechanism of racialization, as it is used to condemn entire groups, imputing natural difference and inferiority to them” (56). Both before and after migration, they tend to be excluded; they are deemed nonessential, and therefore dispensable, by a system that decides who should be included or excluded from the nation. In Wasted Lives, Bauman draws a connection between modernization, globalization, and the production of “wasted humans” (58), that is, those who are deemed “redundant” (12), “disposable” (12), and “superfluous bodies” (41) by the Global North. His posture echoes that of Gaston

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Bachelard when he states that “‘surplus population’ is one more variety of human waste” (Bauman 39). According to Bauman, “The production of ‘human waste,’ or more correctly wasted humans (the ‘excessive’ and ‘redundant,’ that is the population of those who either could not or were not wished to be recognized or allowed to stay), is an inevitable outcome of modernization” (5). Racialized unauthorized migrants exemplify these human wasted lives forced into displacement by global structural forces: “Refugees, the displaced, asylum seekers, migrants, the sans papiers, they are the waste of globalization” (Bauman 58). Bauman’s concept of wasted lives—which reflects the Global North’s attitudes toward these groups of people—is central to my analysis. Like DeLoughrey, I believe that “to call attention to ‘wasted lives’ is not to relegate people to waste but to foreground the political and social systems that deem certain humans ‘matter out of place’” (Allegories 103). The large-scale forced displacements we are witnessing today across the globe, including in the Caribbean, confirm Bauman’s theories. Whether it is Cubans being publicly degraded as escoria (human waste) by Fidel Castro’s government for fleeing the island during the 1980 Mariel exodus, or Haitian-Dominicans losing their Dominican citizenship after the passing of La Sentencia, or the racism that Haitians experience in Dominican society, or the discrimination that both Dominicans and Haitians experience in Puerto Rico, or the marginalization that all these groups confront in the United States, these examples illustrate the “waste-ification” of those who are deemed redundant or excessive. This waste-ification is not just part and parcel of Global North–Global South dynamics but also characterizes what Frances Aparicio terms “horizontal hierarchies” that inform South–South relations. The presence of unauthorized migrants across the Caribbean and beyond reveals the intertwining of migration, neoliberalism, race, and biopolitics— which “posits a connection between individual life and state policies” (Yeng 22). According to Michel Foucault, who coined the term, “Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem” (245). He adds that “biopolitics will derive its knowledge from, and define its power’s field of intervention in terms of, the birth rate, the mortality rate, various biological disabilities, and the effects of the environment” (245). Biopolitics defines “the right to make live and to let die” (Foucault 241). The “who to let die” is of central importance here. As Sokthan Yeng reminds us, “Neoliberalism, as Foucault contends, leads to the birth of biopolitics because the pursuit of national security allows the state to treat

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larger and larger portions of the population as if they were disposable” (61; my emphasis). Racialization determines the “disposability” of individuals and entire groups under neoliberalism, but ethnicity, class, and other factors can also affect it. Those who are deemed “disposable” in their home countries are often considered as such in receiving societies. Not only that, but often they are seen as a “threat,” given that neoliberalism “also encompasses concerns over national security and prosperity” (Yeng 29). Fueled by neoliberalism, state racism has led to the “maltreatment of immigrants by evoking the need to protect the nation’s welfare while concealing how these immigrants are an integral part of America’s prosperity” (Yeng 11). While Yeng’s observations pertain to immigration to the continental United States, similar dynamics play out in the Hispanophone Caribbean, where undocumented migrants often face maltreatment in receiving islands. Echoing Bauman, DeLoughrey asserts that “modernity is constituted by the boundaries erected between the normative and the disposable, resulting in an enormous surveillance industry dedicated to policing the borders between citizens and refugees” (“Heavy” 704). Doubly excluded—from sending and receiving societies—the unauthorized migrants’ journey by sea, and the surveillance apparatus deployed against them, clearly reveals that they are perceived as “waste.” As she also reminds us, “Relegating human beings to waste is a dehumanizing and deeply entrenched social and political practice of capitalism, empire, and neoliberal globalization; to render this practice visible is to open up the potential for radical political critique” (Allegories 103). So, if transformative social change is the goal, it is imperative to make visible and to recognize that these ideas do not exclusively circulate in the Global North but also inform horizontal South–South relations. A racial and economic hierarchy exists in the Hispanophone Caribbean— characterized by xenophobia, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness— evident in the discrimination that exists against Haitians in the Dominican Republic, and against Dominicans and Haitians in Puerto Rico (Duany, Blurred 47).17 At the top of that hierarchy one can find either Puerto Rico (given its relationship with the United States) or Cuba, depending on whom you ask. Most would agree that Haiti is perceived as occupying the lower rung of that hierarchy, clearly a result of anti-Blackness. As James Ferguson explains, “It is Haitians who have borne the brunt of discrimination in the Caribbean, due to the intractable poverty of their homeland and their distinctive cultural identity” (7). The fronteras intranacionales that emerge between groups reveal the power differentials between them, which rest upon fluid, not static, understandings of race, ethnicity, and class. These

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power differentials explain the irony behind the fact that “the prevalent discourse on Dominicans in Puerto Rico resembles those on Haitians in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in the United States” (Duany, Blurred 206). This power hierarchy is a central concern in Ana Lydia Vega’s story “Encancaranublado,” and Mayra Santos Febres’s collection Boat People, which I examine in chapter 2. DeLoughrey departs from Bauman’s argument and Bachelard’s “metapoetics of . . . heavy water” to offer new readings of Caribbean texts that address the dialectic between oceans and waste (“Heavy” 704). Waste, however, is understood both “in terms of pollution as well as the wasted lives of slaves and refugees” (“Heavy” 708). In her analysis of works by Ana Lydia Vega, Edwidge Danticat, and Kamau Brathwaite, she observes, “By placing refugee and fugitive bodies at sea, these authors demonstrate how waste is a constitutive by-product of modernity and national border making. The state surveys the vastus, producing boundaries that reduce human beings to national refuse” (“Heavy” 708).18 The immeasurable presence of drowned migrant bodies—“a symbolic legacy of the Middle Passage”—metaphorizes the absorption of “waste” by the ocean and signals what DeLoughrey refers to as the “humanization” of the sea (“Heavy” 708). The conflation of the two understandings of “waste” that DeLoughrey proposes—as pollution and wasted lives—is evident in the art of the late Dominican artist Tony Capellán.19 His installations offer a meditation on waste-ification in the Caribbean. Most of his work revolves around his interest in recycled objects (or trash), which he often gathered along Dominican beaches. Instead of discarding them simply as trash, Capellán’s works propose that those objects speak to us, that they tell a story. That story is one of poverty, displacement, transit, and forced migration, similar to the movements of the people of Hispaniola. As he once put it, “No son basura, son despojos. Son objetos que tuvieron un uso y vinieron las lluvias y la crecida del río, y se los llevó. Es una poesía dolorosa de la desigualdad, de las nuevas formas de esclavitud, de quienes viven en situaciones extremas” (They’re not garbage, they’re residues. They are objects that had a use and were taken away by the rain and the overflowed river. It is a painful poetry of inequality, of new forms of slavery, of those who live in extreme conditions) (Díaz, “El Mar Caribe”). Elevating these objects infuses them with symbolic meaning, allowing the artist to unveil the impact of (neo)colonialism, neoliberalism, poverty, new forms of slavery, and cruel migration policies that reveal the borders between the Global North and the Global South. He sees “la obra como un regalo del mar” (the work of art as a present from the sea), channeling the stories that those objects tell (Interview with Cielonaranja).

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Figure 1.1. Tony Capellán, Mar Caribe. Plastic, rubber, and barbed wire, 360 × 228 in. © Tony Capellán. Courtesy of Tony Capellán estate. Photo of installation view courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

One of Capellán’s best-known pieces is his installation Mar Caribe (figures 1.1 and 1.2), first exhibited in 1996 at the Museo de Arte Moderno de la República Dominicana, and more recently as part of the Poetics of Relation (2015) exhibit at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago exhibit (2018) at Columbia University, curated by Tatiana Flores. More than twenty-five years since it was first displayed, Capellán’s piece remains as relevant as it was originally. The installation is composed of hundreds of used flip-flop sandals, in a variety of blue and green hues, overlapped and lined in the same direction covering the floor space. At first glance, and especially from a distance, the piece evokes the vastness and the beautiful tones of the Caribbean Sea. But upon closer examination, the ugly and brutal reality that the piece exposes becomes evident: extreme poverty triggers desperation, which leads to forced migration. The piece’s multiple layers of meanings reflect the complexities of migration in the Hispanophone Caribbean. Consider how the meaning of the piece would change if instead of used sandals the artist had utilized new ones. The fact that the sandals were once worn by hundreds of people is central to the meaning of the piece. They

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Figure 1.2. Tony Capellán, Mar Caribe, detail. Plastic, rubber, and barbed wire, 360 × 228 in. © Tony Capellán. Courtesy of Tony Capellán estate. Photo of installation view courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

are not clean, but rather bear the marks of dirt and detritus, that is, they carry the evidence of their use. As the artist reminds us, “en esos zapatos hay historias de mucha gente” (many people’s stories live in those shoes), and the piece collects these remnants to tell a collective story of poverty and displacement (Interview with Cielonaranja). Even before the artist created his installation, the sandals functioned as a trope of migration. Carried by currents, every sandal either made it to the banks of the Ozama River or to urban Dominican beaches, where Capellán collected them. In many cases, as he explains, the sandals made their way from the mountains, dragged by stream or river currents, were carried into the Ozama River, and eventually ended up in the Caribbean Sea, where some floated back to the shore. The sandals’ trajectory from river to the sea adds to the richness of the piece in its mapping of liquid currents and borders. The sandals also function as a metaphor for transit, given that they are made for walking. As footwear, they embody the contradictions of belonging to a poor Caribbean country whose economy depends on tourism, like most islands of the archipelago. Flip-flops are usually associated with tourism, and therefore with social and economic privilege. In the Dominican Republic, a popular destination among Global North tourists seeking pristine

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beaches, all-inclusive resorts at moderate prices, and sex tourism, this type of sandal epitomizes their privilege, including mobility—the ability to cross international borders. The flip-flops found along the beaches are the residues of experiences that affirm the power differentials between Global North and Global South. More importantly, they remind us of the way in which the Caribbean has been envisioned as paradise, an idea that the piece challenges by reflecting on poverty and forced displacements. At the same time, flip-flops are also a low-cost footwear ideal for tropical weather and therefore are highly popular among poor people in warmer climates. Because they are not real shoes, they tend to be associated with poverty and material scarcity, and as such can also function as symbols of inequality. In Mar Caribe, they are tropes for poverty and forced migration. Like the racialized people they symbolize, the sandals, too, are swept away by currents that carry them out to the sea, outside the borders of the Dominican Republic. The sandals’ shifting meaning as symbols of wealth and poverty emblematizes the contrasts between the Global South and Global North. And it is precisely those discrepancies and contrasts—embodied in the sandals—that fuel migration. An important detail about the sandals that make up Mar Caribe is that the straps are made of barbed wire, which evoke the idea of the sea as a border. In her analysis of this piece, DeLoughrey states that “barbed wire (and its successor, razor wire) is a tool of violent concentration, first used on animals in the Indigenous lands of the U.S. west and notoriously on the prisoners of Germany’s concentration camps, and it has been emblematic of the U.S. naval detention camp of Guantánamo” (Allegories 109). To this I would add that barbed wire is often associated with borders, fences, and divisions, especially along the Mexico-US border. The multilayered symbolism of the barbed-wire sandals stands in sharp contrast to regular footwear, which is meant to protect feet. Instead, these sandals hurt, cause injury, draw blood, and leave a mark on the individual who wears them. They convey the idea of suffering implicit in the process of forced migration. Every sandal is made with a section of a border, reminding us of the individual obstacles that undocumented migrants confront in their journeys. Displayed together, they metaphorize the Caribbean Sea as border. When viewers contemplate Mar Caribe, the sandals evoke a fenced sea, or “the sea as an impenetrable barrier” (Edwards). They also call attention to the idea of the Caribbean Sea as a “militarized territory” of US Empire (DeLoughrey, Allegories 109). As such, Mar Caribe disrupts the hegemony of the Mexico-US border by drawing on the parallels between these spaces. The piece represents the sea as an equally hostile border and lifts the sto-

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ries of the undocumented migrants who try to cross it. Conveying the stories of those who are “emigrantes sin patria” (emigrants without a country) is a primary concern for Capellán, as he explains: Los que están dentro de su tierra sin que puedan ser legalmente de su tierra, los que se tienen que ir en canoa y ser apresados en Bahamas y sacados en jaulas como se ve en las noticias, los que sacan inmediatamente especialmente en Estados Unidos cuando llegan. Son los cubanos que tratan de ir a Miami, son los dominicanos que tratan de ir a Puerto Rico. (Those who are in their land without legally being able to belong to that land, those who have to go by canoe and be arrested in the Bahamas and taken out in cages like we see in the news, those who are immediately removed upon arrival to the United States. It is the Cubans who try to make it to Miami, it is the Dominicans who try to make it to Puerto Rico.) (Díaz, “El Mar Caribe”)

The piece alludes to the impact of US Empire, (neo)colonialism, and neoliberalism in the Dominican Republic. According to Capellán, it denounces the expulsion of campesinos (rural dwellers) from their lands, which have been privatized and are now protected by barbed wire. It also condemns the conditions that force Dominicans and others considered so-called wasted lives to migrate by yola and balsa to Puerto Rico or the United States, and who are at the mercy of cruel immigration policies. The installation also raises awareness about climate change and environmental pollution, what Sheller calls “coloniality of climate” (Island 10) and DeLoughrey refers to as “waste imperialism” in the Caribbean (Allegories 115). As the latter puts it, “Mar Caribe might be interpreted as a technofossil montage that memorializes those who are at the frontlines of climate change” (107). After all, these nondegradable plastic sandals were all collected along the flood-prone banks of the Ozama River and along urban beaches in the city of Santo Domingo. They are, for all intents and purposes, trash. In collecting them, Capellán not only helps restore the environment but also forces us to confront the global environmental catastrophe that we humans have created. While his 2015 installation Mar invadido speaks more directly to this issue by featuring hundreds of objects found around Dominican beaches, Mar Caribe also participates in this conversation by reminding us that our actions are having a direct impact on our water sources across the planet. Both works challenge the predominant image of the Caribbean as paradise by calling attention to the economic inequalities and structural violence that plague the region because of (neo)colonialism, US Empire,

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neoliberalism, and globalization. Mar Caribe and Mar invadido reveal the “long history of ‘slow violence’ or ‘slow disaster’ that includes colonialism and genocide of indigenous peoples, slavery and plantation systems, exploitative terms of indenture and other abuses of labor, ecological destruction, and resource extraction” (Sheller, Island 8). Today, we are witnessing the impact of this “slow violence,” which has provoked forced displacements. As a result, Capellán’s work renders “visible the ‘wasted lives’ of refugees as well as the politics of waste imperialism” (DeLoughrey, Allegories 116). Capellán’s Mar Caribe emphasizes the dehumanization of undocumented migrants. As poor people of color from the Global South, they have been reduced to the status of refuse in the eyes of a Global North that depends on them as cheap laborers but continually excludes them from the boundaries of the nation. The migrants’ in-betweenness and uprootedness is both symbolic and material, as is evident when they are at sea. Caribbean unauthorized migrants are seen as dangerous, despite the fact that, paradoxically, their predicament is a product of the Global North’s neocolonial and neoliberal policies. In addition to the fact that Caribbean undocumented migrants are criminalized for their attempts to cross without authorization, they are also criminalized—consciously or not—because of the uprootedness and mobility they represent in a world where notions of belonging are intrinsically tied to territoriality. Unauthorized migrants are often the victims of unjust economic, social, racial, and nationalist policies that force them to migrate in search of survival. However, despite structural forces driving migration, “individual decisions to migrate result from the dynamic interactions of structural, cultural, and personal factors that motivate or dissuade a given migrant” (Graziano 2). In other words, unauthorized migrants are not simply victims of external forces. By deciding to migrate, they display their agency of movement. Literature and art can illuminate the complexities that tend to be erased in discussions of unauthorized migration in the Hispanophone Caribbean.

intra- cariBBean unauthorized Migrations: an overview DoMiniCan Migrations Dominican migration, both authorized and unauthorized, increased dramatically in the early 1960s (Moya Pons; Torres-Saillant and Hernández; Hernández, Mobility). Following the assassination of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo—which put an end to his violent dictatorship (1930–1961)—

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Dominicans finally had the opportunity to step beyond the nation’s borders. While some migrated during this time, the largest exodus came as a result of a second US invasion in 1965, preceded by a longer one from 1916 to 1924.20 The justification was the need to crush a revolution spearheaded by militant factions demanding the return of the exiled leader Juan Bosch, the first democratically elected president of the Dominican Republic (considered a threat by the US government for his leftist and populist ideas). He was forced out of the presidency as a result of a coup d’état engineered by “various forces of the Dominican elite, including merchants, the Catholic Church, landowners, and industrialists, who opposed many of the new government’s policies of social reform and denounced Bosch as a Communist” (TorresSaillant and Hernández 38). Fearing another “Cuban Revolution,” President Johnson ordered the invasion, siding with the former Trujillo crony and right-hand man Joaquín Balaguer, who ran on a neo-Trujilloist platform and sought to remain in power. The US invasion put an end to the insurrection and consolidated Balaguer’s power in the following elections. The United States was aware that Balaguer’s government violently persecuted its enemies.21 However, seeking to consolidate his power, the United States opened its doors to Dominicans—mostly from the urban middle class and the political left—to immigrate (Graziano 9). And thus began the largest Dominican exodus to the United States, one precipitated by political motives, which lasted until the early 1970s. A second migratory wave took place in the 1980s, “peaking in the mid1990s and falling only slightly in the new millennium” due mainly to economic conditions (Ferguson 27). With the end of the Trujillo dictatorship and the political, economic, and social upheaval caused by the Dominican Revolution, the US invasion, and the Balaguer regime, the Dominican economy suffered greatly. The Dominican Republic also went through a period of economic restructuring, which began “in the 1970s with a transition from agricultural exports to an economy based on tourism and export-processing free trade zones (also known as zonas francas)” (Graziano 7). While these measures aided the upper and expanding middle classes, most working-class Dominicans were excluded (Graziano 7): The overall effect for workers was detrimental: a doubling of unemployment between 1971 and 1991, inflation that decreased minimum-wage purchasing power to half the value it had in the early 1970s, and repressive containment of social discontent resulting from impoverishment. The symptoms of chronic poverty—unemployment, illiteracy, infant mortality, malnutrition, social instability—were prevalent. In short, the incorpora-

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tion of the Dominican Republic into global capitalism did more to foster migration than to improve the social and economic conditions that might induce potential migrants to stay home. (7–8)

Ferguson echoes this point when he states, “Poverty is therefore a major factor in Dominican migration, as are the lack of access to education and health provision, and other forms of social exclusion” (27). In short, the economic crisis unleashed an exodus as Dominicans sought opportunities for work and survival outside of the Dominican Republic. The majority of Dominicans who migrated to places like the United States, Puerto Rico, Spain, and the Netherlands during that period did so legally. But as time went on, it became increasingly difficult to obtain proper documentation (Pessar, A Visa 9). Because “demand for legal access into the USA far exceed[ed] supply,” “undocumented migration [became] the only option for many Dominicans” (Ferguson 27). Along with the rise of undocumented migration was the increasingly important role that Puerto Rico played in these movements, becoming “both a transit point and a final destination for Dominican migrants” (Graziano 68). There is, in fact, a long history of displacements between these localities. As Duany reminds us, “Close links between what are now the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico date back to pre-Columbian times, when Arawak peoples from the Amazon basin of South America settled both territories” (Blurred 188). During colonial times, not only did “contraband [flourish] across the Mona Channel,” but people “shuttled between the two [Spanish] territories” (Duany, Blurred 188). Other waves followed during the nineteenth century as a result of the political upheaval that resulted from the Haitian Revolution and the Haitian occupation of Santo Domingo (Blurred 188). At the end of the nineteenth century, large numbers of Puerto Ricans “sought employment in the Dominican Republic,” especially in the sugar industry (Blurred 188). More recently, because “by far the most common means of getting to the USA is via Puerto Rico, separated from the Dominican Republic by the 70-mile Mona Passage,” the island has played a key role as springboard to the United States (Ferguson 27).22 However, many Dominicans have also chosen Puerto Rico as their final destination. Proof of that is the fact that “Dominicans are now the largest and most visible minority group in Puerto Rico” (Duany, Blurred 189). Whether their goal is to start a new life in Puerto Rico or simply use it as a stepping-stone to the continental United States, thousands of Dominicans have felt forced to risk their lives traveling clandestinely in yolas, or small wooden boats, to reach Puerto Rico. The filmmaker Sonia Fritz’s

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documentary Visa for a Dream (1990) explores this voyage and the reasons why thousands of Dominican women cross the Mona Passage to arrive in Puerto Rico. Almost always their decisions have to do with improving their families’ socioeconomic positions and well-being. As Duany writes, “Visa for a Dream tells the story of a people without history and recovers the voice of a group marginalized for several reasons: because they are women, because they are poor, because they are mulatto or Black, and because they are undocumented” (Visa 1040). In their study of Dominican women’s undocumented migration, Ramona Hernández and Nancy López also “examine the socio-economic background of Dominican women who resort to migration in yola” (60). They found that the women were poor, working class, and many were unemployed. Most were also “heads of their households, and most of them resided in overcrowded homes” (63), and they saw yola migration as the only alternative to secure the well-being of their children (64). In addition to the challenges they face while crossing, “Migrants are aware that yola voyages are illegal and indeed refer to them as viajes ilegales (illegal trips) and to themselves as ilegales (illegals)” (Graziano 106). Traveling in a yola to Puerto Rico is risky business. Graziano describes a traditional Dominican yola as “a large wooden boat (thirty to forty feet long, eight to twelve feet wide, and five feet to eight feet high at the bow) built clandestinely for the purpose of transporting migrants. Yolas commonly carry between 40 and well over 100 passengers, and the larger ones, referred to as ‘super yolas,’ can carry 200 or more” (36). Those who travel in yolas face many dangers. Yolas are usually “overloaded, underpowered, and slow,” and the conditions are “conducive to hostility and violence” (Graziano 36, 37). Those who participate in organized smuggling trips “are highly vulnerable to swindle and abuse because the smuggling fee must be paid in advance to anonymous operators who overbook and are prone to flight” (Graziano 37). According to Graziano, other types of voyages include those with a self-employed captain (eliminates the professional smuggler), viajes de familia (family trips) organized among friends and family, and trips on sailboats and speedboats, the most costly alternative (36–41). In the case of the first three types, “There are also life-threatening dangers: the yolas are poorly made and often leak severely or break apart in bad weather; upon arrival passengers are sometimes forced to swim through the breaking surf to shore; and captains on these transports are less likely to pause to rescue overboard passengers” (Graziano 37). Organized smuggling trips carry added risks (violence, extortion, etc.) that are not present in other types of voyages, such as the smaller and more common trip with a “self-employed captain” instead of a professional smuggler, or those that are

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“migrant-organized” (Graziano 37, 39).23 Overall, the risks are even greater for women migrants, who often become victims of sexual violence. In every case, the risk of death by drowning is real. Despite hundreds of migrant drownings, these are not enough to deter migration (Graziano 100). Departures and arrivals usually take place at night to avoid detection by the Dominican Navy and US Coast Guard.24 The timing adds to the danger, since yolas “have no marine safety equipment or navigational lights” (Graziano 44).25 When conditions are favorable, “the trip is monotonous,” “nothing but sea and sky and an unrelenting sun” (Graziano 45). “When the voyage is prolonged and food and water are depleted, some passengers get delirious,” Graziano writes, “in this condition, particularly when hallucinations support the deliria, they are prone to jumping overboard” (45). Capsizing is also a threat, especially during inclement weather. As Graziano points out, “there is an area west of Desecheo Island, near the Puerto Rico coast, where Atlantic and Caribbean currents converge” (45): “Rolling seas yield to chaotic whitecaps; migrants use the word remolino (whirlpool) to describe the area” (45). Dominican migrants must cross the Mona Passage to reach Puerto Rico. Yet the “Mona Passage is one of the most turbulent bodies of water in the world, and migrants in yolas and small fishing boats are at high risk of drowning” (Graziano 56). Sometimes passengers—accidentally or purposely, dead or alive—end up in Mona, Monito, or Desecheo Islands, which lie on the trajectory to the main island of Puerto Rico. While sometimes captains are forced to stop at these islands due to inclement weather or engine or other problems with their yolas, other times passengers are deliberately tricked and dropped off there. According to Graziano, “The most prevalent Dominican smuggling of foreign nationals entails the transport of Cubans to Mona and Monito Islands, which are about halfway between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico” (55). It is important to remember that “foreign nationals from several countries use the Dominican Republic as a transit country in an attempt to reach the mainland United States through Puerto Rico” (Graziano 55). Most are from Haiti and Cuba, but migrants from Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, China, and Sri Lanka have also attempted the crossing (Graziano 55). While undocumented migrants have diverse backgrounds, the majority are Dominicans. Because of the clandestine nature of undocumented migration, estimates about the number of unauthorized Dominicans who set out to Puerto Rico are difficult to determine. However, according to Graziano, the recent “dramatic decline in Dominican migrant flow” is due partly to “border enforcement and a lack of employment abroad” (208). Of those who embark on

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the journey, it is unknown how many survive the crossing. According to Ferguson, “One estimate suggests that only 40 per cent of those setting out actually arrive, but this is difficult to confirm” (28). What we do know, as Graziano asserts, is that in “recent years there seem to be more yola fatalities than in the past, perhaps as a consequence of the transition from large, smuggler-organized trips led by experienced captains to smaller trips captained by amateurs or by the migrants themselves” (59). Because “Dominican migrants are interdicted at sea primarily by the Coast Guard”—“the principal federal maritime law enforcement agency of the United States”— those statistics can be useful in gauging the level of unauthorized crossings in the region (Graziano 181). According to the Department of Homeland Security’s US Coast Guard, the total number of Dominicans interdicted at sea from fiscal year 1993 to 2020 is 29,990, with the highest traffic in 1995 (4,047), 1996 (5,430), and 2020 (2,269) (table 1.1).26 Assuming that a significant number have perished during the crossing, or have actually made it to Puerto Rico or another destination, the total number of migrants can possibly exceed 40,000 for that period. The implications of these figures are real and should give us pause. At the very least, they tell a story that has remained silenced for too long.

froM haiti to the DoMiniCan rePubliC Haitians have been crossing the Haiti-DR border for more than a century, but mass unauthorized migration increased substantially in the late twentieth century as a result of political repression, natural disasters, and extreme poverty (Ferguson 8). The complex and at times contentious relationship between the two nations that share the island of Hispaniola is reflected in the immigration policies designed to control the flow of Haitians to the Dominican Republic. Today, “Nobody knows how many Haitians and Haitiandescended Dominicans are living and working in the Dominican Republic,” although some estimate the figure to be over a million (Ferguson 8). For many decades, the Dominican Republic has depended on the presence of a vulnerable and marginalized Haitian and Haitian-Dominican workforce to be the backbone of its economy. However, a strong anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-Blackness, and antihaitianismo among some Dominican sectors are behind the rampant exploitation and discrimination of Haitians. Antihaitianismo is a term used to describe dominant attitudes fostered by the Dominican nationalist elite and ruling class toward Haitians, characterized by xenophobia, prejudice, and anti-Blackness. Ernesto Sagás defines it as “the present manifestation of the long-term evolution of racial prej-

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Table 1.1. US Coast Guard Statistics of Interdictions of Haitian, Haitians, and Cubans Migrant Flow Data Fiscal Year

Haitian

Dominican

Cuban

2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993

3,031 3,663 2,727 1,573 1,808 2,636 2,942 2,411 3,388 3,541 4,614 3,737 1,124 1,610 1,198 2,404 3,229 1,490 1,287 1,956 1,394 480 1,437 774 733 2,336 25,069 2,404

2,269 2,107 829 643 704 562 146 123 166 71 400 701 1,246 1,455 436 600 810 1,469 801 279 781 531 831 1,143 5,430 4,047 810 600

173 483 384 2,109 7,245 4,437 3,814 2,218 1,870 1,979 1,082 1,740 5,769 7,817 7,158 7,600 5,379 1,374 931 777 928 1,463 1,118 394 391 617 37,191 3,687

udice, the selective interpretation of historical facts, and the creation of a nationalist Dominican false consciousness” (1). Antihaitianismo is related to anti-Blackness and the perception that only Haitians are Black, that Haiti is the “exclusive container of blackness” (Torres-Saillant, “The Tribulations” 1092). In the nationalist Dominican imaginary, Haitians are associated with Africa (Blackness), French, and Vodou, while Dominicans associate themselves with Spain (“whiteness”/hispanismo), Spanish, and Catholicism.

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Fernando Valerio-Holguín has examined the primitivist discourse about Haitians that “has shaped Dominican identity both racially and culturally” (“Primitive” 79). As he explains, central primitivist tropes—such as the equating of Haitians to animals, cannibals, savages, and thieves who are violent and promiscuous—recall those “employed by Europeans to refer not only to Africans and Asians but also to Latin Americans in general and Caribbeans in particular” (76). These rigid distinctions are part of official constructions of Dominicanidad (Dominicanness), which define the Dominican nation in opposition to Haiti.27 According to Ginetta Candelario, “the ideological markers of official Dominicanidad” include “Negrophobia, white supremacy, and anti-Haitianism” (3). While negative attitudes vis-à-vis Haitians have been described as prevalent, it is important to recognize that not all Dominicans embrace antihaitianismo, nor has it been a constant historically (Fumagalli; Paulino). Some examples of recent scholarship that challenge antihaitianismo by examining instances of cooperation and solidarity between Dominicans and Haitians include Martínez’s “Not a Cockfight: Rethinking Haitian-Dominican Relations” and Paulino’s book Dividing Hispaniola: The Dominican Republic’s Border Campaign against Haiti, 1930–1961, which “attempts to demolish the prevalent meta-narrative (or lie) that antiHaitianism has been a continuing element in Dominican culture and politics since the nineteenth century” (2). Similarly, Myers’s Mapping Hispaniola “transgresses literary borders by venturing beyond the often one-sided, antiHaitian national imagery in Dominican literature” in order to “understand how Dominican and Dominican American writers today are re-envisioning their complex racial and ethnic identities and, by extension, DominicanHaitian relations” (19). Moreover, Raj Chetty and Amaury Rodríguez go a step further by questioning the grounding premise that “anti-Haitianism is anti-Blackness” (6). As they put it, “When contextualized within global expressions of right-wing xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment, antiHaitianism takes on broader implications than Dominicans’ desire to distance themselves from their own blackness” (6). By disrupting the equivalence between antihaitianismo and antiBlackness, which has remained mostly unquestioned, Chetty and Rodríguez force us to think of the various factors that shape Dominican attitudes toward Haitians. It is indeed necessary to challenge long-established narratives such as the equation between antihaitianismo and anti-Blackness and the fatal-conflict model that has shaped perceptions of Haitian-Dominican relations. As Fumagalli reminds us, “not everyone agrees with this antagonistic

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and apocalyptic vision”—the eternal conflict between Haiti and the Dominican Republic—“but the effects of this ideological setup on everyday life run very deep” (9). This is evident in the way that antihaitianismo has been codified in everyday language, such as the usage of the term indio to refer to Black and mixed-race Dominicans. As Fumagalli explains, “the ‘myth of the Dominican indio’ has been strategically mobilized in Dominican letters to sustain ultra-nationalistic discourses aimed at creating and consolidating a Dominicanness predicated on anti-Haitianism, negrophobia, and the demonization of the borderland as a dangerously porous territory in need of ‘purging’” (19). The seeds of antihaitianismo originated “during the colonial period with the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and the terror that event instilled, particularly among elites on the eastern end of Hispaniola” (Paulino 121). It developed over the course of centuries as a result of political conflicts between the two countries, but it also received a significant boost during the US occupation from 1916 to 1924. In her examination of the US occupation period, García-Peña goes further back in time, stating that “since the independence of 1844, the United States has influenced the construction of dominicanidad in opposition to haitianismo” (207). For this reason, it is impossible to disentangle the history of antihaitianismo from that of the Haiti-DR border. As she observes, “anti-Haitianism is a colonial ideology that traverses Hispaniola’s historical struggle with European colonialism and US imperial expansionism” (10). Similar to antihaitianismo, “it is important to remember that the present border is a legacy not just of colonialism but also of neo-colonialism” (Fumagalli 19). While the highly complex history of the border is beyond the scope of this study—or my area of expertise—it is important to keep in mind the role of the United States in the definition and militarization of that other border. Referring to the role of the United States in the construction of Dominicanidad, García-Peña observes: This process intensified during the military occupation of 1916–1924, when the United States introduced the concept of border patrol and implemented the bracero labor system that brought cheap Haitian labor to cut cane in the US-owned sugar corporations. The most recent example of the role of the United States in bordering Hispaniola is the creation in 2008 of the CESFRONT, a specialized border security police, trained by the US Border Patrol as part of the American Empire’s effort to promote “strong borders” abroad. (207)28

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While it is clear that the United States’ involvement in the Dominican Republic has been directed at safeguarding their hegemony in the region, their presence has had cultural and social repercussions that are relevant to this day. As Sharri Hall states, “Some scholars believe that the United States helped the [Dominican] white elite to consolidate power by bringing institutionalized racism, amidst the United States’ own Jim Crow years, to the island and by importing Haitian labor to the Dominican Republic’s sugar cane fields.” While racism and xenophobia already existed as a product of European colonialism—think of the casta system—it intensified as a result of neocolonialism. These dynamics show how neocolonialism and antihaitianismo are intricately connected. Most agree, however, that antihaitianismo was institutionalized during the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930–1961). For instance, his government “aggressively propagated anti-Haitian ideology through a variety of means, including the schools, broadcast and print media, national commemorations and holidays, and participation in the all-powerful ruling party” (Martínez, “Not a Cockfight” 82). But by far the most blatant manifestation of the Trujillo regime’s antihaitianismo was the Massacre of 1937, also known as the “Haitian and Haitian-Dominican Massacre,” or “El Corte.”29 Claims by Valerio-Holguín, who has stated that it was the “genocide of more than twenty thousand Haitian, Dominican, and Dominican-Haitian nationals” (80), and Fumagalli, who says that “the estimated numbers of victims vary from 14,000 to 40,000” (20), reveal a lack of consensus regarding the death toll. Official accounts allege that Trujillo ordered the genocide to put a stop to a Haitian “silent invasion” (Martínez 1995) and to take care of the “border problem” (García-Peña 96). The “border problem” referred to the porousness and hybridity of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which Trujillo sought to define so as to concretely demarcate the limits of the Dominican nation. It is important to remember, however, that Trujillo’s own perception about the border did not emerge out of nowhere but can be seen as a legacy of the US occupation from which he benefited personally and politically. As García-Peña reminds us, “As early as November 1916, US preoccupation with the ‘Haiti-DR border problem’ overtook the military officials, who grappled with concerns about ‘the lack of a clear borderline, the nonexistence of a border police and the prevalence of a mixed border population’” (77). These same concerns were still relevant during Trujillo’s regime. Underlying the myth of the “silent invasion” was the belief that Haiti posed a threat, as Joaquín Balaguer—a Trujillo apologist and future

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president—proposed. According to Fumagalli, Balaguer’s La isla al revés: Haití y el destino dominicano (1983) depicts the country’s proximity with Haiti as a grave peril for the Dominicans, who can protect themselves only by promoting the Dominicanization or nacionalization [sic] of the frontier, which has to cover four different aspects: economical, moral, political, and racial. While famously describing the Dominican Republic as “the most Spanish people/nation in the Americas,” Balaguer insists on “Haitian imperialism,” conflict, and incompatibility between the neighbor nations, and depicts Haitians as primitives, diseased, ignorant, and morally flawed. (22)

Balaguer’s words underscore the ideology behind the massacre and the subsequent dominicanización de la frontera (Dominicanization of the border) campaign: that Haiti posed an existential threat to the Dominican Republic. The border therefore emerges as “an integral part in the consolidation and expansion of the nation” (Paulino 7). According to Paulino, “The massacre and its aftermath transformed how Dominican intellectuals wrote about the border and past treaties. By implementing an institutional and ideological war against Haitians in the border region following the massacre, Trujillo’s intelligentsia crystallized a new Dominican identity” (7). That version of Dominican identity was summed up as “not Haitian.” Trujillo’s dominicanización de la frontera campaign was integral to his agenda because it “aimed to distance institutionally and ideologically Dominican border residents and the nation from their Haitian neighbors” (Paulino 7). García-Peña describes the border region as a contact zone, a “fluid, transnational, and multicultural territory,” and “a bicultural area where generations of ethnic Haitians and ethnic Dominicans resided and interacted” (97). “It was precisely the fluidity and cultural hybridity of the Línea Fronteriza,” she affirms, “that preoccupied Trujillo and the Hispanophile intelligentsia” (98). Trujillo’s intelligentsia sought to “extend the definition of Haitian (foreign blackness) to the mixed-race rayanos” (García-Peña 99). The rayano (borderer) came to embody racial “impurity,” and as such, “a potential threat to [Balaguer’s] national project of ethnic cleansing” and “to the Hispanophile project of nation bordering” (García-Peña 99). For this reason, García-Peña warns us about the dangers of referring to this event as the “Haitian Massacre,” when it also entailed “the genocide of the intraethnic border population of rayanos who lived and worked in the northwestern border towns of the Artibonito Valley” (14).30 More recently, Silvio Torres-

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Saillant has deployed “la condición rayana” to refer to the transnational, transcultural, interethnic, and transracial fusions that characterize Dominican society in and outside Hispaniola (“La condición” 221–222). Despite efforts to halt Haitian migration and erase the history of interethnic mixing across the Haiti-DR border, which have extended beyond the Massacre of 1937, Haitians have continued to cross the border. Pushed by extreme poverty, hunger, lack of opportunities, political repression, and natural disasters, such as the earthquake of 2010 (and possibly the recent earthquake of August 2021), Haitians are lured or sometimes coerced to the other side of the island by the promise of a better life. Martínez implies as much when he states: Most braceros cross the border of their own volition, knowing what coercive and exploitative terms and conditions of employment likely await them on the other side. . . . Suffice it to add that the braceros have so little freedom to choose if and how they will emigrate that their “decision” to cross the border implies not so much free choice as coerced consent. (Peripheral 162)

This reality clashes with the fact that “to many impoverished Haitians,” according to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), “the D.R. is viewed as a land of hope” (“From Haiti”). Ironically, despite many attempts to block Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic, the country has historically depended “on seasonally imported migrant labor from Haiti for the harvest of its sugarcane” (Martínez, “The Price” 92). As Martínez explains, “Following the United States’ military invasion and seizure of power in the Dominican Republic in 1916, the military occupation authorities set up a labor recruitment system that with changes would endure for the rest of the twentieth century” (“The Price” 92). The recruitment of Haitian cane cutters, which “was first done under American watch and regulated through a series of US military government ordinances,” benefited “US-based multinational sugar companies and their international creditors” (Martínez, “The Price” 92).31 Interestingly, despite all the regulations they imposed, the US military government did not “put forward any legislation aimed at improving the cane workers’ conditions of life” (Martínez, Peripheral 43). Since then, Haitians have systematically been recruited via illegal practices, coercion, and violence to work in the sugar industry—which, Martínez notes, is “the largest single employer of Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic” (Peripheral 6). Today, it is not possible to fully understand the plight of Haitian immigrants or their

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Dominican-born children without taking into account the central role that US Empire has had in the articulation of their “expendability.” Martínez explains that “Dominican sugar companies have historically relied on two different channels of immigration from Haiti to recruit the harvest laborers they need” (Peripheral 8). The first channel is “voyages organized and paid for by agents of the sugar companies, with official approval on both sides of the border” (8). The second is “clandestine passage by land,” commonly known as “‘âba fil,’ meaning literally ‘under the wire,’ and is commonly traversed with the paid assistance of border guides, called ‘pasè,’ similar to the ‘coyotes’ who work the U.S.-Mexican border” (8). This type of crossing constitutes an understudied link between undocumented migrations across the Haiti-DR and the Mexico-US borders. Most migrants are captured by the Dominican military or the police, who financially benefit from handing over the Haitians to “agents of the state sugar consortium, Consejo Estatal del Azúcar (CEA), to be bused to estates that need harvest laborers” (8). Another common practice is the capturing of forced recruits, “Haitian men whom the Dominican army rounds up in border towns, farms, and, more rarely, cities across the country,” who then are turned over to agents of the CEA (9). Whether âba fil or forced recruits, the “detainees are not allowed to disembark until they arrive at the batey to which they have been assigned” (Martínez, Peripheral 8). Stripped of their papers at the border, workers are taken to bateyes—living quarters in or adjacent to cane fields—where they live in subhuman conditions. The journalist Jacob Kushner describes them as follows: Modeled after the quarters built to house African slaves on the island’s sugar plantations, bateyes were constructed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to house imported cane cutters from Haiti who became indentured by their poverty. Alternately transported in from or expelled back to Haiti, depending on the sugar factories’ seasonal needs, many eventually settled in theses [sic] slums long after the sugar industry had mostly died around them in the mid-20th century. Today the bateyes—with their largely unemployed and often malnourished inhabitants—resemble rural life in neighboring Haiti. (53)

In addition to enduring the subhuman living conditions that characterize life in the bateyes, the Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent who inhabit these spaces constantly face the threat of violence, which can take many forms. As Martínez explains, among “the abuses routinely committed

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against the seasonal migrants are obligatory extra hours of labor” and “denial of a weekly day of rest” (Peripheral 2). Others include being observed by guards, lack of protective gear, and the need to “cut cane or starve” (11). Overall, Martínez argues, “The terms and conditions of employment of Haitian braceros in the Dominican Republic are so inhumane as to be likened by human rights monitors to plantation slavery” (2). More recently, Martínez has stated that “most Haitian-ancestry people no longer live on sugar plantations, and those who still reside there are certainly not held behind barbed wire or doors locked from the outside” (“The Price” 92). People can come and go, but “fewer and fewer can escape the shadow of the law and the bureaucracy” (92). While it is not known how many Haitians live in the Dominican Republic, “The vast majority of them do not have proper immigration documents, and they seek to conceal their presence from state authorities” (Martínez, Peripheral 6). Undocumented Haitians—and their Dominican-born children—live in the shadows, working in industries such as tourism, construction, and service, as well as in the informal economy. Because “Dominican officials have usually perceived Haitian immigration as a threat to national security and identity,” despite the fact that the Dominican economy relies on their labor, Haitians in the Dominican Republic face intense xenophobia, discrimination, and violence (Duany, Blurred 183). The state’s desire to expunge its Haitian presence is evinced by the mass deportation campaigns targeting Haitians and the passing of La Sentencia in September 2013.

Cuban Migrations Cuban migration has a long and complex history. Since the nineteenth century, Cubans have been a steady presence in the United States. Exiled revolutionaries, such as the renowned intellectual José Martí, settled in New York to fight for Cuba and for Puerto Rico’s independence from Spain at the end of the nineteenth century. While Cubans continued to arrive after 1898 and throughout the twentieth century, it was not until the 1960s, following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, that Cuban migration to the United States began in earnest. Since the revolution, most Cubans fleeing the island to the United States benefited from a set of government regulations that provided them support and facilitated their path to citizenship. But the benefits, provisions, and attitudes that allowed for Cuban exceptionalism, or what the author Achy Obejas calls the “myth of Triunfalismo,” have not remained constant (Quesada, “Achy” 131). In fact, drastic US government policy changes in the mid-1990s intensified when President Obama revoked

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the infamous “wet foot, dry foot policy” in January 2017. These changes had a concrete and serious impact on the lives of Cubans trying to escape the island using rafts in recent decades. Perhaps the most salient repercussion has been their treatment as undocumented migrants. In chapter 4, I focus on the representation of the phenomenon of the balseros in selected works of Cuban and Cuban-American literature and visual art to understand how they fit within the greater narrative of undocumented intra-Caribbean migration, and how they contest the notion of Cuban exceptionalism or Triunfalismo. The Cuban balsero crisis of the 1990s, which peaked in 1994, is a leitmotif in the works analyzed here.32 This crisis took place during the so-called Special Period and is considered the fourth wave of Cuban migration.33 Rapid changes due to the collapse of the Soviet Union during 1989–1990 plunged Cuba into a deep economic crisis as the country “lost major commercial markets and subsidies, which affected its gross national product” (Campisi 377). As Aviva Chomsky explains, Faced with the loss of its Soviet-bloc trade and aid, the Cuban economy had gone into a tailspin after 1989. For decades Cuba had been sustained and cushioned by aid, trade, and in particular, the “fair trade” that the Soviets carried out with Cuba. . . . And Cuba’s economy was utterly dependent on imports—especially fuel—that it bought using these earnings. Now the system had collapsed. (157)

The Special Period, compounded by the US embargo, was defined by extreme poverty, economic and political upheaval, and uncertainty about the future. Faced with insurmountable challenges and not many options, a significant number of Cubans saw no escape but forced migration. As expected, many of those who tried to leave the country without authorization were Black and Afro-descendant working-class Cubans. As Chomsky reminds us, “There were global, structural, historical, and ideological factors that came to the fore in different ways during the Special Period and resulted in some older patterns of racial inequality resurfacing” (164). For instance, there was a “preference for lighter-skinned employees, especially in positions of authority or in dealing with the public, which were also some of the betterpaying positions in the foreign sector” (165). In her study of race in Cuba, Danielle Pilar Clealand echoes these claims when she states that “the Special Period in the Time of Peace marked the first serious challenge to racial ideology in Cuba as inequalities increased with significant racial dimensions. Racism and discrimination became much more visible, particularly by

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nonwhites” (72). Given the role that anti-Blackness and structural racism played in exacerbating economic and social inequalities during the Special Period, race and class must be centered in any discussion of the balsero crisis. A similar pattern—though at a smaller scale—had already emerged during the 1980 Mariel exodus, which “included, for the first time, sizable representation from Cuba’s lower socioeconomic sectors and its nonwhite population” (Grenier and Pérez 24). In the end, the Special Period ushered in the symbolic and literal “expulsion” of poor Blacks and other people of color from the borders of the nation. It is important to keep in mind that “the immediate cause of the exodus was the decline in the material conditions of daily life in Cuba, including food and water shortages, power blackouts, deteriorating public health, and a decaying infrastructure, particularly in housing and transportation” (Duany, Blurred 47). In this sense, many scholars agree that this migratory wave was similar to those of other Caribbean migrants in the 1990s, such as Dominicans and Haitians (Henken, “Balseros”; Duany, Blurred). But there was more. According to Ted Henken, “In the early 1990s, as economic impact from lost Soviet aid combined with the already acute lack of political and civil liberties on the island, the rafter exodus exploded” (“Balseros” 398). These conditions, in addition to the fact that the “U.S. Interests Section in Havana [had] stopped granting new visas because of a backlog in applications,” meant that “unauthorized exits became the primary means of leaving the island during the early 1990s” (Duany, Blurred 46). Those leaving the island became known as balseros. According to Henken, balseros are illegal maritime migrants who attempt to reach US shores in small, precarious craft. These crossings are extremely risky with passengers often drifting for days with little food and water, experiencing hypothermia and dehydration, and being threatened by storms and sharks. Furthermore, balseros normally share the costs of the trip among themselves and/or pay a small fee to a leader or organizer. (“Balseros” 395n3)

Like other migrants who venture out to sea in precarious makeshift vessels, balseros left due to the extreme conditions in the home country. In contrast to other groups such as Dominicans and Haitians, however, Cubans may feel a stronger pull toward the receiving US society, given the benefits historically afforded to this group. This explains why, between January and July of 1994, 4,731 rafters were interdicted at sea by the US Coast Guard (Henken, “Balseros” 398). The balsero crisis peaked in 1994 due to the fact that

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after increasing opposition and mass street demonstrations, including the so-called Maleconazo (Pérez; Gordon, Cuban; Bye), in “mid-August 1994, Fidel Castro announced that the Cuban government would no longer interdict or otherwise hinder the departure of Cubans wishing to leave for the United States” (Pérez 400).34 Consequently, the number of balseros rescued skyrocketed to 21,300 in the month of August alone (Henken, “Balseros” 398). The magnitude of the exodus provoked a drastic response from Washington, DC. On August 19, 1994, President Clinton “reversed policy, announcing that any Cuban rafter picked up in the future would not be allowed to enter the US and would be indefinitely detained at a ‘safe-haven’ on the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba” (Henken, “Balseros” 399). Thus, Cuban balseros ceased to be considered refugees; “instead of exiles or special entrants they were now ‘illegal refugees’” (Campisi 378).35 This moment marks a major shift in US policy toward Cubans that ended their special treatment dating back to 1959 (Henken, “Balseros” 394). The balsero crisis ended in “mid-September 1994 when both countries negotiated an immigration pact. Cuban authorities pledged to prevent illegal departures in exchange for which Washington agreed to allow annually 20,000 Cubans to emigrate to the United States” (Pérez 401). The situation was more complex for the 30,000+ balseros detained in Guantánamo, who suddenly were stranded in a legal limbo. They had been excluded from the September accords, which stated that they would not be allowed into the United States as refugees, but rather had the option “to remain indefinitely at the Base or return voluntarily to Cuba and apply for legal entry to the US” (Henken, “Balseros” 400). Faced with mounting pressure from the Guantánamo detainees, a significant number of whom were children, the Clinton administration reversed its position on what came to be known as the “May 2 repatriation accords.” On May 2, 1995, President Clinton declared that Cuban detainees in Guantánamo “would gradually be paroled into the US over the next nine months but ‘Cuban emigrants intercepted on the high seas by the US attempting to enter the US will be returned to Cuba’ if they could not show proof of having suffered persecution in Cuba” (400). This, in addition to the fact that thus far “Cuban rafters who were able to reach US shores were allowed to stay,” became the “new de facto Cuban immigration policy” (400, 401). Commonly known as “wet foot, dry foot,” this policy stated that Cubans intercepted at sea would be returned to Cuba, whereas those who made it ashore would be “allowed to be reviewed for admittance, a pro forma procedure that guarantee[d] a green card and permanent resident status” (Grenier

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and Pérez 102). The logic behind this policy—which implicitly encouraged Cubans to risk their lives to cross by rewarding those who made it alive— was highly controversial. Cubans trying to leave without authorization were forced to elude not only the Cuban patrols, but also the U.S. Coast Guard. To be reasonably sure of reaching U.S. shores a powerboat was needed. The paid smuggler entered the picture, transporting human cargo across the Florida Strait at top speed under the cloak of night, ushering in yet another dramatic and bizarre chapter in the migration of Cubans to the United States. (Grenier and Pérez 26)

The shift from balseros to boteros/lancheros, a significant change in unauthorized Cuban migration patterns, resulted from the need to evade capture by the US Coast Guard and the increased militarization of the Caribbean Basin. It entailed the “gradual shift from sea exits in small rafts (balsas) prior to September 1994 to using migrant smugglers with motorized speedboats (botes or lanchas) after 1994” (Henken, “Balseros” 394). More recently, arriving by raft to Central America or Mexico and crossing through Mexico to the Mexico-US border, a phenomenon known as “dusty feet,” has become a preferred strategy. President Obama’s revocation of the Cuban Adjustment Act in January 2017 effectively put an end to the “wet foot/dry foot” policy. With it, he put an end to the special treatment that Cuban migrants had received for decades at the hands of the US government. While significant attention has been given to the Cuban rafter crisis, Henken reminds us that “numbers indicate that what has been interpreted as a Cuban crisis, is in fact a Caribbean (and even global) phenomenon” (“Balseros” 395). According to the United States Coast Guard Office of Law Enforcement, from 1993 to 2020, a total of 29,990 Dominicans, 84,996 Haitians, and 110,128 Cubans have been interdicted at sea.36 Despite not enjoying the same special treatment afforded until recently to Cuban migrants under the Cuban Adjustment Act, Dominicans, Haitians, and other migrants still risk their lives at sea and constitute the majority of those who participate in intra-Caribbean unauthorized maritime migration.

recLaiMing siLenced histories The cultural production of the Hispanophone Caribbean and its diaspora is broad and diverse, but it has been relegated to the margins of Latin American and US productions. The silencing of these voices is partly a result of their insular origins. As DeLoughrey explains, “Working within the western

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power structures which prioritize size, might, military, and technological power . . . the island voice is often cartographically diminished to the supposed insignificance of its very landscape; small size becomes a metonymy for the lack of history” (“‘The litany’” 38). But of course, nothing could be further from the truth. By focusing on literary and visual arts representations of unauthorized migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean, this book lifts the voices and stories of the most vulnerable. Memory activism, according to Sharon Roseman, “has been used in relation to the reclamation of specific histories in cases where events as a whole, or specific details about them, have been suppressed or distorted” (31). The cultural works I analyze perform memory activism by reclaiming the silenced histories of undocumented migration in the Hispanophone Caribbean. Drawing attention to the phenomenon of unauthorized migration centers these neglected histories within the larger frame of Caribbean history, including the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and US Empire. As DeLoughrey proposes, “The transformative and metaphoric power of literary creation enables the possibility of new island maps” (“‘The litany’” 39). The selected works I analyze here address undocumented migration within the Caribbean, thus creating “new island maps.” Exposing the movements between and among islands unveils how migrants enact their agency of movement and therefore participate in the symbolic decolonizing of the region.

ChaPter 2

Puerto rico: Border and Bridge to the continentaL united states

Era que éramos isleños y el mar, por todos lados el mar, era nuestra única frontera. MagaLi garcía raMis

soMe Might say that Puerto Rico looms large in the Caribbean imaginary. As a colony (unincorporated territory) of the United States—and thus an extension of US Empire—it is often associated with freedom and political and economic stability. This image contrasts sharply with internal views of Puerto Rico as a “colonial necropolis of second-class US citizens” (Lloréns and Stanchich 82). The political links between the Puerto Rican archipelago and the United States soften, and in some cases erase, other borders (cultural, linguistic, etc.) that exist between them. As Duany asserts, the “border with the United States is more permeable than elsewhere because of the island’s nebulous definition as an unincorporated territory” (Blurred 228). For many unauthorized Caribbean migrants, Puerto Rico functions as a borderland. That is, it is a space characterized by the movement of people crossing from the Caribbean to the United States. But the archipelago also functions as a border sometimes. Puerto Rico’s dual role in patterns of undocumented Caribbean migration is the focus of this chapter. Although intra-Caribbean migration to Puerto Rico dates back centuries, it increased significantly in the second half of the twentieth century. Political upheaval in Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic during that period encouraged those displacements. In addition, Puerto Rico’s growth and transformation during this period made it an attractive destination for unauthorized migrants. Under the leadership of Luis Muñoz Marín, the first democratically elected Puerto Rican governor, the island’s agricultural economy was transformed into an industrial economy through Operación Manos a la Obra (Operation Bootstrap).1 This fast-paced initiative began 70

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in the late 1940s and lasted roughly two decades, ushering Puerto Rico into the twentieth century by propelling industrialization and modernization for the benefit of US Empire. Initially, Operación Manos a la Obra created thousands of jobs in urban areas, especially in San Juan, and produced significant improvements in infrastructure, including schools, hospitals, roads, and sanitation across the island. As a result, Puerto Rico became a “showcase of development” (Goldstein 318) and was “touted as a beacon or showcase of democracy in the Caribbean” (Lloréns and Stanchich 84). The US government used the case of Puerto Rico as a model to persuade other Latin American nations—in the midst of the Cold War—to reject communism and benefit from their economic and political power. But ironically, the success of Operación Manos a la Obra proved to be a mirage because it underscored Puerto Rico’s status as an “exploitation colony” (as opposed to a settler colony; Grosfoguel 7). The disinvestment in agriculture, coupled with the promise of jobs in the capital, led to mass internal migration from rural to urban areas (Sánchez Korrol 217). As poor, mostly illiterate, and semi- and unskilled campesinos migrated from the mountains to San Juan in search of jobs, many found the job market saturated. The flux of people continued unabated, with thousands settling in and expanding the shantytowns that had been established decades earlier on the outskirts of San Juan (Moreno, Family 37).2 Others, however, were encouraged by both the federal and local governments to migrate to the US East Coast with promises of work and better living conditions. As Nicholas De Genova and Ana Ramos-Zayas explain, “In part, Operation Bootstrap’s success relied on ‘cleaning up’ the Island of its ‘surplus’ (i.e., poor) population” (10). Muñoz Marín’s government’s response to the “problem of overpopulation” “boiled down to a two-pronged policy of population control (primarily through the mass sterilization of Puerto Rican women) and the inducement of mass labor migration to the U.S. mainland” (De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 10).3 Operación Manos a la Obra led to the Puerto Rican Great Migration (1946–1964), which paradoxically “occurred at a time when Puerto Rico was being showcased as a successful model of industrial capitalist development, modernization, and democratic rule” (Acosta-Belén and Santiago 75). The largest migration in Puerto Rican history—until it was surpassed by the post-Hurricane María exodus—happened between 1940 and 1970, when roughly 850,000 Puerto Ricans migrated stateside (Lloréns and Stanchich 85). Regardless of the negative repercussions of Operación Manos a la Obra, the dominant perception of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean is characterized by the ideals of freedom and prosperity, at least in relation to other islands

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of the archipelago. Cubans, Dominicans, and Haitians escaping political repression, persecution, or extreme poverty have often sought refuge in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico’s colonial condition, therefore, affects patterns of intraCaribbean migration by attracting migrants—legal and unauthorized—in search of survival and proximity to the so-called American Dream. Because of the key role that Puerto Rico plays in migration patterns, I argue that it is a disruptor of US Empire. It interferes with the latter’s hegemonic control of the archipelago, revealing the cracks in US Empire by stimulating the unauthorized migrant’s agency of movement. Puerto Rico’s close ethnic, racial, cultural, and linguistic links to its Hispanophone Caribbean neighbors—in terms of language, food, music, traditions, and history—are a central motivation for many, especially Dominican migrants who “generally think of Puerto Rico as a realm separate from the United States” (Graziano xii). But this symbolic distancing from the United States is destabilized when we consider that part of Puerto Rico’s allure hinges on its condition as a US colony. This tension between the perception of Puerto Rico as simultaneously close and distant from US Empire underscores its ambiguity. The fact that for Dominicans, “Puerto Rico has often served as a springboard to the U.S.” illustrates this point (Duany, Blurred 187). According to Ferguson: Puerto Rico acts as a stepping-stone to the USA, either through legal means via naturalization as US citizens, or by illegal strategies such as false identities. As Puerto Rico is itself a major source of migrants to the mainland USA, the regularity of domestic flights and the absence of passport controls make illicit entry easier than from the Dominican Republic. (27)

“A common itinerary,” according to Graziano, “entails travel by yola to Puerto Rico and then by air to the mainland. There is generally an interlude of some months or years between legs of the journey, during which migrants acclimate and save money for airfare and documents” (68). Other Dominicans end up making Puerto Rico their final destination for various reasons, including family reunification, geographic and symbolic proximity to the Dominican Republic, and aversion to the unfamiliar (Graziano 68). Another motivation is that compared to the US mainland, Puerto Rico “provides proportionally more opportunities for low-wage and unskilled employment,” which perhaps explains why “Dominicans in Puerto Rico tend to be less educated than those in the United States” (Duany, Blurred 192). The fact that “since the 1960s the secondary concentration of overseas Dominicans has

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been in Puerto Rico” corroborates the tendency among many Dominicans to make Puerto Rico their final destination (Duany, Blurred 187). Puerto Rico’s function as a springboard or stepping-stone to the continental United States offers a stark contrast to its role as border. The bordering of Puerto Rico by the US government affirms the former’s colonial condition while upholding the latter’s hegemony in the region. Recognizing Puerto Rico’s potential as a disruptor of US Empire, “U.S. immigration authorities have increased their presence at San Juan’s international airport and have even stationed Puerto Rican officers at airports in New York City and Philadelphia, to detain Dominicans trying to pass as Puerto Ricans” (Duany, Blurred 192). With the increased militarization of the region over the years, apprehension and deportation have become more common.4 In fact, Graziano cites “enhanced border enforcement” as one of the reasons why “Puerto Rico has become more of a final destination than a stopover” (68). Whether it is the threat or the reality of apprehension by border enforcement, its militarization (a product of its colonial status) renders Puerto Rico a border. Puerto Rico thus reflects the same type of fluidity ascribed to water in the circuits of undocumented intra-Caribbean migration: it functions as both border and bridge. The same can be argued about Isla de Mona (Mona Island), part of the Puerto Rican archipelago that functions as both border and bridge. Mona and Monito Islands are located along the Mona Passage, a “fast-flowing, deep, and treacherous 120 kilometer wide” stretch of sea that separates Hispaniola from Puerto Rico, and “through which the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean meet” (Samson and Cooper 32). The archaeologists Alice Samson and Jago Cooper describe it as follows: Mona itself, is a small 50 km2 plateau, 10 km from east to west, and 7 km from north to south, roughly heart-shaped, and described aptly as a “floating fortress” due to steep cliffs, up to 90 meters in height, that rise up around its perimeter and descend to beaches in the south and southwest. The island currently has thin, patchy soils, with 90 percent of Mona and Monito devoid of soil cover, a xerophytic vegetation, maritime climate, and no surface freshwater sources. (32)

In many ways, one can say that Isla de Mona has been erased from the Puerto Rican imaginary, at least in modern times. Its absence from Puerto Rican arts and letters is telling of this silence. One of the only books written about the island is the memoir Viaje a la

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Isla de la Mona, published in 1884 by Don Juan Brusi y Font, a Spanish immigrant living in Puerto Rico, and republished in 1997 with a prologue by the ethnographer Jalil Sued Badillo. Don Juan Brusi y Font tells the story of his family voyage to Mona. His travels were the result of his curiosity and desire to hunt for wildlife. While his journey differs from the forced migrations examined in these pages, his descriptions reveal some of the dangers that unauthorized migrants face. Describing the moment when they reach the waters between Mona and Monito, the narrator says: “El contraste de las diferentes corrientes, producía un tan singular hervidero en las aguas que, muy pronto llegamos a convencernos de que nuestra quilla apenas avanzaba un paso” (The contrast of the different currents produced such turbulence in the waters that we were convinced that our keel would not advance further) (4). The clash of currents slows down the boat to the point that they are stuck. Later on, he remembers how one of the boys in the boat almost lost an arm, which was hanging out of the boat, when a shark tried to bite him. This scene is an early illustration of the dangers of navigating in the shark-infested waters that surround Mona Island. As the first and one of the only works focusing on Mona Island, his text is a significant contribution that offers a glimpse into an island of the archipelago that has remained unknown and mysterious to most Puerto Ricans. The silence surrounding Mona is perpetuated by the school system, where Puerto Ricans only learn that the island is part of Puerto Rico and that it is a unique natural reserve, our own “Galápagos of the Caribbean.” For instance, a 1941 social studies textbook titled La Isla de Puerto Rico describes it as follows: Hay otras islas cercanas a Puerto Rico. Entre éstas está la Mona, al oeste. Tiene un área de 19.5 millas cuadradas y está a una distancia de cuarenta y dos millas de la costa sudoeste de Puerto Rico. Es calurosa. Hay muchos cabros y cerdos salvajes y abundan las aves de distintas clases. (There are other islands close to Puerto Rico. Among these is Mona, to the west. It has an area of 19.5 square miles and is forty-two miles from the southwest coast of Puerto Rico. It is hot. There are many wild goats and pigs and an abundance of birds of different kinds.) (Gaztambide and Arán 159)

Limited knowledge and lack of access have fueled many Puerto Ricans’ fascination over the years. These attitudes are evident in Fritz’s 2017 documentary, Mona, tesoro del Caribe (Mona, Treasure of the Caribbean)—which describes it as “a beautiful, distant, mythic and mysterious island.”5

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Echoing these ideas, Samson and Cooper state that “today, Mona has an equivocal reputation, on the one hand a cherished and pristine utopia in the consciousness of many Puerto Ricans, and on the other a dangerous dystopia where harsh environment challenges survival and hundreds of migrants per year risk their lives to gamble on a US visa” (53). Whether considered a utopia or a dystopia, Mona remains outside the Puerto Rican collective imaginary. However, it has not always been this way. As they explain, “This is a contemporary discourse, in which the physical environment is co-opted into the political and cultural narrative of isolation. However, reaching back into Mona’s deep past, the island was hardly remote, drawing some of the Caribbean’s early colonizers from 3000 BC” (54). In their study, the authors examine Mona’s five-thousand-year-long human history and paint a picture that offers a stark contrast to the island that we know. Today, Isla de Mona is an uninhabited natural reserve, where the only constant human presence is that of rangers from the US Department of Natural and Environmental Resources. It is an important destination for scientific—especially archaeological, biological, ecological, and marine— research. Highly restricted access to the island guarantees protection of its flora and fauna while perpetuating the symbolic distance that exists between it and the main island of Puerto Rico. But it was not always uninhabited, nor did it feel isolated. Thousands of years ago, as Fritz’s documentary examines, “it was a ceremonial center for the Taínos, the original inhabitants,” who created pictograms in its caves (Romero). Samson and Cooper’s archaeological study of mark-making in Mona’s caves and other ruins reveals a high level of human activity on the island. For instance, the finding of late pre-Columbian ball courts “indicate shared ritual and social practices encompassing eastern Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands” (54). “The circulation of social valuables, and regular traffic across the Mona Passage,” they explain, “suggest deep family genealogies spanning the sea gap” (54). After the Spanish conquest, different groups made it their home. The island may have been the “home to a Cimarron population, or escapees of African descent,” a detail that underscores the Hispanophone Caribbean’s central—though often unacknowledged—role in the history of the transatlantic slave trade (Samson and Cooper 45). Pirates (including the infamous Puerto Rican pirate Cofresí) also stopped there, and in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, it served as a “station for barracking enslaved Africans in ruined houses whilst waiting to be sold to sugar producing islands” (45). There is evidence that it also became a stockpile or provision center during colonial times. Mona also became

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a guano-extracting center during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (46). Monito Island, similar to the island municipality of Vieques, became a bombing range for the US military after World War II, illustrating the violence that US Empire has historically exerted on its colony (47). As these details show, Mona’s function has varied throughout history, and it has not always been as invisible as it is today. Learning about the rich history of the island in pre-Columbian and the early colonial period illustrates “how Mona’s boundaries were differently configured and connected through time, and how remoteness and connectivity are historically produced, and play on the affordances of the physical and geographical setting” (54). Though in the past it functioned as an integral part of the Puerto Rican and Caribbean archipelagos, more recently, its perceived remoteness and isolation render it virtually invisible. The Mona Passage was also a vital waterway for the Indigenous peoples who had been circulating within the region for thousands of years before the European conquest. With the arrival of the Spaniards, and the transatlantic slave trade, traffic in the Mona Passage escalated: “Europeans, enslaved Africans, and Indigenous Caribbean and South American individuals were constantly moving, and being moved, through and around the Mona Passage in the early decades of the sixteenth century” (Samson and Cooper 42). During colonial times, human traffic across the Mona Passage involved the forced displacement of Indigenous and enslaved Africans. As Samson and Cooper explain, “The Mona Passage continued to play a significant historical role in European voyaging and imperial expansion in the early colonial period, and was the main route into the Americas and stage for trans-Atlantic confrontations throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (31). For centuries, the region remained important for commercial and military purposes. Today, forced migration continues to take place in the area with Dominicans, Haitians, and Cubans—most of them Afro-descendants—trying to reach Puerto Rico. Through the lens of Wright’s epiphenomenal time, it is possible to see how the “now” (unauthorized migration) correlates to the history of the transatlantic slave trade. In other words, it allows us to envision the Mona Passage as a symbolic extension of the Middle Passage. Presently, the Mona Passage “has become a major entry route into U.S. territory for alien smugglers, after the land frontier with Mexico” (Duany, Blurred 193). Still, the most common type of unauthorized voyage excludes “professional smugglers” and consists of trips improvised by family and friends, the so-called viajes de familia, or family voyages (Graziano 37, 39).6 Over the years, thousands have tried to cross the Mona Passage, often without the know-how, and an undetermined number have died in the process.

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For those who cross successfully, the Mona Passage represents a bridge; for those who lose their lives, it constitutes a barrier. But Mona Island itself becomes a border when yolas capsize along its beaches, or when unscrupulous smugglers swindle their passengers by dropping them off on the island, telling them that they have arrived in Puerto Rico. Given its distance from the main island, as well as the extreme conditions that characterize this deserted island, survival is almost impossible for stranded migrants. Increased militarization has contributed to the bordering of the Mona Passage, making it more difficult to successfully cross this stretch of sea. According to Graziano, “In July 2006, Department of Homeland Security agencies in Puerto Rico formalized a collaboration known as the Caribbean Border Interagency Group (CBIG). Its purpose was to more effectively impede undocumented migration across the Mona Passage and, more broadly, to secure the borders of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands” (179). The multilayered surveillance approach followed by CBIG means that “cutters patrol the Mona Passage, planes and helicopters surveil from above, FURA [Puerto Rico Police Joint Forces of Rapid Action] and CBP boats are closer to shore, and Border Patrol is on land” (180). These tactics have yielded a “70 or 80 percent” interdiction rate (180). For most undocumented migrants, Mona Island is an impassable border. For others, the porousness of that border renders Mona Island a bridge. For instance, before the repeal of the “wet foot/dry foot” policy, the case of Cuban migrants offered a stark contrast to that of other unauthorized migrants stranded on Mona Island. As I explain in chapter 1, US Cuba migration policy has been exceptional. They were welcomed into the country after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, and through the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 were granted permanent-resident status after one year. President Clinton’s repeal of the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1995—as a result of the rafter crisis of 1994—led to the “wet foot/dry foot” policy. Until January 2017, when President Obama revoked it, Cubans smuggled to Mona and Monito Islands would be “shuttled by Coast Guard cutters or Customs and Border Protection helicopters to the main island and then freed” (Graziano 171). In other words, reaching Mona or Monito Islands—two islands of the Puerto Rican archipelago—was considered “dry foot,” and therefore they were allowed to stay in Puerto Rico. As Graziano explains, “The Mona Passage en route to Puerto Rico is well patrolled but Cuban migrants (unlike Dominicans) need only reach Mona or Monito Islands, which are about midway in the crossing. These small islands are possessions of Puerto Rico and therefore of the United States, so landings on them qualify Cubans for parole and eventual residency.”7 But this pattern changed. With the rise of

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Cuban smuggling to Mona Island, border enforcement agencies began to increase security through Operation Monkey Wrench in 2006. This operation was implemented for a short period to prevent Cubans’ smuggling to Mona Island, given that under the “wet foot/dry foot” policy, Cubans intercepted at sea—those who never made it to Mona or Monito Islands—could be repatriated and not allowed into Puerto Rico (Graziano 210, 169). The more Cubans they could intercept, the more they could repatriate. The manner in which the “wet foot/dry foot” policy has played out among Cubans in and around Mona and Monito Islands underscores the ways in which these islands have functioned as borders and bridges. To understand the role that Puerto Rico plays either as a springboard or a final destination among Dominicans—and other Caribbean unauthorized migrants—we must consider how the island has been constructed in the Dominican imaginary. Puerto Rico’s status as a US commonwealth and its proximity—physical and symbolic—to the Dominican Republic are factors that attract Dominican migrants. Media and popular culture have also encouraged migration to Puerto Rico (Pessar, Visa; Martínez–San Miguel, Caribe). For instance, “American television, movies, and advertising foster the illusion that the promised land is promised to you, too, and that a better life awaits you abroad” (Graziano 89). Because Puerto Rico is symbolically associated with the United States, it is envisioned as a “promised land.” Rejecting that their motivation might be the “American Dream,” since it “is hardly on [Dominican migrants’] minds” (14), Graziano explains: “They are motivated more by a Dominican dream: the alleviation of the struggle for subsistence, acquisition of a decent home (‘decent’ by poor Dominican standards), improvement of the situation for the next generation (‘a future for my children’), and a modest share of disposable income for functional (appliances, motorbikes) and luxury (jewelry, better clothing) consumer goods” (14). Regardless of whether one calls it the “American” or the “Dominican Dream,” those who escape extreme poverty do so in search of survival. In their minds, Puerto Rico offers the possibility of redemption. Along with the role that the media plays, the narrative of success perpetuated by migrants and return migrants shapes the depiction of Puerto Rico in the Dominican imaginary (Pessar, Visa; Torres-Saillant, “El retorno”; and Flores). Perhaps as a way to counter the stigma of migration, examined more in-depth in chapter 3, migrants “who return to the Dominican Republic tend to exaggerate their success abroad” (Graziano 86). Those who are not able to return often exaggerate their achievements among family and friends. This performance of prosperity, as I call it, relies on perceptions and visual markers of wealth (clothes, shoes, accessories, gadgets, etc.) that often serve

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as proof of a migrant’s economic success. As Graziano explains, “Narrative constructs a reality for people who hear similar stories repeatedly and who retell them as motivational discourse” (87). Word-of-mouth and media representations of Puerto Rico have perpetuated and attracted Dominican unauthorized migration for many decades. Unfortunately, this success narrative clashes with reality because “Migrants are motivated by idealized expectations that have little in common with the realities confronted upon arrival” (Graziano 86). Undocumented migrants in Puerto Rico—especially Dominicans and Haitians—face serious challenges such as xenophobia, racism, discrimination, unemployment, exploitation, and the fear of deportation. They are racialized as Black in a society defined by anti-Blackness. Like the rest of Spain’s former colonies in the Caribbean and Latin America, Puerto Rican identity has been construed on the idea of Taíno (Indigenous), African, and European racial mixture (mestizaje), which privileges white/European ancestry and erases African roots. As I have argued elsewhere, racial democracy is one of the principal tenets of the foundational myth of la gran familia puertorriqueña (the great Puerto Rican family), which continues to dictate the symbolic borders of the nation: “Today, claims of mestizaje and racial democracy in Puerto Rico still dominate racial discourses and continue to conceal the desire for the blanqueamiento (whitening) of its highly intermixed population” (Moreno, Family 52). The hispanismo and blanqueamiento (i.e., white supremacy) that undergird the heteropatriarchal ideal of la gran familia exclude Blacks, Afro-descendants, and other racialized others—whether they are Puerto Rican or not (Torres; Moreno, Family; Lloréns, Imaging; Godreau). To make matters worse, the illusion of a society built on the ideal of racial harmony (“we’re a family”) has led many to deny that racism and colorism exist in Puerto Rico (Y. Rivero; Santiago-Díaz; Lloréns et al.). As Bárbara AbadíaRexach puts it, “The myth of the great Puerto Rican family problematically homogenizes Puerto Ricans and effectively silences denunciations of racism, even though prejudice and racial discrimination are kept alive in the archipelago.” La gran familia has been successful in cementing anti-Blackness as foundational to puertorriqueñidad. Blanqueamiento has led many Puerto Ricans “to represent Dominicans as darker-skinned than themselves” (Duany, Blurred 205). As Duany explains, “Dominicans in Puerto Rico thus often experience intense stigmatization, stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. The racialization of Dominicans as black justifies their social exclusion—from jobs, housing, schooling, and marriage, even in the second generation. In all these areas, the coupling of dominicano with negro hampers the immigrants’ incorporation” (Blurred

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205). Clearly, anti-Blackness in Puerto Rico has led to the exclusion of Dominicans (including second and third generations), Haitians, and other Black people from the Puerto Rican national imaginary. But as Duany explains, anti-Blackness is not the only factor behind their exclusion: The causes of the growing anti-Dominican discourse include the immigrants’ legal condition (many are undocumented), socioeconomic composition (most are lower class), gender (the majority are women), and, above all, racial appearance (most are black or mulatto). The figure of the Dominican—especially the undocumented immigrant—appears as the Other par excellence: a strange, dangerous, and incomprehensible character who occupies a marginal and clandestine status. (Puerto Rican 27)

These biases, in fact, have resulted in the criminalization of Dominicans in Puerto Rican society.8 Prejudice and xenophobia against them have played an important role in solidifying Puerto Rican cultural identity.9 Martínez– San Miguel echoes this point when she suggests that the hostility against Dominicans has created a frontera intranacional (154). A cultural manifestation of this frontera intranacional is the prevalence of anti-Dominican jokes, which serve to reaffirm a sense of belonging to the Puerto Rican ethnic community (Caribe 157). The fact that most of these jokes are about Dominican Blackness suggests that “el puertorriqueño utiliza al dominicano para exteriorizar sus prejuicios contra las personas de raza negra, mientras cuestiona la similitud racial de estas dos poblaciones caribeñas que comparten las mismas zonas del mapa urbano en el municipio de San Juan” (the Puerto Rican uses the Dominican to exteriorize his/her prejudices against Black people, while questioning the racial similarities between these two Caribbean nations that share the same zones of San Juan’s urban map) (156). A less obvious manifestation is the emergence of gated communities across the island, which, although not exclusively designed to enclose Dominicans, still target them, given that, as Zaire Dinzey-Flores observes, they “are erected in the interest of an upper class and, in modern cities, of the primarily white” (10). An even more blatant manifestation of this frontera intranacional is the fact that “Dominican immigrants are subject to police profiling and brutality in Puerto Rico and, in an age of increased scrutiny by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are also being targeted for deportation on the island” (Alford, “Police”). Despite the fact that it “is difficult to calculate the exact number of unauthorized [Dominican] immigrants for Puerto Rico as a whole, because field studies have focused on small and statistically unrepresentative samples,”

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some estimates place that number between 200,000 and 300,000 (Duany, Blurred 194).10 To be sure, there has been a growing and significant Dominican presence in Puerto Rico for decades. That presence affirms Puerto Rico’s central role as a springboard or a final destination among Caribbean migrants, including Cubans and Haitians. From the mid-twentieth century until the first decade of the new millennium, Puerto Rico attracted legal and undocumented migrants alike. However, the 2008 economic crisis—which has extended into the present—as well as the catastrophic devastation caused by Hurricanes Irma and María, the months-long swarm of earthquakes that began on December 28, 2019, and the COVID-19 pandemic have called into question the view of Puerto Rico as a promised land by unveiling the violence to which it has been subjected for over a century by US Empire (Negrón-Muntaner and Grosfoguel; Duany, Puerto Rican; Grosfoguel; Klein; Lloréns, “Ruin”; Bonilla and LeBrón). Speaking of the multilayered violence exerted on Puerto Rico, Lloréns and Stanchich state: “The perpetration of ‘slow violence’ through enactment of neoliberal policies that have increased dispossession via the loss of life, land, and environmental health—while global financial capital continues to accumulate wealth at the expense of Puerto Rico’s communities—has long inscribed Puerto Rican lives as expendable and the archipelago as a ‘necropolis’” (92; my emphasis). Their argument lays bare a connection that, though often overlooked, exists between Puerto Rico and the rest of the Hispanophone Caribbean as survivors of US Empire violence. Similar to the wasted lives—a product of neoliberal capitalism and globalization—that transit across the Caribbean without documents, Puerto Rican lives are equally “expendable” and “redundant” in the eyes of US Empire. This is evident in the incompetent response of the federal government to the disasters caused by the hurricanes and the earthquakes in recent years, which have led to mass migration, including to the Dominican Republic (thus reversing previous migration patterns). In fact, in contrast to the Great Migration period, the “post economic crisis exodus” (or New Millennium migration) “is already deeper and more prolonged than any period in Puerto Rico’s post-war history” (Centro, “Enduring Disasters” 9). As Lloréns and Stanchich observe, The current historic exodus from the island also indicates that the contemporary political and economic model of the US territory has collapsed under the weight of neoliberal dispossession, shifting from the so-called Free Associated State to a colonial necropolis of second-class US citizens who can freely move to the 50 states, as a decade-long economic migration

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overlaps with climate change refugees whose very survival was at stake in the months after Hurricane Maria. (82)

Lloréns and Stanchich’s focus on the conflation of the effects of colonialism, neoliberalism, and climate change in Puerto Rico invites the reader to consider the ways in which Puerto Ricans are resisting and engaging in decolonial practices to achieve environmental justice. The crises that have led to the mass exodus of Puerto Ricans from the archipelago clearly destabilize Puerto Rico’s alleged privileged status as a US commonwealth. Although it is too early to know the impact that these events have had on unauthorized migration to Puerto Rico in recent years, it is safe to assume that patterns have shifted at some points. While we still need more data to understand the effects of these crises, signs point to an uptick in unauthorized migration from the Dominican Republic in 2020 (Cortés Chico). In this chapter I examine texts by the Puerto Rican writers Ana Lydia Vega and Mayra Santos Febres, and the Puerto Rico–based Cuban author Mayra Montero that depict water crossings in the Mona Passage during the height of unauthorized migration to Puerto Rico in the 1980s and 1990s. Tracing their movements produces revised cartographies that reveal the archipelago and resist US Empire hegemony in the region. To different degrees, the works examined also insist on centering the Hispanophone Caribbean within the epistemology of Middle Passage Blackness.

Between and aMong isLands in “encancaranuBLado” By ana Lydia vega Ana Lydia Vega’s foundational short story, “Encancaranublado,” offers a provocative reflection of intra-Caribbean unauthorized migration, horizontal hierarchies of power, and US Empire.11 Published in 1982, this story depicts the failed attempt of three undocumented men—Antenor (Haitian), Diógenes (Dominican), and Carmelo (Cuban)—to reach Miami. Their journey at sea ends with their interdiction by the US Coast Guard, at which point they encounter a Puerto Rican marine who offers them advice in Spanish. Most of the scholarship produced on Vega’s widely anthologized story focuses on the allegory of Caribbean politics and history as a product of colonialism, with the makeshift vessel an apt metaphor for the instability that characterizes the region (Vélez; Valerio-Holguín, “Postcolonial”; Martínez–San Miguel, Caribe). Critics have also emphasized the tensions between the characters—illustrative of what Aparicio calls “horizontal hierarchies”—that threaten the possibility of a “future Caribbean Federation,” as Vega puts it in the book’s dedication. Yet, while internal strife

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renders the story a “failed allegory of Caribbean regionalism,” it is evident that “U.S. imperialism [is] one of the obstacles” (DeLoughrey, Routes 38). Here, I offer a new reading of Vega’s foundational story because most critics have failed to note that “Encancaranublado” is, as far as I know, the first Puerto Rican and Hispanophone Caribbean narrative that depicts the actual process of undocumented intra-Caribbean migration. This is not a trivial detail. Despite the long history of sea crossings from Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico and the Florida Keys, the theme of unauthorized maritime migration has remained largely absent from Puerto Rican letters. The story, therefore, examines a chapter of Hispanophone Caribbean history that tends to be erased because of the tendencies to privilege land over water (Nguyen 70) and to silence stories that center Blackness. By situating the action in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, the author highlights the sea as a nonhuman actor. Not only does history happen at sea, but both home and host societies are transformed as a result of the maritime migrations that the characters represent. Recalling the ideas that remoteness and isolation are linked to the “colonial imperative to erase islanders’ migratory histories,” Vega’s story pushes against the discursive monopoly that the Global North exerts over the insular regions of the Global South (DeLoughrey, “‘The litany’” 26). Through its depiction of their journey, “Encancaranublado” reveals the migrants’ agency of movement, that is, the power they wield when attempting the crossing. Moreover, the castaways’ movements across the sea shift our attention to the relation between and among islands that reveals the archipelago. If this is a form of “counter-mapping” (Stratford et al. 114), and countermapping is “central to the process of decolonizing the balkanization” of the Caribbean (DeLoughrey, “‘The litany’” 37), by depicting their sea crossing, Vega’s story engages in the symbolic decolonization of the region. A great deal of the story’s value lies in its portrayal of an unauthorized sea crossing. However, most of the scholarship produced has been concerned with other aspects of the text, including the author’s use of language and humor. While these are certainly important aspects of the text, the humorous tension that develops between the characters—which is grounded on witty uses of language—actually distracts the reader from grasping the severity of their circumstances. Two of the men—Diógenes and Carmelo—have already capsized when Antenor miraculously rescues them before they drown. Once in the vessel together, they face the constant threat of shipwreck and interception by the US Coast Guard, both of which eventually materialize. In addition to the present trauma, there is also the trauma that defined their lives in the past and that led them to risk their lives at sea. Because the story’s action transpires on a makeshift vessel—one that

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evokes Pedreira’s “nave al garete”—in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, the reader relies on the narrator’s descriptions and the characters’ dialogue to piece together their reasons for leaving their islands (77). Early on, the narrator observes the following about Antenor, who is Haitian: “Atrás quedan los mangós podridos de la diarrea y el hambre, la gritería de los macoutes, el miedo y la sequía” (14). (The putrid mangos, emblems of diarrhea and famine, the war cries of the macoutes, the fear, the drought—it’s all behind him now)12 (Vega, “Cloud” 202). Life in Haiti, as the narrator reveals, is plagued by hunger, poverty, illness, and the violence and terror of the dictatorship of Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier.13 After Antenor rescues Diógenes, the narrator recounts how despite their lack of communication—the former speaks Kreyol, and the latter, Spanish—the two island neighbors were able to convey the essence of their suffering: “Y cada cual contó, sin que el otro entendiera, lo que dejaba—que era poco—y lo que salía a buscar. Allí se dijo la jodienda de ser antillano, negro[14] y pobre. Se contaron los muertos por docenas. Se repartieron maldiciones a militares, curas y civiles. Se estableció el internacionalismo del hambre y la solidaridad del sueño” (14; my emphasis) (And each told the other, without either understanding, what he was leaving behind—which was very little—and what he was seeking. Then and there was spoken the royal pain of being Black, Caribbean and poor; deaths by the score were retold: clergy, military and civilians were roundly cursed; an international brotherhood of hunger and solidarity of dreams was established [“Cloud” 203]). The key words here are “antillano, negro y pobre” (Antillean, Black, and poor). With this phrase, Antenor and Diógenes emphasize their regional, racial, and class commonalities despite their different ethnic and national backgrounds, with the terms underscoring the effects of colonialism and US Empire in the region. From colonial times to the present, the Global North has relied on violence (exploitation and murder of Indigenous peoples, the transatlantic slave trade, invasion, neoliberalism, etc.) to extract resources (material and human) and enact political, economic, and military hegemony over the region. These violent histories have produced a Caribbean that can best be described as “negro y pobre.” In turn, global anti-Blackness guarantees that most of the Black and poor people who inhabit the Hispanophone Caribbean are rendered “disposable” by the Global North. As racialized “others”-turned-undocumented migrants, the characters in “Encancaranublado” embody the wasted lives that Bauman sees as a result of globalization and modernization. But as I argued in chapter 1, the waste-ification of those who are consid-

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ered “disposable” is not a dynamic limited to Global North–Global South relations; it also informs South–South relations. Horizontal hierarchies inform relations between Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Almost exclusively, Haiti is always perceived as occupying the lowest position among the islands of the Greater Antilles. These same dynamics play out among the characters. While Diógenes and Antenor are initially at a similar level—with Antenor slightly above because the boat “navegaba después de todo bajo bandera haitiana” (15) (was sailing after all under Haitian colors [203])—the dynamics quickly change once they rescue Carmelo. Tensions mount among the men to the point that Diógenes and Carmelo team up against Antenor. At first, they exclude him from their Spanish conversation (15), then they make disparaging comments about Haitians (16), and eventually, they physically intimidate him when they realize he is hiding provisions (16). In the end, they capsize as a result of their struggle, effectively putting an end to their dream of reaching the United States. Humor in the story distracts not only from the severe circumstances that forced the characters to flee their homelands but also from the lifethreatening conditions that characterize migration by boat, “the most physically and emotionally devastating form of forced migration” (Mannik 15). Being adrift in the middle of the sea is often an exercise in the capacity to confront extreme vulnerability. The foreshadowing title points to the greatest force that the characters confront: nature.15 It’s September, hurricane season, and the sea’s agitation is evident in the presence of sea urchins, jellyfish, and sharks (13), which herald suffering, danger, and possibly death. Other conditions, such as winds (“viento”), rain (“llovizna”), and the swell (“oleaje”) also add to the list of dangers that they face. Yet the most threatening of all is the sun—evident when the narrator describes the sky as a “caldero hirviente” (boiling cauldron)—focusing on the severe heat that can lead to death by dehydration and heatstroke. These threats correlate with the state of their “improvisada embarcación,” or makeshift vessel (13). This unseaworthy vessel is not equipped for the perilous journey; its sail, for instance, is a “guayabera,” a traditional button-down men’s shirt popular in the Hispanophone Caribbean and other parts of Latin America (13). Reminiscent of the makeshift balsas that Cuban rafters built using scraps during the balsero crisis of 1994, Antenor’s “bote” embodies the ambiguity of life and death. The narrator constantly emphasizes its instability—and thus the possibility of death—throughout the text. The phrases “el merengue del bote” (14) (the boat’s rocking merengue [202]), “Al botecito le entró con tal violencia un espíritu burlón” (14) (There came upon the little skiff a mocking, derisive spirit [202]), “la rumba que

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emprendió en el acto el bote” (15) (as the boat began to rhumba [203]), “el bote se remeneaba más que caderas de mambó” (18) (the boat was rocking like a mambo’s hips [205]), and “El bote parecía un carrito loco de fiesta patronal” (19) (the boat was like a crazy cart at a local fair) describe the boat’s movement playfully, erasing the symbolic and real violence of their journey. Musical and dance metaphors culturally mark the boat’s Caribbean roots. But at a deeper level, the metaphors’ references to Afro-religious beliefs and musical forms underscore the characters’ shared African heritage despite their performance of whiteness. The vessel reflects the precariousness of their wasted lives as poor afrocaribeños. In the resolution, the US Coast Guard ship calls attention to the power differentials between the Global North (US Empire) and the Global South (Caribbean archipelago). The size and stability of the US ship starkly contrast with the makeshift vessel that capsized, endangering the migrants’ lives. The ship functions as a symbol of US Empire; it embodies the United States’ hegemony over the Caribbean. As DeLoughrey has observed, Vega and others have “depicted heavy waters in the steel ships of the United States military that interdict Caribbean migrants” (“Heavy” 708). By examining the relation between “surveillance, militarization, and waste,” DeLoughrey concludes that “the militarization of the sea has made it into a basin for waste” (“Heavy” 707). Vega’s US Coast Guard ship draws a clear distinction between surveillant/surveilled, white/Black, colonizer/colonized, Global North/Global South, and the valuable/disposable. The captain’s order to “Get those niggers down there and let the spiks take care of ’em” illustrates the power differentials at play within the US ship (20). The use of this insult to refer to Antenor, Carmelo, and Diógenes signals not only the captain’s white supremacist and racist views—reflective of those of US Empire—but also the fact that under the colonizer’s gaze, the three men are racialized as Black and their ethnic and national differences are erased. The phrase “get those niggers down there”—referring to the ship’s hold—echoes the positionality of enslaved Africans as human cargo during the Middle Passage. This point is further emphasized when the Puerto Rican crewman tells them, “Aquí si quieren comer tienen que meter mano y duro. Estos gringos no le dan na gratis ni a su mai” (20) (If you want to feed your belly here, you’re going to have to work and I mean work hard. A gringo don’t give anything away. Not to his own mother [“Cloud” 206]). His warning to them—all Afro-descendants—is a reminder that as dehumanized colonial others, their value is simply a measure of productivity. The fact that the warning comes from a Puerto Rican—who occupies the lower position on the ship in relation to the Anglo crew—is significant for

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several reasons. For one, it establishes a symbolic connection between the men despite the fact that, unlike the rest, he is not an unauthorized migrant. They are on the same boat, literally and figuratively, and all are at the mercy of the United States. Although the Puerto Rican is perceived as having an advantage (given his US citizenship and exemplified by the fact that he is, after all, navigating in a US Coast Guard ship), his lower position in the hierarchy and the racism to which he is subjected are factors that unite them. However, the solidarity that emerges between the men is quite fragile. The Puerto Rican’s presence signals his colonized status, but it is also a reminder of his (and Puerto Rico’s) compulsory participation in the surveillance and militarization of the region. My reading of “Encancaranublado” by Ana Lydia Vega focuses on the experience and process of unauthorized maritime migration. While scholars have commented on the trope of the Caribbean Sea as a frontera (ValerioHolguín, “Postcolonial”; Carson, “El Caribe”), few have considered the role it plays as a liquid bridge between the islands. On the one hand, the narrator refers to that stretch of ocean as a “mollerudo brazo de mar,” or as the sea’s muscular arm, to convey its strength, and therefore the danger it poses to those who try to cross it (13). This metaphor is most likely a reference to the Canal de Mona, considered one of the roughest and more treacherous stretches of water in the world. In this sense, the sea and all the dangers that lurk underneath (sharks) and above (US Coast Guard) it function as a border. On the other hand, the water is a conduit for those trying to escape. Despite the dangers of the crossing, the narrator explains that “con todo y eso, la triste aventura marina es crucero de placer a la luz del recuerdo de la isla” (14) (For all its menace, this miserable adventure at sea is like a pleasure cruise compared to his memories of the island [“Cloud” 202]). The contrast between the dangers that Antenor left behind and the dangers of the journey remind us that his journey is a search for survival. By crossing the sea, he leaves behind an almost certain death and replaces it with the hope of life. The sea embodies the tension between life and death by simultaneously functioning as border and bridge.

FaiLed crossings in Boat PeoPLe By Mayra santos FeBres Undocumented intra-Caribbean migration is also the focus of Boat People, a collection of twenty poems by the renowned Afro–Puerto Rican poet, author, and intellectual Mayra Santos Febres.16 In these poems, Santos Febres addresses the before, during, and after of unauthorized maritime migration

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to humanize the undocumented. It is hard to overstate the collection’s importance, given the prevailing racism against Dominicans and Haitians in Puerto Rico and the virtual absence of this topic from Puerto Rican literature. Boat People paints the dire circumstances of migration by focusing on the violence of the crossing. The constant tension between life and death is palpable when the Caribbean Sea—and Puerto Rico—cease to be bridges and become border(lands). For the Dominican men and women who populate the poems of Boat People, the sea represents hope and life. The Caribbean Sea is a liquid bridge that offers the possibility of survival. On the other side lies Puerto Rico, a stepping-stone to the continental United States, sometimes a final destination, but almost always a presence in the migrant Dominican imaginary. The search for survival is the reason why thousands have risked their lives trying to cross. But as the poems reveal, the sea is treacherous. From one moment to the next it transforms from bridge to border, often claiming the lives of its victims. Unlike Vega’s story “Encancaranublado,” most of the poems in Boat People depict failed sea crossings that end with death. In Boat People, the personification of the sea highlights its function as border. The poems often depict the sea as a female entity, mirroring Santería’s orisha Yemayá17—the Black Virgen de Regla’s counterpart—which David H. Brown describes as “the sea, the archetypal mother of the world, the source of all life, a great enveloping mother and nurturer, and also a warrior (as the sea is rough) and strong ‘witch’” (217, 371).18 By feminizing the sea, these poems also reflect the global and centuries-old practice of associating the land with the masculine and the sea/water with the feminine (DeLoughrey, Routes). References to “fauce azul” (blue throat) in “flota mi morenito” (l. 23) and to “la gran tripa del mar” (belly of the sea) in “en el vientre de los nuevos animales” (l. 8) serve to personify the sea, casting it as a female being/nonhuman actor that swallows the migrants.19 Moreover, its description as “una hembra que engulle” (a female who devours) in “aqui al fondo danzan concejales” characterizes it as an entity that not only devours and swallows but also is (sexually) insatiable (ll. 53–54), tapping into the association between Yemayá and motherhood. In the last poem of the collection, “aqui al fondo,” an apostrophe to a morenito, the lyric voice ends saying: esta es tu casa — morenito ven — deja que te abrace al fin estás conmigo al fin puedo dejarte de embrujar

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(this is your home — morenito come — let me finally hold you you’re finally with me I can finally stop to bewitch you). (ll. 92–95)

These words posit the sea as an enchantress, echoing Yemayá’s attribute as a “witch.” She lures the morenito to the bottom of the sea until he finally heeds her call. He is now at home, with her, forever. But “el mar es insaciable” (the sea is insatiable), as the poetic voice reminds us in “aqui al fondo,” so the cycle must continue to repeat itself (l. 63). Morenito/morenita, rendered as terms of endearment through the addition of the diminutive, denote various degrees of Blackness. In addition, the use of the term “mulato/a,” which also appears repeatedly in the poems, racializes the migrants as Black. References to tigere (tigre, or tíguere)20 (in “flota mi morenito”) and tigra (in “ah si morenita, véndeme tu carne por un beso”), on the other hand, are both gendered ethnic (Dominican) and socioeconomic (poor/working class) markers. Tígueres, according to Ramírez, embody “an excessive masculinity” that “stems from [their] nonwhite status” (134). The tigra, or tíguera, is also a “subject who has to hustle to make ends meet and to move up the socioeconomic ladder,” but she “avoids the hypermasculine connotation of tigueraje while retaining the hustle, playfulness, and style central to it” (Ramírez 172). She sums it up by saying that “tígueras or Lolas represent impropriety in any traditional sense of Dominican femininity” (172). The intersectionality of their identities as poor people of color from the Global South renders tígueres and tígueras “disposable”; they embody the wasted lives produced by modernity. As such, they are subjected to a surveillance apparatus that polices the borders between them and those who are not disposable (DeLoughrey, “Heavy” 704). References to tigra and morenita signal the intersection of race/ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, revealing the additional layers of violence to which Dominican undocumented women migrants are subjected in the process of migration. The poem “ah si morenita, véndeme tu carne por un beso” (oh yes morenita, sell me your flesh) illustrates how sexual exploitation is part and parcel of unauthorized migration when the poetic voice, who appears to be a smuggler, tells the morenita: “por un papel que diga que naciste, / véndeme tus profundidades de molusco” (for a birth document / sell me your mollusk-like deeper parts [ll. 1–2]). The poem exposes the threats of sexual harassment, assault, and rape of undocumented women,

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which are all too common for any female-presenting border crosser. Sexual violence is another aspect of border crossing that echoes the violence of the Middle Passage. In Wicked Flesh, Johnson examines the gendered violence exerted against African women and girls, affirming that “imperial desire for black and female flesh caught enslaved women and girls in its crosshairs” (83). There was a “culture of sexual exploitation that attended Atlantic slaving, permeated slave ships, and afflicted women and girls on the ships” (87). While the context, circumstances, and scale of gendered violence differ between the Middle Passage and today’s unauthorized migration in the Caribbean, the exploitation of women represents a link between past and present. The theme of sexual violence against undocumented Dominican women migrants is also a concern in Miriam Mejía’s “El viaje” (1997), Ana-Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt (2006), and Ángela Hernández’s “Los mercaderes del amor” (2007). The devaluation of unauthorized migrants’ lives is a constant, whether they are crossing waters or the Mexico-US border. In The Land of Open Graves (2015), De León uses the concept of “bare life,” or “individuals whose deaths are of little consequence,” to talk about the devaluation of migrants’ lives along the Mexico-US border (28).21 Similar to Bauman’s concept of wasted lives, bare life signals the border crossers’ dehumanization. As De León explains, in addition to historical context, the suspension of a migrant’s humanity is influenced by location: “The US-Mexico border has long existed as an unspoken space of exception where human and constitutional rights are suspended in the name of security” (The Land, 68). Following De León, I argue that the Caribbean Sea represents another “space of exception” where unauthorized migrants are targeted by both local and US security enforcement, as well as by other actors—human (smugglers, drug and sex traffickers) and nonhuman alike—although not always in the name of security. The funneling of undocumented migrant traffic through hostile territory across the Mexico-US border in Arizona—officially implemented in 1994 through operation Prevention Through Deterrence (PTD)—constitutes an example of both necropolitics (“killing in the name of sovereignty”) and necroviolence (“violence performed and produced through the specific treatment of corpses” (De León, The Land 66, 69). He explains, Building on this idea that taphonomy[22] is a social process constructed of equal parts human and nonhuman, animal and mineral, living and dead, I argue that the postmortem events that affect the bodies of migrants in the desert are a form of necroviolence largely outsourced to nature and the en-

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vironment but intimately tied to Prevention Through Deterrence, territorial sovereignty, and the exceptional (i.e., killable and disposable) status the U.S. government ascribes to undocumented border crossers. (73)

De León’s observations highlight the intersection between violence, surveillance, US Empire, and nature on the bodies of migrants. The main contrast, however, is that necroviolence in this case takes place along a limited border stretch in Arizona (through which migration has been diverted), while in the context I examine it extends across the vastness of the Caribbean Sea. That said, most Dominicans, Haitians, and Cubans trying to reach Puerto Rico cross through the Mona Passage. Therefore, it could be argued that undocumented traffic is naturally funneled (not artificially like in Arizona) through this sea corridor. In addition, instead of one specific policy—such as PTD in the Mexico-US border—there are multiple US and island-specific structural forces such as anti-Blackness, neocolonialism, poverty, and state violence that are driving unauthorized maritime migration in the region. But in the end, the result is similar. Necroviolence is outsourced to nature; the ocean’s ecosystem acts upon the migrants’ bodies. Images of death and decomposition abound in Santos Febres’s poems. In most cases, death is the result of drowning, but the reasons for drowning vary, from capsizing, to heatstroke, to delirium. The poem “el aire falta” (air is lacking) stresses death by drowning and focuses on asphyxiation, contrasting the lack of air under the sea to the lack of air (i.e., life) on the surface due to hunger and violence. In “ah mi morenita cae” (ah, my morenita falls), the poetic voice describes the morenita’s drowning, and concludes by saying “y dale de comer a todo pez” (and feed every fish) (l. 18). The image of the morenita as nourishment for marine life exemplifies how necroviolence completely erases the wasted life that she represents. In these poems, images of dismemberment and mutilation convey the migrants’ dehumanization. Their remains are not whole; they are reduced to fragments (refuse) of the human beings they were once. Dehumanization is also present in “flota mi morenito” (float my morenito), a poem in which the migrant is reduced to his body parts at the hands of a nonhuman actor. The poetic voice describes his “panza” (belly) (l. 6), his “sonrisa tuerta” (twisted smile) (l. 7), and his “ojos picados de granpez” (eyes stung by fish) (l. 8). In addition to his missing finger, the voice notes: te falta varón un canto de tu precioso molusco al que le crecen respiraderos de coral

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(you’re missing man a piece of your precious mollusk where coral is now growing). (ll. 14–16)

The metaphor highlights his compromised manhood—he is missing parts of his sexual organs—thus rendering the feminized sea into an emasculating force. The image of growing coral on his groin reflects how his remains have become an integral part of the marine ecosystem. The same can be said about the rest of his body, described as “lleno de cangrejos alimentados” (full of fed crabs), emphasizing how necroviolence is perpetrated by the sea as a nonhuman actor (l. 1). The poems in the collection show how sea crossings, like desert crossings, often produce “ambiguous loss” or “a loss that remains unclear” (De León, The Land 71). But in contrast to the desert, where migrants’ remains can sometimes be found and extracted, those who die at sea are usually never found. Since maritime crossings—and the dead they produce—are invisible to most, art can offer a space to memorialize those lost lives. The poem “boat people,” which opens the collection, describes the migrants’ remains as “carnes trituradas” (ground meat) and “cuerpos hinchados como moluscos” (bodies swollen like mollusks) (ll. 1, 7). In “sin documentos” (without documents), gruesome images of the drowned remind us of what should never have been: “no son para dar de comer a las gaviotas” (they are not meant to be food for seagulls) (l. 3). The corpses are reventados por las costas del islote. de tripa tan azul que brilla como peces contra el sol (burst by the shores of the islet such blue guts that shine like fish against the sun). (ll. 5–7)

Death dehumanizes by transforming the migrants’ body parts into components of the marine ecosystem. Violence is outsourced to nature, a nonhuman actor that functions as gatekeeper, controlling the flow of unauthorized migration in the region. In Boat People, the flip side of the migrant being reduced to bare life is the humanization of the sea. DeLoughrey’s observation that “the ocean is humanized by the bodies of the past and present” can be applied to Santos Febres’s poems, which humanize the sea by calling attention to the re-

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mains of the undocumented that lie on the ocean floor (“Heavy” 711). The poem “flota mi morenito” echoes this idea when the poetic voice tells the morenito: pero tú flota panza arriba vuela por la ciudad de indocumentados (but you float fly with your belly up above the undocumented city). (ll. 19–21)

The “ciudad de indocumentados,” located on the ocean floor and populated with the remains of thousands of so-called wasted lives, humanizes the sea. Trapped between their point of departure and their destination, the drowned undocumented occupy a third space that signals the function of the sea as borderland. In some of the poems, the seafloor becomes a contact zone where the drowned coexist. Highlighting the diversity of cultures represented below, the voice in “sin documentos” (without documents) says: pero dícelos tú a ellos en patuá, en tigere, en congo, o en caribe (but you tell them in patois, in Dominican, in Congo, or in Caribbean). (ll. 11–13)

The reference to the dead migrants’ languages and dialects underscores the linguistic and cultural hybridity of the Caribbean. But perhaps more importantly, it calls attention to the complex and multilayered colonial history of the region. For instance, different varieties of “patuá” (patois) are spoken across the Caribbean, both in the Greater and the Lesser Antilles. Some varieties are English-based, such as the one spoken in Jamaica, and some are French-based, like the Creole spoken in St. Lucia. This linguistic diversity reflects the different histories of colonization across the Caribbean archipelago. The reference to the tigere—a Dominican archetype whose hypermasculinity often “becomes synonymous with Dominicanness itself”—serves to emphasize the presence of Dominicans in the “ciudad de indocumentados” (Ramírez 135). Allusions to “patuá” and “tigere” call attention to the

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complex histories of European (i.e., English, French, Dutch, and Spanish) conquest and colonization in the Caribbean. Similarly, the references to “congo”23 and “caribe”24 emphasize the African and Indigenous genealogy of modern Caribbean identities. “Congo” and “caribe” serve to link the (pre)colonial past with the present, highlighting a long history of intra-Caribbean migration. Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans—considered wasted lives—also perished crossing those waters. According to Turner et al., “Illness, insanity, hunger, dehydration, torture, revolt, suicide, and ship wreck led to the death of ~1.8 million Africans at sea during their Middle Passage” (2). The ocean floor holds the remains of the drowned, turning it into a repository of the violent but silenced histories that each victim represents. The enormous size of this underwater cemetery underscores the scale of the loss of life over the span of many centuries. The last poem of the collection, “aqui al fondo danzan concejales” (here at the bottom the aldermen dance) goes a step further by connecting the Mona Passage to the Middle Passage: ahogados todos del Caribe emisarios de las naciones del pasaje intermedio ciboneyes todavía suicidándose en rituales de mar disidentes de Trujillo, de Batista, Duvalier (drowned of the Caribbean emissaries of the nations of the Middle Passage Ciboneys still committing suicide in sea rituals dissidents of Trujillo, Batista, Duvalier). (ll. 1–6)

These verses, as well as other references to “cimarrones” (Maroons) and “ex-esclavos” (ex-slaves), explicitly link all who have drowned in the Caribbean more recently (“dissidents of Trujillo, Batista, Duvalier”) to those who perished during the Middle Passage. The poem, I would argue, reflects Wright’s concept of epiphenomenal time, allowing us to see how the “now” correlates to the past (Middle Passage) without being bound to a linear progress narrative. The effect is that the poem centers Middle Passage Blackness within the Hispanophone Caribbean, rejecting the discourse of white supremacy prevalent in these societies and claiming a space within Anglo-centered Middle Passage epistemologies. The poem insists on recuperating the history of the transatlantic slave trade, which is foundational

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to the emergence of the Caribbean we know today. By showing that “water is an element ‘which remembers the dead,’” these poems salvage fragments of that past and memorialize those lost lives (DeLoughrey, “Heavy” 704). By listing those who have died at sea in the Caribbean, “aqui al fondo danzan concejales” represents the seafloor—and thus the water—as a repository of silenced histories. With the exception of enslaved Africans and the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean (“ciboneyes,” “nitaínos”)—who represent the past—the other actors in the poem represent modernity. Such is the case with “prófugos” (fugitives), “traficantes” (traffickers), “panzallenadeparásitos” (bellies-full-of-parasites), “morenitos,” “sirvientas” (maids), “negros,” a “mulata,” and dissidents of Trujillo, Batista, and Duvalier. The diversity of the drowned reveals multiple reasons behind sea crossings. Many migrate due to hunger. Others escape due to state violence and persecution, as is evident in the references to the dictators Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Fulgencio Batista (Cuba), and Jean-Claude Duvalier (Haiti). The end of their dictatorships unleashed mass migratory waves from their respective countries, and additional ones have followed since then. When the poetic voice says, “las balas y el hambre son las madres de la sal” (bullets and hunger are the mothers of salt [maritime migration]), it reminds us that undocumented maritime migration is the product of desperation and the search for survival; unauthorized migration is forced migration (30). As DeLoughrey has pointed out, “The humanization of the sea is expressed by Caribbean inscriptions of wasted lives in the Middle Passage and by the ‘balls and chains gone green’ that mark ocean history” (“Heavy” 708). In Santos Febres’s poem, the history of the Middle Passage is reflected in the image of the green “concejales,” or aldermen (ghosts), who engage in the ritual of slowly walking the streets of the “ciudad indocumentada”— the undocumented city on the seafloor—searching for the “neo-ahogados” (newly drowned) to invite them to join them (ll. 31–37). Like Glissant’s “balls and chains,” the green color of the “concejales” reflects their ancient existence and the impact of time and the environment on their remains; they represent the afterlife of the Middle Passage. The poem links the victims of the Middle Passage to those of today’s middle passages. They band together because “es rito necesario” (it’s a necessary ritual) (l. 52) and they know that “el mar es insaciable” (the sea is insatiable) (l. 63). The ritual, dance, and unity convened by the spirits of African aldermen—actions that highlight their agency—signal an afterlife under the sea where “el hambre no molesta” (hunger does not bother you) (l. 81) and “el baile no termina” (the dance does not end) (l. 82). The poetic voice says,

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por eso bailan los viejos concejales. el baile llama al hambre necesaria para que nuevos cuerpos emigren a esta casa de agua (that is why the aldermen dance the dance calls the necessary hunger so that new bodies migrate to this house of water). (ll. 65–68)

Sometimes, the “viejos concejales” are more forceful in their calling of new victims, as when the poetic voice in “sin documentos” refers to the “ahogados legendarios” (legendary drowned) who “halan / a donde tienen su palenque” (pull / toward their palenque) (ll. 26–27). The reference to “palenque” recasts these crossings as modern marronage. The elders in “aqui al fondo” (here at the bottom) summon the living to join them on the seafloor, and by now, so many have heeded their call that they create a “puente infinito de cuerpos / que caen” (ll. 58–59). The image of the infinite bridge of bodies falling illustrates the ambiguity of the sea as both border(land) and bridge. With this, the poem comes full circle. In the beginning, the sea was envisioned as a bridge allowing unauthorized migrants to escape, but drowning revealed how the sea can also be a border. But in the space where the spirits of the drowned join together—on the seafloor—their remains create an infinite bridge uniting them across space and time. This image echoes Brathwaite’s theory that the unity is submarine. While “the surface of the ocean is unmarked by its human history and thus cannot be monumentalized,” the “puente infinito de cuerpos” and the “ciudad de indocumentados” are symbolic underwater monuments to the thousands of wasted lives lost at sea throughout history (DeLoughrey, Routes 21). The submarine unity they symbolize between and among islands defies the trope of isolation that the Global North (and US Empire) has deployed to balkanize—and thus colonize—the Caribbean. Submarine unity reveals the archipelago—the invisible or erased links between the islands— producing a decolonizing remapping of the region. Boat People also reveals the ambiguous function of Puerto Rico as border and bridge. For the undocumented migrants who survive the sea crossing— whether they consider it a springboard or a final destination—Puerto Rico demands that they continue to fight for their own survival. In this sense, Puerto Rico also embodies the life-death duality associated with the sea. While the Puerto Rican archipelago is associated with life and survival in the Dominican

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imaginary, as several of the poems show, that view glosses over the violence— real and symbolic—that unauthorized migrants face in Puerto Rico. In the poem “aqui al fondo danzan concejales,” the poetic voice states that “las balas y el hambre son las madres de la sal” (bullets and hunger are the mothers of salt), calling attention to how hunger and violence are push factors in undocumented migration in the Caribbean (l. 30). The contrast between life in the Dominican Republic and the vision of Puerto Rico as a promised land is the focus of the poem “queda el mar” (the sea remains). The poetic voice tells us that people in Hispaniola know that on the other side of the sea existe gente que come, GENTE QUE COME que duerme bien a sus orillas y hasta sueña (exist people who eat, PEOPLE WHO EAT who sleep well by the shore and even dream). (ll. 14–17)

Puerto Rico is described as that space “a su otro lado azul” (across its other blue side) (l. 13), a phrase that underscores the contrast between “here” (Dominican Republic) and “there” (Puerto Rico). Above all, Puerto Rico is a place where hunger, supposedly, does not exist. The use of uppercase letters when referring to “people who eat” conveys desperation and urgency. It is also a reminder that behind the extraordinary risk that undocumented migrants take crossing those blue waters lies a simple reason: hunger. In contrast to the extreme poverty of Hispaniola, Puerto Rico is imagined as a land of abundance where the migrant can sleep and dream—quotidian acts denoting peace, stability, and well-being. A similar vision is present in the poem “Tiburón de ónix” (onyx shark), where the poetic voice describes Puerto Rico as esta otra isla donde prometen una casa— una parcelita al menos donde comer y dormir (this other island where they promise you a house— at least a small plot of land to eat and sleep). (ll. 2–4)

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These verses simultaneously call attention to the similarities and differences between Puerto Rico (“this other island”) and the Dominican Republic. Their physical proximity translates into symbolic closeness, as the islands share similar climates, colonial histories, language, and cultures. These connections, in fact, constitute a significant attraction for many undocumented migrants, for whom Puerto Rico becomes a symbolic extension of their homeland. But as these verses suggest, there is a notable contrast between these places. The perception is that shelter, food, and peace are guaranteed in Puerto Rico. Besides these basic needs, the poem imagines returning home “después de haber comprado tantas cosas” (after having bought so many things) (l. 6), emphasizing economic stability and hinting at the consumerism that characterizes Puerto Rican society, a by-product of colonialism. Puerto Rico represents the potential to achieve the so-called American Dream, and for this reason, many undocumented migrants make it their final destination. In the Dominican imaginary, Puerto Rico is not only economically but also politically stable. This stability contrasts with the political repression in the Dominican Republic during Trujillo’s dictatorship and later under Joaquín Balaguer’s government. In “queda el mar,” the references to “macana” (nightstick), “sangre tierna” (tender blood), and “balas perdidas” (stray bullets) allude to the violence of these regimes, which the migrants are trying to escape. Similarly, when the poetic voice in “Tiburón de ónix” suggests that in Puerto Rico one can find “la carne libre de soldados / libre de detractores” (the flesh free of soldiers / free of detractors), it evokes the thirty years of the Trujillo dictatorship and the “Twelve Years” of political repression under Balaguer (ll. 15–16). These verses illustrate how state violence has been a driving force—along with extreme poverty—of Dominican undocumented migration. In contrast, Puerto Rico emerges as an idealized site devoid of violence. In addition to being false, this vision glosses over the different types of violence that unauthorized migrants confront in the Puerto Rican archipelago. “Tiburón de ónix” challenges the perception of Puerto Rico as a promised land by depicting it as a threatening space. The title and first verse— “Tiburón de ónix / control de acceso” (Onyx shark / access control)—use the metaphor of the shark to describe the role of Puerto Rico in the process of Dominican undocumented migration (l. 1). Sharks are one of the most dangerous threats that migrants face crossing the sea in yolas and balsas. These nonhuman actors function as a natural border that controls the flux of undocumented migration. By drawing a parallel between the shark and Puerto Rico, the poem suggests that surviving in “esta otra isla” (this other island) (l. 2) is akin to surviving the hazardous journey across the Mona Pas-

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sage. Symbolically, Puerto Rico functions as access control in the Caribbean, curtailing undocumented migration to the continental United States. The poem is built around the tension between life and death that Puerto Rico embodies. Puerto Rico is “this other island” that promises the migrant shelter and food. However, the reference to “dientitos que muerden sólo en sueños y no descuajan carne” (tiny teeth that only bite in their dreams and don’t pull out meat) indicates that their hunger persists in Puerto Rico (l. 14). In other words, the fantasy of abundance is shattered by the reality of poverty and destitution. The tension inherent in assuming a fake identity, which entails another border that must be crossed in Puerto Rico, is described as “la vida que es la piel de cambiarse el nombre / y parecerse al tipo del papel” (the life that is the skin of changing one’s name / and resembling the guy in the document) (ll. 9–10). A new life is achieved by successfully passing as another person, but adopting a new identity “para poder pasar” (in order to pass) entails more than just a name change (l. 19). To survive, Dominicans must be able to pass as Puerto Ricans, which in a racist society implies being perceived as less Black. This phrase, therefore, reflects how race is at the center of the frontera intranacional that divides Puerto Ricans from Dominicans, who are racialized as Black. The transformation of the individual at his very core is a common experience in assuming a fake identity. The stress and trauma it can cause is also the subject of other poems in the collection, such as “cambiar el nombre” (to change the name) and “llegas a la ciudad donde te pierdes” (you arrive to the city where you get lost). In “cambiar el nombre” / “de células de identidad” (to change one’s name / cells of identity) (l. 1), depicts this process as the loss of identity at its most basic level—the cellular level. Passing is akin to a symbolic death for the undocumented migrant, who must reinvent her/himself anew to survive and avoid deportation. Santos Febres’s “Tiburón de ónix” illustrates one of the key ironies of unauthorized migration in the Caribbean: “migrants in search of a better life discover that their promised land contains further poverty, exploitation and cultural shocks” (Ferguson 8). The last verses of the poem encapsulate the duplicity that Puerto Rico embodies: pasen yolas y llantas y balseros a esta isla de espejismos pulidos que cumple con su hambre y promete no morder . . . pero ñam

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(go ahead yolas, inner tubes, and rafters come to this island of polished mirages that fulfills its hunger and promises not to bite . . . but yum). (ll. 23–27)

Similar to the poem “aqui al fondo danzan concejales,” where the sea seduces the migrant until he jumps to the “ciudad ilegal” at the bottom of the sea, Puerto Rico lures undocumented migrants to reach its shores. The verse “pasen yolas y llantas y balseros” illustrates the perception that Dominican (yolas) and Cuban balseros have of Puerto Rico. Soon, however, they will discover that Puerto Rico is really an “isla de espejismos pulidos” (island of polished mirages). And like a mirage, it seduces the migrants with its promise of a better life. The voice’s observation that Puerto Rico “cumple con su hambre” (fulfills its hunger) plays on the phrase “cumplir con su promesa,” or to keep one’s promise. This revision of the original phrase correlates promise and hunger; Puerto Rico pledges to perpetuate the migrant’s poverty. Ironically, in Puerto Rico the migrant also finds poverty and hunger, which they have tried to escape. In the Dominican imaginary, Puerto Rico “promete no morder.” That is, the island is not considered a threat, in part because of its physical and symbolic proximity to the Dominican Republic. The connections between them often produce the illusion of solidarity, which is one of the myths that the poem effectively dismantles. The dissolution of the mirage and fantasy culminates with the onomatopoeic “pero ñam” (but yum), evoking the bite of the shark.25 Puerto Rico, similar to the shark and the sea, eventually attacks and swallows the undocumented migrant. Life in Puerto Rico, the poem suggests, is an illusion. Death, real or symbolic, always gets the migrant. “Tiburón de ónix” shows how violence does not end with the crossing, but continues even for those who arrive alive at their destination. By challenging the perception of Puerto Rico as a promised land, Santos Febres’s poems raise awareness about the dangers of the crossing. The entire collection can be read as a warning to those considering attempting the journey, but more importantly, it unveils the violence of the crossing and seeks to humanize and memorialize people who have been discarded as wasted lives.

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crossing the Mona Passage in Mayra Montero’s viaJe a isLa de Mona Viaje a Isla de Mona, a young adult (YA) novel by the Puerto Rico–based Cuban author Mayra Montero, is the first work to center Isla de Mona in the route of undocumented migration between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.26 Speaking about Latinx YA, Marilisa Jiménez García states that this genre reflects “how Latinx authors negotiate new ways of imagining social justice” (232). Despite being a novel for young readers, Viaje a Isla de Mona addresses belonging, ethnicity, undocumented migration, human trafficking, and violence. By placing Mona at the center of this narrative, the novel highlights the movement between and among the Dominican Republic, Mona, and the main island of Puerto Rico, thus revealing the Puerto Rican archipelago—which is often erased—and its role in undocumented intra-Caribbean migration. As the filmmaker Sonia Fritz tells us, Mona is “a place where migrants from Haiti and Cuba arrive.” That said, we know very little about the role that Mona Island plays in the circuit of undocumented migration—Haitian, Cuban, Dominican, or otherwise—to Puerto Rico. Reflecting on the invisibility that characterizes Mona, the scholar Javier Laureano observes: “Cuando una persona o grupo inmigrante queda varado en Mona (que es parte del Municipio de Mayagüez), de cierta forma coinciden dos mundos invisibles, el de un entorno natural olvidado y el de los grupos migrantes tachados de nuestra memoria colectiva” (When a migrant or migrant group is stranded in Mona [which is part of the municipality of Mayagüez], what we have in a sense is the conflation of two invisible worlds, that of a forgotten natural environment and that of the migrant groups that we have erased from our collective memory) (Facebook post, May 1, 2016). The merging of these two “invisible” worlds—Isla de Mona and unauthorized migrants—is the subject of Montero’s Viaje a Isla de Mona, the first contemporary literary work produced in Puerto Rico, in which Isla de Mona features as a nonhuman actor. It is also one of very few literary works that deal with the topic of undocumented intra-Caribbean migration. This novel breaks the silence about Isla de Mona and the role it plays as border and bridge in the circuit of intra-Caribbean undocumented migration. The novel tells the story of Tolio, Landi, Javier, Román, and Nelson, who embark on a quest to save Leodán, Tolio’s brother, whom they believe has been left to die in Isla de Mona by the traffickers transporting him from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico. They take Landi’s father’s boat to Isla de Mona, where they face a series of life-threatening dangers, until they are

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eventually rescued. Most of the action takes place in Isla de Mona, which is depicted as border and bridge to Puerto Rico and offers a humanized representation of the undocumented migrant. The novel opens with Ramón recounting how his friends woke him up before daybreak to steal Landi’s father’s boat to travel to Isla de Mona. Through flashbacks, we learn that Tolio, short for Anatolio, is Dominican, and that his brother is supposedly stranded in Mona. Tolio’s relationship with the other boys highlights some of the tensions—or fronteras intranacionales, to borrow the term from Martínez–San Miguel—that exist between Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in Puerto Rico. These are evident on Tolio’s first day of school. As the narrator states, “Anatolio dijo que se llamaba Anatolio, y en el salón estuvimos riéndonos tres días” (Anatolio said his name was Anatolio, and in our classroom we laughed about it for three days) (15). The children’s reaction upon hearing his name is one example among several that reveals the cultural differences that separate Tolio from his classmates. Aware that Tolio has been singled out because of his ethnicity, the teacher takes advantage of the opportunity to educate the children about the Dominican Republic. With this purpose in mind, she gives Tolio the opportunity to tell his story. He explains that his mother migrated alone so she could send money back to her family in Jimaní, the town across the Haiti-DR border where his family is from (17). At first, his mother took care of old people, and after she found a better job, she was able to send for her youngest son, Tolio. The plan was to be reunited with her oldest son in the near future. Once his classmates hear him tell his story of family separation, they display empathy and connect with him at a more personal level. In this way, his narrative foments a sense of solidarity that challenges the hardened fronteras intranacionales that exclude Dominicans from the Puerto Rican imaginary. By giving Tolio the opportunity to share his story, the novel elevates the often silenced and criminalized voices of unauthorized Dominican migrants. His narrative serves to humanize him and to document the stories of many others. Tolio’s acceptance into his new circle of friends happens after he saves the lives of two drowning boys, an act that underscores his bravery and stamina—and therefore his masculinity. Through this heroic feat, he becomes highly respected among his peers, so much so that they are willing to risk their own lives to help him save his brother, who appears to be stranded on Mona. The novel imagines a Dominican–Puerto Rican solidarity that calls into question the internal divisions—based on class, race, and ethnicity—that often divide these groups. Viaje a Isla de Mona explores the island as both border and bridge in

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the circuit of undocumented migration to Puerto Rico, revealing how it is often a stepping-stone to the main island of Puerto Rico, which in turn is a stepping-stone to the continental United States. Its role as bridge is evident in the novel when Tolio’s mom receives a phone call. A mysterious voice tells her that her son Leodán has left in a yola, headed to Puerto Rico: El problema era, dijo la voz misteriosa, que la yola había empezado a hacer agua cuando navegaba cerca de Isla de Mona. El capitán había tenido que aligerarla y para eso, sacar a tres hombres, a los que dejó en la isla con la promesa de que regresaría a buscarlos. Pero al llegar a Puerto Rico había tenido contratiempos y no había podido cumplir su promesa. Eso significaba lo siguiente: Leodán se hallaba en Mona y no tenía cómo salir de allí. (The problem was, said the mysterious voice, that the yola was starting to sink near Isla de Mona. The captain had to lighten the load and to do that, took out three men, whom he left on the island with the promise of returning for them. But when he got to Puerto Rico, he had some setbacks and was unable to keep his promise. That meant the following: Leodán was in Mona and he did not have a way to get out.) (23–24)

Mechanical failure is a common obstacle among those traveling in yolas. When problems develop at sea, captains usually try to lighten the load by throwing food, goods, or even passengers overboard. Luckily for this group, they were able to reach Mona—which potentially saved their lives. Pino, a man the boys meet on the island and who was running away from the traffickers named Pulpo and Gato, has a similar story: Vine—respondió—. Desde Boca de Yuma. Cuando llevábamos unas horas navegando, la yola empezó a dar problemas. Nos bajaron a tres, porque se les iba de lado. Fueron a Puerto Rico, dejaron a los que dejaron, y al regreso pararon otra vez aquí. Fue entonces que empezó a llover, había unas ráfagas muy fuertes y la lancha se les fue al demonio. (I came—he replied—. From Boca de Yuma. After a few hours of navigating, the yola started to have problems. Three of us were forced to get out, because it was capsizing. They went to Puerto Rico, they left whom they left, and on their return they stopped here again. That’s when it started to rain, there were strong gusts, and the boat was swept away.) (95)

In both of these cases, Mona functions as a bridge. It can provide salvation— albeit temporary—for those at risk of dying while crossing the Mona Pas-

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sage. The island offers provisional shelter, but its treacherous terrain and extreme conditions can quickly transform it into a deadly trap. The text highlights the dangers of undocumented migration through Mona’s sudden transformation from bridge to border. Reaching Mona itself is risky because it is surrounded by a treacherous body of water where “ten-foot seas are common,” and “in storm conditions waves can rise to sixteen feet” (Graziano 57). The narrator recounts the threats involved in crossing the Mona Passage when remembering Leodán’s mother’s warnings: De nada había valido que Anatolia le rogara que lo pensara bien; de nada sirvió que le metiera miedo recordándole que los mares alrededor de Boca de Yuma, que era el lugar de donde salían aquellos botes clandestinos, estaban infestados de tiburones. Además, en el Canal de la Mona se formaban tormentas de un minuto a otro, unas trombas marinas que parecían salir de las profundidades del océano y que acababan con todo lo que encontraban a su paso. (It did not make a difference that Anatolia begged him to think about it carefully; it did not matter that she tried to scare him by reminding him that the seas around Boca de Yuma, the place from where those clandestine boats were launched, were infested with sharks. Also, in the Mona Passage, storms could brew from one minute to the next, producing marine whirlwinds that came from the depths of the ocean and destroyed everything in their paths.) (25)

Storms, maelstroms, and sharks in the Mona Passage are some of the dangers involved in the crossing. These illustrate how the sea is transformed into a nonhuman actor that threatens the lives of unauthorized migrants. Like the Mona Passage, which often functions as a liquid border, Mona Island restricts the migrant flow to the main island of Puerto Rico. This is a result of the relative isolation of the island from the rest of Puerto Rico, its climate conditions, and its topography. As an uninhabited island characterized by an arid and subtropical climate, Mona shares many of the characteristics of the Mexico-US border. This means that migrants stranded there face similar hazardous conditions to those associated with the desert, such as sun exposure, excessive heat, and lack of fresh water and food. Landi, who has gone hunting with his father in Mona before, constantly warns his friends about the dangers they face. Early on, after their arrival, Landi tells Javier not to drink his water yet: “Tú no tienes sed, guarda el agua para cuando el

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sol apriete” (You’re not really thirsty yet, save the water for when the sun gets really hot) (37). Hours later, after a series of dangerous incidents, Ramón describes the effect of the heat: El calor venía de arriba, del sol de plomo que nos caía parejo, como una manta de vapor que nos cubría. Pero también venía de abajo, un fuego que salía de la tierra, trepaba por las piernas y nos cocinaba por dentro. En el centro se unían aquellas dos bandas de calor, y por eso nos parecía que el corazón nos iba a estallar. (The heat came from above, from the heavy sun that fell evenly over us, like a blanket. But it also came from below, a fire that came from the earth, climbed up our legs, and cooked us inside. At the center those two swathes of heat joined together, and that’s why it seemed like our hearts were going to explode.) (71)

It is just past noon, and hazardous conditions become life threatening when the boys start to experience the physical and mental effects of heatstroke: Javier vomits, Nelson becomes listless and disoriented, and they all become dehydrated and their heartbeats accelerate. In addition, Román, the narrator, becomes delirious and experiences hallucinations, as hinted in the chapter’s title, “Lo que sueñan los pájaros” (What the birds dream about). Death is a constant threat on Isla de Mona, just as Landi had warned them while they were planning the rescue mission. In addition to the sun and the heat, the children face other dangers. While Tolio fears that a venomous snake might kill his brother Leodán, Landi assures him that the real danger are the cacti. Perpetuating the quasi-mythical view of Mona as a “tierra prohibida” (forbidden land), he discusses a cactus that traps humans, eats them, and spits their bones. When his friends ask him how he knows this, Landi replies: Porque lo vi una vez. Fui con mi papá para buscar una paloma turca que había caído detrás de la pared de cactus. Lo que encontramos fue un esqueleto, vestido con su camisa, su pantalón y sus zapatos. Mi papá dijo que aquello era un laberinto y que por eso la gente se perdía y se moría de sed, pero el esqueleto estaba atrapado por el cactus, eso lo vi clarito. (Because I saw it once. I went hunting with my dad and went to get a scalynaped pigeon that had fallen behind the cacti wall. What we found was a skeleton, dressed with his shirt, pants, and shoes. My dad said that that was

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a labyrinth and because of that people got lost and died of thirst. But that skeleton was trapped by the cactus, I saw it clearly.) (26)

Landi’s testimony perpetuates mythical views of Mona as a preternatural space. He is convinced that the cactus trapped the man, killed him, and turned him into a skeleton, while his father blames the death on getting lost and dying of dehydration and heatstroke. But even if the story about the carnivorous cactus is farfetched, he knows that Mona’s vegetation can kill. For instance, when Javier tries to eat an apple from a shrub, Landi, who knows that they are poisonous, is able to save him (39). The narrative underscores the twentieth- and twenty-first-century view of Mona as an inhospitable territory that threatens the lives of those who set foot on it. For stranded unauthorized migrants suffering from thirst, hunger, and heat, survival is more the exception than the rule. Mona Island’s role as border is further emphasized when traffickers and yola captains trick their undocumented passengers into believing that they have arrived to Puerto Rico. In fact, this potentially deadly practice is one of the most common dangers associated with crossing what the Dominican artist Scherezade García calls the “liquid highway” to Puerto Rico. It is nothing short of murder, since many die as a result of the harsh conditions they encounter in Mona. Undocumented migrants also face violence at the hands of ruthless traffickers like Pulpo and Gato, who point a gun at the children to force them to obey them. Whether the traffickers threaten to kill them by feeding them to the wild pigs, offering them poisonous fruits, or leaving them stranded on the island, the men use their power over the boys to guarantee their own survival (they steal the boys’ cellular phones, water, and their boat). The children’s encounter with these individuals provides a glimpse of the threats that unauthorized migrants face at the hands of traffickers—often other Dominicans—which adds to the layers of violence of the crossing. Because Isla de Mona has similar desert-like conditions to those of the Mexico-US border, it can also be seen as a space of exception. According to De León, this type of space refers to an area “where human and constitutional rights are suspended in the name of security” (The Land 68). Although traffickers or captains who intentionally abandon unauthorized migrants in Mona are not acting “in the name of security,” their actions indicate that their victims have been reduced to bare life. In other words, their lives are valueless and of little consequence to them. These are the wasted lives of modernity, those who are deemed surplus population and who are forced to escape to survive. Similar to the Mexico-US border, necroviolence

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is also outsourced to nature (De León, The Land 73). The skeleton trapped by the cactus, for instance, illustrates how necroviolence operates in Mona, a space of exception where nature is a nonhuman actor that threatens the lives of stranded unauthorized migrants. At the end of the novel, the boys are rescued, the Coast Guard intercepts their stolen boat, and Leodán is found still living in the Dominican Republic. What turned out to be a life-threatening adventure had simply been the result of a rumor that brings about their coming-of-age through migration. But their story remains a testament to the power of friendship and their shared humanity. The narrative articulates the collapse of the frontera intranacional that separates Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, especially in Puerto Rico, by depicting the friendship between an undocumented Dominican boy and his Puerto Rican classmates, who are willing to risk their lives to save his brother. The novel promotes empathy and a humanized view of Dominican undocumented migrants, who have become scapegoats in Puerto Rican society. The novel also sheds light on the role that Isla de Mona—a forgotten and forbidden part of Puerto Rico—plays as bridge and border within circuits of unauthorized intra-Caribbean migration. The novel’s focus on Dominican undocumented migration to Puerto Rico—via Mona—emphasizes islandto-island relations, or the movements between and among islands that help reveal the Caribbean archipelago. The implications of this revised Caribbean cartography are several, including the symbolic decolonizing of the region. Part of this process also entails contesting the view of islands and their surrounding waters as ahistorical spaces, rendering these as sites of history making. Montero’s novel contributes to this endeavor by reclaiming the recent, though silenced, histories of unauthorized migrants across the Mona Passage. By linking Mona and undocumented Dominican migration—two “invisible worlds” in the Puerto Rican imaginary—the novel offers much more than a simple children’s coming-of-age tale. YA literature is revolutionary because it has the potential to change attitudes, worldviews, and preconceptions. It is an instrument for social change. Viaje a Isla de Mona is a deceptively straightforward revolutionary text that challenges the engrained frontera intranacional that divides Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. It offers a window into the dangerous process of unauthorized migration across the Mona Passage, thus promoting empathy and respect for those who have endured it. In short, the novel envisions a community devoid of anti-Dominican and anti-immigrant sentiment—a more just society where children are leading the way.

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the Puerto rican archiPeLago: crossroads oF the cariBBean Despite the crucial role that the Puerto Rican archipelago plays in patterns of undocumented intra-Caribbean migration, it has remained virtually absent from border studies scholarship. The main island of Puerto Rico, as well as Mona and Monito Islands, has been at the crossroads of Caribbean migration for thousands of years. In modern times, migration flows toward Puerto Rico have continued as Cubans, Haitians, and Dominicans have sought a better future. Puerto Rico is physically and culturally close enough, it seems, to be worth the risk. But above all, as a territory of the United States, it falsely represents the wealth associated with this colonial power. Migrants trying to survive soon become aware of the borders that they must cross to achieve their goals. As the works examined in this chapter illustrate, survival depends on overcoming one or more of these borders: the Mona Passage, Mona/Monito Islands, and Puerto Rico. While some have made it to Puerto Rico—which can be either a stepping-stone or a final destination—others have been intercepted by the US Coast Guard or, worse yet, have perished in the crossing. Thousands of unauthorized migrants from Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic have been interdicted at sea since the 1990s. While it is practically impossible to determine how many have died, given the clandestine nature of these voyages, we can assume that thousands have died in the process. The fact that we cannot see the remains of those who die crossing does not mean that the problem does not exist. In the face of the blatant erasure of the wasted lives that have disappeared underwater in the Caribbean, literature and art allow us to reclaim their histories and memorialize the dead. Afterlife is achieved and documented in literature. While the relative lack of representation of sea crossings in Puerto Rican cultural production hints at the intellectual and emotional disconnection of Puerto Rican society from the tribulations faced by Dominican, Haitian, and Cuban unauthorized migrants, the predominance of these themes in Dominican literature and art in turn demonstrates how much is at stake for Dominican migrants.

ChaPter 3

doMinican crossings: disPLaceMents across sea and Land

The blue sea represents the way out and the frontier. It maps stories about freedom . . . and slavery. scherezade garcía

We were once brothers without borders. ayendy BoniFacio

hisPaniola is the only islanD in the Hispanophone Caribbean that is characterized by both an external and an internal border. Like other islands in the archipelago, the sea that surrounds it functions as an external border that separates it from the rest of the archipelago, though at times it can also function as a bridge. Hispaniola also has an internal border, one that divides Haiti from the Dominican Republic. In fact, according to Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is “the longest and most significant land boundary in all the Antilles” (3–4). Constant movement characterizes Dominican migration, including both inward (from Haiti) and outward (to Puerto Rico). My focus in this chapter is precisely this bidirectional movement, specifically how literature and art represent the unauthorized migrants who cross these borders. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first examines Dominican migration by yola to Puerto Rico, and the second focuses on how Haitian migration across the Haiti-DR border is represented in Dominican cultural production. I am interested in examining works that depict unauthorized crossings and that seek to humanize undocumented migrants. Dominicans in Puerto Rico, similar to Haitians in the Dominican Republic, are usually racialized “Others” who are excluded from the imagined nation. Their stories of hardship—the reasons behind their water crossings—tend to remain silenced, hindering the possibility of solidarity. The works that I analyze here 109

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break the silence and complicate dominant stereotypes of undocumented migrants.

yoLas to Puerto rico Undocumented intra-Caribbean migration is not a new theme in DominicanAmerican letters, although it has gained more visibility in recent years. As the topic has gained more traction, representations of these crossings have become increasingly somber, signaling the violence and human rights abuses that typically characterize unauthorized migration. Given the prevalence of gender violence, many of the literary works that address these themes have focused on the experiences of women migrants, who are much more likely to be victimized than their male counterparts. Narratives such as Miriam Mejía’s “El viaje” (1997), Angie Cruz’s Let It Rain Coffee (2005), and AnaMaurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt (2006) exemplify a variety of perspectives that range from the sanitized representation of a yola trip to Puerto Rico, as is the case in Let It Rain Coffee, to the gut-wrenching depiction of this journey depicted in “El viaje.” In this section, I examine the representation of Dominican undocumented migration to Puerto Rico in Miriam Mejía’s “El viaje” and selected works by the Dominican artist Scherezade García.

“sálvese quien PueDa”: engenDereD violenCe in MiriaM Mejía’s “el viaje” People deemed “redundant” and “disposable” are usually the pawns of global forces. These forces, much like currents, carry and displace them into the unknown. Gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, religion, and citizenship, among others, are some of the factors that determine who is considered a so-called wasted life. In the case of Dominican undocumented migration, women and female-presenting individuals tend to be perceived as more disposable than others, and therefore tend to experience a much higher rate of violence before, during, and after migration by yola. But external perceptions of undocumented subjects as wasted lives, as I have shown, clash against their understanding of themselves as valuable lives. Their agency of movement reflects these dynamics by indexing their struggle for survival. Dominican diaspora literature is replete with examples of unauthorized maritime crossings. To the best of my knowledge, one of the earliest Dominican stories to address the tribulations of undocumented women migrants is Miriam Mejía’s “El viaje.”1 The narrative centers on Alba, a homeless undocumented dominicana in New York City who remembers the difficult

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journey that brought her there after spending six years in Puerto Rico. By revealing the different levels of violence to which Alba is subjected, her story problematizes women’s yola crossings. I seek to demonstrate that unlike other texts examined in this book, where the Caribbean Sea becomes a space of exception, Mejía’s story reveals that for undocumented women, that space extends beyond the Caribbean Sea. In their study “Yola and Gender: Dominican Women’s Unregulated Migration,” Ramona Hernández and Nancy López examine the reasons that lead women to undertake the journey by yola: “What prompted [the women] to endure such a perilous trip was not a concern about their own well-being. Instead, they were urged by the desire to enhance the life chances of their family. The survival of her kin, particularly her children, seems to be foremost on the mind of each Dominican woman who decides to migrate in yola” (64). They found that among single mothers who were forced to make the difficult choice of leaving their children behind, the need to provide for them was a primary cause for migration. Mejía’s story reflects the similar conditions that lead Alba to migrate by yola. According to the narrator: “Quería para su hijo todo lo mejor del mundo. Trabajaría sólo unos años y luego regresaría. Le dolió dejarlo. . . . Ahora las condiciones económicas la obligaban a irse” (She wanted the best for her son. She would work for only a few years and then she would return. It hurt to leave him. . . . Now the economic conditions were forcing her to leave) (24). Unfortunately, reality proves to be quite different, and Alba becomes homeless and addicted to drugs in New York City. Alba’s predicament challenges the idea of the Dominican dream by revealing its inaccessibility. The depiction of the process of migration is my primary concern here. I am interested in examining the interstitial spaces between the moments of departure and arrival to demonstrate the layered types of violence to which undocumented migrants—especially women—are subjected. Different stages in the process of migration carry their own risks. As Hernández and López observe in their case study of unauthorized Dominican women immigrants: “After the migrants were recruited for the trip, the yola migration included three stages: 1) first, the hideout in the dense, insect-infested bushes along the Dominican coastlines; 2) second, the actual sea voyage, which may last three days; and finally, 3) the disembarkation process which may include hiding out again in Puerto Rico” (61). These three stages are also reflected in “El viaje,” as I show below. Each one of them reveals how Alba is forced to confront multiple challenges that threaten her life. But in the midst of the violence of the crossing, she reveals—multiple times—that she is a survivor. For Alba, the first stage proves to be very traumatic and unveils the vi-

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olence to which women are subjected throughout the process. Her grandmother, who has raised her and will now be forced to raise Alba’s son, tries to protect her sixteen-year-old granddaughter by insisting that she remain close to two men she knows, and trusts, from their town—who are also passengers—so that they can protect her. She meets them before boarding the bus that will take them to the departure town and reconnects with Nicolás—who has liked her for a long time—when they arrive. Once there, they are supposed to find their “contact,” which proves challenging due to the religious procession taking place to commemorate the Día de la Virgen de la Altagracia, patroness of the town and of the Dominican Republic. As Alba learns, the trip was made to coincide with the festival so the travelers could blend in and not raise suspicion among local law enforcement, which had increased vigilance after a recent surge in drownings caused by yola accidents. After some time, Nicolás finds the “contact” and tells Alba: “Ven vamos a conocer el animal con forma humana que se enriquece a costa de nuestra desesperación económica. Es culpable de muchas muertes. Pero está protegido por un oficial de alto rango, con quien comparte las ganancias” (Let’s go meet the animal in human form who gets rich from our economic desperation. He’s guilty of many deaths. But he’s protected by a high-ranking official who gets a cut of the earnings) (26). Nicolás’s words condemn the system and the actors who benefit from other people’s suffering and desperation. On the one hand, there is the trip organizer—whom Nicolás refers to as a “bestia sedienta de sangre” (blood-thirsty beast) (26)—and on the other, there is the official, whose participation reflects the role that government corruption plays in the phenomenon of migration by yola. Aware of the added risks that Alba faces as a female minor, Nicolás expresses his concern when he tells her: “Me contaron que siempre se inventa un juego perverso para poner en práctica en cada viaje. Ojalá sea ésta la excepción, no quisiera que te pasara nada” (They told me that he always makes up some perverse game for every trip. I hope this one is the exception, I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you) (26). Unfortunately, as his comment foreshadows, Alba eventually falls prey to el Gordo, the organizer. It all begins when el Gordo selects Alba among other women passengers. Without being aware of what this entails, Alba and Nicolás continue their trajectory. He warns her that they have several kilometers of hiking ahead of them, which will lead them to the departure beach. Alba does not know how long they walk, but she knows it is a long way because her feet hurt, and she feels exhausted and hungry. When they finally arrive at the meeting point, they hear their contact say that they will not leave until the next day: “Te-

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nemos que terminar de construir una de las embarcaciones y todavía faltan algunos materiales” (We have to finish building one of the vessels and we are still missing some materials) (30). As Nicolás had anticipated after noticing hammering noises when they arrived at the meeting point—“un lugar alto con varios arrecifes y el mar al fondo a varios pies muy abajo” (a high place with several reefs and the sea many feet below)—men were still constructing one of the yolas, so their voyage had been delayed (29). The story’s depiction of their situation underscores many of the dangers associated with yola crossings, even before the actual sea voyage takes place. First, unauthorized trips often depart from rugged beaches, which makes the act of jumping into a yola a risky or, worse, deadly undertaking, especially for passengers who do not know how to swim. Second, passengers are often forced to risk their lives by embarking on precarious vessels that are not equipped to navigate the rough waters of the Mona Passage. And third, departure delays increase the passengers’ risk not only of capture by authorities but also of abuse at the hands of trip organizers. “El viaje”—unlike other works analyzed in this book—illustrates all these dangers. In so doing, I argue, Mejía’s story proposes a more expansive conception of De León’s space of exception. This concept, which I have applied in another context to theorize the role of the Caribbean Sea in unauthorized crossings, can be stretched even further. For undocumented women, that space of exception often includes the departure and arrival zones. As I propose in chapter 2, the Caribbean Sea functions as a space of exception, where unauthorized migrants are targeted by both local and US security enforcement, as well as by other actors—human (smugglers, drug and sex traffickers) and nonhuman (sea) alike—although not always in the name of security. In “El viaje,” Alba finds herself in a space of exception before her sea voyage begins. As mentioned above, she had been selected by el Gordo, the organizer, though at first it is unclear what that means. Soon, however, it becomes evident that he had chosen her as his rape victim. In other words, the delay puts her in a more vulnerable position. To be successful, one of el Gordo’s men orders Nicolás to hike down to the beach to help get one of the yolas ready for the journey. Once he is out of sight, and the aide starts searching for Alba, other passengers become increasingly concerned. Seeing their expressions, the aide says: “¿Qué miran con esa cara de idiotas? Ustedes pagan muy poco y nosotros nos cobramos lo que falta con repollitos como éste. Quien se atreva a meter las narices, puede terminar como carnada de ciertos pececitos en alta mar” (What are you looking at with those stupid faces? You pay very little and we collect the rest with chicks like this one. Whoever tries to poke their noses into our business

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will end up as bait for certain deep-sea fishes) (32). Alba’s brutal gang rape leaves her badly injured and unconscious only hours before the yola trip, “la parte más peligrosa del viaje” (the most dangerous part of the trip) (34). But with the threat of being thrown overboard and eaten by sharks, the terrified passengers witness her rape without being able to help. As the man’s words suggest, the organizers justify the rape as payment. They do not charge the group enough, therefore sexual assault and rape function as currency in the fraught economy underlying undocumented migration. The violence inflicted on Alba before the yola trip—meant to dehumanize her—illustrates how the lives of undocumented migrants are easy targets for those in positions of power (in this case the smugglers). The departure point becomes a space of exception where their lives are rendered disposable. This space, of course, extends to the sea, as is evident when the men threaten the people in the group with drowning if they intervene to help Alba. In another telling example, one of the rapists taunts her by telling her that Nicolás would die first during the trip, which suggests that the men would kill him during the voyage (34). Despite the violence to which she is subjected, Alba’s actions challenge views of her as victim by underscoring her agency: “Alba no aguantó más, era demasiada la rabia contenida. Se abalanzó como una fiera herida . . . Lo abofeteó, le dió patadas, mordidas y como pudo comenzó a apretarle el cuello” (Alba couldn’t hold herself back, her rage was too much. She pounced on him like a wounded beast . . . She slapped him, kicked him, bit him, and tried to strangle him) (34). Afterward, the man snaps back, telling her that she’s lucky el Gordo ordered that she should arrive “sana y salva a Puerto Rico” (safe and sound to Puerto Rico), suggesting that for undocumented women, the cycle of sexual violence extends beyond the actual crossing (35). He adds: “De lo contrario, puedes tener la plena seguridad de que también te hubiera lanzado rápidamente a los tiburones” (Otherwise, you can be sure that I also would have quickly thrown you to the sharks) (35). In other words, if it were not for el Gordo’s orders, her retaliation would have cost her her life. As these passages illustrate, Nicolás’s and Alba’s lives are expendable. For those in power, the deep sea offers the opportunity to dispose of anyone without leaving a trace. Similar to the dynamic that De León describes as taking place in the desert, for those crossing the Mona Passage in yolas, necroviolence is outsourced to nature. While violence and death at sea at the hands of trip organizers and their associates is a real threat for unauthorized migrants, the violence of the crossing is evident in other ways. The second stage described by Hernández and López—the actual sea crossing—also tests the limits of human stamina,

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as we have seen in other works analyzed in this book. In “El viaje,” the author uses drowning imagery, even before Alba jumps into the yola, to convey the feelings of anguish she is experiencing: “Pero no había tiempo para sumergirse en la oleada de pensamientos angustiantes que comenzaban a ahogarla. . . . En ese momento, tuvo que enfrentarse a la urgencia de saltar a la ya repleta embarcación” (But there wasn’t time to submerge herself in the wave of distressing thoughts that were starting to drown her. . . . In that moment, she had to face the urgency of jumping into the already packed vessel) (35). As the reader learns, even the act of jumping becomes a matter of life or death for her, since she, like many other yola passengers, does not know how to swim. Language reveals the violence of the crossing. Trying to relieve her “turbulencias interiores” (interior turbulences), Alba resorts to prayer in the midst of “turbulencias exteriores” (exterior turbulences) (35). The parallelism between her feelings and the conditions in which she finds herself effectively conveys the chaos of the migration process. As time goes on, conditions worsen to the point that “los oleajes eran rabiosamente constantes y crecientes” (the swells were rabidly constant and increasing), sending passengers into a praying frenzy (35). The sea is revealed as a nonhuman actor, a powerful and violent one that threatens the lives of the group. As the narrator explains: “Al mismo tiempo, los altos oleajes lanzaban gran cantidad de agua dentro de la embarcación” (At the same time, the swells caused large amounts of water to pour into the vessel) (35). Soaked and cold—and at risk of hypothermia—the passengers must take turns emptying the water from the yola using containers, which compounds their emotional and physical exhaustion. For yola passengers, death is a constant threat. The power of the water lies in its potential to act upon both the human body and the vessel. References to the yola’s “constante vaivén” (constant rocking) and the “inmenso mar” (immense sea) emphasize the power of nature over the passengers (36). On the second day, while the sea is characterized by its “inusual tranquilidad” (unusual tranquility), it becomes evident that the threats the group faces amount to more than rough seas (36). According to the narrator: “Pero este segundo día de viaje, resultó otro infierno más de oleajes. El sol calcinaba la piel inmisericordemente, por eso su angulo [sic] agudo de inclinación en el horizonte le llegó como una bendición a los temporales habitantes de la solitaria yola” (But this second day of the voyage ended up being another hell of swells. The sun scorched the skin mercilessly, so when the sun’s angle in the horizon became acute, it was like a blessing to the temporary residents of the solitary vessel) (36). As this passage indi-

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cates, the bright Caribbean sun also threatens the lives of the passengers. They are at risk of sunburn, dehydration, sunstroke, and hallucinations. This is evident when, immediately after this description, the narrator’s tone changes abruptly to say: “Pero todo concluyó de feliz manera. Ahora, Alba se encontraba disfrutando nuevamente de la compañía de su adorado hijo” (But there was a happy ending. Now, Alba was again enjoying being with her dear son) (36). In her delirium, Alba dreams about her son, but also about the death of el Gordo, who is eaten by sharks. It is at this point that she finally reacts as someone yells to her “¡Vamos despierta! prepárate que hemos llegado y tenemos que desembarcar rápido” (Wake up! Get ready, we have arrived, and we must jump out quickly) (37). They have arrived. The third stage of yola migration, according to Hernández and López, is disembarkation. “El viaje” depicts this stage as also characterized by violence. Alba, who had been delirious from sunstroke, finds herself in the middle of a chaotic scene, with other passengers trampling over one another. Everyone feels the urgency to jump out of the yola so quickly to avoid capture that it becomes a “competencia en la que cada quien se olvidó de cada cual” (competition in which everyone forgot about everyone else) (37). The sense of solidarity they had experienced until this moment—and that increased their chances of survival—seems to have evaporated once they reached the shore. All of a sudden, “Todos trataban de salir del mar al mismo tiempo” (Everyone was trying to come out of the water at the same time) (37). As the narrator explains, it was “el momento de sálvese quien pueda” (the moment of “every man for himself”) (37). After being lifted and pushed by others and having her hair pulled, Alba almost drowns when “una horda humana estaba pasando por encima de su cabeza” (a human mob was trampling over her head) (37). These vivid descriptions of Alba’s disembarkation in Puerto Rico emphasize how violence permeates every single stage of a yola voyage, up until the very last moment. This last stage can be characterized by displays of vertical violence (smugglers, organizers, and border patrol against passengers) and horizontal violence (passengers against one another). Once again, the story shows how when considering yola migration, the space of exception is stretched to the land, including departure and arrival locations. Although the story does not provide many details about the six years she spends in Puerto Rico, her time there and her arrival to the “país de las grandes oportunidades” (the country of great opportunities) are described as “torture” (38). Alba’s agency of movement and her trajectory mirror that of thousands of undocumented migrants who use Puerto Rico as a springboard to the continental United States, where they hope to make a better life. The

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fact that her time in Puerto Rico and on the East Coast are characterized as “torture” implicitly underscores other types of violence (structural, racial, gender, sexual) to which Alba, as an undocumented dominicana, is exposed. Her untimely death at the end of the story, after suffering from depression, drug addition, homelessness, and physical abuse, reveals the failure of the system to support the most vulnerable: undocumented women. In the end, the narrator talks about the legend of “una hermosa mujer llamada Alba quien se inmoló con el fin de lograr el retorno de la vida al contaminado cauce del viejo río” (a beautiful woman named Alba who sacrificed herself to bring life back to the contaminated river), where her remains were discovered (39). The story’s ending—which emphasizes Alba’s beauty and her power to bring things back to life—stands in stark contrast to the life she endured, beginning with the moment she decided to migrate. It is noteworthy that the end tries to reframe her as a survivor, not a victim, given the difficult life she had. By recasting undocumented dominicanas as survivors despite the multiple forms of violence they endure, the story depicts women as the backbones of their (often) single-parent households in the Dominican Republic. As survivors, they give life to others, allowing them to survive as well. Miriam Mejía’s “El viaje” represents an important contribution to Dominican diaspora literature because it is one of the first works, to my knowledge, to address the topic of undocumented migration among Dominican women. It is inspired by the author’s own conversations with Mayra and Doña María, two homeless Dominican women who participated in a support program to combat substance addiction in Washington Heights. As Mejía explains in a personal e-mail: Mayra and Doña María son dos mujeres desamparadas que vivían debajo de un puente muy cerca de nuestro trabajo en la agencia comunitaria y que por un periodo de tiempo fueron participantes del programa. Doña María murió de asfixia en un incendio que ocurrió debajo del puente. Al momento de morir tendría unos 50 años, pero su aspecto físico era parecido al de una mujer de 80. Mayra tiene muchos años viviendo en República Dominicana luego que fuera deportada. Una realidad que sobrepasaba la ficción. (Mayra and Doña María are two homeless women who lived under a bridge close to the community organization where we worked and who participated in our program for some time. Doña María died of asphyxia when a fire broke out under the bridge. When she died, she must have been around fifty years old, but her physical appearance was closer to that of an

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eighty-year-old woman. Mayra has been living many years in the Dominican Republic after being deported. It’s a reality that surpasses fiction.)

In telling the story of Doña María, “El viaje” tells the story of thousands of other women who have experienced and continue to experience similar circumstances. Equally important is the fact that the story addresses the many obstacles associated with yola crossings—before, during, and after the journey. In this way, the text lifts the veil of invisibility that shrouds undocumented migration and exposes it to show the different layers of violence, especially gendered and sexual violence, that mark the trajectories of undocumented dominicanas. In the end, the story depicts how “salvation,” a central theme in the next section, is symbolically and materially tied to women’s labor.

liquiD highWay to salvation: the art of sCherezaDe garCía The quest for salvation drives undocumented migration worldwide. For unauthorized Dominican migrants crossing maritime Caribbean borders, the yola becomes a symbol of salvation; it is the instrument that is supposed to bring them safely to Puerto Rico. But crossing the Mona Passage can suddenly turn into a deadly undertaking, as I have shown. In the face of tragedy, such as capsizing, how is salvation redefined? Is the search for salvation worth the risk of dying? These are some of the questions that the New York–based Dominican artist Scherezade García explores through her art.2 In this section, I examine several of her works centered on undocumented migration from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico: her video project Sabana de la Mar: Salvation Action (2002), her installation Theories of Freedom (2009–2011), and her painting Super Tropics: The Liquid Highway I (2015). Examined together, these works offer a poignant reflection on the limits of the Dominican dream and the meaning of salvation. As with the work of the other writers and artists included in this study, García’s “art has to do with questioning the Caribbean as paradise.”3 The visual language she creates pushes back against the (neo)colonial narratives that have constructed an “imagined Caribbean” devoid of history, people, and agency, while reducing it to a place to be exploited for its human, natural, and material resources. For this versatile and multifaceted artist, the Hispanophone Caribbean has been an endless source of inspiration for her drawings, paintings, installations, and videos. Her works allow her to “become a storyteller” by creating “contemporary allegories of history, coloni-

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zation, and politics” (García, “Artist Statement”). Many of the stories she tells through her art have to do with migration—undocumented migration to be precise—and the duality of liquid borders. As García states: “The frontiers of the places I love are liquid. The liquid has been an inspiration to me; it amazes me. I understand it as a frontier and as a road to salvation as well” (“From Amor” 100). These words echo one of the central arguments of this book: the paradox of water as border and bridge. To drive this point home, García coins the term “liquid highway” to reflect the potential for salvation that water embodies. The image of the sea as a highway connecting two points—Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico—highlights the movement between and among islands. Usually downplayed or erased, these movements that characterize the region reveal the archipelago by interrogating tropes of isolation and islandness produced by colonialism and US Empire. Her works explore the paradoxes of migration as a means to salvation, often focusing on the more immediate salvation that floating devices potentially afford as migrants attempt to survive yola crossings through the Mona Passage. The paradox of risking one’s life at sea while attempting to achieve salvation is the subject of García’s five-minute film Sabana de la mar: Salvation Action. This project, conceived in collaboration with the late Dominican author and curator Alanna Lockward, was inspired by “many newspaper and television news reports, of the perils of the passage across the Mona Channel,” as García explains (“From Amor” 104). Realizing that so many people were drowning while attempting to reach Puerto Rico, they decided to organize a “salvation action” in Sabana de la Mar, a small town in the Dominican Republic from which many unauthorized and “uncounted fateful voyages” have been carried out (“From Amor” 104). It is a poor area where the main industries are fishing and farming, and where the population is mostly Afro-descendant. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Sabana de la Mar has become a hub of undocumented migration, as it is mostly poor Black Dominicans who have been forced to migrate in search for survival. As is evident in the video, race and class are determinant factors that lead Dominicans to attempt crossing the liquid highway to Puerto Rico. In locating her socio-artistic intervention at a beach in Sabana de la Mar, García renders visible the Caribbean as a border. The short film aims to generate awareness about the phenomenon of intra-Caribbean undocumented migration and addresses the questions, “What is salvation? And if salvation is understood as leaving one’s own country in small boats (yolas) risking one’s life, why don’t people use life jackets?” (Berg). The video opens with a pink life jacket floating on the

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water by the shore. The next frame shows a Black woman making one of the life vests using an old/antique pedal sewing machine. This image, which recurs again when a different woman is sewing by the beach while a young child stares at her, captures the main objective of the action: to teach the people of Sabana de la Mar how to make and use life jackets, hoping that the practice would help save peoples’ lives. The centrality of sewing and the color pink positions Sabana de la Mar: Salvation Action as a feminist intervention. Sewing and similar practices such as weaving and knitting have been traditionally associated with domesticity and the feminine sphere. As Sarah Gordon puts it, “Sewing is laden with understandings of femininity, family, and social class” (68). While these domestic endeavors are almost universally viewed as “women’s tasks”—and are therefore symbolic of women’s subordinate position within patriarchy—women have also transformed them into instruments of resistance and social change. To be sure, we must make a distinction between sewing as a leisure activity and as a survival mechanism (paid or unpaid labor), especially in the context of the Dominican Republic, the country with the most export-processing zones (EPZs) in the region (Mathews 308). In a country where the apparel industry has boomed in the last few decades, the experience of (mostly Black women) workers in sweatshops can be characterized by exploitation, low wages, and unsafe conditions (Adler-Milstein and Kline ix). In Sabana de la Mar, the act of sewing life vests is visually linked to the labor of Dominican women in EPZs and serves as a reminder of the damaging effects that EPZs have had on the livelihoods of Dominican workers, including serving as a push factor in unauthorized migration. The action comes full circle, symbolically connecting globalization, capitalism, neoliberalism, and the expulsion of Black bodies from the Dominican Republic. Sabana de la Mar, therefore, can be seen as a modality of “craftivism,” a term coined by Betsy Greer in 2003 to refer to the link between craft and activism.4 Sewing life jackets for unauthorized migrants is activism in the name of human dignity and social justice. The video’s emphasis on Black women sewing pink life jackets serves to center them as “saviors,” or agents in the survival of valuable lives, and underscores the many roles they play in the process of unauthorized migration. The action of sewing the life vests signals a shift in the gender power dynamics, since “salvation” becomes symbolically and materially tied to Black women’s labor. Similarly, the use of pink for the life jackets—a leitmotif in García’s artwork—also serves to challenge traditional connotations of this color.

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As García has stated, “Pink is associated with ‘baby girl,’ ‘fragility,’ ‘princess’ . . . By using pink in my lifesaver (as the emigrant dream is sold) . . . I intend to change conception [sic] linked to pink” (“Interview”). Her remarks illustrate two ways in which her socio-artistic intervention challenges ideas associated with the color pink. On the one hand, it is a color traditionally associated with femininity, and therefore, with values that heteropatriarchal society ascribes to women: fragility and weakness. By using pink, García resignifies this color, ascribing the connotations of strength, power, and salvation. On the other hand, García plays with the idea that migration—both the process and the outcome—is “sold” to would-be unauthorized migrants as an idealized dream. The color pink can be seen as a metaphor for the rose-colored glasses through which many view migration. However, the fact that the color is used on a life vest—an object designed to save a person from drowning—challenges this fantasy and seeks to drive home the danger of the crossing. As the video continues, we observe the artist instructing groups of young men on how to effectively use the floating devices. In several scenes, we see her putting the life jackets on potential migrants as she speaks with them. Quotes from these interactions appear superimposed on the screen, giving the viewer access to firsthand testimonies about why and how people decide to make the trip across. Their remarks illustrate the reasons for leaving (“To work, work. I go!”), as well as the cost of the journey (“There are trips that cost $1,000 per head”). One of the young men even admits that “[his] father organizes trips.” The resilience of the migrants is evident when one states, “I have left before and I will do it again,” but the idea of repeated attempts becomes more striking when another says: “Here we never use lifesavers.” Whatever the reasons are for never using life jackets, his remark foregrounds how García’s feminist Salvation Action disrupts this patriarchal operation. This is apparent when a captain, using a threatening tone, tells the artist: “You’re messing with my business.” His statement reveals how García’s socio-artistic intervention disrupts and challenges the heteropatriarchal power hierarchy underlying the business of undocumented human trafficking. These testimonies—which shed light on an illegal, underground, and invisible business—become materially inscribed onto the life jackets. As García explains in an interview: I went to produce lifesaver[s] in the beach and to interview people whom [sic] had been involved in those trips or families of dead passenger[s].

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I listened to their stories and I translated their words to my visual language by drawing on the lifesavers. The physical and emotional action of drawing was a form of sharing a sense of salvation. (“Interview”)

We can view the process of inscribing the life jackets with testimonial words and drawings as a form of life-writing, a genre traditionally associated with the feminine. The visual renderings of their testimonies give voice to a segment of the population that remains invisible and silenced. It also broadens our understanding of salvation by suggesting how sharing silenced stories can be seen as a form of empowerment. The choice of background music, a mixture of Christian music and flamenco, also emphasizes the theme of salvation. Talking about this choice, García explains: I selected that flamenco piece because I am fascinated by the diversity embedded in such music. It is Arab, North African, Christian, Jewish, gypsy! It alludes to movement, and the Christian lyrics carry the lament of the Arabs, the Africans, and the Jews. It is all about survival at a high cost. It is so beautiful, yet so tragic. (Personal correspondence)

The video ends with the powerful and foreboding image of a young child wearing an oversized life jacket. The audience is left to imagine how someday he will grow into it and will probably be forced to make the yola trip to Puerto Rico in the future, like many of the men in his town. Teaching how to sew life jackets and outfitting young men with them are gestures that defy the perceptions of undocumented migrants as wasted lives, reenvisioning them instead as valuable lives. The routine lack of life jackets among those crossing in yolas may be due to any or a combination of the following reasons: lack of access among trip organizers and passengers to these items, desire among organizers to keep costs down, machismo, overconfidence about the success of the trip, or indifference toward the lives of the passengers (they are deemed worthless). Regardless, the fact that unauthorized Dominican migrants rarely use life jackets illustrates how the Caribbean becomes a space of exception where the humanity of the migrant is suspended. García’s Sabana de la Mar: Salvation Action therefore challenges their dehumanization by providing them with objects that could potentially save their lives. Each pink life jacket represents salvation. Similar concerns can be found in García’s installation Theories of Freedom (2009–2011) (figure 3.1), which offers a meditation on the meaning of freedom from the perspective of those who dream of a better life despite being surrounded by a liquid border. It is worth noting that the emphasis on

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Figure 3.1. Scherezade García, Theories of Freedom (2009–2011). Installation. © Scherezade García. Courtesy of Scherezade García.

the theoretical in the title calls attention to the uncertainty associated with unauthorized migration. Speaking about the inspiration for the piece, García says: “This blue liquid road and deep obstacle provokes my imagination. The blue sea represents the way out and the frontier. It maps stories about freedom . . . and slavery” (García, “Theories of Freedom”).5 It explores the contradiction inherent to the Caribbean, and other archipelagos of the Global South, where a tension emerges between freedom and entrapment, given the sea’s duality as border and bridge. Theories of Freedom is composed of several pieces, including a blackand-white mural depicting ocean waves, several paintings, a floating soft sculpture made of blue inner tubes, and another soft sculpture in pyramid form—which occupies the center of the room—made of golden inner tubes. The variety of objects used in this mixed-media installation reflects the artist’s tendency to create “allegorical narratives by appropriating and transforming symbols, events and objects such as life jackets, inner tubes, tents, newspapers clippings, religious icons, contested historical figures, and current events,” as she explained in an interview with “Examiner” (“Scherezade”). As a composite, the piece draws attention to the dreams and risks associated with the phenomenon of Dominican undocumented migration.

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The inner tubes in García’s artwork function as a leitmotif that forces the audience to contemplate the reasons that lead people to embark on such perilous journeys across the Mona Passage searching for their dreams. Speaking about the symbolism behind these objects, García states: Inner tubes are something I use constantly because it’s a device that’s able to float. . . . I always think these inner tubes, these floating devices are a way of salvation, because they can get you from one place to another. Those are devices that people use constantly. Dominicans use them to go to Puerto Rico. They actually cross the canal in those inner tubes. Cubans do the same thing. (CUNY Dominican Studies Institute)

Theories of Freedom illustrates the different meanings behind these floating devices as symbols of salvation. On a practical level, they physically help people stay afloat (and presumably survive). And on a metaphorical level, they represent salvation from poverty, the sometimes-elusive dream of a better life. The tension, however, lies in their precariousness. In this installation, this tension is represented by the presence of the two soft sculptures: one made with blue inner tubes, and the other, with golden ones. Both pieces use inner tubes of different sizes. The sculpture made of blue ones—titled In my Floating World, Landscape of Paradise—hangs from a glass wall. It is composed of inner tubes in various shades of blue, which evoke the colors that we associate with the Caribbean Sea. Referring to the “superimposed lifesavers of different colors and sizes,” Abigail Dardashti suggests that they “mimic the motion of waves” (“Tracing” 29). The overall effect is one in which this “floating landscape” creates a “randomly organic form,” reminiscent of the sea’s own organic fluidity. Some of the inner tubes are covered with “photographic images of the sea on which [the artist has] drawn a variety of symbols from [her] visual repertoire that refer to the memory of the sea” (García, “Theories of Freedom”). The drawings and newspaper clippings create the effect of patched-up or “bandaged” inner tubes, precariously fixed to keep them afloat. The use of airport luggage tags—specifically from JFK—evokes both the journey and the final destination. While the immediate destination of Dominicans crossing in yolas is Puerto Rico, the tags are a visual reminder that for many, New York City is the final destination. Migration to New York—usually by airplane—must first pass through Puerto Rico. The tags illustrate how New York looms large in the Dominican imagination, evinced in the fact that they are the second-largest Latinx group in the city. Finally, the floating devices are tied together with plastic ties. If we see

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the inner tubes as symbols of individual migrants, the fact that they are tied together illustrates that undocumented migration is not an individual occurrence or an exception, but rather a collective and mass phenomenon determined by structural forces that target underprivileged Black and Afrodescendant people globally. But there is another and perhaps more sinister meaning behind the ties. As García reminds us, these “are used by immigration police all over the planet now, instead of handcuffs, because they are disposable” (CUNY Dominican Studies Institute). The fact that Border Patrol routinely uses these ties is a reminder of how unauthorized migrants are criminalized worldwide. The militarization of borders has also led to the dehumanization of border crossers. García’s use of the ties is a powerful statement against structural inequality and inhuman migration policies. The central piece of this installation is Catedral, another soft sculpture made of inner tubes and other floating devices painted in golden hues. The pieces are stacked together in pyramid form, resembling a sort of “monumental altar.” The tower points to the heavens and thus stands as a metaphor of spiritual salvation. The golden color of the floating devices, however, could also be interpreted as evoking the fantasy of material wealth (also associated with the Catholic Church) that fuels the dreams of migrants. Yet, in the end, what appears to be solid gold is actually made of air. Migration is glorified as salvation, as a route to escape poverty and to gain freedom, but as the piece suggests, these are unstable, soft, and precariously balanced dreams. Moreover, Catedral highlights how materialism, largely associated with the Global North, has become the new religion. More often than not, salvation is measured by material wealth. And this is the religion that is pushing so many Dominicans to risk their lives trying to cross the “liquid highway.” Undocumented migration is also the subject matter of Super Tropics: The Liquid Highway I (2015) (figure 3.2), a work that interrogates the Dominican dream through a gendered lens. To the unsuspecting viewer, the painting depicts a dark-skinned girl—the recurrent cherub of her paintings—floating nonchalantly inside a bright pink inner tube in the middle of the sea. Water, another constant image in García’s work, surrounds her. Speaking about water as a symbol of mobility, García has stated: “The Liquid Highway is a way and an obstacle. I see water as an obstacle which we need to navigate and cross, as a mass of water that carries our history, memories, and DNA. . . . The global circulation of that liquid highway in my work is a way to break geographies” (“A Bridge” 35). In Super Tropics: The Liquid Highway I, the surface of the water is characterized by bold strokes of turquoise and red, which contrast with the bottom of the ocean, where dark

Figure 3.2. Scherezade García, Super Tropics: The Liquid Highway I (2015). Acrylic, charcoal, collage on canvas, 72 × 48 in. © Scherezade García. Courtesy of Scherezade García.

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blues predominate to evoke its depth. The use of dark colors underneath the surface and on the horizon creates a foreboding tone. The wide, curved strokes used to depict the water create a sense of movement and agitation that underscores the danger that the unaware girl is facing. Her position in the foreground forces the viewer’s gaze upon her and the bright pink inner tube. As I discuss above, pink is a leitmotif in García’s work that serves to call attention to and interrogate gendered dynamics and expectations under patriarchy. Similar to Sabana de la Mar: Salvation Action, the floating—or salvation—device is pink, which challenges the ideas of fragility and weakness traditionally ascribed to the feminine. In contrast to Salvation Action, however, the migrant is female presenting, which challenges the predominant narrative that undocumented migration is almost exclusively a male phenomenon.6 Not only that, but the migrant in Super Tropics: The Liquid Highway I is also a child. Her innocence is conveyed through the depiction of black rubber ducks with Mickey Mouse heads drawn on her inner tube, which resembles more a pool toy than a raft to cross the liquid highway. The sea is turbulent, and in the distance we see two inner tubes floating away, suggesting that the migrants who used them have recently drowned. While the subject seems unaware of the dangers that lurk around and underneath her, the viewer recognizes the irony: this is not a moment of playfulness, as the rubber ducks with Mickey Mouse ears would suggest, but rather one of gravity, as she is about to embark on a death-defying journey. The depiction of the dark-skinned girl as a child migrant is in consonance with the array of “cinnamon skin” characters that populate and are a distinguishing feature of García’s works, where the cinnamon color is seen as “all inclusive” (Dardashti, “Embodying” 256). As she puts it, her use of brown characters is an “action of diversity” (CUNY Dominican Studies Institute), but more than that, it is what defines her work as Dominican and Caribbean. The importance of this artistic gesture should not be overlooked. As I have discussed, race and Blackness are complex subjects among Dominicans. By affirming the African heritage of Dominican cultural identity, García challenges the dominant official discourse that has constructed a notion of Dominicanidad that privileges the Spanish/European and Indigenous roots while undermining the African heritage. Proof that she is “rocking the boat,” so to speak, is the fact that “her paintings dealing with migration and colorism in the Caribbean are always an issue on the island” (Dávila 130). As she tells Dávila, “People want to know why I paint so many Black people” (130). I agree with Tatiana Reinoza, who states that “in her art, García counters this racist ideology of negrophobia, white supremacy, and

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anti-Haitianism with mulatto icons symbolic of a black and Spanish nation, a more accurate if still contested view of the DR” (15). Dardashti, who has written about García’s art, goes further when she argues that “by choosing to represent a Catholic symbol as black, Garcia critiques Trujillo’s discourse that posited Catholicism as inherently Dominican and ‘white,’ as opposed to Vodou as characteristically Haitian and ‘black’” (“Embodying” 256). Moreover, the choice to depict “black Baroque angels,” central to García’s “NeoBaroque aesthetics,” destabilizes the “racist essence of Spanish Baroque art in the Dominican Republic as inherently white and elite” (Dardashti 257). Lastly, in addition to contesting whitewashed discourses of Dominicanidad, the depiction of the dark-skinned girl inside the inner tube brings attention to the intersection between race, class, gender, and migration. Poor Black and Afro-descendant people represent the majority of unauthorized migrants not only in the Caribbean but worldwide—a fact that reflects the racial dynamics that inform movements from the Global South to the Global North. Unfazed by the potential dangers that threaten her life, the girl stares at the viewer. She is wearing a Mickey Mouse ears hat, a common symbol of childhood, and therefore, innocence. But the Mickey Mouse hat is also a trope that interrogates the Dominican dream and the narratives of success that sustain it. The Mickey Mouse hat is a synecdoche of Disney World, which in turn is a synecdoche of the United States—a country built on promises that veil the forces of capitalism, racism, and colonialism. The Mickey Mouse ears stand as a symbol of materialism and consumerism, and therefore represent the social mobility that many migrants seek. Moreover, Disney looms large in the Latin American popular imaginary—especially in the case of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic—where it represents not only a tourist destination but also a sort of litmus test of economic success. The depiction of the girl wearing the Mickey Mouse cap not only evokes Disney—and Florida—as a final destination, but also the power of media and the lure of consumerism to shape the so-called Dominican Dream. This is illustrated through the superimposition of dark palm trees—a symbol of the tropics—over the Mickey Mouse ears. The visual effect of the palm trees, characterized by splotches of gold, is that of a halo, which evokes salvation. The position of the palm trees around her head also suggests that the girl will always think of her island roots; she will carry the Dominican Republic with her wherever she goes. Seen from a distance, however, the palm trees and Mickey Mouse cap evoke an Afro, a cultural marker that, along with her dark skin, defines her as Afro-descendant. The message is clear: poor Black and Afro-descendant people from the Global South are being pushed by structural global forces to search for salvation in the Global North. In the

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end, the promised land that Disney represents is the product of a powerful fantasy that lures migrants to risk their lives crossing the liquid highway, only to drown literally or symbolically in their attempt. The desire for material wealth that drives many undocumented migrants to escape poverty is represented in this painting by the gold chains around the girl’s neck. As she floats away, the necklaces dangle and her crucifix is suspended in the air, evoking the jolting movement caused by the rough seas. The depiction of the golden crucifix signals the history of colonialism and conquest that led to the exploitation of Hispaniola for its natural and human resources, as well as the history of the transatlantic slave trade that began there. Both the use of gold and the figure of the cherub evoke the Catholic Church, which according to Dardashti “recalls the Church’s complicit involvement in the slave trade” (“Embodying” 257). In addition, the critic contends that the presence of gold “serves as the basis for a Dominican American Neobaroque method, a strategy of appropriation that enables artists to revolt against the history of oppression in the Americas, and specifically in the Dominican Republic and its diaspora” (“El Dorado” 73). As we can see, García’s use of neobaroque iconography is not only an aesthetic choice but also a strong denunciation of the complicit role that the Catholic Church had in the perpetuation of the transatlantic slave trade and other forms of oppression that have had consequences up to the present. Wright’s concept of epiphenomenal time, which “denotes the current moment, a moment that is not directly borne out of another (i.e., causally created),” allows us to see the links between the depiction of modern unauthorized migration in Super Tropics: The Liquid Highway I and the Middle Passage leading to a more “inclusive definition of Blackness” (4). The symbol of the gold chains, however, allows another interpretation. Gold chains have been a cultural marker associated with cadenús, Dominican youth in the diaspora. As García-Peña explains, “Blings, or large gold chains, are associated with cadenuses, Dominican migrants returning on vacation from the US who often wear large gold jewelry as a sign of success” (166). Pejoratively referred to as Dominicanyorks, they are often viewed as “corrupted” by US society, and therefore are symbolically distant from “authentic” Dominicanidad. Their perception contrasts to those of previous waves of immigrants, as Patricia Pessar explains: More recently, the image on the island of Dominican immigrants and retornados has turned far more alien and sinister. Back in the ’80s Dominican immigrants were fondly called dominicanos ausentes (absent Dominicans), an acknowledgment of the fact that, while they might temporarily be resid-

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ing abroad, they still very much belonged within the national fold. Today’s more popular terms—“domínican” (rather than the more authenticallySpanish, “dominicano”), “dominicanyork” (the antithesis of an authentic Dominican), and cadenú (a gold necklace wearer, an allusion to drug kingpins and pushers)—serve to highlight the social distance that many island Dominicans seek to impose between themselves and Dominican immigrants and returnees. (A Visa 85)

Ramírez points to an “‘excess’ of tigueraje, which by the 1980s had become most closely embodied by so-called Dominicanyork cadenús” (139). But perhaps more importantly, she underscores how the Dominicanyork cadenú’s style racializes him as Black American. As she explains: “These were men who fashioned themselves in what Dominicans considered the garb of black Americans, an unacceptable kind of Americanness: think gold chains, ‘doorags,’ cornrows or dreads, sports jerseys, and expensive cars with blaring music” (139). The cadenús represent the “bad” tíguere, who “fashions himself in what is considered to be the style of a foreign blackness,” as opposed to the “good” tíguere, who “fashions himself in a style considered local and traditional” (143). García’s depiction of the girl with gold chains feminizes cadenú subculture—she is a racialized cadenúa or tíguera—hinting at her inevitable transculturation as a result of migration. This accessory serves to underscore another aspect of Dominican identity that has remained outside official constructions of national culture. Despite the presence and pivotal role that the diaspora plays in Dominican history, immigrants are viewed as extrinsic to the nation. For the dark-skinned girl floating inside an inner tube searching for a better future, these chains mark her as an “Other” both in relation to her homeland and to her adopted country. The gold chains become another symbol, in addition to the Mickey Mouse ears, that serves to challenge the narratives of success associated with the Dominican Dream. Regardless of what the future entails for her, Super Tropics: The Liquid Highway I freezes a specific moment in time to remind the viewer of the risks and dangers of crossing the liquid border. As I have demonstrated in this section, Scherezade García’s works Sabana de la Mar: Salvation Action, Theories of Freedom, and Super Tropics: The Liquid Highway I offer poignant commentaries on the phenomenon of unauthorized Dominican migration. The leitmotif of the floating device— whether it is a life jacket or an inner tube—links all of these works to the idea of salvation. García’s interventions are provoking and seek to destabilize misconceptions about undocumented migration. From a feminist lens,

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her pieces challenge male-centered narratives of migration and make visible the role that women play. Race is also a central concern in her works, which aim to destabilize whitewashed versions of national history so as to reclaim the African heritage of Dominican culture. Engaging with the history and effects of conquest and (neo)colonialism, the works examined here illustrate how undocumented migration is a product of that history—it does not emerge in a historical vacuum. More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that for decades, García has sought to shed light on the phenomenon of unauthorized migration like no other Dominican artist to date. Her works seek to humanize people who are viewed as wasted lives, restoring their human dignity as they cross the liquid highway.

haiti and the doMinican rePuBLic: “two countries, one isLand” 7 Until now, this study has centered on the island’s external borders as the space where unauthorized migration from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico unfolds. Now, I would like to turn my attention to its land border, what Silvio Torres-Saillant refers to as an “herida cicatrizada que constituye la raya política que divide a nuestras dos naciones” (a scarred wound that constitutes the political line that divides our two nations), echoing Anzaldúa’s “herida abierta” (“La condición” 223). In contrast to the more elusive liquid borders that characterize the Caribbean and are the main focus of this book, the physical border that divides Hispaniola is part terrestrial and part aquatic. Its physicality, however, does not mean that this is a static or fixed border. Though it has become increasingly militarized over the decades, historically it has been characterized by its fluidity. This contested stretch of land—approximately 360 km long—was the focus of Trujillo’s campaign of dominicanización de la frontera, which Paulino refers to as “state building on the border” (2).8 It is difficult to overstate the importance of this border, and while the dynamics of crossing it differ significantly from the types of displacements that have been the object of my analysis up to this point, no study of Caribbean borders would be complete without addressing the meanings and contradictions behind it. While sea crossings are much different than swimming across or using a raft to cross the Dajabón or Massacre Rivers, or walking across a chain-link fence to enter the Dominican Republic, the reality is that no matter what form it takes, Haitian unauthorized migration has and continues to be a phenomenon that characterizes this border. The constant movement from one side to the other, including to this day, underscores its fluidity and is

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what renders it a threat to those who insist on safeguarding the division that this border marks. Focusing on the flows across the Haiti-DR border allows us to examine horizontal South–South relations, as opposed to the more visible South–North migration flows that have inspired a robust corpus of scholarship on migration from the Caribbean and Latin America to the United States. This is certainly the case in Dominican studies, where most of the focus has centered on Dominican migration to the United States or to Puerto Rico, which falls ambiguously between the Global North and the Global South. Focusing on Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic shows how many of the same dynamics that inform North–South power hierarchies—characterized by racism, xenophobia, prejudice, sexism, classism, and so on—are replicated in South–South relations. As I have argued, the Caribbean Sea represents a space of exception, to borrow the term from De León. Like the Mexico-US border, where “human and constitutional rights [of migrants] are suspended,” the sea is a space that has the potential to dehumanize migrants (De León, The Land 68). I would like to argue that similar dynamics are replicated along the Haiti-DR border. In this section, I examine a series of works that reveal the complexity of this and other internal borders, including Elizabeth Acevedo’s “Regularization Plan for Foreigners, 1922” from her collection Beastgirl and Other Origin Myths (2016),9 Ana-Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt (2006), Pedro Cabiya’s “Fruta de temporada” (2013), Junot Díaz’s “Monstro” (2012), and “Sentencia del infierno I” and “Sentencia del infierno II” by Sophie Maríñez (2015). Through my analysis of these texts, I illustrate how the Haiti-DR border also represents a space of exception, and how these dynamics extend beyond its limits to include bateyes and sometimes, the entire Dominican Republic.

el Corte in elizabeth aCeveDo’s “regularization Plan for foreigners, 1 922” “I will fix this” (1). These are the words ascribed to Trujillo at the beginning of Elizabeth Acevedo’s poem “Regularization Plan for Foreigners, 1922.” The comment echoes both his government’s posture vis-à-vis what it referred to as “the border problem,” and the use of the “euphemism of ‘problem solving,’” as García-Peña calls it, to gloss over the violence perpetrated by the Dominican state during El Corte, the Massacre of 1937 (101). The graphic and violent images that predominate throughout the poem challenge the “problem solving” metanarrative by unveiling the barbaric methods used to “fix” the problem. Equally important, the act of speaking these words

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situates Trujillo front and center of the Massacre of 1937, which according to the Dominican government, “never happened” (García-Peña 93). Even today, the violence has yet to be acknowledged, as García-Peña observes: “There are no memorial sites, official commemorations, or statesponsored efforts for peace and reconciliation of the victims and survivors” (14). In the absence of state recognition, literature and other cultural products become instruments of memorialization. “Literature, too, memorializes,” states Myers, emphasizing how it “can partly fill the void of physical memorials as important mediums of memory” (10). Although Acevedo’s poem is not the first, nor the only, literary work to address this topic, it brings visibility to the historical moment when Trujillo takes unprecedented action to solidify—through the Haitian and Haitian-Dominican Massacre— the border dividing the two nations. It is a tragically foundational moment, executed through extreme violence, that reveals how the border became a space of exception where the human rights of those targeted—Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent—were “suspended in the name of security” (De León, The Land 68). While the magnitude of the violence differs between the treatment of migrants across the Mexico-US border and the genocide perpetrated along la Línea Fronteriza, in both cases we can observe how dehumanization and necropolitics—“killing in the name of sovereignty” (DeLeón, The Land 66)—are intertwined. The poem opens with Trujillo’s utterance followed by the image of the man digging “ditches,” unmistakably situating the action during the Massacre of 1937. The poetic voice describes how the “dirt packs beneath his nails,” and when his wife kisses his hands—a gesture that humanizes him—“she tells him they smell of graves” (3, 4). Death establishes itself as a central force in the poem, emphasized in the first stanza through references to “ditches,” “dirt,” and “graves.” While returning home to his wife seems to bring him some degree of respite, the poetic voice’s description of her as his bella negra of accented Spanish who does not think how a single word pronounced wilted could force him to dig a ditch for her (5–7)

emphasizes how the threat of death is also a constant in their lives. Her description as a “bella negra of accented Spanish” functions as a racial and ethnic marker. Her Blackness and her accent suggest that she is of Haitian descent, and therefore, belongs to the groups that Trujillo targeted along the border: Haitians and rayanos. As García-Peña reminds us, “The rayano

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is not only Haitian, nor is he only Dominican, but a hybrid subject who is ‘indigenous’ to the borderland and who suffers the great tragedy of having been divided in half, the same way the land was” (145). While it is not clear to the reader if the “bella negra” is Haitian or rayana, the color of her skin and her accent mark her as an Other. The woman’s obliviousness regarding the implications of her accent clashes with his awareness about the danger that she is in, not to mention his own responsibility to kill her if she were found out. The powerful image of how her destiny hinges on “a single word pronounced wilted” references the use of the word perejil (parsley) as a litmus test during the genocide. As García-Peña reminds us, “During the days of the Massacre of 1937, cultural authenticity—as determined by the ability to speak Spanish—became the deciding factor for survival. . . . Thus, the Spanish language, rather than race, was often the deciding factor in the atrocious killings” (149–150). For suspected victims, pronouncing the word with a Haitian Creole accent often meant immediate death by machete. The image of the wilted word echoes that of a wilted herb (perejil), and as such, of death. The poem continues describing the nightmares that haunt him at night: Bodies stacked like bricks building a wall that slices through the sky. Borders are not as messy as people think. They are clear, marked by ditches, by people face down, head-to-ankle skin-linked fences: Do Not Cross. (9–13)

The simile linking bodies and bricks underscores the dehumanization of Haitian and rayano people, whose remains become the building blocks of the wall that defines the border. Part of the irony, of course, lies in the fact that people of Haitian descent have been the backbone of the Dominican economy for over a century. When their bodies became a threat, they were terminated to mark a division between “us” and “them.” The magnitude of the killings—or genocide—is represented through the image of the wall that “slices through the sky,” conveying power and impenetrability. The irony behind the poetic voice’s assertion that “borders are not as messy as people think” is evident in what follows: they are “clear, marked by ditches, by people face down” (12). This description underscores the artificiality of borders, the fact that they are constructions erected to protect and safeguard what is valued, often on one side. Here, the power differentials that result from the perceived supremacy of the Dominican Republic and

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the Dominican intelligentsia’s view of Haiti as inferior are enacted through violence. The gruesome image of the “head-to-ankle skin-linked fences,” a clear wordplay on “chain-linked fences,” again emphasizes how the walls are built out of the remains of those who are deemed extraneous to the nation—Blacks, Afro-descendants, Haitians, rayanos—the wasted lives who do not fit within Trujillo’s whitewashed, Catholic, and Hispanophile version of Dominicanidad. This vision reveals the border as a space of exception produced by necropolitics. It is important to note that Trujillo justified the massacre on the grounds that Haitians were engaged in a “silent invasion” of the Dominican Republic. Necropolitics is achieved through necroviolence, a “violence performed and produced through the specific treatment of corpses” (De León, The Land 69). The image of a fence/wall of corpses epitomizes the concept of necroviolence. The bodies, which belong to people considered disposable, become instruments that serve the purpose of the Dominican state. Physically, they are sections of a wall. Symbolically, their collective trauma and death represent a warning: “Do Not Cross.” The poetic voice returns to the man, no longer dreaming, but rather confronting the reality of death to which he is an accomplice. In a telling instance, the reader learns that he has been forced to learn to ignore “when children of Haitians plead, Yo soy Dominicano” (16). This deceptively simple verse challenges the predominant narrative that the victims of the massacre were only Haitians, when in fact Dominicans of Haitian descent— rayanos—were also targeted. As García-Peña reminds us, calling it the “Haitian Massacre” erases the fact that rayanos were victims of the genocide (14). The targeting of a racially and ethnically mixed population shows that in the eyes of the Trujillato, territoriality does not legitimize claims of Dominicanidad. This is evident when the poetic voice says At best they’re mules El Jefe tells the ditch digger, who is glad he was born on this side of the flag. (17–19)

By comparing rayanos to mules, Trujillo not only dehumanizes them but also undermines their Dominicanidad by emphasizing their hybrid identity. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the Spanish word mulato (mulatto) is derived from mulo (mule), from the Latin mulus. Trujillo’s rejection of the common racial category mulato/a, used to describe people of mixed white and Black ancestry, led to the institutionalization of the category indio under his rule (Torres-Saillant, “The Tribulations” 1104). In his

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discussion of the origins of the usage of this term, Sagás refers to the myth of the Dominican indio as one of the “most important myths developed in the late 19th century that remains influential to this day” (3). Its origins date back to the period following the Dominican Republic’s independence from Spain in 1865, when Dominicans sought to symbolically distance themselves from Spain. As Fumagalli explains, the lexical disappearance of Dominican mulatos and Blacks—and their replacement with indios at the end of the nineteenth century—was “a stratagem to deny the existence of an Afro-Caribbean heritage in the national make-up while accounting for the fact that blacks and mulattoes constituted the majority of the population” (18). Soon, Sagás points out, “Dominican mulattoes started considering themselves indios” as a way “to ‘whiten’ [their] own perception of [their] color and race,” given that indio was considered “less traumatic and more socially-desirable” (3). “Black” and “mulatto” were used to refer to Haitians, “who were considered the real blacks” (Sagás 3). Keeping this history in mind, it is evident that when in the poem Trujillo utters the phrase “At best they’re mules,” his language is charged with negrophobia. While the ditchdigger is “glad / he was born on this side of the flag”—the Dominican Republic—it is evident that the same logic does not apply to the children of Haitians. Being born on Dominican soil does not guarantee their inclusion in the national imaginary. I would like to argue that the dehumanization of rayanos, and their brutal extermination, evinces how under Trujillo the Haiti-DR border region becomes a space of exception. At the end of the poem, the poetic voice describes how the ditchdigger must continue to obey El Jefe’s instructions “like a refrain for cutting cane: / aim low, strike wide, look away as the open earth swallows them” (21–22). The plantation imagery offers different readings. On the one hand, it likens Trujillo to a plantation owner and the ditchdigger to an enslaved person, or perhaps an overseer, who must obey his authority. This, of course, evokes the role of Hispaniola as the cradle of slavery in the Americas, and the impact that that institution has had until the present. On the other hand, the plantation imagery emphasizes the centrality of sugarcane production in the Dominican economy—a legacy of colonialism—and is a reminder of the role that Haitians have played in it. As I address in chapter 1, Dominican sugar companies, often supported by the government, have relied on Haitian labor and have used a number of coercive tactics to bring and keep Haitians working in the cane fields. The macabre image of the ditchdigger cutting people of Haitian descent as if they were sugarcane stalks is ironic, since Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans have been the backbone of the sugar industry for over a century. The poem

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successfully links past and present by evoking the history of slavery and showing how, similar to colonial times, Black bodies—Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent—are viewed as wasted lives, disposable instruments of production in a white capitalist economy. To conclude, Acevedo’s poem revisits the Massacre of 1937 and challenges the predominant narrative that only Haitians were targeted. The text also reflects on the artificiality of borders and illustrates how the one that divides Haiti from the Dominican Republic was built by extreme violence. As I have shown, the border represents a space of exception created by the conjunction of necropolitics and necroviolence. Remembering the violent and catastrophic events that took place along the border in October 1937 is important for several reasons. Among them are giving visibility to a history that has been denied by the Dominican state and promoting awareness among younger generations and communities in the diaspora, who might not be familiar with this history. I have discussed the links that the poem evokes between past and present, but one detail that I have not addressed yet is how the title echoes the Plan Nacional de Regularización de Extranjeros, decreed by President Danilo Medina in November 2013. The plan was instituted in response to “domestic and international pressure” to the passing of La Sentencia (TC/0168/13), which “retroactively overturned citizenship norms that had been in effect from 1929 to 2010” (Canton and McMullen). The Plan Nacional created “an expedited process by which ‘foreigners residing irregularly in the Dominican Republic’ could gain residency status” (Canton and McMullen). Eight months later, the Naturalization Law introduced by President Danilo Medina was passed. Although it was touted as a “humanitarian solution to the situation created by decision 168–13,” it left stateless about 90 percent of those impacted (Canton and McMullen). The title of Acevedo’s poem symbolically links the Massacre of 1937 to La Sentencia, which the author and singer-songwriter Rita Indiana Hernández has referred to as “legal ethnic cleansing” (“Black Magic”). While there is a clear distinction in terms of the level of violence behind these two events, the more recent denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent is simply the latest attempt by the Dominican state to “fix” what Trujillo called the “Haitian problem.”

life in the batey in ana- Maurine lara’s erzulie’s skirt One of the greatest ironies behind the efforts of the Dominican state—from Trujillo to the present—to limit the Haitian presence in the Dominican Re-

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public is the fact that the sugar industry has historically relied on the Haitian labor force. Martínez observes that this example of rural-rural migration “is unusual in having endured for more than a century” (Peripheral ix). In fact, large-scale migration of Haitian men to the Dominican Republic to work as cane cutters precedes the US invasion of 1916 (Martínez, Peripheral 33). However, “Under U.S. rule,” as Martínez states, “this migration expanded, and both countries took measures to regulate movement across their shared border” (33). This is important because it highlights how the interconnection between colonialism, the economy, and migration informed the solidification of the Haiti-DR border. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, “Neither government had much control over its frontier, and people on either side of the border circulated freely between the two countries” (Martínez, Peripheral 44). As discussed above, the global economic crisis of the 1930s had a profound effect on the sugar industry, and consequently the lives of Haitian cane cutters, who faced anti-immigrant legislation (Martínez, Peripheral 44). Anti-Haitian sentiment reached its climax with the Massacre of 1937 along the border, which “spared Haitians who resided on the sugar estates,” but made clear to them that their place was in the bateyes (Martínez, Peripheral 45). Rural Haitian migration to sugar estates in the Dominican Republic exemplifies horizontal South–South migration, what Martínez calls “peripheral migrations,” “an important but relatively little understood category of labor migrants internationally” (Peripheral ix). Like most South–South migrations, extreme conditions push the migrants out in search of a better life, even when they realize that it will come at a cost. As Martínez puts it, “braceros have so little freedom to choose if and how they will emigrate that their ‘decision’ to cross the border implies not so much free choice as coerced consent. The coercion to which they are subjected is not mainly legal/physical but economic” (Peripheral 162). As I explain in chapter 1, the Dominican sugar industry has recruited Haitian laborers through both official and illegal means, such as “clandestine passage by land” (Martínez, Peripheral 8). Oftentimes, Haitians are forcefully recruited, rounded up by the Dominican army or arrested and forced to “pay a bribe for release or are detained as undocumented immigrants for shipment to bateyes,” where they are “sent against their will to cut cane on CEA estates,” an image that calls to mind the transatlantic slave trade (Martínez, Peripheral 9).10 One of the keys behind the system’s “success,” in addition to the “threat of violence” that upholds it, has been the confinement of Haitian workers to the periphery of Dominican society (Martínez, Peripheral 10). Relegated to marginal self-contained areas known as bateyes, in or adjacent to sugar

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estates, Haitians and their Dominican-born children remain invisible and trapped in a cycle of exploitation and poverty that many consider modern slavery. It is estimated that more than 100,000 Haitians live in Dominican “private and state-owned sugar estates” and that “90 percent or more of the cane cutters in the Dominican Republic are Haitian nationals or second- and third-generation descendants of Haitian immigrants” (Martínez, Peripheral 6). I would like to argue that bateyes, as contained and isolated communities, function akin to archipelagos whose borders are terrestrial instead of aquatic. Those living in the archipelago within the archipelago thus become doubly invisibilized. In this section I examine Ana-Maurine Lara’s novel Erzulie’s Skirt, which centers on the lives of an Afro-Dominican lesbian couple—Micaela and Miriam (daughter of Haitian cane cutters born in a batey). As Carlos Decena states, this “is the first Dominican novel that centers on an erotic/sexual relationship between its women protagonists” (184). “This alone makes it a bold and pioneering effort,” since it “attempt[s] to imagine Dominican identities differently than how these identities are presented in hegemonic nationalist models” (Decena 184). They settle in a batey and also escape in a yola to Puerto Rico.11 Their struggle for survival amid many challenges exemplifies their resistance against the violence that the Dominican, heteropatriarchal, anti-Haitian, and capitalist society exerts over them. This is the first Dominican diaspora literary work, to my knowledge, that explores life in the batey and that seeks to bring visibility to the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and citizenship within this space. Because “the human and constitutional rights” of Haitian migrants are suspended in the batey—and beyond it, as I will argue later in the chapter— I propose that it represents a space of exception. From the perspective of the sugar industry, Haitian braceros are easily replaceable; therefore, they are viewed as wasted lives whose worth is determined by their productivity. The same reasoning can be applied to others, such as Dominicans of Haitian descent and ethnic Dominicans who live and work in the sugar estates. However, even within the batey—which functions as a sort of contact zone—there is a hierarchy of power. Viejos “(‘old hands,’ i.e., Haitians who take up permanent residence on the estates)” are above braceros in the batey hierarchy, and they share social space with Dominicans (Martínez, Peripheral 69, 71). While viejos and Dominicans share spaces, and there is reciprocity, cooperation, and intermarriage between groups, the fact remains that Haitians are considered inferior to Dominicans. As Martínez explains, “Haitian immigrants, seasonal and permanent, occupy the lowest-paid, most

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physically punishing, and least secure jobs as agricultural piece workers and day laborers” (Peripheral 71). They are the ones who cut the cane, and “generally speaking, the workers who physically touch the industry’s raw material, sugarcane, stand at the bottom of the company job ladder” (Martínez, Peripheral 71). While the perceived inferiority of Haitians in the batey setting is partly determined by their jobs, it is important to remember that race and ethnicity are the primary determining factors, which reflects the social hierarchy of the broader Dominican society. Erzulie’s Skirt places queer Blackness front and center of the narrative to reclaim the African heritage as a pillar of Dominican identity. This is first and foremost achieved by centering Erzulie or Ezili Danto, “a Vodou loa, or spiritual force, who is described as the fierce defender of children, of single women, and of women who love women” (Sheller, Island xxii). Equally important is the celebration of Africa, especially in the context of the Afroreligious rituals represented in the novel. Centering African beliefs and rituals effectively challenges Catholicism, which became a bulwark of Dominican identity under Trujillo. As García-Peña observes, “Through Afroreligiosity, artists, particularly diasporic writers, are finding a diction that allows them to interpellate the Hispanophile version of Dominican history, reimagining an other truth that can finally confront the passivity and silencing of hegemonic Hispanophile texts” (83). Africa’s central presence in the text complicates Gilroy’s restrictive concept of the Black Atlantic—which in its original conceptualization excludes the Hispanophone Caribbean—by situating the novel within this context and therefore expanding its original meaning. Lara’s novel, similar to most works examined in this book, affirms and claims a space within the Black Atlantic. In thinking about the role that Africa plays in Erzulie’s Skirt, Flores’s affirmation that “this history of return as desire and reality has involved, first of all, the longing for Africa as the primordial homeland” rings true (The Diaspora 52). In many instances throughout the novel, the glorification of Africa serves as a counterpoint to the modern-day conditions that the characters face, such as when Micaela’s mother, Mama Hounsin, tells her: “When we were in Guinée, we had everything we needed. All the riches of the earth were ours. But, by the force of iron and whip we arrived here. Everything we do is to remember where we come from” (53). Her words idealize Africa—specifically Guinée—claiming it as the ancestral homeland, a place characterized by the richness of its soil and its plentiful resources. The affirmation of Africa as ancestral land challenges the official discourse about Dominicanidad as the product of Spanish and Taíno Indigenous roots. In addition to glorifying Africa, Mama Hounsin’s statement centers the

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Middle Passage as the pivotal moment that marks the rupture between their past and their present. Again, the text reveals how epiphenomenal time, as Wright proposes, unveils the noncausal connections between the experiences of ethnic Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans in the bateyes and the transatlantic slave trade. The reference to “force of iron and whip” denounces the violence undergirding the colonial slavery system. But the novel’s descriptions of life and work in the modern sugar estate make clear that structural violence continues to shape the lives of the ethnic Haitians, Haitian-Dominicans, and Black and poor Dominicans working in the fields. In fact, the conditions faced by Micaela’s family in the batey evoke those under slavery during colonial times, therefore emphasizing the parallel between past and present. In a scene eerily reminiscent of colonial slavery, Micaela observes: [The women] swung their machetes in the air, up to the right, down to the left cutting down the cane that stood high above their heads. They went in rows, the children a long distance behind them, gathering the fallen stalks and forming piles for the men to gather. The women floated above the ground, covered from head to toe in cloth that protected them from the blazing sun, and the thin shreds of cane that flew out to cut their eyes, throats, noses and skins. The cane was like powdered glass, causing small exposed areas to swell up from the debris. (13)

This and other descriptions of work at the sugar plantation serve to denounce the conditions under which thousands of ethnic Haitians and their Haitian-Dominican children and grandchildren live and work to this day. Because of these extreme conditions, in 1979, “the Anti-Slavery Society for the Protection of Human Rights denounced the labor contract between the two governments and other aspects of the Dominican Republic’s treatment of Haitian braceros as a form of slavery” (Martínez, Peripheral 48). In addition to the manner in which Haitian nationals are forcefully recruited or coerced into working for Dominican sugar estates, living conditions in the batey are also reminiscent of slavery. Workers are kept under surveillance and are offered “only one means of subsistence, cutting cane” (Martínez, Peripheral 11). Because migrants are paid according to the weight of the cane they cut, “To get money for food, they must work, and work hard” (Martínez, Peripheral 11). According to Martínez, Haitian braceros must work days of 12 hours or longer just to earn barely enough to feed themselves. A large part of their caloric intake comes from

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the cane juice that company foremen tacitly allow them to consume at work. Some nights, the braceros return to their quarters too tired to even undress, let alone to fetch water for bathing and cooking, and must return to the cane fields at dawn with the sweat and the hunger of the day before. . . . The Dominican Republic’s cane growers provide their cutters with none of the protective gear—boots, gloves, and goggles—that cane sugar producers in other countries consider essential. . . . Nutritional deprivation and the great physical strain of cutting cane also weaken braceros’ resistance to illness. (Peripheral 11)

Many of the points raised by Martínez about modern-day life within the confines of a sugar estate recall descriptions of life under the plantation system. In this way, Erzulie’s Skirt shows how the batey and the cane field constitute spaces of exception where workers—especially Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent—are reduced to wasted lives, much like their ancestors during colonial slavery. Micaela’s father puts it succinctly when he says: “A Haitian working here is nothing more than a slave” (Lara 31). Depictions of violence, past or present, throughout the novel are counterbalanced by acts of remembrance as a form of resistance. This is evident in Mama Hounsin’s words quoted above: “Everything we do is to remember where we come from.” In the face of extreme violence designed to strip the enslaved Africans and their descendants of their humanity, remembering— as she suggests—represents an act of defiance. Remembering past acts of resistance is another defense mechanism against the violence that Black people and other communities of color face in the present. This is evident when Micaela’s father tells her: Your mother’s families were cimarrones. They resisted the spanish [sic] slavers who ran the bateyes where they grew sugar cane. They took the cane and with our blood made it into sugar. Your mother’s people fled. They came to the mountains before their feet could be cut off. They hid amongst the spirits of the trees that protected them when the spaniards [sic] rode their horses in search of those that escaped the whippings and torture of the plantations. (Lara 80)

By telling Micaela that her ancestors were cimarrones, her father reclaims the family’s ties to Africa and seeks to challenge the narrative that the enslaved were reduced to victims. Escaping the bateyes and hiding in the mountains represents the ultimate form of resistance against a system that dehumanized their people.

Plate 1. Tony Capellán, Mar Caribe. Plastic, rubber, and barbed wire, 360 × 228 in. © Tony Capellán. Courtesy of Tony Capellán estate. Photo of installation view courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

Plate 2. Tony Capellán, Mar Caribe, detail. Plastic, rubber, and barbed wire, 360 × 228 in. © Tony Capellán. Courtesy of Tony Capellán estate. Photo of installation view courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

Plate 3. Scherezade García, Theories of Freedom (2009–2011). Installation. © Scherezade García. Courtesy of Scherezade García.

Plate 4. Scherezade García, Super Tropics: The Liquid Highway I (2015). Acrylic, charcoal, collage on canvas, 72 × 48 in. © Scherezade García. Courtesy of Scherezade García.

Plate 5. Sandra Ramos, Pecera naufragio, from the Series Naufragio I/I (2003). Acrylic on canvas, 19.69 × 25.59 in. © Sandra Ramos. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 6. Sandra Ramos, Bridge/Puente (2011). Calcography, 19.69 × 23.62 in. © Sandra Ramos. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 7. Sandra Ramos, The Raft/La balsa (1994). Calcography, 19.69 × 35.43 in. © Sandra Ramos. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 8. Sandra Ramos, Illusions/ Espejismos (1994). Oil on canvas, 29.53 × 23.62 in. © Sandra Ramos. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 9. Sandra Ramos, To Drown in Tears/Ahogarse en lágrimas (1994). Oil on canvas, 23.62 × 23.62 in. © Sandra Ramos. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 10. Sandra Ramos, Me at the Bottom of the Sea/ Yo en el fondo del mar (1994). Oil on canvas, 29.53 × 23.62 in. © Sandra Ramos. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 11. Sandra Ramos, Dead/ Muerte (1994). Painted suitcase, 27.56 × 28.74 × 17.72 in. © Sandra Ramos. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 12. Sandra Ramos, Fenced by the Waters/Cercados por las aguas (1994). Oil on canvas, 50.79 × 29.13 in. © Sandra Ramos. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 13. ADÁL (Adál Maldonado), Muerto Rico (2017). Inkjet print, 32.01 × 50.51 in. Courtesy of the Estate of Adál Maldonado and Roberto Paradise.

Plate 14. Patrick McGrath Muñíz, Diasporamus (2018). Oil on canvas, 44 × 64 in. © Patrick McGrath Muñíz. Courtesy of the artist.

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The links between past and present are also evident in the parallels that the novel suggests between the transatlantic slave trade and undocumented intra-Caribbean migration. This is evident when the narrator describes the trip that Miriam, Micaela, and her son take in a yola to Puerto Rico. Once their journey has started, the group of unauthorized migrants realizes that they have been tricked; the captain of the yola has abandoned them, and they do not have the navigational skills to get to Puerto Rico. The descriptions of the unbearable heat, hunger, and thirst amid shark-infested waters reaches a critical point when their yola capsizes and a number of the passengers drown. As the narrator recounts: “The water had run out several days prior. There was no longer food, and all around them the ocean jeered at their solitary boat. The two men had jumped from the yola the night before, preferring to drown than suffer the madness of dehydration” (Lara 166). Their abandonment—and the risk of dying by drowning, heatstroke, or hunger—illustrates once again how violence is a central component of undocumented migration. The sea becomes a nonhuman actor that exerts its violence against the migrants, but it is also a space of exception where migrants are reduced to wasted lives. Another way in which the narrative establishes a parallel to the Middle Passage is through the stories of “She” and “Ifé,” two African women who are captured by colonial-era traffickers and sent to the New World. Following the chapter that describes Micaela and Miriam’s journey, the narrator describes how She and Ifé were chained and forced to board the ship: “Ifé had pressed herbs and roots into her hand as they boarded the ship—rough white men pushing and pulling them up the thin boards, dragging the resistant after a hard blow to the back. . . . She floated over rows and rows of bodies, dead or suffering in the fungal darkness of the ship’s keep” (Lara 173; italics in original). This detailed description reveals the violence of the slave trade and how the ships also became spaces of exception characterized by collective suffering and death. Without a doubt, the fact that this passage follows that of the characters’ journey in a yola suggests a parallel between the transatlantic slave trade and modern-day unauthorized intra-Caribbean migration. This correlation becomes even more evident when Miriam and Micaela arrive in Puerto Rico, where they are immediately kidnapped and become victims of sex traffickers. It is once in Puerto Rico, in the dark room where they are forced into prostitution, that a feverish and delirious Miriam finds out that her son Antonio drowned when the trafficker who picked them up on the coast refused to save him. The events that transpire in this chapter reveal the degree of vulnerability to which women and children are exposed

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before, during, and after embarking on the process of unauthorized migration from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico. The graphic passages of Miriam’s and Micaela’s sexual exploitation constitute one of the most forceful critiques of the links between undocumented migration and sex slavery to date in Dominican-American letters and Caribbean Latinx literature more broadly. Erzulie’s Skirt, therefore, sheds light on the problems of sexual violence and exploitation that are often tied to unauthorized migration. Similar to the dire conditions faced by the characters in the bateyes, we must consider this issue to be another example of the types of human rights violations that unauthorized intra-Caribbean migrants face today. A 1996 study published by the International Organization for Migration, titled “Trafficking in Women from the Dominican Republic for Sexual Exploitation,” the authors state that the Dominican Republic “has the fourth highest number in the world of women working overseas in the sex trade” (26). While not all women who participate in the sex trade are coerced into it, the reality is that many have been forced into prostitution before, during, or after the process of undocumented migration takes place. Miriam’s and Micaela’s experiences with sex trafficking in Puerto Rico unveil the gendered violence that is so prevalent in unauthorized crossings. Their experiences also challenge the idealized view of Puerto Rico as a “land of opportunity.” As I discussed in chapter 2, Puerto Rico is one of the main destinations within the intra-Caribbean migratory circuit, either as a stepping-stone to the continental United States or as a final destination. As a US territory, Puerto Rico is often metonymically associated with the American Dream. This connection between Puerto Rico and the American Dream is evident in the novel when Miriam and Micaela find out that they arrived, but realize that “in Puerto Rico the streets were paved, but not with gold” (Lara 181). These words reveal that in the Dominican imaginary, this myth encompasses Puerto Rico. Given the severe physical and psychological trauma experienced by the characters, there is no doubt that the novel directly challenges any idyllic view of Puerto Rico, and even more importantly, the text becomes a warning against the risks associated with unauthorized intra-Caribbean migration. As I have demonstrated, Erzulie’s Skirt centers Africa and the history of the transatlantic slave trade to reclaim the Black heritage that is often denied by official national discourse. The links that the novel establishes between the slave trade and modern-day unauthorized migration serve to contextualize the present, which is intricately connected to the violence of colonialism, slavery, and anti-Blackness. But I would like to argue that one of the novel’s

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greatest contributions—in addition to presenting a lesbian couple as the main characters—is claiming that past as something that unites Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This stance defies the official discourse that has construed Dominicanidad based on hispanismo. By centering the figure of Miriam as a Dominican of Haitian descent, the novel brings visibility to a group of people who have remained marginalized from Dominican society to this day. Lara’s novel denounces the oppression of this group through Miriam, daughter of Haitian cane cutters, who was born inside a batey. But perhaps more importantly, the narrative defies the erasure of Haitian-Dominicans by lifting Miriam’s voice as she resists her exclusion from Dominican society. Erzulie’s Skirt reveals the prejudice that people of Haitian descent confront in Dominican society, where they have never been recognized as full citizens, and in fact, have been targeted recently by the state through the TC/0168/13 ruling, which has denationalized and rendered stateless hundreds of thousands of Haitian-Dominicans. While antihaitianismo has been entrenched in Dominican society for decades (and was institutionalized by Trujillo), its deployment against rayanos illustrates the hardened borders of Dominicanidad, to echo the title of García-Peña’s book. However, just because the borders between those who are included or excluded from the Dominican collective imaginary seem rigid does not mean that they are fixed. Miriam makes this point when she says to Micaela: “Children don’t know yet what it means to be Haitian. They don’t see a difference yet” (Lara 119). In other words, the Dominican-born children of Haitians are not born with an awareness about the inferior position they occupy in Dominican society. They are socialized to recognize it, and to resist it. Their conversation offers a reflection on the position of in-betweenness that Haitian-Dominicans occupy because following Miriam’s comment, Micaela answers saying, “I thought you said you are Dominican.” To this, Miriam responds, I was born in this country. Antonio’s father, too. But here, they only see me and him as Haitian. The neighbors only think about how we are different. They don’t see how we are the same. . . . They don’t see how we are all living in small shacks, and that we all go hungry from time to time. They don’t see how our skins and faces can’t hide the truth of where we come from. We are all from Africa. (Lara 119)

Miriam’s words reveal the complexity of Haitian-Dominican identity. Despite being born in the Dominican Republic, her Haitian heritage and Black-

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ness define her as an Other. More importantly, she calls out the hypocrisy behind antihaitianismo, specifically in the context of the batey. As I explain at the beginning of this section, a hierarchy of power also exists within the batey. However, while these distinctions inform internal relations between Dominicans, ethnic Haitians, and their Dominican-born offspring within the batey, all workers experience similar living conditions. This is what Miriam means when she recalls the extreme poverty and hunger that unites them, despite their ethnic and racial backgrounds. Regardless of their skin tone differences, they share the same African ancestry. The batey, therefore, becomes the great equalizer. Within this space of exception they experience similar hardships because as Black people, global neoliberalism renders them wasted lives. The novel calls attention to how the racialization of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent, beyond the confines of the batey, becomes the main mechanism of their exclusion from Dominican society. As several scenes indicate, Miriam’s Blackness marks her as Haitian. One of these instances takes place when she tries to apply for a travel visa to the United States with her son Antonio and Micaela. According to the narrator, “The guard looked her up and down, narrowing his eyes as he studied her tightly braided hair. ‘Haitians have to go to Haiti to apply for visas. This line is only for Dominicans’” (139). To this, Miriam responds, “‘I am a Dominican, and so is my son. Where do I have to go to get an appointment?’ The guard shook his head. ‘Sorry, I can’t help you.’ He turned his back to her” (139). This exchange between Miriam and the guard is illustrative not only of the conflation of Blackness and Haitian identity but also of the government’s position regarding the “problem” that Dominicans of Haitian descent represent. As Miriam’s situation demonstrates, thousands of children of Haitian parents born in the Dominican Republic, especially inside bateyes, grow up without being officially recognized by the state. Under jus soli, or birthright citizenship, “any person born in the country was considered a citizen (with the exception of people ‘in transit,’ a group that included little more than foreign diplomats)” (We Are All Dominican). Recently, the human rights abuses in the bateyes have been the subject of debate and protests to bring a halt to the violations committed by multinational corporations against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. Shedding light on this issue, Lara’s novel is the first work of literature by a Dominican diaspora author to openly denounce a system that many consider akin to slavery. Beyond the batey, the novel denounces the dehumanization of Haitian-Dominicans and their systematic exclusion from

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Dominican society, which in 2013 culminated with their mass denationalization, as I examine in a later section. Erzulie’s Skirt marks a pivotal juncture in Dominican diaspora literature for several reasons. First, its focus on Haitian-Dominican and LGBTQ+ identities gives visibility to this hybrid subjectivity while destabilizing official definitions of Dominican identity. In addition, the novel establishes a connection between past and present through explicit references to Africa and the transatlantic slave trade, the depiction of life in the modern batey, and yola journeys. Through its emphasis on Africa and its evocation of the slave trade, the novel reaffirms the African roots of Dominican identity, which have been historically denied to privilege a version of Dominicanidad based on hispanismo, that is, white supremacy. And lastly, the novel challenges idealized views of unauthorized migration and of Puerto Rico as a place associated with the American Dream. For all of these reasons, Erzulie’s Skirt is a powerful narrative that reveals the difficulties faced by Black women, especially those of Haitian descent, in the Dominican Republic.

Post- earthquake narratives: Pedro caBiya’s “Fruta de teMPorada” and Junot diaz’s “Monstro” On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 Mw12 earthquake struck Haiti, killing more than 200,000 people and leaving 1.6 million Haitians homeless (COHA, “From Haiti”). The catastrophic event sent the world on a race to provide aid to a country that we are all indebted to for being “the first independent ‘black’ nation in the American hemisphere” and for having launched “the formal end of slavery throughout most of the Atlantic World,” despite the fact that for centuries it has remained invisible and neglected in the face of the political and economic trauma resulting from (neo)colonialism (Daut 3). The first country to step up was the Dominican Republic, when “Dominican rescue workers were the first to enter Haiti” and offered “urgent aid that saved thousands of victims” (García-Peña 153).13 According to García-Peña, “One of the most significant actions of solidarity that emerged as a result of the tragedy came, shockingly, from the Dominican state” (153). She refers to President Leonel Fernández’s declaration of an “open border” policy, which allowed “Haitians to transit freely to the Dominican Republic without need of documentation” (153). The material and symbolic consequences of the “open border” policy should not be underestimated. Not only did thousands of Haitians receive the medical attention they needed, but also their presence in the Dominican Republic “created a significant rupture in the Dominican

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anti-Haitian narrative” (García-Peña 154). More importantly, perhaps, the “resulting narratives of the earthquake” allowed Dominicans, if only momentarily, “to see the possibility of the island as a whole, without borders” (García-Peña 154). In contrast to García-Peña’s take on these events, the historian Edward Paulino is more skeptical when reflecting on the Dominican Republic’s reaction. As he puts it, “In the aftermath of the earthquake the Dominican government took in hundreds of injured Haitians and established makeshift hospitals on the border to coordinate humanitarian relief efforts” (2). But he adds that part of the reason behind the show of solidarity was “also to prevent an uncontrolled exodus of poor and sick Haitians from traveling into Dominican territory” (2). In other words, their actions were as much an expression of goodwill as a preemptive move to curtail Haitians from crossing the border into Dominican territory. Fumagalli echoes this posture when she states: “Formerly considered a country where Haitian immigrant workers were denied their human rights, after the earthquake the Dominican Republic was determined to change its international reputation and refashion itself as Haiti’s ‘Good Samaritan’” (313). Mindful of the skepticism surrounding the Dominican Republic’s response after the earthquake, and aware of how things are now back to “normal,” García-Peña affirms that “the event allowed for a significant contradictions [sic] of anti-Haitianism at the very core of society” (154). The “open border” policy was relatively short-lived, and soon enough, the border was sealed again. This was the case after a cholera outbreak in a refugee camp in Port-au-Prince, which led to the “protracted closure of the frontier on market days in the winter of 2010/11, a measure taken by the Dominican government to (allegedly) prevent the spread of cholera” (Fumagalli 8). The closing had a negative impact on Haitians and Dominicans selling and buying products in the market. In response to the perceived threat that the outbreak posed to the country, Dominican president Leonel Fernández created “Directiva Diecinueve,” a decree that “ordered the Dominican military to seal the border with Haiti, establishing a ‘sanitary barrier’ to prevent the spread of the disease into the Dominican Republic” (Paulino 2). While efforts to monitor, control, and solidify the border with Haiti—such as “Directiva Diecinueve”—have been taking place intermittently for decades, the border has remained relatively fluid, with Haitians and Dominicans crossing it on market days, and Haitian students and workers crossing daily to the Dominican Republic to study and work. I begin this section referencing the 2010 Haiti earthquake because I am

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interested both in how this event marked a shift—even if temporary—in the perception and treatment of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, and how this was reflected in literature. On the ground, this shift manifested not only in the closing and militarization of the border but also in the mass deportation of Haitian immigrants. As the journalists Jacob Kushner and Danica Coto observe: “Dominican officials eased border controls and halted deportations for humanitarian reasons after the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake near Port-au-Prince that killed an estimated 316,000 people and devastated the already impoverished nation. But right at the one-year anniversary of the quake, the deportations resumed— with greater enforcement than has been seen since 2005.” The “Dominican government’s heartless solution to speed the deportations of displaced Haitians” one year after the earthquake was the result of rising tensions between Haiti and the Dominican Republic following a marked increase in Haitian unauthorized migration (COHA, “From Haiti”). While the United Nations estimated that approximately 600,000 undocumented Haitians lived in the Dominican Republic before the earthquake, that number climbed to one million, according to Dominican authorities (Kushner and Coto). A 2011 report by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs stated that “the recent spike in repatriations is a clear indication that the Haitian presence is being felt more heavily and perceived more negatively since the earthquake” (“From Haiti”). These repatriations, which target undocumented Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent, most of whom have never been to Haiti, are conducted by the military and are “frequently accompanied by physical violence and verbal abuse” and take the form of “mass expulsions as well as daily individual deportations” (COHA, “From Haiti”). As Jacob Kushner explains, when the deportations resumed, they “were carried out in the manner they always had been—indiscriminately and unlawfully” (52).14 Not coincidentally, a constitutional reform passed by the Dominican National Assembly on January 26, 2010—just days after the earthquake—made possible the latest wave of repatriations with the specific purpose to “combat a rush of Haitians flooding across the 214 mile-long border” (COHA, “From Haiti”).15 In addition, while efforts by the Dominican government to erode jus soli, or birthright citizenship, had been under way for years, they intensified post-earthquake. As the website We Are All Dominican explains: “In 2010, a constitutional reform eliminated birthright citizenship in the Dominican Republic, denying for the first time the nationality of children born in the country to undocumented immigrant parents.” Eventually, these reforms led to La Sentencia.

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Persecution by authorities and deportation are not the only threats that Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent constantly face. Manifestations of indirect and direct violence are the result of the deep-seated antihaitianismo and xenophobia that the state has institutionalized over decades. For instance, the absence of a required unit on Dominican-Haitian history and relations in the school curriculum leaves it to the discretion of individual schools and teachers to cover the material. Worse yet, “textbooks portray racist depictions of Haitians accompanied by incorrect facts such as that, unlike slavery under the French in what is now Haiti, slavery under the Spanish on the Dominican side ‘was never arduous’” (Kushner 56). These silences and historical distortions exemplify indirect violence, which usually precedes other types of violence. Some examples of direct violence include when “Kreyol (Haitian) stations close to the border warned of ethnic violence against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent by gangs . . . who were credited with having burned down homes, stabbed and victimized, and even on occasion killed Haitians” (Hall). Kushner makes a similar point when he states that “acts of vigilante justice and reprisal killings by Dominicans against Haitians” increased significantly after the earthquake. News report headlines such as “Anti-Black Violence and Mob Justice against Haitians in the Dominican Republic” (African Globe 2013), “Dominican Mob Violence against Haitians” (Racism Review 2015), and “Haitian Man Lynched amid Dominican Republic Immigration Controversy” (Huffpost 2015) attest to these tensions. The escalation of violence against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent is evidence that xenophobia and systemic racism in the Dominican Republic have intensified since the 2010 earthquake. Jenny Marón, a legal coordinator for the Movement of DominicanHaitian Women—known as MUDHA—summarizes it well when she affirms that “after the earthquake, everything changed. . . . People come to think that the life of a Haitian is worth nothing” (Kushner). Because of this, I would like to argue that since the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the space of exception that marks the suspension of human rights of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent is no longer limited to the border, nor to the bateyes, but rather encompasses the entire Dominican Republic and sometimes Hispaniola as a whole. In this section, I examine two texts published post-earthquake—“Fruta de temporada” by Pedro Cabiya and “Monstro” by Junot Díaz—that reveal how the Dominican Republic and even Haiti itself become spaces of exception. Unlike most works analyzed in this book, which center the action of crossing borders, these texts reveal the symbolic border—or frontera intranacional—that separates Dominicans and Haitians.

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haitian WasteD lives in PeDro Cabiya’s “fruta De teMPoraDa” The notion of the frontera intranacional emerges in Pedro Cabiya’s short online piece “Fruta de temporada” (2013), which reveals the extent of the marginalization and dehumanization that Haitian nationals endure in the Dominican Republic.16 Cabiya, a renowned Puerto Rican author based in the Dominican Republic, has written several works that denounce antihaitianismo. Not only that, but he has also been an outspoken critic of corruption in the Dominican government and other institutions through his media presence. “Fruta de temporada” is a short piece he published on his website that addresses antihaitianismo in the Dominican Republic, which many claim has intensified since the Haiti earthquake. The text opens with the narrator declaring the following in a matter-offact fashion: “En días pasados el frutero haitiano que operaba en una calle cerca de mi casa fue atropellado por una yipeta” (A few days ago the Haitian fruit seller on a street close to my house was run over by a jeep). According to witness accounts, the fruit vendor died instantly in a hit-and-run accident. The narrator, who admits that he and the fruit seller were only acquaintances, says that he cannot stop thinking about him: “Pensé brevemente en su muerte, tan casual, tan ordinaria, tan cotidiana” (I thought briefly about his death, so casual, so ordinary, so quotidian). These adjectives are repeated like a refrain throughout the paragraph as the narrator ponders how the events transpired and how the victim’s family will be informed of his death. He notes that unlike Antoni Gaudí, who was mourned after dying in a similar fashion, the Haitian fruit vendor will be quickly forgotten. Reflecting on this contrast, he intimates: “El frutero haitiano, un ser humano con un pasado, una familia y un nombre que nunca me molesté en preguntar, fue borrado del mundo y de la memoria humana con la misma indolencia y absoluta ausencia de empatía con que fulminamos de un chancletazo a una cucaracha” (The Haitian fruit seller, a human being with a past, a family, and a name that I never bothered to ask, was erased from the world and from human memory with the same indolence and absolute lack of empathy with which we kill a cockroach). Aware of his own complicity, he decries the way in which Dominican society dehumanizes and invisibilizes Haitian immigrants. By comparing society’s reaction to the man’s death and the killing of a cockroach, the narrator denounces society’s indifference and lack of respect for Haitian lives. The metaphor captures the extreme dehumanization of the fruit vendor, who symbolically stands for all Haitian lives. In the eyes of xenophobic Dominicans, the narrator suggests, Haitians

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are no more than cockroaches: abundant, disgusting, filthy, and a pest that must be exterminated. While the driver may not have intended to kill the fruit vendor, his decision to flee the scene of the accident illustrates how in the eyes of many Dominicans, Haitians are reduced to wasted lives. They are seen as redundant and replaceable. The narrator’s reflection shifts to the Dominican driver who killed the fruit vendor: “¿Pensó en pararse? ¿En ayudar? ¿Consideró, si bien brevemente, que quizá podría salvarlo si lo recogía y lo llevaba a un hospital?” (Did he think of stopping? Or helping? Did he consider, even briefly, that he could maybe save him if he picked him up and took him to a hospital?). Perplexed by the driver’s decision to continue driving, the narrator imagines the ordinary details of what might have transpired in his life that day. From the moment he realized the jeep had a dent, to the moment he sat down to dinner with his wife and children, to the moment he would take his car to the shop to get it fixed, the narrator traces what he imagines is the mental process of the driver. This shift in focus allows the reader to reflect on the role of the driver—symbolic of Dominican society—as aggressor. However, the irony lies in the fact that by focusing on what he imagines would transpire, the narrator sheds light on the lives of the many other Haitians with whom the driver interacts directly or indirectly. The last paragraph of the text, which is worth quoting in its entirety below, reveals the irony behind Dominican society’s ill treatment of Haitian immigrants despite them being the backbone of the economy: Por la mañana, antes de que todos se levanten, nuestro conductor se sentaría a la mesa, donde la muchacha de servicio, oriunda de Jacmel, de donde proviene, sin él saberlo, el frutero que mató el día anterior, le serviría un tazón de café, endulzado con azúcar extraída de cañas malditas cortadas por compatriotas del hombre que, ayer, aplastó como a un perro. También comería de una bandeja con frutas de temporada, cultivadas por hombres y mujeres que hablan la lengua relampagueante de su víctima. Y, consumido el desayuno, abandonaría su lujoso edificio de apartamentos, levantado bloque por bloque por obreros cuyas muertes valen tanto como la del frutero que reventó con su yipeta, hacia un taller de desabolladura en el que, probablemente, toda evidencia quedaría eliminada por maestros del ferré provenientes de la tierra de Jacques-Stephan Alexis.[17] (In the morning, before the rest wake up, our driver would sit at the table, where the young servant woman born in Jacmel, without him knowing, the place from which the fruit seller he killed was from, would serve him a

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cup of coffee, sweetened with sugar extracted from the damned sugarcane cut by the compatriots of the man that, yesterday, he crushed like a dog. He would also eat from an in-season fruit tray, grown by men and women who speak the same lightning-fast tongue of his victim. And, finished with breakfast, he would leave his luxurious apartment building, erected block by block by laborers whose deaths are worth as much as the fruit vendor’s, whom he crushed with his jeep, to head to an auto body shop where, probably, all evidence would be erased by expert repairmen from the land of Jacques-Stephan Alexis.)

Focusing on the life of the driver the morning after the accident, the narrator decries the hypocrisy of Dominican society, which relies on Haitian labor. In one sweeping statement, the narrator lists the many Haitian laborers that play a role in his daily life: the young housekeeper, the cane cutters who produce the sugar that sweetens his coffee, the fruit pickers who harvest the frutas de temporada that he is about to eat for breakfast, the construction workers who built his neighborhood block by block, and the ones who will soon be fixing his yipeta’s dents. Interspersed throughout the paragraph, references to the fruit vendor’s violent and senseless death are a reminder of the lesser value ascribed to Haitian lives in the Dominican Republic. The reference to the figure of the intellectual Jacques Stephen Alexis at the end of the paragraph is noteworthy for a couple of reasons. First, it underscores the richness of Haitian culture—perceived as “uncivilized” by ultranationalist sectors of Dominican society—and posits Haitians as producers of knowledge. Second, in his works, such as his novel Les arbres musiciens (1957), Alexis depicts and celebrates “connections between the inhabitants of the Haitian-Dominican borderland” (Fumagalli 319). The mention of Alexis, therefore, evokes the possibility of unity and solidarity among Haitians and Dominicans, which stands in sharp contrast to the dehumanization of the fruit vendor by Dominican society. “Fruta de temporada” is a brief piece that packs a strong punch by denouncing the hypocrisy of Dominican society, which despite relying on Haitian labor, continues to oppress and exploit this vulnerable group. The title of the piece evokes these ideas. On the one hand, it is a direct reference to the product sold by the Haitian vendor—the link between the deceased man and the narrator. On the other hand, it metaphorizes the role of Haitian immigrants as dispensable or indispensable in the Dominican economy depending on the economic, political, and social climate. The focus on the product, rather than on the vendor himself, underscores the fact that within Dominican society, Haitian immigrants tend to be dehumanized. This point

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is also evident when we reflect on the absence of the fruit vendor’s name— who remains anonymous and therefore functions as a universal figure. Considering the historical context of this piece is important. While Haitian nationals in the Dominican Republic and their offspring have experienced all sorts of xenophobia, discrimination, and prejudice throughout history, antihaitianismo seems to have intensified in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. This moment, I propose, marks the expansion of the spaces of exception—where the human rights of Haitians are suspended—to areas beyond the border and the bateyes. After the earthquake, the Dominican government, fearing a massive wave of refugees, passed resolutions to protect the border and simultaneously engaged in a deportation campaign. Anti-immigrant sentiments were fueled by fear, and many Haitians became scapegoats of Dominican society. By the time Cabiya’s text was published in May 2013, these sentiments had been intensifying, eventually leading to the passing of the TC/0168/13 ruling in September 2013.

borDer anxieties in junot Díaz’s “Monstro” In his essay “Apocalypse” (2011), Junot Díaz describes the Haiti earthquake as an apocalypse, and therefore, “a revelation.”18 If nothing else, it “revealed Haiti.” What had been hidden before, the earthquake unveiled because, as he explains, apocalyptic catastrophes “expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities.” These factors are proof that, as Neil Smith puts it, “There’s no such thing as a natural disaster”; rather, disasters are always social, since “the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus” (qtd. in J. Díaz). This social calculus, I would like to add, hinges upon who is considered redundant or disposable, the wasted lives of modernization and globalization. In this section I examine Junot Díaz’s story “Monstro” as a text that seeks to “reveal Haiti” by presenting a futuristic apocalypse based on a social disaster.19 I argue that the story conflates historical catastrophes to produce an allegory that interrogates the fear of Blackness and invasion that have shaped the state’s anxieties vis-à-vis Haiti. Fear of a Haitian invasion dates back to Haiti’s incursions into Dominican territory since the early nineteenth century, including the invasion of 1822–1844 that temporarily unified the island (Paulino 23). Since then, the trope of invasion has remained present in the collective Dominican imaginary and has helped shape official notions of identity—usually in opposition to a Haitian Other. Over the centuries, the differences between the two

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sides—especially in terms of race—have been exploited by Dominican elites to cement their own power. Constructions of Dominicanidad, especially during the Trujillo regime, have relied on the perceived differences between the two groups; Haitians are associated with Blackness, French, and Vodou, while Dominicans are associated with whiteness, Spanish, and Catholicism. But under these deceptively straightforward differences hide deeply biased views. Speaking about how the Trujillo regime constructed distinctions between the two sides, Paulino states: “Dominicans were described as cultured, racially superior, governable, peaceful, and white (whatever their actual color). Haitians were viewed as inferior, racially backward, ungovernable, violent, and black” (3). Unfortunately, many of the Haitian stereotypes that were cemented during his dictatorship are still present in the Dominican social imaginary. Junot Díaz’s “Monstro” (2012),20 a futurist short story set in Hispaniola, departs from those very stereotypes to reveal their absurdity. The story imagines how border anxieties will play out in a not-so-distant future. The use of the speculative fiction genre allows Díaz to explore long- standing Dominican fears by projecting them into the future. Speaking about his decision to set this apocalypse story in the future, Díaz explains: I’m one of those apocalyptics. From the start of my immigrant days, I’ve been fascinated by end-of-the-world stories, by outbreak narratives, and always wanted to set a world-ender on Hispaniola. So many apocalypses have already taken place on that island, including the one that gave rise to the modern world, I figured: what’s one more? If any place could take it, it would be that poor island. (“This Week”)

Díaz centers Hispaniola as a space shaped by many apocalypses, beginning with the Spanish conquest and colonialism. “Monstro” narrates another apocalypse—one set in the future—when the worst fears of ultranationalist Dominicans collide and coalesce: Haiti, Blackness, and invasion. The story’s simultaneous focus on the past and the future exemplifies the cyclical nature of history that is a leitmotif in Díaz’s fiction. The fears that have shaped Hispaniola’s history are projected into the future and magnified, revealing how fear of the Other ultimately leads to self-destruction. The fates of both sides are intertwined. “Monstro” can be read as an allegorical representation of the primordial fear of Blackness—embodied by the Haitian—that was promoted by the Trujillo regime and continues to be embraced by conservative Dominican sectors. In a nutshell, the story materializes historical anxieties around

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the threat of a Haitian invasion and the urgency to protect the border to safeguard Dominican survival. Playing on the anxieties that have led the Dominican government to institutionalize antihaitianismo throughout the last century, Díaz’s story presents a “worst case scenario” that challenges hispanismo and anti-Blackness. The first sentence of the story already hints at the conflation of three anxiety-producing pillars: Haiti, Blackness, and invasion. From an uncertain future, the narrator turns his gaze backward and reflects on the origins of what turned out to be an apocalyptic event when he states: “At first, Negroes thought it funny. A disease that could make a Haitian blacker?” (107). The irony lies in the fact that in the Dominican imaginary, Blackness is equated with Haitian identity. The narrator’s words imply that it is impossible for Haitians to be blacker than they are, given that they are already seen as the epitome of Blackness. He continues: “It was the joke of the year. Everybody in our sector accusing everybody else of having it. . . . Someone would point to a spot on your arm and say, Diablo, haitiano, que te pasó? La Negrura they called it. The Darkness” (107). The use of the term negrura, also translated as “Blackness,” preceded by the article la, effectively pathologizes Blackness. The fact that La Negrura is linked to Haitians—as victims and carriers—seems to echo what in another context García-Peña refers to as the “feared ‘blackening’ (ennegrecimiento) or ‘hybridization’ of the Dominican race” that led Trujillo to order the Massacre of 1937 (101). Moreover, as Paulino reminds us, “Dominican intellectuals created a narrative that sought to justify Trujillo’s massacre and the aftermath of control by branding Haitians as carriers of disease and retrograde culture” (116). In the story, the threat of infection—or the possibility of La Negrura crossing the border—functions as the perfect metaphor for the fear of Blackness. Suspense builds up as the narrator reflects on his life when the new disease began to spread. As he recounts it, “The infection showed up on a small boy in the relocation camps outside Port-au-Prince” (107). The location of the outbreak origin near Port-au-Prince reinforces Dominican views of Haiti as the epitome of Blackness and epicenter of disease. While the reference to the relocation camps is not explained—that is, the reader never learns why there are relocation camps in the first place—the image evokes the camps that emerged after the 2010 earthquake, a point to which I will return shortly. The narrator’s observation that it “didn’t rip through the pobla like the dengues or the poxes,” that it was “more of a slow leprous spread. . . . Something new,” highlights Haiti’s vulnerability to disease after catastrophe due to the racial inequities and severe poverty that have resulted from cen-

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turies of (neo)colonialism and global anti-Blackness (107). Contrary to his claim, however, the disease seems to have spread rather quickly, though not many Dominicans seemed to care. “This one didn’t cause too much panic,” the narrator admits, “because it seemed to hit only the sickest of the sick, viktims who had nine kinds of ill already in them. You literally had to be falling to pieces for it to grab you” (107). The Dominicans’ choice not to panic—despite their geographical proximity—reflects their privilege in relation to Haitians. The narrator drives this point home when he states: “And since it was just poor Haitian types getting fucked up—no real margin in that” (107). Later on he adds, “For six, seven months it was just a horrible Haitian disease—who fucking cared, right?” (108). These comments illustrate how in the Dominican imaginary (South–South)—and more broadly the Global North—Haitians are often perceived as what Roane Doty calls “bare life,” or what Bauman refers to as “wasted lives.” Because they are barely alive (“sickest of the sick,” “falling to pieces”), they are considered disposable, and are thus dehumanized. I argue that by unveiling how Haiti is populated by bare life, the narrative renders Haiti a space of exception. As long as the disease stays contained within its borders, life goes on everywhere else, including for its next-door neighbor. The fact that La Negrura affected only Haitians—at least at the outset— symbolically locates Blackness in Haiti and outside of the borders of the Dominican Republic. In this way, the positioning of La Negrura echoes the posture of the Trujillo regime and present-day ultranationalists regarding Blackness as only applicable to Haitians. The outright rejection of Dominican Blackness by these historical and contemporary actors is allegorically represented through the development of the disease. The descriptions of it, in fact, seem to tap into some of the most subconscious and primordial fears of those who hold anti-Haitian and anti-Black views: “A black moldfungus-blast that came on like a splotch and then gradually started taking you over” (107). The narrator adds, “It almost always started epidermically and then worked its way up and in. Most of the infected were immobile within a few months, the worst comatose by six. . . . Coral reefs might have been adios on the ocean floor, but they were alive and well on the arms and backs and heads of the infected. Black rotting rugose masses fruiting out of bodies” (107). These graphic descriptions underscore the repulsive nature of the disease, which deforms its victims and decomposes their bodies to the point of monstrosity. The fact that La Negrura first affects the epidermis and then moves internally can be read as a metaphor of how Blackness

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(a construction understood differently across cultures and contexts) is first and foremost associated with skin color. Similar to how the disease moves inward, racism is internalized, causing trauma in those who experience it. The slow but steady transformation of La Negrura’s victims into the monsters foreshadowed in the title is a projection of the worst fears associated with Haitians. Fear of Haiti has a long history because the country has been considered “a threat to many” (García-Peña 78). The response to this perceived threat has been varied, but always relies on the Othering of Haiti. In the case of the Dominican Republic, a “primitivist discourse with respect to Haiti is as old as the foundation of the Dominican nation itself” (Valerio-Holguín, “Primitive” 75). Some of these primitivist tropes posit that “Haitians are animals, Haitians are cannibals, Haitians are savages, Haitians are violent, Haitians are thieves, Haitians are close to nature, and Haitians are promiscuous and prolific” (76).21 In Dominican folklore, the figures of Comegente and El Cuco embody many of these characteristics. Sophie Maríñez explains that since 1791, “La noción de un Haití caníbal se manifiesta primero en la figura del Comegente, ser monstruoso que aparece en leyendas orales, relatos de crímenes, cuentos y novelas” (The notion of a cannibal Haiti first manifests in the figure of the Comegente, a monstrous being who appears in oral legends, crime tales, stories, and novels) (“Alegorías” 71). Archbishop Fernando Portillo coined the term “para enfatizar el nivel de crueldad y salvajismo del que serían capaces los rebeldes” (to emphasize the level of cruelty and savagery of which the rebels would be capable), referring to enslaved people in neighboring Saint-Domingue (71). From his perspective, the uprisings of enslaved Africans taking place were characterized by “robos, asesinatos y violaciones” (thefts, murders, and rapes) (71), ideas that were central in shaping the narrative around Haitians and the Haitian Revolution. Another oral folklore character evoked in “Monstro” is El Cuco, a monstrous cannibalistic figure that circulates in Latin America. According to Maríñez, “El cuco es una figura abstracta, sin forma específica pero que guarda todas las características de monstruo indescriptible, un caníbal con poderes sobrenaturales que consume a niños, mujeres y ancianos por las noches” (El Cuco is an abstract figure, without specific form but who has all the characteristics of an indescribable monster, a cannibal with supernatural powers who consumes children, women, and the elderly during the night) (72). However, popular Dominican legends “lo asocian primordialmente con la figura de un haitiano que recorre las calles con un saquito al hombro para meter ahí a los niños, freírlos en aceite y untarse ese aceite para hacerse invisible y cometer otras brujerías” (associate him primarily with the figure of a Haitian who wanders

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the streets with a bag over his shoulder in which to put the children, fry them in oil, and smear that oil over his body to become invisible and practice sorcery) (72). More importantly, this figure was co-opted by the Trujillo regime to represent Haiti as a “nación caníbal que engulliría a la República Dominicana si sus habitantes no se detuvieran en la frontera” (cannibalistic nation that would devour the Dominican Republic if its inhabitants were not stopped at the border) (72). According to Maríñez, the image of El Cuco served to justify the campaign of the dominicanización de la frontera and the Massacre of 1937 that preceded it (72). In “Monstro,” Haitians sick with La Negrura embody most of these tropes and figures. But it is also important to note how, historically, the fear of Haiti also extended beyond its neighbor. In fact, “The slave-dependent modern world greatly feared Haiti precisely because of its symbolic status as a locus for racial equality and political contestation” (García-Peña 78). This included the United States, which depended on enslaving people to grow its economy. Fear of Haiti “traveled along with the soldiers who went to the island” during the US occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) and the Dominican Republic (1916–1924) (79). García-Peña observes that “the stories of flesh-eating Haitian zombies and criminal black emperors the US Marines brought with them to the island probably grew as they met the local rumors of Haitian monsters who killed virgins and raped their dead bodies in broad daylight” (81). The Dominican and US narratives produced in response to the fear of Haiti converged with the arrival of US Empire forces to Hispaniola. Once the US military was established in Haiti, “images of Haitians as decomposing bodies (zombies), disabled bodies, and malnourished bodies began to circulate the world” (García-Peña 152). “Monstro” possibly draws from these various narratives as a way to interrogate them and unveil how they have functioned to dehumanize Haitians over the centuries. Thus far, the scholarship on “Monstro” has focused on the figure of the zombie. For instance, Sarah Quesada argues that, in Díaz’s story, “recognizable signs in the diseased point to the fact that they are not only developing into another species but, more specifically, zombies” (“A Planetary” 295). Megan Jeanette Myers also privileges the zombie in her analysis of the story, stating that these zombies critique “a system of global capitalism in which the citizens and residents of impoverished, third-world countries still undergo a disembodiment of sorts: they are modern-day slaves” (136). While I agree with these readings, I believe that Díaz’s story goes further by simultaneously evoking other culture-specific figures such as Comegente and El Cuco, in addition to zombies, whose historical Haitian roots have been whitewashed

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over time (Myers 136). In other words, the monstro in “Monstro” represents an amalgam of the most feared figures in Dominican folklore. The deformations caused by La Negrura are exacerbated when doctors realize that they need to “prevent them from growing together” (107). “That was a serious issue,” the narrator tells us, “the blast seemed to have a boner for fusion, respected no kind of boundaries,” as was evident in the case of the two Haitian brothers “knotted together by horrible mold, their heads slurred into one” (107). The disease’s power to fuse people together represents the embodiment of some of the greatest fears and anxieties expressed by Dominican ultranationalists. On the one hand, the text suggests that eventually everyone in Hispaniola—including Dominicans—will become infected with La Negrura, symbolically challenging the state’s posture that Blackness is located in Haiti, or that only Haitians are Black. On the other hand, the personification of the disease as an entity that “respected no kind of boundaries” also taps into the anxieties that the possibility of a unified Hispaniola have provoked among Dominican ultranationalists since Trujillo’s era to the present. In the end, La Negrura’s capacity to transgress boundaries—whether personal or geopolitical—also serves to highlight the artificiality of borders. The physical fusion among Haitians affected by La Negrura is central to the development of the plot because, as the narrator tells us, the doctors began to notice a change in behavior among the victims: “They wanted to be together, in close proximity, all the time. They no longer tolerated being separated from other infected, started coming together in the main quarantine zone, just outside Champ de Mars, the largest of the relocation camps” (108). Their urge to come together represents an additional threat, given that they gain strength in numbers. Other developments, such as when the infected suddenly stopped talking (the Silence) and when they began to “simultaneously let out a bizarre shriek” (the Chorus), add to the terror that began to sweep through the population (109). Rumors that the “infected were devils”—another common stereotype about Haitians—turned family members against one another (109). Yet, amid these frightening developments the world kept turning a blind eye, emphasizing once more the perception of Haiti as a space of exception. Signs of trouble continue to emerge, evident when the narrator explains that “after a week of that wailing, the majority of [uninfected] kids had fled the areas around the quarantine zone, moved to other camps. That should have alerted someone, but who paid attention to camp kids?” (109). As the situation continues to deteriorate, the warnings of those caught in the epicenter of the epidemic—Haitians—continue to be ignored. The narrator

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drives this point home when he asks “but who paid attention to camp kids?” To be a Haitian is not the same as being a Haitian child, and being a Haitian child is not the same as being a Haitian refugee child. Children do not usually have a voice in this adult world. In fact, children of the Global South are usually dehumanized, especially those who are refugees. By locating these events in the quarantine zone near Champ de Mars, “the largest of the relocation camps,” the text denounces the world’s failure to uphold the humanity of refugees, some of the most vulnerable people on the planet, because they are deemed wasted lives. The references to Champ de Mars throughout the story center this space as emblematic of the world’s indifference toward Haitians. Moreover, it advances the story’s simultaneous focus on the past and the future, exemplifying the cyclical nature of history. The fact that La Negrura is infecting people in relocation camps near Champ de Mars, the actual location of the largest tent city following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, clearly evokes a parallel between the past and the future. Other developments also reinforce the cyclical nature of history, such as when the narrator announces that “riots were beginning in the camps and the Haitians in the D.R. were getting deported over a freckle” (113). Those familiar with the events that transpired after the earthquake know that riots erupted across the country in November 2010, following a cholera outbreak that was believed to have been brought to Haiti by South Asian members of the U.N. stabilization mission (also known as Minustah) (Desvarieux). According to the reporter Jessica Desvarieux, “The cholera outbreak has triggered the release of months of pent-up frustration with Minustah. The protesters converged on the Champ de Mars, a square filled with thousands of tent-dwelling survivors of the Jan. 12 earthquake.” The cholera riots, as they came to be known, were not the only product of the epidemic. The narrator’s comment about the deportation of Haitians from the Dominican Republic also echoes events that took place following Haiti’s earthquake and cholera outbreak. Back in February 2011, Kushner and Coto reported: “The Dominican Republic has deported thousands of illegal immigrants in recent weeks, sowing fear among Haitians living in the country and prompting accusations its government is using a cholera outbreak as a pretext for a crackdown.” “Monstro,” therefore, is not only imagining a future disaster, but rather rearticulating history through a futuristic lens to demonstrate that history is cyclical, even when we do not recognize it as such. Díaz’s idea of the “past bleeding into the present”—or rather the future— continues after scientists discover many people in the quarantine zone “flick-

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ering blue,” their low body temperature a symptom of their infection (114). After a twenty-eight-minute-long shriek, the narrator declares: “And that more or less was when shit went Rwanda” (115). What had begun as a riot quickly transforms into a brutally deadly encounter. The Rwandan genocide that took place during the 1994 Rwandan Civil War evokes a parallel to the Massacre of 1937 along the Haiti–Dominican Republic border, as the following excerpt shows: That shit was no riot. Even we could tell that. All the relocation camps near the quarantine zone were consumed in what can only be described as a straight massacre. An outbreak of homicidal violence, according to the initial reports. People who had never lifted a finger in anger their whole lives—children, viejos, aid workers, mothers of nine—grabbed knives, machetes, sticks, pots, pans, pipes, hammers and started attacking their neighbors, their friends, their pastors, their children, their husbands, their infirm relatives, complete strangers. Berserk murderous blood rage. (115)

While it has been historically decontextualized in this narrative, the riot that turned into a killing spree evokes strong parallels to the Massacre of 1937 a century before.22 In the story, extreme violence leads to a mass exodus that leaves only the “Possessed, as they became known, fully in control of the twenty-two camps in the vicinity of the quarantine zone” (115). The sudden control that those infected by La Negrura gain over the quarantine zone—which we can assume will extend to all of Haiti, and eventually, the entirety of Hispaniola—evokes an even earlier moment in history: the Haitian Revolution. As the first Black republic to gain its independence (1804) from a European colonial power, Haiti became a threat in the eyes of the Global North. As García-Peña observes, “Hispaniola became an international locus for black resistance and liberation as well as the object of fear in the antebellum United States” (8). She adds, “Since the birth of the republic in 1804, Haiti occupied an important space in the US imaginary. Fear of Haiti overtook the slave-driven US nation, and thus myths were constructed and disseminated in order to propagate fear and hatred in the public sphere” (160). It was also the threat that a Black-controlled republic posed that mobilized the Global North to find ways (blockade, indemnity, etc.) to undermine and curtail the power that Haitians had acquired as a result of their independence. Díaz sums it up, stating that “the world has done its part in demolishing Haiti” (“Apocalypse”). In “Monstro,” the Great Powers (i.e., Global North) finally come to terms with the gravity of a situation they had chosen to ignore. In an effort

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to gain some control, “The entire country of Haiti was placed under quarantine. All flights in and out cancelled. The border with the D.R. sealed” (117). Extending the quarantine to the entire country and sealing the Haiti-DR border recalls some of the measures that were put in place after the earthquake and the subsequent cholera outbreak in Haiti. As Kushner notes, In the final days of that month [October 2010], rumors arrived that a sickness that was killing Haitians in the central part of their country was indeed cholera, which had never before been recorded on the island. Within days, the Dominican Republic ordered the border crossing at Pedernales closed in an attempt to keep the bacterial disease from spreading to their side. (51)

In both cases, with cholera and La Negrura, the border is sealed to control the spread of disease. However, while in the case of cholera the Dominican government made the decision (which reflects the power dynamics between Haiti and the DR), in the case of La Negrura, it is actually imposed by the Great Powers (i.e., US Empire). After two weeks of bloody chaos, “advanced elements of the U.S. Rapid Expeditionary Force landed at Port-au-Prince,” echoing the US invasions of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and of the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924 and again in 1965 (117). The use of drone surveillance, a battle force, and the decision by High Command to place Haiti under quarantine and seal the border with the Dominican Republic exemplify the violence exerted by US Empire on Hispaniola—and the rest of the Hispanophone Caribbean for that matter—through the militarization of the region (117). The story’s critical denunciation of US dominance reaches a climax when the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Commander-in-Chief order “a bomber wing [to scramble] out of Southern Command in Puerto Rico,” a decision that underscores not only Puerto Rico’s colonial condition but also the role that it has been forced to play as accomplice of the United States in the surveillance and militarization of the region (117). The US government’s decision to send bombers “loaded with enough liquid asskick to keep all of Port-au-Prince burning red-hot for a week” epitomizes the tendency of the United States to wield extreme violence, such as the use of the atomic bomb, to gain and retain its global dominance (117). The implicit disregard for Haitian lives is illustrated by the disproportionate use of violence aimed at eliminating the Possessed—a minority—at the expense of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who are trying to escape the zone. The willingness to wipe Port-auPrince off the map illustrates the perception of Haiti as a space of exception. “Monstro” shows how Haitian lives are disposable, redundant, wasted lives. The narrator’s description of the events that follow recenters anti-

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Blackness, suggesting that it is the underlying motivation behind the bombing. He explains, “The Detonation Event—no one knows what else to call it—turned the entire world white” (117). The description of the threesecond detonation that momentarily makes the world “white” is a reminder that at its root, the use of military violence aims to suppress La Negrura. The bombing, therefore, can be seen as a metaphor for the violence that the Global North—especially France and the United States—has exerted over Haiti since its independence in 1804. For the (neo)colonial Global North, a republic founded by formerly enslaved Blacks represents a threat that must be eliminated, as the story suggests. “The Reaper,” which follows the Detonation Event, shows how the violence spills over beyond Haiti: “The detonation produced a second, more extraordinary effect: an electromagnetic pulse that deaded all electronics within a six-hundred-square-mile radius” (118). As a result, “A dead zone had opened over a six-hundred-mile chunk of the Caribbean” (118). The electronic black hole that emerges over the Caribbean further isolates and marginalizes the region, making it more vulnerable to outside control. Moreover, it reinforces what DeLoughrey suggests are problematic associations of islands with premodernity and a primitive past (Routes 15). The effects caused by the Reaper show how, historically, the entire Caribbean region has been considered a space of exception. But despite the use of extreme violence and the catastrophic destruction caused by the bombing, the objective to exterminate the Possessed fails. La Negrura, it seems, is indestructible. In contrast to the deadly results of other epidemics, La Negrura has an empowering effect. In an ironic twist, the bombing appears to have accelerated the metamorphosis of the infected. According to the testimony of “hysterical evacuees,” the infected had transformed into “forty-foot-tall cannibal motherfuckers running loose on the Island” (J. Díaz, “Monstro” 118). A photo “showing what later came to be called a Class 2 in the process of putting a slender broken girl in its mouth” emerged later with the message “Numbers 11:18 Who shall give us flesh to eat?” scribbled under it (118).23 The transformation from indigent and sickly Haitians into giant cannibals as a result of La Negrura allegorically represents the materialization of what Valerio-Holguín calls primitivist tropes of Haitians as animals, cannibals, and savages. The monstros are an amalgam of negative Haitian stereotypes that have long circulated in the Dominican, US, and Global North imaginaries (El Cuco, Comegente, zombies); they are simply a reflection of the fears and anxieties expressed by Dominican ultranationalists over the centuries. As I write this, I’m aware of the inherent contradiction that this represents. The materialization of those fears and anxieties can very well work to sustain, reinforce, and perpetuate

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the very same negative Haitian stereotypes that the text challenges. While there are no easy answers to these contradictions, it is important to note that by emerging victorious in the end, the story suggests the triumph of La Negrura, that is, Blackness. Toward the end of the story, before the narrator hints that he has decided to go with his friends Alex and Mysty to the border to bear witness to the disaster, he states: “Reports arriving over the failing fatlines claimed that Port-au-Prince had been destroyed, that Haiti had been destroyed, that thirteen million screaming Haitian refugees were threatening the borders, that Dominican military units had been authorized to meet the invaders—the term the gov was now using—with ultimate force” (118). The combination of the utter destruction caused by the Great Powers and the giant cannibals attacking the Haitian population unleashes a mass exodus to the Dominican Republic. The Haitian-Dominican border, once again, becomes the epicenter of a battle to keep the “invaders” out. Only this time, it is not clear whether the invaders are the monstros, the refugees, or both. In the end, what matters is that they are all Haitian. Fear of invasion resurfaces, leading the Dominican government to order the use of ultimate force against the invaders, similar to the violence deployed against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent during the Massacre of 1937 that Trujillo ordered when trying to halt their “silent invasion.” History is circular, so the reader can imagine the carnage that ensues as the refugees, chased by the monstros, try to cross into the Dominican Republic. The end of the story offers a forceful condemnation of the Dominican government’s immigration policy toward Haitians, a critique that is timely and relevant, given that the threat of invasion continues to inform Dominican policy toward Haitian immigrants and their descendants today, as the TC/0168/13 ruling has made evident. Historically, Dominican ultranationalists have sought to suppress Blackness and Haitian influence in Dominican culture for fear that it will erase Dominican identity. This concern was codified in Balaguer’s La isla al revés, in which he “conjura la imagen de un Haití cuya negrura engullirá a la República Dominicana” (conjures the image of a Haiti whose Blackness will engulf the Dominican Republic) (Maríñez, “Alegorías” 72). The irony of “Monstro” is that it actualizes these fears by leading the reader to imagine the imminent takeover of the island by the monstros. If Haitians have often been envisioned as “monstruous,” this story literally transforms them and renders them victorious. Symbolically, the ending suggests the triumph of La Negrura—Blackness—thus challenging the claims of hispanismo upon which official conceptions of Dominicanidad have been constructed. Nadie se salva, the story seems to say, La Negrura is in all of us. Haiti is us.

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Díaz’s story “Monstro” may be a futuristic post-apocalyptic text, but its plot is largely inspired by historical events dating back to the 1930s and into the present. Although projected into the future, the text captures concerns of the past, the present, and the future. In this analysis, I have argued that the narrative capitalizes on a series of anxieties that have haunted the imaginary of Dominican ultranationalists for a long time; that is, the fears of Haiti and Blackness. The story is timely, given the current situation in the Dominican Republic, where hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent were rendered stateless after the TC/0168/13 ruling passed, and where many thousands of Haitians have been deported in the recent past, especially after the 2010 earthquake. This is a story about the failure of the Dominican Republic—and the world—to see Haitians as fellow human beings, but it is also a story that envisions the triumph of Blackness.

denouncing La sentencia On September 23, 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Constitutional Court issued the TC/0168/13 ruling, or La Sentencia. According to the advocacy group We Are All Dominican, “a collective of students, educators, scholars, artists, activists, and community members of Dominican and Haitian descent residing in New York City,” this ruling “ordered the Central Electoral Board to put in motion the denationalization of an unknown number of Dominican citizens” (“Legal”). The ruling “is the result of an appeal filed by Juliana Deguis [a Dominican of Haitian descent born in 1984] against a prior decision that denied her the right to have the Central Electoral Board (JCE) issue her birth certificate” (“Legal”). Deguis had been trying to obtain a copy of her birth certificate so she could declare her children, but she was consistently denied it. This was done despite the fact that the Constitution at the time of her birth (1966) “established the right to citizenship for those born on Dominican territory (jus soli), except for the children of diplomats and foreigners ‘in transit’” (“Legal”).24 When a new immigration law was enacted in 2004, the condition of “in transit” suddenly applied to “nonresident foreigners.” The Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned the law after it established that “transit cannot be indefinite” (“Legal”). The denationalization of Dominican citizens has been accomplished by ordering civil registries “not to issue birth certificates considered suspect, without prior intervention of a court ruling declaring them null” (“Legal”). This has led to the inability of thousands of Dominicans to live “normal” lives, sometimes generations within one family, because the law has been applied retroactively from 1929 to the present. According to We Are All Dominican, some of the effects of the law include

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that Dominicans of Haitian descent were no longer “able to attend school past 8th grade, go to college, exercise professions such as law, get married, own property, and register their children when they were born” (“Legal”). La Sentencia did not materialize overnight; rather, it was years, or even decades, in the making. For its part, the Dominican government has stated that La Sentencia was part of a broader immigration reform designed to control Haitian undocumented migration, which had increased after the 2010 earthquake (García-Peña 203). However, the legal scaffolding that resulted in this law was built prior to 2010, proof of the continued prevalence of antihaitianismo. As Martínez declares: Laws, high court verdicts, and bureaucratic measures enacted by all three branches of the Dominican government—culminating in a new Migration Law of 2004 and the redrafting of the Dominican Constitution in 2009, both sustained by Dominican high court rulings in 2005, 2011, and 2013— have given the form of unambiguous legal writ to the exclusion from birthright citizenship of Haitian-descendant children, a practice formerly done variably and with imprecise legal foundations. (“The Price” 90)

In other words, systemic anti-Haitianism in the Dominican Republic had been informally carried out prior to the enactment of TC/0168/13. As far back as 1990, Martínez affirms, “evidence had emerged that Dominicanborn Haitian-ancestry children were being denied birth certificates under the pretext that the Dominican Constitution exempted the children of persons ‘in transit’ from the jus soli right to Dominican nationality” (“The Price” 93). It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the post-earthquake Haitian refugee crisis galvanized conservative sectors to codify Haitian exclusion from the Dominican nation. In this section, the Dominican author Rita Indiana Hernández’s response to La Sentencia in an op-ed, as well as two poems by Sophie Maríñez—“Sentencia del infierno I: Poema a los desterrados” and “Sentencia del infierno II: ¿De cuál patria me hablas?”—offer a scathing criticism of the anti-Haitianism and anti-Blackness that underpin La Sentencia. I show how these specific works connect the human rights crisis affecting Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic to the narrative of antihaitianismo that was institutionalized during the Trujillo regime.

rita inDiana hernánDez’s “blaCk MagiC” La Sentencia has inspired a spirited and forceful response among sectors of the Dominican diaspora in the United States. One of the most striking

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ironies has been that the public denunciation of the law has mostly come not from the Haitian government, nor from Haitian communities inside or outside the island, but rather from the Dominican diaspora. Two of the most outspoken literary figures have been Rita Indiana Hernández and Junot Díaz.25 Hernández’s essay “Black Magic” (originally published in El País under the title “Magia negra”) was written as a response to a racist statement made by the highly controversial American televangelist Pat Robertson. In 2010, this media mogul, executive chairman, and former Southern Baptist minister claimed that the devastation caused by the earthquake in Haiti “was the direct result of the pact with the Devil through which the founders of the Caribbean nation had achieved their independence from Napoleonic France” (Rita Hernández). Needless to say, his remarks caused outrage among many, and provided Hernández a point of departure from which to launch her critique of La Sentencia. Taking issue with Robertson, she sarcastically replies, “For you, Pat, of course, any republic created by African slaves has to be the work of the devil, of the living dead, of black magic.”26 The term “black magic” serves a double function; on the one hand it taps into misconceptions about and prejudice toward Vodou and other African-derived religions, while on the other hand it works as a racial marker that reinforces the associations between Haitians and Blackness and Dominicans and non-Blackness, which underlie official Dominican notions of identity. But Hernández’s objective is not to recycle the racially charged discourse that has maligned people of Haitian descent; rather it is to subvert it to rearticulate the so-called black magic as a product of (neo)colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism. By blaming the supposed “pact with the Devil” for Haiti’s present condition, Robertson not only devalues Afro-religious practices—which he sees as inferior to Christianity—but also fails to recognize the structural global forces that have shaped and determined Haiti’s history and present condition. Hernández challenges this view, which places the responsibility on the victims, recasting Haiti’s ruination as a result of centuries of exploitation by greater global forces. The real curse, Hernández states, has been “the blockade that the imperial forces imposed on the small nation and the indemnity of 150 million francs that France demanded in 1814 to recognize its independence.” In other words, the “black magic” is in reality “white magic,” so to speak, a curse set into motion through the European white supremacist colonial enterprise. The past usually bleeds into the present and, as the author tells us, “The curse that now hangs over the Haitians is the product of more powerful, sinister and elusive contrivances than those usually accompanied by the

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beating of drums. This magic, like other colleagues have pointed out, is of the kind that hides behind the law to justify a pitiless racism.” With these words, Hernández ties the past to the present. La Sentencia is evidence that the “magic [still] survives in a special way,” that it is, in fact, its latest manifestation. Drafting a law that automatically renders stateless about 250,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent—considered disposable, wasted lives—by the stroke of a pen is nothing short of “magical.” Evoking the parallels between the Massacre of 1937 and the mass expulsion of Dominicans of Haitian descent from the borders of the nation—products of anti-Blackness and anti-Haitianism—Hernández refers to La Sentencia as “legal ethnic cleansing.” She continues, They will sacrifice children and young people who for the most part are not major players in our local criminality to the idol of racism, but above all they will close the lethal cycle (as curses are cyclical) orbited by the spirit of violence and death, a portal of blood opened in October 1937, when more than 30,000 Haitians were murdered in Dominican territory. (“Black Magic”)

As she sees it, the current crisis is the latest manifestation of the Dominican Republic’s metanarrative of antihaitianismo upon which official notions of Dominican identity traditionally have been cemented. In other words, it is connected to a history of institutionalized racism that reached its climax during the Trujillo regime. Hernández also denounces the hypocrisy and double standards at work in Dominican society. For instance, while the Dominican Republic depends on a cheap, exploitable Haitian labor force as the backbone of its economy, the government refuses to formally recognize Haitians, or their Dominican-born children, as part of Dominican society. Similarly, while the government decries the number of unauthorized Haitians in the Dominican Republic, hundreds of thousands of undocumented Dominicans live in the United States. Hernández concludes her essay by asking, “Pat, tell me now, on which side of the island do the Satanists live?,” upending Robertson’s white supremacist claim justifying the Haitian death toll after the earthquake. By unveiling the confluence of sinister (neo)colonial, imperialist, racist, anti-Black, and capitalist policies that have impacted Haitian history, “Black Magic” challenges long-standing stereotypes that have misconstrued global views of Haiti. Dominican authors in the diaspora have been some of the most outspoken figures against the ruling and have denounced the law as the most recent manifestation of the ideology of antihaitianismo that preceded, and

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was institutionalized, during the Trujillo dictatorship. Many of these authors have faced harsh criticism from Dominican elites as a consequence of their solidarity with those affected by the law. For instance, Junot Díaz was publicly accused of being “un-Dominican.” As García-Peña discusses, he was incorrectly accused of calling for a boycott of the Dominican Republic, which led many to label him a “traitor” and even to demand his denationalization on the grounds of his immigrant identity (206). These reactions exemplify how Dominicans in the diaspora and Haitians are “racexiled,” that is, “they are expunged from the Dominican nation because of their race” (García-Peña 173). To be sure, the racist policies that led to La Sentencia have hardened divisions among Dominicans inside and outside the island, but they have also fomented solidarity between groups fighting against anti-Haitianism. The advocacy group We Are All Dominican (wearealldominicannyc.wordpress.com), for instance, describes itself online as “a campaign of the Dominican diaspora and allies to mobilize for an inclusive Dominican National identity.” Founded by Edward Paulino, Border of Lights (Borderoflights.org) emerged in 2012 to commemorate the seventyfifth anniversary of the Massacre of 1937, and it continues to memorialize the unofficially recognized genocide along the border through candlelight vigils and other volunteer work in Ounaminthe. Other Dominican organizations fighting against anti-Haitianism include Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico-Haitianas (MUDHA) and Reconoci.do, as well as Dominicanos X Derechos in the diaspora. The work of these grassroots organizations has been critical in fomenting awareness about the xenophobia, racism, and exclusion that Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent face.

“MaChetazos De PluMa y PaPel”: Denationalization in soPhie Maríñez’s Poetry La Sentencia has left significant destruction and suffering in its wake, ripping families apart and shattering the lives and dreams of hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian ancestry. Many of them already lived marginalized lives as a result of antihaitianismo, xenophobia, and anti-Blackness, but TC/0168/13 has institutionalized their exclusion, codifying it into law and literally expunging its victims from the Dominican nation. La Sentencia has transformed the Dominican Republic into a space of exception, where violence—physical and symbolic—against Haitians is justified in the name of national security. The law represents the latest iteration of the ideology that led to the Massacre of 1937 at the border. In this section, I examine two poems by Sophie Maríñez inspired by this legislation, “Sentencia del

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infierno I: Poema a los desterrados” and “Sentencia del infierno II; ¿De cuál patria me hablas?”27 The poems, some of the first written about this topic as far as I know, provide a scathing criticism of La Sentencia and the racist policies that led to it. Both poems draw links to the past—slavery and the Massacre of 1937—and challenge the hispanismo and antihaitianismo that inform TC/0168/13. “Sentencia del infierno I: Poema a los desterrados” denounces the ruling and unveils the racism that characterizes Dominican society. It begins with the poetic voice describing a recurrent dream: Me ha dado con soñar con desterrados, hombres y mujeres robados de su tierra un 23 de septiembre del 2013, a puros machetazos de pluma y papel y un fatídico sello, 168 guión 13. (I’ve taken to dreaming about exiles, men and women robbed of their land on a 23rd of September, year 2013, by pure pen and paper machete blows and a fateful law, 168-13.) (ll. 1–5)

The use of the word “desterrados” (exiled) to describe the men and women whom the voice has been dreaming about hints at the violence of the process, a violence that renders them “racexiled,” as García-Peña would say. The following verses emphasize their new condition as a result of TC/0168/13, which effectively made them stateless. The violence associated with the law is evident when the poetic voice describes how the law emerged “a puros machetazos de pluma y papel,” with the image of the “machetazo” linking La Sentencia to the Massacre of 1937. The bold pen strokes used to sign TC/0168/13 into law symbolically echo those of the machetes that Trujillo’s army used to carry out the genocide across the Haiti-DR border. In both cases, Dominicans of Haitian descent were victims. By emphasizing these parallels, the poem proposes viewing La Sentencia as “legal ethnic cleansing,” as Rita Indiana Hernández calls it. While “pluma y papel” (pen and paper) may have replaced the machete as the weapon of choice, the causes and effects of the ruling are the product of antihaitianismo, which was institutionalized under Trujillo. The poem’s description of the “desterrados” as “nuevos esclavizados” (newly enslaved), “aprisionados” (imprisoned), and “amordazados y apaleados” (muzzled and beaten) establishes a parallel between those targeted

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by La Sentencia and their enslaved African ancestors (ll. 7–9). In this way, the text shows the intricate connection between antihaitianismo, antiBlackness, and slavery—both in its past and present modalities. The “desterrados” are the “newly enslaved,” a description often used to characterize the ethnic Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans who work at sugar estates and live in bateyes. Victims of La Sentencia, which include many of them, are also silenced prisoners because they have been rendered stateless and thus are relegated to the margins of society. In her dreams, the poetic voice decries the suffering of the “desterrados”: que ni pueden correr rodeados de mar, ahogados en vorágines de historia y leyes. Deep chains and shackles. (who can’t even run surrounded by the sea, drowned in vortices of history and laws.) (ll. 10–14)

Her descriptions add another layer of complexity to the idea of entrapment by highlighting their condition as island dwellers. The liquid borders that surround them threaten to drown them, as do history and racist laws. The image of being pulled down by the “deep chains and shackles” of history and laws reinforces the parallel between the “newly enslaved” and their enslaved ancestors. While the victims of La Sentencia are not literally shackled with iron chains, their lack of documentation robs them of their freedom and other basic human rights. The link between the past and the present is evident when the poetic voice states that “Ancestros de otros siglos / reviven de pronto / en sus pieles” (ancestors from other centuries / are suddenly revived / in their skins) (ll. 16–18). These verses not only reclaim their African ancestry but also underscore Black agency. After centuries of violence aimed at bringing about their extinction—enslavement, colonization, genocide, denationalization—Afro-descendants have survived. The chains of history date back to Haiti’s colonial past. Despite the fact that Haiti achieved independence and became the first Black republic, anti-Blackness continues to impact the lives of Haitians and people of Haitian descent. The image of the “desterrados” is interrupted by the vision of “una vieja maniática / de la pureza” (an old woman obsessed / with purity) (ll. 26–27)

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who demands that the poetic voice “limpie la casa” (clean the house) (l. 23) after being scared by the “rincones negros” (black corners) (l. 25). The old woman, obsessed with cleaning, represents Dominican elites and nationalists who have fought to keep their house-nation “pure,” that is, not Black. Anchored on Hispanophilia, the cult of all things Spanish, they have exalted the European (i.e., white) roots of Dominican identity while denying their African ancestry. The house, a metaphor for the Dominican Republic, has become “dirty” (contaminated with Blackness) and must be cleaned (whitened), that is, rid of Haitians. In her dream, as the poetic voice frantically runs to obey the old woman’s demands, she declares, “Donde quiera veo algo que borrar. / Fragmentos y desterrados,” (Everywhere I see something that needs to be erased. / Fragments and the exiled), emphasizing how Blackness and the Haitian presence are not erasable because they are already part of Dominican society (ll. 30–31). Distraught by her nightmare, the poetic voice ends the poem lamenting the inaction of apathetic Dominicans who, despite witnessing the “legal ethnic cleansing” unleashed by La Sentencia, have chosen to remain silent. Breaking the silence herself, in her unpublished poem “Sentencia del Infierno II: ¿De cuál patria me hablas?,” the poetic voice decries the hypocrisy of Dominicans who equate an anti-Sentencia stance to treason. The poem begins with the voice reflecting on chants she overhears from people demanding “¡muerte a los traidores a la patria!” (death to the traitors of the homeland!), referring to those condemning TC/0168/13 (2). The use of the term “traidores” indexes the animosity that La Sentencia has fomented among opposite camps. While anti-immigrant, anti-Haitian, and anti-Black sentiments existed before La Sentencia was passed, it has rekindled internal divisions, or fronteras intranacionales, and emboldened expressions of nativism and xenophobia. Through this lens, the defense of an inclusive national identity that embraces people of Haitian descent— in opposition to the hispanismo that underlies the official construction of Dominicanidad—is paramount to treason. The poetic voice reacts to their xenophobic chants by asking the rhetorical question, ¿De cuál patria me hablas?” (Which motherland are you talking about?). She proceeds to deconstruct the idea of la patria, which she describes as two nations that are “superpuestas en un diminuto espacio / sobre la mar” (superimposed on a diminutive space / over the sea), thus calling attention to the Dominican Republic’s (and Haiti’s) islandness (ll. 10–11). The poetic voice continues: “Una es la patria de tus ideas / Y otra es la patria de la tierra” (One is the country of your ideas / And the other is the country of the land) (ll. 12–13). One is imagined (ideas), the other is material

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(the land). It is the former that most interests the poetic voice, who questions and challenges “la patria de tus ideas” throughout the rest of the poem. She begins by stating: La tuya es esta simbólica, de papeles, Que defiendes, cual fanático incongruente; Patria de élites, Jipetas y cardenales de los que pretenden descender de esa España Blanca, católica y de la lengua castiza. (Yours is this symbolic one, made of papers, That you defend, like an incongruent fanatic; Homeland of elites, Jeeps and cardinals of those who pretend to descend from that Spain White, Catholic, and of Spanish tongue.) (ll. 14–19)

There is a clear division here, an ideological border that separates the poetic voice from the people chanting “death to the traitors of our country!” Hers is the concrete and material homeland, theirs is a symbolic one, the product of their exclusionist and racist ideas. At the root of the problem are the racism and xenophobia of Dominican elites, the state, and the Catholic Church. Their exclusionist patria is one constructed through laws (“de papeles”) for the benefit of Hispanophile elites—secular and religious—that aim to protect an imagined identity based on “whiteness,” Catholicism, and the Spanish language. In other words, it is an illusory patria that stands in opposition to Haiti’s Blackness, African-derived religions, and Creole. Race continues to be central to the poetic voice’s reflection as she denounces the internal racism that seems to prevail in Dominican society. That patria “hueca y maloliente” (hollow and foul-smelling) is the product of “travestis mentales” (mental transvestites), Hombres cubiertos de cremas e ideas blanqueadoras, Mulatas peinadas de taínas de pelo muerto y pollinas, Cada hebra partida a golpes del insaciable deseo

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de tapar, ocultar, matar, mitigar la evidencia inefable de sus labios carnosos. (Men covered in whitening lotions and ideas, Mulatas hairstyled like Taínas of straight hair and bangs, Each strand split by the blows of an insatiable desire to cover, hide, kill, mitigate the unspeakable evidence of their thick lips.) (ll. 27–36)

With these verses, the poetic voice denounces the internal racism that is evident in the ideology of blanqueamiento upon which their imagined patria has been built. She condemns the use of whitening creams (a routine practice for Trujillo), as well as whitening ideas. Similarly, the poetic voice criticizes the tendency among Dominican mulatas to straighten their curly hair to conform to Eurocentric (white) beauty standards that devalue and erase their African heritage (Candelario). The process of transforming their appearance into that of “mulatas peinadas de taínas” entails both psychological and physical violence, evident in the verse “Cada hebra partida a golpes,” as well as the use of the verbs “matar” and “mitigar.” The reference to “taínas” is significant not only because it underscores the construction of race as bodily performance, but because it illustrates how the Indigenous Taíno roots have been privileged in the official construction of Dominican identity (institutionalized by the category “indio” as euphemism for mulata/o on identity cards). But as the poetic voice reminds us, none of these efforts achieve their goals, because they fail to hide their thick lips, undeniable evidence of their African heritage. The last two stanzas focus on the so-called patriots’ hypocrisy, given their failure to defend “Los tesoros de [s]u tierra / Ni el oro ni el mar / ni un solo árbol del terruño” (The treasures of your land / not the gold nor the sea / nor a single tree from the homeland) (ll. 43–45). A true patriot, as the poetic voice suggests, would do everything in his or her power to defend the land, la patria. Instead, their idea of the motherland, Pisotea lo propio e importa lo ajeno, Trae a turistas e inversionistas

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Se olvida de hospitales y escuelas, Y deja que viejos extranjeros violen a tus niñas. (Tramples what is ours and imports from outside, Brings tourists and investors Forgets hospitals and schools, And allows old foreigners to rape your girls.) (ll. 49–52)

With these verses, the poetic voice decries the internalized racism of Dominican elites who devalue their land, people, and culture while privileging outside interests (tourists and investors). Their greed for power—economic and political—leads them to turn their backs on Dominican society and disinvest from health and education, which benefit the entire country. Worse yet, these so-called patriots prostitute Dominican girls, allowing foreigners to rape them in exchange for financial favors. What they fail to see, however, is that in their quest for power, they are the ultimate traitors to the motherland. The poetic voice ends the poem stating “Entonces, ¿de qué patria me hablas? / Y “¿quién es el enemigo aquí?” (So then, which motherland are you talking about? / And who is the enemy here?), which brings us back to the beginning of the poem (ll. 53–54). Circling back to the conservatives’ concept of la patria, which she has interrogated and challenged throughout the text, the last question that the poetic voice poses insinuates that the real enemies are the ultranationalists. Echoing the last line in Rita Indiana Hernández’s “Black Magic”—“Pat, tell me now, on which side of the island do the Satanists live?”—Maríñez’s poem calls out the defenders of La Sentencia, not its critics, as the real traitors. A Dominican Republic that tries to erase or deny its history, and its Blackness, is only a mirage.

Bridging Borders The bordering of Hispaniola is the product of its complex history. Its liquid border and land border have shaped histories of migration and constant flow across these borders. When examining the representation of unauthorized migration in the Caribbean, both borders must be taken into account, as their crossings reflect distinct—yet connected—realities. Undocumented migration from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico is mostly carried out by yola across the Mona Passage. As I show through my analysis of Miriam Mejía’s “El viaje” and the works of the artist Scherezade García, there is an inherent tension within the sea, which can function simultaneously as

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border and bridge. The lucky ones make it to the other side alive, though they are often unaware of the profound challenges they will face in Puerto Rico. Others perish in the process, often swallowed by the forceful currents of the liquid highway. All, however, face the violence of the journey that renders the sea into a space of exception where these racialized migrants are dehumanized. In contrast to these maritime borders, the Haiti-DR border is characterized by both daily crossings and unauthorized migration from Haiti. This culturally rich and ethnically diverse area became the object of a brutal genocidal campaign by Trujillo to “purify” (i.e., de-Haitianize) the border when he ordered the Massacre of 1937 that killed thousands of ethnic Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. Though this atrocity is still not officially recognized to this day, cultural producers with roots in Hispaniola have taken it upon themselves to memorialize this tragedy and its victims in their artistic work. In this chapter, I have examined works by Dominican diaspora authors and poets that engage with the border, Haitian-Dominicans, or the representation of undocumented Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Acevedo’s “Regularization Plan for Foreigners, 1922” centers the violent bordering process that took place through the Massacre of 1937. My analysis of AnaMaurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt shows how the space of exception that was originally confined to the actual border was extended to bateyes. Pedro Cabilla’s “Fruta de temporada” and Junot Díaz’s “Monstro”—two texts published after the 2010 Haiti earthquake—illustrate how that space of exception continues to expand and encompasses the entirety of Hispaniola. I end my discussion by addressing La Sentencia, and how Rita Indiana Hernández’s “Black Magic” and the poetry of Sophie Maríñez decry the internal borders that the law has cemented, while drawing a direct link to the antihaitianismo that fueled the Massacre of 1937. The literary and artistic works analyzed here demonstrate that the need and desperation driving unauthorized migration from Haiti to the Dominican Republic is similar to the one driving Dominican migration to Puerto Rico. By humanizing the racialized undocumented migrants who cross the borders of Hispaniola—and who are often relegated to the status of wasted lives—these works contribute to positive social change.

ChaPter 4

cuBans at sea: the BaLsero crisis in Literature and art

La maldita circunstancia del agua por todas partes virgiLio Piñera

in his founDational PoeM La isla en peso (1943), the Cuban author, poet, and playwright Virgilio Piñera laments the Cuban condition as one defined by being surrounded by water. As Thomas F. Anderson has pointed out, “the poem’s disconcerting images of misery, frustration, and racism . . . serve to demystify the stereotypical image of the Antilles as a tropical paradise” (Everything 32). Over the years, Linda Howe observes, “Cuban writers, playwrights, musicians, choreographers, artists, and critics cite Virgilio Piñera’s famous line, ‘the accursed circumstance of water everywhere,’ from the poem ‘Burdened Island’ (1943) to describe Cuba’s literal as well as metaphorical isolation” (20). One of the many Cuban artists whose work has been inspired by Piñera’s poem and famous verse is Sandra Ramos,1 whose piece La maldita circunstancia del agua por todas partes (etching and aquatint, 2003) depicts the island of Cuba as a seductively posing woman—with a photograph of the artist’s face superimposed on the figure—whose body is pierced by palm trees. This feminized representation of Cuba surrounded by water highlights not only the isolation but also the Global North’s exoticization and objectification of the island, enhanced by Cuba’s reliance on tourism (except from the United States) as a driver of the economy after the Special Period. As Howe states, “The piece suggests themes of national isolation and national identity and pays homage to Piñera and other artists whose accounts make up the still-unwritten cultural history of Cuba” (20). Also from 2003 is Ramos’s Series Naufragio I/I, including Pecera Naufragio (figure 4.1), which depicts the figure of the pionerita in various poses, including standing, sitting, and floating over the island of Cuba while encased inside an aquarium.2 As a symbol of Cuban youth 178

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Figure 4.1. Sandra Ramos, Pecera naufragio, from the Series Naufragio I/I (2003). Acrylic on canvas, 19.69 × 25.59 in. © Sandra Ramos. Courtesy of the artist.

molded by the Cuban Revolution, the pionerita’s entrapment within the glass case in Pecera Naufragio provides a visual metaphor for the isolation that she has been condemned to endure, but also of her agency, as she tries to overcome the stasis and walls that isolate her. In stark contrast to these pieces that emphasize Cuban isolation and islandness, to borrow the term from Stratford et al., Ramos’s Bridge/Puente (calcography, 2011; figure 4.2) evokes the idea of unity. In this piece, the pionerita hangs over what appears to be a broken bridge above the water. Suspended between both sides, she completes—and becomes—the bridge. The work conveys, without a doubt, a sense of hope through the gesture of bridging sides, possibly a reference to the rapprochement and softening of restrictions between Cuba and the United States during the Obama administration. Although it is not clear what lies on either side, it suggests a remedy to Cuba’s isolation and the mending of broken ties. The pionerita becomes the bridge that now connects Cuba with the United States, or perhaps Cuba with the world. She also functions as a link between generations, or between disparate political ideologies among Cubans inside and outside the island.

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Figure 4.2. Sandra Ramos, Bridge/Puente (2011). Calcography, 19.69 × 23.62 in. © Sandra Ramos. Courtesy of the artist.

The piece’s strength lies in its capacity to evoke a multiplicity of readings, where unity prevails amid rupture. The prevalence of bridges in Ramos’s works, from paintings to installations (e.g., 90 Miles, 2011), speaks to the need and desire among Cubans to defy isolation. Interestingly, Bridge/Puente also echoes a similar effort taking place in the literary world. In 1995, the author Ruth Behar published Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba, a collection of writings in which island-based and exiled Cuban artists, writers, and scholars explore identity, nationality, and homeland. The collection is a testament to the fact that, as Behar puts it, “conversations can begin again” and that “walls can be turned on their side so they become bridges” (5). Whether depicting Cuba’s isolation or connection, the pieces referenced above use water as a central image. As I have argued throughout this book, the cultural production of the region reflects the bordering of the Caribbean archipelago and unveils the duality of water as border and bridge. In the case

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of Cuba, those aquatic borders are harder, so to speak, than other borders in the region, as Patricia Ybarra suggests: Although the United States and Cuba are not contiguous, the sea between Cuba and Key West has been under surveillance by both countries since 1959, and functions as a border for many. Both the United States and Cuba have tightly controlled the movement of goods and people since the beginning of the US embargo on Cuba in 1962, so crossing out of or into Cuban water or airspace has had serious consequences. (59)

Because historically the Mexico-US border has garnered the most attention, many have failed to see that the “90-mile expanse between Cuba and Key West is part of the US borderlands,” and as such, is characterized by increased surveillance and militarization (Ybarra 59). This chapter examines selected cultural works—produced both inside and outside of Cuba—that focus on the balsero crisis of 1994. The fall of the Soviet Union, in addition to the US embargo, led to acute and severe isolation among Cubans during the Special Period, which some scholars estimate as lasting from 1990 to 2005. Out of the desperation provoked by extreme scarcity and poverty, thousands of Cubans decided to take unimaginable risks. In the summer of 1994 alone, it is estimated that 35,000 Cubans set out to sea in homemade rafts. According to the author Daniel Alarcón in “La ruta larga/The Long Road,” a Radio Ambulante podcast episode about Cuban migration through South and Central America, since 1996 it is estimated that 40,000 Cubans were intercepted at sea by the US Coast Guard and returned to Cuba, while another 15,000 are believed to have drowned attempting the crossing.3 As these statistics confirm, in the Cuban imaginary, water had ceased to be a border and had become a bridge. That transformation, ushered in by conditions of scarcity and precarity, unleashed what came to be known as the balsero crisis, which led to a rupture in terms of US policy toward Cuban exiles. President Clinton’s decision to deny automatic permission to Cubans entering the United States if intercepted at sea provoked a shift in the perception of balseros. As Ybarra explains: “For the rafters, who often identified as balseros rather than as Cubans, this experience constructed their identities by their mode of travel rather than by their national origin, marking mobility as a mode of selfdefinition. This form of self-definition, affected but not completely circumscribed by the regulations mentioned above, made the balsero into a literal and figurative border crosser” (61). US policy toward balseros effectively

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altered the treatment of Cubans, who ceased to be seen as political refugees, and instead began to be treated as unauthorized migrants. In this chapter, I am interested in examining how the depictions of balseros not only challenge the idea of Cuban exceptionalism but also unveil the suffering of millions who have risked and continue to risk their lives in unauthorized maritime crossings across the globe. As the artist Luis Cruz Azaceta puts it, “The image of the balsero, while it is Cuban, is also universal in depicting isolation, horror, and displacement” (qtd. in Alvarez Borland 68). The figure of the balsero also calls into question the image of the Caribbean as paradise. As the rafter Roberto Morales puts it, “This is the other face of the Caribbean sea [sic], not the one that tells about the tropical paradise but the one that tells you only a miracle might save you from death” (422). In this chapter I engage selected works by Richard Blanco; Adrián Castro; Nilo Cruz; Ana Menéndez; Achy Obejas; and the Cuban artists Sandra Ramos, Abel Barroso, and Alexis “Kcho” Leiva to reveal how they depict the figure of the balsero. Their works denounce the crisis of intra-Caribbean undocumented migration by emphasizing the dangerous conditions of that type of border crossing.

“coMe & see the eMPty raFts”: BaLseros in cuBan aMerican Poetry Raft migration from Cuba to other Caribbean islands and the Florida Straits has been a constant for decades, with periods of upsurge balanced by times of relative calm. Some of these migratory ebbs and flows have been captured and represented in Cuban American literature, offering us a glimpse of how and why some decide to risk their lives crossing the ocean. Such is the case of Richard Blanco’s poems “Last Night in Havana” and “El Juan” (City of a Hundred Fires 1998), and Adrián Castro’s “Cuchillo de doble filo (II)” (Wise Fish 2005). Examined together, these poems reflect on the condition of the balsero and the way that water simultaneously emerges as a border and a bridge, bringing about isolation but also offering the possibility of connection. Richard Blanco’s poems “Last Night in Havana” and “El Juan” share a concern with depicting the process of preparing for the arduous journey.4 “Last Night in Havana” is written as an apostrophe to the poetic voice’s cousin, who is planning on fleeing from Cuba on a raft. The opening verses—“Drifting from above, the palms seem to sink / willingly into the saffron ground” (ll. 1–2)—mark a contrast between the poetic voice, who appears to be flying over Cuba after a family visit, and his cousin, who remains there

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planning to escape by raft. The verbs “drifting” and “to sink” foreshadow the difficulties that his cousin will face when he embarks on his journey. “I think of you primo, huddled on the edge / of an Almendares curb last night” (ll. 6–7), intimates the poetic voice, emphasizing both the sense of fear (suggested by the verb “huddled”) and secrecy associated with nighttime. Describing how “Havana’s tenements collapsed around us, / enclosed us” (ll. 13–14), the poetic voice highlights the two main reasons why his cousin wishes to escape: poverty and confinement. The picture painted thus far corresponds to the dire conditions that Cuba faced as a result of the Special Period in the 1990s, and which led to the balsero crisis. The poetic voice’s cousin, like thousands of other Cubans, saw no other choice but to escape in order to survive: You confessed you live ankled in the sand of a revolution, watching an unparted sea, marking tides and learning currents that will carry you through the straits to my door, blistered and salted, but alive. (ll. 16–20)

In these verses, the image of being “ankled in the sand of a revolution” underscores the idea of confinement and lack of freedom under the Castro regime (16). Evoking an anchored raft, this image implies restriction of movement, but it also allows for a double reading of Cuba’s political situation due to the ambiguity associated with sand. On the one hand, because sand is not considered solid, it is a metaphor for what the poetic voice sees as the precarious foundation of the Cuban Revolution. On the other hand, the image of quicksand comes to mind, as an unstable surface that can entrap and swallow. While sand is part of the imagery repertoire associated with the experiences of balseros and undocumented Caribbean migration, its association with the conditions that lead to departure interrogates its more typical codification as a symbol of arrival and survival. Driving the balsero’s agency of movement is his rejection of confinement, an idea evoked in the vision of his cousin “watching an unparted sea” (l. 17). The image recalls Moses’ liberation of the Israelites by parting the waters of the Red Sea, a biblical reference that underscores the lack of a savior or path to freedom for the Cuban people. The cousin’s experiences in Cuba contrast with the sense of liberation he envisions when he is “carried” by the currents to the Florida Straits. The cousin’s vision of being carried away evokes the “tossings, across and between seas” of Brathwaite’s “tidalectics,” which he proposes as characteristic of the archipelago. But freedom, as the

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poetic voice implies, will not come easily. His cousin has spent endless hours learning about tides to maximize his chances of survival. Yet he will not be able to control his trajectory; he will be carried by the currents. In the end, he will arrive “blistered and salted,” that is, suffering the effects of dehydration and sunstroke, but alive. The journey seems impossible, and even more so when taking into account the precariousness of his makeshift vessel: The tires are ready, bound with piano wire, the sail will be complete with the linen scraps your mother will stitch together after midnights when the neighbors are trying to fall asleep. Last night in Havana, your face against your knees, your words drowning with the lees in an empty bottle of bootleg wine you clutched around the neck and will keep to store fresh water. (ll. 26–33)

These verses capture the desperation that has led thousands of Cubans to try what amounts to an impossible journey on unsafe vessels. The description of the materials used to build the raft evinces both the level of poverty and the creativity that defines the experiences of balseros. His cousin will be traveling in a raft made of tires (inner tubes) precariously held together by piano wire. The sail is simply a patchwork of linen scraps stitched by his mother at night—a description that, once again, highlights the lack of basic resources, as well as the fact that this is a clandestine operation. The last verses of the poem return to the poetic voice’s memory of his cousin the last time he saw him in Havana. He remembers him with an “empty bottle of bootleg wine” that he is saving to carry fresh water during his journey. Most likely inebriated, the poetic voice remembers his “words drowning with the lees in an empty bottle” (l. 31). The reference to “drowning,” while used to describe his drunken speech, also serves as foreshadowing. In addition, the mention of “lees” (synonym with leeward, the direction downward from a point of reference) is also suggestive of a failed crossing. Despite its open ending, the poem’s somber language emphasizes the threat of death. Blanco’s poem “El Juan” also expresses similar concerns. Written as an apostrophe to Juan—who becomes a universal symbol for balseros—the poem depicts the process of fleeing by raft. Despite the poem’s succinct structure and its minimalist language, the text manages to produce a powerful and haunting image of the balsero. The use of the anaphora with “Juan” at

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the beginning of every verse (except the last two) makes the poem sound like a litany. In the first few verses, the poetic voice imparts a series of commands that Juan must complete to prepare for his impending journey: Juan, meet with neighbors. Juan, meet with strangers. Juan, tie wire and truck tires. Juan, take your oars and rosary. Juan, leave the necklace of palms. (ll. 26–33)

The references to neighbors and strangers signal the journey’s collective nature; balseros depend on the assistance and complicity of other Cubans to succeed. The poetic voice’s directive to “tie wire and truck tires” shifts our attention to concrete details about his preparation. But it goes further because those five words capture the magnitude of the poverty and desperation that has forced Juan to make his decision to flee. This makeshift vessel made of wire and truck tires is expected to carry him across the sea with only the help of his oars and a rosary. By telling Juan to “leave the necklace of palms” (l. 5)—an item associated with Afro-diasporic religious practices—the poetic voice seems to undermine its value in Juan’s belief system. The minimalist description of the materials needed not only highlights the precariousness of traveling in a balsa but also emphasizes the level of faith required to complete the journey. It is at this point that the religious tone of the poem seems to intensify. The depictions of Juan as “supplicant of the sea” (l. 6), “bastard of the sun” (l. 7), “of salt and blistered lip” (l. 8), and “of bloated feet and fingers” (l. 9) serve to evoke Juan as a Christ-like figure who will sacrifice himself for others. The details of those descriptions, which highlight the physical effects of dehydration and heatstroke associated with sea crossings, also hint at the possibility of Juan’s death. When he says, “Juan, this is your sacrament” (l. 10), the poetic voice establishes a link between the journey and the concepts of obligation and rite that are at the root of the word “sacrament.” When the poetic voice ends by telling him “fold your hands and pray: / in the name of your father, of your sons, / and of your holy virgin of the sea” (ll. 11–13), it reappropriates the sign of the cross shared by Catholics and diverts the attention from God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit to Juan’s father, sons, and the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, considered to be patroness of the Cuban people.5 Ending the poem with a reference to her underscores the central role that she occupies, especially in the balsero collective imaginary. As Thomas A. Tweed explains,

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Like one rafter in 1994 who triumphantly and gratefully held aloft an image of the Virgin that he had carried with him for protection as he rowed the ninety miles across the Straits of Florida, many Cuban migrants have offered private prayers to the Virgin before they set out on their perilous journey and after they arrived on American shores. (32)

For Cuban exiles, the Virgin is a symbolic bridge that connects them to the homeland. For the balsero in the poem, she also represents a bridge, one that will lead him safely across the sea to the Florida Straits. The plight of the balsero is also a central concern in Adrián Castro’s poem “Cuchillo de doble filo (II).” Migration—which he has described as “the story of humanity” and “the most ancient of customs”—occupies a central position as in most of his poetry (Alvarado). “Cuchillo” contemplates what divides the “here” from “there” from the balsero’s perspective. Separation and abandonment emerge as defining experiences from the beginning of the poem. When the poetic voice states: “There were many who were left / we left many behind,” the contrast between the passive voice of the first verse—which implies detachment—and the second one is significant (ll. 1–2). By choosing to speak in first person plural, the speaker calls attention not only to his identity as one of those who left but also to his complicity, and perhaps even remorse, for creating distance between those who left and those who stayed behind. The poem continues by contrasting both sides: There they will continue the traditions of walking to the pulse of papayas the language their children will continue they will carry on the smooth Caribbean relax. (ll. 3–8)

The reference to “traditions” and the use of the verbs “continue” and “carry on” underscore the perpetuation of cultural norms and practices in the home island, which will go on without them. “Here,” as the lyrical voice explains, “there are many who will forget / who will cut the root con un cuchillo / de doble filo” (ll. 10–12). Distance and time mark a rupture where the “here” will be defined in the future as a space of forgetfulness and the abandonment of cultural roots. The image of cutting these roots with a double-edged knife hints at the violence and the paradoxical effects of migration. In the second half of the poem, it appears that the poetic voice and his

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group are adrift in the middle of the sea. As he puts it, “We summon 7 ropes with iron links / to give us a hand” (ll. 13–14). While the use of the verb “to summon” conveys urgency, the allusion to “ropes” and “iron links” is evocative of the Middle Passage, as these objects were commonly used to keep enslaved Africans in captivity. By declaring that “[they] fasten the links to their memory” (l. 16), the speaker evokes the memory of the enslaved who died crossing those waters centuries ago. The “links,” therefore, are a metaphor for the refusal to forget the Caribbean’s transatlantic slave trade history and how that history of empire, colonialism, and white supremacy connects past and present. The poem envisions a direct connection between African ancestors and modern-day balseros. The poetic voice’s invitation to “Come & see the empty rafts” (l. 19) and “Come & see the empty boats” (l. 21) indicates the fatal ending of the journey through the repetition of the adjective “empty.” The use of anaphora with the word “come,” repeated four times in six verses, transforms it into a plea, directed at the reader, to witness death. By centering death, the poem challenges glorified perceptions of the Caribbean as paradise. The last two verses, “come & see we / boat people” (ll. 22–23), suggest that the speaker is among those who have perished in the crossing. It is at this point that the image of the “cuchillo de doble filo” acquires crucial significance. More than the risk of losing one’s cultural roots as a result of unauthorized migration, the crossing itself is a double-edged knife because it can lead to death or salvation. Here/there, life/death, and border/bridge embody the dualities that this poem examines from the perspective of the balsero.

“By the BLue trains oF the sea . . .”: sea crossings in niLo cruz’s a BicycLe country A Bicycle Country, a play about a group of balseros by the Pulitzer Prize– winning playwright Nilo Cruz, premiered in December 1999 at Florida Stage, only five years after the height of the balsero crisis and within the time frame of the so-called Special Period in Cuba (Ybarra 63).6 The play’s focus on only three characters—Julio, Pepe, and Ines7—provides an intimate portrayal of the highly heterogeneous and misunderstood figure of the balsero/a. The characters’ interactions with one another not only reveal their distinct personalities but also provide a window into life in Cuba during the Special Period. The play is set “Before the U.S. intervention on Cuban rafters,” according to stage directions, which means that the action transpires before August 18, 1994, when President Clinton “announced the unprecedented: that Cubans attempting to reach the United States without permission would

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no longer be welcomed. Rather, they would be sent to the U.S. military base in Guantánamo” (Chomsky 169). The first act, aptly named “Tierra” (Earth), takes place in Cuba, while the second act, titled “Agua” (Water), takes place at sea (4). The latter one, however, is subdivided into scenes, respectively titled “Fuego” (Fire) and “Aire” (Air). Cruz’s use of the four elements in this work unveils a series of connections that I examine in this section. Several lines into the text it becomes obvious that life in Special Period Cuba is quite difficult for the characters. Julio, an ill-tempered forty-year-old man, has become disabled after suffering a stroke and seems to spend most of his time feeling sorry for himself. His good-natured friend Pepe, whose ex-girlfriend just left in a raft without saying goodbye, helps take care of him and tries to cheer him up. Pepe hires Ines to be Julio’s full-time caretaker. Ines is a strong-willed woman in her thirties who dreams of a better life outside of Cuba, and who falls in love with Julio. As the drama unfolds, the reader/audience learns about the severe social and economic conditions that eventually lead the characters to become balseros. In a brief exchange with Julio, Pepe laments not having left Cuba before and provides a glimpse of the reality the country was facing at the time: It’s getting tough out there. You don’t know how bad it is, because you never leave the house. But I can tell you, we’re slowly going back to the Iron Age. We’re in the Bicycle Age out there. We’ve gone back to the wheel. A whole country riding bicycles. You only have to look outside the window and see for yourself. Everywhere signs, slogans: “Save energy. Save energy.” What energy is there to be saved, when there is no energy! (12)

Pepe’s observations highlight the economic impact that the fall of the Soviet Union had on the Cuban people. He functions as Julio’s eyes—and consequently our own—painting a picture of the daily challenges they are facing. His comments offer a denunciation of the politics that generated the crisis that has left the country in a state of backwardness, as he implies. The meaning behind the play’s title becomes clear when we hear Pepe complaining about the fact that the whole country is “riding bicycles.” As Patricia Ybarra explains, “Its title references the imported Chinese bicycles that took over the island when gasoline shortages were rampant and alternative forms of transportation were necessary” (65).8 In fact, Castro’s government promoted their use through well-organized and coordinated campaigns in which government employees were rewarded with new bicycles for achieving certain goals at work (Jiménez Enoa, “El ‘período

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especial’”). To advance its own political agenda, the government couched environmental concerns under the veil of nationalism.9 Yet Pepe’s reaction shows that he has wised up and can see through the mask of deceit. While the use of bicycles is touted as a strategy to “save energy,” his sarcastic response—“What energy is there to be saved, when there is no energy!”— decries the government’s deception and failure to meet the most basic needs of Cuban citizens. Underneath his comments, I propose, we find a denunciation of what Cubans in the 1990s referred to as the “triple blockade”: first, the US embargo; second, the fall of the USSR; and third, “the internal blockade: the bureaucracies, rules, and lack of imagination that made economic change a lumbering and difficult process” (Chomsky 159). While the bicycle campaign attempts to make Cuba appear environmentally progressive, the country’s lack of energy is evidence of the severe deterioration of the Cuban economy and infrastructure during the period. When Pepe describes contemporary (i.e., pre-August 1994) Cuba as having reverted to the “Iron Age,” the “Bicycle Age,” not only is he alluding to the primitiveness that characterizes the Iron Age, but he also evokes the Iron Curtain and the US-USSR Cold War politics that led to Cuba’s present condition (i.e., Bicycle Age). Mobility, or the lack thereof, is a central concern in Cruz’s play. This is evident in the title’s reference to the bicycle as a prevalent mode of transportation in act 1, Julio’s disability, and the centrality of the raft in act 2. Both the bicycle and the raft represent alternative forms of transportation that reflect the precarious conditions of the characters and, by extension, of the Cuban population during the Special Period. In fact, the characters are only able to obtain the materials to build their raft after Julio agrees to sell his heirlooms and other property, such as a lamp, a silver pot, a vase, old jewelry, old frames, silverware, and his bike. After offering to sell the lamp, Ines tells him, “Don’t sell it[,] Julio. Things get passed on in our families and we take them for granted. But these objects have a life. They become part of the family. They’ve lived with us” (18). Ines’s remarks underscore the sacrifices that Cubans had to make for daily survival during that period. But letting go of these objects also symbolizes a rupture with Cuban heritage, including familial and national history. Severing symbolic ties with the past becomes a price that the characters must pay in order to start a new life in a different country. In the case of the bicycle, the exchange is significant because as Ybarra points out, “Bicycle Country is predicated on the gradual relinquishing of mobility on land to gain mobility at sea” (65). Bicycles and rafts became vehicles that allowed many Cubans to cross national and international borders, and therefore defined that historical moment.

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The play’s opening scene with Julio “standing, strapped to a wooden board with a rope,” a homemade brace that allows him to stand up (5), and scene 2, where he appears sitting on his wheelchair doing exercises, are instances that capture this character’s profound sense of confinement.10 Julio’s post-stroke condition has rendered him immobile, so he feels he is trapped at home and in his own body. His immobility contrasts to Pepe’s and Ines’s physical mobility. However, despite the fact that they can walk, ride bicycles, and step out of the home, Pepe and Ines also share with Julio a sense of confinement brought on by their shared political and socioeconomic circumstances. This feeling is especially strong in Ines, who laments: “Oh, I’d like to live in a place where the land extends and I can walk for miles, where I can run and never reach the end. Here, there’s always the sea. The jail of water. Stagnant. Just the sea” (21). Her comment exemplifies the bordering process at work within an island context. She feels trapped by what she describes as a “jail of water” that renders the island and, by extension, the Cuban people “stagnant” and immobile. This reflects “la maldita circunstancia del agua por todas partes” of which Virgilio Piñera writes. Of course, in the case of Cuba, the ideas of insularity and confinement are compounded by the politics of Castro’s authoritarian regime as well as by the US embargo—both of which have de facto served to isolate the Cuban people from the rest of the world. Bicycle Country highlights the duality of water as border and bridge by showing the characters’ struggle to leave Cuba in a raft. While Ines and Pepe express—to different degrees—their desire to escape, Julio is reluctant initially due to his condition; he is at risk of having another stroke unless he gets an operation. However, as Julio sees it, his only option is waiting for a travel permit to undergo the procedure in a foreign country. For a country that has showcased universal healthcare as one of the Cuban Revolution’s major triumphs, Julio’s lack of access to an operation reflects the severity of the economic crisis during the Special Period. After hearing Julio’s idealistic plan, Ines sarcastically replies: “When you get a travel permit! When you get a travel permit! You’re going to have to wait a long time for a travel permit. You better find somebody with a boat and leave this place” (14). Her insistence on the need to “get somebody to build a raft” because “what’s important is to go, leave this place” reflects her desperation to save Julio (14). But Julio is not easily convinced and adamantly opposes the idea of leaving on a raft. Feeling pressured by Pepe and Ines to consider the possi-

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bility, he loses his temper and yells: “You want me to throw myself to the sea—look at me! How can I put myself in a little raft, on a truck tire, when I can’t walk well enough? Can’t you see I’m drowning! I’m sinking in my own body. I’m sitting here on solid ground and I’m drowning” (15). Julio’s words underscore the irony behind his friends’ plea; how do they expect to save him, a disabled man, by setting him out to sea in a makeshift raft? The possibility of drowning is real—and not just for him—and he already feels like he is drowning in his own body due to his condition. His own body has become a border, a limit that he is not able to cross. By the end of act 1, Julio confides in Ines that he asked Pepe to get the materials and to find someone to build a raft, thus acquiescing to their pleas. Act 2—“Agua”—opens with the three friends on “a raft in the middle of the Caribbean Sea” (24). They are adrift, and their dialogue offers a window into a reality that is all too common among those attempting unauthorized sea crossings. Unsure of their location, Pepe asks Julio and Ines, “Do you think we’re on the northeastern current?” (25). Julio confirms they are after looking at the compass, only to be second-guessed by Ines, who with a hint of doubt asks, ines. Are you sure we’re not moving towards the northwest? Which way is east? PePe. (Points to the left, then the right. Then makes up a new direction.) This way. No, this way. This way. This thing can’t make up its mind. It doesn’t like pointing north now. ines. I don’t see the current moving us to the east or to the west. I just see waves. How can you tell the current is moving eastwards? How can you see in this darkness? julio. The compass, Ines. The compass. ines. I’ve been rowing for more than five hours and it feels like we haven’t moved a bit. That thing doesn’t work. Look at what happened to Columbus, he wanted to go to India and ended up in the Bahamas and Puerto Rico. (25)

Clearly struggling to figure out the direction in which they are heading, they try to navigate through the Caribbean without the proper equipment. In her analysis of the play, Ybarra states that when “the trio moves to the sea, limited mobility is again highlighted” (66). Ines’s impression that they have not “moved a bit” reflects the idea of immobility (25). Similarly, toward the end of the play, Ines’s spirit/ghost explains her need to “get out

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of this limbo” (40). Being adrift at sea represents a kind of limbo that leads to a suspension of their identities. As Mannik explains, “Oceanic voyages have metaphorically represented liminal periods where human beings are ‘betwixt and between’ real lives and identities” (6). But their liminality is not only temporal but also spatial, producing what we could call a sort of “spacetime” limbo, to borrow the term from Wright. The characters occupy a liminal space, a position of in-betweenness dividing the spaces of departure and arrival. This spatial in-betweenness that the sea embodies mirrors that of the borderland, reflecting the conflation of borders and borderlands in the context of the archipelago. Throughout this study, I have highlighted the ways in which the cultural production of the Hispanophone Caribbean and its diaspora pushes back against imperial and colonial discourses that construct islands as isolated (i.e., weak and dependent). To achieve this, they reveal the archipelago by unveiling the proximity between the islands and the constant flux between them. As Ybarra explains, “That Columbus first landed in Cuba, a fact used by many exiles to attest to the lost beauty of the island, is not mentioned here. Yet, this event is ironically indexed because the raft Julio and Pepe are on might be headed there at that moment, which is exactly where they do not want to go” (66). Puerto Rico is not their destination—although it has been for many Cubans—but awareness that they may end up there, carried by the currents, reveals the archipelago by emphasizing the connections between and among islands, as Stratford et al. suggest. As we have seen, stagnation and the idea of being trapped in a state of limbo, where the characters have limited control over their movements, are common experiences among balseros. Yet, paradoxically, they remain in constant motion—whether they perceive it or not—as a result of currents. Water produces perpetual movement. These movements are the “tossings, across and between seas” that Brathwaite refers to as tidalectics (Stratford et al. 124). The reference to currents in the dialogue quoted above indicates the characters’ awareness about the fact that currents have the potential to carry them toward or away from their destination in the Florida Straits. Toward the end of the play, hallucinating and on the verge of death, Pepe and Julio ask Ines’s ghost for directions to their destination. Their exchange goes as follows: PePe. Where’s the northeast current? That’s what we’re looking for . . . ines. You must follow the north star, if you want to find the northeast current. But who can trust stars, I’ve noticed they’re like dizzy sailors, who faint and fall into the sea.

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julio. Then how do we find our way through this mess? ines. By the blue trains of the sea . . . The constant trains crossing the sea . . . (Sound of a distant train.) julio. I never heard of a train crossing the sea. You mean . . . You mean the currents? ines. There are trains of water sailing everywhere . . . (Sound of a train getting closer.) Can you hear them? I must go! I must go! The trains . . . The trains . . . (Gets up to go.) I’ll try to come back! I’ll come back! (The sound gets louder.) (41)

The scene captures one of the challenges that many balseros face trying to navigate their rafts. Getting lost and being adrift are common perils faced by people who do not have the proper equipment for, or knowledge about, navigation. The metaphor of the blue trains “crossing the sea” that Ines uses to refer to the aquatic currents evokes speed, direction, and strength, all of which contrast sharply with the fact that they are adrift and at the mercy of the sea. The image of currents as “constant trains crossing the sea” materializes what is usually imperceptible to the human eye: the constant flux and movement of water under the surface of the ocean. Interestingly, the image of the “blue train” also evokes la bestia, therefore drawing a connection between unauthorized maritime migration and unauthorized migration across the Mexico-US border.11 The significance of this analogy should not be overlooked, as it emphasizes the unrecognized links between the experiences of Cuban balseros and unauthorized immigrants crossing the Mexico-US border. But perhaps more importantly, it foreshadows the end of Cuban exceptionalism as a result of a shift in US policy. Although A Bicycle Country transpires before “the U.S. intervention on Cuban rafters,” that is, before President Clinton announced that Cubans trying to reach the United States without authorization would be sent to the military base in Guantánamo, the action occurs at a tipping point for US-Cuba relations. After this announcement, Cuban balseros ceased to enjoy the benefits associated with being categorized as refugees. The fact that they were now considered “illegal refugees” challenged the idea of Cuban exceptionalism and brought their plight much closer to that of other undocumented immigrants in the United States (Campisi 378). The connections between the experiences of balseros in the Caribbean and Mexico-US border crossers is also highlighted in act 2, scene 3, when three days into their journey we observe Pepe hallucinating and speaking to the sea.

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PePe. Tears to the water. Water to the sea. (Sound of roaring sea. The sound of a child calling someone in the distance. Then it all subsides.) I’ve heard what the ocean does to people. I’ve heard. Like the desert. A fever. You see things. A mirage. You play tricks on the eyes. (30)

Pepe’s diction insinuates that the correlation between desert and ocean, as paradoxical as it may sound, is common knowledge at least among those familiar with the risks of unauthorized maritime migration. As I have argued, the sea—like the desert—also functions as a space of exception. The suspension of human rights that De León denounces in his study of the desert crossings is also replicated at sea. Both of these spaces highlight the dehumanization of border crossers as wasted lives, individuals stripped of their humanity. Because direct parallels between the desert and the ocean are not commonly found in Hispanophone Caribbean or Caribbean Latinx letters, it is important to note that this play contributes to creating awareness about the experiences of unauthorized migrants at a global scale. Oceans and deserts tend to be vast spaces characterized by minimal or absolute lack of shelter. People crossing these spaces are exposed to the elements and the physical and psychological effects that these may have on them. Getting lost is a common danger that can lead to life-threatening conditions, as is evident in the play. Nighttime can also pose unforeseeable risks that exacerbate a person’s vulnerability, not the least of which is exhaustion due to lack of sleep. This idea is echoed in the following exchange between the characters: ines. What we need is a nightcap, something to put us to sleep. I just never thought that water could be so frightening. julio. It is frightening. ines. All this darkness. PePe. I’ve never seen so many stars. ines. And look at their reflection on the waves. You can’t even tell if the stars belong to the night or the sea. It makes me want to fish them out of the water. (26)

In the expanse of the ocean—as well as the desert—darkness exacerbates the immigrant’s sense of lack of control. Sharks are a constant danger that makes nighttime even more threatening (Cruz 27). Darkness magnifies vulnerability, and as Ines’s words convey, it often heightens disorientation. In their case, not being able to tell the difference between the sea and the sky illustrates the characters’ confusion. Limited access to drinking water and

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food, or lack thereof, is another threat that both balseros and desert crossers face. In the play, Ines illustrates the effects of these conditions when she says: “This thirst is getting to me. My mouth fills up with a bitter foam” (28). Eventually, Pepe’s thirst leads him to lose control and behave violently toward Julio, whom he accuses of having drunk the water that was left (36). As is well known, some of the greatest dangers for those crossing waters or deserts is heatstroke, brought about by the lack of shelter from the sun and heat, as well as dehydration. Hallucinations are a common symptom of heatstroke, and the characters in Bicycle Country are not immune to this condition. By the third day at sea, Pepe’s hallucinatory state leads him to try to walk “on top of the sea like Jesus” (31). Luckily, Ines and Julio are able to stop him. The subtitle of scene 4 (day 4), “Fire in the Sea,” allows various interpretations, as it marks the considerable worsening of Pepe’s and Ines’s conditions. “Fire in the Sea” simultaneously refers to the intense sun, the fever that leads to their hallucinations, and the increasing tensions that develop between the characters. In this scene, Julio seems to be the only one who remains conscious, and reacts to Ines’s and Pepe’s nonsensical behavior saying, “You both are scaring the shit out of me . . . We’re in the middle of nowhere and you’re talking nonsense. . .” (35). Ines replies, saying, “When the sun rises, it will be over, Julio. I keep seeing a bridge in my dreams. A white bridge, curved like a fallen halo in the middle of the sea” (35). The image of the white bridge becomes a metaphor for salvation, underscoring the function of water as a bridge. At the same time, the religious undertone of a bridge that looks like a “fallen halo” also foreshadows the tragic events that follow. Scene 5 is constructed as a monologue by Ines, whose condition has taken a turn for the worse. By the fifth day of their journey, she has fallen ill with severe hallucinations. She looks for her shawl because she plans to wear it when they get to their destination and “run through the seaport” with it (37). She also fantasizes about putting on makeup; she powders her face and notices her “eyes red” and her “lips dry” (37). After having a vision of an angel who “came from heaven and said he was going [to] find [them] a light bulb to light this part of the sea,” we see her saying goodbye to Pepe and Julio (38). Thinking a man has been waving to her from a ship, she decides to go meet him. But it is nighttime, and there is no man, nor any ship. Delirious and disoriented, she steps out of the raft: Water is warm, Julio, like a glass of warm milk . . . You liked to drink warm milk at night. They say it soothes the mind, like summer rain. Oh, I can feel the warmth rising to my face. (The sound of a ship ap-

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proaching will echo throughout the following section.) That’s a good omen. It’s warm like a winter coat, as if a fallen star had bathed in it . . . Look at all this blue water, Julio . . . Nothing like the sea . . . Nothing like the sea . . . (Her voice echoes. Sound of foghorns.) All these different blues . . . Prussian blue, Pompeii blue . . . Aquamarine . . . Aniline . . . Indigo . . . (38)

At the end of the scene, Julio wakes up to find that Ines is missing; she has drowned as a result of her hallucinations. The last scene of the play, subtitled “Aire,” takes place at daytime. In it, Pepe and Julio are deliriously speaking to Ines’s ghost, an image that connects to the subtitle. After a conversation, she convinces them to play a game by covering their heads with a pillowcase—a game she played at the end of act 1 with Julio that evokes René Magritte’s surrealist painting The Lovers (1928). The intertextuality with Magritte’s painting is significant for several reasons. First, it highlights the connection between Bicycle Country and surrealism. Also, it foregrounds the themes of mystery, isolation, and passion that both works have in common. But perhaps more importantly, the painting’s origins suggest a deeper connection to Cruz’s play. As the Museum of Modern Art website states: “Enshrouded faces were a common motif in Magritte’s art. The artist was 14 when his mother committed suicide by drowning. He witnessed her body being fished from the water, her wet nightgown wrapped around her face. Some have speculated that this trauma inspired a series of works in which Magritte obscured his subjects’ faces.”12 Regardless of whether or not the motif of enshrouded faces was inspired by his mother’s suicide—something that Magritte apparently denied—the play’s intertextuality with this painting can be read as a foreshadowing of drowning. Echoing the subject of the painting in an instance of meta-theatre, Ines’s ghost says: Yes . . . I move on, Julio . . . When you lift up the pillowcase, you’ll begin a new life . . . (Music plays. She opens her umbrella and walks away. She disappears. Both men remain with their faces covered. The white screen opens to reveal a green landscape. The men uncover their faces. Blackout.) (42)

The play ends with this scene. Ines is gone again, this time forever, but her spirit has come back to provide hope and guidance to her friends. The use of light to convey a “green landscape” on the screen suggests that Pepe and Julio are probably close to land and might survive. At the same time, the green might be a product of their delirium and could signal their impending death.

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Bicycle Country by Nilo Cruz is a play inspired on the plight of the Cuban balseros who risked or lost their lives trying to achieve a better life. Mobility and immobility are central concerns that speak to the condition of the Cuban people during the Special Period. The play’s temporal setting is significant because it marks a defining period in Cuban migration history. At the beginning of act 2, when the characters are already at sea, we hear Pepe say, “We have to pass the picket line!” because “there’ll be ships, American coast guards. Balloons. . .” (26). The image of the picket line symbolizes their goal, and the presence of the US Coast Guard—balloons included— envisions their arrival as a cause for celebration. This glorified image is based both on the privileged reception that previous waves of Cubans fleeing Castro’s government had enjoyed (except marielitos), and the fact that according to “U.S. policy, they were welcomed, if they could make it out of Cuban waters” (Chomsky 169). Thus, the picket line suggests the international boundary that Pepe knew they had to reach to avoid interception by the Cuban coast guard, at least prior to Castro’s decision on August 11, 1994, when he announced that “Cubans wishing to leave by sea . . . would no longer be intercepted” (Chomsky 169). Shortly thereafter, we should recall, President Clinton ordered those intercepted at sea to be sent to the naval base in Guantánamo. Pepe’s comment offers an instance of dramatic irony, as it underscores Cuban optimism at a moment when this group was on the brink of experiencing the erosion of their exceptionalism. Bicycle Country, as my analysis shows, engages with the paradox of immobility and mobility. Focusing on the two main alternative modes of transportation during the Special Period—bicycles and rafts—the play conveys the daily challenges, struggles, and resistance of the Cuban people. But it is the representation of the journey in a raft in act 2 that I see as the most significant contribution of this work. The balsero experience—as well as that of other unauthorized immigrants crossing waters—remains invisible and silenced. Stereotypes and misinformation abound, and works of literature like Cruz’s play help honor the humanity of those who are often reduced to statistics.

taLes oF a “MiracLe Boy, rescued By Fishes”: the eLián gonzáLez saga in the stories oF ana Menéndez Although the height of the balsero exodus took place in 1994, Cubans continued trying to leave the island after the crisis had “officially” come to an end. As I have stated, the balsero crisis signaled “a major shift in U.S. policy

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toward Cuban immigration” (Duany, Blurred 156). It also marked a shift in Cuban unauthorized migration patterns from the use of makeshift rafts to the hiring of smugglers with speedboats, in an attempt to avoid being intercepted by the US Coast Guard after the “wet foot/dry foot” policy was put in place. Although there have been many controversial cases resulting from the uneven implementation of the “wet foot/dry foot” policy, none has reached the level of notoriety as that of Elián González. As Chomsky briefly explains, Although his divorced parents shared custody of him in his hometown of Cárdenas, Cuba, his mother and her boyfriend absconded with the boy on a small boat bound for Miami in late 1999. Only Elián survived the journey. He was picked up by fishermen, turned over to the Coast Guard, and eventually to his Miami relatives. While the Miami family enveloped him in their midst, his Cuban family, including his father and two grandmothers, demanded his return. (170)13

Elián’s rescue ordeal, and the legal battle that ensued between his families in Cuba and Miami, is considered a pivotal moment of Cuban-US relations and of Cuban American history. In this section, I examine the representation of the case of Elián González in the narrative of the renowned Cuban American author Ana Menéndez to demonstrate how she subverts opposing dominant Cuban and Cuban American narratives about these critical events.14 Her latest book, Adios, Happy Homeland!, is a collection of interlinked stories in which the concept of “flight”—literal and metaphorical—is a common thread. In the context of this study, where representations of unauthorized maritime migration are a central concern, her stories provide alternative narratives of this type of migration in the Cuban context. This section focuses on “Cojimar,” “The Boy Who Was Rescued by Fish,” and “The Boy’s Triumphant Return,” stories that address the case of Elián González from different perspectives. While the stories appear in the order mentioned above, I would like to argue that it is not until one reads the latter two that the significance of the first story, and its position within the collection, are clarified. “The Boy Who Was Rescued by Fish” is a text that relies on parody and humor to offer a scathing criticism of the attitudes and actions of conservative Miami Cubans during the Elián González controversy. Presumably written by Teresa de la Landre (one of the characters in Menéndez’s novel Loving Che), the story depicts how the case of Elián González was understood, experienced, and even symbolically hijacked by the Miami Cuban

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American community to advance their anti-Castro political agenda. Its narration by a character that challenges, and outright rejects, the mythology surrounding the Elián saga, serves to disrupt that narrative and to destabilize predominant Cuban American stereotypes. The first half of the story centers on the narrator’s experience as the media liaison of the Cuban American National Treasury organization—or CANT for short—founded by Beatrice. CANT parodies the real-life CANF, the Cuban American National Foundation. Speaking about CANF, Louis Pérez explains, “Organized during the early 1980s and closely associated with the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, the CANF and its political action committee (‘Free Cuba’) emerged as an effective anti-Castro lobby organization” (401).15 CANF played a central role in the Elián González case, becoming “involved in the fight [between exiles and Castro] to keep the boy in the United States” (Whitefield). However, as Johann Graaff has stated, “there was never anything warm or protective in CANF’s involvement with Elián” (48), since “Washington saw the CANF as an extension of U.S. foreign affairs policy toward Cuba—which meant, at that stage, to get rid of Castro by whatever means possible” (48). The first part of the story focuses heavily on Beatrice’s quirks and idiosyncrasies, which reflect prevailing attitudes among the older and more conservative sectors of Cuban Miami, such as CANF members. Through Beatrice, and the narrator’s views and reactions to her, the text unveils a pointed indictment of the politics that turned six-year-old Elián González into a pawn of politics. “Ladies,” says Beatrice to her employees at the beginning of the story, “I want to introduce you to our salvation” (33). She then proceeds to show them the book The Undisclosed—likely a parody of the best-seller The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. Despite being known for her “zero-tolerance policy for Santería” (34)—which reflects her rejection of Afro-Cuban cultural and religious influences—Beatrice is described by the narrator as “a fundamentalist believer in American Santería, the branch of religion that includes crystals, self-help, and sprouted pumpkin seeds” (34).16 With this comment, the narrator inserts race as a determinant factor behind the rejection of Santería (associated with Blackness) by particular segments of the population. The description also calls attention to Beatrice’s hypocrisy—she rejects Cuban Santería but embraces “American Santería”— while also suggesting that New Age spirituality is closer to Santería than people may recognize. Reflecting on the impact that the book The Undisclosed had on her, Beatrice says: “After I read this book, I completely understood what’s wrong with us Cubans. We focus on the negative, on hate, on revenge. We con-

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stantly use words like Tyrant, Dictator, Dungeon. We have dedicated our energies to thinking and living and breathing . . . That Man!” (36). Her words reinforce dominant stereotypes about older Cuban exiles as hardline anti-Castro conservatives. Her epiphany after reading The Undisclosed leads her to understand the negativity of her fellow Cuban exiles. Ironically, their negativity has not been an undisclosed secret for others outside their community. In an effort to challenge that stereotype, she repeats what she read: “Change your thinking and you will change your life” (34). The characters’ “book club–type” discussion about The Undisclosed— especially Beatrice’s belief that its precepts can illuminate the Cuban exile condition—helps set the stage for the events that follow, which marked “a very important moment in the history of Miami” (42). The main event is the rescue of a boy whose story parallels that of Elián González. As the narrator puts it: The story broke on a Saturday. A raft had been spotted off Key West overnight. Of the twelve men, women, and children on board, there had been only one survivor: a boy of six, small for his age. Even more miraculously, the boy had been kept alive by dolphins, a fact confirmed by fishermen who, just before plucking the boy from the sea, had seen the animals frolicking near him. (40)

Similar to the media narrative about Elián González that depicted him as a “lone, starving child floating at sea in an inner-tube; angelic, innocent, and literally standing in as a Christ figure,” this account underscores the rescue of the six-year-old and the inexplicable circumstances that kept him alive (Banet-Weiser 151). According to the narrator, “Beatrice was convinced that our positive thoughts had brought not just our own salvation but that of the boy” (41). By inserting herself in this quasi-mythical narrative and claiming responsibility for the “miracle” that had transpired, Beatrice adopted a posture echoing that of the most vocal segment of the Miami Cuban community during that time. In real life, the religious undertones ascribed to Elián’s story circulated widely and were crystalized in a mural depicting the scene of his rescue that was placed near his Miami family’s home.17 Menéndez’s story unveils the tension that emerged within the community once the initial joyous reactions to the rescue subsided. On the one hand, there were those who, like Beatrice, thought that “this miracle boy, rescued by fishes after a daring escape with his mother under the protection of Pisces, could mean only one thing: divinity” (42). For her, it became an obsession. She neglected her job while she participated in marches, signed petitions,

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and attended “all-night prayer vigils at the home of the boy’s relatives, with whom, Beatrice believed, God himself wished the boy to remain” (42). On the other hand, there were those who, like the narrator, began to feel that “the Little Pisces was beginning to grate” (42). “What had begun as a heartwarming story of a rescue soon ballooned into an unwieldy drama of international intrigue, ruined reputations, and general madness” (42); the house where his relatives kept him (a “cursed place”), flooded by klieg lights, “turned the whole thing into a stage” (45). Like the narrator, those who were objective and less invested in the religious and political aspects of the case were not free to express their views, as the narrator intimates: “The kid, at least in the snippets I caught on the news, looked miserable, though you could not actually say this, not in Miami” (44). Her thoughts represent a counternarrative to the myth of the “miracle boy,” the less accepted view that probably predominated among younger generations, such as the narrator, who were forced to remain silent for fear of being ostracized. By addressing the contradictory views that emerged as a result of the boy’s rescue, the story emphasizes the internal rifts that have affected the Cuban exile community. In other words, it challenges dominant stereotypes about this community and highlights the complexity of living in such a politically polarized environment. The narrator drives this point home when she says, “These were trying times in Miami. Many friendships collapsed” (44). The internal borders that emerged within the Cuban exile community were also reflected nationwide following the Elián González controversy.18 At its root, this case was polemical because it did not align with US policy toward Cubans. As Grenier and Pérez state: Technically, Elián and the survivors of the tragic journey should have been returned to Cuba immediately. U.S. immigration policy under the Cuban Adjustment Act was amended in 1996 to include what is commonly referred to as a “wet feet, dry feet” policy. Cubans fleeing the island, if intercepted at sea, are unceremoniously returned to Cuba. . . . Elián had wet feet but was brought in for medical attention. (101)

The storm of protests that was unleashed once the US government suggested that Elián belonged back home with his father, Juan Miguel González, instead of with his “Miami family” (who were distant relatives he did not know) had no parallel in Cuban American history. Tensions flared even more after INS operatives used military force to remove the child from his new Miami home. Some argued it could all have been avoided if the family had cooperated with the US government to return the boy to his father in

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Cuba. “This event, perhaps more than any other up to that time,” affirm Grenier and Pérez, “served to polarize and concretize attitudes about the Cuban American community locally, nationally, and internationally” (104). In fact, “one point of agreement among Cuban Americans, non-Cubans in Miami and national on-lookers: over 80 percent of each of these populations agreed that the events surrounding the Elián González affair hurt the interests of the Cuban American community” (Grenier and Pérez 107). While “The Boy Who Was Rescued by Fish” articulates the perspective from the Cuban Miami community regarding the case of Elián González, “The Boy’s Triumphant Return” reads like an official response to the events from the perspective of the Castro regime. Reminiscent of a Fidel Castro speech or an article in the Cuban official newspaper, Granma, this one-page story told by a third-person narrator serves as a counternarrative to the Cuban American perspective found in the previous text. The story begins as follows: LA HABANA—Today a miraculous and heroic sight: a kidnapped Cuban boy returned triumphantly to the fatherland on a jet that soared over the clear skies of the capital, passing once, twice like a bird before nimbly landing on native soil. In its belly: the little hero who had been ruthlessly and illegally held in Miami since being kidnapped last November by his mother and forced aboard a raft across the Straits. (53)

The use of the word “miraculous” to refer to the boy’s return to Cuba is notable, because it is also used in “The Boy Who Was Rescued by Fish” to describe his rescue and survival. The term thus serves to underscore some of the similarities between the opposite views that emerged on both sides— Cuba and Miami—about Elián’s case. References to “flight” (“on a jet,” “like a bird”) in “The Boy’s Triumphant Return,” which contrast to the metaphor of the “Little Pisces” that predominates in the other story, further highlight those opposing views. In addition, the use of a register associated with Castro and the Cuban Revolution—such as the terms “heroic,” “triumphantly,” “fatherland,” and “little hero”—rearticulates the event as political propaganda, not different from what the opposing camp does from Miami. The narrative’s successful spin of the events as a triumph of the Castro government relies on the casting of both the child’s mother and his relatives in Miami as criminals and kidnappers, in contrast to the praise of his father, who is cast as loyal to the Cuban Revolution. In this government-sanctioned account, the boy’s return to the island is, above all, represented as a success for the regime: “Our

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fatherland has reached an honorable and just victory, after seven months of energized, indefatigable, intelligent, and decisive struggle, with the liberation and the return to Cuba of the kidnapped child next to his dignified and valiant father” (53). As Grenier and Pérez have stated regarding how Elián’s return was perceived: “And so Fidel Castro won the trophy and yet another battle. The Cuban exile community felt, once again, defeated and betrayed, and even the parallel with the Bay of Pigs fiasco was noted” (115). By co-opting the language associated with the Cuban Revolution, this story denounces the government’s strategy of touting the father as a hero in opposition to the mother, viewed as a traitor. In the end, the story balances the rhetoric construed by the Miami Cuban community by providing an equally polarized version of the events. At the end of the story, the narrative voice states: “It is imperative that we do everything necessary to prevent a repetition, and that is the only thing that will succeed in devastating the criminal migratory politics that have been deliberately conceived to destabilize and undermine Cuban society, cynically calculated to provoke deaths and suffering, shamelessly manipulating the tragedies occasioned by this law” (53–54). With these words, the official voice of the Cuban government casts blame for the Elián González affair—and all Cubans who have tragically died crossing waters—on the US government. The “criminal migratory politics” may refer to the “wet foot/dry foot” policy, which had the effect of encouraging unauthorized Cuban migration to the United States before President Obama repealed it in January 2017 (see chapter 1). The accusation that it is “cynically calculated to provoke deaths and suffering” aims to dismiss any responsibility that the Cuban government itself has while shifting the burden to the opposite camp, a standard strategy of the regime. This language reflects the rhetoric of Castro’s government regarding this issue. As Bert Hoffmann states: “The Cuban government repeatedly attacked these ‘dry-foot’ loopholes by organizing mass demonstrations against the Ley Asesina (‘Murderous Law’), as it refers to the Cuban Adjustment Act, for inciting illegal emigration” (446). The story’s denunciation of US migration policy and the Cuban government’s own self-exoneration highlight the ideological rifts between these governments. While the “wet foot/dry foot” policy is believed to have incentivized Cubans to risk their lives crossing waters, it is also true that the Cuban government’s failure to produce a stable economic, social, and political climate is another reason why thousands decided to flee. Therefore, the irony lies in the often-unrecognized fact that both sides are responsible. The last story I examine here is “Cojimar,” which actually appears before “The Boy Who Was Rescued by Fish” and “The Boy’s Triumphant

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Return” in Menéndez’s collection. I argue that the fact that the boy’s perspective is central in “Cojimar,” and that it precedes the Miami Cuban community’s and the Cuban government’s respective versions, is significant. In the midst of the media and political circus that developed around the case of Elián González, both factions’ politicized positions presumed to speak for Elián. “Cojimar” reminds us that trapped in the middle of this tug-of-war involving the Cuban and US governments, as well as the Miami Cuban community, was an innocent six-year-old boy. “Cojimar” is written as a retelling of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952). The intertextuality between Hemingway’s classic and Menéndez’s story is a constant, beginning with the name of its fictional author, Ernesto del Camino, a playful quasi translation of Hemingway’s name into Spanish. The main character, an old man with eyes “the same color as the sea,” is reminiscent of Gregorio Fuentes, the man who is said to have inspired Hemingway’s protagonist, Santiago (23).19 As the narrator explains: “He had stopped fishing years ago, but he had not stopped coming to the beach. In his day it had been only about the fishing. The rocky shore covered in skiffs. Now it was different. The fish had disappeared, and the beach was for leaving” (23). Menéndez’s story imagines what transpired in the life of the old man beyond Hemingway’s narrative; Santiago would have been 101 years old when Elián González was found at sea. There is a rupture between past and present, which is marked by the fact that fishing is no longer the main activity for which that beach is known—or was made famous by Hemingway’s novel—but rather the act of “leaving.” These details reflect the economic and social transformations of Cojímar, a small town outside Havana known for its fishing industry in the mid-twentieth century, and which became a preferred point of departure for rafters during the balsero crisis, as evidenced by the number of images of these departures found online. Although “Cojimar” does not offer any explanations for the reasons behind those changes, it sheds light on the conditions that characterize this small fishing town. Cojimar is the place where the old man briefly meets the boy and his mother before they depart on a raft.20 Before this encounter takes place, the reader is transported to their home in Matanzas, where his mother wakes him up before sunrise. He is confused as she talks about going to Miami, which he thought “was someplace in the sky,” “a cloud city beyond sight,” “someplace that hovered over the waters and that’s where they were going” (24). The reader learns that “a man he didn’t know picked them up by the monument to the bicycle in Cárdenas” (25), where they joined others in a truck. The reference to the bicycle monument in Cárdenas (1990)

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provides both a link to Elián González’s story, as this was his mother’s town, and a reminder that these events occurred during the Special Period. The boy’s reaction in this scene highlights his innocence; because the boy believed that they were going to Miami in a ship, he “worried that the ship would be too heavy with all these people, and they would not be able to lift into the clouds” (25). Although the story is told in the third person, the omniscient narrator captures the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the child throughout the ordeal. From the smell of his mother, to her warmth, to his innocence amid the grueling journey he is about to undertake, the text centers the child’s emotions and experience. This is relevant because despite being the main actor of this impossible saga, Elián’s perspective has remained silenced by dominant narratives. The old man meets the mother and her son at La Terraza, a place that had “once been a famous bar for the tourists,” including Hemingway himself (25). It is there that he tells the woman, “He’s young” (26). “Six, almost seven,” says the mother, to which the old man replies, “Too small for that long journey . . . the boy is young and fragile and the sea is deep and rough” (26). Although the mother insists that it will be a short fishing trip—like his was supposed to have been decades before—the old man knows exactly what type of journey they are embarking on, and his words foreshadow the tragedy that unfolds. It is from the deck that the old man watches the boy trying to run back, away from the raft, screaming “No, no, no, that ship cannot fly!” (26). As the boy is dragged back onto the raft by one of the men, the old man “realized that the boy could not swim” (26). Despite the parallels with the Elián González story, “Cojimar” diverges from some of the factual events. For instance, a detail that often gets buried under the layers of myths and fictions that have characterized Elián’s story is the fact that they did not travel by raft, but rather a “hired speedboat” (Henken, “Balseros” 403). Despite the high visibility of this particular case in the media, Henken reminds us, “relatively little attention or analysis has been given to the important shifts in underlying Cuban migration trends of which this episode is a part,” namely, the “important change by the summer of 1998 from a rafter (balsero) to a boater (botero) phenomenon” (403). That said, Elián was found inside an inner tube at the moment of his rescue, and that image has sustained the narrative of the niño balsero, as is evident in the mural mentioned above. The departure scene in the story imagines the first few moments of a journey that has been the object of much debate. While most narratives and media coverage have focused on what happened during and after Elián

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González’s rescue, less attention has been paid to how it all began, including how the boy reacted when he figured out what was happening. This fictional re-creation of those first moments centers the boy. Witnessing the terrified child trying to jump out, the old man heard those around him whispering expressions such as “Shameful” and “What some people do for money” (Menéndez 26), a clear condemnation of the mother and of the motives that led many balseros to try to flee the island. The negative reactions that the mother elicits from the old man and the spectators serve to highlight the internal divisions within the Cuban community during the balsero crisis. Many questioned the reasons that led others to risk their lives, especially when there were children involved. In the story, the weather conditions that particular morning compound the gravity of the boy’s circumstances. As the narrator states, “Dawn had come, but brought with it little light. The sky was low and gray. The sea was dark. A few young men swam out, but they were turned back by the waves. For a while it seemed there would be no more launchings, but after an hour, the first raft went out into the rough sea” (27). The darkness of the sea and sky foreshadows tragedy and contributes to the dramatic tension in the text. Yet the rough seas are not enough of a deterrent to the balseros, who decide to launch their rafts because “they had come this far. And if others judged it safe. . .” (27). As the weather improves throughout the day, the old man witnesses more people launching their rafts. Silence is broken in the afternoon, once the sea is calm, when someone shouts, “Body in the surf!” (27). Given Cojímar’s role as a preferred point of departure during the balsero crisis, one can assume that its residents probably witnessed bodies washed ashore quite often. After hearing the screams, the old man moves closer to shore thinking, “The boy jumped” (27). After unsuccessfully trying to get help from the police, “the current brought the body closer and closer” (28), until it was deposited on the sand.21 When the old man gets closer, he notices that “tangled with seaweed and moss, was a giant jellyfish, the likes of which had never been seen in Cojimar. It was almost exactly the size of a small boy caught inside a balloon” (28). Watching others approach, “The old man felt in his pocket for the pen. He mumbled an old prayer. And in one swift stroke all that was left of the jellyfish was a withered yellow film, which the next wave carried back out to sea” (29). The discovery of the “body that was not, in fact, a body” (28), but rather a giant jellyfish, provides an interesting twist to the story through the parallel it suggests between the boy and the jellyfish. The link between them is reinforced by the description of the jellyfish’s size as that “of a small boy caught inside a balloon.” The jellyfish, I propose, becomes a metaphor for

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the boy and other rafters. Jellyfish are creatures that have limited control over their movements; they typically move carried by currents. Their lack of control and dependence on currents mirrors the experience of balseros. The giant jellyfish symbolically embodies Brathwaite’s tidalectics, with its “tossings” across the seas. A similar idea emerges through the comparison of the jellyfish to a balloon. Both are moved by forces beyond their control; the former depends on aquatic currents, while the latter depends on air flow. The image of the balloon also directly connects to the boy, and even works as a metaphor for his illusions. He thought that Miami was above the clouds, and that he and his mother would fly there. In the end, the boy has no control over his destiny, but rather is forced to comply with his mother’s wishes. Where do the currents carry him? The reader never finds out, because the story has an open ending. The end of the story provides various examples of intertextuality with Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The giant jellyfish is reminiscent of the giant marlin that the old man, Santiago, catches in Hemingway’s novel. The action of stabbing it with a pen evokes the stabbing of the marlin with a spear in Hemingway’s text. The use of a pen instead of a harpoon, as Santiago does, emphasizes the idea of writing as a weapon. The story itself demonstrates the power of rewriting the narrative. In this case, it is about shedding light on the principal actor in a saga, a boy who was not given a voice to tell his own story. As I have demonstrated in my analysis of Ana Menéndez’s “Cojimar,” “The Boy Who Was Rescued by Fish,” and “The Boy’s Triumphant Return,” these stories provide fictionalized accounts of Elián González’s departure, rescue, and return from several perspectives, including that of the Cuban American community in Miami and the Cuban government. Read together, the texts offer alternative views of the Elián González saga, which proved to be a highly polarizing event in the history of Cuba-US relations. Moreover, both in their form and their contents, the stories challenge dominant narratives around these events, especially from the Cuban exile community’s and the Cuban government’s perspectives. Above all, these stories provide a lens through which to examine the issue of unauthorized migration after the height of the balsero crisis of 1994.

reiMagining Borders: the art oF sandra raMos and aBeL Barroso Producing art under the veil of the Cuban Revolution has always been a risky undertaking for Cuban artists, especially when its subject matter is

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migration. But despite the censorship and constraints that the Castro government has imposed since 1959, and which continue to this day under President Miguel Díaz-Canel, artists have found creative ways to address the highly controversial topic of emigration from Cuba. My interest in Cuban and Cuban American art produced during, or reflecting on, the balsero crisis of the mid-1990s led me to the works of Sandra Ramos, Abel Barroso, and Kcho. These artists belong to the generation that the art critic Gerardo Mosquera has referred to as “la mala yerba,” meaning “weeds that grow strong even in rocky soil” (“New Cuban Art” 13). The analogy of the “rocky soil” refers to the extreme socioeconomic conditions that Cuba faced during the Special Period. “La mala yerba” symbolizes the tenacity and the resilience of the 1990s generation. They remained on the island, committed to their work, despite the void that the artists of the 1980s generation left when they “emigrated en masse at the very beginning of the 1990s” (Mosquera, “New Cuban Art” 13). They are also the ones who found creative inspiration in the extreme conditions that they witnessed and were able to produce works with the scarce materials they could find. Their art—which falls under the umbrella of New Cuban Art—overlaps with that of the previous generation, as Linda Howe explains: The New Cuban Art scene evolved just prior to, and in the chaos that followed, the disappearance of [the] Soviet Union, when economic and social upheaval was the norm. Scarce resources played a role in changing the production and distribution of Cuban art during those decades, but other complex factors included the state’s attempts to control artistic expression (through its institutions), especially in the 1980s; the exodus of most of the significant 1980s artists; and the sudden influx of foreign collectors, galleries, foundations, museums, curators, both legitimate and dubious, who rapidly commercialized and practically sustained artistic production on the island. (22)

Ironically, amid the extreme scarcity that Cubans faced during the Special Period, “la mala yerba” generation not only produced unprecedented provocative and irreverent art, but their cultural production—a product of the Special Period—became highly commercialized and coveted worldwide (Howe 25). For Mosquera, “la mala yerba” “constitutes an evolution of new Cuban art in post-utopian times. Its cynicism has been pointed out, its greater interest in formal aspects, and its veiled discourse to evade censorship” (13). Despite the attention that their art garnered from critics and collectors

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outside of Cuba, artists like Ramos, Barroso, and Kcho were not seduced by the commodification of their work. In a personal interview with Ramos, she acknowledged the compromise and responsibility she felt to bring attention—through her art—to the challenges Cuban society has faced. This was especially the case during the balsero crisis. As she explains, access to film and cameras was scarce, and it was mostly international reporters who came to cover the phenomenon who had this type of equipment. Through her art, like the pieces examined here, she sought to capture and document that chapter of Cuban history. The Mayer Fine Art Gallery’s statement on Ramos reflects her compromise to unveil Cuban reality: “Sandra Ramos [sic] groundbreaking work was amongst the first to challenge and expose the harsh realities of Cuban life. By addressing forbidden issues such as mass migration, the plight of Cuba’s raft people, racism in Cuban society and the inequalities of Cuban life, Ramos found a voice through her art that has brought her worldwide fame.”22 In examining works produced by Ramos, Barroso, and Kcho during or inspired by the Special Period, the balsero crisis, and mass migration, I show how they question the metanarrative of Cuban exceptionalism; how the borders of Cuba are reinforced, challenged, and dismantled; and how the duality of water as border and bridge is represented in their artistic production. Since the late 1980s, Sandra Ramos has been actively producing artwork that speaks to the reality of the Cuban people. Today, she is considered a prominent Cuban artist. From living under Castro’s communist regime to US imperialism, and from the 1990s Special Period to the present, her art provides a running commentary on the conditions that have shaped Cuban life in the last few decades. While experimenting with different media (painting, printmaking, installations, videos) and styles throughout her career, the theme of migration has remained central to her artistic production. The reasons for, and effects of, migration, as well as the journey itself, are all themes that her art has addressed for the last two and a half decades. While Ramos’s oeuvre has been vast and prolific, for the purpose of this study I am focusing on selected works produced in or around 1994, the peak year of the balsero crisis, and a moment that marked an unprecedented shift in US policy toward fleeing Cubans, who suddenly found themselves being treated as “undocumented immigrants.” The references to unauthorized Cuban migration—specifically balseros—as well as the issue of Caribbean borders, are a connecting thread among these pieces. In a personal interview with me on November 7, 2017, Ramos spoke about the role that art played in recording the balsero crisis. Given the silence of official media, and the lack of access to cameras and film equipment among average Cubans, art

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Figure 4.3. Sandra Ramos, The Raft/La balsa (1994). Calcography, 19.69 × 35.43 in. © Sandra Ramos. Courtesy of the artist.

became one of the only ways to document the crisis. She sees the art she produced during that period as achieving precisely that; it is an art that tells the stories that were silenced; it is art that recovers history. The piece The Raft/La balsa (calcography 1994; figure 4.3) makes a powerful statement about Cuba’s condition by depicting a map of the island made out of red (a color associated with Castro’s revolution and communist regime) logs. The entire island is represented as a raft, floating in the middle of the sea, an image that captures the mass scale of the balsero crisis. The sea itself becomes a leitmotif in Ramos’s works. In her interview with me, she spoke about the role of the sea in her work: Sí, el mar es un símbolo muy importante en mis obras; tiene que ver con la idea central de esa “maldita circunstancia del agua por todas partes.” El mar como una frontera, como una cosa que limita a la isla, la separa del resto de todo el mundo. También con esa dicotomía que me gusta explorar mucho del mar como algo positivo y algo negativo; como lo que define, como lo que te puede dar vida, y como lo que te puede dar muerte. (Yes, the sea is a very important symbol in my works; it has to do with that main idea of the “damned circumstance of water everywhere.” The sea as a border, as something that limits the island, that separates it from the rest of the world. There’s also that dichotomy that I like to explore a lot about the sea as both something positive and negative; as what defines, what can give you life, and what can bring you death.)

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Her statement echoes some of the central points that I make in Crossing Waters regarding the role of water as border and bridge, and as symbol of life and death. In this particular piece, La balsa, the sea represents a border that threatens with death. Cuba is a raft, with oars, that displays the national flag (tied to a palm tree) flying backward, symbolizing the direction that the country has taken during the Special Period. It is nighttime, and shark-infested waters surround the island-raft. These are the dangerous waters that all balseros try to cross, a seemingly impossible feat given the dangers that lurk below. The presence of the seven sharks swimming around the island-raft, ready to attack, not only depicts one of the most feared dangers faced by balseros, but it metaphorizes the dangerous situation in which Cuba finds itself. It is a country adrift in a dangerous world, a country that faces hunger and extreme poverty due to the failure of the Cuban Revolution, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the US embargo. La balsa depicts a country desperate to escape its circumstances. Ramos’s painting Illusions/Espejismos (1994; figure 4.4) offers a glimpse of the dreams that drive Cubans—and many other migrants—to leave their homelands. In this piece, a naked couple, evocative of Adam and Eve, as well

Figure 4.4. Sandra Ramos, Illusions/Espejismos (1994). Oil on canvas, 29.53 × 23.62 in. © Sandra Ramos. Courtesy of the artist.

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as their baby, are floating on top of a bed with oars. They are sitting with their backs to the viewer, staring at the horizon. It is daylight, and above, the clouds against the blue sky acquire many shapes. Some of the objects floating like clouds in the sky include a television, a car, a house, a boat, a bottle, and what appears to be the Twin Towers. Between the bed and the horizon, eight apples float above the water. In this allegorical modern-day rendition of the story of Adam and Eve, the couple does not face one temptation, but many, as represented by the multiple apples and objects floating in the sky. Together, the objects on the horizon evoke the so-called American Dream. The biblical subtext works to draw a connection between Adam and Eve’s original sin and the lust for material possessions that compels the couple to leave the island. The traditional sexual connotation of the bed is eclipsed by its functionality as a raft—a clear evocation of the balsero crisis—rendering it a metaphor for their dreams. They have nothing, but they dream of a different kind of paradise—one characterized by modernity and technology, and where the value of the individual is measured by possessions. Materialism becomes the temptation that motivates this couple to leave on their bed-raft and risk their lives as well as that of their child. Up on the horizon, those objects they dream of, that land (Global North/USA) they hope to reach, is unattainable. In the end, as the title of the piece reminds us, these are just “illusions” or “espejismos,” as impalpable and elusive as clouds. The Spanish title, “espejismos,” translated as “mirages,” highlights one of the many effects of heatstroke and dehydration suffered by many balseros. By demythifying life on the other side (USA), as well as the reasons for embarking on this perilous journey, this piece serves as a warning to Cubans who risk their lives to attain economic success. Another leitmotif of Sandra Ramos’s art that speaks to the realities faced by rafters, and that is also central to Mayra Santos Febres’s poetry collection, is drowning. Her pieces To Drown in Tears/Ahogarse en lágrimas (1994), Me at the Bottom of the Sea/Yo en el fondo del mar (1994), and Dead/Muerte, from her Series Migraciones II (1994), are only three among many of her works that address drowning and the often-invisible violence of water crossings. They serve as a reminder that, as Nguyen has stated, the sea “indexes the major and minor events” of history (70). The successful and failed crossings of thousands of Cubans—and many others throughout history—have taken place within a space that renders their movement invisible. While the pieces examined above focused on the image of the balsa (raft) representing a people and a country adrift following the Special Period, these works shift our gazes underneath the surface to the drowning

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Figure 4.5. Sandra Ramos, To Drown in Tears/Ahogarse en lágrimas (1994). Oil on canvas, 23.62 × 23.62 in. © Sandra Ramos. Courtesy of the artist.

or drowned balsero/a. To Drown in Tears/Ahogarse en lágrimas (figure 4.5) depicts the figure of a girl drowning in a maelstrom. The painting offers a bird’s-eye view of the drowning girl at the center of the swirling waters as she attempts to stay afloat. It is nighttime, and the aqueous spiral that drowns her also threatens other balseros nearby. The piece depicts an Ekman spiral in lighter shades of blue and white. Six rafts—each with two people in them—circle the woman while she is trapped in the same maelstrom. Urgency, desperation, and the struggle for survival are central themes in this work, which depicts a crucial life-and-death moment that remains invisible and unknown to those who have not experienced this type of crossing. The viewer cannot help but be moved by the girl’s predicament; her mouth is

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open, her look is distraught, and her extended arm appears to be reaching out to the viewer, begging for rescue. A sense of powerlessness pervades as we come to terms with the girl’s imminent death, and presumably that of the balseros who surround her. But beyond the more literal interpretation of this image lies a sharp and critical commentary of the Cuban condition during the Special Period. As a recurring symbol of Cuban youth in Ramos’s works, the drowning pionerita represents the precarious and threatened future of young Cuban generations. Their survival is a predominant concern in this piece, reflected both by her position at the center of the vortex and her disproportionately large size vis-à-vis the rafts around her. In this piece, the balsero crisis—and the conditions that provoked it—are the maelstrom or the Ekman spiral that threatens to absorb everything and everyone in its path. The common expression behind the title of the piece, “ahogarse en lágrimas,” successfully conveys the suffering, pain, and desperation that Cubans experienced during those trying years. In some of Ramos’s other works, the gaze also veers from the surface to the bottom of the sea, where death prevails. This is the case with Me at the Bottom of the Sea/Yo en el fondo del mar (figure 4.6), which offers a snapshot of the sea, from surface to seafloor, a perspective akin to standing in front of an aquarium. Lying flat on the sand is the body of a woman caught between life and death, exhaling her very last breaths. Above, the night sky is dark, and the stars are visible, some reflected on the water. Blue predominates in this painting, with the exception of green algae to the left and small red fish swimming close to the woman’s face and upper body. Contrary to what one might expect, the hues become lighter closer to the bottom of the ocean. The woman—an alter ego of the artist based on the title—is bathed in a light that seems to emanate from her torso. The depiction of several sharks points to the danger of the journey, the violence of the crossing. Marine life is central in this piece, a reminder of the role of the sea as a nonhuman actor. The work depicts what appears to be an octopus tightly gripping the woman’s right leg with its shackle-like tentacles, as if trying to keep her body from floating away. The presence of sharks and the octopus are reminders of how necroviolence is outsourced to nature in the bottom of the sea, a space of exception. More disturbing perhaps are the two miniature skeletons sitting on top of the drowned woman, who suddenly appears to be gigantic. By depicting them rowing on top of her—as if she were a raft—with one staring directly at the viewer, they appear to warn the viewer against the deadly consequences of sea crossings. However, I would argue that their presence also serves another purpose. It is a reminder

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Figure 4.6. Sandra Ramos, Me at the Bottom of the Sea/Yo en el fondo del mar (1994). Oil on canvas, 29.53 × 23.62 in. © Sandra Ramos. Courtesy of the artist.

that as DeLoughrey has stated, “the ocean is humanized by the bodies of the past and present” (“Heavy” 711). Here, the seafloor becomes a contact zone where the remnants of bare lives, both past and present, coexist. A similar idea is evident in Dead/Muerte (figure 4.7), one of the pieces in her Series Migraciones II (1994). This series is characterized by Ramos’s use of old suitcases and a wide variety of media and materials to comment on the socioeconomic and political ills that Cubans faced during the 1990s. Speaking about the series, the artist explains: “I developed a series of painted suitcases. They tried to make a compilation of the experiences, dreams, deceptions and illusions of Cuban people that emigrate from their country. Dealing with the stories about raft peoples[,] the open suitcase was a medium to make public the private and social reality of Cubans” (ARC Magazine). As she explains, working with suitcases allowed her to address the complexities and tensions inherent to the balsero experience. The suitcase is an ideal medium because it is an object embedded with meaning. Movement, travel, migration, displacement, permanence, and temporariness are all concepts that we tend to associate with suitcases. These are used to

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Figure 4.7. Sandra Ramos, Dead/Muerte (1994). Painted suitcase, 27.56 × 28.74 × 17.72 in. © Sandra Ramos. Courtesy of the artist.

hold our personal belongings when we travel, and in this sense, they represent privacy, especially in cases when people who are fleeing are forced to deposit in them their most prized possessions. The inside of the suitcase is thus associated with the intimate. It is for these reasons that the open and painted suitcases in her series

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Migraciones II become a powerful metaphor to, as Ramos puts it, “make public the private and social reality of Cuban people” (“Artist’s Statement”). The suitcases depict the dreams and deceptions of the Cuban people during the turbulent Special Period, particularly those of balseros. Here I would like to focus on what I consider to be one of her most powerful pieces, Dead/ Muerte, which depicts an underwater scene reminiscent of Me at the Bottom of the Sea. When the wooden suitcase is open, both the top and bottom form part of the same image, that is, there is continuity between them. The open suitcase depicts an underwater scene; the top part is teeming with marine life, including coral, fish, jellyfish, and the ubiquitous shark. It is daylight, and the rays of the sun are shining deeply into the ocean. This top scene gives the viewer the sense that one is looking at a vibrant aquarium, but this impression quickly changes when one looks at the bottom half of the suitcase. The emphasis on life quickly shifts to death. We are still exposed to the beauty of the marine ecosystem in this underwater world, complete with more coral, fish, and sea turtles. But this beauty pales in comparison to the grim reality represented in this half of the suitcase. In the foreground and extending across most of the frame is a white skeleton swimming and reaching out with its arms toward the seafloor, where there are recently drowned people who look terrified as they are about to be swept away by the skeleton, the embodiment of death. Around them we also see other smaller human figures, including a baby, in various stages of drowning, as well as more sharks, a net, and at least eight inner tubes. By populating the image with the recently drowned and a skeleton, Ramos’s piece represents the seafloor as a space of exception where balseros’ remains accumulate over time, away from the human eye, and are transformed into “ambiguous loss.” The scene, without a doubt, captures the dangers of attempting to cross the Caribbean using an inner tube—like many balseros have done— and the terror of death by drowning. The theme of borders is also recurrent in Sandra Ramos’s art, especially in her work Fenced by the Waters/Cercados por las aguas (1994; figure 4.8), which depicts an aerial view of the US naval base in Guantánamo, perhaps the most powerful symbol of US Empire in the Caribbean. Although for the last two decades Guantánamo has served—controversially—as a prison for suspected terrorists apprehended during the War on Terror, in the nineties it functioned as a detention center for unauthorized migrants, especially Cubans and Haitians interdicted by the US Coast Guard. Ramos’s piece chronicles the role of Guantánamo as part of the US surveillance apparatus deployed against Cuban balseros during the 1994 crisis. At the foreground,

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Figure 4.8. Sandra Ramos, Fenced by the Waters/Cercados por las aguas (1994). Oil on canvas, 50.79 × 29.13 in. © Sandra Ramos. Courtesy of the artist.

running from left to right across the bottom, there is a razor wire fence— what DeLoughrey describes as an emblem of state violence (Allegories 105)—that six human/stick figures dressed as Cuban flags attempt to climb. Occupying most of the visual space, the border is composed of a stretch of sand, with tent cities to both right and left of the canvas, as well as small and almost indistinguishable stick figures near the tents, which seem to be running toward the fence. Above, in the background, is the coast. The blue sea—which drips into the sand—is replete with US Coast Guard ships. One of the greatest contributions of Fenced by the Waters is the representation of Cuba’s double border, one that is not typically addressed in border studies, which encompasses both Guantánamo’s fence and the sea. Between these two borders, the US naval base in Guantánamo functions as a borderland, as became evident during the balsero crisis. According to Grenier and Pérez, in August 1994, the Cuban government’s decision to allow people to leave the country in rafts led to a mass exodus: As a result, nearly 37,000 Cubans were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard in less than a month. The bulk of the arrivals . . . were detained for more than a year in camps at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo. Remembering the Mariel experience,23 the United States was unwilling this time to hold the door open for Cubans. President Clinton and his Attorney General placed

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the rescued rafters in Guantánamo with the expectation that they would never be admitted into the United States. The absence of alternative destinations for the rafters, as well as the deteriorating conditions in the camps, eventually prompted the United States to admit them into the country. (25)

Ramos’s piece, therefore, puts the US naval base of Guantánamo at the center of the balseros’ struggle for survival during the Special Period. The sea is a border that must be crossed, but its militarization by US Empire curtails unauthorized migration. Once interdicted at sea and apprehended, as was the case for more than 30,000 Cubans, their detention in Guantánamo relegated them to a state of legal limbo that often lasted more than a year. The US naval base, with its tent cities, became a sort of borderland—a space marked by transition, geographically part of Cuba but legally a part of the United States. In the painting, the figures climbing the fence appear to be trying to escape from the base, but some of them may be attempting to cross into Guantánamo. This ambiguity represents how, on the one hand, many balseros tried to be intercepted by the US Coast Guard in order to arrive at Guantánamo, because they thought that would give them a chance to make it to the US mainland. On the other hand, many interdicted balseros grew desperate due to lack of communication with their families or the long wait for the lottery to be admitted to the United States. The waiting became so unbearable that, as Ybarra observes, “Some desperate rafters crossed the line to go back to Cuba rather than waiting for entry into the United States” (61). The ambiguity of this piece reflects the blurriness associated with borderlands generally and emphasizes Guantánamo’s function as borderland. Lastly, I would like to call attention to the irony behind the title of the piece. Cuba—as an island—can be seen as fenced by the sea. However, because what stands out is the razor wire, the tent city, and the US Coast Guard ships, the piece suggests that the bordering of Cuba is primarily the product of the island’s militarization by US Empire. As I have demonstrated, the art of Sandra Ramos that I have examined here is in direct dialogue with the balsero crisis in the 1990s during the Special Period. Overall, these pieces address the desperation, dreams, and expectations of Cubans fleeing dire conditions on the island. However, unauthorized Cuban migration is depicted as a dangerous and deadly phenomenon that claims the lives of those who venture into the sea. Her works also address the concept of borders and unveil the convergences and divergences with the Mexican-US border, which has been privileged in border studies. Abel Barroso is also considered to be one of Cuba’s most important contemporary artists.24 Most of his pieces are wooden sculptures that imitate

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objects associated with technology, play, or migration. Irony is central in his work, which addresses the many challenges that the Global South faces in this era of globalization, neoliberalism, and technology. His pieces consistently satirize the multidimensional distance that separates the Global North from the Global South by calling attention to the lack of resources and the “disadvantages” faced by people living in developing countries. Regarding this contradiction, he states: For example, compared to modern cars, I made my wooden cars; given increasingly fast computers, I proposed making wooden computers using simple resources. This apparent simplicity is the vehicle that I manipulate to satirize the access to these resources and how they’re used. I always focus on them from our position—the position of the “other” confronting development and looking for an alternative solution that reflects things today. (Peraza)

The “alternative solution” that he proposes through his art might be a “wooden flip phone” or a “wooden hand-cranked computer,” but as his art makes evident, lack of resources and access to technology are inextricably tied to migration and the crossing of borders. These were the main themes of Barroso’s exhibit Cuando caen las fronteras/When the Borders Fall, which took place at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes as part of the Eleventh Havana Biennial, from May 11 to June 11 of 2012. In his typical satirical fashion, Barroso took advantage of the occasion to make a statement about migration, not only in Cuba but also worldwide. The very title of the exhibit, When the Borders Fall, highlights the centrality of borders in Barroso’s work, as well as the desire for a borderless world. Speaking about the subject, he once stated: “Lately I’ve focused on the issue of borders, the boundaries drawn by power. I want to point out the marks or imaginary lines that cannot be crossed, whether they are borders between countries or between people” (Peraza). This worldview is reflected in many of the pieces exhibited at the Biennial, especially in El mundo es plano (The World Is Flat, 2012; figure 4.9), a 3D installation that depicts the political map of the world. Instead of the typical lines that divide nation-states, we find wooden picket fences delineating those contours. These vertical fences mark divisions. Sometimes they are horizontal—as in the case of the US-Canada border—thus evoking bridges or paths. Those borders on the map are also complemented by double-sided wooden stepladders (to allow back-and-forth movement) strategically positioned to bridge areas characterized by political divisions or heavy human traffic, such as

Figure 4.9. Abel Barroso, El mundo es plano (The World Is Flat) (2012). Collage, acrylic and ink on canvas, 70.87 × 48.03 in. © Abel Barroso. Courtesy of the artist.

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the Mexico-US and South America–Caribbean borders. In addition to these fence-bridges and ladder-bridges, which serve to destabilize the power of geopolitical borders, the use of the wooden picket fence to signal a porous border serves a similar purpose. El mundo es plano is a piece that, similar to some of his other works, is characterized by its universality. In other words, it is not only concerned with how borders affect Cuba—which clearly presents its unique challenges—but rather addresses global borders, too. It is not surprising, therefore, that his pieces continuously evoke the Mexico-US border. As he once put it, “I also worry what a Mexican thinks about the border between the United States and Mexico, or a person living a few meters away from a border control point” (Peraza). The use of the stepladder connecting Mexico and the United States in this piece illustrates this concern, also reflected in his pieces La ruta hacia El Dorado (The Way to El Dorado, 2012) and Pinball del emigrante: Salta el muro (Emigrant’s Pinball Machine: Climb the Wall, 2012). La ruta hacia El Dorado (figure 4.10) provides a glimpse of the inbetween space, or borderland, between two sides. In the foreground sits a wooden fence. Directly opposite is a skyline in the background, which roughly resembles the wooden fence in the foreground. The viewer glances from the “other side” of the wooden fence, as if contemplating crossing it to reach the city (El Dorado) on the horizon. Between those two sides (fence and city skyline)—or the middle ground—are three wooden stick fences that run parallel to them. Two of the fences are curved, two have openings in them (one looks like it was torn down), and the last one, closer to the city on the horizon, has none. Small footprints crisscross this borderscape, their direction signaling a northward-bound trajectory; some footprints mark a path through broken fences, others suggest those walls were climbed. The piece illustrates that the way to El Dorado, that “promised land” and mythical land of plenty, is fraught with obstacles, borders that must be crossed, fences that must be climbed. Despite the piece’s universality, it clearly evokes the Mexico-US border, a border that has become increasingly central in Cuban unauthorized migration routes. Commonly referred to as “dusty feet” migration, the number of Cubans trying to reach the United States via Mexico has increased significantly in the last decade. Pinball del emigrante (2012) is a series that features seven wooden pinball machines lined up against a skyline backdrop. Each pinball machine is different and has its own subtitle, including Llegadas/Arrivals, Salta el muro/ Climb the Wall, and El Sueño Americano/The American Dream. The pinball machine is a deceptively playful and lighthearted object that allows Barroso

Figure 4.10. Abel Barroso, La ruta hacia El Dorado (The Way to El Dorado) (2012). Woodcut, engraving on plexiglass and wooden mechanism, 17.72 × 20.87 × 19.69 in. © Abel Barroso. Courtesy of the artist.

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to address a rather serious subject matter. The depiction of the process of migration as a game of pinball effectively denounces the arbitrariness and luck behind successful migration. In Salta el muro/Climb the Wall (figure 4.11), the allegorical representation of undocumented migration entails advancing through a series of layered walls. The movement of the ball (representative

Figure 4.11. Abel Barroso, Pinball del emigrante: Salta el muro (Emigrant’s Pinball Machine: Climb the Wall (2012). Installation, dimensions variable. © Abel Barroso. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 4.12. Abel Barroso, Adiós, The Good-Bye Machine (2013). Engraved wood, 15 7/10 × 23 3/5 × 15 7/10 in. © Abel Barroso. Courtesy of the artist.

of the migrant) begins at “La frontera,” which is described as “Visible e Invisible,” and advances through areas marked as “Novice,” “Advanced,” “Expert,” and “Veteran.” Language—for instance, the use of Spanish to refer to la frontera and English to label the categories of migrants based on their level—marks another type of border, in this case a linguistic border between Latin America and the United States. Salta el muro parodies the ranking system for game players based on their level of expertise by adopting it to categorize migrants based on their previous experience crossing the border, or rather, climbing the wall. In this sense, this piece offers a strong commentary about undocumented migration, which is likened to a game of fortune. The topic of Cuban balsero migration is the subject of the pieces Adiós, The Good-Bye Machine (2013; figure 4.12) and Border Patrol (2007;

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Figure 4.13. Abel Barroso, Border Patrol (2007). Woodcut, engraving on plexiglass, wooden mechanism, 16 × 22 × 20 in. © Abel Barroso. Courtesy of the artist.

figure 4.13). The first is a hand-cranked wooden machine composed of several layers. In the foreground (next to the rotating handle and coin slot), a row of five rustic houses symbolizes the idea of “home.” In the background, at the opposite side of the board, the sharp-angled silhouettes of five skyscrapers looming tall beyond the horizon represent a Global North city, possibly New York. Between these opposite planes, layers of ocean waves interrupted by two-dimensional hands move side to side when activated by a coin and hand crank. Unlike other pieces that depict walls and fences—such as La ruta hacia El Dorado and Salta el muro—the ocean waves suggest a different type of border crossing: maritime undocumented migration. Playing with the notion of “waving” good-bye, this work turns the action of saying good-bye—usually characterized by pain and sadness—into another game. The mechanization of the action of waving good-bye underscores the repetitiveness and frequency of unauthorized migration, and inevitably depersonalizes this otherwise intimate experience for those affected by it. There are too many who have left the homeland; migration has become so mechanized that people—whether they are migrating or have chosen to stay behind—do not need to participate in this most basic human gesture. A machine can wave good-bye for you as you or your loved ones venture into the waves.

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Border Patrol is a mixed-media sculpture resembling an aquarium. It consists of a wooden base with the words “Border Patrol” carved on it and glass encasing it. In the background, superimposed and sticking out of the glass—which symbolizes the ocean—is an island with three houses on top and steps leading to the water. On and inside the glass case are depictions of marine life, including etchings (on the glass) of jellyfish, stingrays, fish, and algae, as well as cutouts of five black sharks swimming around the island with their fins sticking out of the water (glass). Similar to Santos Febres’s poem “Tiburón de ónix,” this piece makes a statement about the dangers encountered by unauthorized migrants crossing waters in the Caribbean. Both works call attention to one of the greatest ironies associated with undocumented intra-Caribbean migration: nature plays the role of border patrol. The sea, as a space of exception, is characterized by necroviolence that has been outsourced to the sea, a nonhuman actor. The sharks circle the waters, and their presence, similar to that of the US Border Patrol, deters unauthorized migration, whether it is by scaring potential migrants from trying to escape in the first place or by attacking them in transit. About this piece, Barroso has stated: Es bien simbólico también porque nosotros vivimos en islas, entonces los tiburones son como los policías en la frontera, es decir, que el que cruza por México y Estados Unidos tiene un río o la migra, pero para nosotros los border patrol son los tiburones, que es un poco más trágico, más peligroso. (It’s very symbolic because we live on islands, therefore sharks are like the border patrol, that is, the person who crosses through Mexico and the United States has to deal with a river or la migra, but for us the border patrol are the sharks, which is a little more tragic, more dangerous.) (“Re: Pregunta”)

Here, the presence of sharks represents a natural barrier that controls and limits the flow of undocumented migrants. But the piece allows another reading. It functions as an allegorical representation of the US Border Patrol. The comparison to sharks highlights the aggressiveness and violence typically—though erroneously—ascribed to sharks. Either way, Border Patrol centers the Caribbean as a border that is similar, yet different, from the Mexico-US border. Ramos’s and Barroso’s works engage with the topic of migration in distinct ways. Ramos’s pieces offer a critical perspective of the 1994 Cuban balsero crisis, reflecting on how Cubans were forcibly displaced by the extreme precarity of the Special Period. The works examined here offer a window

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into the conditions and consequences of crossing waters, especially death by drowning. Barroso’s wooden pieces and installations also center Cuban undocumented migration, but they reflect on other types of border crossings, too, such as those taking place across the Mexico-US border. Together, these works provide an insightful reflection on migration from a Cuban perspective.

ghost raFts in achy oBe Jas’s “the coLLector” and kcho’s archiPiéLago en Mi PensaMiento In 1992, the Orlando Sentinel published an article titled “Cubans’ Rafts Tell Sad Tales of Desperation.” The article tells the story of Humberto Sánchez, a “Cuban-born, Miami-bred” man who had dedicated years to collecting makeshift vessels—up to 240 rafts in three years—washed up along the shore from Boca Raton to Key West (Bell). According to the journalist Maya Bell, “He says he will not rest until the real stories, the sad stories, of the Cuban rafters—or balseros—are told, until their names are remembered, until their desperation is understood, until they have a permanent museum of their own.” Sánchez’s goal of erecting a museum for these artifacts challenges the erasure of balseros as the disposable, wasted lives that Bauman sees as products of globalization. As Sánchez puts it, “Yes, we all know about rafters. We see people who make it. But there’s another side to it—the many who don’t make it, the many whose lives are destroyed in the process” (Bell). The need to remember those who have perished in the process drove Sánchez to collect their rafts and personal belongings—objects otherwise considered disposable by the US Coast Guard—with the goal of memorializing the lives lost in the crossing. In this last section, I examine the memorialization of balseros through the image of the empty raft in Achy Obejas’s short story “The Collector” and Kcho’s installation Archipiélago en mi pensamiento (1997). The first story of Obejas’s Tower of the Antilles (2017), “The Collector,” is dedicated to Humberto Sánchez and opens with the protagonist in the process of boarding a plane, “waiting to leave the island,” while lamenting that “he’d never find that familiar seascape again” (13, 14).25 Images of departures and arrivals, as well as flight and navigation, are prevalent throughout the text. Its fragmented structure—it is divided into seven nonchronological sections—echoes the fragmentation caused by migration. Throughout the story, past and present are interwoven to emphasize their links. For instance, the second section returns to the pre-Columbian past, and the narrator explains that “before the island had visitors, the natives

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traveled easier on water than on land” (14). With this, the text underscores the central roles that water and navigation played in the lives of the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, despite the fact that “the islanders were terrible, unambitious mariners” (14). The image of the “smooth dugout shells of maca trees they shaped into canoes,” in addition to their lack of navigational skills, foreshadows the fateful journeys that balseros will later make in their makeshift vessels (14). The next time the reader encounters the protagonist, in section three, he has an “orange nylon wrapped around [his] ankle like seaweed” (15). After tossing the “torn vest” tangled on his fishing line, the “orange nylon floated back toward him,” as if demanding the man’s attention (16). And it works, because he notices a metal water bottle, an upside-down tennis shoe, and a box of saltines (16). In fact, his eyes follow “the line of debris: a magazine, a compass, the jagged edges of a torn foam floater, a Manila rope like an albino snake curling on the sandy bottom” (16). All of this debris jolts his memory: “The man remembered his flight, how he’d pasted his face to the double panes of the window and lost count of the dark shapes in the water” (16). Those dark shapes were balseros. The debris he had just found was likely to have belonged to drowned balseros. Similar to the protagonist’s experience, Humberto Sánchez began to think about how many balseros had died crossing after “he spotted a jacket floating in the ocean while fishing off the coast of Miami” (Bell). The protagonist’s story is interrupted again in section four, with the narrative switching back to the time of the Spanish conquest, as is evident in the first sentence: “The first visitors to the islands emerged from a tropical mist on three caravels” (16), undoubtedly a reference to Columbus’s ships, the Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa María. Once again, the emphasis is on navigation and travel. Above all, the story establishes a contrast between the three large caravels and the natives’ canoes when the narrator states: “Each ship ran nearly thirty meters in length and weighed more than ninety tons, dwarfing the native canoes beside them” (16). In contrast to the “unambitious mariners” with small vessels stand the “visitors,” whose expertise at sea was demonstrated by their God-like arrival and the size of their vessels. They had “sailed on [those] big boats” and “come a long way” (17). At a deeper level, however, this section conceptually ties together the so-called “discovery” of the Americas and the modern Caribbean. Water has been a nonhuman historical actor because water crossings—of all types—have impacted the development of the region’s history over the centuries. The inclusion of precolonial vignettes within this narrative about balseros reflects the concept of epiphenomenal time, suggesting that contemporary unauthorized migration

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is a legacy of conquest, colonization, and US/European Empire. Past and present are inextricably tied together. The rest of the story focuses on the protagonist and his “discovery” of many vessels. It begins one day when he “stumbled on a tiny boat on the shore. He folded it like paper and took it home, setting it in his backyard” (17). From that day on, he continues to find crafts on the beach, which he brings home. He even “rented a trailer” so he could bring home larger vessels. As time goes on, he transforms into “the collector”: “Soon other crafts found a home in and around his yard—canoes and kayaks, floats built out of driftwood, hollowed tree trunks, discarded refrigerators made buoyant with inflated tubes, car chassis with water wings. A green truck with propellers. Inner tubes piled one on top of the other, filling his garage and blocking his driveway” (18). The number of crafts he finds speaks to the scale of unauthorized migration taking place in the region. Speaking about Humberto Sánchez, the man who inspired this story, Natalie Catasús observes: “The sheer number of rafts, held together in the visual field, would resist any expression of their arrival as anything other than mass migration” (210). In both cases, it is clear that the number of rafts found—either by Sánchez or the collector in the story—is evidence of a mass exodus. The variety of devices described by the narrator also tells stories of desperation and ingenuity. While at first the references to “car chassis with water wings” or a “green truck with propellers” might seem outlandish, it is well documented that in their desperation to flee, Cuban rafters were extremely creative in building their rafts with any materials they could gather, including cars. Similar to Sánchez’s case, the protagonist’s obsession with collecting what remains of these shipwrecked vessels becomes an act of defiance against forgetting and a way to memorialize lives lost at sea. For all intents and purposes, what the man finds—and collects—is considered waste or debris contaminating the sea. In her discussion of Sánchez’s rafts, Catasús states: “The event is repeatable—the rafts accumulate in excess—and so they have come to be regarded as refuse rather than as relics” (203). In other words, the repetitive appearance of thousands of rafts complicates their potential status as relics. For this reason, Catasús suggests, what prevails is a tension between the value and nonvalue of the rafts: “The rafts, both relic and refuse, are the detritus of the most desperate and ill-fated crossings and the materialization of this fraught political history” (211). Like Sánchez, Obejas’s protagonist sees so much value in them that he is “working three jobs to house the vessels” everywhere he can (18). He even takes flying lessons so he can “reach them before their desolate landing” (18). The man’s actions demonstrate his commitment to salvaging the remains of crafts that once embodied the life and dreams of the people in them. His attitude,

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again, echoes that of Sánchez. According to Catasús, “He [Sánchez] recognized the metonymic relationship between the empty raft and the lost balsero and sought to counteract the transformation of meaning into materiality. His efforts to salvage the vessels act as a performance of recognition, one of the few traces that have the capacity to represent their absence” (211). In Obejas’s story, the protagonist is unable to detach these objects from the human stories they represent. It is as if “the empty rafts that emerge from the water come to stand in for the bodies of those who have died there” (Catasús 203). For this reason, he personifies them, which becomes evident in his need to find them before “their desolate landing.” He is so convinced about the importance of these rescues that he asks for the support of the community: “He had plans for a tower that would display the crafts and tell their stories” (Obejas, The Tower 19). His plea to his neighbors echoes Humberto Sánchez’s own efforts to build a memorial for balseros—what he named The Liberty Column. According to Bell, “He [Sánchez] convinced himself, and a lot of contributors, that Miami should have a memorial to the rafters who have no final resting place. He raised $30,000 in donations and materials, and he sought approval of a downtown Miami site.”26 In the end, his dream of finding a permanent home for the rafts he collected never materialized, and he had to “dismantle his famed collection, and its legacy exists primarily as the stuff of local legend” (Catasús 204).27 Catasús finds deeper meaning in Sánchez’s unrealized dream of a raft museum, because as she states, it “reflects the irresolution of the balsero phenomenon” (210). Unlike Sánchez, who at least was able to raise funds for the memorial, the protagonist’s pleas go unanswered by his audience: “They would listen politely then shake their heads. These are ghost tales, they’d say, phantom rafts” (Obejas, The Tower 19). There is a clear tension between the collector’s view of the rafts as personified objects whose stories must be told, and his neighbors’ perception of them as “phantom rafts” and “ghost tales.” But their indifference does not stop him. In section seven, the reader sees him surveying “the collection in the reservoir”: “Then he took a hammer and drill and, one by one, undid each and every vessel, piling the planks, stacking the tires, making a heap of the lawn-mower motors” (19). By taking the crafts apart and stacking their pieces, the man dismantles the collection— which mirrors what happened with Sánchez’s rafts—while he also creates a tower. Perhaps it is not the kind he envisioned at first, but it certainly stands tall against forgetting. Through this homemade and temporary memorial, the collector pieces together one last time the many stories that each craft represents. While no one will ever know the truth of what became of the people who once boarded those vessels in search of a better life, the tower stands as a reminder of the many lives lost at sea. As the last relics linked to

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the undocumented—human beings who are often perceived as disposable or wasted lives—the “phantom rafts” stubbornly reclaim their humanity. In an interview about the recent publication of her collection The Tower of the Antilles, Obejas talks about the inspiration behind the title story: “It was inspired by ‘Archipiélago en mi pensamiento,’ a towering installation of boats, bottles, ropes, suitcases and inner tubes by Kcho [Alexis Leiva Machado], a Cuban artist, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1999” (“Immigrant”).28 While she wrote “The Tower of the Antilles” many years before “The Collector,” analyzed above, it seems evident that the latter was also influenced by Kcho’s installation. The interdiscursivity between these pieces—one literary, the other an installation/sculpture—is noteworthy. A 2016 Hyde: Hypocritedesign Magazine piece states: “Water defines all aspects of Kcho’s life and his oeuvre is populated with sculptures constructed from found objects associated with the sea: boats, propellers, driftwood, inner tubes and fishing nets” (“Kcho”). These “elements that populate his compositions are all related to life on an island, any island” (“Kcho”). But the astute viewer knows that his pieces are about much more than island life; they are about the violence of water crossings. Kcho’s Archipiélago en mi pensamiento (figure 4.14) is a product of the Special Period. The balsero crisis that peaked in 1994 provides the context to Kcho’s installation. The largest—and central—pieces are two makeshift wooden vessels, similar to the thousands used by balseros who tried to reach the United States. There are also tables, chairs, suitcases, inner tubes, and wooden planks that hold the two crafts together. The entire tower appears to be precariously balanced and at the mercy of even the subtlest of winds. Underneath, standing on the ground, dozens of glass bottles evoke the sea and emphasize the tower’s fragility. The title of the piece allows a double reading. On the one hand, it can refer to the entire Cuban archipelago, which tends to be erased by the main island (similar to the case of the Puerto Rican archipelago). Reflecting on the erasure of the archipelago, Kcho has stated that he is a “double islander.” As he explains, “We had to take a boat to get to Cuba; I made that trip a thousand and one times. Boats were an everyday reality to me. I feel sorry for the person who, upon seeing a boat, can only think of Miami” (Obejas “Island”). On the other hand, the title can also refer more generally to the Caribbean archipelago, especially when taking into account the large numbers of Haitians and Dominicans, who in addition to Cubans, have also tried to cross those waters in precarious crafts. Regardless of how it is interpreted, the title of the installation—and the symbols of mobility and displacement that it utilizes—reveals the Cuban and the Caribbean archipelagoes. Em-

Figure 4.14. Alexis “Kcho” Leiva, Archipiélago en mi pensamiento (2000), exhibited at the Reina Sofía National Museum, Madrid, Spain. Boats, wood, furniture, cage, propellers, bottles, paper, life-preserver, truck tire, suitcases, cloth, 35.04 × 86.61 × 177.17 in. © Alexis “Kcho” Leiva. Courtesy of the artist.

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phasizing the movement of people between and among islands challenges perceptions of remoteness and isolation undergirding imperial and colonial projects in the region. In a piece that Obejas wrote, titled “Island Dreams,” about the exhibit Encounter: Bruce Nauman and Kcho at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, she describes Archipiélago en mi pensamiento as follows: “A towering installation of weather-beaten dinghies, dusty liquor bottles, wasted ropes, worn suitcases and leathery inner tubes, the piece not only defies the atrium space, it overwhelms it with its paradoxical precariousness and weight, earned wisdom and imperfect humanity.” Emphasizing the dimensions of the tower, Obejas also calls attention to the used condition of its elements. Adjectives like “weather-beaten,” “dusty,” “wasted,” and “worn” mark these materials as “waste.” But “waste,” as DeLoughrey has proposed, allows for a double reading; it can indicate both pollution and wasted lives. Archipiélago en mi pensamiento challenges our preconceived ideas of waste as pollution and wasted lives. This is evident in Kcho’s words when he states: It’s made of all the refuse in my life, all the things that I accumulated and were left over, things that I had for sentimental reasons—boats I found useless and deserted on the beach, bottles I drank with my friends. The suitcases are really mine; I really traveled with them. They’re filled with books I really read, all of which meant something to me. (Obejas “Island”)

While the viewer is most likely inclined to see this “towering installation” as a precariously balanced pile of discarded objects (trash), there is more to it than meets the eye. For sure, it is fragile. Kcho himself states that “there is nothing holding it together but equilibrium” (Obejas “Island”). But the objects that make it up—what Kcho describes as “all the refuse in my life”—are also objects that he has kept for sentimental reasons. To the artist, as an insider, he sees its pieces as far from trash; they are objects that carry his personal memories and tell his story. But perhaps more importantly, the installation provokes reflection about human beings who are deemed, as Bauman puts it, disposable, redundant, or wasted humans. As I argue in chapter 1, racialized others-turnedunauthorized-migrants exemplify human wasted lives, forced into displacement by structural global forces. Balseros, as underprivileged and displaced people, also fall into this category. When Castro declared on August 1994 that any Cuban who wanted to leave could do so in a raft—that it was no longer illegal—his words implied that these human beings were seen as “national refuse,” something to get rid of. But there is a much more sinister

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interpretation. The tens of thousands of balseros who have perished attempting water crossings literally represent wasted lives. Kcho’s installation, using objects materially associated with undocumented maritime migration, forces the public to consider the fate of the drowned, whose stories have remained invisible. Archipiélago en mi pensamiento, like the tower erected by the protagonist in Obejas’s “The Collector,” stands as a memorial to those who have died as a result of the violence of crossing waters.

cuBan Borders The end of the balsero crisis in September of 1994, due to a pact reached by the Cuban and US governments, marked the beginning of a “major change in U.S. policy toward Cuban migrants,” known as the “wet foot/dry foot” policy (Duany, Blurred 47). About twenty years later, a new wave of Cuban migrants was unleashed as “a direct response to the normalization process with the US,” which took place under President Obama (Bye 226). As Vegard Bye explains, “The 2013 emigration reform was exactly the new exit opportunity thousands of another generation of young Cubans had been waiting for. During the three following years, a total of 121,000 Cubans emigrated to the US, compared to a total of 46,000 during the previous four years” (226). Since then, thousands of Cubans have ventured on a perilous journey by sea and land through Mexico. These Cuban migrants are referred to as “dusty feet,” that is, “those who reached the US by crossing the border from Mexico” (Bye 224). This phenomenon, which remains to be studied in depth, has increased especially after the repeal of the “wet foot, dry foot” policy. As the Cuban journalist Abraham Jiménez Enoa explains: Not even President Barack Obama’s repeal of the “wet foot, dry foot” policy in 2017 could stop the flow. Cubans may no longer throw themselves into the sea on rafts in hopes of reaching the Florida coast, but they continue to emigrate: A majority of those who flee take on the risky adventure of surrendering themselves to Central American smugglers—coyotes—to arrive at the border posts of Mexico and, from there, pursue the American dream. (“Young”)

The end of the “wet foot/dry foot” policy also coincided with the transition to the Trump administration and his promise “to reverse the rapprochement towards Cuba” that his predecessor had initiated (Bye 120). And he delivered: Access for Cubans to the US has become increasingly difficult under the Trump administration. First, the consular section of the US Embassy in

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Havana stopped issuing visas, thus obliging Cubans to go to a third country to apply for visas. Then, in March 2019, the visa category called B2, with a validity of five years with multiple entries, was suspended. After that, it became extremely complicated for Cubans trying to obtain access to the US, with all the consequences this had on travel, emigration and the provision of goods. (Bye 120)

In addition to these restrictions, the historian Ada Ferrer reminds us that “by targeting remittances, the Trump administration threatened to dry up an income stream of more than $3.6 billion a year” (465). “Everywhere people began to talk about another Special Period, like the one that had followed the fall of the Soviet Union. The new crisis, said some, was even worse than that” (465). The worsening of the economic crisis and the Cuban government’s heightened “surveillance of dissidents” coincided with increasing access to the internet among the Cuban people (464). These changes, in addition to the rising discontent of certain Cuban sectors (youth, LGBTQ+, Black people, intellectuals, artists) amid growing restrictions by the Cuban government through authoritarian measures, led to a series of movements and protests in 2020, such as the Movimiento San Isidro (MSI)—“a growing collective that includes many young Afro-Cuban artists and writers” (464)— and the 27th of November (N27) movement, as well as, more recently, the July 11, 2021, street protests (J11, also known as the #SOSCuba Movement), which were inspired by the song, slogan, and hashtag #PatriayVida.29 According to the artist, activist, and dissident Tania Bruguera, the #SOSCuba spontaneous protests that began in the town of San Antonio de los Baños and spread nationwide (and that the Cuban government tried to discredit and conceal) did not arise because of Covid-19 or the embargo, but because “people are tired of the [Cuban] government’s abuse.” She adds that “the situation [they] are in today is caused by the Cuban government,” “a dictatorship.” In his recent op-ed in the Washington Post, Jiménez Enoa draws a direct link to the Cuban government’s crackdown on protesters and racism, reminding us that most of those who participated were Black and Afro-descendant Cubans who continue to suffer the economic, social, and psychological effects of anti-Blackness under a system that denies its own racism (“La ‘revolución’”). While it is too soon to know the impact that these waves of protests—led largely by Black Cuban youth—will have on society and future patterns of migration, many like Bruguera assert that “there’s no turning back.” Time will tell how this new chapter of Cuban history will unfold and how it will be represented in literature and art.

ePiLogue

Muerto riCo (2017; figure 5.1), an arresting photograph by the late Puerto Rican artist Adál Maldonado, better known as ADÁL, won the 2020 People’s Choice Award in the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Speaking about his legacy, the art critic Maximiliano Durón states: “Over some 45 years, ADÁL created a wide-ranging and experimental artistic practice that included portraits documenting important Puerto Rican artists, performers, and intellectuals and extended to projects in which he imagined new futures for Puerto Ricans that would lead to liberation and self-determination.” In addressing these topics, his art “was often infused with bitingly satirical humor and a subversive political message” (Seelye). Satire and subversiveness are at the center of Muerto Rico, part of his series Puerto Ricans Underwater/Los Ahogados (The Drowned), which depicts a man lying submerged underwater in a bathtub. His face is covered with a red bandana, except the eyes, and he is wearing a black T-shirt with the words “Muerto Rico” in white printed on it. Bubbles blur half his face, as if he is exhaling his last breath. His look is one of resignation and defeat. Bold Destrou, the man in the photograph, had come to ADÁL’s “studio directly from a large protest against then-Gov. Ricardo Roselló” (Catlin). It was probably taken in March 2017, when student-led protests erupted around the island in response to Roselló’s proposed budget cut to the University of Puerto Rico. The photograph—and the series to which it belongs—imagines Puerto Ricans literally drowning as a result of the debt crisis and the excessive austerity measures imposed by la Junta as part of the US Congress plan to restructure Puerto Rico’s debt. Structural forces have been slowly killing Puerto Rico, metaphorically represented in the “Muerto” of the title. These are, without a doubt, Puerto Rican wasted lives. By the time ADÁL took this photograph in 2017, headlines in Dominican

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Figure 5.1. ADÁL (Adál Maldonado), Muerto Rico (2017). Inkjet print, 32.01 × 50.51 in. Courtesy of the Estate of Adál Maldonado and Roberto Paradise.

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newspapers, such as “Puertorriqueños se radican en República Dominicana huyendo de la crisis” (Diario Libre), indicated an unprecedented increase in Puerto Rican migration to the Dominican Republic, a pattern that stood in drastic opposition to the migration flows of the previous sixty years.1 Although the mass exodus from Puerto Rico as a result of the debt crisis was primarily US (Florida)-bound, a significant number of Puerto Ricans decided to start new lives in the Dominican Republic. That said, Puerto Ricans—perceived as non-Black—tend to arrive by airplane with visas, circumstances that confer a great deal of privilege and negate any attempts at drawing comparisons between them and unauthorized Dominican migrants to Puerto Rico. Little did ADÁL know, Muerto Rico would soon acquire a new meaning after Hurricanes Irma and María devastated the archipelago in September 2017. The hurricanes, which caused catastrophic flooding, destroyed bridges and houses, damaged communication lines, and wrecked an already weak power infrastructure, basically left Puerto Rico on the verge of collapse. The magnitude of physical destruction was apparent early on, though not so much the extent of the death toll (Roselló’s government covered it), which the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo determined to have reached 4,645.2 Another wave of mass exodus ensued, shrinking the total population and putting it closer to post–Great Migration levels. After Hurricane María, Muerto Rico acquired another layer of meaning, reflecting death and the losses brought about by the storm. Puerto Rico, which had already been drowning in debt, now was drowning also because of corruption and the fatally inadequate responses of both the local and federal governments. The trope of drowning is also central in the Puerto Rican artist Patrick McGrath Muñíz’s painting Diasporamus (2018; figure 5.2), which offers a poignant commentary on the Puerto Rican climate refugee crisis unleashed by Hurricane María. Inspired by Spanish Renaissance art, McGrath Muñíz reimagines a biblical scene that evokes the story of Noah’s Ark, except that his rendition features a small and extremely overcrowded fishing boat, populated with a diverse group of Puerto Ricans, including the iconic jíbaro—though dark-skinned instead of the more traditional “whitened” depiction—a woman (possibly a santera) dressed in African garb, a cow, a pig, and a dog. The image is striking for many reasons, not the least of which is that it represents, to the best of my knowledge, the first time that Puerto Ricans are depicted as refugees in a precarious vessel, echoing representations of undocumented Dominicans, Haitians, and Cubans at sea. Trauma, desperation, and fear are palpable in the subjects’ gestures and facial expressions, especially that of the boy holding on to the boat to avoid

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Figure 5.2. Patrick McGrath Muñíz, Diasporamus (2018). Oil on canvas, 44 × 64 in. © Patrick McGrath Muñíz. Courtesy of the artist.

drowning in dirty waters. As Carlos Rivera Santana observes, the piece invites us “to contemplate an aesthetic of disaster, weaving together the themes of posthurricane disaster, colonization (by referring to Spanish Renaissance art), climate change, capitalism and forced displacement” (181). Unlike most depictions of undocumented migration analyzed in this book, which feature the open sea, Diasporamus locates the small fishing boat in the middle of a flooded neighborhood. This is Puerto Rico after Hurricanes Irma and María—characterized by houses with blue tarps (many still in place four years later), defoliated trees, flooded streets, and people searching for a cellular signal to connect with loved ones. Poverty is everywhere, and it contrasts with the material excess embodied by the Starbucks and Shell logos, which stand for US Empire, global capitalism, and the rift between Global North and Global South. The painting allegorizes the waste-ification of Puerto Rico at the hands of US Empire and global forces (i.e., neoliberalism), which, among other things, have accelerated climate change, disproportionally affecting archipelagoes and the Global South. The Puerto Ricans of Diasporamus represent Bauman’s wasted lives, as the roll of paper towels—“a direct reference to the controversial incident involving US president Donald Trump when he visited the island”—at the hands of a

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Christ-like figure suggests (Rivera Santana 181). The message on the side of the boat, “Trans Aquas Turbulentas Diasporamus,” satirically imitates the Latin language by adding “diasp” (from diaspora) to the verb “oramus” (“to pray” in first-person plural), to produce “diasporamus,” which signals forced mass displacement. While recognizing that Puerto Ricans enjoy the privilege of US citizenship that allows for unrestricted movement to the continental United States, this painting lays bare the colonial “slow violence” that the hurricanes unveiled as Puerto Ricans became climate refugees. Just when Puerto Rico started to rebuild after the hurricanes, in January 2020 the archipelago faced more destruction as a result of a swarm of earthquakes—the first of its kind—that hit the southwest part of the main island. Thousands of families lost their homes, municipal infrastructure was severely damaged, and schools collapsed, leaving hundreds of thousands of people traumatized by recurrent tremors that are still happening to this day. Puerto Rico was facing another test in the midst of its ongoing recovery from Hurricane María. Soon after, by mid-March, Puerto Rico, like the rest of the world, was facing a new, unknown, and deadly threat: COVID-19. In the context of these numerous crises, these two works by ADÁL and McGrath Muñíz remain as relevant as ever. In the case of Muerto Rico, the red bandana now also evokes the ubiquitous mask that protects us from the virus, reflecting “the current conditions of the global pandemic” (Catlin). Death, literal and symbolic, has been a constant through the debt crisis, the hurricanes, the earthquakes, and the pandemic. The impact of these events has compounded, weakening Puerto Rico’s already vulnerable economy and producing a mass exodus that has fluctuated over the last several years. At times, it appears that the various crises have upended perceptions of Puerto Rico as a promised land. The privilege that for decades has been associated with Puerto Rico has been called into question, leading to some shifts in patterns of intra-Caribbean migration. While it is too early to know the long-term effects that these changes will have in the region, the one thing we know for certain is that we need more data and academic studies. Among the topics that should be examined are the impact of these disasters on Dominican and Haitian undocumented migration to Puerto Rico and on their living conditions in the archipelago; the changes in Cuban migration patterns under the Trump and Biden administrations, as well as after the July 11, 2021, street protests in Cuba; the effect of Puerto Rican migration to the Dominican Republic; the consequences of the pandemic in the entire region; the effects of the assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse (July 7, 2021) and the August 14, 2021, earthquake on Haitian migration;3 and the most glaring omission of all, the condition of

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the Haitian population in Puerto Rico, a topic that deserves urgent attention from various disciplinary perspectives, given the racialization, exploitation, and extreme poverty that this community faces in Puerto Rican society. As I was writing this, a video of a yola landing on a crowded beach in Rincón, on the western coast of Puerto Rico, quickly went viral on May 16, 2021. The footage, captured by a beachgoer on a sunny Sunday afternoon, showed the desperate migrants jumping out of the yola while running and dispersing through the beach. In the background you can hear people, presumably Puerto Ricans, yelling “¡Corran, corran!” (Run, run!), and some encouraging the migrants to sit with them so they would blend in. For someone like me, having spent over a decade working on the topic of the representation of undocumented migration in Caribbean cultural production—and keenly aware of the racism and xenophobia that migrants face in my homeland—seeing these displays of solidarity from Puerto Ricans toward the migrants was deeply moving. Like most people commenting on this event on social media, I had also assumed that the migrants were Dominican. But a tweet from US Customs and Border Protection (@CBPCaribbean) on July 17 confirmed that seventeen passengers were Haitian and one was Dominican.4 This stopped me in my tracks, forcing me to reflect on my own assumptions. Three things became clear. First, despite the dire conditions that Puerto Rico continues to face, our Caribbean brothers and sisters continue to risk their lives at sea to reach Puerto Rico for survival. Second, the erasure of Haitians in Puerto Rico (mostly a result of their conflation with Dominicans) is far-reaching and dangerous and keeps that population in a position of extreme vulnerability. And third, not all Puerto Ricans reject undocumented migrants. By encouraging them to run, to sit down with them, and wishing them luck (all of which you can hear in the video), their solidarity shows how Puerto Rico can be a disruptor of US Empire, forever blurring and destabilizing the fluid borders of the Caribbean.

notes

introduction 1. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2019, Puerto Ricans represented 9.7 percent of the total US Latina/o population (estimated at 62.1 million according to the 2020 US Census); Cubans, 3.9 percent; and Dominicans, 3.4 percent (Krogstad and Noe-Bustamante)

chaPter 1: rethinking the Borders oF the cariBBean archiPeLago 1. See Dara Sharif’s “Haitians and Africans Are Increasingly Among Those Stranded,” https://www.theroot.com/haitians-and-africans-are-increasingly-among-those -stra-1836201429. 2. I first made this argument in my article “Bordes líquidos, fronteras y espejismos: El dominicano y la migración intra-caribeña en Boat People de Mayra Santos Febres” (2007). 3. Throughout the book, I borrow the phrase “between and among” from Stratford et al. and their cited work in archipelago studies, “Envisioning the Archipelago.” 4. See Silvio Torres-Saillant’s Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature (1997); Jossianna Arroyo’s Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry (2013); Alaí Reyes-Santos’s Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles (2015); and Kalhila Chaar-Pérez’s “Revolutionary Visions? Ramón Emeterio Betances, Les deux Indiens, and Haiti” (2020). 5. The failure to even mention the island of Puerto Rico in an article titled “The US-Caribbean Border: An Important Security Border in the 21st Century” by Suzette Haughton illustrates that even the islands of the Greater Antilles are at risk of being excluded from the “Caribbean.” Moreover, the omission is telling about the pattern of exclusion that haunts the “nonincorporated territory” of Puerto Rico—marginal to the United States, Latin America, and sometimes even the Caribbean. 6. Other scholars who have written about the Haiti-DR border include Frank Moya Pons and Lauren Derby. 7. According to Stephanie Smallwood, “Slaves became, for the purpose of transatlantic shipment, mere physical units that could be arranged and molded at will—whether folded together spoonlike in rows or flattened side by side in a plane. Because human beings were treated as inanimate objects, the number of bodies stowed aboard a ship was limited only by the physical dimensions and configuration of those bodies” (68). 8. Elizabeth Acevedo (1988–) is an award–winning Afro-Dominican American performance poet and author born in New York City. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Maryland. She is the best-selling author of Beastgirl and Other Origin Myths (2016), The Poet X (2018), With the Fire on High (2019), and Clap When You Land (2020). Her first novel, The Poet X, won the 2018 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, and a Carnegie Medal. Currently, she is a National Slam

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Champion, Beltway Grand Slam Champion, and the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam representative for Washington, DC, where she now resides. 9. Adrián Castro is a Cuban Dominican American poet, writer, and artist born in Miami, Florida. His work speaks to transnational migration experiences, exploring AfroCaribbean identity through myths and rhythms. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Cantos to Blood and Honey (1997), Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time (2005), and Handling Destiny (2009). 10. In her book Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries, Guidotti-Hernández uses “unspeakable” to refer to instances when “people allude to the event but rarely, if ever, flesh out the details” (2). 11. According to Carnegie, “Marronage was greatest where islands belonging to rival colonial powers lay within easy reach by boat” (118). 12. Sharpe argues that the works she analyzes “metaphorically extend the middle passage to contemporary conditions of black migration” (98). 13. I disagree with Jiménez Román and Flores about limiting this observation to prerevolutionary Cuba. Afro-Cubans were disproportionately represented in the 1980 Mariel exodus and were the majority during the balsero (rafter) crisis of 1994. 14. Graziano states: “The 9/11 hijackers are often used to justify the link between terrorism and undocumented migration, but in fact all of those terrorists entered the United States with valid passports and visas (although some were fraudulently acquired), and none crossed or tried to cross a border between ports of entry. No terrorists have ever been detained on migrant vessels (or otherwise) in the Mona Passage” (174). 15. Graziano explains that “the dual strategy of interdiction and deterrence has been used in border enforcement at least since the Mariel boatlift, and ‘prevention through deterrence’ has been policy since the early 1990s” (204). 16. Paradoxically, despite the security concerns that undocumented migration poses according to some, the “attitude of governments, both in sending and receiving countries, is often ambiguous in regard to undocumented migration,” usually because of the “constant demand for cheap, and by implication undocumented, labour” (Ferguson 8). 17. In his analysis of “El día de los hechos” by Ana Lydia Vega, Danny Méndez states: “The Dominican is at the bottom of the social hierarchy, and if he makes his way up, that is a story in itself, an aberration” (106). 18. “The Latin vastus signifies the ocean as well as waste” (DeLoughrey, “Heavy” 707). 19. Tony Capellán (1955–2017) was a Dominican artist born in Tamboril. His work explores immigration, diaspora, and the environment. After completing his studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo and at the Art Student League of New York, he became known for collecting trash along the shores of the Dominican Republic and using it in his artwork. Capellán is the 1995 recipient of the UNESCO Promoción de las Artes Prize, and his work has been exhibited in Curaçao, Dominican Republic, Martinique, Peru, and the United States. Capellan died in 2017 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. 20. Duany affirms that “Large-scale migration from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico took off after 1965” (Blurred 189). 21. Balaguer was in power during three nonconsecutive terms: 1960–1962, 1966– 1978 (also known as los doce años, the Twelve Years), and 1986–1996. According to the historian Frank Moya Pons, “The Dominican Republic suffered for several years under the terror imposed by Balaguer’s military and paramilitary forces. These groups systematically

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and randomly repressed the opposition parties at random [sic] without regard to whether they were leftists or not” (391). 22. Graziano estimates the journey to Puerto Rico in a yola to be between sixty to ninety miles (1). 23. Graziano clarifies that “yola captains are generally fishermen who are hired by trip organizers to transport passengers. . . . One must distinguish, therefore, between the organizers of migrant smuggling operations (organizadores) and the captains (capitanes) who pilot the boats. . . . In all cases, the word ‘captain’ is misleading because it implies a significant vessel and a sophisticated operation. Yolas, quite the contrary, are rustic, unseaworthy boats powered by outboard motors, and the captains have no qualifications other than widely varying maritime knowledge and experience” (ix–x). 24. Graziano observes that “the Dominican navy has been deeply corrupt and for decades complicit in migrant smuggling. The most significant effect is facilitation: the authorities responsible for impeding undocumented migration are profiting from it through collusion and payoffs” (104). 25. According to Duany, “The yolas usually depart from the eastern ports of Higüey, Samaná, Boca de Yuma, and La Romana in the Dominican Republic and arrive on the western coast of Puerto Rico, especially Rincón, Añasco, Aguadilla, Aguada, Mayagüez, and Cabo Rojo” (Blurred 194). 26. This information was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): 2020-CGFO-02657 (see table 1). A previous report from 2017 (2018-CGFO-00237) shows considerable disparities, putting the total at 33,664. 27. I follow García-Peña’s use of Dominicanidad, with a capital D, to refer to “hegemonic and official institutions of state control” (The Borders, “Note on Terminology”). 28. According to García-Peña, in 1917, “the US military government created the first Hispaniola border patrol, a branch of the Guardia Nacional Dominicana (GND), which was charged with checking documentation and stopping illegal border crossing” (78). 29. “Evoking la zafra (also known as el corte), the period in early fall when sugarcane is harvested, El Corte is reminiscent of the European sugar plantation economy that resulted in the largest slave population of the Americas” (García-Peña 95). 30. García-Peña defines a rayano as “a person from the geographical area of the Haitian-Dominican borderland also known as the Línea Fronteriza” (“Note on Terminology”). 31. Martínez explains: “As early as 1884, workers from the Lesser Antilles had begun to find their way to the Dominican sugarcane harvests. In 1893, leading sugar producers formed an association for the recruitment of foreign braceros, the Immigration Society of Macorís. . . . In the earliest years of recruitment, hundreds of Puerto Ricans also went to the Dominican Republic as contract workers, but soon migrants from the Lesser Antilles came to predominate” (Peripheral 38). The name “cocolos” refers to West Indian immigrants, “whether they came from British, Danish, Dutch, or French possessions” (Martínez 39). 32. Duany states that according to Ackerman and Clark (1995), “At least 63,175 Cuban rafters arrived in the United States between 1959 and 1994” (Blurred 47). 33. The “Special Period in Peacetime,” as Elizabeth Campisi explains, was “a set of severe economic austerity measures which were accompanied by increased government repression” (378). 34. According to Bye, the Maleconazo is the only “massive street confrontation [that]

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has taken place in Havana since the Revolution” (225). Reacting to the burning and sinking of a hijacked ferryboat by the Cuban Coast Guard, “hundreds of young people gathered on the Malecón beach avenue in Havana, starting a spontaneous protest, attacking police and destroying shop windows with stones and sticks, and crying anti-Fidel slogans” (225). After several hours, the police controlled the situation, and Fidel himself addressed the crowd, later hinting that the government would not stop anyone from leaving Cuba (225). The Maleconazo is no longer the only mass demonstration in Cuba since the revolution. In July 2021, the record was shattered by mass street protests throughout the island, with the slogan “Patria y vida” transforming into a rallying cry for political freedom and a demand for better living conditions. 35. According to Duany, “The balsero crisis led to a major change in U.S. policy toward Cuban migrants. On May 2, 1995, the Clinton administration announced that the United States would not give automatic asylum to Cubans interdicted at sea. Since then, the U.S. government has treated those leaving Cuba without visas as undocumented immigrants subject to deportation” (Blurred 47). 36. These statistics vary greatly from the previous statistics I received through an FOIA request to the US Coast Guard in 2017. According to the 2017 report, between 1993 and 2017, a total of 33,664 Dominicans, 57,044 Haitians, and 78,037 Cubans had been interdicted at sea. The discrepancies between the reports are staggering and underscore the challenges of obtaining reliable statistics in relation to undocumented migration.

chaPter 2: Puerto rico 1. Aware that modernization was perceived as “Americanization,” and that national customs and values were being eroded by rapid change, Muñoz Marín launched Operación Serenidad (Operation Serenity) to counteract these changes. Under Operación Serenidad, the government created the División de Educación de la Comunidad (Division of Community Education)—better known as DIVEDCO—which produced scores of books, films, and posters by some of Puerto Rico’s most renowned graphic artists. For more information on DIVEDCO, please consult Moreno (2012) and Anderson and Moreno (2018). 2. Some of these areas include La Perla in Old San Juan (immortalized in René Marqués’s 1953 play La carreta), El Fanguito, and Caño Martín Peña. 3. Another measure of overpopulation control targeted women’s reproductive capabilities. See Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire. 4. According to Graziano, Dominican migrants interdicted in the Mona Passage “may be repatriated without legal formalities” (169). 5. See a description of the film in the Repeating Island website: https://repeatingislands .com/2017/01/07/new-film-mona-treasure-of-the-caribbean/. 6. Migrant smugglers “are distributed on a continuum between local fishermen and organized crime” (Graziano 38). 7. http://undocumented-dominican-migration.com/text/cuban-migration-to-mona -and-monito-islands/; accessed July 27, 2018; website no longer active. 8. As Duany observes, like other people of color “from the Caribbean and Latin America, Dominicans have been criminalized in the United States, Puerto Rico, and other countries” (Blurred 77). 9. Reyes-Santos makes a similar observation when stating: “This ambivalence is

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grounded in narratives of Puerto Rican national kinship that exclude Dominicans by imagining them as poor, criminalized, racialized migrants” (23). 10. See Natasha S. Alford’s “Police Violence against Dominicans in Puerto Rico Suggests Systemic Problem.” 11. Ana Lydia Vega (1946–) is a renowned Puerto Rican author who was a key figure in the Puerto Rican women’s literary boom that took place in the 1980s as part of what is known as the nueva narrativa (new narrative). The nueva narrativa “constituted a new direction in Puerto Rican letters that challenged the paternalistic canon” (Moreno, Family 21). After earning her PhD in French literature from the University of Provence in France in 1978, she taught French literature and Caribbean studies at the University of Puerto Rico. Vega is perhaps best known for her books: Vírgenes y mártires (1981, written in collaboration with Carmen Lugo Filippi), Encancaranublado y otros cuentos de naufragio (1982)—which won the Premio Casa de las Américas in 1982—and Pasión de historias y otras historias de pasión (1987). Her work explores the ambiguous state of Puerto Rico, migration, and the role of Puerto Rican women. She won the Premio Internacional Juan Rulfo in 1984. 12. Macoutes is a shortened version of Tonton Macoutes, a brutal paramilitary force created by Haiti’s dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier in 1959, which remained in effect until 1986, when the regime of his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, ended. According to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), “The Haitians nicknamed this warlord-led goon squad the ‘Tonton Macoutes,’ after the Creole translation of a common myth, about an ‘uncle’ (Tonton) who kidnaps and punishes obstreperous kids by snaring them in a gunnysack (Macoute) and carrying them off to be consumed at breakfast” (“The Tonton Macoutes”). 13. Jean-Claude Duvalier was named president after the death of his father, the dictator François Duvalier, in 1971. He remained in power until 1986, when he was overthrown by a popular uprising that put an end to his violent dictatorship. 14. In describing this moment of solidarity between the characters, the narrator’s use of the racial marker “negro” to define what supposedly unites them in fact erases the complex history of this term in the Dominican context (therefore saying more about how these two groups are racialized in Puerto Rican society). 15. “Encancaranublado” translates as “cloud covered,” indicating inclement weather. 16. Mayra Santos Febres (1966–) is a renowned and influential contemporary Afro– Puerto Rican author, intellectual, and cultural figure. She has written over twenty-five books of poetry, essay collections, and novels, including Anamú y manigua (1991), Pez de vidrio (1995), Sirena Selena vestida de pena (2000)—a finalist for the prestigious Premio Rómulo Gallegos in 2001—Nuestra señora de la noche (2006), and Antes que llegue la luz (2021). She is a graduate of the University of Puerto Rico and Cornell University, where she earned her PhD. Central themes in her work include sexuality, gender fluidity, Blackness, afropuertorriqueñidad, and power. She is the recipient of several honors, including a 2010 UNESCO award for founding the internationally known Festival de la Palabra in Puerto Rico, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Juan Rulfo Prize for short story, and Puerto Rico’s National Literature Prize. Santos Febres is currently a professor at the University of Puerto Rico, where she teaches creative writing and recently established a new AfroDiasporic and Racial Studies Program, the first program of its kind in Puerto Rico and all of Latin America. An earlier version of my analysis of Boat People was published in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (University of Puerto Rico) in 2007.

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17. An orisha is a “divine being of santería,” a saint (Murphy 181). 18. According to Brown, “In the minds of Regla’s santeros, these insignia ‘colors’ (blue and white with silver) and attributes of the black Virgin have always been shared with Yemayá: the key, the ship’s wheel, the anchor, the boat, and the crescent moon” (218). 19. All translations of the poems in Boat People are mine. Timing constraints prevented the use of Vanessa Pérez-Rosario’s recently published English translation of Boat People (Cardboard Press, 2021). 20. Lauren Derby defines tíguere (tiger, also spelled tigre) as “the quintessential Dominican underdog who gains power, prestige and social ascendance through a combination of extra-institutional wits, force of will, sartorial style, and cojones (balls). The tigre seduces through impeccable attire, implacable charm, irresistible sexuality and a touch of violence. His defining feature is his daring, audacious willingness to go after whatever he wants— money, commodities, or women, particularly beyond his social reach” (1116). 21. Giorgio Agamben coined the term “bare life” in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) to refer to “life that is exposed to violence by the state’s refusal to extend legal protection” (Whitley 3). Recently, scholars in border and migration studies have critiqued his theories for failing to address intersectionality and the way that race, ethnicity, and gender inform the construction of bare life. 22. According to De León, the “Soviet paleontologist Ivan Efremov coined the phrase taphonomy in the 1940s to refer to the analysis of the combination of human and nonhuman elements that impact biological remains. In its modern usage, taphonomy is typically considered ‘the science of postmortem processes,’ or the ‘study of the phenomena that affect the remains of biological organisms at the time of and after death.’ It is also a crucial element of many forms of necroviolence” (72). 23. The word “congo” is a reference to a variety of Niger-Congo languages. As such, it points to the region from which many enslaved Africans came. In his Glosario de afronegrismos, first published in 1923, Fernando Ortiz provides five definitions for the term. 24. One of the Indigenous groups that inhabited the Caribbean archipelago when the Spanish arrived. According to Jan Rogoziński, the “Carib were found on the Virgin Islands, many of the Lesser Antilles, and the northwestern tip of Trinidad” (14). The author adds that their “reputation for violence and cruelty almost certainly is exaggerated. When the French and British settled the Lesser Antilles in the 1630s, the Carib initially were friendly and provided food to the starving adventurers. They turned hostile only after they were attacked by the Europeans” (17). In his book Los caribes, realidad o fábula (1978), Jalil Sued Badillo offers a revision of the history of the Caribs that seeks to set the record straight. 25. The onomatopoeic “ñam” in this poem is reminiscent of that in the Puerto Rican poet Luis Palés Matos’s poem “Ñam ñam,” from his collection Tuntún de pasa y grifería, which offers a problematic representation of Africans as cannibals. 26. Mayra Montero (1952–) was born in Havana, Cuba, but moved to Puerto Rico in the mid-1960s. She currently works as a journalist, maintaining a weekly column in the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día. She has written a number of novels, novellas, and short story collections, including Tú, la oscuridad (1995) and La trenza de la hermosa Luna (1987), the latter of which was a finalist for the Herralde Prize. The themes of her work often center on Puerto Rican politics, colonialism, gender, and sexuality.

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chaPter 3: doMinican crossings 1. Miriam Mejía is a Dominican writer from the town of Mao who now resides in New York City. Her writing and organizing throughout her career have been focused on the empowerment of female Dominican writers, as well as the issues faced by women immigrants. These focal points have led to a number of literary works, including La mujer dominicana en Washington Heights: Visión, papel y desafíos (1996), De fantasmas interiores y otras complejidades (2004), Garabatos en púrpura (2007), La palabra rebelada/ revelada: El poder de contarnos in 2011, and . . . y la imagen se hizo verso (2012). 2. Scherezade García (1966–) is a celebrated interdisciplinary visual artist who utilizes drawing, painting, installations, artists’ books, and video animation to explore the history of colonization and migration. Born in the Dominican Republic, she moved to New York City at the age of twenty to pursue her studies in art. She holds an AAS from Altos de Chavón School of Design, a BFA from Parsons–The New School, and an MFA from the City College of New York. Her work is exhibited in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, the Housatonic Museum, and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Santo Domingo. García has taught at Parsons School of Design in New York and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Austin. 3. “Interview with Scherezade” (http://www.scherezade.net/about/). 4. For more information on “craftivism,” see Maria Elena Buszek’s Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art. 5. “Theories of Freedom,” https://www.scherezade.net/#/theories-of-freedom/. 6. According to Dardashti, “The implicit erasure of gender, common in García’s representations of angels, undermines historical gender inequalities in the Caribbean such as the sexualization of black bodies throughout the history of the Americas” (“Embodying” 260). 7. This subtitle references Julia Alvarez’s poem “Two Countries: One Island,” written for the first Border of Lights commemoration on October 4, 2012, at the Dajabón/ Ouanaminthe border. 8. According to Fumagalli, “As it is often the case for international borders, there is no consensus on its length and estimates vary from 275 to 391 kilometres” (2). 9. In a personal conversation with Acevedo during her visit to the University of Notre Dame in October 2017, she confirmed that the date on the title of the poem is a typo. It should have read “Regularization Plan for Foreigners, 1937.” 10. CEA is the acronym for the Dominican Republic’s Consejo Estatal del Azúcar. 11. Ana-Maurine Lara (1975–) is a Dominican American poet, fiction writer, and performance artist born in the Dominican Republic and raised in East Africa and New York City. Her work explores Afro Latinx identities, Black queer aesthetics, Vudú in the Dominican Republic, and Afro-Dominicanidad. She is the author of Erzulie’s Skirt (2006), When the Sun Once Again Sang to the People (2011), Watermarks and Tree Rings (2013), Kohnjehr Woman (2017), Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty (2020), and Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic (2021). Kohnjehr Woman was nominated as a finalist for the Thirtieth Annual Lambda Literary Awards in 2018. She is an LGBTQ human rights activist and is currently an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon.

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12. Mw stands for moment magnitude scale, a metric of an earthquake’s magnitude based on its seismic moment. 13. According to Kushner, the Dominican government “responded immediately by sending doctors, rescue teams, and over $34 million worth of emergency aid” (50). 14. See the short documentary Birthright Crisis 2013. 15. Kushner observes that a Haitian rights group “working in border regions claims the Dominican government deported 15,647 Haitians in 2011” (52). 16. Pedro Cabiya (1971–) is a Puerto Rican writer, poet, and filmmaker based in the Dominican Republic. He is the author of the novels La cabeza (2005), Trance (2007), Saga de Sandulce (2009), Malas hierbas (2011), and María V. (2013), in addition to the short story collections Historias tremendas (1999) and Historias atroces (2003). He has also published a number of books of poetry: Crazy X-Ray Boomerang Girl (2013), Phantograms (2013), and Rayos XXX (2013), as well as several graphic novels. His innovative work explores the space where science fiction and hyperrealism meet. His novel Reinbou (2018) was made into a film. 17. Jacques-Stephan Alexis (1922–1961) was a Haitian communist poet, novelist, physician, and activist who was tortured by Tonton Macoutes and was disappeared. 18. Junot Díaz (1968–) is a Dominican American writer born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He has published two short story collections, Drown (1996) and This Is How You Lose Her (2012), the latter a New York Times best-seller and finalist for the National Book Award. His novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In addition to authoring numerous contributions to magazines and a children’s book titled Islandborn (2018), Díaz has received a number of prestigious awards and fellowships, including the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Currently, he is the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 19. The narrative alternates between the description of the events surrounding the outbreak—as the narrator learned about it while visiting family in the Dominican Republic—and his pursuit of Mysty, a Dominican girl with whom he falls in love. 20. Although both Cabiya and Díaz have denounced the treatment of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, their views have not always aligned. In fact, in 2015 a disagreement developed between them after Junot Díaz and the Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat spoke in Florida about statelessness, to which Cabiya replied with an open letter. 21. According to Valerio-Holguín, “All these images and ideas are the same as those employed by Europeans to refer not only to Africans and Asians but also to Latin Americans in general and Caribbeans in particular” (“Primitive” 76). 22. Speaking about the setting of the story, Díaz has said: “In my mind, ‘Monstro’ takes place in the twenty-thirties, in what I would describe as a not-too-estranged tomorrow” (“This Week”). Following this logic, the riot in “Monstro” takes place about a century after the Massacre of 1937. 23. Although a theological examination of this quote is beyond the scope of my analysis and my expertise, it is worth noting that Numbers 11 can be considered the “paradigmatic intercession story: the people complain, angering the Lord who punishes their ingratitude; Moses is beseeched, intercedes for the people, and the punishment abates” (Tamarkin Reis 208). The flesh that God gives in excess to the people could be seen as corresponding to the victims of the monstros.

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24. “According to the regulations of the Migration Law of 1939, transit was a temporary stay of ten days, after which this condition disappeared. This was the legal regime of transit until August 2004 when the new Immigration Law was enacted. Article 36.10 of this law attempted to redefine the concept of transit, incorporating the condition of nonresident foreigner” (We Are All Dominican, “Legal”). 25. Rita Indiana Hernández is a Puerto Rico–based Dominican performer, musician, and writer. Born in 1977 in Santo Domingo, Hernández attended school in Costa Rica at El Colegio Calasanz before returning to the Dominican Republic for higher education. Her works include La estrategia de Chochueca (2000), Papi (2005), Nombres y animales (2013), La mucama de Omicunlé (2015), and Hecho en Saturno (2018). She expanded her horizons into music, and her first single was released in 2008 to popular success. Along with her band, Rita Indiana y los Misterios, Hernández has released two albums, El juidero (2010) and Mandinga Times (2020). She is widely considered to be one of the most important Dominican authors of her generation. Key themes in her work include mass media, Dominican popular cultural production, and global youth cultures, as well as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, LGBTQ+ themes, class, and migratory status. 26. Robertson’s response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti drew widespread condemnation. According to NPR, Robertson “said Haitians made a pact with the devil to be freed from their French colonizers in the 18th Century” (James). 27. Sophie Maríñez is a poet and French Dominican professor of modern languages currently residing in New York. Maríñez specializes in early modern French literature and Caribbean literature with an emphasis on Haitian-Dominican relations. Her book Mademoiselle de Montpensier: Writings, Chateaux, and Female Self-Construction in Early Modern France was published in 2017. She has also published poetry in the Caribbean Quarterly, the Caribbean Writer, Small Axe Literary Salon, the Cincinnati Romance Review, and Mondes Francophones.

chaPter 4: cuBans at sea 1. Sandra Ramos is a contemporary Cuban painter, printmaker, collagist, and installation artist. Born and raised in Havana, she now resides and works in Miami, Florida. Ramos earned a degree in printmaking at the Higher Institute of Art in 1993. Her work was among the first to deal with the taboo issues of mass migration, racism, inequality, and balseros from her home country. She has earned many awards, including the National Print Award in 1993 and the Cuban National Cultural Award in 1997. Today she is featured in permanent collections in museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Fuchu Art Museum in Japan. 2. The pionerita is a leitmotif in many of Ramos’s works, and it is believed to function as an alter ego of the artist. It is the figure of a young girl wearing a traditional Cuban school uniform, with the head composed of a black-and-white photo of the artist as a child. As Hamlet Fernández explains, “When children enter school at the age of six, they choose to join the O.P.J.M. (Organization of Pioneers Jose Martí). They make a pledge: ‘Pioneros por el comunismo. Seremos como el Che (Pioneers for communism. We shall be like Che [Guevara]) (28). 3. According to Christine Armario, “Scholars estimate at least 1 in 4 Cuban rafters don’t survive, which could mean 18,000 have died.” 4. Richard Blanco (1968–) is a Cuban American poet laureate and civil engineer. Born

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in Madrid to Cuban exiles, he and his family moved to New York City, and later to Miami, when he was an infant. His books include City of a Hundred Fires (1998); Directions to the Beach of the Dead (2005); Looking for the Gulf Motel (2012); Matters of the Sea/ Cosas del mar (2015); How to Love a Country (2019); and his memoir, Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (2014). In 2012, President Barack Obama selected Blanco to serve as his presidential inaugural poet, making him the youngest and first Latina/o, immigrant, and LGBTQ+ person to serve in that capacity. 5. According to Thomas Tweed, the “‘official’ ecclesiastical narrative about Our Lady of Charity” can be summarized as follows: “At the start of the seventeenth century three laborers [an enslaved African and two Indian brothers] rowed a small boat in search of salt. As they paddled toward the salt mine in the Bay of Nipe, they found an image floating in the water. The image, which miraculously had remained dry, had an inscription that said, ‘I am the Virgin of Charity.’ That icon was enshrined in the easternmost province. As other miracles were attributed to her, devotion spread to other parts of the island over the centuries” (49). 6. Nilo Cruz is a prolific Cuban American playwright born in Matanzas, Cuba. His family immigrated to Miami, Florida, in 1970 on a Freedom Flight. In 2003, Cruz became the first Latina/o playwright to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Anna in the Tropics. Some of Cruz’s other notable works include A Bicycle Country and Two Sisters and a Piano. 7. Although the name Inés carries an accent, the author chose not to use it on his character’s name. 8. According to Chomsky, the collapse of the USSR had a severe impact on the Cuban economy, “which was utterly dependent on imports—especially fuel” (157). To address the situation, “Government strategists tried to make the best out of fuel scarcities, promoting green agriculture and bicycle use” (162). 9. The Monumento a la Bicicleta in Cárdenas, Cuba, built in metal and twelve times the size of a normal bicycle, celebrates its environmental value. The monument was unveiled on May 3, 1990. 10. Although a reading of this play through the lens of disability theory is beyond the scope of this study, I believe it merits critical attention. Similar to the texts that Julie Minich examines in Accessible Citizenships, Bicycle Country also “refuse[s] the ideal of the healthy, whole body as a paradigm for the nation or the citizen, [it] provide[s] material through which to explore the ways in which images of disability might open up the idea of national belonging to critical scrutiny” (3). 11. According to Dominguez Villegas, “As many as half a million Central American immigrants annually hop aboard freight trains colloquially known as ‘La Bestia,’ or the beast, on their journey to the United States. The cargo trains, which run along multiple lines, carry products north for export. As there are no passenger railcars, migrants must ride atop the moving trains, facing physical dangers that range from amputation to death if they fall or are pushed.” 12. René Magritte, The Lovers, https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/rene -magritte-the-lovers-le-perreux-sur-marne-1928. 13. Other accounts point out that there were other survivors. Grenier and Pérez, for instance, state: “The other survivors technically made it to land by being rescued after swimming to shore. In any case, they got lost in the shuffle and were allowed to stay” (102).

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14. Ana Menéndez is an author and journalist born in Los Angeles to Cuban exile parents. She has written four books of fiction: In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd (2001), Loving Che (2003), The Last War (2009), and Adios, Happy Homeland! (2011). Menéndez has also worked as a reporter since 1991, both domestically in the United States and abroad. 15. According to Johann Graaff, “Since its founding in 1981, it was dominated by Jorge Mas Canosa until his death in 1997. Briefly, he was wealthy, powerful, tyrannical, politically reactionary, grandiose, and corrupt” (47). He adds, “Mas Canosa died in 1997, so at the time of the Elián event in 1999, CANF had a new president, but considering that the new president was his son, Jorge Mas Santos, the momentum and tradition of Mas Canosa was still strong” (48). 16. The Columbia Encyclopedia defines “santería” as a “religion originating in W Africa, developed by Yoruba slaves in Cuba, and practiced by an estimated one million people in the United States. Blending African beliefs with those of Roman Catholicism, it fuses Christian saints with African deities (orishas)” (s.v. “santería”). 17. “Elian Gonzalez in the Spotlight,” CNN, October 14, 2015, http://www.cnn.com /2015/10/14/world/gallery/elian-gonzalez/index.html, accessed Oct. 17, 2017. 18. See the Grenier and Pérez chapter “The Trophy: Elián González and the Cuban American Community” in The Legacy of Exile. 19. “Gregorio Fuentes, 104, the captain of U.S. novelist Ernest Hemingway’s boat in Cuba and the inspiration for ‘The Old Man and the Sea,’ died Jan. 13 at his home in his fishing village [Cojímar]” (“Gregorio Fuentes”). 20. Elián and his mother, Elisabeth Brotons Rodríguez, left not from Cojímar but rather from Cárdenas. 21. About the police, the narrator states, “Later, it emerged that the police would not grant them a rescue boat—the illegal activities of Cojimar being well documented by the indifferent but cruel authority” (Menéndez 28). This calls attention to the illegality of such voyages, and sheds light on the abuses committed by the Cuban police and Coast Guard against balseros. According to Antonio Gordon, “Persons trying to leave Cuba and captured, were detained, at times beaten, and at times even gunned down at sea. . . . Cubans convicted of the crime of ‘illegal exit’ made up a good portion of the political prisoner population in 1994” (31). 22. “Sandra Ramos,” Mayer Fine Art, http://www.mayerfineartgallery.com/artists /sandra-ramos. 23. The Mariel Exodus took place in 1980 after six people stormed the Peruvian Embassy in Havana seeking asylum. “The Cuban government withdrew all guards from the Peruvian compound, an action that caused the embassy to flood with more than 10,000 people seeking to leave the country. The Cuban government responded to the crisis by opening a port for unrestricted emigration. The port was Mariel, giving name to a boatlift that brought, in a manner uncontrolled by the United States, more than 125,000 Cubans into the country” (Grenier and Pérez 24). 24. Abel Barroso (1971–) is a renowned Cuban artist who lives and works in Havana. He is known for creating modern technologies out of wood, using humor to offer commentary on the anxiety of migration and the disparities between the Global North and the Global South. Barroso’s work has been featured in a number of museums internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba; the University of Arizona

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Museum of Art, Phoenix, Arizona; and the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida. 25. Achy Obejas is a poet, novelist, journalist, translator, and teacher born in Havana, Cuba. She immigrated to the United States with her family at the age of six, and grew up in Michigan City, Indiana. Themes central to Obejas’s writings include identity, nationality, exile, sexuality, and LGBTQ+ issues. Some of her works include We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (1994), Memory Mambo (1996), Days of Awe (2001), The Tower of the Antilles (2017), and Boomerang/Bumerán: Poetry (2021). She has also translated the works of Junot Díaz, Wendy Guerra, and Rita Indiana Hernández. 26. “Construction on The Liberty Column, a 14-foot white marble pillar standing in a fountain of turbulent waters, may begin next month. Etched into its black marble base will be the names of the balseros known to have disappeared at sea. So far, Sanchez has documented and verified more than 1,000 names” (Bell). 27. In her research about Humberto Sánchez, Catasús concludes that “by the late 1990s, his collection had grown unsustainably large, and no one seemed to show interest in preserving or exhibiting the rafts in a long-term capacity. He could no longer afford the storage, and many of the vessels were deteriorating from dampness” (204). For this reason he had to dismantle the collection. 28. Kcho, born Alexis Leiva Machado, is an award-winning Cuban sculptor and multimedia artist whose works are part of the permanent collections at MoMA, Reina Sofía, the Walker Art Center, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, among others. He was born and raised in Isla de la Juventud, an island of the Cuban archipelago. His work focuses on a combination of inspirations, including boats, driftwood, recycled materials, and cultural iconography meant to honor the dead. Some of his most important works include Columna infinita, Las playas infinitas, and El camino de la nostalgia. 29. The Movimiento San Isidro, mainly composed of artists and activists, emerged in 2018 to protest Decree 349 (2018), which forced artists to obtain the government’s permission before exhibitions and performances, effectively working to censure them (Henken, “From the San Isidro Movement”). The hit song “Patria y Vida,” interpreted by the Cuba-based rappers Maykel Osorbo and Eliécer Márquez (aka “el Funky”), and the diaspora hip-hop/rap artists Descemer Bueno, Gente de Zona, and Yotuel, came out in February 2021 and quickly became a rallying cry among Cubans on and outside the island. Its lyrics subvert the Castrist slogan “patria o muerte” and offer an alternative way to imagine Cuba’s future, one in which freedom, a dignified life, and unity among islanders and exiles are central. The Cuban government’s reaction to the song’s success was to discredit and insult the six Black Cuban men behind it, accusing them of being “jineteros” (sex workers), “ratas” (rats), and “mercenarios” (mercenaries), displaying once more the deep-rooted racism, anti-Blackness, heteropatriarchal sexism, and classism of the Cuban authoritarian government (Jiménez Enoa, “La Cuba”).

ePiLogue 1. “Puertorriqueños se radican en República Dominicana huyendo de la crisis,” Diario Libre, January 25, 2016, https://www.diariolibre.com/actualidad/internacional /puertorriquenos-se-radican-en-republica-dominicana-huyendo-de-la-crisis-JA2534478. 2. See “The Deaths of Hurricane María,” Centro de Periodismo Investigativo. 3. As I write this in September 2021, the Biden administration is about to deport

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close to 12,000 Haitian migrants assembled under and around a bridge in the small border town of Del Rio, Texas. This group of migrants arrived at the border via South America: “Haitians have been migrating to the U.S. in large numbers from South America for several years, many of them having left the Caribbean nation after a devastating earthquake in 2010. After jobs dried up from the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, many made the dangerous trek by foot, bus and car to the U.S. border, including through the infamous Darien Gap, a Panamanian jungle” (Gay and Spagat). 4. I want to thank Carlos Aguilar González for bringing this fact to my attention.

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Socolovsky, Maya. Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature: Explorations of Place and Belonging. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013. Stratford, Elaine, Godfrey Baldacchino, Elizabeth McMahon, Carol Farbotko, and Andrew Harwood. “Envisioning the Archipelago.” Island Studies Journal 6.2 (2011): 113–130. Suárez, Lucía M. The Tears of Hispaniola: Haitian and Dominican Diaspora Memory. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. Sued Badillo, Jalil. “Christopher Columbus and the Enslavement of the Amerindians.” In Displacements and Transformations in Caribbean Cultures, edited by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo, 24–48. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. ———. Los caribes: Realidad o fábula. San Juan, PR: Editorial Cultural, 1978. Tamarkin Reis, Pamela. “Numbers XI: Seeing Moses Plain.” Vetus Testamentum 55.2 (2005): 207–231. Torres, Arlene. “La gran familia puertorriqueña ‘ej prieta de beldá’ (The Great Puerto Rican Family Is Really Really Black).” In Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean: Social Dynamics and Cultural Transformations, edited by Arlene Torres and Norman E. Whitten Jr., 2:285–306. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. El retorno de las yolas: Ensayos sobre diaspora, democracia y dominicanidad. Santo Domingo: Librería La Trinitaria/Editora Manatí, 1999. ———. “La condición rayana: La promesa ciudadana en el lugar del ‘Quicio.’” In La frontera: Prioridad en la agenda nacional del siglo XXI, 220–228. Santo Domingo: Secretaría de Estado de las Fuerzas Armadas, 2003. ———. “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity.” Callaloo 23.3 (2000): 1086–1111. Torres-Saillant, Silvio, and Ramona Hernández. The Dominican Americans. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Nation, State, and Society in Haiti, 1804–1984. Washington, DC: Latin America Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1985. Turits, Richard Lee. Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Turner, Phillip J., Sophie Cannon, Sarah DeLand, James P. Delgado, David Eltis, Patrick N. Halpin, Michael I. Kanu, Charlotte S. Sussman, Ole Varmer, and Cindy L. Van Dover. “Memorializing the Middle Passage on the Atlantic Seabed in Areas beyond National Jurisdiction.” Marine Policy 122 (article 104254) (December 2020): 1–5. Tweed, Thomas A. Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Valerio-Holguín, Fernando. “Postcolonial Encounters and Caribbean Diaspora: ‘Encancaranublado’ by Ana Lydia Vega.” “The Caribbean Redefined,” issue of Latin American Issues (online) 13.7 (1997): 127–136. Meadville, PA: Published by Allegheny College, Meadville, PA. ———. “Primitive Borders: Cultural Identity and Ethnic Cleansing in the Dominican Republic.” In Primitivism and Identity in Latin America: Essays on Art, Literature, and Culture, edited by Erik Camayd-Freixas and José Eduardo González, 75–88. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000.

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Vega, Ana Lydia. “Cloud Cover Caribbean.” Translated by Mark McCaffrey. In Short Stories by Latin American Women: The Magic and the Real, edited by Celia Correas de Zapata, 202–207. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990. ———. “Encancaranublado.” In Encancaranublado, 13–20. Río Piedras, PR: Editorial Antillana, 1982. Vélez, Diana. “We Are (Not) in This Together: The Caribbean Imaginary in ‘Encancaranublado’ by Ana Lydia Vega.” Callaloo 17.3 (1994): 826–833. We Are All Dominican. “Legal Analysis of the Sentencia.” Accessed May 1, 2016. https:// wearealldominicannyc.wordpress.com/resources/perdomo-analysis-of-the-sentencia/. ———. “Vision and Mission Statement.” February 1, 2016. Accessed May 1, 2016. https:// wearealldominicannyc.wordpress.com/. Whitefield, Mimi. “Elián Documentary Revisits Painful Chapter in Cuban-American History.” Miami Herald, April 27, 2017. Accessed October 17, 2017. https://www.miami herald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article146976189.html. Whitley, Leila. “The Disappearance of Race: A Critique of the Use of Agamben in Border and Migration Scholarship.” Borderlands 16.1 (2017): 1–23. Wright, Michelle M. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Ybarra, Patricia. “Havana Isn’t Waiting: Staging Travel During Cuba’s Special Period.” In Performance in the Borderlands, edited by Ramón H. Rivera-Servera and Harvey Young, 58–81. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Yeng, Sokthan. The Biopolitics of Race: State Racism and U.S. Immigration. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014. Zaki, Jamil. The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. New York: Broadway Books, 2019.

inDex

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Abadía-Rexach, Bárbara, 79 Acevedo, Elizabeth, 29, 33–35, 243– 244n8; “La Santa Maria,” 29–33, 35. See also “Regularization Plan for Foreigners” (Acevedo) ADÁL (Adál Maldonado), 237, 239, 241; Muerto Rico, 9, 237, 238; Puerto Ricans Underwater/Los Ahogados (The Drowned), 237 agency of movement, 36, 51, 72; decolonization and, 24, 69; definition of, 8, 19; erasure and invisibility of, 8, 19, 51; in fiction, 83, 110, 116–117; in poetry, 183–184 Allatson, Paul, 12 Álvarez, David, 39 Alvarez, Robert, 11 American Dream, 72, 78, 98, 144, 147, 212 Anderson, Thomas F., 34, 178 anthropology, 11 anti-Blackness: antihaitianismo and, 30, 56–58; balsero crisis and, 66; of Cuban government, 236, 254; displacements fueled by, 39; in Dominican Republic, 30, 56, 150; global neoliberal turn and, 43; in Haiti, 157, 167, 169, 170, 172–173; Martínez–San Miguel on, 24; myth of great Puerto Rican family and, 79; in Puerto Rico, 79–80; racial hierarchies built upon, 28, 45; La Sentencia and, 167, 169, 170, 172–173; trauma of slave trade and, 28 antihaitianismo (anti-Haitianism), 56–60, 145–146, 150–151, 154, 156, 169–172, 177; anti-Blackness and, 30, 56–58; coded in everyday language,

59; colonialism and, 59–60; definition of, 56–57, 136; imperialism and, 59; institutionalization of, 60, 145, 167, 169–170; origins and history of, 59 antillanité, 16 antiracism, 10 Anzaldúa, Gloria: on border as “herida abierta” (open wound), 131; Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 11, 24–25; on border versus borderland, 24; land-centered definition of border, 11, 12, 24–25; theory of la frontera, 3, 11–12, 14, 24 Aparicio, Frances, 44, 82 Araujo, Ana Lucia, 5, 28, 35 archipelagos: bateyes as, 139; border studies and, 3–4, 108; connected by unauthorized migration, 14; and erasure of movement and borders, 14, 17, 19, 96, 101, 119, 228; imperialism and, 13–14; invisibility of, 17, 19, 96; isolation and, 13; Martínez–San Miguel on, 13, 15–16, 22 archipelagraphy, 17, 21 Ashcroft, Bill, 20 asylum seekers, 40–41, 44, 246n35, 253n23 Bachelard, Gaston, 43–44, 46 Balaguer, Joaquín, 52, 60–61, 98, 165, 244–245n21 Bales, Kevin, 38 balkanization, 19, 83, 96. See also colonialism balsas (rafts), 38, 39, 50, 68, 85, 98, 185, 210, 210–212 balsero crisis of 1990s, 65–68, 181–182; anti-Blackness and, 66; in drama, 187–

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197; in fiction, 198–207, 228–232; Elián González case, 198–203, 207, 253n15; isolation and, 176–181, 182; Maleconazo and, 66–67; in poetry, 182–187; US Coast Guard interdictions during, 66; US governmental response to, 67–68, 181–182, 235; in visual art, 227–228, 232–235 balsero migration: erasure of balseros, 228, 235; memorialization of drowned balseros, 228, 229, 230, 231, 235; in poetry, 99–100; shift to boteros/ lancheros, 68, 205. See also balsero crisis of 1990s balseros, definition of, 66 barbed wire, 49–50 Barroso, Abel, 182, 208, 209, 219–228, 253–254n24; Adiós, The Good-Bye Machine, 225, 225–226; balsero migration in works of, 225–227; Border Patrol, 226, 226; Cuando caen las fronteras/When the Borders Fall, 220–221; El mundo es plano (The World Is Flat), 220, 221, 222; Pinball del emigrante: Salta el muro (Emigrant’s Pinball Machine: Climb the Wall), 222, 223, 224, 225; La ruta hacia El Dorado (The Way to El Dorado), 222, 223 bateyes (living quarters in or next to sugarcane fields): as archipelagos, 139; “desterrados” (newly enslaved) in, 172; erasure and invisibility of, 139, 145; escape from, 142; human rights abuses in, 64, 146–147, 154; living conditions of, 63–64, 139–142, 146–147; peripheral migration and, 138–139; power hierarchy in, 139, 146; as space of exception, 132, 139–140, 150, 154, 177; transatlantic slave trade and, 141, 147 Batista, Fulgencio, 94, 95 Bauman, Zygmunt, 8, 40–41, 43–44, 84, 90, 157, 228, 234, 240 Bell, Maya, 228, 229, 231 Benítez Rojo, Antonio, 16 Bestrou, Bold, 237

Bhabha, Homi, 26 Bicycle Country (Cruz), 187–197; duality of water in, 190; meaning of title, 188–189; metaphor of trains crossing the sea, 192–193; mobility in, 189–191, 197; ocean and desert crossings in, 193–195; premiere of, 187; surrealism and, 196; temporal setting, 187–188, 197 biopolitics, 44–45 Black Atlantic (Gilroy), 27, 140 Blackness: epiphenomenal time and, 37; erasure of, 3, 4; fear of, 155–158, 164–166; Middle Passage Blackness, 5, 37, 82, 94; Santería and, 199. See also anti-Blackness Blanco, Richard, 182–186, 251–252n4; balsero journey in works of, 182–186; “El Juan,” 184–186; “Last Night in Havana,” 182–184; religion in works of, 183, 185–186; threat of death in works of, 184, 185 blanqueamiento, 79, 175 Boat People (Santos Febres), 46, 87–100; “ah mi morenita cae,” 91; “ah si morenita, véndeme tu carne por un beso,” 89–90; “el aire falta,” 91; “aqui al fondo danzan concejales,” 88–89, 94–97, 100; “boat people,” 92; “flota mi morenito,” 91–92, 93; humanization of the sea in, 92–93, 95–96; Middle Passage in, 94–96; Puerto Rico as border and bridge in, 96–97; “queda el mar,” 97, 98; seafloor in, 93–94, 95–96; “sin documentos,” 92, 93–94; themes in, 87–88; “Tiburón de ónix,” 97–100, 227 border(land), Caribbean archipelago as, 21–26; ambiguity of, 24, 96; distinction between border and borderland, 24–25; double borders and borderlands, 25–26; fronteras intranacionales and, 23–24; Haiti-DR border and rayano, 26; liquid borders, 24–26; origins of borders, 22–23 borderland studies, 12–15, 22–25, 39 border studies: absence of Cuba’s double

index

border in, 218; absence of Puerto Rican archipelago in, 108; archipelago theories and, 3–4; Haiti-DR border and, 26; Mexican-US border privileged in, 11, 13, 14, 219; shift from border to bordering in, 4 Bosch, Juan, 22–23, 52 Bowman, Cara, 43 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 19–20, 21, 32, 46, 96, 183, 192, 207 Brown Threat, 41 Bruguera, Tania, 236 Brusi y Font, D. Juan, 73–74 Bush, George W., 41, 199 Bye, Vegard, 235–236, 245–246n34 Cabiya, Pedro, 132, 150, 151–154, 250n16; Junot Díaz and, 250n20; “Fruta de temporada,” 151–154 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 16–17 Candelario, Ginetta, 58 Capellán, Tony, 46–51, 244n19; Mar Caribe, 47, 47, 48, 48–51; Mar invadido, 50–51; waste-ification in works of, 46, 50–51 Caribbean Latinxs: Caribbean AfroLatinx populations, 37; folklore of, 158–159; island–island nexus of relations in undocumented migration and, 5–6; “Latina/o” and “Latinx” used as designations, 7; Latinidad and, 3; Latinx fluidities, 5, 6; primitivist tropes used against, 58; scholars of and scholarship on, 3, 5–6, 12–13; unbelonging and, 43; in US Latinx population statistics, 2 casta system, 34, 60 Castro, Adrián, 33–35, 186–187, 244n9; balsero crisis in works of, 186–187; “Cuchillo de doble filo (II),” 186–187; “In the Beginning (II),” 33–35; transatlantic slave trade in works of, 33–35 Castro, Fidel, 44, 67, 183, 188, 190, 197, 199–200, 202–203, 208–210, 234 Catholicism: Dominicanidad and, 52, 57–58, 128, 135, 140, 155, 174; po-

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etic reappropriation of, 185; Santería and, 253n16; symbolized in art, 125, 128, 129 Chetty, Raj, 58 Chomsky, Aviva, 65, 189, 197, 198, 252n8 Christopher, Emma, 18, 20, 32, 36, 37–38 Clealand, Danielle Pilar, 65 climate change, 5, 50, 81–82, 240 Clinton, Bill, 67, 77, 181, 187, 193, 197, 218–219, 246n35 coercion, 35–38, 62, 136, 138, 141, 144 Cold War, 71, 189 “Collector, The” (Obejas), 228–232, 235 colonialism: antihaitianismo and, 59–60; black magic as product of, 168, 169; borders as legacy of, 59; cartography and, 21, 69; decolonial resistance to, 19; and decolonization, 8, 21, 24, 69, 82–83, 96, 107; and desire for remoteness and isolation, 18; erasure of island histories by, 18; in fiction, 82–87, 140–144, 155–157, 162–164, 229–230; geography and, 21; and imperial gaze, 2, 86; in poetry, 32–34, 93–94, 96, 98, 136–137, 138, 172, 187; Puerto Rico and, 8, 70, 72–73, 75–76, 79, 81–82, 108; racism and, 60; in visual art, 46, 50–51, 118–119, 128–129, 131, 240–241; white supremacy as legacy of, 30; xenophobia and, 60. See also Columbus, Christopher; decolonization, symbolic; Middle Passage and transatlantic slave trade; neocolonialism colorism, 79, 127 Columbus, Christopher, 23, 29–31, 33, 191, 192, 229 Confederación Antillana, 16 Consejo Estatal del Azúcar (CEA), 63, 138 consumerism and materialism, 98, 125, 128–130, 212 Cooper, Jago, 73, 75–76 Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), 62, 149, 247n12 counter-mapping, 17, 83

274 index

COVID-19 pandemic, 81, 236, 241 criminalization: of Dominicans, 80; of migrants, 2, 40, 41; role of Brown Threat in, 41; of unauthorized migration and migrants, 2, 40–41, 51, 80, 102, 125 “criollos,” 34 Cruz, Angie, 110 Cruz, Nilo, 9, 187–197, 252n6. See also Bicycle Country (Cruz) Cuba: Castro (Fidel) government, 44, 67, 183, 188, 190, 197, 199–200, 202–203, 208–210, 234; fall of Soviet Union as influence on, 65, 181, 188, 208, 211, 236, 252n8; Guantánamo Bay US naval base, 49, 76, 188, 193, 197, 217–219; Maleconazo, 67, 245–246n34; Mariel exodus from, 44, 66, 218, 244n13, 244n15, 253n23; Movimiento San Isidro (MSI), 236, 254n29; N27 movement, 236; #SOSCuba Movement, 236; Special Period in the Time of Peace, 65–66, 178, 181, 183, 187–190, 197, 205, 208–214, 217, 219, 227, 232, 236, 245n33; US embargo of, 65, 181, 189, 190, 211; US “wet foot/dry foot policy” regarding, 64–65, 67–68, 77–78, 198, 203, 235. See also balsero crisis of 1990s Cuban Adjustment Act, 68, 77, 201, 203 Cuban Coast Guard, 245–246n34, 253n21 Cuban migration and migrants, 64–68; “dusty feet” migrants, 68, 222, 235; invisibility of, 197, 212–213; and shift from balseros to boteros/lancheros, 68, 205 Cuban Revolution, 64, 77, 178–179, 183, 190, 202–203, 207, 211 Danticat, Edwidge, 46, 250n20 Dardashti, Abigail, 30, 124, 127, 128, 129, 249n6 Decena, Carlos, 139 decolonization, symbolic: cultural production as, 19, 69, 192; environmental justice and, 82; remapping as, 19, 21,

83, 96, 107; undocumented migration as, 19, 24, 69. See also colonialism De Genova, Nicholas, 71 De León, Jason, 90–91, 92, 106–107, 113, 114, 132, 133, 135, 194, 248n22 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 164; on archipelagraphy, 17, 21; on Caribbean Sea as “militarized territory,” 49; on double reading of “waste,” 234; on humanizing effect of bodies in the ocean, 92, 95, 96, 214–215; on state violence, 49, 218; on wasted lives, 51, 89, 92, 95, 96, 214–215; on “waste imperialism,” 50 Desecheo Island, 55 Díaz, Junot, 9, 46, 50, 132, 154–166, 250n22; accused as “un-Dominican,” 170; “Apocalypse,” 154, 162; biographical details, 250n18; Pedro Cabiya and, 250n20. See also “Monstro” (Díaz) Dinzey-Flores, Zaire, 80 Dominican dream, 78, 111, 118, 125, 128, 130 Dominicanidad (Dominicanness), 127– 130, 155; antihaitianismo and, 58, 59; in fiction, 140, 145, 147; hispanismo and, 165, 173; ideological markers of, 58; negrophobia and, 58; in poetry, 135; use of the term, 245n27; US role in construction of, 59–60; in visual art, 127–128, 129–130; white supremacy and, 58 dominicanización de la frontera (Dominicanization of the border), 61, 131, 159 Dominican migration and migrants, 51–56; in fiction, 101–107, 110–118; in poetry, 87–100; as scapegoats of Puerto Rican society, 2, 107; US interdiction statistics on, 56; in visual art, 118–131. See also yola migration Dominican Republic: antihaitianismo (anti-Haitianism) in, 30, 56–60, 145–146, 150–151, 154, 156, 167, 169–172, 177; assassination of Trujillo, 51–52; cadenús (Dominican youth in the diaspora), 129–130;

index

export-processing zones (EPZs), 52, 120; first migrant exodus to United States, 51–52; folklore of, 158–160, 164; Haitian invasions, 154; Haiti-DR border as space of exception, 132, 133, 135–137; independence, 136; Medina government, 137; myth of Haitian “silent invasion,” 60–61, 135, 165; Naturalization Law, 137; Plan Nacional de Regularización de Extranjeros, 137; second migrant exodus to United States, 52–53; La Sentencia (TC/0168/13), 26, 44, 64, 137, 149, 166–173, 176–177; ultranationalists in, 153, 155, 157, 160, 164, 165–166, 176; US invasions of, 23, 52, 62, 138, 163. See also antihaitianismo (antiHaitianism); Trujillo, Rafael Leónidas “Dominicanyorks,” 129–130 double borders and borderlands, 24, 25–26, 218 duality: in poetry and plays, 187, 190; of water as border and bridge, 4, 20, 96, 119, 180–181, 187, 209 Duany, Jorge, 5, 41, 53–54, 66, 70–73, 79–81, 244n20, 245n25, 245n32, 246n8, 246n35 Duvalier, François “Papa Doc,” 84, 247n12 Duvalier, Jean-Claude, 94, 95, 247nn12–13 “Encancaranublado” (Vega), 82–87; imperialism in, 82–84, 86; narrative summary, 83–84; publishing significance of, 83; unauthorized maritime migration in, 82–87 epiphenomenal time, 8, 37, 76, 94, 129, 141, 229–230 erasure and invisibility: of agency of movement, 8, 19, 51; of archipelago movement and borders, 14, 17, 19, 96, 101, 119, 228; of balseros, 228, 235; of bateyes, 139, 145; of Blackness from Caribbean history, 3, 4, 30, 32– 33, 35, 79; in border and borderland studies, 12, 14; of drowned enslaved

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Africans, 32; of gender, 249n6; of Haiti, 147; of Haitian Dominicans, 51, 62, 145, 151, 153, 165, 173, 175, 176; of Haitians in Puerto Rico, 242; of human trafficking, 121–122; of Isla de Mona from Puerto Rican imaginary, 73; by Latinidad and mestizaje privilege, 3; of migratory histories, 18, 83, 86, 91, 101, 108, 151, 158–159, 197, 212–213; of Mona Passage, 76, 101, 107; of natural environment, 101; racialization and, 86, 247n14; of slave trade, 32–33, 34–35; of unauthorized migration, 2, 92, 107, 118, 139, 151, 197, 212; of violence and death, 86, 91, 108, 135. See also silence and silencing Erzulie’s Skirt (Lara): Africa and slave trade in, 140–144, 146–147; dehumanization in, 146–147; HaitianDominican identity in, 145–146; publishing significance of, 139, 146; queer Blackness in, 140, 144–145; racialization in, 146; remembrance as resistance in, 142; sex trafficking in, 143–144; sexual violence in, 143–144; sugar industry in, 137–142 “ethnic cleansing, legal,” 137, 169, 171, 173 export-processing zones (EPZs), 52, 120 femininity: domesticity and, 120; lifewriting and, 122; pink and, 121, 127; sea/water and, 88 feminism and feminist theory, 120–121, 130–131 Ferguson, James, 35, 45, 52–53, 56, 72, 99 Ferrer, Ada, 236 Figueroa-Vásquez, Yomaira, 36 flip-flop sandals, 47–49 Flores, Juan, 5, 36–37, 140, 244n13 Flores, Tatiana, 47 forced migration, 4, 35–40, 47–49, 65, 74, 76, 85, 95 Foucault, Michel, 26, 44–45 Fritz, Sonia, 101; Mona, tesoro del Caribe

276 index

(Mona, Treasure of the Caribbean), 74–75; Visa for a Dream, 53–54 frontera, la, 3, 23, 39; dominicanización de la frontera (Dominicanization of the border), 61, 131, 159; use of Spanish language for, 225; in visual art, 223, 225 fronteras intranacionales (intranational borders), 23–24, 45–46, 80, 99, 102, 107, 150, 151, 173 “Fruta de temporada” (Cabiya), 151–154 Fumagalli, Maria Cristina, 13, 58–59, 60, 61, 136, 148 García, Scherezade, 8–9, 106, 118–130, 176. See also Sabana de la Mar: Salvation Action (García); Super Tropics: The Liquid Highway I (García); Theories of Freedom (García) García-Peña, Lorgia, 13, 59–61, 129, 132–135, 140, 145, 147–148, 156, 159, 162, 170–171 gaze, imperial and colonial, 2, 86 genocide, 51, 60–62, 133, 135, 162. See also Massacre of 1937 Gilroy, Paul, 27, 140 Glissant, Édouard, 16, 95 globalization, 42–45, 81, 84, 120, 154, 220, 228. See also neoliberalism González, Elián, 198–203, 207, 253n15 Gordon, Sarah, 120 Graziano, Frank, 35, 41–42, 51, 52–56, 72–73, 76–79, 244nn14–15, 245nn22–24, 246n4 Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole, 34, 244n10 Guillén, Nicolás, 34 Gutiérrez, Ramón, 12, 13 Haiti: Champ de Mars, 160, 161; cholera outbreak, 148, 161, 163; Haiti-DR border as space of exception, 132, 133, 135–137; independence, 59, 162, 164, 168, 172; invisibility of, 147; US invasions of, 163 Haitian earthquake of 2010, 62, 147–151, 154, 156, 161–163, 166–169, 177; cholera outbreak following, 148,

161, 163; deaths resulting from, 149; deportation of Haitians following, 149–150, 154, 161, 166, 250n15; riots following, 161; Pat Robertson on, 168, 169, 251n26 Haitian earthquake of 2021, 62, 241 Haitian migration and migrants, 56–64; erasure and invisibility of, 51, 62, 145, 151, 153, 165, 173, 175, 176; in fiction, 137–147; invisibility of, 151, 158–159; in poetry, 132–137; primitivist tropes of, 57–58, 158, 164; as scapegoats of Dominican society, 154; as scapegoats of Puerto Rican society, 2. See also antihaitianismo (anti-Haitianism); bateyes (living quarters in or next to sugarcane fields); Massacre of 1937 Henken, Ted, 66–67, 68, 205 Hernández, Ángela, 90 Hernández, Ramona, 38, 42, 54, 111, 114–115, 116 Hernández, Rita Indiana, 251n25; “Black Magic,” 137, 168–169, 176, 177; on “legal ethnic cleansing” of Massacre of 1937, 137, 169, 171, 173 heterotopia, 26 Hey-Colón, Rebeca, 13, 26 hispanismo (whiteness ideology), 4, 57, 79, 145, 147, 156, 165, 171, 173 Hofman, Corinne, 27 Hohle, Randolph, 42–43 horizontal hierarchies, 44, 82, 85 Horsti, Karina, 39 human trafficking, 90, 113, 121–122, 143–144 Hurricane Irma, 81, 239–240 Hurricane María, 9, 71, 81–82, 239–241 hybridity, cultural, 12, 39, 60, 61, 93, 134, 135, 147 hybridization, 156 hypermasculinity, 89, 93. See also masculinity Ibrahim, Habiba, 28 “illegal alien,” 40 imperialism: antihaitianismo and, 59;

index

archipelagos and, 13–14; black magic as product of, 168, 169; in border and borderlands studies, 12–14; the Caribbean as imperial border, 22–23; in Caribbean history, 18–23; Cuba and, 209, 217, 219; in fiction, 82–86; genocide and, 61; Haiti and, 61, 159, 163, 168, 169; imperial gaze, 2; Mona Passage and, 76; in poetry, 90–91; Puerto Rico as disruptor of US Empire, 70–73, 76, 81, 240, 242; transatlantic slave trade and, 187; tropes of isolation and islandness and, 18, 24, 96, 119; unauthorized migration and, 17, 41; violence of, 76, 90; in visual art, 49–51, 240, 242; waste imperialism, 50–51. See also colonialism; Columbus, Christopher International Seabed Authority (ISA), 29 invisibility. See erasure and invisibility Isla de Mona. See Mona Island (Isla de Mona) isolation: in art, 176–181, 196; balsero crisis and, 176–181, 182; bateyes and, 139; challenges to trope of, 14, 15, 16, 17, 96, 119, 192, 232, 234; colonialism and, 18–19, 24, 83; definitions of archipelago and, 13; embargos as cause of, 190; islandness and, 17–18; Mona Island and, 75, 76, 104; unauthorized migration and, 14; water as symbol and source of, 15, 17, 19–20 Jiménez Enoa, Abraham, 235, 236 Jiménez García, Marilisa, 101 Jiménez Román, Miriam, 36–37, 244n13 Johnson, Jessica Marie, 28, 90 Johnson, Lyndon B., 52 Kcho (Alexis Leiva Machado), 182, 208, 209, 232, 233–235, 254n28; Archipiélago en mi pensamiento, 228, 232, 233, 234–235 Kendi, Ibram X., 10 Kibria, Nazli, 43 Kushner, Jacob, 63, 149–150, 161, 163, 250n13, 250n15

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Lara, Ana-Maurine, 9, 90, 110, 132, 137–147, 177, 249n11. See also Erzulie’s Skirt (Lara) Latinidad, 3, 4, 30 Latinx studies, 2–3, 6, 12 Latinx young adult literature, 101, 107. See also Viaje a Isla de Mona (Montero) Laureano, Javier, 101 Let It Rain Coffee (Cruz), 110 LGBTQ+ identities, 37, 140, 144–145, 147, 236 Liga Antillana, 16 liminality, 12, 192 liquid borders: duality of, 119; Mona Passage as liquid border, 104; theory of, 24–26 Lloréns, Hilda, 81–82 Lockward, Alanna, 119 López, Nancy, 42, 54, 111, 114–115, 116 Maillo-Pozo, Sharina, 30 Mañach, Jorge, 23 Mannik, Lynda, 7, 21, 40, 85, 192 Maríñez, Sophie, 9, 132, 158–159, 167, 170–176, 177, 251n27; “Sentencia del Infierno II: ¿De cuál patria me hablas?,” 173–176; “Sentencia del infierno I: Poema a los desterrados,” 170–173 marronage, 36, 96, 244n11 Martí, José, 64 Martínez, Samuel, 26; on anti-Haitianism in Dominican Republic, 167; on Haitian migration to Dominican sugar estates, 62–64, 138–142, 245n31; “Not a Cockfight: Rethinking HaitianDominican Relations,” 58, 60 Martínez–San Miguel, Yolanda: on archipelagos, 13, 15–16, 22; Caribe Two Ways, 4, 5, 22, 23–24; Coloniality of Diasporas, 5; on fronteras intranacionales (intranational borders), 23–24, 80, 102 masculinity: heroism and, 102; hypermasculinity, 89, 93; ideal citizenship

278

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and, 30; land and, 88; tigere archetype and, 89, 93 Massacre of 1937: antihaitianismo and, 138, 177; Border of Lights commemorations, 170; in fiction, 156, 162, 169–170; as “legal ethnic cleansing,” 137, 169, 171, 173; memorialization of, 170, 177; in poetry, 132–137, 170–171; La Sentencia and, 170–171 McGrath Muñíz, Patrick, 239–241; Diasporamus, 9, 239, 240, 240–241 Medina, Danilo, 137 Mejía, Miriam, 8–9, 90, 110–118, 176, 249n1; agency of movement in “El viaje,” 116–117; gendered violence in “El viaje,” 110–118; inspiration for “El viaje,” 117–118; publishing significance of “El viaje,” 117; Puerto Rico as springboard in “El viaje,” 116–117; “El viaje,” 110–118 memorialization: absence of, 133; of drowned balseros, 228, 230, 231, 235; of lives lost in Middle Passage, 29–31; of Massacre of 1937, 170, 177; shipwreck as memorial, 30–31; through art and literature, 50, 92, 95, 100, 108, 133, 177, 228, 230, 235; virtual, 29 memory: collective, 101; cultural, 5, 28–29; of drowned balseros, 229; erasure from, 101; of European power and violence, 32–33, 187; objects of, 187, 234; public, 5, 28 memory activism, 69 Menéndez, Ana, 9, 198–207, 253n14; Adios, Happy Homeland!, 198–207; “The Boy’s Triumphant Return,” 202–203; “The Boy Who Was Rescued by Fish,” 198–202; “Cojimar,” 203–207 Meniketti, Marco, 21–22 mestizaje, 3, 4, 79 Mexico-US border: in border and borderland theory, 11–14, 23–26; in drama, 192–195; iconization of, 11–12; Mona Passage compared to, 104, 106; operation Prevention Through Deterrence, 90–91; in visual art, 49, 222, 227–228

Middle Passage and transatlantic slave trade: Blackness and, 5, 37, 82, 94; in fiction, 140–141, 143; invisibility of, 32–33, 34–35; memorialization of lives lost, 29–31; in poetry, 94–96, 187; in visual art, 129 Migration by Boat (Mannik), 7, 40, 41 militarization: of borders, 125; of Caribbean Sea, 49, 68, 86; of Cuba and Cuban waters, 41, 181, 219; of Dominican border, 41, 59, 149; of Hispanophone Caribbean, 163; of Mexico-US border, 12; of Mona Passage, 77; of Puerto Rico, 73, 87, 131; of US southern boundaries, 41, 59 Mona Island (Isla de Mona): as border, 73, 77–78, 104–107; as bridge, 73, 77, 102–104, 107; in fiction, 101–107; in film, 73–75; history of, 74–76; limited knowledge of, 73–75; as uninhabited natural reserve, 75; US Operation Monkey Wrench, 78 Mona Passage, 53–55, 73–78, 108, 113, 118–119; Caribbean Border Interagency Group and, 77; erasure and invisibility of, 76, 101, 107; in fiction, 82–87; history of, 75–76; invisibility of, 76, 101, 107; militarization of, 77; in poetry, 87–100; in young adult literature, 101–102 Monito Island, 55, 73, 74, 76–78, 108 “Monstro” (Díaz), 154–166; disease in, 156–165; Dominican folklore in, 159–160, 164; fear of Blackness in, 155–158, 164–166; fear of Haiti in, 154–156, 158, 159, 162, 165, 166; fear of invasion in, 154–166; narrative summary, 155–158, 163–165; setting and genre of, 155 Montero, Mayra, 100–108, 248–249n25. See also Viaje a Isla de Mona (Montero) movement between and among islands, 15, 17, 21, 243n3; as counter-mapping and remapping, 17, 69, 83; Cuban migration and, 192; Dominican migration and, 101–107, 119; in fiction, 82–87, 101–107; history of,

index

27; in poetry, 96; submarine unity and, 96; in visual art, 234 “mulato/a” as terms, 89, 95, 127–128, 135–136, 174–175 Muñoz Marín, Luis, 70–71, 246n1 Museo del Hombre Dominicano, 30 Myers, Megan Jeanette, 13, 58, 133, 159–160 necropolitics, 90, 133, 135, 137 necroviolence, 90–92, 106–107, 114, 135, 137, 214, 227 Negrón-Muntaner, Frances, 24 neocolonialism: in art, 46, 50–51, 118, 131; black magic as product of, 168, 169; borderland trope and, 22; borders as legacy of, 59; in fiction, 156–157, 164; racism and, 60; xenophobia and, 60. See also colonialism neoliberalism, 41–51, 81–82; definition of, 42; disposability of individuals and, 45; globalization, 42–45, 81, 84, 120, 154, 220, 228; slow violence through, 81 Newman, David, 13, 14–15 Nguyen, Vinh, 20, 21, 31–32, 212 Niña, La (ship), 29, 229 9/11, 40–41, 244n14 Obama, Barack, 64–65, 68, 77, 179, 203, 235, 251–252n4 Obejas, Achy, 182, 254n25; “The Collector,” 228–232, 235; on inspiration for “The Tower of Antilles,” 232; “Island Dreams,” 234; on “myth of Triunfalismo,” 64; “The Tower of Antilles,” 232; Tower of the Antilles, 9, 228–232 O’Leary, Megan, 43 Other, the, and Othering, 109, 130, 134, 145–146, 154–155, 158 Paulino, Edward, 58, 59, 61, 131, 148, 155, 156, 170 Pedreira, Antonio S., 22, 83–84 Pérez-Rosario, Vanessa, 12 performance: narcoviolence as, 90–91, 135; of prosperity, 78–79; race as

279

bodily performance, 175; of recognition, 231; of whiteness, 86 peripheral migrations, 138 Pessar, Patricia, 129–130 Piñera, Virgilio, 178, 190 Pinta, La (ship), 29, 229 plantations and plantation economy, 51, 63–64, 136, 141–142, 245n29 Pratt, Mary Louise, 19 Puerto Rico: American Dream and, 72, 78, 98, 144, 147; anti-Blackness in, 79–80; Balaguer government, 52, 60–61, 98, 165, 244–245n21; as borderland, 70, 73; Caribbean perceptions of, 71–72; colonialism and, 108; as colonial “necropolis,” 70, 81–82; as disruptor of US Empire, 8, 72–73, 242; in Dominican imaginary, 78–79, 88, 98, 100, 144; duplicity of, 99–100; as exploitation colony, 71; as final destination for migrants, 53, 72, 73, 78, 81, 88, 96, 98, 108, 144; Great Migration period, 71, 81, 239; history of intra-Caribbean migration to, 70–71; Hurricane Irma, 81, 239–240; Hurricane María, 9, 71, 81–82, 239–241; as migration stepping-stone to United States, 72–73; militarization of, 73, 87, 131; Muñoz Marín government, 70–71, 246n1; Operación Manos a la Obra (Operation Bootstrap), 70–71; Operación Serenidad (Operation Serenity), 246n1; Roselló government, 237, 239; as stepping-stone for migrants, 22, 24, 25–26, 53, 72–73, 78, 81, 88, 96, 103, 108, 116–117, 144. See also yola migration Pybus, Cassandra, 18, 20, 32, 36, 37–38 Quesada, Sarah, 159 racialization: anti-Blackness and, 84; colonization and, 86; as defining characteristic of unauthorized migration, 36–37; disposability of individuals and, 45; of Dominicans in Puerto Rico, 99, 109; erasure and, 86,

280

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247n14; gendered, 130; language of, 89; of refugees, 43; of unauthorized migrants, 79, 146, 177; wasted lives and, 177, 234 racism, 171–176; of Cuban government, 236, 254n29; in Cuban society, 209; of Dominican elites, 175–176; images of in La isla en peso (Piñera), 178; institutionalized, 60–61, 150, 156, 169–172; in Puerto Rico toward migrants, 1, 242; La Sentencia and, 169, 170–173; of Spanish Baroque art, 128; in statement by Pat Robertson on Haiti, 168, 169; systemic, 150; in textbook portrayals of Haitians, 150. See also anti-Blackness; antihaitianismo (anti-Haitianism) Ramírez, Dixa, 30, 31, 89, 93, 130 Ramos, Sandra, 178–180, 208, 209–219, 227–228, 251n1; balsero crisis in works of, 227–228; Bridge/Puente, 179–180, 180; on compromise and responsibility, 209; Dead/Muerte, 212–213, 215, 216, 216–217; Fenced by the Waters/Cercados por las aguas, 217, 218, 218–219; Illusions/ Espejismos, 211, 211–212; La maldita circunstancia del agua por todas partes, 178–179, 210; Me at the Bottom of the Sea/Yo en el fondo del mar, 212, 214–215, 215, 217; Pecera naufragio, 178–179, 179; The Raft/La balsa, 210, 210–211; on role of sea in her work, 210; Series Migraciones II, 179, 212–214, 215–217; Series Naufragio I/I, 178; To Drown in Tears/Ahogarse en lágrimas, 212, 213, 213–214 Ramos-Zayas, Ana, 71 rayanos (borderers), 26, 61, 133–136, 145, 245n30 Rediker, Marcus, 18, 20, 32, 36, 37–38 refugees: climate refugees, 81–82, 239, 241; crises, 20, 39, 167; dehumanization of, 161; Haitian earthquake of 2010 and, 148–149, 167; modernity and, 44, 45, 46; racialization of, 43; reclassification of Cuban refugees, 67,

181–182, 193; “wasted lives” of, 44, 46, 51, 163 “Regularization Plan for Foreigners” (Acevedo), 132–138; artificiality of borders in, 134–135, 137; bordering process in, 132–137, 138; dehumanization in, 133–136; Massacre of 1937 and, 132–137; necropolitics in, 133, 135, 137; necroviolence in, 135, 137; rayanos (borderers) in, 133–136; Rafael Leónidas Trujillo and, 132–133, 135–136 Río Bravo, 26 Río Grande, 23 Río Masacre, 26 Rivera, Christopher, 41 Rivera Santana, Carlos, 240–241 Rivero, Eliana, 24–25 Robertson, Pat, 168, 169, 251n26 Rodríguez, Amaury, 58 Roselló, Ricardo, 237, 239 Roseman, Sharon, 69 Rwandan Civil War, 162 Sabana de la Mar: Salvation Action (García), 118, 119–122; domesticity and femininity in, 120; feminism and, 120–121; floating devices in, 119–121; pink (color) in, 119–122; poverty in, 119; symbols of salvation in, 119–122; testimonies in, 120–122 Sagás, Ernesto, 56–57, 136 Samson, Alice, 73, 75–76 Sánchez, Humberto, 228–232, 254nn26–27 sandals, 47–49 Santa María, La (ship), 29–33, 229 Santería, 88, 199, 253n16 Santos Febres, Mayra, 46, 87–100, 247n16. See also Boat People (Santos Febres) scapegoats, migrants as, 2, 107, 154 Sengupta, S., 17 Sentencia, La (TC/0168/13), 26, 44, 64, 137, 149, 166–173, 176–177 sex trafficking, 90, 113, 143–144 Sheller, Mimi, 14; on “coloniality of

index

climate,” 50; on history of “slow violence,” 51; on “mobility justice,” 4; on “mobility regimes,” 18; on primacy of movement, 19; on Vodou loa, 140 silence and silencing: of African patrimony in Dominican history, 30; of Blackness in Caribbean history, 83; of Mona Passage, 73–74; in myth of great Puerto Rican family, 79; of racism, 150; of stories of water crossing, 56, 69, 102, 107, 109–110, 122, 197, 205, 209–210; of transatlantic slave trade, 31; of victims of La Sentencia, 172; of violence, 94–95, 150. See also erasure and invisibility Slave Wrecks Project, 30–31 Socolovsky, Maya, 43 Soviet Union, fall of, 65, 181, 188, 208, 211, 236, 252n8 space of exception: bateyes as, 132, 139–140, 146, 150, 154, 177; Caribbean region as, 164; Caribbean Sea as, 90, 111, 113, 122, 132, 143, 177, 194, 227; definition of, 90; departure and arrival zones as, 113, 114, 116; Dominican Republic as, 150, 170; expansion of, 116, 150, 177; gender and, 111, 113; Haiti as, 150, 157, 160, 163; Haiti-DR border as, 132, 133, 135–137; Mona Island as, 106, 107; seafloor as, 214, 217 Spanish-American-Cuban War (1898), 23 Stanchich, Maritza, 70, 71, 81–82 Stratford, Elaine, 15, 17, 179, 192 Sued Badillo, Jalil, 74 Super Tropics: The Liquid Highway I (García), 125, 126, 126–130; blings [sic] in, 129–130; cadenús (Dominican youth in the diaspora) in, 129–130; dark-skinned girl in, 125, 127–128, 130; femininity in, 127, 130; materialism and consumerism in, 128–130; pink (color) in, 125, 127; poverty in, 128–130; symbols of salvation in, 128 TC/0168/13 (La Sentencia), 26, 44, 64, 137, 149, 166–173, 176–177

281

Theories of Freedom (García), 122, 123, 123–125; Catedral, 125; floating devices in, 123–125; materialism and consumerism in, 125; In my Floating World, Landscape of Paradise, 124–125; objects as allegorical narratives in, 123–125; symbols of salvation in, 124, 125 tidalectics, 19–20, 21, 183, 192, 207 Torres-Saillant, Silvio, 16, 26, 61–62, 131 transatlantic slave trade. See Middle Passage and transatlantic slave trade Trodd, Zoe, 38 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 109 Trujillo, Rafael Leónidas: assassination of, 51–52; Dominican identity under, 140, 155–156; dominicanización de la frontera campaign, 61, 131, 159; “Haitian and Haitian-Dominican Massacre,” 60–61; institutionalization of antihaitianismo, 60, 145, 167, 169–170; poetic references to, 94, 95, 98, 132–133, 135–136; racial theories of, 30, 61, 128, 131, 135–136, 137, 155–156, 157, 159, 169; whitening creams used by, 175 Trump, Donald, 235–236, 240–241 Turner, Phillip J., 29–31, 94 Tweed, Thomas A., 185–186, 252n5 “unauthorized migration,” use of the term, 7 “undocumented migration,” use of the term, 7 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, 30 US Coast Guard: balsero crisis interdictions by, 66; evading capture by, 55, 68; in fiction, 82, 83, 107, 108; interdiction statistics of Cubans from, 181; interdiction statistics of Dominicans from, 56; interdiction statistics of Haitians, Dominicans, and Cubans from, 57, 68, 246n36; media stories of, 1; in visual art, 217–218, 219; “wet foot/dry foot” policy and, 77, 198

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Valerio-Holguín, Fernando, 58, 60, 164, 250n21 Vannini, Philip, 13–14 Vega, Ana Lydia, 46, 82–87, 88, 247n11. See also “Encancaranublado” (Vega) Viaje a Isla de Mona (Montero): Mona Island as border in, 104–107; Mona Island as bridge in, 102–104, 107; narrative summary, 101–102, 107; publishing significance of, 101; themes in, 102–107 violence: erasure and invisibility of, 86, 91, 108, 135; gendered and sexual violence, 110–118; revealed through language, 115 Vista del amanecer en el trópico (Cabrera Infante), 16–17 War on Terror, 217 wasted lives: agency of movement and, 110; bare life and, 90; concept of, 43–44, 46; dehumanization and, 10, 95, 100, 131, 157, 177, 194; in drama, 194; empathy for, 10; erasure of, 91, 108; in fiction, 152, 154, 157, 161, 163, 231–232; globalization and, 8, 43, 81, 84, 146, 228; modernization and, 43, 84, 106; neoliberalism and, 8, 81, 146; in poetry, 91, 93–94, 100, 135, 137; racialization and, 8, 86, 89, 94, 135, 137, 142, 177, 234–235; refugees and, 46, 161; La Sentencia and, 169; memorialization of, 96, 100, 108; space of exception and, 139, 143; in visual art, 46, 50, 51, 122, 131, 234–235, 237, 240 Wasted Lives (Bauman), 43–44 waste-ification of unauthorized migrants, 44, 46, 84–85, 240

waste imperialism, 50–51 whiteness: Dominicans associated with, 57, 155, 174; “good citizenship” and, 43; Latinidad’s privileging of, 3; performance of, 86 white supremacy: black magic as product of, 168; blanqueamiento and, 79, 175; “good citizenship” and, 43; racial hierarchies built on, 27–28, 45; resistance against, 30, 33, 37; slave trade and, 27–28, 187. See also Dominicanidad Wright, Michelle: on epiphenomenal time, 8, 37, 76, 94, 129, 141; on “spacetime” limbo, 192 Yeng, Sokthan, 44–45 yola migration, 72, 176; capsized yolas, 77, 103, 143; dangers of, 39, 54–55, 98, 114–116, 118; definition of yola, 38; Dominican departure points for, 245n25; fatalities in, 56, 77; in fiction, 103, 106, 108, 110–116, 139, 143, 147; in film and art, 53–54, 118, 119, 122, 124; first stage of, 111–114; gendered violence and, 110–118; length of journey to Puerto Rico, 245n22; media coverage of, 1; in poetry, 99–100; precariousness of yolas, 38, 39, 53–54, 56; Puerto Rican arrival points for, 245n25; second stage of, 114–116; size and capacity of yolas, 54; third stage of, 116; viral video of landing in Rincón, 242; yola captains, 39, 54–55, 56, 103, 106, 143, 245n23 Young, Elliott, 12, 13 young adult literature, 101, 107. See also Viaje a Isla de Mona (Montero) zombies, 159–160, 164