North America's Other Bloody Border War

Hispaniola, in a map from the Encyclopedia Britannica

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 84
Michele Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola

Though it’s impossible to say with precision, many historians believe the spot where Christopher Columbus first landed in the Americas is in Haiti. Archeologists have found remains of a rudimentary wooded village with European structures near modern Cap-Hatiën. This means that, though Native Americans had a rich, complex pre-Columbian civilization, modern written history in North America begins on the island of Hispaniola.

So it’s particularly puzzling why Haiti and the only country with which it shares a land border, the Dominican Republic, remain essentially terra incognita for English-speaking Americans. Ivy League-educated journalist Michele Wucker, who specializes in crisis points and why nobody prevents preventable explosions, turns to this issue in her first book. The answers she uncovers aren’t pretty, because they indict us first-worlders in the ongoing cataclysm that is Latin America.

Inspired by the American Revolution, Haitians became the second Western Hemisphere colony to overthrow its European masters. Though that war dragged for thirteen years, and cost far more lives, it produced North America’s second independent nation, and the first dominated by an entirely black, formerly enslaved population. Sadly, Haiti didn’t establish freedom right away; strings of coups, royalist pretenders, and overseas occupations meant Haiti’s first free election didn’t happen until 1989.

Haiti controls approximately one-third of Hispaniola; the Dominican Republic controls two-thirds. Though the French controlled Haiti, the former colony of Santo Domingo bowed to Spain, who didn’t treat its colony so cruelly, but also didn’t extract as much wealth. Santo Domingo didn’t rebel against Spain for decades, and when it did, it petitioned the United States for statehood, and was declined. So naturally, Haiti invaded.

Michele Wucker

The Dominican Republic celebrates its Independence Day, not from the Spanish colonial overthrow, but from the ouster of Haiti in 1844. From this moment, we get an ongoing struggle of economics, power, and race that makes American civil rights struggles look placid and well-behaved. Violence between nations, particularly by relatively wealthier Dominicans against chronically impoverished, and black, Haitians, marks the identity of Hispaniola to this day.

Wucker uses cockfighting as a metaphor to understand this battle. White Americans perceive cockfighting as a barbaric activity, one which we prosecute as inhumane and backward. The nations of Hispaniola, however, see cockfighting much like we see horseracing, as a perfect union of human trainer and animal capability. The Dominican capital, also called Santo Domingo, has a glamorous, state of the art cockfighting arena like Americans have football stadiums.

Haiti’s border with the Dominican republic wasn’t codified and made enforceable until the United States occupation of both nations, during and after World War I. This became important later. Haitians sneak into Dominica much like Mexicans sneak into Texas, crossing a border into a country where they’re not wanted in pursuit of work. An ironclad border made sneaking in a more definite activity, which introduced new risks and rewards on both sides.

During Dominica’s Trujillo dictatorship, from 1930 to 1961, the government cracked down on illegal Haitians. This crackdown started as an ordinary law-enforcement issue, but as unelected government leaders whipped up nationalist sentiment, the crackdown escalated to violence, some of it extreme. Dominica’s massacre of Haitian immigrants, which partly overlapped the German Holocaust, competed for one of the Twentieth Century’s bloodiest genocides. Consequences echo down Hispaniola’s history to the present.

And it’s impossible to deny the racial implications of this genocide. Upper-class Dominicans consider themselves “white,” and have nine gradations of racial identity, down to “black,” which is Haitian. (Most Haitians have unmixed African ancestry.) It’s a shock to many “white” Dominicans when they emigrate to the United States seeking work, and discover that, in America, they’re considered Black. The implications for the United States are glaring, and painful.

Throughout, Wucker keeps her emphasis mainly on the Dominican Republic, the larger, wealthier, paler-skinned neighbor in this arrangement. She strenuously avoids commenting upon larger world affairs, except where the global context contributes to Hispaniola’s conditions. (For instance, the way Haitians and Dominicans both travel to America for economic opportunity.) However, it’s tough to avoid noticing parallels with Mexicans in America, Muslims in the EU, and other perilous border crossings.

However, like the best classic literature, Wucker’s journalism isn’t really about its subject. Ultimately, it’s about the audience, challenging us to understand our position in the world arrangement. We’ll maybe never personally visit Hispaniola; we’ll never engage in bloody race-baiting or cockfighting. But we, individually and collectively, are part of the system that makes this possible. Where, Wucker asks, do we stand? And what will we finally do?