¿Ajeno Siempre Será (Foreigners Forever)?:The Spectacle of (Un)Making Dominican/Haitian Identity

Abstract

This article examines political developments leading up to the September 23rd, 2013 constitutional court decision in the Dominican Republic which changed the country’s citizenship policy and applied it retroactively to 1929, citing the “in transit” clause in their 1929 constitution. I examine this internationally controversial action of redefining “in transit” clause as a spectacle that remakes various lived experiences into mere representations of elitist visions of Dominicanness and thus a powerful vehicle for isolating and consolidating power. Through examining these legislative actions as a spectacle, a public display of governmental power to rewrite law in the present and to concretized the image of Haitians as quintessentially non-Dominican, fraudulent and threatening, Dominican citizenship is detached from aspects of lived experiences and previous political/cultural realities so that Dominicanness becomes this generalized trope and object of endless contemplation. The spectacle functions, primarily, in attracting an international stage of human rights defenders to which the government labels interventionist and sovereignty-violators. It is with this neo-colonial discourse that the Dominican government consolidates dissenting national opinions around the amendment