When Dialogue Is No Longer Possible, What Still Exists Is the Mystery of Hope’: Migration and Citizenship in the Dominican Republic in Film, Literature and Performance

The debate around the ruling of 23 September 2013 by the Dominican Constitutional Court which ordered that all birth registries from 1929 should be searched for people who had been (allegedly) wrongly registered as Dominican citizens has brought to the fore the predicament of Dominicans of Haitian descent who were born in the Dominican Republic or have been long-term residents as well as the vulnerability of more recent Haitian migrants whose status in the Dominican Republic has never been regularised. This chapter analyses literary and artistic interventions which have creatively engaged with the right to citizenship of Haitian Dominicans, the regularisation of Haitian immigration and the marginalisation of the communities who inhabit the Dominican borderland but also of the mixed communities in urban and rural spaces alike.