| dc.description.abstract | Across the Dominican Republic and beyond, the politics of belonging and citizenship continue to breed stigmatization, xenophobia and social exclusion. The following ethnography, based on a three-month research period in 2019 in the Dominican Republic, explores the negotiation of belonging and citizenship between the triangular relation of Dominican, Haitian and Venezuelan residents in the urban landscapes of Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital. This paper discusses how repertoires of belonging are informed by normative ideas of modernity, nation and race and how these hegemonic imaginaries are translated and copied onto the urban social fabric, materializing in every day interactions, in spatial regimes as well as encoded onto physical bodies. Furthermore, this work captures voices and perspectives opposing the dominant canon of belonging within the barrio and beyond. This work demonstrates that the social fabric within the studied urban spaces is defined by a vastly differing positionality of Haitian and Venezuelan migrant subjects. Haitian and Venezuelan subjects are integrated into racial and modernity hierarchies as two opposite poles, in which the Haitian subject is allocated at the bottom bestowed with the role of the African and primitive anti-thesis to Dominican ideas of belonging whereas the Venezuelan subject is idealized as the white and Hispanic alter ego to the Dominican nation. Thus, the unequal triangular relation between the three actors, Dominicans, Haitians, and Venezuelans constitute a stress field, which unveils and catalyses the modes, in which urban ideas of Dominican belonging and citizenship are negotiated as well as contested. | |
