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For forty years, on the second Sunday of August, 10,000 of the approximately 1.2 million Dominican migrants living in the United States, predominantly in New York and New Jersey, cross the Hudson River or travel downtown from their neighborhoods in Washington Heights and the Bronx to march through the streets of midtown Manhattan.
The joyous annual parade of floats, brass bands, and dancers in festive regalia is a celebration of national pride and heritage, cheered on by onlookers waving the Dominican flag in appreciation of their vibrant culture.
But less visible within the masses of Dominicans who live and work in the United States is a small group of ultranationalists who call themselves Antigua Orden Dominicana (the “Old Dominican Order”).
Though they claim membership approaching 2,000, only dozens participate in their demonstrations, and the number is thought to be more probably in the low hundreds; they operate both in the Dominican Republic and in the United States. Though they promote themselves as a group advancing the return to the somewhat nebulous “lost Dominican values” and sport insignias proclaiming “God, Country, Liberty,” they have a history of being credibly accused of sending death threats to those they oppose, especially those upholding the rights of Dominicans of Haitan descent and Haitian migrants.
In 2018, they had a public event in New York City to show support for their government’s rejection of a United Nations migratory pact meant to offer a pathway toward a resolution of ongoing tensions between Haitians and Dominicans, two peoples who share a common island. The group had some ugly confrontations on the streets of New York City with supporters of journalist Marino Zapete, whose life they’d threatened.
Fast forward to April 2, 2022, weeks before veteran human rights activist Ana Belique was slated to present her debut children’s book, La muñeca de Dieula, or Dieula’s Doll, at her publisher’s bookstall at the International Book Fair in Santa Domingo. On that day, the Old Dominican Order published an announcement on Facebook requesting that their supporters show up to shut down Belique’s book talk, publicly inviting them to “bring their matchsticks.” For Belique, who’s been advocating for Dominicans of Haitian descent like herself and Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic for more than a decade, a threat of arson or worse from extremists is a telltale sign that state agencies such as the judiciary and immigration departments will soon be bringing chaos, harm, dislocation, and dispossession to her people.
Photo provided
"La muñeca de Dieula"
Such was the case when the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States documented a campaign of psychological warfare against her in December 2013:
On November 4, Ana María Belique, a leader and activist with Movimiento Reconocido, reportedly received threats from individuals via the social media network Twitter: “We’re going to have to move Belique to the same barrio where Sonia Pierre lives” (a reference to a human rights activist and defender who died in 2011), and “we’re ready for anything; if it’s blood they want, blood they shall have.”
That campaign of terror was an attempt to silence her as she worked to prevent a constitutional court, via a ruling in 2013, from stripping hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent of their citizenship rights, rendering them stateless and at risk for deportation. There is no way to know how many newly stateless Dominicans of Haitian descent were swept up in the 248,778 deportations of Haitian immigrants from the Dominican Republic over the five year period from 2017 through 2021, as that distinction is not officially acknowledged by the state, much less tracked.
While the Ministry of Culture, under whose auspices the book fair was being presented, initially offered support to Belique and the book’s illustrator and publisher Michelle Ricardo of Anticanon Press, three days prior to her book talk scheduled for April 23, her event was peremptorily canceled.
Neither political history nor polemic, La muñeca de Dieula tells the sweet, simple story of a mother who sews her daughter a Black doll, delighting the child. Published bilingually in Spanish and Haitian Creole, the proceeds from the book, which is available in the United States through the Dominican Writers Association, are being used to fund Belique’s work in los Bateyes, the underdeveloped areas where sugar cane workers live in the Dominican Republic. Her other book project to date was as coordinator of Nos Cambió La Vida, Our Lives Transformed, a volume of 19 first-person essays that describe the impacts of the 2013 court order on Dominicans of Haitian descent.
Furious at the treatment of her colleague and friend, and disappointed at the lost chance to share this book with an interested International audience, Ricardo took the opportunity of her own appearance at local newspaper Tribuna Libre’s Slam Poetry event at the book fair to ridicule the cowards who had threatened to attack a progressive cultural project. In introducing her composition, which is full of puns and wordplay (making it too challenging to easily translate here), she told the audience: “We were to have a presentation in the book fair of Ana Belique’s book but due to threats by the ultranationalists it was canceled; in response to this, and to these ultranationalists who constantly threaten us, I have written this text.”
Her defiant speech act brought the wrath of the Old Dominican Order as well as Belique’s other longtime antagonists, “Movimiento no tenemos miedo” (the “we are not afraid” movement), down on Ricardo as well, something she was unaccustomed to as an arts activist. Ricardo, who studied visual arts in Mexico and who’s had invitations to live and work abroad, has chosen to stay in the Dominican Republic to use the arts, and arts education, to try to change mindsets about entrenched colorism and immigrant and LGBTQ+ rights, and to halt her country’s frightening drift to the reactionary right.
After weeks of cyber-bullying and harassment, including dozens of hateful phone calls and texts, Ricardo says she received a grotesque text—a picture of a bloodied human body hacked into pieces—with the unambiguous threat: “Take this as a warning.”
Colleagues immediately began to mobilize international support for the two women, and hundreds of individuals and organizations across twenty-six nations have signed onto a statement of solidarity, which also calls out the government of the Dominican Republic for conceding to neofascist forces.
We call on writers and artists, leftists, trade union and human rights organizations internationally to reject the censorship by the Dominican government and to demand that it cease its complicity with fascist organizations, providing minimum security guarantees to writers, artists and human rights defenders in the Dominican Republic.
Anticanon Press wrote a letter of protest to the Ministry of Culture about its cancellation of Belique’s book talk at their bookstall, and Ricardo is pursuing legal action. But past threats against Belique and others working to advance human rights in the Dominican Republic have gone unpunished, a pattern that Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat once called on Democracy Now! “a state-sponsored open season on people who are considered Haitians by the way they look, primarily, or by their Haitian-sounding name.”
As scholar Ayendy Bonifacio explained in 2020, Antigua Orden Dominicana promotes a view of Belique’s work as “propaganda to establish Reconocido’s program of fusion and occupation in the Dominican Republic.” Similar to the QAnon conspiracy theory in the United States, the Dominican far-right casts George Soros as a bogeyman who is using global institutions like the United Nations to dissolve the Dominican Republic to form a “fusion state” with Haiti. It’s a preposterous proposition, but one that serves a useful purpose for their aims of fear mongering “an invasion” of outsiders and an alleged loss of national sovereignty.
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An image from "La muñeca de Dieula."
Though the threats against Belique and Ricardo are being taken seriously by activists, intellectuals and journalists in the country and elsewhere, it’s become almost predictable that when there is a large public show of aggression against Belique and her allies, some very serious and real danger to Haitian descendants or Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic will follow.
On Sunday, May 22, members of “We are not afraid” made their move. The group marched, under police escort, to Ciudad Juan Bosch, an urban development in Santo Domingo where many Haitian migrants live. Earlier in the week, the same community had been raided by immigration officials. More than 25,000 people have been deported in 2022 alone, including hundreds of pregnant women. It is not uncommon for immigration officers to break down doors, steal people’s belongings and money, and beat them.
The ultranationalists came after the incursion by government officials to push for a wider eviction and dispossession of the Haitians. Their belligerent call to action was both a challenge and a promise of spoils: “We will see where the brave ones are. Dominicans . . . you don’t have a house, come on, we will have one for you…”
Government agents returned on May 24. Black people were rounded up and sorted. Activists on the ground report that if they were Dominican citizens and had their legal documents, they were released. But if they were Haitian, they were taken to a detention center for a document check. Human rights defender Roudy Joseph, who was filming the raid on his cellphone, was detained even though he had his ID card.
I interviewed Ana Belique via email, and spoke with Michelle Ricardo on the phone on May 19, about the disturbing events at the book fair, the aftermath, and this new serious threat to the well-being of Dominicans of Haitian descent and Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic.
Q: I’m having a hard time imagining that the violent reaction to La muñeca de Dieula was anything other than a pretext for a fight they’d already decided they wanted to have. But maybe I’m wrong about that. Can you please say more about the book and its purposes?
Ana Belique: The truth is that it is a question that I would not know how to answer. Most of the people who called for the protest did not have access to the book previously; I do not think they have seen the content. I have some guesses, nothing really confirmed.
Many people thought it was a book to teach Creole, but it really is not. So I think the fact that I am its author, and that I have a long history of digital violence toward me from these groups [and] that it is a bilingual book (Creole-Spanish), [makes them] feel this as a threat to national identity.
Michelle Ricardo: In 2019, Ana told me that she has a story about a little girl who has a favorite doll, a blonde doll…that she wants to be like. But her mama makes her a Black doll, and when she presents her daughter with this doll she becomes the happiest girl in the town. When Ana told me this story, I said yes we need to do this book.
We Dominicans don’t recognize ourselves as Black, and supposedly the only Black people in our country are Haitians. But we are an Afro-descendent country, so we have a lot of years of mental problems with ourselves and our Afro identity.
Our idea was to create a book so beautiful that it would alter the image and the bad taste associated with people living in poverty. We decided to create a children’s book so beautiful that people can relate to the people without prejudice. We wanted to make readers aware of the situation of the children living in the bateyes, which are like invisible places in our regular narratives.
And with that concept we created some pedagogy around it, a study guide so that parents and teachers can work with the book. We decided to put the book in the two languages because as a writer I work to create a bridge between the artists, intellectuals, and writers of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. We want to create a space for Haitian kids also, not just for the kids of the bateyes, but to create a book for all kids that speak Creole so they can feel proud of their mother tongue.
Q: How have the threats to burn Anticanon’s book stall and, subsequently, the death threats, changed your daily life routines or affected you emotionally, and how do you protect yourself and help yourself feel less vulnerable?
Belique: I had to change my routine a long time ago due to the amount of threats I receive. Since 2012, different people and groups through social networks have been tagging me with hate messages. I have been made very public as a human rights defender, hence everything related to Haiti, they use it as libel toward me.
I try to lead a normal life, but it is not easy. Many people know me, but I do not know everyone, and when I go down the street I do not know if those who recognize me will greet me kindly or insult me for defending my cause.
We have always said that one of the objectives of these groups is to create fear, to intimidate us so that we do not act, do not speak out and even more that we do not denounce situations of human rights violations, racism, and discrimination against Black people—especially migrants and their descendants.
In general, everything I do that comes to public light is denigrated by these ultraconservative groups. They brand me as a traitor to the homeland and a pro-Haitian who hates the Dominican Republic, and who conspires for the destruction of Dominican identity. So they constantly incite the authorities to deport me from my own country, the Dominican Republic, because according to them I am Haitian and I do not deserve to be in the DR, nor have DR identity documents.
Ricardo: Because I work with art in the public [sphere], my phone number wasn’t hard to find, and they started to call me, sending messages to my personal phone number. They weren’t sending me death threats at the beginning. When I started getting the insults, I was OK, I can handle that, I don’t mind about that. But then they sent me pictures of people cut in pieces and they said “Take this as a warning.” So at that moment I said I have to take this seriously. I don’t have any proof that they have done this, but they’re sending me pictures of mutilated people, and if you can do that, you probably will do it.
I have fear. I don’t want to say that I have fear, but this is something bigger. I saw what happened in Buffalo, [New York,] last week, and these people have the same mindset. Probably the authorities will move after they’ve killed a bunch of people, but we can’t have that happen. We cannot. People need to understand, they are increasing their power because the Dominican diaspora that lives mostly in the United States is supporting these groups, giving them resources, so they have money.
Q: Ana, what did Michelle’s act of solidarity at the poetry slam mean to you? And also, the symbol of the hundreds of people around the world who have signed the solidarity statement?
Belique: It was very important and brave on her part. However, it generated a lot of anxiety for me to know that she has exposed herself so much by speaking in my favor, because I knew that raising her voice publicly would bring her problems. But it is something I am grateful for. She was very brave and, honestly, we need more brave people; the silence and passivity of the good Dominicans is what has made these groups gain so much ground. Nobody confronts them, they feel free and legitimate to say and do what they want.
It is important to show these groups that there are more of us who are against racism and discrimination, there are more of us who believe in a more just society where everyone can feel part of it.
Ricardo: I was really impressed. I didn’t expect all the signatures. That made me decide to move forward with pressing my grievance with the attorney general’s office in Santa Domingo. When everything went public, the fascists changed their tone and made a public statement saying (paraphrasing) “of course, our problem is not with you, it’s with Ana, so don't worry.” Ana and I have become friends. She is the real target. They want to isolate her. I felt if I didn't do anything, I would regret it my whole life.
And now we see what’s happening in Ciudad Juan Bosch. This country is in the grip of madness. It is a war.
Q: Madness, but with a particular aim, right?
Belique: Every day, every week we live in shock in this country, the hate and violence have become my daily bread and yes, I think they seek to unbalance us emotionally. But they will not succeed, knowing that we have many people who support us and help us to spread the word. Changing our reality depends heavily on political will; the government in power does not seem to have the least will to act to address our situation, or the reality of the various minority groups that demand rights, justice, and inclusion. But we cannot let our guard down.