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More than a Massacre is a history of race, citizenship, statelessness, and genocide from the perspective of ethnic Haitians in Dominican border provinces. Sabine F. Cadeau traces a successively worsening campaign of explicitly racialized anti-Haitian repression that began in 1919 under the American Occupiers, accelerated in 1930 with the rise of Trujillo, and culminated in 1937 with the slaughter of an estimated twenty thousand civilians. Relatively unknown by contrast with contemporary events in Europe, the Haitian-Dominican experience has yet to feature in the broader literature on genocide and statelessness in the twentieth century. Bringing to light the massacre from the perspective of the ethnic Haitian victims themselves, Cadeau combines official documents with oral sources to demonstrate how ethnic Haitians interpreted their changing legal status at the border, as well as their interpretation of the massacre and its aftermath, including the ongoing killing and land conflict along the post-massacre border.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. From natives to foreigners: Executive Order 372 and the origins of denationalization; 2. The end of the old border: Ethnic profiling, discrimination, and arrests in the Dominican border provinces, 1920-1936; 3. Curses, scuffles, and public disturbances: Eruptions of popular racism in the premassacre border region; 4. "They killed my entire family": The 1937 genocide; 5. "La campaña contra los haitianos": Round-ups, concealment, and the plan behind the 1937 genocide; 6. The "Dominicanization" of the border; 7. Refugees and land conflict in the postgenocide Haitian-Dominican border region; Epilogue: The right to have rights: Migration, race, and citizenship in the Dominican Republic; Appendix: Photographs.
About the author
Sabine F. Cadeau is a research fellow for the Legacies of Enslavement project at the University of Cambridge. A historian of Latin America, the Caribbean and the African diaspora, her research has been supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
