The industrial complex – the fact that people who are just trying to feed theirfamilies are in detention. It’s jail. And people are making money off that.Corporations are benefiting. It’s horrible. [As for DACA], what about ourfamilies? People who couldn’t finish high school because they are disabled. [Weneed to highlight] the complexities about immigrants in the country. [You can’t]just throw people under the bus if you’re OK [because you have DACA]. The ideathat gay marriage is the only thing we need to worry about. How are trans people

I knew what it was like to grow upa Mexican male, full of these expectations. I didn’t know what it was like tohave a gay son.

In the feminist movement, you look at where you had...white women leading movements. And you had women of color trying to say“your experience is different from my experience.” Knowing that history, I knewthat my experience as an undocumented man from California is different from theexperience of Yahaira, who grew up in St Louis. I wanted to hear from them,what was that experience like

The work I do really focuses on culture. The art I put out there is really tryingto change the culture of migrant hate, anti-migrant. A lot of times when you thinkof art, the first two semesters that I [took art classes at college], I didn’t see myselfin the art. [And then I found the work of] Emory Douglas... that depicted blackpeople in dignified ways. For a long time, black people were seen as docile, peopleyou could take advantage of. In Emory’s work ... they were dignified. People youshould be not afraid of, but you can’t mess with us. Those empowering images,images that were not seen, I really admired them. Younger artists like FaviannaRodriguez, she did a lot of work around Chicano youth in the ‘90s and early2000s. Her work was really inspiring, so I took a lot of that inspiration and said,“We need that.” What a lot of the [undocumented] students are doing is historic.If I can draw, if I have this gift, this was the... way I could contribute. If you havesomething you can do right, you should focus on those things ... . I’m not goodwith sports, but I can really get down with a poster! So owning that and figuringout how I can use this as a tool to empower my community – I’m going to do it

These posters are given toorganizations to create dialogue and spaces where youth can talk about theintersection of these identities and issues in their lives.

he states that she is “not going to apologize forspeaking my native language” and names herself as a “proud Georgian”as well as “a proud Mexicana.

In stating that they “shouldn’t and won’t conform” to the idea that“the only path to legalization is to lead a heterosexual lifestyle,” queerDreamers force the immigrant rights movement to consider how sexu-ality has served as grounds for controlling what sorts of newcomers areallowed to enter the country.

DREAM activists who choose to “come out” and openly declare theirundocumented status emphasize the linkages that connect sexuality andmigration

Moreover, by focusing on children who did not “choose” to immigrateillegally and whose opportunities are limited through no fault of theirown, the DREAM Act reinforces a good immigrant/bad immigrantaccount of migration that criminalizes undocumented parents as law-breakers but labels their children “innocent,” upstanding, and assimi-lated

academic success, involvement in commu-nity and volunteer activities, and desire to engage in military service

In 1937 Dominican frontier residents had to bury the Haitian mem-bers of their community. And in so doing, they also buried their own way oflife, and ultimately the memories of their collective past

Among subsequent generations, though,anti-Haitianism appears to be far more accepted. And overall it became asalient part of everyday discourse in a way that contrasts sharply with the pre-massacre frontier world

Because if we didn’tdo this, we would be Haitians. . . . Already in the frontier we had becomeHaitians.

If Trujillo hadn’t done this, the Haitians would have eaten uslike meat. Already there would be no Dominicans here.”

this new law imposed a prohibitive 500-peso immigration fee onall those not “predominantly of caucasian origin” and thereby effectivelybarred legal Haitian migration for the first time.

Ironically, then, the massacreand eviction of ethnic Haitians produced the very type of local ethnic conflictover poaching that the regime had first claimed was at the root of the killingsin the frontier.

o the contrary, President Vincent of Haiti acted in every way possibleto avoid a military conflict. 122 It was not only the army that Vincent held back.He prohibited public discussion of the massacre, and refused for a long timeeven to allow the church to perform masses for the dead

“I had ahusband and this man died under the weight and sorrow of witnessing theHaitian massacre, as he had worked with many Haitians. When he went to theHaitian houses and found so many Haitians dead and their houses burned, thisman went crazy, and didn’t eat anything. He passed all his time thinking withhis head lowered, thinking of all the Haitians who had died. He died . . . threemonths later.”

killed me along with them

“There was an epochwhen Trujillo wanted to have the Haitian elite with him . . . to facilitate the vis-its of businessmen, and of all Haitians of a certain prestige, great writers. . . . Atthat time, we always thought that Trujillo had the idea to expand his controlover the entire island, not with the idea of invading and demolishing every-thing, but by rendering his power acceptable.”

modernize the countryside.

Haitianinfluence was perceived as an obstacle to the elite’s aims to render the country“modern” and “civilized.” For centuries the cultural practices of the Domini-can peasantry had themselves been seen by Dominican intellectuals and policy-makers as backward and the primary obstacle to progress, marked, as onenineteenth-century writer put it, by “religious fanaticism and . . . a peculiarindependence rendering it unamenable to enlightened practices . . . of work.”

Dominican intellectuals represented the Haitian pres-ence in the Dominican frontier as a “pacific invasion” that was endangeringthe Dominican nation. 28 This “invasion” was supposedly “Haitianizing” and“Africanizing” the Dominican frontier, rendering popular Dominican culturemore savage and backward, and injecting new and undesirable African admix-tures into the Dominican social composition

And these notions of culturaland physical difference were more hierarchical than egalitarian ones

egalitarian

The story of the Haitian massacre is also one of Dominicans versusDominicans, of Dominican elites versus Dominican peasants, of the nationalstate against Dominicans in the frontier, of centralizing forces in opposition tolocal interests, and, following the massacre, of newly hegemonic anti-Haitiandiscourses of the nation vying with more culturally pluralist discourses andmemories from the past

Haitian-Dominican relations and comparative themesin world history, namely, hostility toward lower-class immigrants and theracial and ethnic conflict, ethnic cleansing, and genocide that marked thetwentieth century.

Anti-Haitianism, moreover, has only grown and, above all,diffused during the last 60 years, as Haitian migrants to Dominican sugarzones and other areas—mostly far from the frontier regions—actually increasedin number after the massacre. These migrants have been subjected to extraor-dinary exploitation and continual human rights abuses. In addition, there is asalient racial dimension to Dominican anti-Haitianism, as Haitians have beenidentified in the Dominican Republic as “black” in contrast to Dominicanswho, evidently since the colonial era, have rarely constructed such identitiesfor themselves (even though most also have not identified themselves — norbeen identified by others — as “white”).