Blood Memory and the Borders of Identity

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The border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti is more than a line in the soil. It is a wound cauterized by silence, reopened by every racialized deportation, every denial of identity, every unspoken legacy of the 1937 Parsley Massacre that killed as many as 30,000 Haitians and Black Dominicans.

Amanda M. Ortiz, a New York-born Dominican writer and scholar, grew up with the familiar rhythms of Dominican life, plátanos on every plate, merengue and bachata at every party. But embedded in those rhythms was another inheritance: silence.

“Silence has become a corrosive element of Haitian and Dominican society following the 1937 Massacre,” Ortiz writes in her master’s thesis, Fractured Memory: The Parsley Massacre & Distorted Identity in Hispaniola, completed at The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs. “Perpetuation of this wound continues to yield generations increasingly unaware and dismissive of their history.”

Ortiz’s reflections on the 1937 Massacre informed not only her scholarship but her public writing and activism. She is also a guest writer and contributor to the Dominicans Love Haitians Movement, a grassroots initiative founded by Clarivel Ruiz, focused on using participatory art, storytelling, and advocacy to confront anti-Blackness, racism, and statelessness in Hispaniola. In 2023, Ortiz wrote a personal essay titled “Beyond Borders: Dominicans Love Haitians”, reflecting on the organization’s inaugural Nou Akoma Nou Sinèrji Haitian-Dominican Transnational Film Festival. Ortiz described the event as “nothing short of remarkable.”

“It was a space of genuine vulnerability and healing; a celebration of Haitian and Dominican art, expression, and culture; a forum for candidly addressing injustice, genocide, and the resulting implications,” Ortiz wrote. “Attending Nou Akoma Nou Sinèrji, I at long last felt seen and part of something bigger, a cohort connected to a concrete and pivotal mission.”

Ortiz first learned about the Parsley Massacre as a teenager when she read Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, a book that profoundly shaped her personal and academic trajectory. “I was stunned by what I found in its pages, a history directly pertaining to me that I’d never heard of or seen in a textbook,” she wrote in 2024. “Those 312 pages lit a fire in me that would forever color my perception of events, some I hold dear, and what I thought I once knew of my own culture.”

She later defended her thesis on the massacre against academic resistance, including a professor who deemed the subject irrelevant. Despite the pushback, she persisted. “I wonder if, in light of such a blatant human rights violation, she would still deem my thesis topic irrelevant,” Ortiz wrote, referencing the 2013 ruling that stripped citizenship from Dominicans of Haitian descent.

Ortiz’s thesis draws heavily on four historical novels: Massacre River, El masacre se pasa a pie, General Sun, My Brother, and The Farming of Bones, which reconstruct the events of the massacre through fiction. “These texts attempt to bridge this divide between actuality and incredibility,” she writes, “serving as ‘substitute graves’ for unburied victims, and a ‘memorial space’ through commemorative narratives.”

For Ortiz, literature becomes a form of resistance. It is a vehicle for unspoken truths in a country where “the absence of monuments or museums to memorialize or acknowledge the Massacre” mirrors an institutionalized forgetting.

This forgetting, as Dominican-American poet and essayist Roberto Carlos Garcia notes, is deeply racialized. Ortiz and Garcia’s work intersects in their belief that racial silence is enforced and inherited.

“To be Dominican is to live in a racial contradiction,” Garcia told the Poetry Foundation in a 2021 interview. “We dance to Afro rhythms and still claim we’re Spanish.” In his poetry collections black / Maybe and Melancholia, Garcia explores the tensions of Dominican identity and the cultural rejection of Blackness.

“We come from denial,” Garcia writes. “Our mouths full of Spanish, our dreams edited down to poems that won’t scare our mothers.”

Ortiz echoes this contradiction. “While the overwhelming majority of the population-over 90 percent-has definitive African roots, most non-white Dominicans self-identify as indio,” she writes. The term indio, a label disconnected from actual Indigenous ancestry, functions as a euphemism to distance Dominicans from their African heritage.

Hair becomes a battlefield. “Curly hair is overwhelmingly deemed unsightly and a clear indication of ‘Africanness,’” Ortiz writes. “Young girls are conditioned to chemically straighten their hair... a regimen that religiously follows throughout their lives and passes down to their own daughters.”

In 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Constitutional Court retroactively stripped citizenship from tens of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent, claiming they were born to “migrants in transit.” This left generations stateless in the only country they had ever known.

“Today, this deprival of documentation continues to spur mass deportations to Haiti by the Dominican military,” Ortiz writes. “Armed soldiers stop and search passing vehicles for Haitians and racially profile Black Dominicans.”

In 2023, Dominican President Luis Abinader ordered a border shutdown with Haiti, citing a canal dispute, drawing criticism from human rights groups who viewed it as a politically motivated escalation of xenophobia.

Organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International condemned the surge in deportations and racial profiling. A UN report raised concerns over collective expulsions and violations of international law.

Yet this state-sanctioned dehumanization is not new. Ortiz calls it a continuation of what Trujillo began, a national myth built on erasure.

Ortiz closes her thesis with a warning: “Without acknowledgment of the past, Haiti and the Dominican Republic face a black collective future… racialization, distorted identity, and societal fragmentation prevail.”

But through scholarship, storytelling, and solidarity movements like Dominicans Love Haitians, voices like Ortiz’s are reshaping the cultural narrative. They remind us that literature is not a luxury; it is a necessity. It is a record. It is resistance. It is what survives when the silence finally breaks.

The message is not one of despair, but of determination that the truth can be remembered, honored, and ultimately healed. And in doing so, perhaps the border will finally become not a scar, but a seam.