DOMINICAN-AMERICAN YOUTH IN THE UNITED STATES, THE DOMINICAN LIBERATION PARTY, AND THE STRIPPING OF NATIONALITY AGAINST DOMINICANS OF FOREIGN PARENTS An exploratory reflection from the Dominican diaspora about the Dominican political elite and the Dominican youth abroad February 3, 2014. (When this reflection was first shared the PLD Government had announced a law bill on the denationalized Dominicans to be presented on February 27, but the date came by and it was not submitted to the Congreso Nacional of the Dominican Republic. Now it is believed that the peledeísta leadership have not yet achieved a consensus about what to do in the face of this denationalization that discriminates against hundreds of thousands of Dominicans.) During years, maybe decades already, the Dominican Liberation Party has tried to have a presence and an audience among the children and descendants of the large immigrant Dominican community of the United States. The party has had for decades a militant presence in the United States, but it may be said that most of its membership until now have always consisted of Dominican immigrants of first generation. In the face of the extensive public debate sparked by the TC/0168/13 sentence by the Constitutional Tribunal of the Dominican Republic, which has been the culmination of a process of questioning of the Dominican nationality of Dominicans born in the Dominican Republic to immigrant parents arriving in the country, the PLD and practically its entire leadership, with very few exceptions, has adopted a posture that was first of ambiguity and then of acceptance and reaffirmation of the central notion contained in the sentence. This sentence declares non-Dominican the descendants of undocumented immigrants arrived into the Dominican Republic from 1929 onwards, including tens of thousands of Haitian workers brought into the Dominican Republic during decades by Dominican private business owners and the Dominican government to engage in the types of job that Dominicans themselves did no longer want to tackle due to the indignant salaries that those business owners and those governments intended to pay as compensation. It occurs to me that the Dominican Liberation Party must have adopted this treatment against almost a quarter of a million people that just until yesterday were considered as full-rights fellow citizens by most Dominicans after making a calculation of political, partisan, and power interests. I suppose a perception by the PLD of still needing the votes of the most xenophobic Dominican ultraright-wing, heirs of Trujillo, must have played a role. And maybe also a conviction that this issue of agitating Dominican public opinion around national pride (promoted as a safeguard against an alleged Haitian threat to the existence of the Dominican national ethnicity and to “the fatherland”) will be the one giving them the largest accumulation of votes in the upcoming elections, vis a vis a Dominican public opinion that, mostly among its middle class youth segments, seems to be sensitizing itself increasingly about the shortcomings of the Dominican Liberation Party as such in providing Dominican society the type of modern public service that it had proclaimed as the party’s main political goal so many times during recent decades. Is my intuition is minimally in focus, maybe this has been an electorally productive decision by the PLD in the short term. I mean, this generalized position of supporting the denationalizing of Dominicans of immigrant parents, taking advantage of the fact that they happen to be overwhelmingly Dominicans of Haitian descent. In this I depart from a suspicion, again, that the PLD may have made de decision that anti-Haitianism, under the wrapping of an ardent defense of Dominican sovereignty, will be explicitly or implicitly the center-axis of the upcoming electoral campaign by the party. As a result I imagine we will be witnessing an electoral campaign that will be not the most peledeísta or partisan but the most Dominicanistic-nationalistic in our memory of the history of the organization. In its beginnings the PLD preached a “national liberation” with heavy contents of social justice and internationalism but now, given the ideological involution of the organization, I suppose its campaign message will be based on the alleged “anti-Dominican” international plot and threat. As we know, it is a very old trick, but if the ultra-nationalistic campaign inside the Dominican Republic cannot be debunked between now and the elections, it is possible that the PLD could reap juicy electoral results from it. Yet for those of us that have been observing (and even before, had helped) the PLD within the Dominican diaspora in the United States, and especially in New York, say during the last decade and more so during this recent phase of attempted exclusion-discrimination against Dominicans of Haitian descent revamped by the TC/0168/13 sentence, the question arises whether the PLD and its entire leadership, and above all its most renowned leaders who for years have tried to promote de party’s visibility among Dominican-Americans, have maybe decided that they are going to abdicate their old eagerness to win over the sympathy of the children and grandchildren born in the United States to Dominican immigrants because maybe they consider it incompatible with the more immediate (and juicy, in terms of power and privileges derived from power) political interests of holding control over the government indefinitely in the Dominican Republic. I say so because I am under the impression that this decision by the Dominican Liberation Party of aligning itself with the Dominican ultra-right in this political reaffirmation of alleged Dominicanness based on the exclusion of the Haitian component that is already part of the Dominican people (precisely after all those decades of Haitian immigration cynically induced by the Dominican business class and political/state elite) is going to cost the PLD and its entire leadership a probably drastic estrangement, distancing from and questioning by the more young generations of children and descendants of Dominican immigrants born and/or raised in the United States. (And this, again, with the exception of the few officials of the party who dared to distinguish themselves, from the start, by their independent take in favor the idea of a Dominican nation more respectful of its real diversity.) I may be dead wrong, but everything tells me that the degree of ethno-cultural and racial sensitivity felt and professed by the majority of Dominican youth raised and socialized or enculturated in the U.S. in regards to issues of racial or ethnic discrimination (resulting from the large civic and political struggles within U.S. society itself as it has been dealing with its own internal demons of White supremacy, racism, and segregation) is going to generate among them such high levels of rejection, distrust, and disdain towards the Dominican Liberation Party and the xenophobic Dominican ultra-right and the Dominican political segment they represent (and possibly towards the Dominican Revolutionary Party as well for adopting a very similar position), that it remains to be seen what will be the PLD’s capacity, as the most powerful political party yet in Dominican society to even interact with an entire generation of Dominican-Americans that the PLD and its leadership have tried to woo in different ways. And again the same question is valid about the other larger Dominican political parties. The younger generation of Dominican-Americans is a generation that more and more is achieving college education and moving up socio-economically despite the prejudices and barriers that U.S. society presents and casts upon those who arrive as impoverished immigrants and try to climb that pyramid of social classes that the U.S. , like all modern societies, consists of. They are already almost have a million –and growing—of children and grandchildren of Dominicans and many are gradually penetrating the corporate, cultural and political worlds of the U.S., not only earning incomes higher than those of their immigrant parents that send remittances to the Dominican Republic, but also a visibility and an audience in the U.S. political and cultural public opinion. And they are a generation that, whatever their ideological posture may be vis a vis the gamut of political options dominant in U.S. political parties, shares –I think—a high degree of sensitivity towards everything smelling of discrimination, especially when related to race, culture-ethnicity or national origin. Not only, let’s insist, because of having grown up within the heritage of civic culture forged by the civil rights movement led mainly by African-American activists in the U.S. during decades, but also because their own lived experiences of discrimination, from its most crude forms to its most subtle ones, in the midst of Dominican and Latin immigrant communities, has given them a capacity for empathy, a capacity for putting themselves in the shoes of others that suffer of may suffer these kinds of discrimination. Among some of them that sensitivity is acute, and I have seen a number of times how for Dominicans of the most conservative type from the country of origin this is almost impossible to understand, looking at them as if they were from another planet, and frequently accusing them of being incapable of “understanding” the “realities” of Dominican society, which is how they often refer to issues of socioeconomic inequalities and “natural” social marginalizations that occur within that society. In summary, I believe that the Dominican Liberation Party and the Dominican Revolutionary Party (and I do not mention the Dominican ultraright-wing because I see them as incapable of evolving) will pay –and maybe are already paying—a high political price with the large and growing youth of the Dominican diaspora for their stubborn political opportunism in confusing the entire issue of immigration into the Dominican Republic with that of the acquired rights to nationality of generations of Dominicans of Haitian descent to whom conservative Dominicans are trying to apply an arbitrary and retroactive notion of illegality based on a totally nonsensical notion of “transit.” I wonder whether the youth of the Dominican diaspora will forget this denationalization and stripping of citizenship rights practiced against Haitian-Dominicans, even if on February 27 the PLD government may try to apply a lukewarm pad to this “problem” by offering a mechanism for a naturalization that already in advance looks like it is not going to be similar to a full citizenship with total equality of rights. I am not sure the political elite the Dominican Liberation Party has become will need the hundreds of thousands of young Dominicans from the diaspora in the future to exert power in the Dominican Republic or at least to preserve a part of that political and economic power it has today. But when one considers the large presence of that youth, and their growing political participation, in nations that are or have traditionally been key for the international relations of the Dominican Republic (the United States, Puerto Rico, Spain, not to mention another half a dozen countries), it is hard to imagine that this elite would believe it can afford to dismiss them in the long term. For the time being, I think that because of their treatment against Dominicans of Haitian descent inside the Dominican Republic, the PLD and the others should prepare themselves for a job of reconstruction, damage-control, and regaining of respect and trust that is going to take some time and whose long term cost is unknown, with a possibility that it could be larger than what their ideological reactionarism, in regards to the definition of Dominican nationality, and their extreme short-term political pragmatism may yield to them in the present.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 12:29:37 +0000
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