In Someone Else's Country: Anti-Haitian Racism and Citizenship in the Dominican Republic [Hardcover]

In this groundbreaking work, Trenita Childers explores the enduring system of racial profiling in the Dominican Republic, where Dominicans of Haitian descent are denied full citizenship in the only country they have ever known. As birthright citizens, they now wonder why they are treated like they are in someone elses country.

Childers describes how nations like the Dominican Republic create stateless second-class citizens through targeted documentation policies. She also carefully discusses the critical gaps between policy and practice while excavating the complex connections between racism and labor systems. Her vivid ethnography profiles dozens of Haitian immigrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent and connects their compelling individual experiences with broader global and contemporary discussions about race, immigration, citizenship, and statelessness while highlighting examples of collective resistance.

Childers (American Institutes for Research) presents an ethnographic study of race embedded in place, resulting in dichotomies of free versus unfree and citizen versus resident. Through her field research, she enables undocumented Haitians in the Dominican Republic to tell their stories of racism and alienation that attest to the stigma associated with Haitian-ness. Anti-Haitian racism is institutionalized in the DR, creating a liminal space in which Haitians live and work in enclaves, unable to leave without documentation and also unable to acquire the necessary documents in a system stacked against them. In the absence of formal identification, skin color, features, and accent are most often used to identify Haitians and to deny them the formal identification they lack. In a perpel3