Engendering “Illegality”: Blackness, citizenship, and Dominico-Haitian motherhood

Abstract

In 2013,the Dominican Republic's highest court ruled to retroactively apply the elimination of jus soli citizenship, commonly known as birthright citizenship. The ruling impacted more than 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent and culminated a decades-long attack on territorially based citizenship in the country, which largely provided access to the children of Haitians, who make up more than 80% of the country's migrants. The intensification of anti-birthright citizenship politics and the implementation of a host of restrictive measures since 2004 shifted focus from the male labor as the primary target of migrant control, to the “pregnant migrant.” This article examines how these policies shaped Dominico-Haitian women's experiences of motherhood by drawing on interviews and participant observation undertaken from 2014 to 2018 in and around Santo Domingo. I argue that anti-birthright citizenship politics target Black women's reproduction in a form of racialized violence that shares continuities with the nation's history of enslavement.