In Someone Else’s Country

At a brief but content-rich 177 pages, In Someone Else's Country adroitly covers all of the relevant terrain that readers, from the newcomer to Dominican Studies to the scholar-expert, need to traverse in order to understand the convoluted anti-Haitian strategies deployed by the Dominican state to de-nationalize hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent (dohd); to limit Haitian immigrants' access to residency documentation and naturalization; and to deny both groups their civil, political, and human rights in order to exploit their labor in both public and private sectors.Trenita Childers usefully deploys Cecilia Menjivar's "liminal legality" concept, together with her own analysis of anti-Haitian racism in the Dominican Republic, to explain how dohd s and Haitian (im)migrants are incorporated into Dominican society as workers whose labor is critical in the agro-export, construction, domestic service, and tourism industries, while they are simultaneously barred from becoming part of the body politic.This, she argues, is the essence of the Dominican Republic's long-standing and self-engineered "Haitian problem."Organized in six chapters, Childers's lucid analysis is grounded in the relevant scholarship from both the Dominican Republic and the United States.Her book deftly covers historical, political, legislative, and sociocultural ground from a sociologically appropriate structural perspective while also offering individual stories that humanize the issues and social problems at play.She recounts the experiences of dohd s and Haitian (im)migrants who have been forced since the 1990s to navigate these increasingly byzantine and intransigent gauntlets of injustice, concluding empathetically that "as overwhelming as it was for me to make sense of these policy changes, it was even more daunting for the people impacted by these changes" (p.19).She also devotes attention to the organizing work being done by dohd s-particularly women-who have mobilized nationally, transnationally, and internationally, using both formal institutional vehicles for redress such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and grassroots organizing.Childers's mixed-method research design is exemplary, combining structured and open-ended interviewing, participant observation, ethnography, discourse analysis, and legal research.She interviewed 55 residents of the batey (industrial sugar cane plantation) that constituted her research site-an impressive 15 percent of the population, well distributed across genders, ages, and countries of birth.This is especially laudable for a nonnative speaker of Dominican Spanish and Haitian Kreyol.Beyond her ability to overcome lin

Media studies · Political science · Politics · Principle of legality · Racism · Scholarship · Sociology · Canadian Policy and Governance · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Gender Studies · Law