Eleven Years of Activism at the Haitian-Dominican Border

Abstract

The 1937 Massacre, ordered by the infamous Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and carried out by the Dominican army and conscripted civilians, claimed the lives of approximately fifteen thousand Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. This article reflects on eleven years of work by Border of Lights (BOL), a transnational volunteer collective that publicly remembers the massacre and honors the lives lost. The article introduces readers to BOL and traces its impact and legacy since its inception in 2012. Written by two co-founders of BOL, the reflective piece acknowledges the physical and metaphorical “markers”—or memorials to the massacre—that exist today; we reference not only physical memorial sites but textual sites (and other “places of memory”) and temporal markers. The article ends by questioning what remembering the 1937 Massacre will look like in the future, especially as formal community organizing by BOL volunteers on the Haitian-Dominican border in the towns of Ouanaminthe, Haiti, and Dajabón, Dominican Republic, comes to an end.