In August 2013 the Dominican artist Polibio Díaz, whose 1993 photograph Rayano was discussed in Chapter 5, received an award from the Santo Domingo Museum of Modern Art for his video-performance Manifiesto, which was presented at the Dominican Republic's National Biennial of Art. It features two illegal Haitian immigrants reading The International Immigrants Movement Manifesto in the back seat of a car while they are driven around the city of Santo Domingo on 18 December, International Migrants Day. We see and hear the man reading the Manifesto in Spanish and occasionally helping the woman next to him to translate it into Creole. The itinerary they cover is highly significant and it is crucial that all the places that the car drives by are seen by the audience from inside the car. In fact, the contours of the car windows are often visible in the frame and partly obstruct our view; as a result, while we listen to the immigrants reading and translating we are placed in the car with them and are forced to share their perspective. The first building they pass by, houses the offices of the Junta Central Electoral (‘Central Electoral Committee’), the institution which, traditionally, has arbitrarily refused birth certificates to the children of Haitians born in the Dominican Republic. As Wooding and Moseley-Williams have pointed out, this systematic discrimination has been ‘the institutional policy of the Junta Central Electoral’ for a long time: during Balaguer's administration it was also the official line of the government while, taking advantage of the fact that Junta Central Electoral is an autonomous body, subsequent governments have tended to ‘duck the issue,’ leaving the matter in the hands of the Supreme Court. A birth certificate, as we have seen, is the most important document in the Dominican Republic because, in its absence, one is denied name, nationality, citizenship, and access to health care and education, has serious difficulties in finding a ‘formal’ job, securing a pension fund, getting married, registering one's children's births, opening bank accounts, purchasing a house, and obtaining inheritance – in short, a life without a birth certificate is the life of ‘an underclass non-citizen.’

The preceding chapter ended with a desperate inmate calling the prison of the southern border-crossing of Pedernales a ‘graveyard of living men, where men are broken and friends are forgotten!,’ a sentiment arguably amplified by its locus of enunciation. This chapter gives detailed attention to two novels, a long poem, a film, and a piece of investigative journalism which concentrate on different ramifications of what, in La criatura terrestre, Rueda has called ‘the forgotten heart-breaking epic of […] border struggle’ (p. 26; emphasis mine). In addition, some of the works under scrutiny here remind us of particularly vulnerable border-crossers, namely the Haitian braceros working in Dominican bateyes. Their predicament was brought under the spotlight in 1979 by the London Anti-Slavery Society, which broke the silence and the strategic collective amnesia surrounding their condition. Backward looks will not be infrequent but, generally speaking, the texts and contexts at the core of this and the following chapters will deal with Hispaniola from the 1960s onwards.

In 1998, in his introduction to the Antología Literaria Contemporánea de la Frontera, Francisco Paulino Adames forcefully complained about the state of neglect suffered by the Dominican borderland. Adames was not alone in holding such views: four years earlier, in his novel La Frontera (‘The Frontier’), the Dajabónero Diego D'Alcalá also lamented the state of abandonment in which the central powers had traditionally left his native province. In his short preface, in fact, D'Alcalá explains that, as a work in progress, his novel had a different title, along the lines of ‘the novel of forgotten and/or omitted things.’ In La Frontera D'Alcalá describes the hardship of the inhabitants of the northern borderland, especially in Macaboncito, Dajabón, and Ouanaminthe, and offers his analysis of border relations between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

The texts analysed in the previous chapters highlight the existence of areas overlapping with the current borderland of Hispaniola which, like the chiefdom of Jaragua and the indigenous strongholds in the Bahoruco mountains, were characterized by a rebellious ethos before and after the two European colonies established themselves on the island. The same can be said, as we have seen, for the ‘borderland from below’, which played a decisive role in the 1791 slave uprising and the Haitian Revolution that followed it and erased forever the French colony of Saint Domingue from the world map. Unavoidably, these events also had social, political, racial, and religious repercussions on the Spanish side of Hispaniola. Esteban Deive's Viento Negro, bosque del caimán (‘Black Wind, Bois Caiman’, 2002) reconstructs the effects of this earth-shattering historical moment on Spanish Santo Domingo – a usually neglected perspective – while recasting the borderland as a site for rich cross-cultural exchange. Born in Spain in 1935, Deive moved to Santo Domingo in 1955 and, ten years later, was given Dominican nationality. Deive lives in Santo Domingo and is currently a member of the Academia Dominicana de la Lengua; he is the author of many books on Dominican history and cultural anthropology as well as of novels and plays for which he has received numerous awards – among others, Premio Nacional de Literatura in 1962 and 2001; Premio Nacional de Ensayo in 1976 and 1981; Premio Siboney de Literatura in 1978; and Premio Alonso de Suazo de Historia in 1980.

Deive's Viento Negro criss-crosses Hispaniola at a crucial time in its past and from the point of view of a problematic and tense present, and insists that a better future for the island depends on a transcolonial and transnational understanding of its history and on the elimination, once and for all, of xenophobic nationalism. A revisitation of dominant discourses related to the magical world of the island and to the representation of Vodou plays an important part in Deive's recasting of the past and in his creative narrative which, in a way like Vodou itself, aims to go beyond differences and previous enmities to highlight and gain strength from connections, mutual influences, and shared (but disavowed) empowering experiences.

The fluid world of Rueda's raya where, as we have seen, according to one of the eyewitnesses of the massacre, the people from the two sides of the border felt a deep sense of unity, is vividly reconstructed in El hombre del acordeón (‘The accordion man,’ 2003), one of the novels under scrutiny here. This chapter presents four fictional recreations of the events written between 1955 and 2003 by writers who had not directly experienced the 1937 events: three of the authors featured here were born in Haiti, one in the Dominican Republic; two have resided mostly on the island while two have spent a remarkable part of their lives abroad. Yet, despite their differences of origin, context, and approach, they can all be seen as committed utopian thinkers animated by an urge to investigate the complex and troubled past of the borderland in order to identify in it a promise for a better future. Crucially, they all seem to imply, more or less forcefully, that this promise can be kept.

The first of the works analysed here is the most recent: El hombre del acordeón, by the Dominican poet, novelist, archaeologist, anthropologist, and critic Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, who weaves a vivid and diversified tapestry with the complex human, political, and cultural fabric of the northern borderland. Born in Santo Domingo in 1963, Veloz Maggiolo is a prolific author who has received multiple awards (Premio Nacional de Poesía in 1961; Premio Nacional de Novela in 1962, 1981, and 1992, and Premio Nacional de Cuento in 1981) for his literary works, many of which have been translated in various languages. Veloz Maggiolo has long been committed to dismantling the ideological apparatus of Trujllo and his followers, and El hombre del acordeón, set in the years just before and after the 1937 massacre, presents and investigates the often contradictory dynamics of a society deeply traumatized by a murderous dictatorial regime which violently ripped apart a well-established way of life.

The previous chapter closed with harrowing images from the film Jean Gentil depicting the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti on 12 January 2010. The earthquake was also felt in the Dominican Republic, where, although the seismic activity was much reduced and did not cause any serious damage, its occurrence was a compelling reminder of the inescapable, but often disavowed fact that Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island. After the catastrophe, many Dominicans performed gestures of solidarity towards Haitians in need; one of the most publicized stories was the case of Sonia Marmolejos, a young Dominican woman who, on 14 January, was in the Darío Contreras hospital of Santo Domingo with her new-born daughter. Marmolejos became famous because she decided to breastfeed wounded, hungry, and dehydrated Haitian children who had been admitted to the hospital after the disaster. The Dominican government capitalized on this story, defining Marmolejos as a heroine, and used her actions as a metaphor to illustrate the charitable response of the country towards neighbouring Haiti. Formerly considered a country where Haitian immigrant workers were denied their human rights, after the earthquake the Dominican Republic was determined to change its international reputation and refashion itself as Haiti's ‘Good Samaritan.’

Marmolejos's gesture has also been praised by the Dominican–American writer Junot Díaz in a long article entitled ‘Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal,’ in which he acknowledges the prompt mobilization of the Dominican government and the generous response of Dominicans towards Haitians in need. In his article Díaz points out that the word ‘apocalypse’ derives from the Greek apocalypsis, meaning ‘to uncover,’ ‘to unveil,’ and, using James Berger as his springboard, he calls the earthquake ‘an apocalypse of the third kind’ – that is, ‘a disruptive event that provokes a revelation’ and unmasks pernicious discourses ‘that we as a society seek to run away from [and] hide behind veils of denial.’ In the context of the Dominican Republic, some of these pernicious veils of denial are simultaneously the product and the origin of anti-Haitian propaganda.

Rueda's Bienvenida y la noche, as we have seen, ends with Trujillo departing from the city of Montecristi in 1929 after delivering a threatening speech (p. 154). On 2 October 1937, after he had ruled the country for seven years, Trujillo addressed the inhabitants of the Montecristi province again in order to make very clear his intention to eradicate, once and for all, the Haitian presence from the Dominican borderland. After accusing the Haitians of stealing from the Dominicans he promised his compatriots that he would ‘solve the problem. Indeed,’ he said, ‘we have already begun. Around three hundred Haitians were killed in Bánica. The solution must continue.’ Trujillo's solution was to forcibly include the unruly and disorderly raya into his geography of management by turning it into the dominated ‘Dominicanized’ and modernized frontier. This not only caused the death of thousands of people but also impacted on the lives of the rayanos who continued to live on the borderland and had to pay the price of modernization, and transformed the lives of the settlers of the agricultural colonies which were established on both sides of the border in the aftermath of the massacre.

The human and environmental costs of post-1937 modernization are brought to the fore by some of the texts included in this chapter. Others reveal the incongruities which emerge when both the Dominicanized borderland, which up to that point existed only at the level of discourse, and the model agricultural colonies as they were planned and envisaged ‘on paper’ – what Lefebvre would call ‘conceived’ or even ‘representational’ spaces – are approached from the perspective of those for whom they were places in which they had to live and develop practices of daily life informed by mechanisms of survival and resistance against abusive governments often supported by exploitative foreign interests.

In the immediate aftermath of the Haitian earthquake Junot Díaz was not the only one who hoped that the earthquake could turn into an opportunity to improve the relationship between the two nations which share Hispaniola. Many writers and artists tried to play a central role to support and promote solidarity and the kind of cultural exchange which could make a difference: for example, in July 2011 the Caravan Cultural de la Isla/ Karavan Kulturèl Zile saw more than a hundred artists from both Haiti and the Dominican Republic travelling from Santo Domingo to Jimaní and performing in Oeste, Baní, Cabral, and Jimaní. In Jimaní, the route to Port-au-Prince was declared the ‘The Route of Solidarity’ and, combining music, dance, theatre, painting, photography, and literature, the artists continued their journey across the border to Port-au-Prince through Fond Parisien, Gantier, Croix-des-Bouquets, and the camps for those displaced by the earthquake in Karadé. In 2012 the Dominican poet Basilio Belliard and the Haitian poet Gahston Saint-Fleur compiled Palabras de una isla/ Paroles d'une île, the first anthology of poems featuring, side by side, Haitian poems translated into Spanish and Dominican poems translated into French. Incidentally, the volume is dedicated to the poet Jacques Viau, who was born in Port-au-Prince and moved to the Dominican Republic in 1948 with his father. He was killed in 1965, at the age of twenty-three, by American troops when Haitians and Dominicans fought together on the side of the constitucionalistas, an important moment of transnational solidarity also celebrated by Klang in L’île aux deux visages.

The contradictory dynamics engendered by the presence of a colonial frontier in Hispaniola are carefully highlighted in the work of Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, which concerns itself with pre-revolutionary French Saint Domingue and Spanish Santo Domingo. A prominent member of the white creole elite born in Martinique in 1750, Saint-Méry is the author of a monumental work which set out to describe Hispaniola in its entirety but within the framework of its geopolitical colonial division. The Description Topographique et Politique de la partie espagnole de l'Isle Saint-Domingue was published in Philadelphia in 1796 and followed, a year later, by the Description Topographique, Physique, Civile, Politique et Historique de la partie française de l'Isle Saint-Domingue. With its neat two-fold division, Saint-Méry's work is organized in a way that invites readers to take for granted the partition of the island between Spain and France and betrays Saint-Méry's determination to contribute to the consolidation of what Muir would call a ‘vertical interface.’

Saint-Méry's Description of the partie française has received more attention from historians and scholars, particularly because it contains his well-known detailed racial taxonomies and offers precious information on pre-revolutionary Saint Domingue. What matters here, however, is that, back in the eighteenth century, Saint-Méry had fully realized that, in order to be fully understood, the island of Hispaniola has to be approached in its entirety. While being ultimately committed to the (re)inscription of the colonial frontier, both Saint-Méry's Descriptions intriguingly oscillate between its erasure and its reinforcement. Moreover, as determined as he might have been to contribute to the consolidation of the colonial border, which, at the time of writing, had only very recently been officially sanctioned, Saint-Méry also reveals the existence of horizontal dimensions and dynamics which transcend and traverse this vertical interface.

Smuggling and illicit trade between the two parts of the island were an open secret; for a long time the two colonies were prevented from trading with one another by their respective mother countries but did so all the same, out of necessity and mutual advantage.