Documenting the ‘Stateless’

Hispaniola is the name of the medium-sized Caribbean island nestled between Puerto Rico and Cuba.

It’s where Christopher Columbus first landed his ship in the Americas in 1492, deciding the fate of an entire continent. It was home to the Taíno, an Indigenous people who were all but exterminated in the decades following first contact. And for the last 200-plus years it has been shared by two separate countries: the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

The opening title cards of Michèle Stephenson’s new film Stateless cut right to the chase: despite historic cross-border solidarity between these two nations, racial tensions have existed since colonial rule.

The Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic and French/Creole-speaking Haiti share more than 80 border entry points. In 1937, in an effort to restrict border crossings and to whiten the Dominican population, dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered what was effectively a genocide of Haitians and Black Haitian descendants living in the Dominican Republic. Thousands were massacred.

Fast forward three-quarters of a century to 2013, and state-sanctioned racial cleansing had taken on a new and more insidious form.

In an attempt to expel Haitians from the country, the Dominican Constitutional Court revoked citizenship from all Dominicans of Haitian descent retroactive to 1929. The new law left over 200,000 people without any national identity or official home, stranded in bureaucratic limbo between the two countries.

New York-based Canadian filmmaker Stephenson, herself of Panamanian and Haitian heritage, set out to document the injustice of this situation, wielding a camera and a powerful narrative. The result is available for screening as part of this year’s online DOXA Documentary Film Festival.

When we first meet human rights attorney and activist Rosa Iris Diendomi Álvarez, she’s in full action. Accompanying a young Black Dominican man to the immigration office, she is arguing with a government official over the man’s paperwork. After having asked the man if he is indeed Dominican, the official turns to Diendomi Álvarez, telling her that he does not speak Spanish.

Diendomi Álvarez fires back immediately. “He is not a migrant,” she says. “He is a Dominican citizen, just like you and me. He was born here.”

What Diendomi Álvarez is fighting for is personal. The daughter of a fifth-generation Haitian-Dominican mother and a Haitian migrant father, she’s advocating for her own community. Like so many other Dominicans of Haitian descent, she has lived all her life in the Dominican Republic.

But she’s watched the government systematically discriminate against her people.

In a television broadcast we hear Dominican President Danilo Medina respond to claims that the state is targeting and expelling Haitian Dominicans. He counters that this information is “completely false” and that the government is instead performing an act of benevolent care in asking every citizen to register for new identification under a “national regularization plan.”

It’s a story that feels all too close to home for anyone watching Trump’s America. And Stephenson is well aware of this.

We soon meet another character that strikes a familiar chord. At the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, people cross between the two countries daily. Gladys Feliz-Pimentel, a member of the Dominican nationalist party, a right-wing citizen-led group, documents them with her point-and-shoot camera.

“Haitians commit murder, they assault, they chop people up... because that’s the way they operate,” Feliz-Pimentel tells Stephenson. “Dominican families are victim to this every day and the government does nothing.”

It’s a perspective we’ve heard before. And Feliz-Pimentel’s next words solidify the parallel: “Our nationalist movement has submitted a few proposals to the government,” she says. “First, the government must build a wall.”

Stephenson has spoken in interviews about the similarities between the situation in the Dominican Republic and the increasing racial tensions and anti-immigrant sentiment unfolding in the U.S. and across the world. She’s noted that the right-wing nationalist movement in the Dominican Republic is a microcosm of larger global white-supremacist movements.

What Stateless really brings into sharp relief is just how intricate the workings of white supremacy and racism are — especially in colonized nations.

Over 80 per cent of the population in the Dominican Republic is Black or biracial. At a protest that Feliz-Pimentel attends at the national immigration office, she is surrounded by a group of Dominicans of Black, European and mixed heritage angrily demanding that Haitians return to “their country.”

The scene captures the complex reality of many Latin American and other countries still grappling with the painful legacy of colonialism and slavery: internalized racism, colourism and anti-Blackness, and deep-seated issues of class and racial inequity.

Feliz-Pimentel, we later learn, is the direct descendant of one of the nation’s founding fathers. She also married — and later divorced — a Black Dominican man, and her own children are Black.

Yet she argues that “the invasion” of Haitians is not an issue of race. It’s about volume, a population control issue. She sees the Dominican nation as Dominicans’ “big house” — a house that needs to be “fixed.”

Feliz-Pimentel is a powerful foil to Diendomi Álvarez — both are equally passionate about what they are fighting for, but one is motivated by xenophobia and the other by anger and grief at the injustice taking place around her.

Stateless is a careful and intelligent film that avoids simplistic narratives. It does not set out to convince its audience of anything. Instead it lets us draw our own conclusions. In Feliz-Pimentel, Stephenson has captured white supremacy in its less obvious form: a surprisingly warm, mild-mannered woman who jokes about how sweet she likes her tea one moment and spews hateful, ignorant rhetoric about Haitians being “rapists and murderers” the next.

The remainder of Stateless focuses on Diendomi Álvarez and the heartbreaking endeavour she takes on as she attempts to help her cousin, a man named Juan Teofilo Murat, who’s been stranded in Haiti as a result of the new citizenship law.

This is the emotional core of the film, and it is a sobering one.

Murat, like Diendomi Álvarez, has spent his entire life in the Dominican Republic. His two young children live there. And yet he’s run into an issue with incorrect birth certificates — his own and his mother’s — that’s meant he has become one of thousands displaced and separated from family members.

Watching Diendomi Álvarez and Murat as they embark on a perilous journey across various border checkpoints from Haiti into the Dominican Republic is alarming and upsetting. Wearing hidden body cameras, they document the persistent interrogation they face at each stop: “Are you Dominican?” the border patrolmen ask. The question is fraught with deeper racial tension.

While this story of present-day flight takes place in real-time, Stephenson weaves in an aesthetically haunting, magic-realist fable from the past. In voiceover, Diendomi Álvarez recounts a story to her son about Moraime, a young Black woman who is fleeing the country during the genocide of 1937.

The segments detailing Moraime’s journey are dream-like, showing images of inverted cane fields and children running along muddy country paths. They feel heavy with symbolism as we watch the desperation of Juan Teofilo’s own parallel plight, caught up in what feels increasingly like the same struggle nearly 100 years later.

Diendomi Álvarez is the fiery heart of Stephenson’s story. Not only does she spend her days travelling the country to help Juan Teofilo and other Haitian-Dominicans with their registration documents, but she eventually decides to run for congress to continue her organizing work.

It is difficult to watch as she strives to win over voters, facing brutal social-media backlash and threats and passionately voicing her commitment to justice and change, all while her opponents hand out $100 peso notes to buy votes.

Like so many places around the world — and all throughout Latin America — the game was rigged before it even began.

One of the final images in Stateless is one of its most powerful: the camera pans up from a busy, noisy road to land on a large nationalist-party banner that reads “Without borders, there is no nation.”

Looking on as the world burns, and at the chaos, pain and brutality that nation-building has inflicted on so many people, it’s hard not to feel that maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

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'Stateless' is available to screen as part of DOXA’s online virtual festival until June 26.