Undocumented Dominican Migration

Orlando

Orlando Orlando’s first problem was his race. He was born with skin darker than the siblings who preceded him and his father rejected him at birth. “That’s when the problems began,” Orlando relates, and they got worse as his childhood progressed. The father had married Orlando’s mother after serving eighteen years in prison for a double homicide he committed in his youth. The mother, born into a family that could not sustain its ten children, was given away at the age of two. She married Orlando’s father when she was fourteen. Orlando’s darker skin, although like hers, prompted accusations of her infidelity . The father denied paternity, resented Orlando, and later in childhood abused him cruelly. The abuse was complemented by neglect and Orlando was eventually sent to live with a grandmother. The neglect, nevertheless, continued.The grandmother had little more to offer Orlando than her indifference and chronic poverty. Orlando managed as best he could on his own: “I grew up eating mangos from trees, stealing chickens, stealing eggs, sleeping on the beach under boats.” He became accustomed to solitude. He developed the skills of a defiant outsider . “I was a person without a father, without a mother,” and finally “a total delinquent” surviving by his wits on petty crime. “What I learned there stayed with me for years,” Orlando adds, “the same story as my father, the same pattern that I learned. That’s why I wound up in prison.” Orlando left the Dominican Republic on a fishing boat at the age of nineteen in 1973, before maritime migration was common. By that time 80 Undocumented Dominican Migration he had already fathered five children of his own, three with one girl and two with another. He described his departure almost as flight, as a wounded man fleeing a loveless youth and a life that had overwhelmed him. “I didn’t even know what I was doing because my head was screwed up, I was traumatized, I was dead. Because a human being who is not raised in the warmth of family can’t be a good person. Some kids come home and their mothers say, ‘How are you son, I love you, I adore you, here, I made you some food, I got you these clothes.’ That’s where human relations begin, in the family. If you don’t have that, you’re raised dead.” Orlando paused, thought for a moment, and added: “All of that hatred and bitterness accumulated inside me for years. I left with that inside me. I just wanted to forget. I wanted nothing to do with family or mother or father or children or wife. I was dead.” Orlando organized the voyage and departed from Miches with five others. The boat was insanely underpowered by a six-horsepower engine and Orlando navigated without a compass, but somehow the group arrived without incident at the Puerto Rican coast, at Añasco, in three days. Upon arrival they called a taxi, were stopped by the police, and shortly after were repatriated. A year later Orlando organized another trip, this time with ten people in a nineteen-foot boat propelled by a 7.5-horsepower motor. During this five-day journey the sea got rough and the boat nearly capsized. The passengers began to argue about whether to continue or turn back, but Orlando, already “dead,” was determined to risk the crossing. He calmly related how he almost threw two passengers overboard to shut them up and continue in peace. Somehow, again, the voyage ended safely on a Puerto Rican beach, this time in Aguadilla. The passengers scrambled for cover in the brush and made their respective ways inland. Orlando headed for his half-sister’s house in the Hato Rey section of San Juan. Upon arrival he had a surprise: some others from his boat were there too. They were, it turned out, distant relatives on his father’s side, seeking refuge at the home of someone more or less known.The sister blamed their descent on Orlando—“You filled my house with illegals”—and refused the welcome that otherwise she might have offered. Orlando felt betrayed. His negative view of family was reinforced. Broke, homeless, and bitter, he made his way first to Loíza (“where there are people the same color as me”) and then Fajardo. He eventually bought false documents that made him employable and was licensed for work in scuba diving. [52.14.126.74] Project MUSE...