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67 Navigating the Racial Terrain: Blackness and Mixedness in the United States and the Dominican Republic KimberlyEisonSimmons I n 1999, Anthony, an African American student studying in the Dominican Republic, was detained at the border overnight when he and some Haitian friends decided to visit Haiti for the weekend. Having accepted the invitation to visit his friends’ families across the border from Dajabón, about two hours from Santiago where he was studying, Anthony and his friends had crossed the border into Haiti without incident; but a problem arose when they tried to return to the Dominican Republic on Sunday. The border was closed. With Haitian passports in hand, along with their Dominican visas, Anthony’s friends were prepared to pay a nominal fee to enter the Dominican Republic. Unlike his friends, Anthony did not carry his passport with him and could not establish his citizenship at the border. Anthony was dark-skinned and thought to be Haitian, which made his situation even more difficult to resolve. In that moment, to the border officials, he became an undocumented Haitian trying to cross the border into the Dominican Republic. Because the officials did not believe that he was an American student studying in the Dominican Republic, he had to spend the night in a building on the border until the border officially opened the next day. Early Monday morning, Anthony contacted the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) office in Santiago, and someone from the staff faxed a copy of his passport to border officials prompting his immediate release, and he traveled back to Santiago without further incident. I heard this story for the first time when I became resident director of the CIEE Kimberly Eison Simmons 68 Study Center in Spanish Language and Caribbean Studies in Santiago in January of 2000. The previous director recounted the story and commented that since that incident, she was encouraging the African American students to carry copies of their passports with them as proof of U.S. citizenship. More to the point, she asked them to carry their passports to prove that they were not Haitian. I wondered what the studentsthoughtaboutthissuggestion,especiallyinacountrywheremanyofthemfelt aconnectiontoplace,becausetheDominicanRepublicispartoftheAfricanDiaspora (Simmons2001a,2006). CIEEhadageneralpracticeoffaxingcopiesofallofthestudents ’passportstotheU.S.EmbassytoregisterthemasAmericansinthecountry,not onlyintheDominicanRepublicbutworldwide.However,intheDominicanRepublic, the African American students were the only ones encouraged to carry a copy of their passportswiththematalltimes.White,Latino/a,andAsianAmericanstudentswere not told to carry a copy of their passports. Asdirector,Imadethesuggestionthatallstudentscarryacopyoftheirpassports with them as another form of identification, in part so that the African American students would not be singled out in orientation. I was also careful not to predict their experiences by suggesting that Dominicans would think that they were Haitian becauseoftheircolor,andinsomecases,becauseoftheirnaturalorbraidedhair(Candelario 2000). There, braids are usually associated with Haitian women, and many of the African American women students wore braids, had short, natural hair-styles, or wore their hair in natural curly locks. Dominican women, on the other hand, tend to wear their hair in straight relaxed style (Candelario 2007). This practice is changing, however, especially among the younger generation with experience in the United States among African Americans and other people of African descent (Simmons 2009). Yet hair was still a marker of racial, and therefore national, identity for many people in the Dominican Republic, and as a result, African American students were sometimesharassedonthisbasis.NotallAfricanAmericanstudentswereassociated with Haitians, however. It bears mentioning that those African American students who were lighter in complexion, even those with natural hairstyles, were not thought of as Haitian. Only the darker-skinned students, with or without natural hairstyles, were so identified. Beyond the kinds of racial identifications made on the basis of hairstyle in the Dominican Republic, there also is a practice of referring to people in public by using skin-color categories (such as morena or brown) to get their attention. This is usually thecasewhentheperson’snameisnotknown.Itiscommontohear,forexample,“Ven aquímorena”(Comehere,browngirl)whilewalkingdownthestreet.Othertermssuch asgringo/aorrubio/a(blond)wereusedifthestudentswereperceivedbyDominicansto be American or had blond hair. As a result of these kinds of accumulated experiences Na v ig a ting the Ra c ia l T e rra in 69 over the course of the semester, students began to call their whiteness, blackness, Latino(a)ness, and Americanness into question as new ideas about the significance of these categories and identities arose in the Dominican Republic. In this article, I draw on the experiences of the students as a way to situate the seeminglyconflictingracialprojectsoftheDominicanRepublicandtheUnitedStates to show that, for...

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