Undocumented Dominican Migration

Raúl

Raúl I am lying on a damp bed in Las Galeras, reading through a pile of photocopies . A bilateral agreement, a Coast Guard budget request, another study with “transnational” in the title. The tedium is polyrhythmic: on one side someone’s bachata on auto-replay and on the other the torture of television murders backed up by competing merengues. But the next work in the pile, a migrant testimony, broke through the tedium and distractions and put me inside a migrant’s mind on a yola. I read the book through in amazement, then studied the photograph of the author, Raúl. He was tall and skinny, dressed in a wedding-white suit and exuding an evangelical demeanor. The next morning, on an Internet center’s dumpy computer, I searched for Raúl and sent an email. That was the beginning of a friendship. Raúl is an amalgam of audacity and humility, of ambition and a love of simple pleasures. When his parents separated in his early childhood he lived with his paternal grandmother, alternating between Santo Domingo and “eating fruit and chasing chickens” in rural Cotuí. The grandmother, like his mother, was strong-willed and hard-working; Raúl inherited those qualities. After six years, when he was nine, he reunited with his single mother, who supported Raúl and his five siblings by selling fried meats and plantains. Raúl’s path to migration began with studies of English. The language skills made him eligible for a job at a car-rental agency (better-qualified candidates had declined the job due to the poor salary), which in turn put 164 Undocumented Dominican Migration him in contact with a yola-trip organizer who rented vans to transport migrants .The personal relations with the organizer afforded a discount: Raúl paid $300 instead of the $500 that others were charged, which made migration more within his means. At the time of his departure in 1986, Raúl was twenty-three, was earning $133 per month at the car-rental agency, and had completed a year of university studies in systems engineering. The first migration attempt failed because the yola, “a little boat for twelve people,” was overloaded with sixty. The inherent buoyancy of the vessel was overwhelmed, and, on the verge of sinking, the captain turned back, unloaded weight (including some passengers who volunteered to swim), and barely made it to shore. Raúl’s mother had opposed the trip and was reinforced in her opposition after this failure. Raúl was brooding , broke, unemployed, and hungry. Rather than burdening his mother, however, he sold an iron that he had used to press his rent-a-car shirt and sustained himself with the proceeds. His mother later reciprocated the kindness, giving him $100 that she owed to a butcher so Raúl would have cash for his journey. Raúl’s second voyage departed soon after the first, again on a small and overloaded vessel. The organizers decided to leave secretly from Punta Cana, a tourist site on the eastern coast of the Dominican Republic, rather than paying off the Dominican navy for another illegal departure. The yola leaked profusely, and Raúl—self-appointed to the task—bailed constantly and struggled to understand the lethargic indifference of other passengers. The yola was underpowered by two outboard engines, one twenty-five and the other forty horsepower, and both were disabled en route when a wave crashed overand soaked them.The yola drifted for five hours, leaving plenty of time to think about slow death by dehydration and corpses given over to the ocean. Capsize also seemed inevitable as the engineless yola rocked and bobbed violently in the rough seas off the coast of Puerto Rico, with unpredictable waves breaking over the sideboards and drenching the screaming passengers. After repair of the engines and a rest on Desecheo Island, the migrants arrived finally at a Puerto Rican beach and waded ashore in chest-deep water. The crew sank the yola to evade detection; the engines and gas tanks were hidden in brush. The migrants were stranded, however, because the ground transportation awaiting them had long since departed. Raúl and the sixty-six other migrants hid in the monte for twelve hours, fighting off mosquitoes and ants, while new transportation was arranged. Raúl 165 Dehydrated and hungry, exhausted after days at sea, the migrants crowded into...