Undocumented Dominican Migration

Preface

Preface The beach is windblown and covered with debris; the palms rise gently at odd angles. Families of pigs, foraging in the scrub, menace and grunt to protest my approach before retreating at a ridiculous trot. The piglets, sidelit, give an afterglow of indecent pink. I’m heading toward a naval outpost in the distance—it’s on the beach to impede undocumented migration —but my access is blocked by a river. I try to wade across, pause, and back off; it’s too deep. That’s when I heard the motorbike. The driver dismounted, hid his shoes under coconut husks, stripped down to briefs that were impossibly white, and walked toward the surf with his fishing net. I waved; we talked. His name was Rafael. He knew the river and guided me across, then reappeared for the return after I interviewed the recruits at the naval station. Rafael related that for a ten-year period in the 1980s and 1990s he had been a captain of yolas, the wooden boats used by undocumented migrants to cross the Mona Passage between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. I invited him to my hotel to record an interview, he agreed, and we went together on his motorbike. Rafael’s career as a yola captain ended in 1995 when one of his trips was interdicted at sea and he was prosecuted in Puerto Rico for migrant smuggling. He served half of a three-year sentence in federal prison and was deported. Under U.S. law Rafael is considered a smuggler, but like most yola captains he had no role in the organization of illegal voyages. Yola captains are generally fishermen who are hired by trip organizers to x Undocumented Dominican Migration transport passengers. The captains supplement or replace their meager fishing incomes with this more lucrative opportunity. They are guilty because they knowingly accept employment in the illegal transport of migrants , but their arrest is of little consequence in the disruption of organized smuggling. Another fisherman can always be recruited, and the trip organizers, who generally work in collusion with corrupt Dominican authorities , remain free to continue their enterprise. One must distinguish, therefore, between the organizers of migrant smuggling operations (organizadores) and the captains (capitanes) who pilot the boats. That distinction must in turn be qualified by two others: on locally organized voyages the organizer and the captain are often the same person (in which case culpability before the law increases, although the scale is small); and on trips that are self-organized by family and friends there may be no captain because the responsibilities are assumed collectively by the migrants themselves. In all cases, the word “captain” is misleading because it implies a significant vessel and a sophisticated operation. Yolas, quite to the contrary, are rustic, unseaworthy boats powered by outboard motors, and the captains have no qualifications other than widely varying maritime knowledge and experience. Many captains fatally bungle their transports simply for lack of expertise. The United States Coast Guard refers to captains as “masters,” meaning the person legally responsible for the vessel. The captains are accompanied by one or more crew members or assistants (ayudantes), who in the U.S. legal system tend to be prosecuted as co-captains. Crew members come from at least three sources: they are provided by the organizer, they are trusted friends or coworkers of the captain (sometimes the helpers on his fishing boat), and they are migrants —usually the poorest—who offer their services in exchange for all or part of the smuggling fee. Members of this last group are the most unfortunate , because their poverty, rather than their willful complicity in smuggling, makes them vulnerable to prosecution. The word “smuggler” itself confers an eerie stigma that hardly corresponds to Rafael or the other yola captains I interviewed.U.S. federal agencies describe migrant smuggling as the work of criminal gangs, perhaps adapting that concept from drug trafficking, but I encountered instead the disorganized or loosely organized ventures of forthright men—many of them young—who had a skill that was marketable and who satisfied a need in their communities. There are undoubtedly unscrupulous and murderous criminals among them, particularly in the high-volume orga- Preface xi nized smuggling operations that were typical in the 1980s and 1990s, but the great majority of captains are men with principles and behaviors consonant with those of their society. This consonance is not...