They arrive from the airport every Wednesday on a government provided bus to the same central downtown destination. Tonight the total number is 46, 40 men and six women. Looking tired and somewhat bewildered, they descend the steps of the large, gray Hyundai bus. Their ages vary. Some are young men, almost boys, in their early twenties. The women look to be mostly in their thirties and there are many men in their forties and perhaps even fifties. Who are these hapless Dominican wanderers descending on Santo Domingo? They are this week’s batch of deportees from the United States, coming to spend the rest of their lives in the Dominican Republic. Most of them will never entertain the possibility of returning to their wives, children, mothers, loved ones who, in turn, continue their lives in the different Dominican enclaves of New York, Boston and Miami.
Deportations of this kind began in the early 1990s as the U.S. war on drugs reached another level of draconian inventiveness. As a number of commentators and social scientists have pointed out, the impact of the drug war on communities of color has been especially disastrous. Literally hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class men and women have been dragged away from their families to spend the next five, 10, 15 and even 20 years behind bars for an ounce or two of cocaine, a couple grams of crack or a few bags of marijuana. Of course, there have been a number of relatively big-time dealers among them. But for the most part it’s the small fry who are picked up and railroaded through the courts, many “copping a plea” for fear of losing their case in front of a jury and thereby ensuring that instead of 10 to 12 years they might be doing 15 to 20. Principles of equal treatment before the law or the notion of innocent until proven guilty are largely mythical concepts when we consider the handicaps facing so many ghetto- and barrio-dwellers waiting to be arraigned. Many lack any legal knowledge or fluency in English and are the victims of institutional poverty and racism. It is out of these luckless multitudes that the Dominican deportees are derived and transplanted to a country from which they often feel socially and culturally estranged.
We are sitting on a bench in Parque Colón in the colonial zone of Santo Domingo. The Americas’ first cathedral peers imperiously over our proceedings. Javier relates to me his circumstances and how he felt when he first arrived in March 2001, after spending seven years in the character-building institutions of Attica and Sing-Sing among other New York State penitentiaries:
“I have all my papers with me. I have my green card, I have my tax statements, I have my social security stubs, I have everything. What am I doing here? I have six children all living in New York City; I haven’t seen them for years. I try to call them when I can get enough money for a long distance call but you know how things are here. You go from day to day. Some days you can make 500 pesos (20 dollars), other days you make nothing. Mostly you make very little, just enough to buy one meal a day and maybe a beer. I do little jobs for tourist guides. I’d like to get a better job but you need a nota de buena conducta (good conduct letter). If you’re a deportee it’s stamped all over it, so as soon as the employer sees that, it’s all over. What did I do? I sold prescription drugs, I think it was morphine, to an undercover. For that I got seven years and deported to a country I hadn’t been to in 20 years. All my family’s over there, all of them: my mom, my dad, my brothers, my sisters, my children. My mom always said something bad would happen to me if I kept messing up. But this? I tell you, when I first arrived I wanted to kill myself. I was gonna take an overdose of something. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
Javier’s encapsulated history is not unlike that of others I spoke with like George, Juan, José, Luis or Manolo, or many other of the 20,000 formerly legal residents of the United States who have been deported back to their homeland during the last ten years. Unfortunately for them, either when they were in prison or just before they were sent away, the U.S. Congress passed the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act which states: “An alien convicted of an aggravated felony shall be conclusively presumed to be deportable from the United States.” One of the key aspects of this legislation was the dramatically increased list of offenses that now constituted an “aggravated felony.” In effect, the present act guarantees that almost any non-citizen resident receiving a sentence of 12 months or more is automatically subject to deportation.
And so here they are. Once more in the poverty stricken barrios of Santo Domingo—often where they grew up. Back to the daily grind of electricity blackouts, erratic water supply, unemployment, no government retraining programs and a host of public services taken over by U.S. or Spanish corporations, ensuring that monthly telephone bills are on a par with those of Manhattan and electricity prices are, according to the U.S. Ambassador, the highest in the world.
George, a local English teacher at a private language school, recounts the circumstances of his own deportation: “I got caught with two ounces of cocaine and I got 20 years. Twenty years! It’s fucking unbelievable isn’t it? Sometimes I still don’t believe what I went through. I spent nine years in a maximum security prison in Trenton, New Jersey. You know what those places are like? Do you? I had six children from three different marriages. I used to keep in touch with all of them and I had three of them living with me when I was put away. The only ones I can say I know out of them now are my oldest daughter and one of my sons. Don’t talk to me about U.S. justice ‘cos it doesn’t exist for the likes of us. Not for us who don’t have tons of cash to spread around to pay all the fancy lawyers that are gonna get you off and the investigators that are gonna dig up contrary evidence. I’ve lost almost half my fucking life to the joint. I’m an intelligent man. I speak three languages fluently. I went to the United States because of the political situation back here when I was 14-years-old. I saw the Americans invade this place. I saw a lot of things back then and now I’m back again. I still don’t believe it.”
George tells me his story as he rocks back and forth in a cane rocking chair. He lives in a roomy though spartan apartment on El Conde, Santo Domingo’s once famous shopping street that has now been eclipsed by malls that have mushroomed throughout the suburbs. George inherited his living space from his mother who died earlier this year at the age of 71. She was visiting one of his sisters in New York City when she passed away after suffering for years as a chronic diabetic, a disease he also inherited. George was unable to visit her or even attend the funeral because of his deportee status. Tears well up in his eyes as he tells the story and motions to his girlfriend.
“I hardly ever go out any more. I bet you know the barrio where I grew up better than I do. Basically, I teach my English classes and I spend my time with my honey, thank god I have her. I make 5,000 pesos a month [about US$200], as long as I have ten students in the class. My rent is 14 hundred pesos, I pay my phone bill and I have enough to eat. My insulin is the most difficult thing to buy. It costs me 200 pesos for each bottle and I need at least one a week. Insulin used to be cheaper, but then the government cut out all the price supports for medicine. I think a lot of people die from diabetes because they can’t afford the medicine. No one seems to talk about it, but it’s true.”
I’m sitting on a beer crate outside a grocery store in another run-down quarter of the capital waiting for José to beckon me. José is a deportee and street hustler who has promised to introduce me to a particular sector of deportees in the city: the heroin addicts. The door to a small second-floor apartment suddenly opens and a tall, gaunt man appears, probably in his early forties. José motions me to come upstairs and join them.
As I enter the front door, I see a number of men in their twenties and thirties standing around in little groups. The air is thick with cigarette smoke and the men are courteous though a bit wary when Chino, a strapping, tall deportee who I interviewed several weeks before, comes forward. “Hi there, Davey, come to do a few interviews? Well, they are all here. These guys have a lot to tell you.”
They probably did have a lot to tell me, but unfortunately, in their present state it wasn’t forthcoming. The two that I did manage to engage over a tape recorder were very high and couldn’t stop scratching themselves. They both spoke in a soft, almost monotone voice about their struggle to survive in a country where they barely eke out an existence. Were it not for their remittances from relatives living in the United States, they would probably be rummaging through garbage cans for food and mugging unwitting victims.
Juan, the owner of the apartment “shooting gallery,” tells of the difficulties he experiences in resettling: “I’ve got nothing against Dominicans, don’t get me wrong. I’m one myself. But they’re different to those of us raised in New York and elsewhere. I don’t think like them anymore. I’m used to having my own money, to having work, to having food on the table. Over here, people look at you funny if you don’t behave like them. And then there’s the police. They’ll hit you up for not having your cédula [identification stamp] and if they know you’re a deportee they’ll always try it on you. So you always gotta be giving them some cash to get them off your back or else they’ll throw you in the hole without missing a beat. I tell you, this is a fucked situation.”
Manolo explained the predicament of the addicts in this way: “They all do that shit up there, all of them. It’s mean stuff. It’ll knock you out for the best part of a day and cost you about six dollars. It gets a hold of you and then you can’t kick it. You end up scratching and breaking out in a rash. Your skin color changes and you basically lose control of your life. All of those guys up there have lost their jobs, their cars, their apartments, everything. Nearly all of them have relapsed after spending time back here. When they first came back they were trying their best to get by, but gradually they just sink down, lower and lower. They can’t help it. It’s so hard to think positive when you’re here. You can’t see your family, you miss your friends, you can’t make a decent living. What else are you supposed to do?” Manolo’s comment succinctly describes the vicious circle many deportees are frequently caught in. Without hope, help or opportunity, old habits and life styles resurface, often endangering themselves and others.
But there are those deportees who are said to have “made it,” and are now leading fruitful lives as businessmen, police administrators and even as politicians. To be frank, I haven’t had the opportunity to meet any of them and nearly every deportee I’ve spoken to or interviewed has been living at a subsistence level sometimes with the help of U.S.-based family members who do what they can to contribute. Meanwhile, the Dominican government does absolutely nothing to make life tolerable for this involuntary population whose many skills and talents go wasted in a land where underemployment is running at 50% and poverty, both absolute and relative, afflicts at least a third of the populace. Similarly, the United States—despite its imposing presence here with its massive embassy, its trade mission and its aid headquarters—takes a hands-off approach best summarized by a political attaché at the U.S. Embassy: “Dominican deportees are not the problem of the United States. They knowingly broke the law of a country where they were guests, and now they have been dealt with according to our system of justice. We have no interest in the matter.”
The situation of the deportees is not entirely hopeless. They are beginning to organize to make their lives more bearable. This was occasioned not by any outside agency but largely by the deportees themselves and their friends in the community. At the back of a church in Cristo Rey, one of the poorest barrios in Santo Domingo, five deportees met with one of the country’s most famous radical priests, Padre Rogelio Cruz. Cruz told them: “You are human beings and you deserve the protection and privileges of all human beings. You have to reclaim yourselves from those negative labels put on you by the media, by different criminal justice systems and by governments. Of course the government wants to blame you for everything, what else can you expect from a bunch of liars and crooks. So now you have to organize yourselves and regain your dignity.”
The five deportees then talked about their vision of founding a national organization of deportees and establishing a casa de repatriados (house of the repatriated) where people could come and find social and moral support. Within a few weeks, talk had translated into action with a site for a house established and an informational brochure inviting all deportees to become members of a dynamic new support group. Luis, a co-founder of the group and a practicing barrio lawyer, stated: “We’ve got to let the people know that we’re not animals or criminals. We’re Dominicans just like them, and we deserve to be given a chance. Some of us screwed up, and we paid our debts to society. Others were guilty of nothing, but they got busted anyway. But all that’s behind us. Now we have to focus on the future.”
As planeloads of deportees continue to arrive at the airport, they will be met by a growing number of men and women in Santo Domingo who refuse to live their lives suffering in silence. While the number of deportees from the United States increases dramatically throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, this embryonic movement of the expelled in Santo Domingo perhaps offers a glimmer of hope and a model for others to follow. One thing is certain: There will be no positive changes in U.S. immigration policy any time soon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Brotherton is associate professor of sociology and criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He recently co-organized the first conference on deportees from the United States in Santo Domingo and is planning a national life course study of this population in the Dominican Republic.
