Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic: From Citizen to Foreigner

Eve Hayes de Kalaf

Anthem Press, 2023 - Political Science - 146 pages

Over the next decade, states will be carrying out large-scale registrations in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which aim to provide more than one billion people around the world with evidentiary proof of their legal and, increasingly, digital existence. 'Legal Identity, Race and Belonging: From Citizen to Foreigner' is an important book which identifies a connection between the role of international actors, such as the World Bank and the United Nations, in promulgating the universal provision of legal identity and links these with arbitrary measures to restrict access to citizenship paperwork from (largely) Haitian-descended people born and living in the Dominican Republic. The book provides the definitive analysis of the events leading up to the controversial 2013 Constitutional Tribunal ruling that rendered the Dominican plaintiff Juliana Deguis Pierre stateless. Hayes de Kalaf illustrates how measures that purposely blocked people of Haitian ancestry from accessing their legal identity not only affected undocumented and stateless populations - persons living at the fringes of citizenship - but also had a major impact on documented people; Dominicans already in possession of a state-issued birth certificate, national identity card and/or passport. The book illustrates the complex and contradictory ways in which digital identity systems are experienced, thus challenging the assumption within current development policy that the provision of ID to everyone, everywhere will lead to the inclusion of all citizens.

About the author

Eve Hayes de Kalaf is a research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, the UK's national centre for history, based at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and was raised in New Jersey. His fiction has appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, African Voices, and Best American Short Stories. He wrote the story collection Drown and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His debut picture book is entitled Islandborn, published June 2018. He is a professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic: From Citizen to Foreigner; Anthem series in citizenship and national identities
• Author: Eve Hayes de Kalaf
• Contributor: Junot Díaz
• Publisher: Anthem Press, 2023
• ISBN: 1839988290, 9781839988295
• Length: 146 pages
• Subjects: Political Science / Civil Rights; Political Science / Public Policy / Social Policy; Political Science / World / General; Social Science / Cultural & Ethnic Studies / American / Hispanic & Latino Studies; Social Science / Discrimination