More than a Massacre

This book is for readers who are interested in the history of racism, citizenship, and the legacies of slavery and empire in the Americas. Sabine F. Cadeau uses state documents and oral sources to tell the story of the carefully concealed, lesser known, twentieth-century genocide of ethnic Haitians.

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More than a Massacre is a history of race, citizenship, statelessness, and genocide from the perspective of ethnic Haitians in Dominican border provinces. Sabine F. Cadeau traces a successively worsening campaign of explicitly racialized anti-Haitian repression that began in 1919 under the American Occupiers, accelerated in 1930 with the rise of Trujillo, and culminated in 1937 with the slaughter of an estimated twenty thousand civilians. Relatively unknown by contrast with contemporary events in Europe, the Haitian-Dominican experience has yet to feature in the broader literature on genocide and statelessness in the twentieth century. Bringing to light the massacre from the perspective of the ethnic Haitian victims themselves, Cadeau combines official documents with oral sources to demonstrate how ethnic Haitians interpreted their changing legal status at the border, as well as their interpretation of the massacre and its aftermath, including the ongoing killing and land conflict along the post-massacre border.