A Dream Deported: Race, Crime, and Deportation in Transnational Haiti (WGF - Post PhD Research Grant)

Summary

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Since 2011, the United States has classified an increasing number of migrants as 'criminal aliens' for the purposes of deportation. Recent studies have illustrated this policy's social toll: chronic insecurity among migrants, suffering among families torn apart, and alienation among those sent to an unfamiliar 'homeland' and as 'criminals' (e.g., Boehm 2016;Coutin 2016;Golash-Boza 2015;Khosravi 2018). These accounts underscore how criminal deportation targets Latino and Caribbean migrants, reinforcing longstanding patterns of race-based criminalization in the United States. Building on this finding, I plan to conduct an ethnography of the yet unstudied subgroup of Haitian deportees (depòte), who offer a unique vantage point to theorize the transnational intersection of race, criminalization, and deportation not only because they primarily identify as black but also because they experience the criminalization of their blackness both in the United States and in Haiti. Depòte who have endured racial profiling in the United States return to Haiti to confront the prejudices of Haitians who suspect them of importing violence, crime, and what is perceived as a disreputable African American culture to Haiti. Initial research has yielded both anticipated and unexpected outcomes: such prejudices can make finding employment, housing, and community in Haiti difficult, but some depòte have been able to subvert the categories of their racial subjugation to become rap music stars, hip-hop DJs, or urban block leaders. Offering a new longitudinal approach in the ethnography of deportation, the proposed ethnography will follow twenty depòte over the first few years of resettlement, allowing a picture of their everyday struggles and successes to emerge and inform how they rebuild lives in Haiti structured not only by but also around their criminalized transnational racial identity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• WGF - Support for Research Projects   •
• Wenner-Gren Foundation

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Contact(s): Wenner-Gren Foundation

Notes

Rights & Attribution: This resource is an application from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and has been approved by the grantee solely for pedagogical purposes. Please do not cite, circulate, or duplicate any part of these documents without the express written consent of the author.

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