On September 26th 2013, the Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic invalidated the nationality of children born to unauthorized migrants retroactively from the last 90 years. The rule stripped the nationality of tens of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent within days. Join Ana Maria Belique, one of the leaders of Reconocido (Red Común Nacional Organizada de Ciudadanos/as Dominicanos/as), a movement that campaigns for citizenship rights and equality for all Dominicans of Haitian descent, mobilizes and empowers marginalized communities, and accompanies people who need legal support to access their documents.
PANELISTS
Ana Belique: Sociologist and social activist. Ana is a founding member of the Reconoci.do movement, a group of young people fighting against the sentence 168-13 and discrimination in the Dominican Republic. She has stood out for being one of the main leaders and spokeswoman for Dominicans of Haitian descent. She is currently leading the Muñecas Negras RD initiative that seeks to empower black women from vulnerable communities in bateyes by rescuing the values of Afro identity and creating economic opportunities.
Amarilys Estrella is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Afro Latinx Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She holds a Master’s in Latin America and Caribbean Studies and a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from New York University. Her dissertation research examined the role of human rights discourse in transnational activism against anti-Black racism in the Dominican Republic. Estrella is also an organizing member of We Are All Dominican (WAAD), a collective of graduate students, educators, scholars, artists, activists, and community members of Dominican and Haitian descent residing in New York City who joined forces in October 2013 to denounce the Dominican Constitutional Tribunals’s decision, TC-0168/13, which stripped the nationality of hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent.