594 Wendy Hunter and Francesca Reece Nonrecognition and erasure of citizenship: A saga of administrative entanglements The difficulties that Dominico-Haitians have experienced in navigating the country’s bureaucracy—most notably the JCE (Junta Central Electoral)—have played a consistent and ongoing role in their marginalization. This section chronicles and analyzes these challenges. From the beginning of many people’s lives and extending to their efforts to restore citizenship that was retroactively erased, Dominico-Haitians have done battle with the state. For decades, consistent with the concept of “blame avoidance” (Weaver 1986, 375), government officials have diverted responsibility for their plight to the JCE, the agency in charge of registering and maintaining the records of Dominicans and granting the identification documents necessary to confirm citizenship. It speaks volumes that political leaders continue to allow the JCE this responsibility, knowing full well that the agency (besides being under-resourced and incompetent) employs large numbers of registrars who arbitrarily turn away people with a rightful claim to state services. As we could expect, the poorest and most marginalized Dominico-Haitians—residents of bateyes, shantytown camps constructed around sugarcane mills—experience the greatest difficulties in interacting with the state. Exceptionally limited schooling and income among this population hinder their ability to deal with the bureaucracy in general.7 Not having their (Dominican) births registered and certified puts them at a distinct disadvantage in trying to navigate the onerous administrative processes necessary to have their citizenship restored after 2014. Even their higher-status counterparts with official proof of having been born in the country have found it difficult to clear the requisite administrative hurdles and often fail to do so. Despite long-standing hostilities between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, manifested in strong anti-Haitian sentiments held by many Dominicans (Contreras 2016) and expressed frequently by political elites to mobilize electoral support (Morgan, Hartlyn, and Espinal 2011; Lozano 2014; Mayes 2018; Haggard and Kaufman 2021, 22), the Dominican constitution of 1929 granted citizenship to the children of migrants based on the jus soli principle.8 It conferred citizenship on every person born in the country except for the children of foreigners present in a diplomatic capacity or otherwise “in transit,” a phrase that was not explicitly defined but was generally understood to mean passing through for ten days or less (Sears 2014; Román and Sagás 2017; Sagás 2017). Thus, for decades, notwithstanding their socioeconomic marginality, the Dominican-born offspring of migrant workers who had settled in the DR were considered legal Dominican citizens. Jus soli endured as the ruling principle of citizenship until 2010, when a new constitution abolished its automatic application (República Dominicana 2010).9 Even before this legal change, a long-standing problem was that many Dominican-born descendants of Haitian immigrants lacked official evidence of their birth in the country. This was the first administrative strike against them, because birth certificates are the principal means of identification for all Dominican nationals under the age of eighteen, at which age they must apply for voter registration and national identity cards (cédula de identidad). Contributing to underdocumentation was the poor state of public health services, which led many Haitian migrants to give birth at home (Riveros 2014, 70); faulty coordination between existing public hospitals and the JCE (UNICEF 2016a, 13, 19, 22–27); and sparse distribution of civil registry offices, especially in regions with high 7 The illiteracy rate among youth in the bateyes is approximately 20 percent and among those aged sixty and older closer to 40 percent (Hasbún Martínez 2014, 23). See also CESDEM (2015, 6–10). 8 See Thornton and Ubiera (2019) on the need for scholars of the DR to consider divisions beyond racial and national identity. 9 Since that time, babies born of parents who could not present a national ID card (cédula) have been unable to secure Dominican citizenship (Corbacho and Osorio Rivas 2012, 29; UNICEF 2016a, 26). https://doi.org/10.1017/lar.2022.48 Published online by Cambridge University Press