Sabine Cadeau is a historian of Modern Latin America and the Caribbean who recently joined McGill University's Department of History and Classical Studies as an Associate Professor. A gradaute of the University of Chicago (PhD'2015), Cadeau's research focuses on the early modern Atlantic World as well as modern Latin America and Carribean history, with a particular focus on Haiti. Her first book, "More than a Massacre: Racial Violence and Citizenship in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands" (University of Cambridge Press), traces the worsening campaign of explicitly racialized anti-Haitian repression that began in 1919 under American occupation, and culminated in 1937 with the slaughter of around 20,000 civilians. In 2023, "More Than a Massacre" was also awarded the Latin American Studies Association's Bryce Wood Book Award and the Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide.
We spoke to Professor Cadeau about her book, the importance of remembering the 1937 Haitian genocide and her experiences in the field.
Q: “More Than a Massacre” is a history of race, citizenship, statelessness and genocide from the perspective of ethnic Haitians in Dominican border provinces. How did you come to grow your interest in this particular subject and its continuing legacy in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and amongst the Haitian diaspora?
SC: While I was living and researching in the Dominican Republic, the Haitian-Dominican question, and the Haitian-Dominican civil rights movement led by the late Sonia Pierre was propelled onto front pages around the world when a new constitution and a range of new laws and supreme court decisions reversed birthright citizenship in the Dominican Republic and retroactively withdrew Dominican nationality from tens of thousands of people born to Haitian parents on Dominican soil. More than a Massacre does not explore the era since the fall of Trujillo in 1961, or the emergence of a more open border since the late 1980s. But political debates and social struggles surrounding race, ethnicity and citizenship in the contemporary Dominican Republic did inform my decision to look back in the archives and explore the evolution of the crises of race and citizenship in the Dominican Republic.
The historiography argued that the border was peaceful and harmoniously bicultural before the cataclysm of 1937. It also argued that unlike other genocides, the 1937 Genocide had no prior history of gradual rising repression or official racism. It argued that official racism appeared in the post-massacre period. However, when I encountered the archives and saw thousands of arrests of “non-caucasians” under Executive order 372, stretching from 1919 to 1939, I realized that we had yet to properly understand the story of 1937. What I discovered is that Executive order 372, which placed a prohibitive tax on the entry of ‘non-caucasian braceros,’ and which would evolve to become the major repressive law that Rafael Trujillo would use against his domestic ethnic Haitian population in the leadup to 1937, was promulgated by the US Marines during their simultaneous occupation of both the Dominican Republic and Haiti in 1919. Though the scholarly literature said nothing about this key piece of racial legislation, and its evolving uses in the leadup to the 1937 genocide, it was for me the clearest evidence for me to understand the role of American imperialism in the 1937 Genocide.
Q: Your book was recently awarded the Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide. What does this recognition mean to you?
SC: The recognition brings to mind the victims of the 1937 Genocide. It suggests that the world has begun to hear the voices of the victims. It is also a signal that the 1937 Haitian Massacre is gaining its place as an important event in the history of genocides in the twentieth century. As I researched and wrote More than a Massacre, I saw that this history included statelessness, profiling, and a process of racialization that had parallels elsewhere. I observed patterns of repression that I compared to events in other parts of the world. For instance, the 1921 case of Maria Matirén, a half Haitian, half Dominican woman who was arrested and had to go to court to plead that she was in fact born in the Dominican Republic demonstrated a very early history of racial surveillance and policing that long predated 1937.
My book endeavors to bring to light names and testimonies of individual victims of the 1937 Genocide and related campaigns of arrest, displacement, and deportation. The testimonies of Juanis Sodis and Elias Hernandez stand out in my mind. These were two Dominican citizens and border residents who were both made stateless in 1930. Sodis was kicked out of a farm where he was born and raised and deported to Haiti despite being a native-born Dominican citizen. Hernandez who was also born in Dominican territory complained of having no choice but to pay a high fee to register himself as a foreign immigrant. News of the award made me think that I had succeeded in telling the story of these two, and many of the other ethnic Haitians who left their voices in the historical record. Elias Hernandez and Juanis Sodis stood out in my mind because their vocal objections to their mistreatment and their formal recategorization as foreigners marked the changing times along the border. Elias Hernandez was especially clear about the difference between how ethnic Haitians were treated before Trujillo’s new use of Executive Order 372. Defending their rights in court meant speaking out for their humanity and the protection of ethnic Haitians’ rights to citizenship, property, and life itself. Though they would ultimately lose that fight, their words live to tell us of the time in which ethnic Haitians had been citizens in the Dominican Republic and of the struggles of ethnic Haitians who did as much they were able to defend their rights. Representation of these voices fill the pages of my book as I try to narrate both a history of racial violence and the resistance against it.
The Lemkin award is special not only because it helps to bring the 1937 Genocide to a broader scholarly network, but also because of the direct links between this Caribbean story and the Holocaust. The years prior to the Holocaust did not just hang in the background of my study, the holocaust was directly relevant to this history. The problem of Jewish refugees and statelessness confronted the Dominican state in precisely the years in question. Some of the same officials who helped carry out the killing of ethnic Haitians, accepted a small number of European Jewish refugees at the Sosua settlement as part of a diplomatic effort to help cover up the genocide against ethnic Haitians. Interestingly, around this same time, the Dominican government also turned away the famous refugee ship St. Louis, just as the Cuban and American governments did. The rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s certainly influenced the course of events in the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. It is this comparative interest in the study of genocide that makes me especially honored to receive the Raphael Lemkin award. The need to see and understand the history of genocides comparatively and across time and space was a key project for Lemkin.
Q: In your book, you mark the year 1930 as a “watershed”, where Executive Order 372, a racialized migration law, was introduced. What impacts did this particular year and the executive order have on the trajectory of Haiti and the Dominican Republic’s history?
SC: Executive Order 372 was actually issued in 1919, by the U.S. Marines. It policed the movement of ‘non-caucasian braceros.’ This ‘non-caucasian’ language came from the Americans. The U.S. Marines used the law to arrest ethnic Haitians on Dominican soil. It was in 1920 that the Dominican police begin using the law to interrogate and arrest people along the border. 1930, the year that Trujillo came to power was a ‘watershed,’ because his government immediately began using Executive Order in an entirely new way. From that year, people arrested under Executive Order 372 were no longer able to go free by proving that they were Dominican citizens by birth or long-term Dominican residents or property owners. From 1930, people who were born on Dominican soil were arrested and then either forced to pay for immigration permits or deported to Haiti, notwithstanding their vocal objections on the basis of birthright citizenship. This for me was the biggest turning point in the buildup to the 1937 genocide. It was from this point that Trujillo’s government was annulling people’s citizenship rights and deporting them to Haiti based entirely on their race.
These cases of denationalization or stateless can be traced to 1930. This was the beginning of the history of the phenomenon of Haitian refugees and statelessness in Hispaniola. While Haiti has figured within the literature on refugees since World War II, the so-called ‘refugee studies’ field had not considered stateless ethnic Haitian refugees from the period before World War II. These victims were among the most ignored individuals, from the most ignored rural margins of two of the most ignored countries on earth. By contract, my work recognizes these people and events as a key chapter in human history. If the motivating rationale of genocide studies is to identify the warning signs of potential genocides with the view of recognizing mounting dangers of this kind in different contexts around the world, then the key periods to study in this case are the years from 1919 to 1930, and especially from 1930 to 1937.
While Executive Order 372 is long gone, the latest Dominican constitution, and a series of Dominican court rulings, have famously rendered tens of thousands of ethnic Haitians stateless. Thousands of people have been retroactively denationalized, and their situation represent a major, longstanding crisis of citizenship and human rights. As I write in my epilogue, explicitly racial and ethnic definitions of citizenship can be found buried deep within the new Dominican Constitution. This troubled issue has been a core feature of Dominican political life for decades and decades. It is an issue that heats up periodically, that is regularly a major feature of Dominican politics and that sometimes boils over into atrocities and pogroms, which echo aspects of the grim history of statelessness and violence in the 1930s.
Q: Chapter 4, “They killed my entire family”, recounts the 1937 genocide and considers its relationship to other genocides in the twentieth century. How does the framework of comparative genocide help us understand the unique circumstances of 1937 within modern Caribbean history more specifically and global history more broadly?
SC: Within Latin American and Caribbean history and the Americas in general, the 1937 Genocide was the largest single episode of anti-black violence. In less than two weeks an estimated 20, 000 ethnic Haitians were killed. In the subsequent years, thousands were also killed in different parts of the Dominican Republic. These numbers dwarf even the worst U.S. racial Massacres such as Elaine or Tulsa, or the horrendous Cuban racial massacres of 1912. While twentieth century genocides vary in terms of the magnitude of the victims, comparative studies of genocides demonstrate that carefully orchestrated and premediated killing can be quite swift and successful and were often inspired and driven along by willing civilian participation and collaboration. As with fascist Germany and Italy, which Truillo explicitly mimicked and admired, the 1937 genocide grew directly out of explicit racial policy.
There was a gradual buildup of anti-Haitian and anti-black violence before the genocide. Statelessness, mistreatment, imprisonment, discriminatory taxation, and displacement preceded large scale killing. Previous chapters of the book show a world in transition, a gradually mounting tide of repression that is essential for understanding the fourth chapter. “They Killed My Entire Family,” focuses heavily on the lived experienced of genocide and the victims’ interpretation of their experience and the event. It is also about the memory of violence and the impact of genocide on the survivors and their descendants. The title of the chapter bears witness to the total loss that has characterized genocide for many survivors across the globe. The line ‘they killed my entire family’ matches the experience of many surviving eyewitness of genocide. People who managed to flee to the Haitian side of the border, or who hid in the forest, watched as entire families and communities were killed. Witnesses recall the experience of incalculable and unimaginable loss. Their testimonies evoke the words and memory of other victims of genocide in the twentieth century.
Like other survivors of genocides, ethnic Haitians focused on their exact losses in detail. These losses included lost lives and lost communities, as well as livestock, crops, land, homes, and other property. In this chapter I argue that ethnic Haitians interpreted the 1937 Genocide as a form of theft, a pillage, and crucially, as one of the largest land grabs in Modern Latin American and Caribbean history. Their interpretation of the 1937 genocide as a major land grab resonates in Caribbean history very powerfully. In the Caribbean region, where powerful plantation interests and nineteenth and twentieth century demographic growth rendered land scarce, struggles for land and freedom have been historically defined by prolonged histories of racial and ethnic land conflict. The 1937 Genocide in the Dominican border provinces harkens back to earlier regional histories of colonialism, imperialism, genocide and land conflict.
Q: You include oral sources and testimonies from ethnic Haitian victims in the book, as well as considering a variety of documented sources. What are some of the responsibilities academics have when interviewing subjects who have experienced traumatic events? Was there any part of your field work that presented challenges or gave rise to opportunities you were not expecting?
I still remember the first time I encountered a Dominican military source from the 1940s about ethnic Haitian survivors who secretly returned to their former farms in Dominican territory to grow crops after the genocide. These sources confirmed accounts that the descendant of a survivor told me. As I continued to read the sources, I found voluminous records regarding ethnic Haitians who took the risk of returning to Dominican territory, often under the cover of darkness, to grow crops. In More than a Massacre, I discuss nighttime secret border farming as the most widespread form of resistance after 1937. State documents confirm that post-massacre land conflict was a persistent concern for the Dominican military. I place the oral sources into conversation with Dominican state documents to write and interpret the history of the 1937 Genocide. Trujillo, Renaldo Valdez, Emilio Zeller, and other high level Dominican officials who helped plan and coordinate the genocide purposefully concealed and misrepresented the event, so the testimonies and oral sources that were collected from eyewitnesses and their descendants are very important for any attempt to reconstruct the events. The testimonies themselves are a weapon against official concealment. Oral sources were among the many research strategies that I used to address official concealment in the historical record. Accounts of killing do not appear Dominican State documents and even in the mid 1940’s Dominican military officials pretended that they new nothing about a genocide. One of the best ways to counter the silence has been to collect oral histories from the survivors and their descendants.
The remaining survivors of the 1937 Genocide figured out how to cope and live with the memory of violence and perhaps their stories can teach communities, academic and non-academic how to deal with traumatic events. The reality is that some refugees died because they could not live with the loss. Most suffered incredible privations as refugees. Survivors tell these stories.
The oral interviews that I collected are rare, so I see preserving and archiving oral sources as a matter of justice and respect for the survivors and descendants who took the time to recount horrifying events. A forthcoming book project, “Victims in Their Own Words: Remembering the Forgotten 1937 Haitian Massacre” emerges from my desire to better understand how ethnic Haitian and their descendants remembered and interpreted the 1937 Genocide. It is a documentary history that centers survivors’ detailed accounts and interpretations. In this work I am grappling with how ethnic Haitians have made sense of this genocide since 1937. I see the process of writing and documenting the 1937 Genocide as critical to the process of remembering those who died, the survivors and their descendants. The refugees and their descendants in Haitian border communities are beginning to discuss ways to officially commemorate the event. Remembering and writing this story has been central to how some of the descendants deal with this trauma. My work then, is part of a larger reparatory work in Haitian border communities to remember, interpret and commemorate this event. I am interested in contributing to scholarly and public efforts to explore and better commemorate this history. As one community member told me, “there is no repair, they cannot give me my grandfather back.” By writing more on the event, and producing a more robust archive of the event, I hope to bear witness to this history.
Q: How have your students, colleagues and peers, engaged with the book and subject matter? What has surprised you most about the book’s reception?
I am surprised to see readers paying serious attention to the 1937 Massacre as an important example of a modern genocide. In many settings, Caribbean history attracts little to no interest at all. When it does, scholarly attention usually centers on the centuries in which the region was particularly important to the economic fortunes of European empires. Caribbean history has been synonymous with slavery and sugarcane, and this scholarship has grown up as a comparative counterpart to slavery historiography in and on the U.S. I had grown very accustomed to a general situation in which whatever interest that there was in Caribbean history remained mostly confined to the early-modern era, the era of European colonization and plantation slavery. Notwithstanding growing interest in the Haitian Revolution, there was little interest in Haiti following the expulsion of the Europeans and the end of the French Revolution. This has expanded recently with a wave of interest in Haiti’s disastrous 1825 indemnity, which saddled Haiti with an impossible debt burden. But this topic is still directly connected to slavery. The Caribbean after Slavery has generally attracted far less scholarly interest. Apart from particular topics such as Fidel Castro, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, twentieth century Caribbean history has been widely ignored. So, I was surprised to observe readers taking interest in twentieth-century Caribbean history. My point has been that twentieth century events in the Caribbean have wider importance to do with nationalism, race, underdevelopment, and neocolonialism, and that the region’s history never ceased to matter. I wrote on the twentieth century Caribbean because it matters, and it is quite interesting to see readers accept the universal importance of evens that had been ignored as localized disturbances.
Q: You were previously a research fellow for the Legacies of Enslavement project at the University of Cambridge. How did this shape your experience as a researcher and professor?
SC: Before I became a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, I had spent many years conducting research in the Caribbean and the U.S. My prior work had mainly revolved around 20th century Latin American and Caribbean history. The Cambridge Legacies of Enslavement project brought me to the other side of the Atlantic and to a very different period. I began to study slavery and its legacies within British universities from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. This work introduced me to a whole new set of archival sources on early modern slavery. The project at Cambridge consisted of over 3 years of archival work and I studied a range of financial records from institutional archives. These included financial account books, wills, land transactions, dividend receipts, and financial records from the Royal African Company, The South Sea Company, the Bank of England, and several private banks. These archives were largely quantitative. They generally documented how much various Cambridge colleges, or donors, or the university itself invested in various financial instruments. While I focused on assets derived from the capital stock of slave trading companies, the financial records do not mention the enslaved at all. Seeing African captives collateralized into stocks and bonds, which were often sold to purchase land or buildings or other kinds of paper assets transformed my understanding of the evolution of financial capitalism in the early modern period. Constant archival encounters with South Sea Company shares or East India Company Bonds do not include any direct mention or trace of the actual victims themselves. Years of work on the financial side of Atlantic slavery have deeply influenced my approach to sources as I try to help students understand enslaved people beyond their commodified, financialized existence as articles of trade and victims of extreme exploitation. As a professor this research has given me a whole range of new insights into the ways in which slavery was profitable at levels I had never appreciated before. This work massively influences the ways in which I teach the history of slavery.
Q: You are currently working on another monograph, which builds on your oral history fieldwork. Can you tell us a bit more about that project and why it’s important to centre survivor’s accounts in historical narratives?
There is a huge and important historiography on testimonies, especially testimonies of survivors who lived and experience genocide. There are several dimensions to this next book project on the 1937 genocide. First it will reproduce the testimonies in their original Haitian Kreyol and also in Spanish and English translation. The book will document the testimony of victims in an effort to enhance our historical understanding of the lived experience of genocide and the aftermath. Survivors have their own way of telling their stories, their own analytical interpretations and narrative styles. This book will introduce the 1937 genocide through witnesses’ own words and language. Fortunately, there are important survivor testimonies recorded in the immediate days and weeks following the massacre. There are also more recent interviews, of which I managed to conduct several dozen. In this book, I will reproduce multiple testimonies as accurately as possible, not only because they are rare, but because the victims offer their own reflections on the event. Through these testimonies, I hope that scholars will be able to compare the lived experiences of ethnic Haitian genocide survivors with other cases from around the world. During my interviews, I found that there were certain widespread, indelible features of a kind of collective local popular memory of the 1937 genocide in Haitian border communities. Much of this tradition has yet to be told and properly understood. So, in a way, I am trying to put into print certain key aspects of how ethnic Haitian victims made sense of this big event and why they came to remember and retell the event the way they have.