Contested Citizenship and Defensive Nationalism in Panama and the Dominican Republic

W. Frank Robinson, Vanderbilt University

Politicians mobilize nativist sentiment in various ways, but one common strategy is to make minority population groups scapegoats for their nation’s social ills. Panama and the Dominican Republic represent two compelling case studies that demonstrate how defensive nationalism can generate legislative efforts to strip birthright citizenship from targeted communities. Historically, both nations exhibited anti-immigrant tendencies grounded in xenophobia, racial discrimination, and exclusionary citizenship. In Panama during the turbulent decades of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, strident nationalist politicians called for the deportation of the country’s Afro-West Indian community, going so far as to support a constitution that snatched away the citizenship even from those born in Panama. Shortly after assuming power in 1940, President Arnulfo Arias rammed through the National Assembly legislation that rescinded the citizenship of Panama’s Afro-West Indians and prohibited any further immigration. The actions of President Arias reflected feelings, widely held on the isthmus, of resentment toward a minority population deemed incapable of assimilation. As for the Dominican case, it has been said that antihaitianismo is as old as the Dominican Republic itself. In 2013, a ruling known as “La Sentencia” retroactively stripped Dominican citizenship from the children of undocumented immigrants, effectively rendering thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless. This paper, based on research undertaken in Panama, the Dominican Republic, and at the United States National Archives, seeks to consider ways that volatile nativist politics emanated from and further distorted Panamanian and Dominican conceptions of race, national identity, and citizenship.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 163. New Perspectives on Nativist Discourses