Basic Question of How

They demarcated, said Edgar Morin2, "the zone of integrity and inviolability" nationalist. Returning to Ríos, there were always reasons to imagine the other side, but the imaginations were anchored to mediocre realities. An extreme case, but not unusual, was the Dominican-Haitian border. After many decades of strong interaction between the border communities on both sides, in 1937 the Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo decreed a brutal ethnic cleansing – which ended the lives of thousands of Haitians and Dominican-Haitians, separated families and devastated the social fabric.

cross-border – and the hermetic closure of borders. Its gates, located in four posts along the border, were opened a few times a year, either to let Haitian laborers through for the Dominican sugar harvests or to allow the movement of cargo from the Whatsapp Mobile Number List trade. The border blocked the relationship of the Dominican community –which considered itself Hispanic, Catholic and white– with its Haitian neighbors –considered foreign, African, black and pagan–. Contact, often even visual, between neighbors, only worked in those few activities that supported agro-export reproduction.

Neoliberal capitalism produced an intense process of territorial rearticulation by virtue of the immense capacity for movement that capital acquired, totally disproportionate with respect to the speeds of movement of the communities and the control capacities of the States. In relation to the topic that concerns us, it produced a systematic drilling of the sacred Westphalian limits and turned the borders into economic resources for capitalist accumulation.