Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art [REVIEW]
Borikén, as it was called by its Taino Arawak natives, was soon named Puerto Rico by Spaniard invaders who recognized the island’s wealth upon their arrival in 1493. Christopher Columbus followed a conquest agenda that slowly depopulated the island of its Indigenous population through hard labor and diseases. The Taíno peoples were quickly replaced by enslaved Africans who would soon become the largest diasporic people in the region through the transatlantic slave trade. Spain’s religious and political agenda of land ownership and expansion was in competition with the United States, leading to the latter obtaining from Spain, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam through the Spanish American War in 1898. Since then, Puerto Rico has been a colony of the United States, and as a U.S. territory, it has been a destination of hope for immigrants who “cross waters” in search of a better life.
Marisel Moreno’s Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art posits the ocean as one of the most important borders connecting the Spanish Caribbean islands. Moreno explains that “in this book [she] bridge[s] border and archipelago theories to provide a new framework that reflects the specificity of the Caribbean” (3). The book is composed of four chapters that offer critical analyses of literature and art in relation to the representation of undocumented immigrants from the Hispanophone Caribbean to the Puerto Rican archipelago. It examines how this representation contributes to what she calls “a symbolic decolonizing of the region” through literature and art (8).
Chapter One settles the theoretical approach of water as a border, contesting the more general idea of land as a connector between two places. Instead, water is examined as the gateway for undocumented Spanish Caribbean islanders who choose the sister island of Puerto Rico as their destination. Moreno juxtaposes the undocumented migration to Puerto Rico to that of undocumented immigrants to the U.S. mainland as an intra-island movement, contesting the continental hegemony perpetuated by the U.S. and the Global North (19). This chapter also sets the tone for the book’s critical analysis on the representation of undocumented migrants in Latinx literature and art by including the works of Eliana Rivero “‘Fronterislena,’ Border Islander,” and Elizabeth Acevedo’s “La Santa María,” for example. In this chapter, Moreno defines Puerto Rico as both a border and a borderland. The former because of its separation from the Dominican Republic, the latter because it “constitutes a space of transition; it is and it is not the United States” (25). This analysis is done in contrast to the more generally discussed Mexico-U.S. border studies as well as Haiti-Dominican Republic border scholarship.
The second chapter explores Puerto Rico’s industrialization and its impact both from and to Puerto Rico. Mainly, it examines how Puerto Rico is portrayed as a U.S. territory and the potential benefits of migrating to the island. This portrayal of a prosperous life in Puerto Rico, promoted by the media and by those who return home to their island, positions the archipelago both as a border and bridge to the U.S. mainland (70). However, the chapter describes the harsh reality faced by Haitian and Dominican undocumented immigrants upon arrival. Marred by the historical legacy of political and racial colonization, the sentiments of many Puerto Ricans lead them to reject their undocumented neighbors, “othering” them from the rest of the Puerto Rican population. Specifically, “the racialization of Dominicans as blacks justifies their social exclusion—from jobs, housing, schooling, and marriage, even in the second generation” (79).
Chapter Three’s focus is to describe the violent process of forced migration. The title of the chapter “Dominican Crossings” serves a double purpose. It includes the Haiti/DR border, offering an analysis of Haitian representation in art and literature, while it also looks at Dominicans in Puerto Rico. Chapter Three also illustrates the dehumanization endured by undocumented migrants, and at the same time shows how they are humanized and made visible through Latinx literature and art. For example, Moreno uses Miriam Mejía’s “El viaje,” to take us on an imaginary sea-bound, turbulent, undocumented journey through its main character Alba (110). In her journey, Alba is lied to, raped, and almost dies. The name Alba translates as sunrise, a symbolism that suggests —in the life of undocumented migrants— the hopes of un mejor mañana through the crossings of a “liquid highway.” Moreno explains that the latter is a phrase coined by Dominican artist Scherezade García in her art Super Tropics: The Liquid Highway I (118). She quotes García explaining that for her “The Liquid Highway is a way and an obstacle. [She] see[s] water as an obstacle which we need to navigate and cross, as a mass of water that carries our history, memories, and DNA….The global circulation of the liquid highway in my work is a way to break geographies”(A Bridge 35).
Moreno then moves to study the policed mobility of Haitians crossing the liquid (river) or solid (land) border to the Dominican Republic and how they are racialized, as Dominicans claim an ancestral whiteness that excludes them from the same historical colonization and slavery that marked the island in 1492. This racialization does not only occur in the border-crossing process but in the country as well, where many Haitians both documented and undocumented are “relegated to marginal self-contained areas known as bateyes…[where] Haitians and their Dominican-born children remain invisible and trapped in a cycle of exploitation and poverty that many consider modern slavery” (138-9). Moreno argues “that bateyes, as contained and isolated communities, function akin to archipelagos whose borders are terrestrial instead of aquatic. Those living in the archipelago within the archipelago thus become doubly invisibilized” (139). Yet, through her critical analysis of art and literature, Moreno imposes the voice of the silenced undocumented immigrants over the violence that accompanies their life and journey. Between pages 142 and 143 is a gallery of paintings that serve as the visual language that tells their stories.
In the last chapter, we learn about the water crossings of Cubans as they struggle with the political tensions between Cuba and the U.S. and how their experience is depicted in cultural production both in Cuba and the U.S. For example, Moreno interprets Sandra Ramos’ Pecera Naufragio to be “a visual metaphor for the isolation that she [the pionerita in the painting] has been condemned to endure, but also of her agency, as she tries to overcome the stasis and walls that isolate [Cuba] (179). In chapter Four, Moreno also invites readers to understand Cuban undocumented migration as a fluid issue going on for decades and not as a static romanticized exemption for Cuban unauthorized migrants to the U.S. (182). A highlight in this chapter is the analysis of Orlando Sentinel’s 1992 article “Cuban’s Rafts Tell Sad Tales of Desperation.” The story features Humberto Sánchez, who according to Moreno spent years collecting capsized Cuban rafts from the shores of Boca Raton and Key West. Sánchez’s objective was to assure that the lives of those who did not make it were remembered, and that their names were known and their stories told (228).
Water is one of the five elements of life and therefore essential for survival. In the analysis of cultural production about unauthorized migrants in the Spanish Caribbean offered by Moreno, we learn that water may be a source of survival and expiration for the many who engage in island-hopping in search of a better future. However, although undocumented migrants die in the water, it is not water per se that directly causes their death but a long-lingering violence that can be traced to colonization. And thus, from Cuba to the Keys, Haiti to the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico, the bottom of the ocean continues to welcome bodies that embody the accumulation of colonial power and the decimation of those it subjugates.
Marisel C. Moreno’s book invites readers to question the push and pull factors that motivate the undocumented in the Hispanophone Caribbean to risk their lives. It posits the ocean as “the other” border, while also looking at the representation of undocumented immigrants in the region. This representation contests the negative narrative that is often portrayed about unauthorized immigrants by illustrating their life stories through art and literature. Equally important, the book surveys the migration phases of each group discussed that serve as the cause-and-effect explanation for the main topic of the book. Eloquently written for various audiences to benefit from its jargon-free pages, Crossing Waters is an invitation for generations of scholars to continue adding to the area of immigrant studies.
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Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art
by Marisel Moreno
304 pgs. University of Texas Press. $29.95
Lissette Acosta Corniel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Race and Ethnic Studies at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, in New York City where she teaches Dominican History and the History of Latinos in the U.S.