Rosario Espinal & Nassef Perdomo

Rosario Espinal, Professor of Sociology at Temple University, and Nassef Perdomo, constitutional lawyer and professor in the Dominican Republic, served as panelists in the last Conversations in Human Rights workshop – “Statelessness and the Quest for Citizenship in the Dominican Republic.”

Rosario Espinal

Rosario Espinal sees her roots as a political sociologist going back to early childhood in the Dominican Republic. “I was a child when [Rafael] Trujillo, the dictator, was killed, so I remember – somewhat vaguely – but I do remember the aftermath of the fall of a dictator,” she said. “For me, what I saw stayed in my mind, and even though the dictator was gone, there was a legacy of repression still for a number of years.” She explains, “I was already a young adult when there was a transition to democracy in the Dominican Republic,” adding, “I think all those events shaped my academic interests.”

Knowing she was interested in politics, Espinal chose sociology as her field largely because of her Latin American context. “At the time, in Latin America, sociology was the field for politics. Political science, in the old days, was not as central for Latin American academic life, so I saw sociology as a way of doing work in politics.” Although she’s committed to academia, having served both as department chair and director of the Latin American Studies Program during her twenty-seven years at Temple University, Espinal also remains invested in issues of applied politics and human rights, especially in her native country. She’s a well-known public intellectual in the Dominican Republic, writing a weekly column carried by several online and print newspapers.

Her most recent columns have critiqued the Dominican government’s actions during the ongoing controversy over citizenship for people born to undocumented immigrants on Dominican soil. Given the DR’s historical reliance on cheap Haitian labor in the agricultural sector, the vast majority of people born to undocumented immigrants are of Haitian descent. Prior to the 2010 constitution, it was generally understood that children born in the Dominican Republic qualified for Dominican citizenship, with the exception being the children of diplomats and “people in transit”: families not actually residing in the DR on a permanent basis.

However, in 2010, the new constitution declared that all children of undocumented immigrants are born “in transit,” and thus not Dominican citizens. The Constitutional Court, based on a Supreme Court ruling of 2005, recently applied that status retroactively to everyone born to undocumented parents since 1929. Suddenly it is possible to have several generations of stateless people in one family. Espinal has been tracing the political and social roots and implications of the Constitutional Court ruling, including the government’s framing of the issue.

“The government says Dominicans have the right to set the parameters for nationality … we are sovereign,” she explains. “Of course, critics then argue that it is racism.” She adds, “There is no dialogue, because the government says that [racism] is not the case. But more than that: most Dominicans are really worried about the significant presses of Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic.”

Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent represent a significant population in the DR, and some worry that granting citizenship (and encouraging more immigrants) will put strain on the DR and its resources. In contrast, Espinal says, “The government created the immigration mess,” by tacitly encouraging Haitian immigration for the sake of cheap labor in agriculture and construction – both sectors that contribute heavily to the DR’s growing economy. Rather than fixing the “mess,” this current court decision is “going against granting rights to the descendants of these immigrants.”

For Espinal, this concern for human rights is inextricably bound to her sociological work on democracy. Currently, she’s using survey data to study gender gaps in political and civic participation in Latin America. Her findings so far are not entirely encouraging: “Even though there has been a democratic move in the region, and important gains have been made for women to participate in the economy, in the educational system, and in politics, still we see legacies of the inequality and the differences that historically characterized gender relations.”

Despite the often slow progress of democracy, Espinal is not disheartened. Rather, she argues, democratic experience has played a key role in society’s growing support of human rights. By broadening our notions of who deserves equal protection and from what, participation in an open society incorporates more people, and more issues, into the political agenda. It is a process – flawed, to be sure – that Rosario Espinal has learned to embrace. “Over time,” she says, “democracy has become the space to really argue for human rights.”