Remember the River: Trujillo, the Parsley Massacre and the Long Fight Over Haitian Belonging

Part one of our Haiti series — the backstory to "One History, One Struggle" in the debut issue of [Black Thread](/magazine), November 1.

Two nations share one island. Haiti, the first Black republic, won its freedom in 1804 by defeating Napoleon's army. The Dominican Republic, which declared independence in 1844 from Haitian rule, came to define itself against its neighbor. The border between them has been crossed for centuries by farmers, traders, families and laborers. In October 1937 it became a killing ground. This feature begins with that massacre and follows its roots and its long shadow, to the deportation buses of today.

Two Occupations, One Army

Between 1915 and 1934 U.S. Marines occupied Haiti, and from 1916 to 1924 they occupied the Dominican Republic. Washington justified both occupations by pointing to debt and instability, but the outcome on each side of the island was the same: customs houses under U.S. control, land opened to American sugar companies, and new constabularies trained by Marines. In Haiti, the occupiers revived forced road labor, the corvée, and crushed the Caco resistance led by Charlemagne Péralte, whose body they photographed and displayed in 1919. In the Dominican Republic, the Guardia Nacional became the ladder that a young officer named Rafael Leónidas Trujillo climbed to power.

Sugar and the Making of a Border Labor Force

U.S.-owned sugar estates in the eastern Dominican Republic needed cheap labor, and they recruited it from Haiti and the British Caribbean. Haitian cane cutters, known as braceros, lived in company settlements called bateyes, often without papers, rights or a way home. Their labor built Dominican sugar wealth, while officials portrayed them as invaders. That contradiction, wanting Haitian workers but rejecting Haitian people, ran beneath everything that followed.

In early October 1937, Dominican soldiers fanned out across the borderlands that divide the island of Hispaniola. Acting on orders from dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, they hunted down Haitian men, women and children, and Dominicans of Haitian descent, killing most of them with machetes, bayonets and clubs so the slaughter could be blamed on angry farmers rather than an army. Historian Richard Lee Turits estimates that about 15,000 people died in roughly a week. Haitians call it Kout Kouto a, "the stabbing." Dominicans often call it El Corte, "the cutting." In English it is remembered as the Parsley Massacre.

A Word as a Death Sentence

The name comes from a cruel test. Soldiers reportedly held up a sprig of parsley and asked people to say the Spanish word perejil. Those whose Kreyòl-accented tongues could not roll the r the way the soldiers expected were marked as Haitian and killed. Whether the test was used everywhere matters less than what it reveals: a regime had decided that belonging could be heard in a single word, and that skin color and speech could sort neighbors into citizens and targets.

On October 2, Trujillo spoke at a dance in Dajabón, on the northern border, and declared that the Haitian "occupation" of Dominican land would end. The killing had already begun, and it spread quickly. Bodies were thrown into the river that marks the border, a river whose name, by grim coincidence, was already Massacre.

Why Trujillo Wanted a "Whiter" Nation

The border had long been porous. Families crossed it to farm, trade, marry and worship, and many borderland residents spoke both Spanish and Kreyòl. Trujillo, who came to power in 1930 after rising through a National Guard trained during the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–1924), wanted a hard line on the map and in the Dominican imagination. His government promoted antihaitianismo, a doctrine that cast the Dominican Republic as Hispanic, Catholic and white, and Haiti as Black, African and dangerous. That Trujillo himself had a Haitian grandmother, and reportedly lightened his skin with makeup, shows how much the project depended on denial.

A Cheap Settlement and a Long Silence

Haiti's president, Sténio Vincent, moved cautiously, and Washington, which valued Trujillo as a stable anticommunist ally, pressed for a quiet resolution. In 1938 the Dominican government agreed to pay an indemnity of $750,000, later reduced to about $525,000, without admitting responsibility. Much of the money never reached survivors. Trujillo ruled until his assassination in 1961, and for decades the massacre was barely taught on either side of the border.

Danticat Gives the Dead a Voice

Edwidge Danticat, born in Port-au-Prince in 1969 and raised partly in Brooklyn, broke that silence for millions of readers with her 1998 novel The Farming of Bones. The story follows Amabelle Désir, a Haitian woman who works as a maid for a Dominican family, and her lover Sebastien Onius, a cane cutter. When the killing starts, Amabelle flees toward the river and survives; much of the novel is about what survival costs, including the struggle to have her testimony recorded and believed.

Danticat drew on survivor accounts and historical research, but her purpose was not only to document. She wanted readers to understand the massacre as something that happened to people with names, loves and work, people the regime had tried to reduce to a pronunciation. The title points to the cane fields, where Haitian laborers' bodies were worn down long before the soldiers arrived. The novel won an American Book Award in 1999 and remains a staple in classrooms.

What the River Still Carries

The anti-Haitian ideas that Trujillo weaponized did not die with him. In 2013 the Dominican Constitutional Court issued Ruling 168-13, which stripped citizenship from many people born in the country to undocumented Haitian parents as far back as 1929, leaving tens of thousands at risk of statelessness. Mass deportations of Haitians have continued in recent years, even as Haiti faces a deep security crisis.

Yet there is also resistance across the line. Since 2012, Dominicans, Haitians and members of both diasporas have gathered for Border of Lights, a commemoration held each October in Dajabón and Ouanaminthe to honor the dead and reject the politics of division. Their candles answer Trujillo's machetes with a simple claim: the island's people share a history, and they can choose to share a future.

The Border After Trujillo

Trujillo's death in 1961 did not end his ideology. His longtime aide Joaquín Balaguer, president for 22 years across three periods, wrote openly about the supposed threat of Haitian "Africanization." Under Balaguer, the Dominican state signed contracts with Haiti's Duvalier dictatorship to supply cane cutters, while Haitians fled the Tonton Macoute, the Duvaliers' secret police. In 1991, after Jean-Bertrand Aristide's election in Haiti, Balaguer expelled tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. In 1994, opponents attacked the leading presidential candidate, José Francisco Peña Gómez, a Black Dominican, as secretly Haitian, a smear that helped keep him from office.

Citizenship Revoked

The Dominican constitution once granted citizenship to nearly everyone born on its soil. In 2010 a new constitution narrowed that, and in 2013 the Constitutional Court went further with Ruling 168-13, applying the restriction backward to people born as far back as 1929. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned the decision in 2014. A 2014 naturalization law offered a partial path back, but many people never received documents. Juliana Deguis Pierre, the woman whose case produced the ruling, became a symbol of a generation told it belonged nowhere.

Walls, Raids and Deportation Buses

In 2022 the Dominican government under President Luis Abinader began building a border wall. In October 2024 it announced plans to deport up to 10,000 undocumented Haitians a week, even as gangs controlled most of Port-au-Prince and hundreds of thousands of Haitians were displaced inside their own country. Human rights groups documented raids on homes and hospitals, the detention of pregnant women and children, and racial profiling of dark-skinned Dominicans. The language had changed since 1937, but the logic, that Blackness and Haitianness could be detected and expelled, had not.

Memory as Resistance

Against this history stand survivors, writers and activists on both sides. Danticat followed The Farming of Bones with The Dew Breaker (2004), about a former Tonton Macoute torturer living quietly in Brooklyn, showing how dictatorship follows people across borders. Dominican scholars such as Edward Paulino and Lorgia García Peña have challenged the idea of a "white" Dominican nation. Groups such as Reconoci.do, led by young Dominicans of Haitian descent, fight for restored citizenship. And each October, Border of Lights brings people from both countries to the river to remember. The past is present, and on Hispaniola the river still keeps its name.

From Our Haiti Archive

• Haitian Independence, January 1, 1804
• The Haitian Tragedy: A Historical Background (Part I) (2024)
• A Perpetual Sea of Troubles: Crisis in Haiti
• Immigration Debacle: Haitian Migrants at the Border (2021)
• The River Remembers: Trujillo, the 1937 Massacre and Danticat's *The Farming of Bones

Where the Full Story Lives

This piece is part of our free Haiti series: Remember the River, then From Baby Doc to Titid, then A Nation Under Siege. Together they are the backstory. The full story, One History, One Struggle: What Da'Vinchi's Comments Can Teach Us About Haiti and Black America, appears in the debut issue of Black Thread, our monthly magazine. It traces two centuries of ties between Haiti and Black America. Magazine features are for members at $9.99/month, and our blogs and archive stay free. Join here.