Navigating mobile phone infrastructures on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic

This chapter investigates how mobile phone infrastructures are made and unmade in a border region. Borders themselves are constituted in and through everyday practice. Nicholas Long (2011) has described this as a process of "bordering." Rather than focusing upon borders as spaces of difference or a "third space" set apart, the notion of "bordering" enables us to understand "the affective charge and powerful symbolic weight that our informants' claims about bordering have, even when they seem to be inconsistent and contradictory." Bordering acknowledges the ways in which the border may become more or less significant and, indeed, have greater or lesser material "effects" in people's everyday lives. This is especially evident on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where Haiti shares a 224-mile geographic border with the Dominican Republic and Haitians have migrated to the Dominican Republic since the early 20th century to work in Dominican sugar plantations (bateyes) and the construction industry. Living on and crossing the border makes life easier for thousands of Haitians who move across the border into the Dominican Republic on a regular, if not daily, basis to work, access health care and education, and use services such as the internet, pay bills, send money, buy phone credit, and travel. Nevertheless, this dependency upon the Dominican Republic has contributed to structural inequality between the citizens of the two nations. In particular, antihaitianismo (anti-Haitianism) by Dominicans has led to discriminations against Haitians and, at particular times in history, the deportation of Haitians living and working in the Dominican Republic. In effect, the border, and the unequal power relations between Haitians and the Dominicans, can be understood as a porous space created through state formation and materialized through laws, regulations, and social relations.