The bridge
In late September, a humanitarian crisis unfolded under a bridge in Texas. Thousands of migrants, many of them originally hailing from Haiti, converged on the border town of Del Rio, in the hope of finding asylum in the United States. This hope has been fueled by Donald Trump’s successor in the White House, Joe Biden. While Trump famously included Haiti in a list of what he called “shithole countries” whose citizens should not come to the States, Biden promised a more kind-hearted immigration policy. However, his administration deported many Haitian migrants to their homeland, a particularly cruel decision considering the current situation in Haiti. This year, the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse and a 7.2 earthquake caused further destabilization in a country already plagued by high-impact natural disasters, political instability, and poverty.
International border crossing between Ciudad Acuña (Coahuila, Mexico) and Del Río (Texas, U.S.A.)
The Plantationocene concept is central to the Race Land project. It is also a useful framework to explain the turn of events in Haiti and Del Rio. The Plantationocene is an alternative label for the Anthropocene, the geological time period we currently find ourselves in. “For the first time in Earth’s history, Homo sapiens has become a geomorphic force on the planet, altering the chemistry of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans and precipitating an era of rampant species extinction,” the authors of Plantation Legacies describe the Anthropocene. Although the Anthropocene emphasizes the role of human beings in disastrous developments for our planet like climate change and environmental destruction, it is not as specific as the Plantationocene, which has the emergence of modern plantation agriculture as its starting point. The rise of the modern plantation coincided with the advent of Western European imperialism. The plantation embodies the main elements of the Europeans’ imperial pursuits: racialized labor regimes instituted on large-scale farms aimed to make enormous profits through the brutal exploitation of human (enslaved workers) and natural resources.
The Haitian Revolution: Combat et prise de la Crête-à-Pierrot (March 1802)
Back to Haiti and Del Rio. How does the interrelated history of the plantation and imperialism help us understand what happened there? It is important to grasp the connections between racialized plantation labor, the emergence of global capitalism, and its social and ecological impact. The legacies of the plantation – the plantation afterlives – continue to haunt us today. Haiti is a case in point. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, its enslaved population managed to topple French colonial plantation rule, an unprecedented accomplishment for which the country paid dearly. The colony had been extremely lucrative for France – the sugarcane plantations on the island yielded huge profits for the colonizer. After Haiti gained its independence, France did not plan to let go of those profits easily. In comparison to the young Caribbean nation, the French still had superior naval power, which eventually enabled them to force the Haitian government to pay a crippling debt as reimbursement for the lost plantation income. Simultaneously, many Western countries (including the United States) were very reluctant to recognize Haiti as an independent nation. The debt was not paid off until after World War II, taking up a tremendous percentage of Haiti’s gross national product. It seriously hampered the country’s economic development.
U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback
Fast forward to September 2021. After being sucked dry and intermittently occupied by Western powers for centuries (also by the United States), Haiti is currently one of the poorest nations in the Americas. It makes the country very vulnerable to the effects of climate change, such as more powerful hurricanes, droughts, and floods. And it makes people want to leave the island, in search of a better life. At the border near Del Rio, they met mounted law enforcement cracking their horse reins like whips. Such images are problematic, rebuttals by U.S. Border Patrol notwithstanding. Tools that were once used on the plantation to lash enslaved workers into obedience now reappear as weapons to keep migrants out of the United States.
