“Is It Because We Are Negroes?”: Haitian Refugees, Racialized Detention, and Anticolonialism in Puerto Rico

This talk takes as its point of departure a question posed by Haitian women asylum seekers detained in Puerto Rico in the early 1980s: “Is it because we are Negroes?” Their query exposes the racialized foundations of U.S. refugee policy, while their confinement at Fort Allen, a U.S. military base on the still-colonial territory of Puerto Rico, reveals the entanglements of migration control, empire, and racial exclusion. Haiti – the site of the first and only successful self-liberation of the enslaved – has been systematically marginalized, isolated, and impoverished ever since, leaving precarious flight as one of the few avenues of survival, though it often results in the opposite: social or literal death. By situating Fort Allen within a longer history of U.S. and European colonialism in the Caribbean, this talk excavates the colonial and anti-colonial logics that have shaped and contested refugee detention, showing how contemporary practices of offshoring racialized “Others” and the struggles against them across the world are far from new.