EPISODE 16 - Dominican Love Haitians
Episode 16 - Dominicans Love Haitians Movement with Clarivel Ruiz
Rocio and Mercedes talk to Clarivel Ruiz the creator of the Dominicans love Haitians Movement. We talk about how the organization started, what tools they are using, and about the Black Doll Project Movement.
Clarivel, We, daughter from Ayiti Kiskeya (aka Hispaniola, aka the Dominican Republic and Haiti), a land colonized but never conquered, raised in New York City on the ancestral bones and covered shrines of the Lenape people. Our art practice is to decolonize and unravel the racialized framework we live in to heal wounds created by eurocentrism.
In 2016 we initiated Dominicans Love Haitians Movement, an art-based non-profit organization. We are using various art modalities to unlearn racism and decolonize. Our goal is to celebrate our commonalities and honor our differences. Art is the pathway for community healing, enabling us to envision and create a new future.
We are alumni of Hemispheric Institute's EmergeNYC, Culture Push's Utopian Fellow, a Civic Practice Seminar participant at the Metropolitan Museum, The Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship at CCCADI, a 2019 Brooklyn Arts Council award recipient and an MFA graduate of CUNY, City College.
GUEST INFO
https://www.instagram.com/dominicanslovehaitiansmovement/
website: https://www.dominicanslovehaitians.com/
The project challenges current thinking with respect to how Dominicans view their history. It utilizes language in shifting the current sociological framework of oppression. The name of the project in and of itself challenges the thinking that love can exist between two nations that have been at odds with each other since the 1800s. It is imperative to dismantle the myths of race that have been instituted and internalized as hard-core values and a belief that continues to perpetuate hate and separates people by creating “others” who are subsequently used as scapegoats and seen as less than human.
More broadly, her project seeks to undo a colonized mindset she says is also prevalent in the Caribbean. She has set to tackle this issue with her Brooklyn-based organization, the Dominicans Love Haitians Movement. In the Dominican Republic, most people have some African heritage, yet a very small percentage — about 4.13 percent — of the Caribbean country’s population identify as black. Instead, most prefer to claim their indigenous roots, a stance that reveals the Caribbean country’s long history of anti-blackness that persists today.
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This episode was produced by: Quinton Cameron, Mercedes Ilarraza, and Rocio Mendez
Logo by: Dylan Rogers
