UC San Diego

In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, 3,000 Haitian migrants rebuilt their lives in Tijuana. Black Haitians in Tijuana are living with the legacies of slavery and colonialism, one of which is racialized sexuality. Their arrival in Tijuana makes visible the intersection of the construction of racialized sexualities in response to long histories of U.S. imperialism. My dissertation, “Fronteras Rebeldes/ Fwontyè Rebèl: Haitian Blackness in the Borderlands,” brings together the fields of Critical Refugee Studies, Media Studies, and Black Diaspora Studies through a queer of color lens. I consider how race and sexuality intersect in Tijuana, a place which has long been imagined both as a liberatory space and as a city of vice. Taking up this body of work, I analyze how race and non-normative sexuality interact in early 20th-century U.S. cultural production about Tijuana. I suggest that an analysis of cultural texts about Haiti and Tijuana reveals how imperialism and racialized sexuality shape the ways Haitian migrants in Tijuana are being perceived, written about, and treated in the contemporary moment. More specifically, my dissertation focuses on early 20th-century U.S. interventions in Haiti and Mexico as well as the borderlands in these regions to examine the relationships among imperialism, cultural production, and racialized sexuality. My genealogy of these relationships provides a foundation on which to understand the experiences of Haitian migrants in present day Tijuana.My first chapter, ““Dance Around the Border Like I’m Cassius Clay”: Haiti, Mexico, and U.S. News Media,” juxtaposes “The Latest Revolution in Haiti,” an article published in the New York Times in 1915 the day after U.S. marines invaded Haiti, to editorials by prominent Black writers W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington that pushed back on this account. I examine the ways in which the Mexico/U.S. border has historically been and continues to be militarized, sexualized, and racialized. My second chapter, ““Love, and man’s unconquerable mind”: Representations of Haitian Spirituality, Race, and Sexuality in Comic Books,” investigates racialization, sexuality, and resistance in comics of Mexico, Haiti, and the U.S. from the early 20th century to the present to illuminate how comics have historically been used to shape imperial racial formations but in the contemporary moment are being adapted to imagine new worlds outside of white supremacist, imperialist territory. I focus on Mexican comic character Memín Pinguin, created in 1943 by Yolanda Vargas Dulché, who invented the comics after observing black children on a trip to Cuba. The comics, in which Memín and his mother are the only Afro-descended people, take cues from U.S. minstrel cartoons of the early 20th century and are a staple in Mexican culture. While weekly issues continue to be reprinted and sold widely, they were at the height of their popularity in the 1970s and 1980s and helped to inform an entire generation’s racial beliefs. I also analyze the Marvel comic book character Brother Voodoo, which draws on racist Haitian stereotypes and has been featured in comics as recently as the early 2000s. As well, I consider the worldmaking possibilities of Haiti’s own superhero, Tamana, and what she represents to her fans in Haiti and the diaspora. My third chapter, “You are less alive than the trees”: Bodies and Borders in North American Zombie Cinema”, explores the zombie films of Haiti, the U.S. and Mexico. The section on Mexico specifically examines cinema of Mexico’s Golden Age of Cinema, which was part of a national project instituted by the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), Mexico’s ruling party at the time. One race-making tactic of the PRI was to use cinema to erase or marginalize blackness in Mexico to give lip service to the ideals of the Mexican Revolution, which partly involved defining what it meant to be a citizen of the Mexican nation by valorizing mestizaje – an identity category describing people of mixed indigenous and European decent that evolved into a nationalistic political and social category. Here I analyze Santo Contra Los Zombis (1962) and Santo Contra la Magia Negra (1972), which is set in Haiti and builds upon earlier racializations and sexualizations. Finally, my epilogue, “Performa as Resistance: Byenveni nan Ayitiwana/Bienvenidos a Haitíjuana/Welcome to Haiti-juana” turns to performance in Haiti and Tijuana, including dance performances put on by Haitian migrants. I draw on queer-of-color critique and performance studies to reveal the world-making possibilities of these acts. I hope my focus on resistance to racist representations contributes to conversations about the radical power of Haitian and Haitian diasporic cultural production.