Enemy Within, Enemy Without: Dominican Attitudes Toward Haitians Before and After the Earthquake of January 12, 2010

There has long been tension between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, two nations begrudgingly linked by the geographic constraints of a shared island, differing in their economic status, way of life, and how they perceive themselves and each other. This tension springs from conflicts over land, the lingering perceived threat of Haiti’s occupation of the Dominican Republic in the mid-1800s, the discourse of the Trujillo dictatorship that rejected Haiti as a means by which to forge national unity, and ongoing Haitian labor migration that has its roots in the emergence of the Dominican sugar industry. This thesis performs a content analysis of letters to the editor by coding major themes found in the Dominican Republic’s Listín Diario online newspaper one year before and two years after the earthquake that devastated Haiti on January 12th of 2010. These data are used to determine how media representations of Dominican attitudes toward Haitians are affected by this disaster, and therefore provide insight into Dominican attitudes themselves