Dominicans Love Haitians Movement uses art and storytelling to help Haitians and Dominicans see each other as family. We understand that what divides us was created, not inherent. Through media and cultural storytelling, we uncover shared histories and challenge racial myths that have caused harm, creating spaces for dialogue and healing, leading to a future of mutual respect, cooperation, and shared prosperity.
Vision
To transform division into connection.
Philosophy:
Dominicans Love Haitians Movement is using various art modalities to reflect and reconcile with over 500 years of Eurocentrism. It is exhuming mythological injustices designed and instituted by colonialism, dictators, and plutocrats to instill fear, prejudice, and oppression. Using art as a vehicle for unraveling biases and bigotry, healing wounds inflicted by racial stigmas, and by creating spaces to manifest the possibility of and the ability to witness violent acts without deflection, amnesia, or suppression, and voicing those acts so they no longer hold power or designate who we are as human beings.
The vision of Dominicans Love Haitians Movement is to bring these complex, dissonant, historically significant experiences to the forefront through participatory art and facilitation to formulate dialogues, reflections, and restore compassion and healing to create a future from unimagined places and bring communion to the island of Kiskeya Ayiti.
The project challenges current thinking with respect to how Dominicans view history. It utilizes language in shifting the current sociological framework of oppression. The name of the organization in and of itself challenges the thinking that love can exist between two nations because of elite and government machinations insisting our nations are at odds with each other since the 1700s. It is imperative to dismantle the myths of “race” that have been instituted and internalized as hard-core values, truths and beliefs that continue to perpetuate hate and separate people be creating “others” who are subsequently used as scapegoats and seen as less than human.