Sobrevivientes: testimonial literature, Haitian migrants, and Mexico’s racial imagination

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since 2010, Haitian migration to non-traditional destinations such as Brazil and Chile intensified. After a series of shifts in Brazilian and Chilean immigration policies that restricted and criminalized Haitian migrants, many Haitians began seeking asylum elsewhere. That is in this context that Haitian refugees began arriving in Mexico in the past ten years, which presented a challenge to the political, cultural, and racial Mexican imaginary about immigration. Through the critical reading of Sobrevivientes: ciudadanos del mundo, a testimonial narrative written by Pascal Ustin Dubuisson, a Haitian asylum seeker, I argue that ‘testimonio,’ as a genre, offers a space of critical reflection to better understand the connections between dispossession, exploitation, and forcible displacement in the continent. In so doing, Dubuisson’s account also requires us to reconsider the limits of testimonio, its political project of emancipation, to critically engage with the history of anti-Blackness and anti-Black immigration restriction in Latin America.