Muertos Civiles: Mourning the Casualties of Racism in the Dominican Republic

Black Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Reconoci.do movement often state that denationalization policies in the Dominican Republic have caused their muertes civiles, or civil deaths. Although Reconoci.do’s members organize to fight against their figurative deaths, their struggles are not limited to a fight for legal recognition. They also fight for survival in the context of higher rates of death as a direct result of systemic racism and social exclusion. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in the Dominican Republic, this article explores resistance to the deaths of Black individuals who form part of a large‐scale movement against statelessness. I engage Christina Sharpe’s analysis of “wake work” in order to examine “Black people’s ability to everywhere and anywhere … produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence on existing” (2016, 11). I analyze Reconoci.do’s activism as wake work to interpret the movement’s manifestations of resistance to death by racism.