Case Stories: Challenges for the Sons and Daughters of Mixed Couples

July 13, 2018.- Aneudy, 18, dreams of one day becoming an accountant in order to guarantee well-being in old age for his father, Maximino (58), a Dominican dedicated to ox-cart hauling at the Lima sugar mill, Central Romana, in the municipality of Ramon Santana, province of San Pedro de Macoris.

It was there that Maximino met Melania Pierre, Aneudy's mother, of Haitian origin, who arrived in the country as a child. From this union they had three children. Aneudy is the oldest of the three children of this ethnically mixed couple and the second one without civil registration (birth certificate), a situation that stands between him and his goal.

Melania obtained a Haitian passport at the end of her third pregnancy, which allowed her to regularize her migratory status in the country. With it, she was able to register the youngest of her children, Leudy, who was born at the Central Hospital of San Pedro de Macoris. Aneudy, however, did not have the same luck: after the competent official in Ramon Santana questioned Maximino's paternity. "She interviewed my father and told him that those boys were not his children," Aneudy recalls, despite having the documentation required by the corresponding national agencies. "They have sent inspectors here, to Batey Lima, they have spoken with everyone who knows us, and at each appointment they send the case back again," says Melania, who has been in the process for five years. In return, she has only received the offer of registration in the foreigners' book, which she has not accepted because she understands that her children are Dominican.

Aneudy was champion in the Mathematics Olympiad organized by the Ministry of Education, representing the Campina Educational Center, the school he attended until he was forced to stop because he lacked the birth certificate needed to take the national exams. The same happened to his sister Arisleidy, age 17. Aneudy has seen his school year left unfinished and his desire to continue being a high-achieving student postponed. Now his life is woven between waiting through the process and working in a grocery store in La Romana, a job with which he supports the family, now dispersed because of the few possibilities for survival that life in the batey offers to young people like him.