A fishing coast becomes an industrial park for garment work

Caracol lies on the north coast of Haiti, well outside the zone damaged by the earthquake of January 2010. Shortly before the earthquake the area had been designated Haiti's first marine protected area. Afterwards it was selected for an industrial park instead, at a total cost of 260 million dollars, with the United States government putting in a quarter of its reconstruction funding. Local men fished the mangrove and the clear water beyond it and could make up to thirty two dollars a day. Work on a factory floor paid the minimum wage of three dollars seventy five cents a day. Farmers said the land taken was the best growing land they had. The American aid agency promised 750 houses for earthquake survivors who would be relocated there, and by June 2012, with the factory nearly finished, none had been built. The sewing plants were to run tax free and supply Walmart, Target, Kohl's and the Gap. Charlemagne Peralte, killed by United States marines in 1919, was buried on this ground.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot died in Chicago in July 2012. He was born in Port-au-Prince into a family of historians, left Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship, and spent his career in American universities, the last of them the University of Chicago. His first book, written in Haitian Creole in 1977, retold the revolution for readers who spoke the language the revolution was fought in. Haiti: State Against Nation, published in 1990, described a state sitting on top of a peasantry it taxed and did not serve. Silencing the Past, published in 1995, is the work that travelled furthest. It argued that power enters the record long before any historian arrives, at the moment a fact is made, filed, retrieved and finally told as a story, and that the revolution in Saint-Domingue was unthinkable to the Europeans who had to write it down. Scholars in fields with no interest in Haiti now use his terms to ask who kept the documents and what was never written at all.

Pottery excavated at sites in Puerto Rico and the islands beside it comes in two styles of the same date, and archaeologists have argued for thirty years about what that means. Irving Rouse and others treated the makers of the Huecoid wares as part of the same cultural stock as their neighbours, holding that a difference in decoration is not a difference in people. Luis Chanlatte Baik argued the opposite, that the pottery and the carved stone ornaments of these sites are distinct enough to mark a tradition with its own origin. The dispute went nowhere for a long time, because the evidence was thin and each side could read the same sherds either way. Excavation with controlled stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating has since settled part of it, mostly by establishing which deposits are genuinely contemporary. Keegan and Hofman use the case to show a limit of their discipline. Ethnic and social boundaries in the ancient Caribbean have to be inferred from what people threw away, and objects move between communities more easily than identities do.

In 2007 the Dominican electoral board created a separate civil register for foreigners, known as the Book of Foreigners or the pink registers. A child born in a Dominican hospital to parents who cannot show legal status is given a pink birth certificate and entered in that book. It is a document, and it is not citizenship: people registered in it cannot vote. In the same year the board issued a circular, also called Resolution 12, instructing registry officers to stop issuing identity papers to children of foreign parents whose births had been recorded irregularly. Adults who needed their own birth certificates to enrol at a university found them refused. Whether a father had used a ficha, the identity card handed out by a sugar mill, to register a birth years earlier became the mark that flagged a family. Thousands of people born in the country were left stateless while officials audited their papers.