The sweet and salty air of the Caribbean Sea swings through the tall green palm trees as calmly as the turquoise waves splash onto the soft sand. The sun radiates like a warm omniscient eye beaming from the horizon. Its golden colors reflect from the west in Haiti, to the Dominican Republic in the east, creating a glow that covers the entire island of Hispaniola. But somehow, in the eyes of most of its inhabitants, one side of the island is dark and the other is light. The inhabitants of Haiti and the Dominican Republic have shared the Caribbean island of Hispaniola for over five hundred years. Yet tension runs high between the two nations of this island. In 2013 the Dominican Supreme Court ruling stated that people born in the country between 1929 and 2010 to non-citizen Haitian parents did not qualify as Dominican citizens and began deportations in August of that same year. The court ruling affected over 100,000 citizens with over 30,000 being deported. But this epidemic isn’t the only divide on the island; it’s simply a leaf falling from a tree that has roots spreading all the way back to 1804. When Italian sailor Christopher Columbus landed on Hispañola in 1492, the island was claimed for the Spanish crown. It was the first settlement in the New World and paved the way for conquest in the mainland of present-day Central and South America. The Spanish soon introduced the encomienda or forced labor of the natives to work sugar and coffee plants. But following the arrival of Europeans, Hispaniola's indigenous population suffered near-extinction in possibly the worst case of depopulation in the Americas. The Spanish had brought diseases that natives were not immune to. In 1501, when the Spanish sought a new means of labor-force, they instituted African slavery in the Americas at the port of Santo Domingo – Hispañola’s capital. This was the first place in the New World to import Africans as slaves and a major port in the transatlantic slave route between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. The island is the birthplace of the black experience in the Americas; slavery wasn’t completely abolished on the island until the year 1822. For well over three hundred years people of African decent made up more than ninety-five percent of all inhabitants of Hispaniola. How then, did racial tension develop? In 1697, Spain ceded the western three-eighths of the island to France. Haiti then became the ‘Pearl of the Antilles,’ France’s richest colony producing well over half of Europe’s sugar and coffee supply. The French Revolution in 1789 sparked the Haitian Revolution in 1801. Lead by Toussaint Louverture, the African slaves declared their freedom and took over the entire island of Hispanola, declaring freedom on the Spanish portion as well. But in 1844, the Dominican Republic declared their independence from Haiti; it was then that Hispañola permanently became two separate nations. Most historians argue that the idea of race was the leading factor in this separation. But when the distinction between a Haitian and Dominican is phenotypically impossible to make, it’s hard to understand how race played such a prominent role. Whether nationalism between imaginary boarders, or concepts of race purely constructed, both may be illusory, but their effects are detrimental. Since the early 20th century, there has been frequent hostility, strict border and immigration laws, the 1937 Parsley Massacre of 30,000 Haitians and, what I began with, the 2013 Supreme Court ruling. Dieusibon and his three siblings kneel together on the cement floor; the children share a small room containing nothing but a twin-sized bed with their parents. They have no toys, no games, no books, and have not attended school since they were forced to leave their home. As refugees, they migrated to this small town on the Haitian side of the border. They are unwanted in the Dominican Republic, their country of birth and have nothing in Haiti, their country of heritage. Division between the Dominican Republic and Haiti prevails today. With roots firmly gripped in the early nineteenth century, the tree of division continues to grow, and the inhabitants of Haiti and the Dominican Republic continue to reap its bitter fruit.