Written by Attia Taylor
Cover: Clarivel Ruiz. Photo: Michael Foster, 2010.
Clarivel Ruiz, Artist, Educator and Founder of Dominicans Love Haitians Movement, 2024 BAC Grantee. Photo courtesy of Clarivel Ruiz.
Clairvel Ruiz is a member of BAC’s Cultural Heritage Advisory Group (CHAG). CHAG consists of members whose artistic practice, expertise, insights, and perspectives contribute to our efforts to preserve and promote Brooklyn's rich cultural heritage and help inform our future programs with a focus on diversity and inclusivity.
Clarivel Ruiz is (we, us, you) is a passionate and dedicated activist, artist, and educator whose work pays tribute to the often marginalized histories of Black and Indigenous peoples. With ancestral roots in Ayiti Kiskeya (the Dominican Republic and Haiti), Clarivel grew up in New York City, on the ancestral land of the Lenape people.
In 2016, Clarivel founded the Dominicans Love Haitians Movement, an arts-based nonprofit organization utilizing the arts for decolonization and to celebrate shared heritage, foster a future free from oppression, and promote tolerance, belonging, and dignity for all.
As an artist-activist and educator, Clarivel dedicates their efforts to transformative work around cultural responsiveness and the unlearning of racism. Their influence extends through educational roles at the New York City Department of Education's Division of Multilingual Learners, Ramapo for Children, and New York University's Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity. Clarivel's commitment is further reflected in their involvement with cultural programs such as the Hemispheric Institute's EmergeNYC, Culture Push's Utopian Fellowship, the Civic Practice Seminar at the Metropolitan Museum, the Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship at CCCADI, and as a Brooklyn Arts Council awardee. They are also a recipient of the Unicorn Fund through the Media Democracy Fund and an Intercultural Leadership Institute Year 5 Fellow.
Clarivel holds an MFA from CUNY, City College, and continues to inspire and lead in the realms of art, education, and activism. I spoke with Clarivel about the start of Dominicans Love Haitians, how and why their work is rooted in Brooklyn, and how their film festival supports Dominicans and Haitians in NYC and beyond.
Attia Taylor: Can you tell me a little bit about how the Dominicans Love Haitians movement came to be?
We grew up here in the United States as a first generation immigrant in the Bronx. In 2009, it was our first time ever going back to the Dominican Republic.
[In the United States], you get to meet so many African diasporic people from different countries. And not to say that there aren't issues that happen here, but the likelihood is that you'll be friends with people, and you’ll connect with people even though you may come from different Islands and different cultures.You'll gravitate towards each other.
And then when we went [to the Dominican Republic] as an adult, it was the complete opposite in fact, there was a heightened state of xenophobia, where we saw news articles being like, ‘be careful of Haitians’ or a Haitian person did this. It’s like the equivalent of what we find here when newscasters blame a Black person for something.
At that point, our father disclosed that my grandmother was Haitian. At 70 years old, he was still holding this secret. And at that moment, our mother said, if I had known this I never would have married [you]. Growing up, our father was an alcoholic, a womanizer, and verbally abusive to our mother. So we were like, he could be all these other things and you profess your undying love. And yet to be Haitian, that's the reason not to have a relationship. It stopped us and it was like, if this is the case then this is an illness. It took us a moment to be like, what can we do?
Her reasoning is something that's happening across the Dominican Republic. It's not just her.
You can do a much deeper dive into the issues that are pertinent, not only to this island, but you as an African and Indigenous diasporic person. Asking, what do you know, Clarivel? And it was the beginning of our journey to discovery.
Is that how the movement started for you?
A friend of ours, Atibon, is the artist who created the t-shirt that said, 'Brooklyn Loves Haiti’. That was the conversation that he came back from Haiti with. Part of that conversation emanated over here and we're like what could that look like if we created something that said ‘Dominicans Love Haitians’? We need to create solidarity but more importantly for us it’s what it symbolizes. That Dominicans have been divorced and have been disassociated from our own Blackness.
How does the movement here in Brooklyn reach over to Haiti and DR and across the diaspora?
Before Covid, we were developing a project called the Black Doll Project where we were asking people to donate and to create Black dolls. And then we were sending them overseas to Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. We were then having conversations around the significance of how racialization and other “isms” have been created through art and doll making.
Unpacking really heavy conversations around xenophobia, discrimination, racialization, gender, and all the things. Working on community building … and then Covid happened.
We had a hard time pivoting or we were trying to figure out how to pivot and then during that same time in 2020 we got hit by Dominican ultra nationalists. They started cyber bullying and threatening us. That along with other things that were happening in the organization really had an impact and we had to kind of step away.
I’m so sorry. That is incredibly frightening. You’ve made your way back to the work and that’s beautiful. You’re now working on a film festival?
The [Nou Akoma Nou Sinèrji Haitian Dominican Transnational Film Festival] was our response to that threat because we were like, if anything, what is the next step that you need to take on to ensure that no matter what happens, these conversations keep happening? That you continue to build a stronger network of community, and that the issue gets elevated.
Our background is in media and theater, and we've managed a youth documentary program for several years. So the solution, we thought, was a festival that could bring all these pieces together. Bringing people together to have these important conversations. So we consider the film festival to be an impact film festival.
Can you share more about what the film festival entails?
We're specifically curating films that have important conversations that are necessary for people in our community. For people to understand what is taking place and for us to be connected because it's really easy to get disconnected here in the United States.
It almost seems like you can't be all of you. You have to choose or eventually you have to assimilate and we feel that it's important for you, however you identify, to feel proud of your history.
And you had a festival last year? This is your second.
Yeah, so this is the second one. We're partnering with Saint Francis College to support the screening in October. We’re programming the films as we go and we’re still looking for more people to submit their films, shorts and features.
What’s significant about having the film festival in Brooklyn?
There's a good number of Haitian and Dominicans here and because it's downtown, it's easily accessible for those who are in the Bronx. Dominicans who are in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan can come to Brooklyn.
Plus, we love Brooklyn. Energetically and it’s just a different vibe. We grew up in the Bronx and when we moved to Brooklyn it felt much more artistic and we felt much more of that creative energy. We also felt that it’s very communal and community oriented. We just found family here.
What was the audience's response to last year's festival?
There were people who were very thankful. They told us that they felt disconnected from their culture and that this was the first time they felt back connected. This is Haitians and Haitian Americans. There were Dominicans who felt that they were carrying a heaviness that got lifted. There are people who were crying, not just because of the content but because afterwards in their conversations they discovered something that they didn't know was happening in their culture. They found something [out] about themselves that they can let go of.
I think the miracle of the festival is that, wherever you may be, you get to discover something about yourself. To decolonize a practice or a way that you've been behaving that no longer serves our community or serves you either. So for us it’s really the importance of healing.
Attend the second annual Nou Akoma Nou Sinèrji Haitian Dominican Transnational Film Festival!
Dominicans Love Haitians Movement hosts its second annual Nou Akoma Nou Sinèrji (We Heart We Synergy) Haitian Dominican Transnational Film Festival in downtown Brooklyn, October 9-12, on the campus of St. Francis College. Partnering for the second year with St. Francis College and its Haitian Studies Association, the festival continues to center Dominicans Love Haitians Movement’s enduring mission of promoting solidarity and awareness between the Haitian and Dominican communities, both at home and within the diaspora.
Program Highlights:
October 9 at 5:30pm - Opening Festival Art Exhibit: “The Right to Have Rights”
October 9 at 6:30pm - Screening of “Mountains”
October 11 at 6pm - Special screening of “Parsley,” with guest speaker Edwidge Danticat
About Attia Taylor
Attia Taylor is a Brooklyn based creative producer, director, and musician. She is the founder of Womanly, a creative studio and publication founded in 2017 to provide preventive health information through art to Black and Brown women and non-binary folks. Her work is rooted in social justice and health advocacy to bring inclusive and culturally relevant content to print and film. She is passionate about building and cultivating communities through storytelling, research, and creative production.
Attia Taylor, Founder and Editor in Chief of Womanly, 2023 BAC Grantee.