Wucker, Michele 1969-

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WUCKER, Michele 1969-

PERSONAL: Born 1969, in Kansas City, MO. Education: Rice University, B.A.; Columbia University School of International Affairs, M.A.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 19 Union Square W., New York, NY 10001.

CAREER: World Policy Institute, New York, NY, senior fellow, 2001—. Milwaukee Sentinel, Milwaukee, WI, reporter; Listín USA, foreign editor; International Financing Review, Latin America bureau chief.

WRITINGS:

Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola, Hill and Wang (New York, NY), 1999.

Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, Newsweek, World Policy Journal, Haiti Insight, Nando Times, NACLA Report on the Americas, and In These Times.

SIDELIGHTS: Freelance journalist Michele Wucker lived for a number of years in the Dominican Republic and reported on the coup in Haiti in 1991. Based on these first-hand experiences, she wrote her first book about the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the space of the single island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean. Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola, published in 1999, is more than just a journalistic account of the author's own experiences. It covers five centuries of the island's history, showing how the conflict between the divided cultures on the island developed.

The cockfight reference in the title of Wucker's book is a metaphor for the often contentious relationship between the Spanish-speaking and mixed-race Dominicans and the black, French-speaking Haitians. The limited resources of the land they share lends to their wary and oftentimes violent reactions to one another. Violence and poverty, the author points out, has led numerous people from both sides of the island to migrate to the United States. For example, Miami and New York counted among their populations a million Haitian immigrants in 1994. Twelve and one-half percent of the island's entire population, Wucker tells us, immigrated to the United States in the last twenty years. Numbers like these give these communities significant political power in the United States, making the events of Hispaniola relevant to Americans.

In addition to statistics and historical facts, Wucker mixes in colorful anecdotes and images of people from both cultures living on the island today. Wucker interviews a Haitian cane cutter who knows no other way of life than to work seventy hours a week for just pennies an hour. She also talks to a number of immigrants in the United States. According to Patrick Markee in the New York Times Book Review, one particularly memorable street life scene closes the book. The author describes a carnival that takes place annually on the outskirts of Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. The author shows us that some of the barrier walls can come down as both Haitian and Dominicans dance side-by-side during this celebratory time.

Moments such as continued to be rare, however, and the theme of racism is explored in depth in Why the Cocks Fight. In addition to being of different races, the two peoples of Hispaniola have long suffered conflict over the issue of immigration from Haiti to the Dominican Republic. The Dominican government continued to purchase thousands of Haitians each year to work as sugar cane cutters. The conditions these laborers work in barely surpassed slave labor with minuscule pay, poor conditions, and few legal rights. IN additin, the natives of the Dominican Republic treat them with disdain, calling them braceros and marginalizing them to segregated communities on the outskirts of town.

A reviewer for Publisher's Weekly praised the Wucker's "insightful treatment of many cultural issues, particularly the politicized nature of language, to which she brings an understanding of Creole, Spanish and French."