The Americans of Samaná, 1998-2001

Photographers Andrea Robbins and Max Becher give visibility and voice to the community of Samaná, a peninsula in the northeast of the Dominican Republic, and home to the descendants of freed African- American slaves. In 1824, some 34 families arrived there from Haiti, which had recently achieved independence, encouraged by Haiti’s new president and the American Colonisation Society, which, for supposedly humanitarian reasons, promoted the expulsion of freed slaves. Although they live in a Spanish-speaking Caribbean country, today's 8,000 descendants have preserved the English language of the nineteenth century, together with the music, customs, gastronomy and the Protestant religion. A succession of dictatorial governments has banned English, but despite their linguistic and religious isolation, they continue to maintain their group identity. Excluded from economic development and  condemned to poverty, many still identify as Americans and wait for repatriation or to be reunited with branches of their families in the United States.