Decolonizing the migration archive: Haitian refugees at Fort Allen, Puerto Rico, 1981–82

Abstract This article offers a decolonial reading of Fort Allen, a U.S. military base temporarily repurposed as a detention camp for Haitian refugees in southern Puerto Rico in 1981–82, to interrogate the imperial geographies and archival silences of migration governance in the Caribbean. Drawing on a range of archival materials—including court rulings, newspaper editorials, photographs, private letters, and activist artifacts—it reconstructs the spatial, legal, and political dimensions of Fort Allen as both a site of confinement and a lens into broader U.S. strategies of offshoring and racialized migration control. The article situates Fort Allen within intersecting histories of U.S. empire, Cold War geopolitics, and Caribbean anticolonial resistance, arguing that the camp’s short-lived existence exemplifies a longer history of spatialized legal exceptions and colonial entanglements. It further engages with recent efforts to decenter and decolonize migration studies by foregrounding subaltern memory, contested archives, and the methodological imperative to read across silences, erasures, and fragmentary traces.