Johanné Gómez Terrero’s Sugar Island Exposes the Hidden Realities of Dominican-Haitian Teens

A story told by few but experienced by many unsung girls, director Johanné Gómez Terrero captures the raw, political, and spiritual journey of a Dominican-Haitian teen pregnancy. Sugar Island is a coming-of-age film that follows 14-year-old Makenya as she navigates a sudden pregnancy while living in a sugarcane community. Terrero spoke to HipLatina about the making of Sugar Island and the dynamic ways bodily autonomy, documentation, labor rights, and spirituality function as pillars throughout the film. These themes don’t simply coexist; they reinforce one another, revealing how one girl’s pregnancy becomes a window into the larger structural inequalities shaping life on the island.

An Afro-diasporic artist who positions her work within a Caribbean and decolonial framework, Terrero roots the film in personal lineage. The first spark, she says, came from realizing that teen pregnancy wasn’t an isolated event in her family; her niece became pregnant at 13, and both her mother and grandmother had given birth young as well. This generational thread pushed Terrero to interrogate how girlhood, agency, and expectations of womanhood collide. “What I perceived in my family circle is that women’s lives change radically when they become mothers,” she says. “Their desires move to the background or disappear.”

Her observation mirrors the reality for many Dominican and Haitian girls. While Hispanic teen pregnancy in the U.S. declined by 65% from 2008 to 2018, the picture across Latin America remains different. The Dominican Republic is one of only 24 countries worldwide—and one of six in Latin America—with a total abortion ban, with no exceptions, not even for rape, incest, or the life of the mother. For young women like Makenya, unexpected parenthood is not a question but an inevitability shaped by law, poverty, and cultural norms.

Terrero reflects on this contradiction in the film: in one moment, Makenya is dying her eyebrows blond, blasting dembow, and savoring the carefree playfulness adolescence should allow. In the next, a missed period rewrites the trajectory of her life. “Teenage motherhood is especially complex now,” Terrero says, “because the sense of communal mothering has been lost, and all the weight falls on a body that hasn’t yet reached adulthood.”

The burden is compounded by Makenya’s fractured family structure. She lives only with her mother and grandfather, in a household shaped by loss and the racialized borders embedded in Dominican life. Her grandfather is Haitian; her late grandmother was Dominican. This blending of identities, once common in sugarcane communities, now sits at the center of the Dominican Republic’s fraught relationship with citizenship and belonging. Sugarcane built modern Dominican wealth, and it did so through the exploitation of Haitian laborers recruited decades ago to work in bateyes, often without papers, rights, or state protections.

Makenya’s grandfather embodies this history. After decades of cutting cane, he becomes a pension activist, fighting for compensation that the mechanization of the industry has rendered precarious. With machines replacing bodies, older workers are discarded, deported, denied paperwork, or left without wages. “Makenya says it in the film: her grandfather was useful as long as his hands were useful,” Terrero explains. “Bodies that can no longer be exploited are deported without guarantees of their rights.” His fight is not just economic but existential; without documentation, he—like many Haitian-descended Dominicans—is legally invisible.

This invisibility becomes another inheritance passed down to Makenya. Throughout the film, in brief yet potent moments, the audience watches her confront the reality that her child may inherit her grandfather’s undocumented status—a life defined by limited mobility, state surveillance, and a lack of recognition. Terrero sees this erosion of dignity clearly. “Poverty is inherited, just as great fortunes are inherited—it’s how the status quo is maintained,” she says. “Denying documents and perpetuating statelessness is a way to prevent people from climbing the social pyramid. Without identity, without documents, there is no dignity.”

This question of inheritance leads the film into its spiritual dimension. In spaces where state power strips people of rights, Afro-spirituality becomes a site of resilience, connection, and self-definition. While Catholicism dominates the Dominican Republic, Makenya’s family practices las 21 divisiones, a syncretic spiritual tradition blending African cosmologies, Catholic saints, and Taíno influences. These “Misterios,” or spiritual guides, become protectors and teachers throughout the film, grounding the family in rituals that defy the colonial hierarchies embedded in Dominican society.

“Every spirituality is a ‘cosmosentir,’ a worldview,” Terrero explains. “I’m trying to dissolve the veils of coloniality and reveal the beauty within our ancestry and their ways of imagining the world. Embracing our Blackness is expansion.” The film offers just that—an extension of Dominican and Haitian Blackness within the African Diaspora. Through this lens, Sugar Island becomes not only a portrait of Dominican-Haitian girlhood but also a restoration of Black Caribbean spiritual knowledge often dismissed or deemed taboo in mainstream Dominican culture.

Despite the heaviness of filming teen pregnancy, statelessness, and colorism, Sugar Island is a story that begs to be told—one often overlooked in conversations about Dominican-Haitian relations. Terrero could have told a singular story, but the parallel narratives of Makenya’s pregnancy and her grandfather’s fight for labor rights underscore the geopolitical reality of being darker-skinned Dominican and Haitian in the Dominican Republic. It is a reality marked by centuries of border violence that remains present today. “There is a lot of noise around Dominican–Haitian relations. I would like to encourage healing conversations—to revisit our shared history so we can heal and imagine a maroon future,” says Terrero. “What I want most is radical tenderness.”

A story like Makenya’s could be described as tragic, but Sugar Island offers audiences both the wounds and the beauty of the island of Hispaniola—the richness of the earth and the vibrancy of tradition. Terrero captures it all vividly, bringing the fragility of girlhood—a conversation often had only once it is lost—to the forefront.

Sugar Island will screen at the African Diaspora International Film Festival until December 14 in New York City.