Bordering on (In)visibility: The Mobility and Containment of Haitian Migrant Women in the Dominican Republic's Linea Noroeste

This research sterns from twelve months of ethnographic research with Haitian migrant women who reside in Batey Sol, a former sugar-company labor camp located along the Linea Noroeste (northwest line) linking the Dominican Rebulic's border town of Dajabon with the urban center of Santiago. The multi-sited study considers the larger network of political, social, and economic structures and relations of power in which these women are positioned in their daily lives and through their livelihoods as market women. Through key anthropological and feminist theoretical frameworks, I offer a commentary on the political economy of racism and gender inequality in the contexts of Caribbean colonial history, Dominican nationalism, and globalization. By mapping both figurative and literal border crossings and inspections across space and time and the complex relationships between mobility and containment, I bring greater visibility to the daily experiences of Haitian women as workers, as migrants, as mothers, and as activists. I argue for the necessity of making visible the unique positionings of these women within the contexts of both structural power and individual agency as they play out in the interstices of capitalism and poverty, neoliberal democracy and state violence, globalization and feminism, migration and the informal economy, and citizenship and human rights. We need to pay attention to what they are saying and what they are doing to carve out creative spaces that contend with and contest in strategic ways the contradictions derivative of their simultaneous visibility and invisibility as migrant women.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Anthropology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Shoaff, Jennifer Lynn

Contributors dc:contributor

• Torres, Arlene

• Black Studies
• Anthropology, Cultural
• Women's Studies

Identifier

(UMI)AAI3392474

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/72386