OneBook "Why the Cocks Fight": Articles

Over the last 10 years, food prices throughout the Dominican Republic have skyrocketed, and gaining access to in-store credit (calledfiao) to buy food has become an increasingly pervasive economic strategy to secure household needs. Recent scholarship on food security in the Dominican Republic has focused on strategies Dominicans use to access food on credit through social networks. But there has been little research to date that discusses the strategies migrant Haitians use to buy food in the Dominican Republic. The gap in this literature is all the more noteworthy because of the broader contemporary social, cultural, political, and economic context of an increasing number of Haitians living and working in the Dominican Republic, and the long-standing tension that increased Haitian migration has precipitated. This article examines the strategies people use to establish social networks that help them gain access to in-store credit to buy food at neighborhood corner stores in the Dominican Republic. Haitians remain food secure primarily through fiao exchanges, linking Dominicans and Haitians in extensive social networks that are predicated upon borrowers' reputations of being “gente responsable,” (responsible people, those who are good to their word, pay off their debt, and can be relied upon in times of need). Research results show that fiao is a process that creates trust between Dominicans and Haitians, but it does not necessarily lead to the modification of people's negative perceptions of the Other. The moral economy of corner stores forwards a morality of care by using a system that allows for those who are trusted to stand up for those who have not yet proven this trust. This case study highlights the complexity of Dominican–Haitian relations, shows that everyday life in the Dominican Republic requires intercultural engagement, and gives a more nuanced perspective on when and how discrimination is experienced in the Dominican Republic

To destabilize sequentialist, stage-like understandings of global production, this paper examines changing relations of accumulation taking shape in the garment export industry in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. I draw upon a framework called 'the coloniality of power' to consider the reworking of the social and spatial boundaries between hyper-exploited wage work and the people and places cast out from its relations. Through a critical ethnography of a restructuring garment firm and its operations in a trade zone on the Dominican-Haitian border, I argue for attention to how places and labouring bodies are marked differentially as Other. The production of racialized and gendered hierarchies of Otherness creates the conditions for relational and relative North-South divides, constituting uneven and fragmented geographies of production.

Explores how the recruitment of harvest labor and employment practices in the Dominican Republic sugar industry have evolved. Historical context and geographic setting; Formation of the Dominican migrant labor system; State formation and dictatorship.

This article presents a documentation note of the 10th Migration Dialogue seminar held March 7-9, 2002 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Migration Dialogue seminars provide a setting for 40 opinion leaders from Europe and North America to learn about and discuss the major migration management issues of the twenty-first century. The following are three central issues explored in the 2002 seminar. First, the Dominican Republic economy grew rapidly in the 1990s, 6-8 percent per year, as thousands of rural women especially found sewing jobs in free-trade zones. Why did emigration pressure remain so high despite rapid job creation? Are emigration and remittances substitutes for socioeconomic reforms, notably in the education system and the labor market? Do remittances, which account for almost 105 of the Dominican Republic's $16 billion gross domestic product, increase or decrease the desire to emigrate? Second, Hispaniola is a relatively small island shared by peoples with different origins, histories, and languages. The population of the Dominican Republic and Haiti are each 8-9 million. Some 500,000 to 800,000 Haitian nationals live in the Dominican Republic, equivalent to almost 10 percent of Haiti's population.

Focusing on the Parsley Massacre-one of the major events that has helped to define the complex relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic-this paper analyzes two works that treat it: the short story 'Nineteen Thirty-Seven' by the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat and the novel Song of the Water Saints by the Dominican-American writer Nelly Rosario. Although racial formation in the Dominican Republic and Haiti as well as ideological notions of national identity in Hispaniola inform this reading, the framework at hand invokes primarily a combination of collective postmemory and performativity. Collective postmemory serves as a way of approaching fictional renderings of the Parsley Massacre because the texts in question attempt to make the reader aware of this historical event as well as contribute to knowledge and identity in the diaspora(s) of Hispaniola. Performativity serves as a lens for bodily instantiations of identity in these texts. I demonstrate how female protagonists in these texts (mis)perform identities-marked by ideology-that are linked to postmemory. This paper, then, ultimately examines how these texts serve as cultural tools that perform postmemory and allow for the potential evolution of harmful aspects of past national identity through diasporic consciousness.