Migration and relations of production in the Dominican coffee economy [electronic resource] : Haitian workers on El Fondo coffee plantations.

1996

1 online resource (267 p.)

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This dissertation is an historical ethnographic study of the people who live and work on a Dominican coffee plantation cluster in the Haitian-Dominican border region known as El Fondo. The first section is concerned with the "thick description" of people's lives in El Fondo; the second section, through a coffee plantation owner's life history, brings together local and regional levels; and the third section, analyzing the border/frontier area, links local, regional, national and international levels of the study. It emphasizes the grassroots description of the village and people's working conditions. It describes the political economy of the district which is based on an ethnic division of labor whereby Dominicans control the land, coffee production and cattle raising, while Haitian workers make a living out of subsistence agriculture, charcoal making and wage labor. It focusses on cultural capital as it supersedes the ethnicity/class dichotomy often used in explaining Dominican discriminations against Haitians. It uses the life history approach to uncover the patterns of inequality of power based on ethnicity, gender, class, economic and cultural differences among the people in El Fondo. It combines interview material with archival findings to explore the whole life history of a Dominican coffee plantation owner and partial life histories of Haitian workers. Through stories told, and interpretation of stories, it analyzes the legendary myths according to which, a Dominican coffee owner combined a pact with the devil and his devotion to the Virgin to accumulate wealth and prestige. It investigates the impact of the border/frontier non-state zone on the Haitian-Dominican relations through an analysis of the 1937 massacre and the Dominican state formation. In conclusion, the study explores the ways in which the relative structural continuity of the border/frontier zone is combined with ongoing social and cultural change brought about by human agents incessantly engaged in a duel opposing resistance to domination, rebellion to oppression, and hidden self-compensation to exploitation.

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English

July 12, 2011

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 1996.