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From Hidden Hand to Heavy Hand: Sugar, the State, and Migrant Labor in Haiti and the Dominican Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Samuel Martínez
Samuel Martínez*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
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Abstract

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For more than a century, the Dominican sugar industry has hosted seasonal immigrations of neighboring Caribbean islanders as harvest laborers (most recently, Haitians). This migrant labor system is fully comparable to systems of labor control after slavery in other parts of the Caribbean. But the regional historical trend toward more liberal labor relations in commercial agriculture seems largely to have been reversed in the case of Dominican sugar. Between the 1930s and 1960s, the recruitment and employment of harvest labor changed from something resembling free wage labor into a government-managed system of semicoerced exploitation. Processes of state formation in Haiti and the Dominican Republic are crucial in explaining this transformation. Fuller understanding of historical change in the case at hand is afforded by broadening the scope of inquiry beyond the direct confrontation between labor and estate owners and by recognizing that governments and their agents have not always acted in accordance with private agro-industrial interests.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , 1999 , pp. 57 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

The field research for this article was carried out in the Dominican Republic and Haiti from January 1985 to March 1987, under fellowships granted by the Doherty Fellowship Committee and the Social Science Research Council. I presented a preliminary version at the NEH Summer Seminar “Slavery and Freedom in Caribbean History,” University of Wisconsin, 10 June–19 July 1996. The comments by the seminar's participants and preceptor Francisco Scarano are gratefully acknowledged. Michiel Baud, Monica van Beusekom, and two anonymous LARR reviewers also critiqued drafts of this article. I completed revisions of the manuscript during my postdoctoral fellowship at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, University of Virginia. Unless otherwise noted, all findings and opinions are mine, as is responsibility for any errors, omissions, or distortions.

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