University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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

Shoaff, Jennifer Lynn

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/72386

Description

Title
Bordering on (In)visibility: The Mobility and Containment of Haitian Migrant Women in the Dominican Republic's Linea Noroeste
Author(s)
Shoaff, Jennifer Lynn
Issue Date
2009
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Torres, Arlene
Department of Study
Anthropology
Discipline
Anthropology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
  • Black Studies
  • Anthropology, Cultural
  • Women's Studies
Abstract
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.
Graduation Semester
2009
Type of Resource
text
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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/72386

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