Gender, Class, and Migration in the Dominican Republic: Women's Experiences in a Transnational Community

Abstract

The experiences of women in one village in the Dominican Republic, Los Pinos, are analyzed as these relate to the dense transnational network of social relations that now link the village to New York City where most Dominican migrants have settled. International migration and gender relations affect 2 groups of Pinera women: 1) those married to US migrants or with migrant offspring in the US and 2) those women who had no household members in the US. As a consequence of the remittances they received, members of the 1st group often constituted the village's transnational middle class; the latter group included some of the poorest members of the community. Subsistence-level remittances also ensured that they were almost totally dependent on husbands to maintain their families. Women in patrilocal, stable marriages with US migrants conformed more readily to prevailing ideals of respectable feminine behavior. Such respectability was also sustained by remittance-subsidized consumption, especially of improved housing and consumer goods. For some of the younger women, however, conforming to these ideals was often an annoying burden. As the locus of many migrants' investments, the village of Los Pinos has experienced a modest growth in the number of full-time jobs paying somewhat above the minimum urban wage and in a variety of petty entrepreneurial activities depending heavily on the patronage of migrant households, themselves heavily subsidized by remittances. Women who followed a serial mating pattern, even some of the poorest, benefited from migration (higher income, consumer goods, visas) through the informal ties they established with migrants and their kin, although all of the desirable new jobs had gone to men. Nevertheless, for both groups of women prevailing gender ideologies impacted the socioeconomic changes stemming from the transnational process to conform to Pinero practice.