Creating Transnational Ties

by Lara López
translated by Zachary Romansky

One day, without telling anyone, seventeen-year-old Margarita left her family to embark on voyage in a small wooden boat to Puerto Rico and then on to New York, the city idealized by the Dominican collective imagination and home to the largest number of Dominicans outside Hispaniola. Thousands of Dominican women like Margarita migrate to places around the world every year, often risking their lives and leaving behind everything they most love to look for work. Other issues such as gender inequality, the desire for independence, and female empowerment factor into the decision to migrate.

Photo provided by Susan Sermoneta

Many female migrants from the Dominican Republic arrive in the New York City neighborhood of Washington Heights to live and to work in factories, or settle in Puerto Rico to work as house cleaners or domestic servants. Some might find work at the food stands in Piñones, known as the cradle of Afro-Puerto Rican culture. Little by little, these women become legal residents and provide for their families—by bringing them abroad or sending them money. Dominican women in Washington Heights have worked in the textile industry since the 1970s, but now they have branched out into many other secondary and tertiary services that maintain the global economy’s private financial sector. They serve New York’s upper class by sewing in sweatshops, cleaning offices and hotels, caring for children, cooking and selling food from carts on the street, as well as by working in cafeterias, laundries, and beauty salons. The diasporic communities of these women, the subject of study for University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus Sociology Professor Karin Weyland, create transnational ties on political, economic, social, and cultural levels.

Between 1993 and 2005, Weyland, now Director of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at UPR-RP, lived among the Dominican communities in Santo Domingo and Washington Heights, participated in community movements, volunteered at the Dominican Women’s Development Center, and performed a feminist and post-colonial ethnographic study of the Dominican community, which allowed her to describe various examples of economic, political, and cultural transnationalism.

Weyland explored the benefits of transnationalism from a cultural and gender-oriented approach, focusing on the building of “social capital” and the social networks formed by Dominican migrant women. As she understands it, the field of contemporary transnationalism goes beyond considering migration as a mere transfer of capital and cheap labor between nations, and migrants are no longer viewed as victims of poverty and international relations.       

According to Weyland’s ethnographic study, transnational migration offers a way to see migrant women’s real contribution to the global economy and acknowledge the way in which their social, cultural, political and economic networks create and expand sources of work, income, travel, home improvement, and business. Though above all, migrants solidify and transform cross-border networks of friends and family.

“Migrant women have broken old power models and given new meaning to cultural identities, especially gender and racial identity, by defying national power spaces,” she says. 

In her project, Weyland recommended that the Dominican government foster broader communication with Dominican communities abroad, with the aim of developing a more democratic citizenry that would contribute to the collective welfare and have a positive impact on communities. This outreach would be aimed also at impacting the impetus of migration, which—in the case of the Dominican Republic—is triggered by the promise of remittances. That is, migrants send the money they earn back to their relatives in the Dominican Republic to go toward food, healthcare, and housing expenses.

In 2008, remittances topped $3 billion. According to the Central Bank of the Dominican Republic, Dominican money transfers remained the second highest source of capital of the Gross Domestic Product. Weyland was pleased to find out that an initiative similar to the one she proposed in her research project is currently underway. Although it was not adopted at the national level, as she had suggested, a community-based initiative, the Migrant Families Abroad Network (REDMI by its Spanish acronym) emerged in 2008 from the women’s advocacy group Tú, Mujer de la República Dominicana. REDMI lobbies the Dominican government to allow migrants to participate in decisions and discussions on the country’s political and economic situation, demand respect for migrants’ rights from foreign governments, and develop public programs to facilitate remittance investment and voluntary return for migrants.

Since 2006 Weyland has been living and working in Puerto Rico. With support from the Office of the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, she now measures the contributions of Dominicans in Piñones and contextualizes their participation within the struggles of the Afro-Latino community.

“In Piñones, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans have been able to join forces to protect the area’s prosperity and cultural and recreational value by preventing construction of megaprojects, restaurants, and nightclubs. Piñones kiosk owners have succeeded in forming a coalition, supporting one another, and working hand in hand with community organizations. At times this generates tension and at other times it has resulted in agreements between the community and the state. The social struggles of these communities against displacement, new housing, and hotel construction also have contributed to continuing the social imaginary of Piñones as a place of independence and Maroon culture,” she explains.

Weyland will compare and analyze these struggles of day-to-day resistance within an Afro-Latino historical frame of reference. For this, she is going to include events and battles that have taken place from colonial times until the present day, beyond national boundaries. By collecting data on Afro-Latino history, Weyland’s research documents Black social history in Puerto Rico, Argentina, and the Dominican Republic and displays the similarities found among their processes of racial fusion and resistance.

According to Weyland, Dominican migrants’ current situation, transnational home structure, and the creation of political and cultural networks form the basis for a new global citizenship emerging outside national boundaries to produce new social and economic capital. By risking their lives and leaving everything behind, migrants defy geographic spatial boundaries and forge transnational links that redefine individual, family, and community relationships both in their countries of origin and in the countries that receive them.