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From Hidden Hand to Heavy Hand: Sugar, the State, and Migrant Labor in Haitiand the Dominican Republic
Samuel Martinez
 Latin American Research Review
, Vol. 34, No. 1. (1999), pp. 57-84.
Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0023-8791%281999%2934%3A1%3C57%3AFHHTHH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L
 Latin American Research Review
is currently published by University of Texas Press.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/texas.html.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.http://www.jstor.orgWed Nov 21 17:10:23 2007
 
FROM HIDDEN HAND TO HEAVY HAND: Sugar, the State, and Migrant Labor in Haiti and the Dominican Republic" 
Samuel Martinez
University of Connecticut 
Abstract: For more than a century, the Dominican sugar industry has hostedseasonal immigrations of neighboring Caribbean islanders as harvest laborers(most recently, Haitians). This migrant labor system is fully comparable to sys-tems of labor control after slavery in other parts of the Caribbean. But the re-gional historical trend toward more liberal labor relations in commercial agricul-ture seems largely to have been reversed in the case of Dominican sugar. Betweenthe 1930s and 1960s, the recruitment and employment of harvest labor changedfrom something resembling free wage labor into
a
gove&ment-managed systemof semicoerced exvloitation. Processes of state formation in Haiti and the Do-hinican ~e~ublid this transformation. Fuller under-re crucial in explai;ingstanding of historical change in the case at hand is afforded by broadening thescope of inquiry beyond the direct confrontation between labor and estate own-ers and by recognizing that governments and their agents have not always actedin accordance with private agro-industrial interests.
In many Caribbean societies, the transition from slave labor to freewage labor did not occur immediately with emancipation but took manyyears to complete.' After emancipation, according to Bonham Richardson,"Caribbean planters attempted to control members of the newly freedworking classes by restricting their access to local lands, enacting immo-bilizing vagrancy laws; and importing thousands of laborers into the re-
*The field research for this article was carried out in the Dominican Republic and Haitifrom January 1985 to March 1987, under fellowships granted by the Doherty FellowshipCommittee and the Social Science Research Council. I presented a preliminary version at theNEH Summer Seminar "Slavery and Freedom in Caribbean History," University of Wiscon-sin, 10 June-19 July 1996. The comments by the seminar's participants and preceptor Fran-cisco Scarano are gratefully acknowledged. Michiel Baud, Monica van Beusekom, and twoanonymous
LARR
reviewers also critiqued drafts of this article.
I
completed revisions of themanuscript during my postdoctoral fellowship at the Carter
G.
Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, University of Virginia. Unless otherwise noted, all findingsand opinions are mine, as is responsibility for any errors, omissions, or distortions.1.Recent reviews of Caribbean labor history after emancipation include Richardson (1992,70-77), Scarano (1989), and Stinchcombe (1995, chap. 10).
Latin American Research Review
volume
34
number 1
O
1999
57
 
Latin American Research Review
gion in order to drive wages down" (1992,70).Thus even after slavery wasabolished, what could be called "unfreedom" was maintained in the formof limits on civil rights and constraints on freedom of economic maneuver.The Dominican Republic, despite never having hosted sugar pro-duction on an industrial scale during slavery, invites comparison withother Caribbean societies in the post-emancipation systems of immigrantlabor control instituted there during the development of its modern sugarindustry. The struggles of Dominican sugar estate owners to diminishtheir workers' alternatives to estate labor and the efforts of rural Domini-cans and Afro-Caribbean immigrants to resist planter domination arecomparable to contests for control over labor after slavery in other parts ofthe Caribbean.Michiel Baud (1992) recently went further than any previ-ous analyst toward situating the Dominican Republic in the comparativeframework of unfree labor after slavery. He interpreted the preference forimmigrant labor over national labor among Dominican sugarcane grow-ers as well as the use of coercion of various kinds in recruiting and em-ploying immigrant braceros as evidence of the Caribbean sugar industry'spersistent need for unfree labor. For Baud, Dominican sugar exemplifieshow free-market capitalist development and the employment of unfreelabor have been complementary rather than contradictory processes onthe global economic periphery, even as late as the twentieth century (Baud1992,302).In this article, I seek to build on Baud's insights by exploring howrecruitment of harvest labor and employment practices in the Dominicansugar industry have evolved over the past hundred years. I will argue thatin the Dominican Republic, the main direction of historical change in re-lations among immigrant labor, sugar estate owners, and the governmentruns counter to that observed elsewhere in the Caribbean after slaveryand seems unusual from the perspective of third world migration theory.Over the long term, immigrant recruitment and transportation as well asefforts to control immigrants' mobility within the Dominican Republic in-volved escalating levels of direct government interference.2 Over the longterm, migrants tended to lose rather than gain significant freedoms, re-flecting a historical shift from a system in which labor was controlledprimarily by market forces, to a government-managed system ofsemi-coerced exploitation.In most Caribbean societies, systems of labor control evolved dif-ferently than they did in the Dominican Republic. Legal restrictions on
2.
State intervention
refers to actions taken by government agents (those to whom powerhas been delegated by the central government) that impinge significantly on markets andother relations involving private property. This definition applies regardless of whetherthese actions are centrally coordinated and spring from explicit policy, are unorganized andpursued mainly out of individual opportunism, or are even contradictory in purpose.
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Chi-isyen

Abstract: 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.

reply01 / 12 / 2009
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