The Immigrants of BUMIDOM and Their Resistance to Employment Assignments

Abstract

Abstract: The Bureau pour le développement des migrations dans les départements d’outre-mer (Office for the Development of Immigration in the Overseas Departments of France, or BUMIDOM), created by France in 1963, oversaw the immigration of some two hundred thousand people from the Overseas Departments, about a third of whom were women, to metropolitan France between 1963 and 1982. These immigrants were subjected to strictly controlled employment assignments. These women, mostly Black women succeeded, partially, in escaping them. Without comprising a Black feminist movement per se, these women demonstrated a desire for emancipation and a capacity for agency through different strategies. Although their social and economic situation did not put them in a dominant position, they were still not entirely defenseless against BUMIDOM, whose capacity to control the women was limited and which appeared to be a weak institution. Thus, these immigrants’ assorted paths are reminiscent of other forms of contemporary Black feminisms in which Antillean women have long distinguished themselves.