Belonging between precarity and hope: immigration, tourism, and violence in the Dominican Republic

Abstract

This article discusses the contemporary entanglements of a growing immigration-industrial complex and a mass international tourism project in the Dominican Republic. At this nexus, Haitian im/migrant labor, and the labor of policing it, are intricately connected to the tourism economy and facilitated via politics of belonging. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with young male-identifying Haitian and Dominican tourism workers in two coastal communities in the Dominican Republic, here I bring into focus the violence disproportionately faced by Haitian men and elucidate how experiences of belonging and exclusion interface with precarity and hope in a globalized marketplace that privileges the pleasure of international tourists.