The “Counter-Plantation” and Sugar Cultivation: How Peasant Practices Shaped Dominican Sugar Plantations

My poster will explore how Haitian-Dominican communities residing on bateyes, or settlements within sugar plantations, made claims to space formally owned by sugar companies. With the rise of sugar production during the 20^th century, many Dominican peasants lost their access to communal ranching land and their usufruct rights to cultivation plots. Displaced Dominican peasants joined Haitian migrants on bateyes. These fledgling Haitian-Dominican communities drew on memories of peasant practices to claim space on the plantation and to resist management and state attempts to control them. Based on six months of fieldwork in a batey in the Eastern Dominican Republic, and archival research in the Archivo General de la Nación in Santo Domingo, I explore how batey residents gained informal rights to homes and provision grounds and utilized these claims to space as a basis for resistance against plantation and state authorities. The sugar plantation was designed for commodity production and not human reproduction. None of the residents of the bateyes owned the land they lived on or the homes they lived in. However, this has not stopped Haitian migrants and Dominicans from making informal claims to plantation land. Residents combined Dominican and Haitian peasant practices to create bi-lingual, bi-cultural, proto-peasant communities within what has previously been considered the capitalist enclave of the sugar plantation. In this poster presentation I will demonstrate how workers on plantations belonging to the Consejo Estatal de Azúcar (CEA), the state sugar company, were able to transform company owned barracks into family homes and plantation land into provision grounds that were passed down between generations. By displaying photographs from my fieldwork site that demonstrate how residents used barracks and cane fields, I will explore the spatial politics of the batey. These images focus on how residents transformed the space of the plantation by claiming homes and cultivatable land and the pride they take in these homes that they have invested in and improved upon. In addition, by exhibiting maps and photos, I will show the conflicts that have arisen between residents and plantations authorities over land management. Following diminishing profits during the 1980s, the CEA was privatized in 1998. Today there is very little company presence in the bateyes and the sugar cane fields are rented to a foreign company that has decreased production dramatically. Through the process of privatization, batey residents fought to maintain their informal claims to plantation land. I examine how cultivating was not just an economic strategy for batey residents, but an important part of their identity as well. I also explore how historical memory shaped the moral economy of space on the plantation. Residents make strong claims to land “donde nunca había caña antes” or where there has never been cane planted before, and resist any attempts to deprive them of that land. By combining powerful visuals with archival and ethnographic research, my poster will illuminate the historical development of a contested landscape and how batey residents, the Dominican state and company management struggled for spatial control on the sugar plantation.