Abstract
This book has rapidly come to be regarded as an exemplary study, which takes on board the growing literature on transmigration or ‘transnationalism from below’, initiated by Basch, Szanton-Blanc and Glick-Schiller, and developed further by Smith, Guarnizo and Portes. Peggy Levitt is highly conscious of current debates in this emergent field, and applies its concepts to her empirical study of Dominican migrants in Boston, and of returning migrants living in a small town in the Dominican Republic. In being so faithful to the new model, the book highlights both the strengths and limitations of the transnationalism from below approach.
Because of its turbulent political history and proximity to North America, the Dominican Republic has been a major sending country, with over a million migrants living in New York City alone. The original discussion of transmigration from Haiti by Basch et al. stressed the continuous involvement of migrants in the politics of the home country, with New York even being invoked as ‘the 10th Department’, because of the large numbers of Haitian migrants there voting in their country's elections. Unlike most other Caribbean migrants to the USA, Dominicans are Spanish speaking, and are thus set apart culturally and socially from other West Indians, and from the indigenous African American population. As Catholics they form part of the massive Hispanic migration to the United States, and belong to its less educated, lower classes.
The merit of this book is its focus on the Dominican Republic itself, its political and economic history, and the impact of overseas migration on the small town of Miraflores in which Levitt spent nine months. Almost two thirds of Miraflorian families have relatives in the Greater Boston area, and migrant remittances are an important source of revenue, especially for home improvements and mod con appliances.
The book's message is highly pessimistic. Life in Boston is extremely hard for migrants. They live scattered and meet only intermittently, since they often hold more than one full-time, menial job. Their community institutions are rudimentary, although they do fund raise for the home country. They often leave children behind to be cared for by relatives. Perhaps the best chapter in the book is the detailed discussion of the impact of parental absence on children growing up on the island, who often lack discipline, are showered by parents with spending money as compensation for their absence, and end up with little education, relying on the expectation of future migration, and latterly on the growing drug trade, to make up for their lack of qualifications. Children growing up in Boston fare little better, coming back to empty homes since parents work long hours, and failing educationally. The emotional bitterness and trauma suffered by families as a result of transnational migration are thus a key finding of the study.
A further finding is that the sending town gradually loses its best people to migration, leaving it underdeveloped and economically backward. Retiring migrants who return to the island rarely manage to convert their hard-earned savings into productive investments, and often end up as impoverished as when they set out on their travels.
The study reveals some of the limitations of multi-sited research. Almost invariably in such studies, research in one site is far richer and more persuasive than in the other. In this case migrants in Boston remain a shadowy presence whereas the study of Miraflores is a good deal more complex ethnographically, and backed up by a very competent historical, political and economic analysis. Nevertheless, one does get the sense of migrants struggling to remain involved in the home country, most recently by achieving absentee voting rights in Dominican elections after extensive lobbying.
Levitt introduces the notion of ‘social’ remittances, which she defines as ‘the ideas, behaviours, and social capital that flow from receiving to sending communities … tools with which ordinary individuals create global culture at the local level’ (p. 11). On the whole, however, her examples are less than persuasive that international migration ‘from below’, that is, the migration of uneducated manual workers, really creates meaningful, radical life style shifts in the home country. Given the global flow of ideas via the media, especially television and the internet, the growth of tourism, foreign investments, and in particular the influence of elite mobility (including transnational movement for higher education) and the impact of international NGOs, it would appear that lasting processes of westernisation and modernisation are the result primarily of globalisation and cosmopolitisation ‘from above’. In fact, the town studied by Levitt remained stagnant, and returning migrants soon returned to their old ways.
The book leaves us with an impression of a dependency economy being sucked into the international drug trade, with most transmigrants leading hard and joyless lives, and yet being envied by those left behind on the island. Without a more holistic sense of the cultural and social lives of Bostonian Miraflorians, the study remains anthropologically thin. It is based almost entirely on interviews with returnees. There is no sense of Boston, the Italian immigrant urban village conjured by Herbert Gans, and oddly, given the title of the book, there is no reference to this classic ethnography of migration and settlement. Nevertheless as a study of the impact of international migration on the modern-day Dominican Republic, this is an excellent and highly informative book.