CENTRO


 

BOOK PRESENTATION AND DISCUSSION: "From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies" [Temple University Press, 2001]

Guest Speaker: Dr. Suzanne Oboler

 


ALL LABOR MIGRATIONS ARE GENDER MIGRATIONS
All labor migrations are best understood as gender migrations. And the gender dimension becomes essential to understanding a population´s displacement. And, certainly, as Professor Whalen has shown, the story of the exodus of Puerto Ricans in the postwar period, is the story of a deliberate economic development policy that emphasized on the one hand the need of population control through the sterilization and the immigration of women, and on the other, the use of women both in the traditional Marxist understanding of women as having a very important role in the reproduction of -- unpaid contributors to the reproduction of the labor force but more importantly, what she´s done is to show that they are also labor migrants in their own right, they didn´t just come floating after.

So, in other words, she shows that there´s a very clear connection between the productive and the reproductive work of women and that in the postwar period women were recruited into the factories just as men were recruited into the fields, making visible not only the experience of women as labor migrants but also the specific ways that gender is enmeshed in development policies. And this is one very important contribution, I think, she´s made to the study of labor history and to Puerto Rican Studies.



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