Paper short abstract:

I will be making an analytical connection of the Dominican migratory policies, and the racialization of labour in the tertiary sector, as a way to understand the interconnections of the legal and racial categories within the political and economical processes of Dominican nation-state construction.

Paper long abstract:

The purpose of the present essay is to theoretically address the recent modifications to the Dominican migratory law and to discuss how, taking them as case study, may be a good resource to the understanding of the social construction of race. Driven by the projection of a doctoral research, I will ask how it is possible to make sense of these structural changes from an ethnographic perspective focused on the racialization of labour. In that regard, I will analyse one specific labor niche, the tourism sector, and the subjects that along the racial and legal categories, are being produced within its different processes. With it, I pretend to establish an analytical bond between the definability of the status of illegality and the exploitability of the workforce identified as illegal, within a racialized Dominican framing of nation-state formation.