Dominican Women and Men Negotiate Gender, Work, and Family in Providence, RI.

This paper addresses gender role negotiations among Dominican women and men in Providence, Rhode Island, a secondary enclave of Dominican immigrant settlement that has not been examined sociologically. The central analytic question guiding the original ethnographic research study from which this paper is drawn is: How do gender processes, roles, and statuses shape Dominicans? participation in the labor market and the domestic sphere, and how does participation in these institutions affect gender identity and behavior? Previous studies have suggested that as Dominican women?s wages rose relative to men?s, women?s authority and status within the family would rise, as indicated by, for example, men?s increasing contributions to household labor. The literature also has intimated that women?s new household power represented a challenge to persistent cultural norms of patriarchy. Very recent revisions in the literature suggest instead that Dominican women?s productive roles and men?s relative displacement in the new global economy may provoke modifications to household labor or household decision making, while fundamental gender role constructs remain firmly in place. This paper focuses analytically on this new theoretical orientation, which has roots in the race-class-gender debates of the last two decades. Data from the larger study support the more nuanced, approach, in which analysis of immigration processes is performed within conjunctions of social status (i.e., race, gender, and class) and social institutions (e.g., labor force, family, education). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]