2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

            Historical studies of Caribbean labor and migrations have called attention to the role of women, children and families in the work force. These studies have also expanded the definition of “labor” itself by probing how individuals contributed to Caribbean economies through gendered and racialized labor systems, systems that have produced occupations often omitted from labor history as a field. Building on the vibrant and intersectional history of Caribbean labor studies, this panel will examine overlapping histories of women workers. The papers present new analytical frameworks for the study of race and gender in the region and its disaporas. Panelists will examine inter-Caribbean and Latin American migrations, internal-labor migrations on individual islands, as well as migration to the United States. We will also consider how Caribbean labor migrations engendered the participation of women in social movements, including: labor organizing, state management of organized labor, and changes in how diasporic communities imagined "labor." Individual papers will focus on the labor and social worlds of women of African Descent in Cuba, Intra-Caribbean migration to Cuba and the history of domestic service, and the history of Puerto Rican labor migration(s) in the United States. Together these papers center the lives of Caribbean women workers in their analyses of twentieth-century labor movements and economies.