Batey (sugar workers' town)
This article includes a improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (May 2020) ) |
A batey (plural: bateyes) is a settlement around a sugar mill. They can be found in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
In
A batey is a company town consisting of barracks and a few houses. Bateyes vary in size considerably. They are located close to cane fields so that groups of workers can live nearby their labor site.
Dominican Republic
Every year since 1933, seasonal
. The migrants are lodged in rooms at the batey, sometimes with no facilities, and expected to work cropping sugar cane in long days with hard hours.These days, individual ingenios and land owners (colonos) pay
Over time, some of these migrants have stayed through the six months that follow the cane harvest (zafra), called "dead time" (tiempo muerto), and have started families with Haitian women that have migrated as well. Bateys are unique in culture and language in their mix of which is
The
Since the Haitians who originally filled the bateys were not legal immigrants, their children have often been denied
In the past, sugar was a profitable industry. However, the Dominican sugar industry is no longer competitive, and when combined with the historical lack of educational and health services to these communities, the low wages have tended to make bateys some of the poorest communities in the country.
The current trend in the Dominican Republic is for the ingenios to stop production, and thus the only source of income for the community and for the bateys to very slowly transform themselves into new sorts of communities. Los Alcarrizos in the Santo Domingo province is a good example of something that used to be a batey but now is a municipality which survives through jobs in the area and in Santo Domingo. The Batey is a modern form of slavery where Haitians are paid less than $2.00 American dollars for 12–14 hours of labor. They are forced to sleep on foam boards and live without electricity or running water.
External links
- Beyond the Bateyes, a 1996 report by the National Coalition for Haitian Rights
- Batey Relief Alliance
- The Batey Foundation