Racialized Resort Economies, Youth Workforce Development, and Strategic Entanglement with Tourism in the Dominican Republic

• In Event: Youth as Agents of Change: Cases from Nepal, Rural USA, Saint Lucia, and Dominican Republic

Proposal

Globally, youth workforce development initiatives focus on youth-facing educational interventions that aim to support youth in developing the technical and soft skills necessary to become employable in locally productive labor markets (EDUCA & MEPyD, 2017; USAID, ChildTrends, FHI360, 2015). In the Caribbean, many of these initiatives are linked to larger strategies of crime and violence prevention led by international donors as well as national development strategies focused on the growth of particular industries (Parra-Torrado, 2014; USAID, n.d.). Contextually, these initiatives intersect with high levels of unemployment and widespread informality in the labor market (Maurizio, 2021) as well as lower levels of school completion rates at the secondary level (CEPAL, 2021). As a result, most youth workforce development programming targets “out of school, out of work” youth (de Hoyos et al., 2016).

Scholars and education practitioners who focus on school-to-work transitions and college and career readiness seek to align education systems—including skills and competency development frameworks—with local labor markets. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, education and employment are terrains upon which these policy and program interventions often take place. In the restructuring of the plantation economy to the resort economy (Pantojas García, 2016), youth living in situations of economic precarity are often framed as at-risk and subjected to “coercive concern” (Jaffe-Walter, 2016) by institutions that mark them as possible subjects of empowerment or “unworthy subjects of care” (Kwon, 2013, p. 8). While project design is often focused on skill-building, these programs rarely include social transformational aspects of pedagogy and may lead to the reproduction of social inequalities by funneling marginalized youth into precarious labor. Critiques of these education models are frequently limited to discussions about neoliberalism and privatization, less often paying attention to racial capitalism and imperialism.

This paper, based on 12 months of ethnographic and youth participatory action research in the Dominican Republic, reveals not only how workforce development programs are entangled with unequal labor markets, but also tracks how youth themselves negotiate strategic entanglements (Bonilla, 2015) with tourism. In the Dominican Republic, as youth employment programs orient to the tourism industry and offer technocratic solutions to fix youth practices framed as deficient by employers, racialized systems of exploitation remain intact. In the design of these programs, national and international actors project racialized anxieties about crime, violence, and sexual activity onto youth. At the same time, they seek to address national economic growth and unemployment by vesting hopes for the future into tourism as key to progress and modernization. In this paper, I explore how youth navigate stratified pathways of precarity and deferral amidst the managed mobilities of tourism (Sheller, 2021), which open up the country to foreign leisure while simultaneously increasing Afro-Dominican youth’s desires for out-migration and facilitating regimes of enclosure and deportation for Dominicans of Haitian descent.

While youth’s embodied practices are disciplined in ways that serve hegemonic forces—in alignment with this year’s theme of “The Power of Protest”—youth also engage with tourism to support their own needs and proyectos de vida (life projects) rather than the demands of the international political economy. This paper thus explores the dominant discourses and ideologies that circulate in the Dominican Republic about youth futures and their relationship to education and employment while illustrating how youth actively reconstruct and reimagine the visions for their lives that are so often set forth by others. In addition, I explore the affordances of shifting the focus of youth workforce development programs to address experiences of exploitation and harm that youth frequently experience on the job. Specifically, I share how education policymakers and program designers as well as classroom educators can more adequately fulfill the role of adult allies by working with institutional actors and youth themselves to combat structural issues that prevent youth from securing or succeeding in their employment experiences.

Author

• Molly Hamm-Rodriguez, University of South Florida