Downtown Ladies - 2

I am again astounded by the complexity of Uylsse’s study. It is interesting to see how in this reading she incorporates into her study an elaboration of the characteristics of class and gender as they relate to both women and men. Of course, I understand that you cannot have one without the other, but she steps beyond the interactions that exist between women and men and includes the interactions between each gender as they confront structural limitations via their interactions with the state and economy, and ultimately the side effects of globalization. She refers to this as “the masculinization” and “the feminization of poverty” (p. 167). The connections between violence and the drug trade are most illuminating, for instance.

As Ulysse explains, ICIs have maintained an adaptive response to the death of their national economy: they are extremely resourceful in the ways they attempt to maintain personal autonomy and secure a livelihood for their families through their trading. However, across the island, an increasingly feminized (and hence low-wage) workforce leads to an enormous amount of unemployed men. This has been both a cause and an effect of the growth of new entrepreneurs who have contributed to the saturation of the trading market. One side effect she describes is the way that both men and women have been sucked into drug trafficking. The result is that men, for instance, become key players in the act of trafficking, which has brought with it an explosion of violence. ICIs, meanwhile, experience tighter state restrictions and more surveillance because of the existing sexist and classist stereotypes that surround the ICI (‘rude girl’, lower-class, etc.).

So the irony here, of course, is that rises in unemployment and increased trading have led to a growing drug trade. And the state has successfully cracked down the hardest on those individuals who are frequently innocent merely because they also happen to be the most ‘visible.’ Meanwhile, the invisible ICIs, who are often middle to upper middle class, or those who do not rely on the trade to secure the livelihood of their families, go undisturbed and relatively unhindered by the regulations and searches that afflict the visible. Of course, while the state persistently comes down upon the only organized group of folks they can get their hands on, it simultaneously (and ironically) fails to acknowledge the benefits that the ICIs have provided to the state. That is, as the state has completely failed its people by selling off the local economy to the lowest international bidder, the ICIs have provided just enough stability (by coming up with provisions when the state could not, by meeting the economic and commerce needs of the people, etc.) to keep the public from altogether overthrowing their government.

And amazingly, throughout all of this, with all of the poverty and economic and political upheaval, the ICIs are still capable of maintaining an egalitarian perspective on their state of their trade. Even though new competition saturates the market and threatens the individuals who have made a life as an ICI, they remain relatively open to the idea that new people should enter the field because they have a right to try to make a decent life for themselves