This course will focus on the extreme shifts that globalization - the reshaping of boarders in an expanding capitalist world market - is introducing to the diverse inhabitants of Dominican tourist town, particularly those who lack access to the formal economy such as market vendors, sex workers, taxi drivers, and Haitian construction workers.

Las Ballenas (a pseudonym) is known as a town of transgression in which uneducated, resource-poor migrants dream of social advancement through becoming dynamic consumers in the market economy while nostalgic EuroAmericans seek a “pre-modern” world in which their fading privileges can be maximized. Behind the tourist scrim designed to mystify exploitive power relations and class struggle there is a dense network of host/guest strategies and negotiations over land, property, and identity, as well as spatial disciplinary tactics involving police, gossip, and magic.

In charting “frictions and flows” of the town’s inhabitants we will examine the protective and prohibitive function of boundarywork; in particular under what conditions elite/state/national borders constitute themselves and under what conditions they dissolve. In so doing we will situate our case study tourist town in asymmetrical power-laden practices that are as global as they are local. And we will make linkages between peoples lives in full recognition of the specificities and differences of their contexts.