Abstract: Puerto Rican women living in New York City represent a segment of a transnational community with some of the highest rates of poverty on the US mainland.  This community is characterized by high rates of repetitive (circulation) migration, and we discuss evidence that links circulation migration to the reduced labor force participation of Puerto Rican women. We utilize a pooled data set of micro-level, longitudinal event-histories, drawn from two complementary sets: the 1982 Puerto Rico Fertility and Family Planning Assessment and the 1985 Survey of Fertility, Employment and Migration Among Puerto Rican Women.  We find that nativity plays a strong role in differentiating a group of women with work experience in New York from a group of women with no work experience in New York.  The relationship between circulation migration and labor force participation is more nuanced.  We interpret these findings in the light of our previous research on the gendering of circulation migration and the emerging discussion of racialized experiences of migrants in the U.S.  We close by arguing for a re-conceptualization of poverty conditions in transnational communities that offers more insight into the material conditions, gender relations, racialized experiences, and household survival strategies.