The Circular Migration Of Puerto Rican Women: Towards A Gendered Explanation
This paper develops an explanation of the circulation of Puerto Rican women that includes both gender and capitalist relations in central roles. The prevailing theories of international migration, for the most part, either ignore gender or take a reductionist approach to women’s migration decision-making. The structural explanation of circulation is that it provides the US economy with cheap labor from its Caribbean periphery. This argument links outmigration to the capitalist transformation of peripheral economies but ignores the sex-selectivity of the migrant stream. Micro-level explanations which focus on household strategies and networks are flawed because they fail to recognize gender inequality in decision-making and access to information resources. Starting with Guy Standing’s four conditions for the initiation of migration from an exploited group we develop a theoretical argument about the circulation of Puerto Rican women which has gender relations in a pivotal explanatory role. Empirical analysis confirms many of our propositions: most women do not move for labor market reasons; they move instead because they are “tied” to a family or for reasons related to life course transitions and the improvement of their place utility. This is particularly the case for the return migration to Puerto Rico. There is some evidence that the proportion of migration for labor market reasons increases with circulation experience, lending tentative support to the notion of feedbacks between migration and gender relations. Our results have implication beyond theorizing about female migration. They also have relevance to the debate about the linkages between Puerto Rican poverty and island-mainland migration processes.