Abstract

The national sugar industry, both in its founding phase and in its consolidation phase, was affected by the serious inconvenience of the instability of the workforce available for cutting in the cane fields. This instability was explained due to the seasonal nature of the productive process of the sugar mills and to the fact that the idea of "proletarianization" slowly caught on in the mentality of the peasant, still attached to the cultivation of his properties. Thus, despite the fact that the predominance of local braceros in the mills is not disputed during the initial period of the modernization of the Dominican sugar industry, it was necessary to resort to the importation of foreign labor force.