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© 2021 Alex Mousan
San Pedro de Marcoiris, Dominican Republic
An elderly man looks on at a baseball game in the Bateyes of San Pedro. The Bateyes are underserved communities of predominantly Haitian sugarcane workers.
These days, individual ingenios and land owners (colonos) pay headhunters (buscones), a fee for each cane cutter (picador) the headhunter provides. A headhunter may entice the prospective labourer with promises of a work permit, and often requires a large fee from the prospective immigrant. When immigrants arrive, they may find that they are not free to leave the batey until they finish the labor.
Over time, some of these migrants have stayed through the six months that follow the cane harvest (zafra), called "dead time" (tiempo muerto), and have started families with Haitian women that have migrated as well. Bateys are unique in culture and language in their mix of which is Haitian and which is Dominican.