Women, Gender, and the Politics of Refugee Resettlement in the Cuban Mariel Migration of 1980

Abstract

This dissertation examines how gender influenced the reception and resettlement of Cubans who arrived in the United States during what came to be known as the Mariel Boatlift. It explores the tension between treatments that stigmatized Mariel Cuban women and those that portrayed them as more “traditional” types of Cold War refugees. It analyzes relationships among media discourse(s) and other sites of Mariel Cuban knowledge production, including agencies of the federal government and private institutions tasked with aiding in the sponsorship and resettlement of Mariel refugees. It demonstrates that perceptions and treatments of Cuban women reflected long-held suspicions of unaccompanied migrant women, larger national, international, and geopolitical concerns, including U.S. anxieties about immigration, the economy, national identity and politics, and the status of the American family and the welfare state. It contends that damaging constructions of Mariel women influenced broader American perceptions of the larger group and complicated their ability to find sponsors and resettle in the United States. Often these understandings of Mariel women were sexualized, racialized, and classed, depicting Mariel women as prostitutes, as especially fertile, or otherwise as sexually or criminally deviant. In turn, these deeply sexualized and racialized understandings of Mariel women contributed to the growing perception that Mariel Cubans constituted a new kind of refugee underclass. Overall, the dissertation illuminates how Mariel women became centered in larger social, economic, and political debates of the period, and most especially the deliberation over what made migrants, and Cubans, in particular, worthy of national belonging and political asylum.