Batey (unit of sugar production)

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A batey is a company town where sugar workers live. They can be found in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

Sugar mill in Ingenio Consuelo, Dominican Republic

In Cuba and the Dominican Republic, the basic conglomerate unit of a sugar production is usually called an ingenio. An ingenio consists of a central administrative office, a sugar refinery, the town around the office and refinery, sugar fields (campos de caña), and miscellaneous production equipment like trucks, trains, tractors, weighing scales, and housing for workers, usually in what is called a batey.

Canefields beside a batey near Ingenio Consuelo, Dominican Republic

A batey is a company town consisting of barracks and a few houses. Bateyes vary in size considerably. They are located close to cane fields so that groups of workers can live nearby to the site of their labor.

Dwellings on a batey

Every year for seventy years or more, male seasonal immigrants from Haiti have arrived to work the sugar harvest in the Dominican Republic. These people are called congoses (plural-singular un congo), which is a derisive term roughly equivalent to "hick," "idiot," "chump," or "sucker" in our language. Congoses are lodged five to a room with no bedding and expected to work long, hard hours. In the past, Dominican heads of state paid Haitian heads of state a finder's fee to round up large numbers of Haitians. These days, individual ingenios and colonos pay headhunters, called buscones, a percentage of the wages of each 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, and that the conditions are not so good after all.

Over time, some of these migrants have stayed through the six months that follow the zafra, called tiempo muerto, and have started families. Haitian women have migrated, as well. Bateyes are unique in culture and language in their mix of that which is Haitian and that which is Dominican.

Kitchen facilities in a dwelling on a batey

The Dominican government has historically provided fewer public services to bateyes than to similarly sized communities in the rest of the country. The bateyes were regarded as exceptions to the country's governance system. It was often left to the CEA or private companies to provide basic services, a responsibility that all too often they did not fulfill. Bateyes are often still regarded as places where only Haitians (non-citizens) live. Since the Haitians who originally filled the bateyes were not legal immigrants, their children have often been denied citizenship papers. Without citizenship papers, these Dominican born children of Haitian immigrants cannot go to school nor can they receive the benefits of other public services; however, a number of non-governmental organizations have attempted to address this problem by operating primary schools on bateyes.

School established on a batey near Consuelo, Dominican Republic

In the past, sugar was a profitable industry. However, the Dominican sugar industry is no longer competitive, and when combined with the historical lack of educational and health services to these communities, the low wages have tended to make bateyes some of the poorest communities in the country.

The current trend in the Dominican Republic is for the ingenios to stop producing and for the bateyes to very slowly transform themselves into new sorts of communities. Los Alcarizos in the Distrito Nacional (Santo Domingo) is a good example of something that used to be a batey (actually an ingenio) but now is something entirely different.