“She Was Something of a Ripoff Artist”: Broken Sponsorships, Secondary Resettlement, and Welfare Politics following the 1980 Mariel Boatlift

Melissa Hampton, University of Wyoming

Between April and October 1980, around 125,000 Cubans entered the United States in what has become known as the “Mariel Boatlift.” This paper examines how damaging constructions of Afro Cuban Mariel women complicated refugee resettlement in the aftermath of this event. Mariel women were often represented as sex workers, as especially fertile, or otherwise as sexually or criminally deviant. Not only did these understandings play a significant role in the construction of what scholars have referred to as the “Mariel stigma,” but these deeply sexualized and racialized understandings of Mariel women contributed to the growing perception that Mariel Cubans constituted a new kind of refugee underclass. I specifically explore how Mariel women’s sponsorship became linked to race and family structure. Since resettlement prioritized family reunification while catering to a pool of prospective sponsors who preferred “whites only,” black Cuban mothers served as a visible symbol of failed Mariel sponsorship and ultimately, a failing refugee resettlement system. Indeed, one of the most notable groups to experience “broken sponsorships” were Afro Cuban women. Following the consolidation of Mariel Cubans at Fort Chaffee, “leftover” Mariel women and their families felt the intertwined disadvantages of blackness, pregnancy, and poverty. Beyond Fort Chaffee, public representations of Miami’s “Tent City” likewise emphasized its hopeless qualities, utilizing unfavorable depictions of black refugee women to help convey the “ghetto” that Tent City had become. In 1980, Mariel Cubans entered a climate of welfare reform that coded poverty and welfare recipients in racial terms. I contend that the contexts of immigration restriction, refugee fatigue, welfare reform, and a lagging recession collectively laid the foundations for a new gendered racialization of Cuban migrants following the boatlift.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 76. Refugees