Pèpè ports: Haitian women’s labour and resistant mobility in Cap-Haïtien’s second-hand clothing trade

Hammond, Charlotte ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5383-7486 2025. Pèpè ports: Haitian women’s labour and resistant mobility in Cap-Haïtien’s second-hand clothing trade. Didur, Jill and Mohabir, Nalini, eds. (Post)Colonial Ports: Place and (Non)Place in the Ecotone, Routledge,

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Abstract

Pèpè is the Kreyòl term for used clothing in Haiti, arriving from the United States since the 1960s. Haiti’s increased dependency on pèpè, a global commercial trade in foreign “hand-me-downs,” is the result of the invisible borders and one-way trade liberalisation agreements forged between the United States and Caribbean nations under the Caribbean Basin Initiative since the 1980s. This contribution examines the networks of women’s labour that enable the vertical transnational trade in second-hand clothing through the port of Cap-Haïtien, Haiti’s second city, and across highly permeable national economic borders. It will connect Cap-Haïtien’s historical role, as defined byCLR James, as a colonial entrepôt of European trade, surrounded by some of the colony’s most profitable plantations, with contemporary foreign extraction projects in the region, including the Caracol Industrial Park (which this chapter conceives as both a port/al and container of mobility). It reveals how Haitian women entrepreneurs respond creatively to contemporary global economic constraints through adaptive strategies of mobility. It explores how Haitian women workers participate in and disrupt the linearity of this transnational traffic of castoff clothing as they navigate in between the cracks of the external/internal racialised and class-divided border controls.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Modern Languages
Publisher:	Routledge
ISBN:	1032427191
Date of Acceptance:	22 December 2022
Last Modified:	17 Apr 2025 10:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/177083

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