'Flowers? And for what? Better a shampoo!': An Ethnography of Romantic Love in the Las Pajas batey of the Dominican Republic

This ethnographic study explores the concept of romantic love within the Las Pajas batey of the Dominican Republic, a community primarily composed of Haitian and Haitian-descendant families on company-owned sugar cane plantations. Through detailed fieldwork, it examines how local women perceive and express romantic love in a socio-economic context marked by both historical and ongoing exploitation. The women of Las Pajas prioritise economic necessity and practical considerations over emotional or idealised romantic attachments. What emerges from their narratives is not a lack of love, but rather its contextual re-signification, a shifting of meanings grounded in constraint, expectation and the desire for recognition. From this perspective, the study of love must go beyond generalising definitions and instead attend to the situated meanings that shape how people experience and question their intimate attachments.