Not Even a Grain of Rice: Buying Food on Credit in the Dominican Republic

This ethnography examines the impact of food shopping on emerging social changes in Cabarete, an important international tourism destination in the Dominican Republic and a hub for migrant laborers. This book analyzes the social networks of fiao, a form of in-store credit for food buying, in the context of class solidarity, poverty, and racism. The voices in this book shed light on the complexity of people’s experiences with food shopping, debt, and survival to reveal a more complicated interpersonal engagement between Haitians and Dominicans than has been previously assumed.