Summary Of The Devil Behind The Mirror By Steven Gregory

The Devil behind the Mirror by Steven Gregory is a book based on more than a year of ethnographic research in the tourist towns of Andrés and Boca Chica. In this book, Gregory shows "how distinct economic, cultural, and social processes that have been associated with 'globalization' and neoliberal economic reforms have restructured the lives and livelihoods of people in the Dominican Republic" (p. 4). While studying and observing the lives of working poor people in these areas, he states how globalization and the neoliberal tourism economy of the country have affected these people, preventing them from escaping poverty and live a better life. He supports his claim by explaining some topics like tourism and sex tourism, privatization, gender

The author show how a lot of people feel like the government doesn’t care about them, but only about tourism. We can see this, “for example, in the wake of Hurricane George… government relief efforts focused primarily on the zona turistica… while neglecting Andrés and the popular barrios of Boca Chica” (p. 101). They feel that everything the government sees is tourism and not the poor communities in need. This is why non-governmental organizations like the Junta de Vecinos was created, in order to help these communities overshadowed by tourism to solve most of their own problems ever since the government is kind of ignoring them. One way in which Gregory portrayed this issue was by reporting in the case of Altagracia, where “local authorities had installed a water conduit to service the area, but it remained unconnected to the water source” (p. 110). As a result the people in the community started protesting for the government to do something about it. At the end of the day, the government decided to solve the problem just when the protest was about to turn ugly and

As explained by Gregory in Chapter 4, some mothers needed to find alternative ways to support their family and children, so they turn to prostitution. As time passed, more tourists started hearing about it and going to the Dominican Republic more often for sex rather than for the beaches. As a result, the Dominican Republic, especially Boca Chica, started being label through the Internet as a sex paradise. According to Gregory, the Dominican community was definitely not happy with these because they felt foreigners were ruining the Dominican culture. The community was really worried for the future of the children because it was not healthy for their children to be growing up around that type of environment. They were worried that the teenagers will also turn to prostitution. After certain time, everyone lose hope that the problem was going to be fixed because almost every business owner in the tourist zone was involved, even the police. In order to continue with their occupation, prostitutes tended to pay incentives to police officers and business owners, that way they were not going to have any problem with the