In 2012, Victor Angel Oquel Depen received a full scholarship to attend university to study agronomy. He hoped that having a degree would help him and his family access more opportunities outside the menial agricultural work that defines life in his community.

“I was really excited to move forward, get an education, and look for work that could help bring in more money,” says Depen, a father of six children. The forty-year-old lives in a batey  — a sugar workers’ town — near the city of Tamayo in the southern Baoruco province of the Dominican Republic, close to the country’s border with Haiti.

The some five hundred bateyes in the country were built by sugar companies as temporary accommodations to house Haitian laborers. Known as braceros, these laborers arrived in the country over the last century to harvest sugar cane. They were promised fair wages, adequate housing, and pensions. Many, however, faced rampant abuse and were forced to work in abysmal conditions for little pay.