This paper is based on qualitative interviews with sixty-two first-generation Dominican immigrants in Switzerland and forty-five in the Netherlands. The paper aims to analyze symbolic boundaries within the Dominican community, examine the factors influencing these boundaries, and compare the Netherlands and Switzerland to identify similarities in this process. In both contexts, respondents employed constructs related to socioeconomic status, gender, migration trajectories, the perceived level of integration of coethnics, and coethnics’ income generating activities to create internal distinctions. Sex work and time of arrival constructs emerged as specific constructs of the Swiss context. As argued, we found that socioeconomic status, gender, immigration regimes and labor market opportunities, and racist integration discourses contribute to internal categorization. Pre-migration experiences play a role in perpetuating divisions.

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