This article employs an ethnoecological analysis to link indigenous, ethnomedical, and Western biomedical ideas of infectious disease causation/ prevention. The ethnoecological analysis is expanded to include the cultural and historical context of political will and community participation in dengue fever control activities in an urban neighborhood in the Dominican Republic. Findings indicate that a key source of dengue fever transmission has been overlooked because it falls between established gender‐role boundaries, and that mala union, an explanatory concept central to the failure of previous community‐based interventions, emerges from local views of national political history. Data were generated through a neighborhood household survey, key respondent interviews, and participant‐observation. [Ethnoecology, Caribbean, gender roles, dengue fever, Dominican Republic]