Making New York Dominican

Large-scale emigration from the Dominican Republic began in the early 1960s, with most Dominicans settling in New York City. Since then the growth of the city's Dominican population has been staggering, now accounting for around 7 percent of the total populace. How have Dominicans influenced New York City? And, conversely, how has the move to New York affected their lives? In Making New York Dominican, Christian Krohn-Hansen considers these questions through an exploration of Dominican immigrants' economic and political practices and through their constructions of identity and belonging. Krohn-Hansen focuses especially on Dominicans in the small business sector, in particular the bodega and supermarket and taxi and black car industries. While studies of immigrant business and entrepreneurship have been predominantly quantitative, using survey data or public statistics, this work employs business ethnography to demonstrate how Dominican enterprises work, how people find economic openings, and how Dominicans who own small commercial ventures have formed political associations to promote and defend their interests. The study shows convincingly how Dominican businesses over the past three decades have made a substantial mark on New York neighborhoods and the city's political economy. Making New York Dominican is not about a Dominican enclave or a parallel sociocultural universe. It is instead about connections—between Dominican New Yorkers' economic and political practices and ways of thinking and the much larger historical, political, economic, and cultural field within which they operate. Throughout, Krohn-Hansen underscores that it is crucial to analyze four sets of processes: the immigrants' forms of work, their everyday life, their modes of participation in political life, and their negotiation and building of identities. Making New York Dominican offers an original and significant contribution to the scholarship on immigration, the Latinization of New York, and contemporary forms of globalization.

This volume forms part of the Latino Communities, Emerging Voices Political, Social, Cultural and Legal Issues series. This study explores the diverse struggles of incorporation pursued by immigrants from the Dominican Republic to one city in the United States- New York City. The Dominican Republic, the second largest country of the Greater Antilles in the Caribbean Sea, was the nation that sent the most immigrants to New York City during the 1980s and 1990s. This study chronicles the lives of Dominicans in New York City: their difficulties, their courage, and their boldness to incorporate themselves into American politics.

In this book, Jacqueline Jiménez Polanco examines the politics of empowerment of Dominican Americans in the United States. Covering the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Jiménez Polanco provides a new analytical perspective to understand the political development of a growing ethnic community that has been historically neglected in the studies of Latino/a/x political development and whose peculiar characteristics represent a paradigmatic case that debunks pervading theories about immigrant communities’ participation and representation in U.S. electoral politics. Rich archival research and interviews with key Dominican American leaders and activists shed light on how some patterns followed by Dominican Americans in their political empowerment correspond to those of other Latino/a/x communities, while other patterns distinctly diverge from that common trend. Dominican American Politics: Immigrants, Activists, and Politicians serves as a perfect companion for courses on Latino/a/x and Dominican studies and U.S. ethnic politics.

The destructive effects of modern industrial societies have shaped the planet in such profound ways that many argue for the existence of a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene. This claim brings into relief a set of challenges that have deep implications for how relations between the human, the material, and the political affect contemporary social worlds. The contributors to Anthropos and the Material examine these challenges by questioning and complicating long-held understandings of the divide between humans and things. They present ethnographic case studies from across the globe, addressing myriad topics that range from labor, economics, and colonialism to technology, culture, the environment, agency, and diversity. In foregrounding the importance of connecting natural and social histories, the instability and intangibility of the material, and the ways in which the lively encounters between the human and the nonhuman challenge conceptions of liberal humanism, the contributors point to new understandings of the capacities of people and things to act, transform, and adapt to a changing world.

The Dominican Republic has posted impressive economic growth rates over the past thirty years. Despite this, the generation of new, good jobs has been remarkably weak. How have ordinary and poor Dominicans worked and lived in the shadow of the country's conspicuous growth rates? This book considers this question through an ethnographic exploration of the popular economy in the Dominican capital. Focusing on the city's precarious small businesses, including furniture manufacturers, food stalls, street-corner stores, and savings and credit cooperatives, Krohn-Hansen shows how people make a living, tackle market shifts, and the factors that characterize their relationship to the state and pervasive corruption. Empirically grounded, this book examines the condition of the urban masses in Santo Domingo, offering an original and captivating contribution to the scholarship on popular economic practices, urban changes, and today's Latin America and the Caribbean. This will be essential reading for scholars and policy makers.

In the second half of the twentieth century Dominicans became New York City's largest, and poorest, new immigrant group. They toiled in garment factories and small groceries, and as taxi drivers, janitors, hospital workers, and nannies. By 1990, one of every ten Dominicans lived in New York. A Tale of Two Cities tells the fascinating story of this emblematic migration from Latin America to the United States. Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof chronicles not only how New York itself was forever transformed by Dominican settlement but also how Dominicans' lives in New York profoundly affected life in the Dominican Republic. A Tale of Two Cities is unique in offering a simultaneous, richly detailed social and cultural history of two cities bound intimately by migration. It explores how the history of burgeoning shantytowns in Santo Domingo--the capital of a rural country that had endured a century of intense U.S. intervention and was in the throes of a fitful modernization--evolved in an uneven dialogue with the culture and politics of New York's Dominican ethnic enclaves, and vice versa. In doing so it offers a new window on the lopsided history of U.S.-Latin American relations. What emerges is a unique fusion of Caribbean, Latin American, and U.S. history that very much reflects the complex global world we live in today.

**WINNER, D. Scott Palmer Prize for Best Edited Collection, given by the New England Council of Latin American Studies** Introduces new approaches, theoretical trends, and understudied topics in Latinx Studies This groundbreaking work offers a multidisciplinary, social-science oriented perspective on Latinx studies, including the social histories and contemporary lives of a diverse range of Latina and Latino populations. Editors Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas and Mérida M. Rúa have crafted an anthology that is unique in both form and content. The book combines previously published canonical pieces with original, cutting-edge works created for this volume. The sections of the text are arranged thematically as critical dialogues, each with a brief preface that provides context and a conceptual direction for the scholarly conversation that ensues. The editors frame the volume around the “humanistic social sciences,” using the term to highlight the historical and social contexts under which expressive cultural forms and archival records are created. Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies masterfully sheds light on the diversity and complexity of the everyday lives of Latinx populations, the political economic structures that shape enduring racialization and cultural stereotyping, and the continuing efforts to carve out new lives as diasporic, transnational, global, and colonial subjects.

This two-volume encyclopedia profiles the contemporary culture and society of every country in the Americas, from Canada and the United States to the islands of the Caribbean and the many countries of Latin America. From delicacies to dances, this encyclopedia introduces readers to cultures and customs of all of the countries of the Americas, explaining what makes each country unique while also demonstrating what ties the cultures and peoples together. The Americas profiles the 40 nations and territories that make up North America, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, including British, U.S., Dutch, and French territories. Each country profile takes an in-depth look at such contemporary topics as religion, lifestyle and leisure, cuisine, gender roles, dress, festivals, music, visual arts, and architecture, among many others, while also providing contextual information on history, politics, and economics. Readers will be able to draw cross-cultural comparisons, such as between gender roles in Mexico and those in Brazil. Coverage on every country in the region provides readers with a useful compendium of cultural information, ideal for anyone interested in geography, social studies, global studies, and anthropology.