Abstract
Since the 1960s, migration to New York City (NYC) from the Dominican Republic has been substantial. In 2009 there were almost half a million Dominicans in NYC, with the biggest concentration in Washington Heights and Inwood in northern Manhattan, but during the last decade, the population has spread to the Bronx and other boroughs. Dominican immigration has been a key factor revitalising neighbourhoods abandoned by the white middle class during the 1960s and 1970s.
Making New York Dominican by Christian Krohn-Hansen (Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oslo) is the first detailed ethnography drawn from daily life of Dominicans’ tenements, small businesses and small-business organisations. The author begins by providing a brief history of the Dominican exodus to the USA and outlines some main features of their history in NYC. Most of the early mass migration was strongly shaped by Dominican and US foreign policy and security concerns (US occupation 1916–1924, the dispatch of US Marines to Santo Domingo in 1965); more recently migration has been driven by economic opportunity. Kin and friendship ties have been particularly important in directing new arrivals toward the Washington Heights and Inwood areas of northern Manhattan.
Krohn-Hansen examines oral history accounts of Dominican entrepreneurship in three economic-social niches. Beginning in the 1970s Dominican immigrants began buying grocery stores in declining neighbourhoods (often from Italian or Jewish owners) utilising funds from rotating credit associations and relying on low-wage labour provided by relatives. Dominican drivers also edged into Puerto Rican livery cab bases, resulting in a Dominican take over. Also, Dominican women started beauty salons in their neighbourhoods, reflecting the changing demographics and the fact that beauty shop work is viewed as a skilled profession. Dominican salons have been able to build up a varied clientele, including African Americans, in part because Dominican shops are generally less expensive than African American-owned ones.
Social networks played a key role in creating Dominican grocery stores and taxi bases, but once established these businesses then strengthened existing networks. Social networks played a commanding role not only in creating bodegas and taxi bases but also in sustaining them. ‘The constant encounters in the bodega helped convert the immediate vicinity into a community – a loosely organized system of shared pieces of information and meanings’ (p. 128). ‘The sports activities in the [taxi] bases, and the rituals accompanying them, contribute to the production of friendship. The practice of sports creates not only new friendships, but it consolidates and strengthens a multitude of already existing relations’ (p. 164).
The history of the Dominicanisation of New York is a story of the development of identity. Dominican immigrants and their children identify both as Dominican and Hispanic, in part because the US Census Bureau allows for a pan-ethnic identification where ethnic origin remains a separate category from race. This survey methodology enables Dominicans (and others) to maintain a three-category system: Hispanics, whites, and blacks. ‘For many [Dominicans] the intermediate racialized category “Hispanic” corresponds to the Dominican Republic’s intermediate racial category “indio”’ (p. 183). ‘To this day to be Dominican has been not to be black’ (p. 181). Nevertheless, day-to-day discrimination by fellow New Yorkers supports Dominicans’ belief that they are excluded from the white category.
Krohn-Hansen questions the widely held view that Dominicans (like other immigrants) take little part in the political processes in their new homeland. In reality, the political mobilisation of the Dominican owners and operators of small and medium-sized independent supermarkets and the Dominican livery drivers has led to close links between leaders of these groups and elected officials. For example, in 1996 Dominican supermarket owners working through the mostly Dominican National Supermarkets Association, successfully opposed the city’s megastore plan; similarly in 2000 in response to pressure from the largely Dominican New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers, Mayor Giuliani created a US$5 million programme to increase the safety of drivers.
Making New York Dominican should be as useful for European as for American urban scholars. Krohn-Hansen asks the right questions, uses the right methodology – ethnography – to study underlying social processes and correctly examines immigration within a global framework. He shows that in the case of Dominicans, transnationalism has been good for the group, the city and the nation. Whether this conclusion applies to immigrant groups in European cities is a question worth asking. In other words, how have migrants from the global periphery (Turks, Moroccans, Indians) influenced the larger cities of Western Europe and conversely how has living in these cities influenced immigrants’ lives? I hope that my European colleagues read this impressive book and try to answer these questions.