A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950
352
A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950
352eBook
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691188393 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/05/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 1,032,168 |
| File size: | 29 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Tale of Two Cities Santo Domingo and New York after 1950
By Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2007 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-12338-7
Chapter One From the Burro to the Subway
The Dominican Republic, like much of Latin America, has a history of uneasy relations between the city and the countryside. When the former Spanish colony of Santo Domingo gained independence, a handful of small cities and their tiny cadre of lettered elites found themselves profoundly burdened by the demographic and political weight of the countryside. The independent Dominican peasantry, and the regional strongmen it supported, resisted the imposition of a centralized state and commercial agriculture. To urbanintellectuals, peasants represented the backward and barbarous legacy of centuries of Spanish neglect. Yet in a republic that seemed perpetually threatened by external domination, from either Haiti or the United States, Dominican nationalists also frequently depicted idealized country folk as carriers of supposedly essential Dominican values like Spanish language, premodern simplicity, and Roman Catholicism. The disorganized, and racially suspect, countryside was the main obstacle to the flourishing of the nation. But if it could be bent to the will of urban elites, it was also the ultimate hope for national salvation and the antidote to foreign influence.
In the twentieth century, attempts by urban Dominicans to domesticate and transform thecountryside unleashed the transformation of their rural nation into an urban society, a process that quickly spun out of their control. The change began as early as the 1930s, when the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo concentrated political power in the capital, renamed it Ciudad Trujillo (Trujillo City), and began to build it as a monument to the modernizing potency of the regime. But the urbanization of the Dominican Republic sped after 1950 as rural Dominicans began flooding into the monumental city. Between 1950 and 2000, the proportion of Dominicans living in cities (defined as provincial capitals and municipal districts) grew from 23.7 percent to 62.4 percent. In 1950, the population of Santo Domingo stood at 181,553. By the end of the century the population of greater Santo Domingo, including the capital and contiguous urban areas, had reached about 2.1 million, or about 25 percent of the national population. As in much of Latin America, the exodus from the countryside far outpaced construction in the capital and the demand for urban workers. Rural migrants built their own city of shantytowns in converted cane lands, steep canyons, and marshy riverbanks on the outskirts of the capital. They engaged in daily struggles to secure jobs, housing, sanitation, water, schools, and electricity: the unfulfilled promises of the modern Dominican capital. The center of everyday Dominican politics and culture thus migrated with the rural poor, from small villages, cattle ranches, and sugar plantations to sprawling expanses of concrete block, corrugated iron, and found materials.
Rural migrants in the capital became key symbols of this uneasy change. To critics of the government, migrants were victims of the development politics pursued by Dominican leaders. They were starved out of the countryside and crowded into slums to provide capitalists with a permanent pool of reserve labor, the key sign that national development strategies were out of balance. To intellectuals allied with the government, migration to the city was a symptom of overpopulation, which undermined the otherwise exemplary course of economic development. The growing urban slums, they argued, were the result of the cultural failings and misbehavior of the Dominican masses who crowded into "illegal and promiscuous" shantytowns at the city's edge.
The rural exodus also became fodder for comedic commentary on the national condition. In the early 1970s, for instance, a character named Don Cibaíto appeared regularly in sketches on Radio Universal in Santo Domingo. Created by author Domingo Rodríguez Creus and comedian Julio César Matías, Don Cibaíto was a peasant who had ventured from the countryside to the Dominican capital. There, in comic monologues, he reported on the magnificent city to a kinsman in his remote village. "I am not going to send you the hundred pesos for your cataract operation, compadre," he related in an early episode. "For what you have to look at in Nabá Aentro, one eye is enough." A person would need "two eyes or more, if it were possible," to take in all the sights of the capital, he marveled. "I don't think even Nueva Yoi [a heavily accented pronounciation of New York] has as many houses and beautiful things. There must be almost three hundred houses, or maybe a few more." In their tales of a man transported from the farthest reaches of civilization to the bewildering modern world, Cibaíto's creators offered an easy sort of humor at the expense of the rural poor. Yet the sketches were not without sympathy for the peasant. Rodríguez and Matías used Cibaíto's thickly accented voice to make sharp and unmistakably Dominican assessments of civilization itself, and especially of Dominican big-city life. "What's modern is modern, compadre," Cibaíto lamented, "even though it is ugly, expensive, and in bad taste. You have to be up to date because if you aren't they criticize you, they call you a hick, a rebel, and an illiterate."
The Empire City
Cibaíto's creators deployed him as a symbol of the nation at large, a lovable island of backwardness suddenly afloat in the ugly and expensive sea of modern urban life. In this playful mockery, it was of no small significance that the mispronounced world capital, New York, was the yardstick against which Cibaíto measured the capital city he wandered. It was laughable, radio audiences surely expected, that anyone would think muddy Santo Domingo a bigger, more modern city than New York. But audiences likely shared Cibaíto's assumption that Dominican modernity ought to be measured by comparison with the United States-and that the comparison could be boiled down to the contrast between two cities, New York and Santo Domingo.
In the century before Cibaíto appeared on the radio, the Dominican Republic endured one of the most thorough experiences of United States imperialism of any country in the world. In 1870 the United States nearly annexed the nascent republic. When Congress voted the annexation down, U.S. trade representatives outmaneuvered their European rivals to monopolize Dominican imports and exports including the emerging sugar industry. In the 1880s and 1890s, a corrupt Wall Street firm purchased the entire national debt of the Dominican Republic, monopolized shipping to and from the island, and through its dealings with a Dominican dictator plunged national political life into chaos. In 1904 the United States seized direct control over the collection of Dominican customs revenue. In 1916, the U.S. Marines invaded Santo Domingo and for the next eight years governed the Dominican Republic by force. The U.S. War Department then supported dictator Rafael Trujillo's rise to power, lending his thirty-one-year regime both weaponry and legitimacy. After Trujillo's death in 1961, President John F. Kennedy sent the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, and the Central Intelligence Agency to Santo Domingo in order to construct a stable, anticommunist government. Then, in response to a popular democratic uprising in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson invaded Santo Domingo again. By the time Cibaíto appeared on the radio, a new authoritarian patriarch, Joaquín Balaguer-elected while U.S. forces held Santo Domingo and backed by the U.S. Embassy and the CIA-was firmly in place.
Open assertions of United States modernity and Dominican backwardness underwrote each of these imperial encounters, fundamentally shaping the ways that Dominicans imagined themselves. U.S. officials explained their aggression by claiming the role of tutor, helping a young, dark-skinned neighbor to learn the ways of civilized life. Dominicans responded with projects to imitate the United States and, as frequently, with rejections of everything about the United States as wholly opposite to a true Dominican spirit. But whether they inspired mimicry or nationalist resentment, appropriation or self-deprecating humor, comparisons with the United States became inseparable from attempts to define Dominican identity. New York took on a special role in this relationship. New York was where Dominican sugar went to market and where shippers loaded manufactured goods for the return voyage to Santo Domingo. New York was where the San Domingo Improvement Company had its headquarters, where the U.S. government deposited Dominican customs receipts before disbursing them to creditors. Meanwhile, urban reformers, architects, and city planners consciously redesigned the buildings, parks, and public works in New York to "prepare" it for its "imperial destiny." They built the Empire City on the theory that "the appearance of a metropolis will always be accepted as the index of the national character." As the twentieth century progressed the iconic New York City skyline cast a shadow long enough to be visible to the distant subjects of the U.S. empire. When Cibaito appeared on Dominican radio, the Empire State Building, the new World Trade Center, and the subway system were akin to the moon launch in Dominican public opinion, undisputed symbols of Anglo-American achievement. The comparison with New York served as an easy shorthand for the general differences between the United States and the Dominican Republic.
Songwriter Mercedes Sagredo summed up this contrast in a popular dance tune about a Dominican traveler to New York, "Del burro al subway." "What a big change," the chorus repeated, "from the burro to the subway." New York was grand, Sagredo conceded, but it offered little comfort to the "typical" Dominican. "I prefer my little mule to riding the subway," the song concluded. "I won't trade my little hut, not even for the Empire State building." Like tales of Don Cibaíto's endearing rural simplicity, this message may have been comforting as Santo Domingo was quickly transformed into a sweaty sprawl. But not all Dominicans preferred huts to skyscrapers. In fact, despite her nationalist sentiments, the author of the tune was among the first Dominicans to take up residence in New York City. When she arrived by steamship in 1929, she joined about 350 other Dominicans living in the city. In 1962, when she published, "Del burro al subway," there were perhaps as many as 10,000 or 15,000, including many who had arrived in the year since Trujillo's death. Then, in the four decades that followed, Dominicans became regular fixtures on the New York subway. By end of the century, conservative estimates put the Dominican ethnic population in the United States at about 1.12 million. By comparison, the total population living in the Dominican Republic at the time was only 8.27 million.
Nueva York
Nueva York, as Dominicans frequently called it, was the unquestioned capital of the new Dominican diaspora, home to more than two-thirds of U.S. Dominicans throughout the 1970s and 1980s. After 1990 smaller settlements in the cities of New Jersey and in Boston, San Juan, Providence, and South Florida grew in relative importance compared with the city. But fully one-half of U.S. Dominicans, more than 650,000 people, continued to live in New York City, and 200,000 more lived in smaller cities in the surrounding metropolitan area. The extent of this primacy was reflected in everyday speech. Just as Dominicans often referred to all of the Dominican Republic as Santo Domingo, they commonly referred to the whole United States as Nueva York. As settlements outside New York grew more widespread, the conventions of Dominican Spanish simply incorporated the increasingly important territories west of the Hudson, north of the Bronx, and south of Staten Island as "the states of Nueva York" or "the countries of Nueva York."
"What a big change," Mercedes Sagredo unwittingly predicted. Not only did a nation long imagined as essentially rural rapidly become unmanageably urban. The distant Empire City, the universal standard against which Dominican identity could be measured, grew over four decades into the second-largest Dominican city. Washington Heights, Corona, the Upper West Side, the Lower East Side, and the West Bronx became transplanted Dominican neighborhoods. Migrants brought their notions of racial belonging, their language, their political parties, their religious practices, their music, and their proliferation of street vendors to these newly Dominican spaces. They plastered the subway stations in their neighborhoods, once perfect symbols of the dissonance and distance between the United States and Dominican identity, with posters supporting various political parties in Santo Domingo. Some rose to leadership in Dominican political parties from their community activity in New York. Others, naming themselves the dominicanos ausentes (absent Dominicans), demanded the right to participate in Dominican national politics. After decades of delay, in 1994 the Dominican government allowed dual nationality for Dominicans who chose to naturalize as U.S. citizens. In 2004, for the first time, Dominicans voted for president of the Dominican Republic at polling places in New York, Boston, Florida, and San Juan. They helped elect Leonel Fernández, who himself had moved with his family to New York in the 1970s and spent summers working in the family bodega (corner store) in Washington Heights even after he returned to Santo Domingo to study law.
Even as migrants carved out distinctive enclaves in their adopted city, transplanting homeland norms and institutions, and even as they created mechanisms for continued participation in homeland politics as dominicanos ausentes, they also became New Yorkers. Dominicans were the largest new immigrant group in New York after 1960, as the city once again became a patchwork of immigrant neighborhoods. They were among the poorest of all New Yorkers, crowding into small apartments and working in garment factories, as taxi drivers, as superintendents and janitors, as hospital workers, as nannies, and in countless small groceries or bodegas. And among the many groups that came to be called New York Hispanics or Latinos, Dominicans were second in numbers only to Puerto Ricans. Dominicans were Spanish speakers descended, in large part, from enslaved Africans. Even as they negotiated identities distinct from blacks and Puerto Ricans, they often shared the neighborhood spaces, politics, and social fate of those other groups. In the process they became one of the "minority" groups to which the city was left as the descendants of earlier immigrants confirmed their white status by fleeing to the suburbs.
This incorporation into New York, as workers, immigrants, and racialized minorities, reverberated profoundly in the national life of the Dominican Republic. More impressive than the prominent return of individual migrants, like Leonel Fernández, were the small sums of money sent home by hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers. In 1999, remittances sent home by Dominicans working abroad amounted to $1.75 billion, 10 percent of the country's gross domestic product. Remitted migrant wages provided three times more revenue than agricultural exports, including sugar, coffee, tobacco, and bananas. They also surpassed foreign direct investment, income from export processing zones, and international development aid. Only tourism contributed more foreign exchange to the national economy, and among the tourists who spent most freely in the Dominican Republic each year were thousands of Dominicans living abroad, visiting home.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Tale of Two Cities by Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof
Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Foreword xi
Maps xxiii
Chapter One: From the Burro to the Subway 1
Chapter Two: Progreso Cannot Be Stopped 15
Chapter Three: Beautiful Barrios for the Humble Folk 44
Chapter Four: Yankee, Go Home . . . and Take Me with You! 68
Chapter Five: Hispanic, Whatever That's Supposed to Mean 97
Chapter Six: To Have an Identity Here 132
Chapter Seven: Not How They Paint It 163
Chapter Eight: Strange Costumbres 200
Conclusion 243
Appendix: Population Change in the Dominican Republic 249
Notes 251
Selected Bibliography 297
Index 307
What People are Saying About This
A Tale of Two Cities adds an important new case study and a focus on youth culture to the growing literature that acknowledges the full circuit of migratory experiences. It is one of the best and most empirically grounded of such works.
— Donna R. Gabaccia, University of Minnesota
Refreshing and convincing. Hoffnung-Garskof traces in very specific terms how the existence of transnational networks played out on both ends of the circulating stream of migration between the mid-1960s and the present. He does a very nice job in excavating the intricate ways U.S. economic and military imperialism in the Caribbean shaped Dominicans' opportunity structures and influenced their most important life choices. Truly a pleasure to read.
— David G. Gutierrez, University of California, San Diego
Hoffnung-Garskof's A Tale of Two Cities is a stunning study of Dominican life in Santo Domingo and New York City that raises the bar for transnational-migration scholarship. A work of rigorous research and analysis along multiple lines of inquiry (imperialism, migration, modernization, urban youth culture), it also is a deeply humane book that reveals the manifold ways in which ordinary Dominicans apprehend and make their social world.
— Mae M. Ngai, author of "Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America"
By using previously untapped sources of data—including oral history among barrio dwellers in Santo Domingo and migrants in New York City—this book goes well beyond previous works that focus only on demographics and socioeconomic issues. A Tale of Two Cities recreates the history of Dominican migration from the perspective of lower-class Dominicans—portraying the human face of Dominican migration while still keeping track of the big picture.
— Ernesto Sagas, Southern New Hampshire University
"Hoffnung-Garskof's A Tale of Two Cities is a stunning study of Dominican life in Santo Domingo and New York City that raises the bar for transnational-migration scholarship. A work of rigorous research and analysis along multiple lines of inquiry (imperialism, migration, modernization, urban youth culture), it also is a deeply humane book that reveals the manifold ways in which ordinary Dominicans apprehend and make their social world."—Mae M. Ngai, author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America"Refreshing and convincing. Hoffnung-Garskof traces in very specific terms how the existence of transnational networks played out on both ends of the circulating stream of migration between the mid-1960s and the present. He does a very nice job in excavating the intricate ways U.S. economic and military imperialism in the Caribbean shaped Dominicans' opportunity structures and influenced their most important life choices. Truly a pleasure to read."—David G. Gutiérrez, University of California, San Diego"A Tale of Two Cities adds an important new case study and a focus on youth culture to the growing literature that acknowledges the full circuit of migratory experiences. It is one of the best and most empirically grounded of such works."—Donna R. Gabaccia, University of Minnesota"By using previously untapped sources of data—including oral history among barrio dwellers in Santo Domingo and migrants in New York City—this book goes well beyond previous works that focus only on demographics and socioeconomic issues. A Tale of Two Cities recreates the history of Dominican migration from the perspective of lower-class Dominicans—portraying the human face of Dominican migration while still keeping track of the big picture."—Ernesto Sagás, Southern New Hampshire University