Making New York Dominican

Small Business, Politics, and Everyday Life

Christian Krohn-Hansen

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780812244618, 9780812244618
• eBook ISBN: 9780812207545
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

From Quisqueya to New York City

“Quisqueya” is the indigenous name for the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (or, in Spanish, Española), which lies between Cuba and Puerto Rico. Hispaniola is divided into two nations—the Dominican Republic (which occupies the eastern two-thirds of the island) and Haiti (which occupies the remaining western third of the island). Nowadays, Manhattan north of Harlem is often referred to as “Quisqueya on the Hudson” or “Quisqueya Heights”—Washington Heights being New York City’s name for Manhattan north of Harlem (see, for example, Duany’s title from 1994).¹

The history of emigration from the Dominican Republic differs markedly from the pattern characteristic of the Anglophone Caribbean, where seasonal or temporary migration in search of work within the Caribbean and more recently to Europe and North America has been important since the nineteenth century (Olwig 1993; Maurer 1997). Mass emigration from the Dominican Republic is a new phenomenon, dating only from the early 1960s. Indeed, for over 130 years, or since the late 1870s, the Dominican Republic has been an importer of labor, primarily from the English-speaking West Indies and Haiti (Bryan 1985; Martínez 1995, 1999).

Why has the Dominican Republic become a significant supplier of migrants? While most by far of those who have emigrated have been driven by a desire for economic progress—an improved income—the earliest large-scale migration from the Dominican Republic to the United States generally, and New York more especially, was politically motivated. To explain this, I must first say a bit more about the Dominican Republic’s political and social history. This chapter is meant as an introduction—it sketches a background and a set of contexts for the analyses that follow in the rest of the book.²

The Making of a Migration Movement

A watershed in the history of the Dominican Republic, independent since 1844, was the U.S. occupation from 1916 to 1924.³ The U.S. occupation regime created an effective national military institution in a country that had previously had none. Among the first class of native officers who graduated from the new military academy in 1921 was Rafael Trujillo, who rose to command the modernized military the United States had helped establish and then overthrew the elected government and ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.

Trujillo’s rule was marked by grotesque violence and abuse, and he used state power to amass a spectacular fortune. The regime’s greatest crime was the 1937 massacre of thousands of Haitian peasants and workers in the Dominican-Haitian borderlands, a still greater number being expelled from the country (Fiehrer 1990; Turits 2003: 144–80).⁴ Hundreds of Dominicans were also killed by his agents, although Trujillo generally employed means of domination and repression short of actual liquidation (Galíndez 1958: 129; Vega 1986).

The dictator’s Dominican Republic was basically a peasant society, and even Trujillo’s rule (often viewed by scholars, novelists, and foreign observers as totally despotic, a regime with little or no backing in society) had, in fact, a substantial social basis and significant spheres of acceptance (see, for example, Walker 1970; Turits 2003; Derby 2009; Krohn-Hansen 2009). The thirty-one-year regime mediated important socioeconomic changes, especially through agrarian policies that benefited the country’s large independent peasant population. In the mid-1930s, 82 percent of the population was rural; in 1960, 70 percent remained rural, still one of the highest proportions in Latin America and the Caribbean (Turits 2003: 265). In his Foundations of Despotism (2003), Turits has shown how reforms by the Trujillo state changed the nascent processes of restructuring in the countryside that had threatened Dominican peasants when Trujillo seized power—changes energized by new production of sugar for the world market, by increased commercialization of land, and by new property laws. By implementing policies that in practice sustained the peasants’ free access to land during a phase of national economic growth, the dictator secured rural backing. In Turits’s terms, Trujillo promoted a peasant-based modernity (2003: 81–82).

Massive emigration from the Dominican Republic to the United States began in 1962 after the death of Trujillo, who had severely restricted movement out of the country to conserve the domestic agricultural and industrial labor supply (Georges 1990: 29).⁵ In 1962, there were perhaps as many as 15,000 Dominicans in New York, including many who had arrived in the year since the dictatorship’s end. But just four decades later, moderate estimates put the Dominican population in the United States at around 1.12 million—and by far most of these lived in New York City (Hoffnung-Garskof 2008: 4).

After Trujillo was assassinated, relatively free elections followed in 1962, the first of their kind since 1924. Those elections resulted in an overwhelming victory for Juan Bosch, leader of the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD), which he had founded in Cuba in 1939. Although Bosch’s political ideas were far more “reformist” than “revolutionary,” he was soon labeled communist (by members of the armed forces, businessmen, and industrialists), and after only seven months, his government was overthrown by a military coup. The triumvirate regime that followed stayed in power with the support of the Trujilloist generals in the army and the United States. In April 1965, civil war broke out in the capital between pro-Bosch and anti-Bosch forces. Peace, or a second Pax Americana, was then imposed, when President Lyndon Johnson on April 28, 1965, ordered 42,000 U.S. marines to Santo Domingo to stop Bosch and prevent the establishment of “a second Cuba in America.”

During this politically turbulent period, Dominican emigration to the United States jumped to about 10,000 legal migrants per year, while there were also 20,000–30,000 tourists per year, many of whom overstayed to work (Hoffnung-Garskof 2008: 69). Most of this earliest mass emigration was politically driven, or rather, strongly shaped by Dominican and U.S. foreign policy and security concerns (68–96).⁶ At first the emigrants were mostly middle-class people, worried about the progressive rule by President Bosch. Soon their unease shifted to the civil unrest after Bosch’s defeat. But U.S. visas were not at all reserved for conservative or indeed reactionary (white or light-skinned) middle-class Dominicans. The U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic during the early 1960s worked actively, with the president’s backing, to issue more visas to Dominicans. Thus it became possible for quite a few progressive supporters of Bosch in the 1965 crisis to obtain visas, including leaders and activists of left-wing and social-democratic parties, trade union organizers, barrio militants, and radical students from the nation’s oldest and largest university, the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo (UASD) (Georges 1984; Hoffnung-Garskof 2008: 68–80). Many of these individuals chose to leave for New York after the U.S. military intervention in 1965. Others were in reality forced to leave the country; they were deported under the terms of an agreement between the two governments (Martin 1966; Hoffnung-Garskof 2008: 77–79).

Fairly soon, however, the Dominican exodus was primarily a response to (1) the manner in which the Dominican state-building project was managed and (2) the living conditions of vast segments of the population. After Trujillo’s death, Dominican ruling elites gradually shifted from a more self-sufficient agriculture-based economy to a new economic model, “an increasingly neoliberal version of modernity” (Turits 2003: 263). But the bulk of the population drew relatively little benefit from what occurred. The changed political and economic system made the old rich richer, created some new categories of rich, and (at least up to the late 1970s) expanded the middle class slightly; but it only improved to a modest extent the basic conditions of the masses. Hence increasing numbers of Dominicans chose to seek their fortunes in New York—or more generally, abroad.

The three decades from 1966 to 1996 were dominated by Joaquín Balaguer. He ruled the nation first from 1966 to 1978 and then from 1986 to 1996. Earlier, Trujillo had ruled for some time without holding the title of president, through puppet presidents of whom the last was Joaquín Balaguer. A lawyer and shrewd politician, Balaguer was also a prolific author who published many books. He occupied a set of important positions under Trujillo and was one of the regime’s leading ideologues.

After a brief exile in New York following the dictator’s death, Balaguer founded the Partido Reformista (PR) in 1964 and gained the support of army officers. His first twelve years in power (1966–78) were violently repressive and have been described as “Trujillismo without Trujillo” (Black 1986: 42). The elections in 1966 were organized in an atmosphere of extended civil war. With U.S. troops in the country and while terrorist campaigns against Bosch’s PRD killed hundreds of the party’s activists and Bosch himself feared for his life, Balaguer won with 57 percent of the vote to Bosch’s 39 percent. The nation suffered for some eight years under Balaguer’s state-sponsored terror. Paramilitary groups killed more than 4,000 Dominicans between 1966 and 1974 (Moya Pons 1990: 528).

Balaguer gave up power in 1978 after the elections that year had triggered loud allegations of fraud.⁷ Eight years later, he regained the Dominican presidency and then was reelected once more in 1990. When he stepped down from office for the last time in 1996, he had once again been forced to resign, having lost credibility in a spectacular way. The opposition and foreign observers had condemned the presidential elections of 1994, which Balaguer (now ninety years old) was declared to have won, as scandalously rigged (Hartlyn 1998: 251–54).

But Balaguer also enjoyed ample support in important sectors of society. He used the nation’s large public sector for patronage politics. Across the country, public sector jobs were given almost exclusively to members of the president’s own party. After 1966, the number of public sector employees increased steadily, boosted by massive U.S. aid plus a favorable U.S. sugar quota (Moya Pons 1990: 531; Betances 1995: 120, 123), conspicuous economic growth with more foreign investment and tourism (Kryzanek and Wiarda 1988: 49–50, 137–38), and a public sector wage freeze from 1966 to 1978 (Kearney 1986: 151). In the 1960s and 1970s, there was also a marked increase in the national rates of enrollment of students pursuing higher education. Postsecondary enrollment grew from 3,400 in 1960 to 23,500 in 1970 and then rose sharply to 139,300 in 1982 (Grasmuck and Pessar 1991: 36). But in spite of the national economic growth, a large number of Dominicans, including graduates, actually saw their meager incomes fall during the 1970s: “A look at the changes in the distribution of income in Dominican society during the 1970s would show that the poor became poorer, but the other social strata largely benefited” (Torres-Saillant and Hernández 1998: 54–55).

An almost complete turnaround in the national economy came in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1977, petroleum costs absorbed 60 percent of sugar export earnings, but the figure had increased to 133 percent in 1982 (Kryzanek and Wiarda 1988: 138–39). By the 1978 election, clear signs of an end to the economic boom were already present. In addition, leaders of the opposition had finally managed to put aside their differences and shape a viable coalition. Their presidential candidate was Antonio Guzmán, whose main promise was to get rid of the repression and establish democracy. Guzmán’s party, the PRD, thereafter remained in power for eight years. Another PRD leader, Salvador Jorge Blanco, was elected president for the period 1982–86.⁸

By 1981 “it was already evident that the entire public sector was on the edge of bankruptcy” (Moya Pons 1990: 537). Negotiations on the Dominican debt problem with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and bilateral creditors followed. And predictably enough, the 1980s and the early 1990s saw a general pauperization of the population and a reduction of the middle class. Indeed, by the early 1990s, the purchasing power of the nation’s minimum wage was half its value in the 1970s—and salary readjustments in the country’s large, most modern companies had brought these companies’ wages down to around 60 percent of the value they had had in the 1970s (Torres-Saillant and Hernández 1998: 59). At the same time, the distance in wages between the island and New York (based on the annual average exchange rate and the two countries’ minimum monthly salaries) continued to increase. In 1975, the minimum monthly wage for full-time work in the United States was four times that in the Dominican Republic; a decade later, it was between six and seven times, by 1991, thirteen times Santo Domingo’s minimum salary (Grasmuck and Pessar 1991: 46–47; Guarnizo 1992: 63).

The natural outcome was, as we know, a continued tremendous Dominican migration to the United States. As noted, the Dominican Republic was the country sending the most immigrants to New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, and kept that position in the early 1990s. In 1995 the former Soviet Union became the primary source of immigrants to the city (Ricourt 2002: 35). But since 1995, the Dominican Republic has supplied enormous numbers of immigrants to New York.⁹ Statistical data for 2009 indicated that the city’s official Dominicans had grown by some 41,000 from 2000 to 2009 (from 547,379 to 588,865) (Bergad 2011: 5). Not only has the volume of the exodus grown but so has the geographical and socioeconomic variation this migration stream contains. Dominican migrants to New York have already for a long time come from most areas of the country. In the 1960s and 1970s, relatively many came from the middle sectors of society; but after the country was hit by growing economic crisis from the late 1970s onward, the migration stream broadened considerably to include a colossal number of ordinary (or fairly poor) Dominicans from both urban and rural areas, as well as a wide range of highly educated professionals.

Most Dominicans who travel to New York arrive in the city with some form of visa to the United States (Georges 1990: 81–92; Hoffnung-Garskof 2008: 74–80, 90–93); hence the social composition of the Dominican migration stream to New York has been shaped not only by processes on the island but also by U.S. immigration policies.¹⁰ U.S. visas are essentially of two types: immigrant (sometimes described as residence) and nonimmigrant (tourist and student) visas. An immigrant visa allows wage employment, is usually valid without time limitation, and gives the right to apply ultimately for citizenship. The majority of the United States’ legal immigrants are granted visas under a family unification stipulation; they have been spouses, children, parents, or siblings of an adult U.S. citizen or spouses or unmarried children of a permanent resident. A minority are granted visas because they are regarded as persons (professionals or workers) with needed skills. The tourist and student visas usually prohibit wage employment and are valid for only a limited period. But many arriving on such visas, often using forged documentation,¹¹ have overstayed the granted time period. The great majority of those who begin their sojourn in New York in this manner manage subsequently—say, after three to six years—to regularize their status, that is, become legal residents (although most often at considerable expense) (see, for example, Georges 1990: 90–92; and Grasmuck and Pessar 1991: 171–74). Many Dominicans with whom I became acquainted in the field, in Washington Heights and elsewhere in New York, belonged to this category.

After becoming legal residents, Dominican immigrants typically start applying for additional visas for family members still on the island; they become the pioneers or anchors to which sets of future migrants tie themselves. Thus, the practice and sustenance of kinship—or the production and sustenance of what Dominicans describe as la familia, or the extended family—have functioned, and continue to function, as a key mechanism in the history of the Dominicanization of New York. When Dominicans (on the island and in New York) discuss migration to the United States, they frequently speak about the cadena—the chain of migrant kin binding the sending community in the Dominican Republic to the immigrant community in the Empire City.

In sum, after 1966, Balaguer and Dominican leaders more generally came to rely on a migration-dependent political-economic project (or a migration-dependent form of state building and economic development). But the roots of the last two hundred years of political, economic, and social development on Hispaniola lie in colonialism and imperialism (Hansen and Stepputat 2005). What is today the Dominican Republic’s territory belonged for about three hundred years to the Spanish Empire. From the late nineteenth century, the Dominican Republic’s history has, to a striking extent, been shaped by U.S. military, political, and economic concerns. The United States occupied the country militarily in 1916–24 and again in 1965. Both Trujillo and Balaguer were in practice helped to power through U.S. activities on the island.

Settling in New York

As two prominent U.S. migration sociologists have put it, “Migration is a network-driven process, and the operation of kin and friendship ties is nowhere more effective than in guiding new arrivals toward preestablished ethnic communities” (Portes and Rumbaut 1996: 32). Dominican newcomers to the U.S. are typically helped in decisive ways by already established relatives or friends. The new arrival is temporarily lodged in the apartment of a relative or friend. Close kin and acquaintances in the city attempt also to find employment for the newcomer.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2007 38.9 percent of New York City’s Dominicans resided in the Bronx, 28.8 percent in Manh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Colofon
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Acknowledgments