A Tale of Two Cities
eBook - PDF

A Tale of Two Cities

Santo Domingo and New York after 1950

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

A Tale of Two Cities

Santo Domingo and New York after 1950

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access A Tale of Two Cities by Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Contents
  5. List of Illustrations
  6. Foreword
  7. Maps
  8. ONE: From the Burro to the Subway
  9. TWO: Progreso Cannot Be Stopped
  10. THREE: Beautiful Barrios for the Humble Folk
  11. FOUR: Yankee, Go Home . . . and Take Me with You!
  12. FIVE: Hispanic, Whatever That’s Supposed to Mean
  13. SIX: To Have an Identity Here
  14. SEVEN: Not How They Paint It
  15. EIGHT: Strange Costumbres
  16. Conclusion
  17. Appendix: Population Change in the Dominican Republic
  18. Notes
  19. Selected Bibliography
  20. Index