Little D.R.

Our website media project focuses on the immigration history and settlement of Dominican immigrants in New York City. We use a few concepts from our group statistical profile as well as some covered in class, particularly assimilation, gentrification, and transnationalism, to structure our website. The most interesting aspects of our statistical profile, which we incorporated into this project, are the history of Dominican immigration and demographic information such as levels of English proficiency among Dominican immigrants. The YouTube video about the gentrification of Washington Heights and images of Dominican artwork seen here supplement our website with visual references to the topics we learned over the semester. The interview with a Dominican immigrant featured on this site was uploaded from SoundCloud. The goal of our website is to display the research we have compiled over the course of the semester on Dominican immigrants in a creative way. By including the history, demographic data, and frameworks we covered in class we hope to present an informative and visually appealing outlook on a major immigrant community of New York City.

The history of Dominican immigration goes back to the mid 1960s. Following the death of dictator Rafael Trujillo there was an absence of power in the government that led to violent unrest in the country, causing many of the nation’s citizens to seek refuge elsewhere. Around the same time, President Lyndon B. Johnson passed a bill in Congress that eliminated the quota system and most barriers that restricted immigration. Thus, thousands of Dominicans immigrated to the United States, particularly in New York City and the surrounding areas. The greatest section of New York that has been home to countless Dominican immigrants since the ‘60s is Washington Heights. Sometimes called “Little Dominican Republic” this part of Upper Manhattan has the highest concentration of Dominican immigrants not only in New York but also in the world. According to Brennan Ortiz in his article “NYC’s Micro Neighborhoods: Little Dominican Republic in Washington Heights, Manhattan,” Washington Heights experienced a decrease in its Dominican population as societal issues like crime and gentrification, forcing many Dominican immigrants to resettle in areas of the Bronx. Still, as Ortiz points out, Dominicans are the largest group residing in Washington Heights today. The interview below discusses a Dominican immigrant’s life in Washington Heights and her process of assimilating to American culture. Assimilation is the process by which a person’s culture or language becomes acclimated to and resembles that of another.

“I do think that Hispanics in this country are seen as… intruders,” says an unnamed Dominican immigrant, who arrived in New York City as an adolescent and grew up in Washington Heights. Despite New York City having the second highest Dominican population in the world (second only to the Dominican Republic itself), there still appears to be many barriers to assimilation. The most predominant barrier appears to be language: 70% of Dominicans in New York City above the age of 5 state that they do not speak English “very well”, citing a second language as their dominant language. (The Newest New Yorkers, 2013, p.101) Furthermore, Dominicans experience harassment when they speak Spanish instead of English. For this reason, most Dominicans congregate in areas with an existing Dominican population. There is a strong sense of kinship among Dominicans. Communities will celebrate religious and cultural festivals together among themselves, retaining their values from their homeland, though not at the same scale as they would have back home. Dominicans in New York City, especially first-generation immigrants, seem to want to identify more strongly as Dominicans than Americans, largely as a result of their being surrounded by family all the time. “I did not want to lose my Dominican citizenship… I was told that once I became a US citizen, I would be recognized as a Dominican citizen, and to me that meant a lot.”

Gentrification, also known as “hipsterification,” takes place when middle/upper income families move into a specific neighborhood, property values increase, and the “character” to the neighborhood is changed. Typically, when this takes place, low-income families and small businesses are displaced.

In “New Winds at an Island Outpost”, Manny Fernandez points out that Washington Heights seems to be becoming two different neighborhoods. Old residents refer to it as “the Heights,” whereas new residents refer to it as “WaHI,” just as how the area South of Houston street in lower Manhattan was dubbed “SoHo.” According to Stephen Francoeur in “A Brief History of Washington Heights,” “The median price of a two-bedroom apartment in 1999 was $180,000; in 2004 it is $460,000.”

However, gentrification might not be as drastic as some may think. “From 1990 to 2000, the Dominican population in Washington Heights and Inwood soared, from about 88,000 to nearly 117,000. But in the following five years their numbers dropped slightly, to fewer than 113,000… the decrease of Dominicans as statistically insignificant, possibly a reflection of a small drop in the area’s overall population. Dominicans, in fact, increased as a percentage of the total population in Washington Heights and Inwood, from 43 percent in 1990 to 53 percent in 2005.” (Fernandez). However, when it comes to the foreign born Dominicans in Washington Heights, the decline is much more drastic. “In 1990, 89 percent of Dominicans in Washington Heights and Inwood between 15 and 44 years old had been born in the Dominican Republic. Ten years later, that figure was down to 78 percent. In 2005, it was 67 percent” (Fernandez). The video below by Massiel D. Mejia depicts the rise of gentrification in Washington Heights within the time frame of 2:32 – 5:02.

As conveyed in the YouTube clip above, Dominicans with ties to Washington Heights would be sad to see the neighborhood evolve into a new SoHo. Due to the high concentration of Dominican immigrants in the area, the Heights have long been a major site for transnationalism. Transnational networks can be broadly defined as “[connecting] actors through direct and indirect relations across borders between those who leave and those who stay behind” (Duany, p.2.) Several aspects of Dominican culture have been carried over to this neighborhood, creating parallels that connect the immigrant population to their homeland. Men play dominoes at storefronts, and chimichurri trucks are a common find. The Heights are the origin of the annual Dominican Day Parade, which fills the streets with merengue music, fried plantains, and rituals such as the gaga ceremony (traditionally performed before the sugar cane harvest). During this cultural festival, the streets come alive with colorful costumes native to the Dominican Republic. The event began in 1981 as a small festival spanning only one avenue, and has since grown to attract hundreds of thousands of people per year. Without the heights, this celebration of Dominican culture may not be what it is today. Cultural enclaves like this one provide Dominican immigrants with a sense of belonging in a country where they may otherwise feel alienated.