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The Dominican Americans. Silvio Torres-Saillant and Ramona Hernandez. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998. 208 pp. (Cloth US$39.95)
Silvio Torres-Saillant and Ramona Hernandez draw an insightful contemporary portrait of Dominican Americans and resident Dominican nationals in New York City, highlighting their varied experiences with migration and adaptation to the US, as well as their accomplishments after settlement. Their introduction provides a brief historical overview of the Dominican Republic: the land; European conquest; encounters among the Tainos, Spaniards, and enslaved Africans; and relations with Haiti. Five subsequent chapters explore facets of Dominican identity, work, and community life.
Chapter One, "The U.S.-Dominican Relations: An Age-Old Romance," focuses on the birth of the Dominican State, US involvement in internal Dominican affairs (including nineteenth-century annexation attempts), the dictatorship of General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1930-1961), and the political turbulence after his assassination in 1961. Chronicled here are the election of President Juan Bosch, the circumstances surrounding his brief term (1962-1963) and subsequent exile, and the 1965 re-election of Joaquin Balaguer who vowed to continue Trujillo's legacy. The authors maintain that Balaguer's economic development policies, combined with the US Immigration Act of 1965, which allowed more people to secure travel visas, were the driving force behind the mass exodus of Dominicans.
Picking up this point, Chapter Two, "Escape from the Native Land," first asks "Who are the Dominican immigrants?" Early analyses, which relied heavily on ethnographic studies of small communities in the Dominican Republic, indicated that the post-1965 Dominican migrants to the US were primarily rural, uneducated, poor, unskilled, and jobless (p. 34). However, citing more recent studies, the authors...