Feb. 19, 2008

The Caribbean in New York


ANN ARBOR, Mich.—"A Tale of Two Cities" takes the reader with intensity and realism to Washington Heights in Manhattan, the most emblematic Dominican neighborhood in the United States, and to Cristo Rey, the poor neighborhood north of Santo Domingo, with multicolored shanties hanging off muddy hills. It tells the story of these northern and southern cities, and of the way in which transnational migration has influenced the very foundation of their identities.

The author, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof ("A Tale of Two Cities, Santo Domingo and New York after 1950," Princeton University Press) worked as a social worker in Latino barrios in New York and developed a deep interest in the neighborhood that is home to one in 10 Dominicans in the world. Soon he realized that the history of that narrow strip of Manhattan, where taxi drivers live among textile workers, cleaners and nannies, surrounded by hundreds of small grocery stores with Caribbean aromas, was inseparable from the history of Santo Domingo.

Hoffnung-Garskof spent years working in archives and libraries in the United States and the Dominican Republic, walking the streets and talking with overlooked yet central personalities of urban life. One such personality, an elderly man, still remembers the neighborhood of Cristo Rey when it "only had 13 families and was just a hamlet."

"I wanted to tell the story of Washington Heights, but it was impossible to tell it without the history of the Dominican Republic," said Hoffnung-Garskof, whose passion is to understand contemporary urban life in both the United States and Latin America, and their mutual influences, outside nationalistic frameworks. "I could not tell it from the standpoint of the official history of immigration to the United States, where migrant lives are meaningful only because they contribute to the melting pot or to 'American' multiculturalism.

"The Dominican population has become increasingly 'de-territorialized.' New York is another capital of the Dominican Republic. Washington Heights is part of the Caribbean. International migration forces us to reconsider the way we imagine urban history in both countries. But the two countries shared a history long before the first Dominican migrants appeared in New York, a history that included multiple military invasions of the Dominican Republic by the United States and a profoundly asymmetrical system of economic exchange."

The historian points out that the debates in the U.S. Congress over the past year assume that migration is controlled by visa policy and border fences, but in reality the origins of migrations often lie in foreign policy.

"History does not stop at the border and has never been stopped at the border," he said.

Hoffnung-Garskof documents how Dominican migrants, the largest group of foreigners in New York, forever transformed the city, while also playing a major and visible role in the life of the Dominican Republic.

"The most striking influence is remittances, modest amounts of money that Dominicans working abroad send to their relatives in the Dominican Republic, but which together contribute more to the Dominican economy than exports of agricultural products, direct investment by foreigners, and international aid," Hoffnung-Garskof said.

The author sees transnational migration as an extremely complex process and "one of the most significant transformations in many Latin American countries in the last 50 years" that generates extra-regional ties and links between families, communities and nations—which today are organic components of the lives of many throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

The World Bank estimates that globally there are approximately 74 million "South-South" migrants, meaning from one developing country to another, and another 82 million migrants who have moved from the "South to the North."

Though academic, the book is extremely readable because it is woven with details of daily life and popular culture. Hoffnung-Garskof not only analyzes the major historical events that affect both countries, including the occupation by U.S. troops, the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (1930-1961), the April revolution and the IMF obligatory adjustment in 1984, but also the lyrics of popular songs in both Washington Heights and Cristo Rey.

These lyrics document some of the most controversial aspects of migration, for instance, the role of migrants in the evolution of consumer culture in Latin America. He cites a text of a merengue associating New York with economic success. Pochy Familia y su Cocoband's "El Hombre Llegó Parao," a successful dance hit from 1995, celebrates a man who left 'on his knees,' but returned 'standing up'. The song asks "What's in New York that makes people become more beautiful?" Then the chorus hints at the answer, adopting the voice of Dominicans awaiting gifts from relatives living abroad. "What did you bring me?…A gold chain, a polo shirt and a bottle of whiskey."

Likewise, the historian analyzes the complex layering of Dominican identity caused by migration, especially the way in which racial identity changed as Dominicans left the countryside and moved to places like Washington Heights and Cristo Rey.

"The Dominican Republic has a history of slavery and the vast majority of the population has African heritage. Like all of the countries in the Americas, the Dominican Republic also has a tradition of racism which assigns low value to all things African or black," Hoffnung-Garskof said.

"It's important to understand that Dominicans, whether of white or darker skin, do not generally understand color in the same way that most other Americans do. The idea that many Americans have, that anyone who has a drop of African blood is part of a racial community with a shared culture and politics, is not as strong in the Dominican Republic, where exclusions people face on a daily basis are often based on class or geography—which barrio or part of the country you live in."

At the same time, the national discourse paints both the mestizo and Spanish as pure Dominican, while Haitians, which constitute about 11 percent of the Dominican population and the poorest of the poor, are the only group considered black. In New York, in the 1970s and 1980s, Dominicans encountered a city obsessed with a divide that was understood to be primarily racial, and they had to negotiate between the different systems of exclusion that they encountered there and in Santo Domingo.

True to his idea that history does not end at the border, Hoffnung-Garskof offers a course about the Social History of Latin Music in Latin America and the United States, one of the most popular classes at the University of Michigan. His students, inspired by Afro-Caribbean tones and words of salsas, tangos, sambas and merengues begin to understand and become a part of an open, mixed hemispheric identity.




Source: http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=6352

thanks for the post, Arsenio. this is a very edifying article. i hope some of our posters are paying attention

I started this title, however I had ordered some Trujillo books at the same time and those have me totally hooked right now.

Manhattanite:

I though you were a speed reader. You'd said you received your copy well over a month ago.
Ponte las pilas, hombre!