Take the case of the New York-based Barahona Company, which was organized in 1916, the year of the invasion. By 1925, it had amassed 49,400 acres, largely from buying communal holdings, and was the second largest plantation in the country. The Central Romana mushroomed in size from 3,000 acres in 1912 to 155,000 acres in 1925. By 1924, twenty-one sugar companies controlled 438,000 acres -- a quarter of the country's arable land. More than 80 percent of it belonged to twelve U.S. companies. As land for subsistence farming diminished, staples had to be imported from the United States and the prices of food skyrocketed.

But the sugar boom did not lead to higher wages. Instead of increasing what they paid their Spanish-speaking workers, the growers shifted to bringing in English-speaking blacks from Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos, whom they regarded as more docile and better suited to their needs than the Dominicans, Cubans, or Puerto Ricans. At some Dominican sugar mills, the entire workforce became English-speaking. Many of those migrants settled in the country after the harvest season, and their descendants inhabit areas around the old mills to this day. Local residents, angry at how the immigrant blacks siphoned jobs away from natives, took to labeling them cocolos, a racial pejorative that still persists in the Caribbean.

Title: Harvest of Empire
Author: Juan Gonzalez
Language: English
ISBN: 0140255397

Montesquieu previously said:

I have complained about the many race threads here but I'm reading this book and found this quite interesting:

divinedominicana previously said:
wow i have often heard this word but never knew the origin of it

Glimmertwin previously said:

Really doesnt say where that word came from..... My great grandfather was a Cocolo and settled in SPM...never have I heard that it was a derogatory term, unless you are a blackophobe..... as we are all proud to be cocolo....

In Pto Rico, sometimes dominicans are called Cocolo !

The Dominican sugar plantations offered wages that were more than double those paid on plantations in Nevis and St. Kitts. The centrales in La Romana and San Pedro de Macoris paid between $20 and $30 weekly for six consecutive days of work, while in the Leeward Islands the average salary was barely $12 per month. Unlike in Cuba, where laborers would often settle for years, in the Dominican Republic cane cutters from the Leeward Islands would frequently work for the six months of the harvest and then return to their homeland island,.
Year after year, between 2,500 and 4,000 laborers from St. Kitts and Nevis, as well as several hundred from Antigua, Montserrat, the Virgin Islands, Dominica, Anguilla, St. Vincent, and the Turks Islands, would sail to the DR on ships rented by Dominican centrales, leaving the women, children and elderly behind. This created a labor shortage on the Leeward Islands. ... Migration statistics show more than 90,000 workers who went to the DR between 1914 and 1939.
Many workers repeated the trip numerous times until they grew older or tired, or until they had saved enough to buy a plot of land or improve their homes on their islands. Other settled in the vicinity of Santo Domingo, San Pedro de Macois, La Romana or Puerto Plata.Dominicans nicknamed the laborers from the West Indies "cocolos". The origin of this name is not clear, but it is widely accepted to be a corruption of "Tortolo", Spanish for an inhabitant of Tortola, one of the small British Virgin Islands that also sent laborers annually to the DR. The 1935 Dominican population census registered 9,272 cocolos.

Cocolos were accused of not spending money in the Dominican economy, sending their savings abroad, begging, being dirty, spreading disease, monopolizing the industry, and depressing salaries. Puerto Ricans too were " a phalanx of unemployed and vicious men who swarm in the streets of Macoris or who lived holed up in a hellish gambling den".
...
Merchants did not like immigrants, because they did not buy much - they saved all their money to take home
...
Cocolos especially were marginalized because of their "strange" practices {for religious & Africanized practices}.
...
Immigrants were not competing with Dominicans for jobs, since the latter were only interested in their conucos.

Montesquieu previously said:


Same here, everyone I asked before had no idea.


If you want a linguistic explanation I'm afraid you'll have to do your own research. Puerto Ricans have called Dominicans cocolo for a very long time. Probably before it was even used in DR. But that's the background of the word.