Nueba Yol: Aspiration, empire and migration in Santo Domingo and New York, 1950-1996

Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof

This project is a tale of two cities, Santo Domingo and New York. In the 1950s, one was the capital of an overwhelmingly rural country, thrust suddenly into an uneven and wretched modernity. The other was a mature (and some believed decrepit) manufacturing, commercial, and financial capital with a long history of immigration, and a recent explosion of black and Puerto Rican populations. Beginning in the early 1960s, an unprecedented movement back and forth of people, money, things, and ideas between these two cities transformed them both. In 1990, one in ten Dominicans lived in New York, and one in four lived in Santo Domingo. Neighborhoods, politics, and culture in each city intimately reflected and reshaped social life in the other. “Nueba Yol, Empire and Aspiration in Santo Domingo and New York, 1950-1996,” tells the history of the relationship that evolved between Santo Domingo and New York over three decades. Based on extensive documentary research and on oral histories collected in working class Dominican neighborhoods in each city, the project suggests that the emergence of Latino minorities (perhaps eventually majorities) in the cities of the United States can be written into the history of social and cultural transformation in twentieth-century Latin America. This global story is set locally in the neighborhood schools of Santo Domingo and New York. In the Dominican Republic high schools and universities were the sites of intense contention over social mobility, imperialism, and nationalism in the second half of the 20th century. In New York, schools were the places where Dominicans, students and parents, first encountered the heated ethnic and racial politics that defined the city by the end of the 1960s. Schools were the crucibles where new kinds of ethnic and national identities took shape. Rich histories of schooling, students, and school politics thus provide the backbone of a broader inquiry into contemporary immigration and world history.

About Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof

Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, Assistant Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. After working for several years for Head Start in New York City, he received his doctorate from Princeton University in 2002. He is the author of the "The Migrations of Arturo Schomburg: On Being Antillano, Negro, and Puerto Rican in New York 1891-1938" which appeared in the Journal of American Ethnic History in 2001, and of several forthcoming articles. He is currently at work on a book manuscript titled Nueba Yol: Empire, Aspiration, and Migration in Santo Domingo and New York, from the fall of Trujillo to the end of the twentieth century.