Encountering American Faultlines: Race, Class, and the Dominican Experience in Providence (review)

Since the 1960s, thousands of Dominicans have resettled in Providence, Rhode Island. This group provides an excellent case study for assessing how race and class shape immigrants' incorporation into the contemporary United States. José Itzigsohn documents that most Dominicans in Providence are located at the bottom of the occupational structure and are racialized as black or Latino. First he identifies the causes and consequences of the immigrants' subordination within the U.S. labor and housing markets, as well as the public school system. He then focuses on the formation of multiple cultural identities among Dominicans, including their panethnic and transnational attachments.

In this engaging and thought-provoking book, Itzigsohn proposes a theory of "stratified ethnoracial incorporation" to interpret the meaning of "becoming American." This theory is a modified version of the segmented assimilation approach elaborated by Alejandro Portes and his colleagues. The basic idea is that disadvantaged immigrant groups may not assimilate to mainstream U.S. culture, but adopt the oppositional lifestyle characteristics of inner-city minorities such as blacks and Puerto Ricans. Unlike Portes et al., Itzigsohn emphasizes that most second-generation immigrants obtain low-skilled service jobs, rather than join the so-called urban underclass. Furthermore, Itzigsohn contends that intergenerational mobility for working-class immigrants occurs largely through mainstream social institutions, especially public schools.

Encountering American Faultlines draws on multiple sources of information. To begin, the author culled quantitative data from the 5-percent sample of the 2000 U.S. Census and the 2007 Latino National Survey. From 2002 to 2004, he surveyed 181 Dominican immigrants in Providence, and performed another 34 intensive interviews with key informants. Itzigsohn also conducted long-term participant observation within the Dominican community in Providence. Although born in Argentina, he got to know well many Dominican and Latino organizations and their leaders in the city.

After tracing the demographic and geographic contours of Dominican Providence, Itzigsohn underlines that most Dominicans have entered a growing service sector and a declining manufacturing economy (46). Their primary mode of labor incorporation places them below most whites and close to blacks and other Latinos. As the theory of stratified ethnoracial incorporation predicts, the racialization of most Dominicans as black curbs their opportunities for upward mobility within American society. Itzigsohn acknowledges that intergenerational class mobility for Dominicans is significant but restricted by pervasive discrimination.

Moreover, second-generation Dominicans face major structural barriers in the Providence public school system. Among them are the scarcity of Dominican teachers and administrators, concentration in low-quality schools, alienating school environments, and lack of institutional support for higher education. Still, Itzigsohn recounts the successful life stories of five young Dominican Americans to show that such limitations can be overcome.

The book's most intriguing findings refer to the cultural identities of Dominican immigrants and their children in the United States. Both first-and second-generation Dominicans in Providence commonly used the panethnic category "Hispanic" or "Latino" to describe themselves. They rarely thought of themselves as "American," a term they reserved for non-Hispanic whites. Although transnational practices steadily decline in the second generation, most immigrants and their descendants "adopt a transnational frame of reference in their understanding of Dominican identity."(149) Itzigsohn explains the persistence of transnational identities as a result of stratified ethnoracial incorporation, which rarely allows Dominicans to perceive themselves as fully American-meaning white, English-speaking and middle class. For most Dominicans, the author quips, "Becoming American means becoming Latino."(189)

Itzigsohn insists throughout that "the process of becoming American follows the pattern of stratified ethnoracial incorporation."(194) Despite his eloquent argument and empirical demonstration, two conceptual issues merit further reflection. One is that the racial ideologies of Dominican immigrants often clash with the binary system of racial classification in the United States. This conflict is particularly acute among dark-skinned Dominicans, who ordinarily think of themselves as indios (literally, Indian; figuratively, brown), but are typically considered black by Americans. Hence, most Dominicans avoid the black or African American...