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Chapter Six: At Home Abroad? The Dominican Diaspora in New York City as a Transnational Political Actor
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s i x At Home Abroad? The Dominican Diaspora in New York City as a Transnational Political Actor A d r i a n D . P a n t o j a Although American diplomatic history is replete with examples of ethnic minorities shaping American foreign policy, the participation of Latinos as transnational political actors has not received serious scholarly attention. This may be due in part to the belief that aside from Cuban Americans (Fernández 1987), most other Latinos are preoccupied with domestic issues and lack the organizations and resources necessary to shape American foreign policy or be involved in the politics of their home countries (Rendón 1981; Cohen 2000). However, in the past two decades the expansion of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, a new wave of Latin American immigrants, and intense outreach efforts by Latin American countries toward their diasporas have provided Latinos with a greater opportunity to participate in the politics of their home countries (Jones-Correa 2001, 1998; Shain 1999, 2000). This study explores the emergence of Latinos as transnational political actors by analyzing the Dominican diaspora in New York City. Dominicans are one of the fastest growing Latino ethnic groups in the 182 At Home Abroad? ■ 183 United States and have long been noted for having vigorous ties to the ancestral homeland. The Dominican population dramatically grew from 170,817 in 1980 to 1,041,910 in 2000. By 2010, they were projected to overtake the Cuban population to become the third largest Latino group in the United States, below Mexicans and Puerto Ricans (Hernández and Rivera-Batiz 2003), although they ultimately did not. Although studies on Dominicans characterize the diaspora as one that has sustained intense transnational networks with the homeland (DeSipio and Pantoja 2007; Duany 2002, 1994; Levitt 2001; Pessar 1995; Hendricks 1974), these ties are largely analyzed along an economic (Portes and Guarnizo 1991; Grasmuck and Pessar 1991) or socialcultural dimension (Levitt 1998; Duany 1994), with little attention paid to their transnational political networks (Itzigsohn 2000). Indeed, political scientists and other social scientists have not paid sufficient attention to Dominican political participation in the United States and abroad. Without question, this diaspora has become an important agent of economic and social change in the Dominican Republic (Levitt 1998; Grasmuck and Pessar 1991). To what extent are they likely to become agents of political change? This study considers the prospect of the Dominican diaspora as an agent of political change in the Dominican Republic by examining the factors that foster or mitigate their political participation in the politics of the Dominican Republic. The analysis for this study is based on a unique survey of 413 Dominicans residing in Washington Heights, New York City. Unlike previous works on Dominicans and other diasporas which have largely been based on participant observation or interviews with a limited number of individuals, surveys with randomly selected samples have the advantage of allowing researchers to make more concrete generalizations about the population. While Dominicans are settling in states throughout the East Coast, the heart of the diaspora in the United States remains in New York City (see Table 6.1). New York City is home to 53 percent of the diaspora in the United States or 552,212 Dominicans . The city has the second largest concentration of Dominicans outside of the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo. Within New York City, the largest settlement is in a neighborhood in upper Manhattan known as Washington Heights or Quisqueya Heights (Quisqueya being the indigenous name of the Dominican Republic). 184 ■ Adrian D. Pantoja Latin American Diasporas: Influential Transnational Political Actors? The failure of policymakers to develop and articulate an international grand strategy for the post-Cold War era led some scholars to argue that diasporas or “ethnic lobbies” were playing an influential role in shaping American foreign policy and were in part responsible for its lack of coherence (Clough 1994; Smith 2000). One of the most prominent opponents of ethnic involvement in international affairs is Samuel Huntington . Writing in 1997 in the journal Foreign Affairs, Huntington argued that several overlapping forces were leading contemporary diasporas to place their homelands’ interests above those of the United States. Foremost among them were the rise in diasporas from non- European countries, challenges to the assimilationist paradigm in favor of one that embraced multiculturalism, and growing transnational ties between contemporary diasporas and their home countries. Most recently , Huntington proffered that Latin American diasporas, in particular those from Mexico, pose the greatest threat to...