Latinos in New England

4. Mofongo Meets Mangu

4 Mofongo Meets Mangú: Dominicans Reconfigure Latino Waterbury Ruth Glasser C onnecticut is experiencing a cultural reconfiguration, and Waterbury is literally and figuratively in its middle.1 The state with the highest proportion of Puerto Ricans among its Latinos, the highest per capita Puerto Rican city in the United States (Hartford), the first capital city with a Puerto Rican mayor (also Hartford) is becoming more nuanced, as newcomers from a variety of Spanish-speaking countries arrive daily to make their homes here.2 Dominicans are the most prominent group of newcomers reshaping Waterbury’s social, cultural, and economic landscape: Dominican-owned grocery stores abound. Dominican children form the core of a group dancing Colombian cumbia in Waterbury’s schools. Local funeral homes now advertise that they can send bodies to Santo Domingo as well as San Juan. Unlike most northeastern states, Connecticut’s urban life takes place in small cities—its largest, Bridgeport, has only 139,529 people. These are cities with heavily industrial economies in steady decline since World War II, when their factories began to shut down.3 Waterbury was in the most industrialized corridor of the state, the center of the brass industry and related manufacturing, and was among the hardest hit.4 This study is a preliminary investigation of two questions: (1) how has the arrival of a new group of Latino immigrants affected the nature of Latino Waterbury and Waterbury as a whole, and (2) what does the addition of new Latino groups have to tell us about interethnic interaction in general and the reshaping of U.S. Latino identities in particular? Since World War II, Puerto Ricans have been the dominant Latino group in Connecticut. However, in the last twenty years, Connecticut’s Latino communities have become more multiethnic, as illustrated in the story of Waterbury. Waterbury is also emblematic of the kind of small city to which Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and other Latino groups have increasingly migrated during the last several decades. This trend is a departure from the traditional pattern of migration to New York City, still the main focus of studies about Puerto Rican migrants and Dominican immigrants. This chapter intends to bring such smaller but increasingly popular destinations into the historical literature on Latinos in the United States. The history of Dominicans in Waterbury is a still-unfinished story of immigration and community development, and this chapter will, hopefully , begin to portray their community in the making. It represents a continuation of the author’s research on Latino community history in Connecticut, a project that was begun with the Puerto Rican experience.5 The author’s approach here is eclectic: statistics from the U.S. Census are supplemented with evidence of the physical and cultural geography of ethnic changeover. ‘‘Geography’’ refers both to the configurations of ethnic space and the meanings and attachments with which people endow them. As Lewis Holloway and Phil Hubbard suggest, we need to look beyond numbers to a humanistic geography that takes into account how people change places and endow them with personal meaning.6 The author uses her personal observations of the changes in businesses, clubs, and other neighborhood institutions, and has asked her interviewees about them. Shows, advertisements, and announcements aired over local radio stations also provide clues to this cultural realignment. This geography, in turn, is shaped with information culled from oral history interviews with Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who have settled in this central-western Connecticut city. Information for this chapter is in large part drawn from interviews with more than fifty Puerto Ricans conducted throughout the course of the 1990s. Twelve Waterbury Dominicans as well as five from other parts of the state were interviewed formally by the author and her students in two urban and community studies classes taught at the University of Connecticut Waterbury Campus . Informal conversations also took place over a period of a year with dozens of Dominicans in a variety of settings, including a local Dominican restaurant, a C-Town supermarket, a Dominican-owned party shop, a Dominican-owned beauty salon, and at Hispanic child care provider meetings. Context was also provided by interviews done by students and the author with immigrants to Waterbury from Peru, Colombia, Ecuador , Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Waterbury’s New Dominican Immigrants In small cities, even a few hundred or thousand migrants or immigrants from one country have a significant impact. Waterbury’s population has long hovered between 100,000 and 110,000. Waterbury’s...