The Dominican Diaspora: From Quisqueya to Puerto Rico and Beyond

Introduction

Migration among the Caribbean islands has a long history that dates to pre-Colombian times. However, socioeconomically driven migration has increased during the twentieth century, and has been pluridirectional (e.g., Lipski 1994; Ortiz López 2016). It has extended to the continental U.S. and, to a lesser degree, to geographic areas beyond the immediate Caribbean, e.g., Europe. Each migration wave has been conditioned by different political and economic crises affecting the islands. The current dossier, entitled "The Dominican Diaspora: From Quisqueya to Puerto Rico and Beyond", aims to offer its readers a more concrete glimpse of the historical, sociopolitical, linguistic, and psychological contexts which motivate and accompany the Dominican migration. Moreover, this collection of studies not only sheds light on the contexts of the geographic movement, but also on its complex repercussions on the migrants themselves and their processes of integration in the countries of their destination.

Background and Motivation

The editors of this dossier, both have been active researchers on the linguistic effects of migration and language contact in Caribbean groups, mainly in Puerto Rico and in Caribbean communities in the United States. Eva-Maria Suárez Büdenbender has been focused on examining linguistic contact between Dominican migrants and Puerto Rican natives on Puerto Rico and pursued a variety of research questions and different methodologies to examine the influence of non-linguistic factors (e.g., socioeconomic background, educational attainment, and race) on the perceptions of Dominican Spanish among Puerto Ricans, and vice-versa (e.g., Suárez Büdenbender 2011, 2013). She has also been interested in the robustness of the Dominican identity and its relationship to the maintenance of Dominican Spanish among émigrés to Puerto Rico (2010). Moreover, she has investigated Puerto Rican linguistic (in)security at home and their perceptions and thoughts of other varieties of Spanish world-wide (2019).

Wilfredo Valentín-Márquez has carried out research on the social conditioning of dialectal features in Puerto Rican Spanish (i.e., the influence of age, sex, socioeconomic background, educational attainment, and social networks on lateralization and velarization). While he has examined the relationship of language use and the speakers' perceptions of a boricua identity (Valentín-Márquez 2015, 2020), he also proposed the presence of Dominican migrants in Puerto Rico as a motivating cause for the emergent use of the glottal stop, an innovative linguistic trait in Puerto Rican Spanish (2006). Furthermore, he examined dialectal attitudes as well as perceptions of race and national identity among Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in a transnational context (2019).

Both researchers have joined in this project to bring to life a dossier that allows the reader to examine the situation of the Dominican diaspora from different research perspectives and vantage points. To this end, cutting-edge work on Dominican migration from areas such as history, psychology, literature, and linguistics are brought together to allow the reader to take in the social, educational, and psychosocial repercussions that accompany these migration dynamics. Whereas most scientific publications offer work by researchers in the same field, those are publications mostly geared to a reading public with similar interests or educational background. However, this dossier is also geared towards those readers, both younger and more experienced scholars, who seek to examine the Dominican diaspora within their respective disciplines. With this dossier we hope to entice readers of many different backgrounds and interests to go on this journey that will start with a history of Dominican migration and its travails and ends with the representation of very individual migration stories in current literature. The five studies that appear in this dossier stem from respected and well-known scholars in each field of study. They offer to the reader not only a broad array of themes but also insight into different methodologies of research, specific to each field. The ensuing section will focus on the organization of the dossier and offer more detail on each of the studies included.

Structure of the dossier

The current dossier covers a wide range of areas of...