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| 253 12 Transglocal Barrio Politics Dominican American Organizing in New York City Ana Aparicio Over the past two decades, Dominican American activists working in the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights have initiated projects that have reshaped that neighborhood and the local political landscape. In this process, they have established and utilized numerous networks that include and extend beyond local and transnational Dominican circles; these networks include African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and progressive whites. While they use these networks, they have also helped to transform them. This chapter will focus on the ways and reasons Dominican American activists work through these multiple networks, and on the implications this work has for the way we theorize contemporary “barrio politics.”1 This chapter takes as its central question the debate over the significance of the “local” in a globalized world, particularly when examining immigrant politics in the United States. When discussing New York–based Dominican American organizing, I am often asked about the extent to which local concerns compete with transnational practices in the realm of politics. Are new generations of Dominican American activists tied exclusively to the neighborhood of Washington Heights or to Dominicans? Can we not begin to look at the ways that people are identifying with various populations and localities? That is, could we not theorize on how people are simultaneously becoming transnational, global, and local—or “transglocal”—in a globalized world? These questions are raised particularly in relation to the work that emphasizes the central place of the local in recent trends in Dominican American politics (Aparicio 2006; Ricourt 2002). One could ask, “Haven’t we moved beyond the strict boundaries of place-specific, provincial notions of community?” In fact, yes, people do move between or across borders—physically , socially, economically, and culturally. The growing body of literature on 254 | Ana Aparicio transnationalism highlights these trends. In analyses of Dominican transnationalism , neighborhoods like Washington Heights, New York, and Jamaica Plain, Boston, are often described as the quintessential contemporary transnational communities, with Dominican social and political groups regularly working across various boundaries (Duany 1994; Levitt 2001). Precursors to this kind of dynamic political life can be found in the work of organizations like the Young Lords Party. In the 1960s and 1970s, this organization worked across cities in the United States and with activists in Puerto Rico. They also worked across ethno-racial group definitions; that is, from their inception they had close ideological and social ties to activists in groups like the Black Panther Party. An exploration of the history of organizations like the Young Lords further explicates the transglocal as a concept that necessarily considers the local, the global, and the transnational. This notion of the transglocal incorporates lessons from these varied analyses to offer a more nuanced and multifaceted reading of Latino/a politics, forcing us to reconsider the very nature and complexity of local barrio politics. Recent texts on U.S.-based Dominican politics (Levitt 2001; Ricourt 2002; Aparicio 2006) point out that the transnational sphere is one space in which Dominicans living in places like New York City and Boston practice and alter politics. Peggy Levitt’s work, building on the earlier literature on transnationalism (e.g., Basch et al. 1994), delves into the complex nature of this transnational work among contemporary transmigrants such as Dominicans living in Boston and in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Foundations like the Inter-America Foundation have also taken note of the growing role of transnational networks among Dominican organizations; in recent years, they discovered that many of the organizations they funded in the Dominican Republic developed projects and products that eventually found their way to organizations in the United States. In 2004, the Foundation held meetings with scholars and community organizers who worked with Dominican populations in Miami, New York, and Boston to ascertain how they could begin to work with this understanding of the way Dominican organizers—in the Dominican Republic and in the United States—occupied local and transnational spaces. It is clear to whoever takes an even cursory glance at political life in Washington Heights (or in the Dominican Republic) that networks span geopolitical borders. Transnational practices are important, and today’s technology and economic forces make such practices more urgent. But this does not suggest that geopolitical borders no longer exist, or more important , that immigrants move across these borders with facile acrobatics. State power continues to exert tremendous force. And place matters much. [18.219.112.111] Project MUSE (2024-04-16 14:38...

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