Making New York Dominican : small business, politics, and everyday life
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Making New York Dominican : small business, politics, and everyday life
(The city in the twenty-first century)
University of Pennsylvania Press, c2013
- : hardcover
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Large-scale emigration from the Dominican Republic began in the early 1960s, with most Dominicans settling in New York City. Since then the growth of the city's Dominican population has been staggering, now accounting for around 7 percent of the total populace. How have Dominicans influenced New York City? And, conversely, how has the move to New York affected their lives? In Making New York Dominican, Christian Krohn-Hansen considers these questions through an exploration of Dominican immigrants' economic and political practices and through their constructions of identity and belonging.
Krohn-Hansen focuses especially on Dominicans in the small business sector, in particular the bodega and supermarket and taxi and black car industries. While studies of immigrant business and entrepreneurship have been predominantly quantitative, using survey data or public statistics, this work employs business ethnography to demonstrate how Dominican enterprises work, how people find economic openings, and how Dominicans who own small commercial ventures have formed political associations to promote and defend their interests. The study shows convincingly how Dominican businesses over the past three decades have made a substantial mark on New York neighborhoods and the city's political economy.
Making New York Dominican is not about a Dominican enclave or a parallel sociocultural universe. It is instead about connections-between Dominican New Yorkers' economic and political practices and ways of thinking and the much larger historical, political, economic, and cultural field within which they operate. Throughout, Krohn-Hansen underscores that it is crucial to analyze four sets of processes: the immigrants' forms of work, their everyday life, their modes of participation in political life, and their negotiation and building of identities. Making New York Dominican offers an original and significant contribution to the scholarship on immigration, the Latinization of New York, and contemporary forms of globalization.
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART I
1. From Quisqueya to New York City
2. Origin Stories
PART II
3. From Bodegas to Supermarkets
4. From Livery Cabs to Black Cars
PART III
5. Dominicans and Hispanics
6. Up Against the Big Money
7. In Search of Dignity
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
Acknowledgments
by "Nielsen BookData"