As in the case of the Puerto Rican and Cuban Diasporas, we again deal with a very complex situation. The presence of Dominicans in the U.S.A. is due primarily to two factors. The first factor is economic, military, and political support given to the dictatorships in the Dominican Republic by the government of the U.S.A. The second factor is the economic conditions generated by the foreign policies of the U.S.A., as we have seen in Cuba, and will be seen in other areas of Latin America.
Electoral democracy and representative government have been the exception rather than the rule in the Dominican Republic for most of its history. From the 1810's to the 1930's, the country had more than 120 rulers, ranging from Spanish and French officials to Haitian presidents. As political scientists have often pointed out, political instability was the norm in the Dominican Republic until the 1960's. Much like impoverished Nicaraguans, the Dominican people have been poorly served by their political leaders for much of their history. After subjugation to Haiti (1822), then independence (1844), then resubjugation by Spain (1861), the Dominican Republic finally achieved its lasting independence in 1865. The caudillo Buenaventura Baez held a fraudulent plebiscite (16,000 in favor, 11 against), and then signed a treaty to annex the country to the U.S.A., but the annexation treaty died in the U.S. Senate after a contentious debate. In the 1880's and 1890's, General Ulises Heureaux dominated the nation. Hereaux and his successor, General Ramon Caceres (1911), both died at the hands of assassins (Marshall C. Eakin, the History of Latin America: Collision of Cultures. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, p. 368).
The U.SA. (under President Theodore Roosevelt) intervened in 1905 to establish a receivership that guaranteed the repayment of foreign creditors through control of the customs houses in the ports (invoking the so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine). When civil war broke out in 1916, the U.S.A. sent troops and occupied the country again until 1924, US interests were both economic and strategic. As war raged in Europe in 1916, the U.S.A sought to blunt the German presence in the key shipping lanes of the Caribbean. As in Cuba and Haiti, the U.S.A. military built roads, schools, communication systems, and gradually trained and equipped a police force. Like Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, and Anastacio Somoza in Nicaragua, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina (1891-1961) established a long-lasting personalistic dictatorship by assuming control of the "non-partisan" security forces created by the U.S Marines. The racially-mixed Trujillo trumpeted "Hispanism" and the "white" Spanish heritage of the country while putting in place a brutal and repressive regime with secret police, torture, assassinations, and massacres. In October of 1937, Trujillo ordered the execution of some 25,0003 Haitians living in the Dominican Republic (Trujillo's maternal grandmother was Haitian). Much like the Somozas in Nicaragua, the Trujillo family assessed a phenomenal fortune (estimated at $800 million) by turning the country into their own personal business fiefdom (Ibid, pps. 368-369).
During the 1950's, Trujillo closely aligned himself with the anti-Communist foreign policy of the United States. Despite his close relationship with the U.S.A., and the use of expensive lobbyists in Washington, President John Kennedy personally ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to assist in the assassination of Trujillo in 1961 to make way for moderate reformers rather than revolutionaries, or so he thought. Between 1961 and 1965, however, reform failed. In September 1963, the Dominican military deposed Juan Bosch who had been elected president in December 1962. As the country floundered in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson, fearing a leftist uprising, sent in the U.S.A. Marines and the 82nd Airborne to take control of the country. Within two weeks, more than 20,000 troops had landed. Although this invasion (along with many other US military interventions in the region) has been condemned over the last 60 years, the Dominican Republic is the rare case of electoral reform and stability emerging out of U.S. military intervention (Ibid, p. 369).
From 1966 to 1978, one of Trujillo's old associates, Joaquin Balaguer (1906-2000) was elected president for three consecutive terms (1966, 1970, 1974). Balaguer's Reformist Party lost the 1978 and 1982 elections to the Dominican Revolutionary Party, but both of these administrations were plagued by corruption scandals. Amazingly, the 78-year old Balaguer won the 1986 election, and was elected again in 1990 and 1994. He was forced from power in 1996 (at the age of ninety and completely blind), although he ran again for the presidency in 2000, gathering a quarter of the vote. Despite the dominance of Balaguer, and frequent complaints of irregularities, Dominicans have now voted in ten consecutive presidential elections, and have alternated power among competing political parties. Whatever the flaws of Dominican democracy, the country has evolved into an open, competitive, electoral democracy, and the process began more than a decade earlier than in the majority of Latin America in the 1980's (Ibid).
Before 1960, few Dominicans made their way to the U.S.A: Trujillo's ironfisted regime maintained strict control over visas and travel abroad. After Trujillo's assassination in 1961, and fueled by the 1965 civil war, Dominican immigration rose to significant birth levels and then remained steady through the 1970's. Then in the 1980's, when economic depression plagued the Dominican Republic, immigration soared. In that decade alone, 250,000 Dominicans entered the U.S.A. legally, constituting the second-largest national group of immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, with Mexicans being the largest. The 1990's and the early years of the new century also saw an unprecedented number of Dominicans immigrating to the U.S.A., due to enduring social injustice, and a continued lack of economic opportunity in the Dominican Republic (Himilce Novas, Everything You Need to Know About Latino History. New York: Penguin Group, 2007, p. 232).
In addition to Dominicans who enter the country through legal channels and secure U.S.A citizenship, there is also a sizable undocumented Dominican population in America. No reliable data on this population's size has been published, but many researchers assert that as many as three hundred thousand undocumented Dominicans have settled in the U.S.A. One way that Dominicans enter the U.S.A illegally is by paying small fortune, often an entire year's wages to smugglers to transport them across shark-infested Mona Passage, the eighty-mile stretch of turbulent sea separating the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. This perilous journey, undertaken in small, rickety boats, or on rafts , costs thousands their lives every year. If they make it across the Mona Passage and succeed at dodging the US Border Patrol agents combing the western coastline of Puerto Rico, a US territory with commonwealth status, Dominicans customarily work until they have enough money to travel to the US mainland. They either hop a plane from Luis Munoz International Airport in San Juan to the mainland, usually New York, with false documents, pretending to be Puerto Ricans, who are American citizens, and thus needing no visa or passport, or they board container ships sailing to mainland ports, sometimes paying crew members to look the other way. Naturally, it was much easier for Dominicans to travel illegally from Puerto Rico to the U.S.A mainland before September 11, 2001, and the establishment of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (Ibid, pps . 232-233).
There is a group of Dominicans called the "retornados (returned immigrants)." They have spent some time in the U.S.A., and then returned to the Dominican Republic, either to establish businesses with capital earned abroad or for personal reasons. There is no reliable data indicating just how many Dominicans have gone to America and then returned to their homeland, but their number must be significant as companies and organizations that serve "retornados" special needs have cropped up in the Dominican Republic (Ibid, p. 233).
Although clearly defined Dominican communities first appeared in the United States over sixty-five years ago, Dominican-Americans have always been the invisible Latinos, especially in comparison to Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban-Americans. And since a large percentage of Dominican Americans are of mixed African, native, and Spanish descent, they have encountered the same prejudice and racial discrimination that African-Americans have suffered in the U.S.A. Operating under the false belief that Dominican immigrants represent the poorest, most disenfranchised members of Dominican society, some Americans have argued that these immigrants shoulder the nation's social service system. While Dominicans do dominate the ranks of the small percentage of Latino's receiving public assistance, the truth is that the vast majority of Dominicans are extremely hard-working people who have never been on welfare or received food stamps or worker's compensation. What's more, as a group, Dominicans who come to the U.S.A. are more highly educated than those on the island, and a good number among them are professional (Ibid, pps. 232-233).
Unfortunately, too many Dominican immigrants end up in low-wage, low-status, blue collar jobs. Based on the the US 2000 Census Current Population Survey for 1998 and 2000, the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research at the University of Albany estimated that in 2000, the mean earnings of employed Dominicans was just below $8,000 and that 36% of the population lived in poverty. In New York City, where Dominicans endure the highest poverty rate of all New Yorkers, a large number of Dominican women make a meager living working the garment industry (and enjoying little protection), while Dominican men work for modest pay in manufacturing, in the restaurant and hotel industry, or as livery drivers. No matter how scant their earnings, a good number of Dominicans send a significant portion of their paychecks to relatives back in the Dominican Republic (Ibid, 234).
Little by little, Dominicans in New York, with the support they get from their strong, close-knit community, have been working their way up. Some have launched small businesses or revamped preexisting ones, particularly bodegas, supermarkets, diners, family-style restaurants, travel agencies, and taxicab companies. As an example of just how invisible Dominican-Americans are, Dominican restaurateurs in New York are apt to describe their fare as Spanish and American, which is what Cubans and Puerto Ricans cooking in America used to be called in the old days. Thus many of their patrons, both Latinos and non-Latinos, have the false impression that they are being served by Cuban and Puerto Rican chefs. Dominican restaurateurs fear that if they told "the whole truth," their non-Dominican clientele, unfamiliar with Dominican flavors would shy away (Ibid).
Relative to the Dominican Diaspora, we can say the following from a theological standpoint:
1. Theology is the study about God by men and women in their relationship to God and to other persons. Theology forces the question: How do we know or love God if we do not first know or love the neighbor, "the other?" We cannot separate theology from the experience of a people. Experience, lived reality, is part of the ongoing process of creation and men and women's constant struggle and dialogue with it (Andres G. Guerrero, A Chicano Theology. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1987, p. 159).
Like that of other Hispanic communities in the U.S.A., the Dominican experiences is one of oppression. A Dominican diasporic theology must reflect on the process of liberation. It must re-invent, re-create, re-define, and re-construct in its proper context by drawing on its own proper reality. In its vision it must search for an experience of liberation; this demands the creation of new models that aid in understanding the oppressed-colonized context out of which Dominicans think, speak, and love. Old models cannot be inserted into new situations of liberation. These new models need to be created in the process of liberation. Dominican theology has to help Dominican people recognize this process. They must envision those new models which come from an experience of oppression moving towards liberation (Ibid).
The uniqueness of the Dominican experience lies in the fact that they exist between two worlds: the impoverished and the rich. In giving direction to a Dominican theology of liberation, Dominicans cannot be neutral. Neutrality in the global setting of rich and poor implies a choice. To opt for the poor involves a prophetic decision, one that paves the way toward liberation for both oppressed and oppressors (Ibid).
Theologically speaking, Dominicans must look for some alternatives for strengthening their history, culture, language, and dignity as human beings. The Church is one vehicle that can be utilized provided that we see the process of liberation going on concerning education. Dominicans who get an education can easily be alienated from the rest of the oppressed Dominican community. There is a need to organize or institutionalize endeavor to move leadership back into the Dominican barrios in the U.S.A. (Ibid, pps. 161-162).
The Church is not doing all it could for Dominicans. The Church as an instrument of liberation, is the last hope for the Dominican-American community. As responsible moral entities, we must cooperate in re-directing and restructuring a just society for humanity (Ibid, p.165).
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona,
Visiting Professor of Theology, Tainan Theological College/Seminary
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