E' Palante Que Vamo!: Transnational Education in the United States and in the Dominican Republic
This research project is designed to tell the stories and experiences of Dominican immigrant students living in New York City. For decades, immigration and educational policies in both the Dominican Republic and the United States have been widely discussed and criticized by scholars and members of this compelling community. Over the span of five decades, members of this community have engaged in a massive migration from the Dominican Republic into the United States. The study sheds light on the phenomenon of transnationalism on the lives of Dominican immigrant students, and the way that it shapes their educational experiences in schools across New York City. Through their reflections, I provide evidence that the idea of the American dream is virtually non-existent for members of this community. Additionally, Dominican immigrants all show a deep desire to return “home,” despite the educational and personal opportunities offered in the United States.
Language and negotiation of ethnic/racial identity
The ethnolinguistic terms in which the children of Dominican immigrants in Rhode Island think of themselves, i.e. as "Spanish" or "Hispanic," are frequently at odds with the phenotype-based racial terms "Black" or "African American," applied to them by others in the United States. Spanish language is central to resisting such phenotype-racial categorization, which denies Dominican Americans their Hispanic ethnicity. Through discourse analysis of naturally occurring peer interaction at a high school, this article shows how a Dominican American who is phenotypically indistinguishable from African Americans uses language, in both intra- and inter-ethnic contexts, to negotiate identity and resist ascription to totalizing phenotype-racial categories. In using language to resist such hegemonic social categorization, the Dominican second generation is contributing to the transformation of existing social categories and the constitution of new ones in the US. (Dominican, construction of race, African-descent immigrants, ethnolinguistic identity, Spanish)* Dominican American self-definition of race in terms of ethnolinguistic heritage as "Spanish," "Dominican," or "Hispanic" - runs counter to popular and historical US notions of race in which African-descent phenotype has preceded all other criteria (e.g. national origin, language, or religion) for social classification. African-descent RACE has historically been treated as equivalent to Africandescent ETHNICITY in the US (Mittelberg & Waters 1993), with the result that immigrants of African descent have largely merged into the African American population by the second generation (Bryce-Laporte 1972, Woldemikael 1989, Waters 1994). Unlike these other African-descent groups, Dominican Americans are successfully reversing, in many contexts, the historical precedence of African descent over ethnolinguistic identity for social classification.' Dominican American enactment of identity in Providence, Rhode Island, shows that race, which is popularly treated as a static attribute of an individual, can be situational. Although it has long been recognized that an individual can count as a member of different races in different societies (e.g. Hoetink 1967) and that one
Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants
world co-evolve as one civil society and nature give way to a new civil society with an alternative practice toward the natural environment. To analytically examine this transformative process, he uses an analytic framework comprised of four components around which frontier conflicts coalesce: (1) changes in migration and settlement patterns; (2) shifts in resource use; (3) creation of new social institutions; and (4) economic globalization pressure. Based on his extensive field research, he provides us with examples of frontier transitions from a wide range of locations and time periods, such as the shift away from common-pool resource management in the Spanish Pyrenees, and the development of ecotourism in the Mexican Caribbean coast. At the core of his analysis is that frontiers can be seen as places where there is a “renegotiation between the increasing penetrative power of the market and the establishment, or defense, of cultural identity” (p. ix). In all of the cases studied, he shows how the penetration of global economic forces collided with, and ultimately transformed, both the nature of the civil society and the treatment of nature in each location. The use of frontiers as the site for this analysis is a unique and original contribution to the study of the interactions between society and nature. One can easily see how frontier conflicts over what society would be dominant in an area also involve what practices will be followed in the interaction with nature. Additionally, his close attention to historical analysis leaves one firmly convinced that his portrayal of events is well founded. Throughout his analysis, Redclift refers to the dialectical process that occurs between the development of civil society and the natural world. Yet, how this dialectical process of mutual influence works is never clearly delineated. Rather, one must infer this from the narrative analyses. As a result, a causal analysis of mutual causality between social structures and nature cannot be analytically distilled from this work. Additionally, there has been a great deal of work done by human ecologists (such as Bonnie McCay, Tom Rudel, or Thomas Dietz) attempting to develop causal models of the process linking social processes to natural processes. Yet nowhere in this work do we see any reference or connection to this work. So while Redclift has made a contribution to the work on understanding society/environment relations, its overall potential contribution to the literature remains unrealized. Overall, I feel that Redclift has produced an important and strong addition to our understanding of the interaction between society and nature. By examining the frontier and how this physical place embodies conflicts over both civil society and our treatment of the natural world, Redclift has moved beyond the stale debate over social constructionist vs. realist notions of nature, and successfully unites them both in the study of society/nature interactions. This is an important contribution that deserves a wide readership.