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
The Internet and the Changing Beijing-Taipei Relations: Toward Unification or Fragmentation?
Information and its technologies facilitate the exercise of what has been called “soft power,” a concept that differentiates information from the conventional dimensions of “hard power,” which is mainly associated with military force and economic influence. Soft power, according to Nye, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense of the United States, means that “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness. In this sense it is just as important to set the agenda in world politics and attract others as it is to force them to change through the threat or use of military or economic weapons.”1