Perspectives on the Second Generation

First-Generation Views of the Second Generation

As many of the first-generation Dominican immigrants discuss their second-generation Dominican children, they recognize that their children slowly become “more American,” as they immerse themselves in the culture of their home, and somewhat lose the culture of their parent’s home. However, due to the dense concentration of Dominicans in neighborhoods such as Washington Heights and Inwood, many second-generation Dominicans maintain certain parts of their culture, including language, music, and food, through association with other Dominicans.

“The Second Generation is Very Difficult”

The second generation is in a state of conflict because they have been raised with the values of the first generation while they are confronted with the values of American natives of the third generation and above. Sometimes these values can clash with each other and members of the second generation struggle to choose which values they want to keep, which to reject, for fear of not being accepted into American society or being labeled as a “traitor” to their parent’s backgrounds. As a psychoanalyst, Dr. Piña gives insight on what factors complicate the relationship between the second generation and their parents. Dr. Piña cites the preservation of the Spanish tongue as an important indication of the perpetuation of Dominican culture. "What I see is that they don’t care if you speak to them in Spanish or English, which is good. They maintain and keep culture of their family, salsa, merengue, the language itself, going back to Santo Domingo every year given the fact that in this community we like to speak Spanish. Culture is language. Above all, the language defines culture." At the end of this video, Dr. Piña also reveals the new fad among the Dominican second generation – marrying in Santo Domingo.

Although, the second generation marry in Santo Domingo it is mostly during winter and spring break or summer vacations. They usually return to the United States.

Dr. Piña's Focus on the Academics: Good the First Year and then Change
According to Dr. Piña, the Dominican second generation in Washington Heights has a high school drop out rate of 50% or 60%. This is fairly consistent with the statistics presented in the table below. However, the only discrepancy is that the table examines the educational attainment of Dominicans in the United States, which includes Dominicans from various generations, not just the second. But this discrepancy is alleviated by the fact that Dominicans are a recent immigrant group and thus, most Dominicans in the United States should be of the first or second generation.

 For the most part, Dominicans are doing better than the Native Hispanics in terms of educational attainment.

Dr. Piña mentions that even though the Dominican students start off well, their academic performance declines by the third year. He atrributes Dominicans low educational attainment (as compared to other immigrant groups) to a combination of two factors: poor parental involvement and inferior New York school systems. “I believe the New York system, the schools are bad - the worst.”

Knowing the importance of a good education, Dr. Piña takes pride on how Culturarte has positively shaped the lives of some of its members, “We have that type of story…how they learn, how they change their mind going to college.”

Junot Diaz On Being a Second-Generation Dominican-American

Junot Diaz had no easy time growing up in a slum of Parlin, New Jersey. His road to literary success was not paved smoothly. “My mother and father were members of the first wave,” says Diaz on the background of his immigrant parents. Diaz is referring to the first significant influx of Dominican immigration. Along with immigrants born in Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti the number of Caribbean born has seen substantial increase beginning in 1960 and continuing to this day. The Dominican Republic contributed largely to this Caribbean exodus. The foreign-born population from the Dominican Republic grew by 675,794 from 1960 to 2000, as did the other aforementioned groups, as seen in this chart:

Source: MPI Data Hub

According to Diaz, many of the women from this first wave came with no husbands and often opened businesses to support themselves. This strong work ethic is still present today, even if not in entrepreneurship: according to the MPI Data Hub, the Caribbean born were as likely to participate in the labor force as the overall foreign-born population. However, despite their odds, Diaz says, “the women … from that first generation [led] extraordinary lives.”

Diaz praised their perseverance and ability to give up all the connections they had available in the Dominican Republic in order to come to the United States: “to have given up language, culture, a society, social networks, comfort, to come to a country that was extremely hostile at the time– early 60s, early 70s– you think it’s hard being a person of color now? Try 1972.” In fact, the character of Belicia, Oscar’s mother in Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is largely drawn from the women of the first wave of immigration of the 1960s: Diaz’s own mother and her friends.

Diaz did, in fact, grow up during a time when being an individual of Dominican descent was not as common as it is today— only about a third (36.5%) of today’s total Carribean-born population arrived before 1980 (MPI Data Hub). Diaz described his experience as a part of this lone third during a talk he gave at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center Campus on April 15, 2009:

Second-generation Dominican-American individuals today may very well struggle with this same “societal shrapnel,” discrimination and negative influence filtered to some extent by the strong ethnic networks present in the Dominican-American community. Data from 2000 shows that although New Jersey is the second largest home of foreign-born individuals in the U.S., it is home to little more than 13 percent of the population. Given the recent spike in Dominican immigration over the last ten years, there is no doubt that Diaz struggled against odds both social and statistical when he was growing up in the 1970s.
 

Source: MPI Data Hub

As a young man, Diaz struggled with what he calls “absurd hypermasculinity,” the inspiration from which the character of Oscar was born. Diaz reminisced about how he and his friends “were desperately pretending to be five times tougher than we were, when in fact we were just a few poor kids who got into college.” For Diaz, getting into college was an accomplishment that required characteristics of “nerdiness” and “bookishness.”

Even today, many individuals who come from backgrounds similar to those of Diaz downplay intellectuality. At one panel of writers of color, Diaz observed that many try to mask their knowledge by forcing the façade of toughness: “the thing nobody wanted to talk about was how much nerdiness there was in certain sectors of our community, namely those of us who are artists. […] Oscar was a way to address that.”

“I felt like I wanted to put the ‘nerd’ back in ‘Dominican.’”
 

On Racial Identity

Regarding Oscar Wao, Diaz states: “there is an attempt to address through fiction the multiplicity of who we are. Dominicans are … always talking about race, the same way Americans are always talking about race.”

Peers chided Diaz in his youth, often calling him a “nigger” out of spite and hatred in his youth often chided Diaz. He commented that these people never considered “whether [Diaz] was a quarter black or an eigth black.”

Having afflicted him since the age of 6, racism and cultural norms factor heavily into Diaz’s literary work. During his talk at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus, he told the audience: “as an artist you wonder [about] words and cultural things that [affect] us, and what happens when a community has a wide range of relationships to that word. […] I was trying to display the incredible range of all those relationships.”

Within the Dominican community, some of his peers were unresponsive to racial slandering; still others resisted it— this dichotomy of attention to discrimination is the “relationship” to which Diaz refers. Rather than wrestling words with bigoted strangers on street corners, however, Diaz wove this unfounded hatred into the book that is now the best-selling, Pulitzer-Prize winning The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Works Cited

Gelatt, Julia, and David Dixon. "Detailed Characteristics of the Caribbean Born in the United States." Migration Information Source. Migration Policy Institute. 29 Apr. 2009 <http://www.migrationinformation.org/USFocus/display.cfm?ID=408>.

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