Waterbury, Connecticut: An Evolving Multi-Latino City

PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION

By Ruth Glasser1

A local funeral parlor now has a large yellow pages ad saying that it can send

bodies to Puerto Rico—or Macedonia or the Dominican Republic

A Colombian-born Department of Education employee form a group of Hispanic

youngsters to dance cumbia in the Waterbury schools. They are applauded as

good, authentic dancers—but the majority of them are Dominican!

Don Taco is about to open, touted on Spanish-language radio as a new, authentic

Mexican restaurant, but its creators are the owners of La Cazuela, a local

Dominican restaurant!

Introduction

Connecticut is undergoing a re-Latinization. The state which has had the distinction in

recent years of having the largest proportion of Puerto Ricans among its Hispanic

population is now experiencing a cultural realignment.2 Even in Hartford, the largest per-

capita mid-sized Puerto Rican city in the United States, the first capital city to have a

Puerto Rican mayor, Dominicans march prominently in the Puerto Rican parade—with

their own flag aloft, merengue and bachata as their auditory accompaniment.3 Both

Puerto Ricans and Dominicans also participate in the new annual parade of Peruvians,

another group with a growing presence in the city and the state.

This article will look at this changeover from Puerto Rican to multicultural Latino as it is

happening in one city, Waterbury, Connecticut. My approach here is eclectic: statistics

1 Special thanks are due to Delmaliz Medina, who conducted interviews, transcribed, translated, and provided comments on the manuscript. Many thanks also to Luis J. Pomales, who faithfully documented this Puerto Rican to Dominican transition in his photographs.2 In the 1990 census, 69 percent of all of Connecticut’s Hispanics were Puerto Ricans, as compared to 49 percent in New York, the long standing locus of settlement of migrating Puerto Ricans. As of the 2000 census, 60.7 percent of Connecticut’s Hispanics were still Puerto Rican, as compared to 36 percent in New York.3 Holyoke, Massachusetts became as of 2000 the largest per capita Puerto Rican city in the United States [almost 36.5%], but its total population of 39,838 makes it a small city.

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will be supplemented with evidence of the physical and cultural geography of ethnic

changeover. By geography I refer both to the configurations of ethnic space, and the

meanings and attachments with which people endow them.4 This geography, in turn, will

be shaped with information culled from oral history interviews with Puerto Ricans and

Dominicans who have settled in this central-western Connecticut city. Dominicans are

the largest group among a multitude of Spanish-speaking immigrants who have begun to

settle in Waterbury. Thus, their presence is the most tangible within the new multi-ethnic

mix of Hispanic Waterbury.5 The history of Dominicans in Waterbury is a still-

unfinished story of immigration and community development. This article will,

hopefully, portray their community in the making.

Context: State

From the 1950s to the contemporary period, Connecticut increasingly became the home

of migrants from Puerto Rico. While New York was the overwhelming destination of

migrants who came from the island before World War Two and during the immediate

post-World War Two era, Puerto Ricans began migrating to states such as Connecticut

under agricultural [and a few industrial] contracts. They also came as part of a secondary

migration of people leaving New York City in search of industrial jobs, affordable

housing and what they hoped would be quieter, safer places to raise their children.6

Puerto Ricans were the overwhelming majority of the state’s Spanish-speakers until

about 20 years ago when immigrants from other parts of Latin America began to arrive in

4 As Lewis Holloway and Phil Hubbard suggest, we need to look beyond numbers to a humanistic geography which takes into account how people change places and endow them with personal meaning. See their book People and Place: The Extraordinary Geographies of Everyday Life (Essex, England: Pearson Education Ltd, 2001), p.13.5 Information for this article is in large part drawn from interviews with more than 50 Puerto Ricans. Twelve Waterbury Dominicans as well as five from other parts of the state were interviewed formally by myself and the students in two Urban and Community Studies classes taught at the University of Connecticut/Waterbury Campus. Informal conversations took place over a period of a year with dozens of Dominicans in a variety of settings, including a local Dominican restaurant, a C-Town supermarket, a Dominican-owned party shop, a Dominican-owned beauty salon, the house of a Dominican childcare provider, Hispanic childcare provider meetings, and a party held at the house of a local Dominican immigrants. Context was also provided by interviews done by students and myself with immigrants to Waterbury from Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Shows, advertisements, and announcements aired over local radio stations also provided clues to this cultural realignment.6 The Puerto Rican community is still growing at a fairly rapid rate in areas such as Connecticut, it is just not keeping place with the rapid growth of the collectivity of other Spanish-speaking groups.

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significant numbers/proportions. However, as was true in New York and other areas,

Waterbury and other Connecticut cities had actually been home to a diverse scattering of

multi-ethnic Spanish-speakers before the large-scale Puerto Rican migration.7 In a sense,

the re-Latinization of states such as Connecticut and cities such as Waterbury mirrors

these earlier trends, though on a larger scale and with some class differences. If trends

continue, it is the identification of Hispanic Connecticut with Puerto Ricans that will be

seen as the short-lived anomaly in the overall picture.

Context: Waterbury

Connecticut is unlike most Northeastern states in that its urban life takes place in

relatively small cities—its largest city, Bridgeport, is only 139,529 people, followed by

four other cities whose populations hover between 100,000 and 125,000.8 In these small

cities, it has been possible for one type of business to dominate the economy, or for a

cluster of interlinked businesses to have an enormous impact in their presence—or

absence. Most of these cities, and many of Connecticut’s smaller cities and towns, had a

primarily industrial economy until the late 1970s, when their large industries, in decline

since the end of World War Two, began to shut down or drastically cut their work

forces.9 In these factory town settings, layoffs of a few thousand or even a few hundred

people from one facility are significant. In such small cities, the presence of even a few

hundred or thousand migrants or immigrants from one part of Latin America can also

have a noticeable impact. Obviously, Hartford is the one of the largest per capita Puerto

Rican cities in the United States largely because like Lawrence, Massachusetts [which

holds the same distinction for Dominicans] it is such a small city that although its

7 See, for example, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, “The Evolution of the Latino Community in New York City: Early Nineteenth Century to the Present,” in Gabriel Haslip-Viera and Sherrie L. Baver, eds., Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), pp.3-29.8 According to the 2000 census, New Haven’s population was 123,626; Hartford’s 121,578; Stamford’s 117,08; and Waterbury’s 107,271.9 See, for example, Jeremy Brecher, Jerry Lombardi, and Jan Stackhouse, compilers and eds., Brass Valley: The Story of Working People’s Lives and Struggles in an American Industrial Region (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982; Thomas R. Beardsley, Willimantic Industry and Community: The Rise and Decline of a Connecticut Textile City (Willimantic, CT: Windham Textile and History Museum, 1993) and Douglas W. Rae, City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

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population numbers are dwarfed by those of New York City and many other

municipalities and regions, its proportion is so great.10

Within modest-sized cities, relatively small populations can have a great impact—witness

Eddie Perez’s rise as the first Puerto Rican mayor of a capital city, Hartford, the political

impact Dominicans are having in places such as Lawrence or Haverstraw in Rockland

County, New York, both of which were key voting centers in the May 2004 Dominican

presidential election. Unfortunately, there is still a dearth of studies concerning the

impact of such recent immigrant and migrant groups upon the many small, largely post-

industrial cities and towns that are an important part of the social fabric of the Northeast.

This piece is intended to illustrate the importance of such towns for Latinos in the New

England area by using the example of one city, Waterbury. Waterbury to a certain extent

is emblematic of smaller cities which become receiving grounds for a secondary

migration—of relatives and friends of those who are already there, as well as of people

who find New York to be too big, too expensive, too dangerous—and may indicate

important trends for the future for migration and settlement of newer Latino groups.

Waterbury, population 107,271 according to the 2000 census, is a hilly city located in

Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley, along the river of the same name. It is neither the

bucolic, rural Connecticut nor the affluent suburban Connecticut portrayed in movies. It

is part of a hardscrabble industrial corridor where legions of immigrants from Europe,

Lebanon, the Cape Verde Islands, French Canada, as well as African American migrants

from the US South have come to live in successive waves between the mid-19th century

and World War Two.

For a long time, Waterbury was part of the most heavily industrialized, working class

region of the state. From its mill-on-the-river and ‘Yankee peddler’ days in the early

1800s, Waterbury evolved into the center of the brass industry and related manufacturing,

such as of buttons and clock parts. Later, other metal parts processing plants for the

10 As of the 2000 census, Hartford was 32.6 percent Puerto Rican. Lawrence was 22.5 percent Dominican. Haverstraw, New York, which is a village of some 10,000 rather than a city, was nearly 27 percent Dominican.

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cosmetics, automotive, and airline industries developed in the area, as well as some small

textile and apparel factories.11

Some 90 miles and over an hour and a half from midtown Manhattan on a light traffic

day, Waterbury is decidedly not part of the New York metropolitan area. In this respect

it is unlike Danbury and other cities of Fairfield County where a multitude of immigrants,

including a substantial Dominican population, have been arriving in what may be a

spillover from New York or an attempt to maintain a reasonable commuting distance to

that city. It is very difficult for someone living in Waterbury and working hard to

maintain New York City as part of a frequent orbit. Coming to Waterbury is thus a

strategic choice, a complete change of location.

Spanish-speakers who have come to live in Waterbury have mainly been people looking

for factory jobs, in contrast to some of their counterparts in other areas of Connecticut.

For example, a handful of wealthy Spanish-speakers, most noticeably Puerto Ricans and

Cubans, settled along Connecticut’s shoreline from the mid-nineteenth century onward as

merchants or sent their children to be educated at elite boarding schools or Yale

University.12 Hartford, historically the center of the nation’s insurance industry, has also

attracted more white collar employees in a multitude of professions, a legacy reflected in

its more institutionally developed Hispanic mercantile community and Dominican

political and social networks.

From earliest times, those who came to Waterbury were there to labor in the area’s brass

mills or related industries, or plied their trade as barbers, boardinghouse keepers, or

proprietors of other small businesses that were directly dependent upon the city’s

industrial workers.13 In the post-World War One period, for example, Spaniards could be

found living in the Chase Brass company’s barracks or other North End housing, and

working at the Chase factories.14 Cuban and Spanish storekeepers and boardinghouse

proprietors are reported by pionero Puerto Ricans to be among those who housed, fed, 11 Brecher, Lombardi, and Stackhouse, Brass Valley, passim.12 Ruth Glasser, Aquí Me Quedo: Puerto Ricans in Connecticut (Middletown, CT: Connecticut Humanities Council, 1997), p.33.13 Ibid.

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and otherwise attended to their needs when they arrived to work in local factories and

foundries in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Puerto Ricans in Waterbury

A few Puerto Ricans were found in Waterbury in the pre-World War Two era. However,

it was during the late 1940s and early 1950s that Puerto Ricans began to arrive in

significant numbers and work in the foundries and factories of Waterbury and its

surrounding towns. Most came from south-central mountain and coastal towns and cities

such as Peñuelas, Utuado, Jayuya, Guánica, and Ponce. Interviews reveal that the typical

pattern was for people to spend a very brief period in New York City—sometimes only

as long as it took to board a train to Connecticut-- and then to come up to Naugatuck or

Waterbury to live in boardinghouses or join relatives. Others came to Waterbury through

a more circuitous process—agricultural contracts arranged by the Puerto Rican

Department of Labor. Such migrants worked on vegetable farms, orchards, and nurseries

in surrounding towns, eventually making their way over to Waterbury, where the

factories offered better pay and a more independent lifestyle.15

The migration pattern among Puerto Ricans was one of young, often married men coming

first, getting established in jobs, and then sending for their loved ones. When their

families arrived, Puerto Ricans typically settled, at least at first, in the areas surrounding

downtown, most particularly the city’s South End. The community grew through chain

migration—relatives and friends coming over to join those who were already here,

secondary migration from New York, and of course, through a second generation born

here. Interviewees report that there were some distinctions and hierarchies between the

different migrant streams. Puerto Ricans from the island’s cities sometimes characterized

the migrants from mountain towns as jíbaros who were easily identified by their

countrified dress and behaviors. Geographically-based subcultures also reportedly

14 Charles R. Walker, cited in Brass Valley, p.53. ; Consuelo Lanza and Linda Tirado, interview by Ruth Glasser, July 3, 1995.15 Glasser, AquíMe Quedo, p. 63.

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developed between the more ‘street-smart’ Nuyoricans and those who came directly from

the island.16

In these early days, however, migrant Puerto Ricans seemed to have gathered around

religion, secular community activities, and shopping. Most of the early migrants

gathered in the basement of the Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church in

downtown Waterbury, later working with a local priest, John Blackall, to form a Hispanic

parish in the late 1950s in the formerly German St. Cecilia’s.17 Sports teams, Boy Scouts,

political and social clubs grew up among the Puerto Ricans of the late 1950s and early

1960s. From the mid-50s on, a small but vibrant Puerto Rican business community

began to form on South Main Street and in other areas of the South End contiguous to

downtown. People who worked in factories got loans from relatives and friends to start

bodegas, furniture stores, record, and jewelry stores. Couples would arrange for an

elderly relative to care for their children while they themselves minded the store and

worked in local factories in alternating shifts.

Puerto Ricans often had friendly relationships with members of earlier immigrant groups

as they went through this process. Closest relationships were with those of the “newer”

migration streams of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Puerto Ricans were

mentored in their business practices and bought stores, for example, from retiring Jewish

merchants. They selected Italian godparents for their children, rented apartments from

Portuguese landlords. In the South End, they lived among French-Canadian, Lebanese-,

Portuguese-, and Italian-American families. In the North End, they lived among African

Americans.

The building of the interstate highway and urban renewal, both of which came relatively

late to Waterbury, devastated many of early Puerto Rican attempts at community-

building. In a one-two punch, the building of Interstate 84 through Waterbury in the late

1950s and early 1960s [and its later further expansion into the South End in the early 16 Araminta Cortés and Lillian Martínez, interview by Ruth Glasser, July 29, 1998; Victor Cuevas, interview by Ruth Glasser, January 30, 1996. These distinctions have been reinforced by other interviewees, as well as distinctions based on religion and politics.17 Glasser, Aquí Me Quedo, p.109.

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1970s] and the 1970s projects of the Waterbury Redevelopment Agency flattened many

of the houses, storefronts, and clubhouses of the fragile, still-forming community. Even

St. Cecilia’s Church was not spared by the bulldozer. After the original church was

knocked down, members of the embattled congregation were forced to relocate to a much

smaller building on one of the blighted streets adjacent to the ‘renewed’ area. 18

Members of the pionero generation had managed to get relatively well-paying factory

jobs, though as newcomers and people of color they struggled with discrimination and

were often employed in the least desirable, most dangerous jobs. These jobs offered

steady work, benefits and overtime, however, and with them many were able to buy

homes and to educate their children. In fact, scores of those children ended up as

members of the professional class—most notably social service workers and teachers—

who ministered to the newer migrants still coming from Puerto Rico and, increasingly,

from other countries. These children typically moved away from the increasingly

devastated inner city neighborhoods to the outlying areas of Waterbury and to nearby

suburbs. Parents often followed this trend. Although some retired to Florida or to

Puerto Rico, a sizable number remained in the Waterbury area, and their children

overwhelmingly opted not to ‘return’ to the island-- if they had ever been there in the first

place!

Thus the first generation of Puerto Rican pioneros and their children were able, as

immigrant groups had before them, to achieve upward mobility with a base of good

factory jobs and to create some small businesses and other institutions. However, a

combination of the physical havoc of highway building and urban renewal, along with the

closing of the ‘Big Three’ brass mills and other local manufacturers not only destroyed

many of these institutions, but made it difficult for ensuing migrants to scale similar

social and economic ladders. Newcomer Puerto Ricans and immigrants from other parts

of Latin America found a community with a shrinking supply of low cost housing, fewer

job opportunities, and scant community-generated stores and services.

18 Glasser, Aquí Me Quedo, passim.

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Waterbury’s New Latino/Dominican Immigrants

However, context is everything, and both the sending country conditions and those of

New York City made smaller cities such as Waterbury an attractive choice for members

of other Latino groups. As Mahler points out, within the new ‘hourglass’ economy,

immigrants from countries where the dollar stretches far are able to sustain lives at home

and here with jobs at the bottom of the hourglass.19 In Waterbury, where the rent is

substantially cheaper than in New York, the proposition becomes even more workable.

That Waterbury was becoming an increasingly popular choice for non-Puerto Rican

Latinos is borne out by the census figures. Even if we consider the peculiarities and

inconsistencies in the way the census has been conducted, the figures are striking. In

1980, out of a reported total of 6,912 of “Spanish Origin” in Waterbury, 5,819, or 84

percent, were Puerto Rican. As of 2000, they were down to 77.7 percent out of a total of

23,354. In the meantime, Hispanics had climbed to 22 percent of Waterbury’s

population. There were growing numbers of Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Colombians, and

Cubans. Particularly prominent in that rise were Dominicans, who now numbered 1,336,

more than three times their number of ten years before.20

Dominican immigration differed markedly from the Puerto Rican migration in ways that

fed into the economy. As in many places, the jobs that remained in Waterbury tended to

be in smaller factories that paid relatively low wages. Often they were apparel or other

lighter industrial jobs that tended to employ women.21

19 Sarah J. Mahler, American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp.7-10.20U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1980 Census of Population and Housing, Census Tracts Waterbury, Connecticut SMSA (July 1983) Table P-7; Data Set: 1990 Summary Tape File 3 Sample Data, Table PO11: Hispanic Origin: Persons, Waterbury, Connecticut; Data Set: Census 2000 Summary File 1 100 Percent Data, QT-P9: Hispanic or Latino by Type: Waterbury, Connecticut, http://factfinder.census.gov. Dominicans in Waterbury are the second-highest after Danbury, which has 2,033 Dominicans according to the 2000 census. 21 The pattern in Waterbury and other Dominican urban enclaves of Connecticut confirms that found in New York City. Sherri Grasmuck and Patricia Pessar, for example, describe the importance of Dominican women as workers within New York’s declining-wage apparel industry. Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p.167.

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And it was women who were coming in significant numbers from the Dominican

Republic. Unlike the older Puerto Rican pattern of single young men coming alone,

young women were often coming first, with or without their children, looking for jobs

and a new place to live. Immigrants from the Dominican Republic were more urbanized,

with stronger serial migration patterns.22 Whereas many of the earlier Puerto Rican

migrants had come from smaller mountain or coastal towns, the Dominicans who

immigrated appear to have come from larger cities such as Santo Domingo or Santiago.

Some had started off in smaller towns, particularly in the Cibao region. However, even

those had typically migrated starting from a young age to ever-larger and more urbanized

areas in search of education, jobs, or to join husbands. Moreover, there was a tendency

for Dominican immigrants to spend several years in New York City before coming to

Waterbury.23

Perhaps as a result of the logistical and monetary difficulties of emigrating from the

Dominican Republic rather than migrating from Puerto Rico, these newcomers also seem

to have enjoyed at least a slightly higher economic position than the typical Boricua

migrants to Waterbury. Whereas the latter were often struggling small farmers, farm

laborers, or fishermen, Dominican immigrants interviewed were more typically children

of small business proprietors or farmers or ranchers with sizable landholdings, or

themselves had operated businesses that were thwarted by a teetering economy.24

Francisco Hernández, for example, was born in the town of Guaranico in the Puerto Plata

region, where his family had a farm. He later moved to the capital to pursue his

education. Hernández had trouble finding work in Santo Domingo, so he moved to

Bonao, where he worked in a bank and then started a restaurant. Finally, economic

difficulties forced him to close up shop and migrate:22 A later generation of Puerto Rican migrants to Waterbury would share this pattern, but not the class advantages described in the ensuing paragraphs.23 Grasmuck and Pessar’s book, Between Two Islands, passim, makes a strong case for the prior urban background of many Dominican immigrants to the United States.24Truisms often repeated by both Dominican and Puerto Rican im/migrants suggesting that Dominicans are ‘naturally’ business-minded can be better understood in terms of their class position, which provides them with appropriate economic and social capital. See Grasmuck and Pessar’s claims that “Dominican men[‘s] premigration employment often placed them in the ranks of the middle class or the upper working class,” Between Two Islands, p.157, and their discussion on p.171 concerning the urban, highly-skilled backgrounds found among many undocumented immigrants.

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Downstairs it was a pizzeria and an ice cream parlor and upstairs it was a dance club with beer and things. At the beginning it was very good, but later things started happening in the country, and there was no electricity and there were a lot of problems, to the point where I left the business and decided to go to the United States.25

According to immigrants interviewed, the first Dominicans came to Waterbury in the late

1960s. They had started off in New York City with no apparent plans to move anywhere

else. As Gladys Maldonado explained,

I came [to New York] in 1966. First my brother-in-law came, my oldest sister’s husband, who is a barber in New York. He came looking to improve his life as a barber. A friend who had a barbershop helped him to come legally. Then after some time passed, he put in a request for my mother. My mother was a little older and she was a seamstress and seamstresses, well, they had a lot of work in New York in the 1960s.26

Waterbury became part of their mental geography for occupational reasons. Apparently,

close ties between New York City and Waterbury area manufacturers were at the root.

One woman narrated the story of how she, a talented designer working in a garment

factory in New York, was asked by a Waterbury area couple to come work in their

factory.27 Others, more prosaically, were transferred by the factories in which they

worked in New York City to branches in Waterbury or nearby towns, or came when the

factories themselves relocated to the Waterbury area. Felicia Díaz explained:

My sister emigrated in 1973, she was the first one who came here and she brought us, my mother and my seven siblings. She tells the story that she worked in a factory in the Bronx. And the factory transferred her to Connecticut and she had to travel each weekend to New York from Connecticut. So she decided to live here in Waterbury.28

Gladys Maldonado’s cousin and her husband had come in the wake of her brother-in-

law’s pioneering move to New York City. He was a tailor who made men’s clothing.

When his company moved from New York to Waterbury, he moved with them.

Maldonado, who had come to New York in 1966, joined her relatives seven years later, 25 Francisco Hernández, interview by Delmaliz Medina, May 2, 2003.26 Gladys Maldonado, interview by Ruth Glasser, August 28, 2003.27 Carmen Judith Mariñez, telephone interview by Ruth Glasser, May 24, 2004.28 Felicia Díaz, interview by Ruth Glasser, August 13, 2003.

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bringing other family members. Those initial migrants who had established a beachhead

in Waterbury now ‘sold’ it as a place with a better ‘ambiente’ for the children as well as

with work in local factories:

In the year ’73, well, my nieces and nephews were in the elementary grades in public school. We were worried because my sister’s children were very shy, quiet children, and the public school in New York, well, it was a little bit of a problem. So my cousin Carmen Peña said to us, why don’t you move to Waterbury. Carmen told us it was a very peaceful city, especially for raising children, that it was better than New York. And that’s why we came here.29

Others moved to Waterbury for the same reasons, but ‘discovered’ the city through

community connections. Adelaida Garcia, who had lived in Puerto Rico and then New

York, found out about Waterbury through a friend in her Pentecostal church. She left her

troubled marriage behind and came here with several children:

I came to visit with my family in the summer, with my friends who brought me here. They were church people. I was going to a church [in New York] so it was like [there was] a branch of the church here [in Waterbury]. So the sisters in New York visited the sisters in Waterbury, and those from Waterbury went to New York. So they belonged to my church and asked me to come with them and I began to explore the place. I came on two separate occasions and then I decided to take the step to come and live here. There were about five Christian families who helped me to move here. I lived in the Bronx, it was a dangerous place where if a woman went out alone at such and such an tour, well, something could happen to her. But it was safer here at the time that I came here.30

Once single mothers such as Garcia and Díaz had come to Waterbury, they recommended

it enthusiastically to other family members and friends. In part, they were helping their

compatriots to better their lives. They also believed they had a historical role in creating

a community that extended beyond the handful of Dominican settlers already in the city,

and were proud of their role in developing that community. Adelaida Garcia commented:

29 Maldonado, August 28, 2003.30 Adelaida Garcia, interview by Delmaliz Medina, April 10, 2003.

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[The community was] very small, there were seven families, including me. In almost all the places I worked I found Dominican families. I came and I paved the way. I stimulated them to come, I spoke to other people. Including that every time I had the opportunity I went to New York and I told them they should come to Waterbury. I had gotten a lot of benefit from coming here and raising my children here. Today there are a lot [of Dominicans], so it seems that they got the message.31

Within such a small city, Dominican pioneras felt effective as recruiters and ultimately,

as we shall see below, as community leaders. Even small efforts at shaping the

community were visible in this modest setting, the population increase exponential—and

very personal. As Felicia Díaz said:

First my sister came, she brought my mother, my mother brought her children—we were seven—and their spouses. Those spouses could then bring their mothers, their siblings, those siblings could bring their spouses as well. So over time one could bring a cousin, a friend, there was always someone having a hard time in Santo Domingo to whom one could lend a hand by bringing them. If you stop to think about the connections you’ve made to bring people, you almost believe you’ve created a complete Waterbury, with all the families that have come here.32

Dominicans built this community at some sacrifice to themselves. On top of full- and

part –time jobs, they spent hours getting immigrants acclimated. Felicia Díaz

remembered:

The way we helped is that if someone didn’t have a car and needed to get to work, the other person went to pick him up. If he needed to go to the hospital, we would get him an interpreter. We would tell the person who came from Santo Domingo or New York where there was work, where they sold the cheapest clothes, where he could find Hispanic food.33

They also routinely shared their homes. Victor Díaz, Felicia’s son, the only boy among

several sisters, recalled that he never had a room to himself until he was virtually an

adult. As his mother explained:

What happened is that people always came who had nowhere to live. And if you’re humanitarian you say, ‘Come, stay with me until you get a job.’

31 Ibid.32 Díaz, August 13, 2003.33 Ibid.

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When they got a job, well then, the person left but by the time they left another one had arrived. It was difficult to see people come here with no place to live. So since he [Victor] always took the biggest room, he had to share.34

Dominican Residence Patterns

Perhaps in part because of the long and arduous process of acquiring visas, it has taken

many years for this Dominican chain migration to yield a sizable community. It has only

been in the 1980s and the 1990s that Waterbury’s Dominican community has blossomed

into visibility. But the early settlers established some patterns that continue to this day.

As Adelaida Garcia commented, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, only a handful of

Dominican families lived in Waterbury. While some lived in the South End stronghold

of Puerto Ricans, the majority seem to have resided in the North End of town.

Interviewees attributed this residence pattern to a variety of factors. For one thing,

Dominicans found housing that was close to the North End factories where many worked.

Limited transportation options and the desire to be near their children made this

proximity especially desirable. Those who came later followed this pattern.

One factor for many in deciding where to live may have been long term plans. Workers’

Compensation Commissioner Amado Vargas, a Dominican attorney who has close ties to

Waterbury’s community, explained that many of his compatriots stayed in Waterbury’s

inner-ring neighborhoods [such as the North End] in an effort to economize:

They tend to stay together, they don’t go into the nicer communities. I think Dominicans in general would rather live a life in a working class neighborhood even though they’re making middle class income, because a lot of these Dominicans, their goal is to go back to the island. Perhaps not their children or their children’s children, because they become Americanized. But for those Dominicans who are in their 40s, 50s, 60s and who emigrated here in the 70s, 80s, their goal is to go back. They’d rather not invest money in a nicer home, they’d rather invest that money in their home they build year by year. They may start a home in the Dominican Republic, buy their property and then once or twice a year when they have the money they’ll start adding to it. And so by the time they’re ready to retire, they have a house to go to.35

34 Ibid.35 Amado Vargas, interview by Ruth Glasser, August 27, 2003.

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Indeed, the relatively low cost of living compared to New York made life easier for both

those who planned to go back to the island as well as those who intended to stay. Within

an increasingly bifurcated economy where factory, construction, and service jobs all

offered relatively low wages, declining as compared to the rising cost of living, it was

cheaper to live on a low wage in Waterbury than in the New York metropolitan area.

One immigrant, Mercedes Sánchez, describes her family’s decision to come to Waterbury

from New Jersey:

A lot of things make us move here. First was that a sister of my husband that I think from 1982 she live here, she was always pushing them, all her brothers, sisters, and her mother to move to Waterbury because it’s too crowded in New York, the jobs don’t pay enough for living and she [was] always telling us that here be much better for the children to live here. Me and my husband were tired of paying one thousand dollars rent for a two bedroom apartment a lot smaller than this one and only my husband was working and it wasn’t really the economics because he was supervising in the company warehouse. The other reason was that I wanted to work because I was tired to be at home with the kids and I couldn’t find a job. I had all of my family in New Jersey. So, one day we came one weekend to stay up his sister’s home and she say “Hey, Orlando they need somebody, they need a guy there [to work].” He went and they said “Ok you can start whenever…” then we decided to come. He started right away.

We came here paying five seventy-five [a month for rent]. It was real cheap for us. Of course we have to pay for heat but it was cheap, cheap, cheap, really a lot less and another thing is we park right here, in New Jersey forget it. We were paying for a parking lot. One hundred dollars every month. Then [my husband] decided not to pay for the parking lot any more. And with two children, any time we went to the grocery store with all those bags, we were living in a second floor apartment; we would put the food in first then we had to go back to find parking and we were tired of that kind of living.36

While parents looking for affordable housing and relatively crime-free neighborhoods

were enthusiastic about Waterbury, others were less so. Family position and life purpose

have determined how Dominicans feel about the move. For newcomers from the

Dominican Republic, iconic images of New York as the immigrant destination were very

36 Mercedes Sanchez, interview by Kevin Fitzpatrick, April [ ], 2003.

15

strong and the city’s glamour alluring, even if its reality didn’t live up to fantasies. Those

with no prior experience simply had no image at all of what Waterbury might be like—

there were no pictures of such a place on the television nor in the mental geographies

from home. As Grismilda Pérez, who came as a teenager, put it: “I didn’t really have any

ideas because really what they show you on TV is New York. You think you’re going to

see a lot of people and a lot of buildings and when I came it was really lonely and there

was not many people.”37 Those who came directly to Waterbury sometimes had comical

misconceptions of what the city might be like. Felicia Díaz was told she was moving to

“the country”—as indeed Waterbury might have been described in comparison to New

York. She envisioned raising her own chickens, and told her small daughter that now

she’d be able to have the horse she coveted.38

By contrast, Waterbury’s Puerto Ricans had had decades to export images of their

adopted city home to their relatives. People in Peñuelas who had never left Puerto Rico,

for example, could speak knowingly of Baldwin Street—a major thoroughfare in

Waterbury’s Hispanic South End-- or the local bolita vendors and other characters who

frequented that street.39

To Adelaida Garcia and other adult female caretakers, Waterbury seemed quiet,

uncrowded, a city but not too urban, on the edge of the country. Its hills were comforting

and reminded many of the landscapes of home. For young men or teenagers accustomed

to life in a Dominican city or in New York, however, Waterbury seemed like the end of

the world. Enrique Familia came to Waterbury so that his U.S.-born wife, pregnant with

triplets, could be near her family, but felt some misgivings as well as the lure of the New

York mystique:

The great majority of the Dominicans, if they say that they’re going to the United States, it means they’re coming to New York. Maybe because we always see it on television, that’s New York where there are a lot of people, a lot of Dominicans, a lot of Hispanics. Perhaps being with a lot

37 Grismilda Perez, interview by Jayra Quiles, April 22, 2003.38 Felicia Díaz, conversation with Ruth Glasser, May 30, 2003.39 Peggy Levitt speaks of a similar process among Dominicans in Miraflores, who can speak about ‘La Mozart’ and ‘La Centre,’ streets in Jamaica Plain where their relatives live but which they have never seen. See Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 3.

16

of Hispanics would have made me feel better. But we came here. Some friends helped me move. A cousin of mine, he said when we got here to Waterbury and he saw all this, “Oh my God!” He said, “Later, don’t be yelling, calling me to come get you.” And I thought, and I thought, I have to get used to this because I have my family, my wife, my three children.40

One can well imagine what a place like Waterbury would look like to an excitement-

seeking adolescent whose point of reference was New York City. Miles of slightly or

very ramshackle triple-decker houses canted on hills, shopping strips bearing big box

retail stores, low-lying, mostly abandoned brick factories or the rubble they leave behind

as the city avidly demolishes signs of its industrial past. The streets are as broken and

almost as unkempt as New York’s, but without the attendant life to distract the eye from

this desolation: There are few older-city-style commercial districts with dense blocks of

storefronts pushed close to the street. Those that exist rarely last more than a few blocks,

and are interspersed with private homes. Moreover, Waterbury’s public transportation is

spotty, consisting of a few buses which typically run once an hour during [narrowly

defined] working hours. It is a city of drivers where pedestrians en masse, or any sort of

vibrant street life, are virtually non-existent. It rolls up its sidewalks at night and looks

abandoned.

Waterbury is perhaps more typical of the kinds of United States cities many immigrants

are moving to in this respect—most, unlike New York, do not have the critical mass nor

the physical configuration that encourage dense communities or vibrant pedestrian life.

Often, as in Waterbury, their dense districts of locally-owned stores have been urban-

renewed out of existence. There is no ‘Sabana Church’ nor ‘Quisqueya Heights’ in

Waterbury—what community there is is scattered and sparse, based more in people’s

homes or in individual businesses than out on the street. The kind of isolation, lack of

old-country neighborliness and friendliness that immigrants often complain of is

compounded in a small city such as Waterbury, where there is little in the way of a

visible, protective ethnic enclave.

40 Enrique Familia, interview by Delmaliz Medina, May 13, 2004.

17

For Grismilda Pérez, Waterbury was the epitome of desolation. Teenagers without

drivers’ licenses or cars, especially girl teenagers with strict old world guardians, could

be virtual prisoners in their homes and neighborhoods:

My neighborhood was so quiet. It was just, I don’t know, at least in my country you sit outside like in the balcony and you see people walking up and down and you hear people talking and people wave at you or something. But, I remember that I was sitting at a window and it was so lonely and I had no friends and nobody to talk to and I was just so sad I started crying. I was like; “This is the most ugly place in the whole world.” It was the beginning and I didn’t know anybody.41

Dominican immigrants who have been here longer, of course, say that Waterbury was

‘mas tranquilo,’ a very different place than it is now. Like many towns, Waterbury has

changed over time. Deindustrialization, the attendant erosion of the tax base, and federal

and state disinvestment in cities have taken away some of the amenities earlier

im/migrant groups had, such as recreation programs for children, well-kept parks and

streets. Earlier im/migrant groups, including Puerto Rican pionero children, went to

neighborhood schools. Today, most travel by bus to schools beyond walking distance,

thus further eroding a sense of the neighborhood as a social unit.

The town Grismilda Pérez came to in the 1990s with its shrinking job options and

attendant neighborhood deterioration and crime, very different from the world Gladys

Maldonado described:

Waterbury at that time, in ’73, was a very quiet city, you almost didn’t see people on the street compared to New York. We knew that there were people because when there was a festival on the Green, like for Memorial Day, there were cars, there was a parade. We lived on Cooke Street then, we didn’t see cars nor many people at night, very quiet. Now it’s different. There are more people, it’s like New York now.42

Dominican Occupational Patterns

Dominicans who followed the first immigrants into their neighborhoods also followed

their occupational footsteps. While the large brass factories were declining into non-

41 Perez, April 22, 2003.42 Maldonado, August 8, 2003.

18

existence, a cluster of small garment and metal parts factories in Waterbury’s North End

provided jobs for Dominican newcomers, particularly for the women. Leather jackets,

pocketbooks, gloves, and cosmetics cases were manufactured in small workshops on

North Main Street, Cherry Avenue, and Maple Avenue. Immigrants particularly recall

cutting, stitching and packing for what they called “La Correa” and “La Chalina” belt and

tie manufacturers that occupied two floors of the same building.43 Others worked at a

needle factory. And some worked for the larger companies-- Century Brass in Waterbury

or Uniroyal in nearby Naugatuck—manufacturer of tires, sneakers, and other rubber

products as well as chemicals. As time wore on, more immigrants arrived, and factories

shut down, Dominicans could be found on construction sites, as certified nurses’ aides,

and in restaurants. In most cases, they worked alongside Puerto Ricans as well as co-

ethnics and members of Latino and other immigrant groups with a growing presence in

Waterbury, including Albanians, Bosnians, and Guyanese.

Ethnic Businesses

The Puerto Ricans who came to Waterbury after World War Two talk about a city

virtually without ethnic stores to service their needs. The closest they could come to their

products was by shopping at Italian grocery stores, where at least they could get espresso

coffee and short grain rice. Otherwise, Boricuas had to make special trips to New York

for their produce. Within a few years, however, peddlers were selling viandas

informally, and then opening up stores with Caribbean products.

When Dominicans first arrived in Waterbury some ten or fifteen years later, they found a

few bodegas run by Puerto Rican pioneros where they could get most of what they

needed. However, they still longed for more specific products from home, as Felicia

Díaz recalled:

Upon arriving here one found nothing from Santo Domingo. For one to find the food it was quite difficult until a short time ago. All the seasonings from Santo Domingo people brought from over there, the

43 According to Felicia Díaz, the tie factory was nicknamed “La Chalina” rather than “La Corbata” because the majority of the Dominicans who worked for this manufacturer had had no reason to wear ties in their homeland and thus little familiarity with them.

19

mints, the candies, until a short time ago they were bringing them over. It was difficult because [those things are] part of one’s culture.44

Dominicans pining for familiar products and services from home were eventually served

by compatriots looking for alternatives to the increasingly insecure factory jobs. As in

New York, one of the most popular niches was the bodega. Juan Laras felt that the time

was right to start his own business as the job market in the Waterbury area declined: “I

lasted for eight or nine years working in several factories because before it was easy to

get a job, people would move from one place to another for a dollar. Now the level of

unemployment in Connecticut is too high.”

Interviewees have described an explosion of Dominican-owned bodegas in Waterbury

and other parts of Connecticut during the last five to ten years, and attributed it to a

variety of factors. Some saw it as a natural ethnic succession. Just as Puerto Ricans a

generation earlier had taken over stores from Italian and Jewish merchants, now

Dominicans were replacing Puerto Ricans who were aging out of the business and whose

children had climbed the occupational ladder. As Juan Laras put it:

I have to be in here for fourteen hours, seven days a week. It looks easy. That man is a bodeguero and in five years he has X amount of money, yes, but in those five years he’s there 150 hours a week, 362 days a year. On New Year’s, when you’re in your house unwrapping your gifts, I have to open up the bodega.

The Puerto Ricans were the ones who began the bodega business. It’s not easy. Probably that’s why those who made their money got tired and they retired to enjoy what they earned. So that’s why, I believe, that they’ve passed the baton to the Dominicans. That’s the future here.45

As with the factories, connections based in New York City also seemed to have played a

role in the development of bodegas in Waterbury. Dominicans who had started in New

York began to expand into Connecticut in an attempt to find new markets and investment

opportunities—bolstered by credit from New York bodeguero sources. As with the

earlier immigrants, the opportunity to live in Connecticut rather than New York was also

an enticement.

44 Felicia Díaz, interview by Ruth Glasser, August 13, 2003.45 Juan Laras, interview by Delmaliz Medina, May 13, 2004. This point of view is also confirmed by Cirilo Bonilla, interview by Ruth Glasser, May 13, 2004.

20

Libio Rosado was one of these enterprising bodegueros. When his photocopy center in

Santiago foundered in the wake of a bank crisis, he reluctantly moved to New York in

1989 to try his luck. Rosado worked in the produce and grocery business in Brooklyn for

several years, until the opportunity arose to invest in Waterbury’s C-Town supermarket.

With credit offered by a co-ethnic from New York, Rosado happily moved his family to

Connecticut, paid back his debts, and has now been a co-owner of the local C-Town since

1994. He has also opened a wholesale food warehouse, and invested in other local

bodegas or helped co-ethnics to open them.46

As in New York and other large cities, a small percentage of Dominicans in Waterbury

become bodegueros. But the fact that they are a small percentage is belied by the visual

strength of their presence—all over Waterbury, there are dozens of bodegas that have

been opened or bought out by Dominicans. Chains of support by co-ethnics, often

relatives, have helped in this process. Juan Lara, for example, is buying his bodega

gradually from his brother-in-law. In many cases, family support is compounded by prior

experience. Libio Rosado’s mother, for example, owned a bodega in Santiago where he

worked from a young age. Amado Vargas describes one family of bodegueros, close

friends from his home town of La Boca:

They were like my family, a well-known family. They were cattle people, they were farm people, they’re upper middle class folks. But when they came here, the first thing they did was open up a business. There must be at least six or seven brothers and sisters. Hipólito, the oldest, is an entrepreneur. His first little bodega [from the 1980s], was on Bank Street. And then from there they opened up a second bodega, one on Cherry Street, and then from there another brother, he opened one up on Congress Street. And the sister also was an entrepreneur, she had a restaurant on East Main Street, it was one of my favorite places to go to eat. Then they have first cousins. They came here [One] was a chef in upper New Jersey. I guess Hipólito mentioned to him the job opportunities they had here.

Even with little or no English, it was these kinds of people who had the material

resources and the savvy to deal with the city bureaucracy necessary to start a business, as

Vargas observed: “They’re the ones that had the means and the skill and knowledge to 46 Libio Rosado, interview by Delmaliz Medina, March 10, 2004.

21

put things together. Which individual do I need to talk to, who do I deal with in city hall

to get the right permits. It takes someone with some sort of skills to come here and open

up a business because it’s hard running a bodega.” 47

Dominican Women in Business

After many years spent working in a variety of clothing and metal parts factories, Sonia

Rosario decided to open up her own business. As with many Dominican entrepreneurs,

longstanding, close ties with Puerto Ricans enabled her to do so. She had met Don

Joaquin and Doña Hilda Batista working in local factories. The couple, who may in fact

have been the first bodegueros in Waterbury, had a daughter who owned a party shop,

something Sonia admired:

Because there weren’t such [stores] for Hispanics, only this one. I decided it was nice work, entertaining, not too hard. We were all good friends and then finally she said to me, “You’ve always wanted to work here. I’ll sell it to you!” So I spoke to my children and I bought it.48

But Sonia wanted to give the shop, then called “Miriam” after its owner, a Dominican

feel. Thus she came up with the idea of “Merengue Party Shop”:

I was looking for a name that was more Dominican. Sonia, there are twenty thousand Sonias. So I said to myself, look at this, everyone knows ‘merengue.’ Now as I walk around that’s how everyone knows me. ‘Sonia Merengue! Look, there’s Sonia Merengue!

Single Dominican women have helped to alter Waterbury’s Latino landscape as they

become bodegueras, clothing shop owners, and beauty salon operators. Some make

‘Dominican cakes’ or prepare and sell other foods from their homes, or clean the houses

of others. Single mothers such as Adelaida Garcia and Felicia Díaz have always

cultivated more than one income stream, looking particularly for jobs that allowed them

the flexibility needed to be with their children:

I always had a full-time and a part-time job. I did jobs at home, like those jobs where you pack things at home and send them back by mail. I also did manicures and pedicures on the weekends. I saw people who said, I’m cleaning houses’ and I said, ‘Do you need a helper?’ I cleaned houses and

47 Vargas, August 27, 2003.48 Sonia Rosario, interview by Ruth Glasser, March 22, 2004.

22

offices in order to get ahead. When my son was little he always heard that, ‘Mami leaves at dawn and she leaves in the afternoon and she’s always going to work.” And there were days when [my children] went with me to work.49

But perhaps the most unusual—and growing-- niche among Dominican women in

Waterbury is the childcare business, becoming as ubiquitous and organized as any

bodegueros’ association. As with the bodegueros, opportunity and changing economic

circumstances combined to create this niche. Dominican women earning their living in a

variety of ways began to see the writing on the wall.

Adelaida Garcia, for example, had brought clothes and knickknacks up from New York

City and sold them from her home. She had also offered her services as a beautician

from her house. But then welfare reform began under the Clinton Administration:

I’d sold the house that I had in Santo Domingo and bought a little house [in Waterbury]. I had my license called ‘Small Business Based in the House.’ Selling clothing, I’m a beautician also. The majority of my customers were people who lived on welfare. When they began to take away welfare, I began to prepare myself. Because my customers were going! So I began to take daycare classes.50

Indeed, it was that very welfare-to-work transition that inspired the formation of the

Waterbury Hispanic Professionals Day Care Association, of which Adelaida Garcia,

Felicia Díaz, and dozens of other Waterbury Dominicanas are active members.

In 1996, Luz Lebrón, a Puerto Rican who was herself a single mother of biological,

foster, and adopted children formed a group of women transitioning off welfare. They

brainstormed about what skills they had and how they could deploy them in order to earn

a living. Among these single mothers, the most important skill that emerged was that of

raising children. It seemed the perfect solution—form a group of women who could

provide affordable, culturally appropriate daycare in a city with few Spanish-speaking

childcare providers. Women with limited English and formal education would train to

49 Díaz, August 13, 2003.50 Garcia, April 10, 2003.

23

have their own businesses, providing needed services to other mothers returning to the

workforce.51

Soon, the first ten women began a series of classes, under the auspices of Waterbury

Youth Services, to get their state-approved daycare certifications. Felicia Díaz was one

of the first people to join the fledgling association, get training, and open up a daycare

business in her home.

I always wanted to find a way to have my own business. And I was always interested in children. I said, I’d like to have a business where I can take care of children in their first years. One day I read in the newspaper that Luz Lebrón was giving a training class to open a daycare. I got my first training there, I never missed a class. I got my license, along with about six or seven others. We were very united, this was a support group. If something happened in my daycare I would call another [provider], we lent each other toys.

For Díaz and the other women, the Association offered leadership opportunities as well:

At the beginning we sat down at the table and said, you can be president because you’re always speaking on behalf of others, you can be treasurer because you’re good with money. Now the Association is eight years old, and it’s one of the biggest in Connecticut. We have about 55 women, but with those who’ve come and gone it’s a hundred and something.

Although there are numerous Puerto Ricans and a scattering of Ecuadorians, Cubans,

Mexicans, a Cape Verdean woman, and even a few men, women such as Díaz and Garcia

have been instrumental in making licensed, home-based day care an attractive economic

niche for local Dominican women. Since her beginning, Felicia Díaz has worked her

ethnic networks, making daycare for Dominican women in Waterbury, in its own way a

counterpart to the chain-like opening of bodegas among men:

There are a lot of Dominican women there, it’s the big source of business, a lot of Dominican women with their own daycare. I go to see my Dominican compañeras and I say to them, ‘Look, things are going well for me, why don’t you come with me? So I get them into the Association. In fact today a Dominican called and asked me about it. I told her, ‘This is a

51 Luz Lebrón, interview by Delmaliz Medina, August 28, 2003.

24

great business, what area do you live in? There? Magnificent, we don’t have providers in that area.’ It’s a way for them to be able to work while staying in their homes. The majority of Dominican women love children. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that many Dominican women have four, five, six children.52

The daycare providers see themselves as doing much more than childcare. They have

evolved a philosophy and a set of credentials in which they position themselves as

professionals, carefully explaining the differences between daycare and babysitting.53

Membership in the association provides ongoing educational opportunities, the ability to

get licensed in different areas [indeed the need, since new requirements are always

arising] and leadership opportunities within the organization. Members of the

organization see themselves as providing educational and cultural services to their young

charges and beyond. As Felicia Díaz explained:

For example, the day the children graduate, we have a multicultural activity, with different countries. Number one I focus on Santo Domingo, we have [Dominican] dances, we also have children dressed in the typical costumes of different parts of Santo Domingo.

The Association gets together once a month, we bring in news of what’s happening in our community. We also go to visit convalescent homes, we do street cleanings. We do different community activities for Christmas or for Halloween.54

As we will see below, the variety of local Dominican business enterprises, be they

bodegas or daycare centers, become jumping off points for larger activities along the

continuum between community work and politics. Below, we look at the ways in which

small-scale Dominican activities in Waterbury have evolved into community-

transforming initiatives.

The Evolution of Dominican Collective Activities

52 Díaz, August 13, 2003.53 “When is a Babysitter a Provider?,” provided by Waterbury Hispanic Professionals Daycare Association, n.a., n.d.54 Díaz, August 13, 2003.

25

When [my sister] came the community was small, there were only about seven [families]. It’s not like now where we’re a lot and almost nobody knows each other. Everyone was united, everyone visited each other, and every weekend they made a meal in a different house. When I came here in 1978 there were few of us Dominicans but we were always looking for each other and helping each other out. [Felicia Díaz]

Before it was wonderful because the Dominicans who were here were very close. On the weekends, it was always the same group, ‘Tomorrow we’ll go to church,’ and everyone got together at Mass. From Mass, ‘let’s go to the flea market, to the house of Fulano who’s making a sancocho. We danced but in the house, among family, not like now where everyone goes to the discotheque. [Sonia Rosario]

From the 1960s, Dominican immigrants in Waterbury gathered informally at each others’

houses to celebrate birthday parties, independence days, and other festivities. At first,

Dominicans got their social and recreational needs met informally, among compatriots or

with Puerto Ricans. As time passed, however, they began transforming already existing

institutions as well as forming some of their own.

Puerto Ricans had struggled in the 1950s to form cultural beachheads such as St.

Cecilia’s Church, for many years the only Hispanic parish in Waterbury. Dominicans

and other Latinos slowly began to enter these institutions and make them more

multicultural. After a long time of participating side by side with Puerto Ricans in church

and watching the development of Dominican communities in other parts of the state or

region, a group of Dominican women decided to celebrate their culture’s uniqueness

within the larger context of hispanidad. In the late 1980s, they started the celebration of

the festival of the Virgen de la Altagracia, the patron virgin of the Dominican Republic,

inside St. Cecilia’s Church. As Gladys Maldonado explained:

We have a group of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, all that, but we are all Hispanics. And each group celebrates the festival of its country’s patron, right? The Puerto Ricans have a very big parade, right, a very particular festival that they celebrate. But the Dominicans in this little town, no. But as I understand it, there are places where there are many [Dominicans] and they have a parade, in Rhode Island [or] many from here go to the Dominican parade in New York.

26

But here in Waterbury, I was the one who started it and others helped me. I established a Mass in honor of the Virgin of Altagracia and invited the people I knew. As time went on and we kept doing it, people were invited by mail or through the [church] bulletins. Now the church fills up with many more Dominicans than the ones I know.55

In this community, women have been instrumental in starting ethnic celebrations and

institutions. The idea to start a Dominican club, for example, emerged a few years ago at

the Sabor Latino restaurant, owned by Ycelsa Díaz of the La Boca Gonzalez clan

mentioned earlier. Felicia Díaz remembered:

We were in a little party at Sabor Latino. And someone asked what had happened to the place where [Dominicans] had played dominoes. And Duran [the man who had started the place] said that he’d closed it. So I said, ‘Why don’t you form a club?’ I was the coordinator. We would get together at Sabor Latino and we put a lot of effort into forming a club.56

After a few months, the group rented a site at the intersection of Cherry and Vine Streets,

near the small factories where many Dominican women first came to work. The building

had previously housed the Cape Verdean Club, which had since sought larger quarters.

The Dominican club is an important symbol for the community, a modest location at a

major intersection that displays the Dominican flag to passing motorists. It also has

become an important point of contact for Dominican clubs and organizations that have

developed in other cities in Connecticut, most notably Hartford, Danbury, Bridgeport,

and New Britain. It sponsors domino tournaments and baseball games where Dominican

teams from Waterbury compete against those in other cities. It also has a broader-than–

Dominican world view.

Perhaps because Dominicans are additions to an already-formed Latino community, even

their club reflects a multicultural outlook, with members from a multitude of Spanish-

speaking groups, none of whom currently have a formal recreational center. Puerto

Ricans, Bolivians, Peruvians, Costa Ricans and others participate in the informal

socializing and the formal social activities offered by the club. As Adelaida Garcia says,

55 Maldonado, August 28, 2003.56 Díaz, August 13, 2003.

27

“This club is not just for Dominicans but for our community, for our hispanidad.”57

Dominican-Puerto Rican Relations

Within a multi-ethnic world increasingly populated by immigrants from Central and

South America, Dominicans appear to feel especially close to Puerto Ricans. Both

cultural affinities and proximity have fostered these relationships. Puerto Ricans were

among the first to orient them and to provide them with basic services. Waterbury’s

Dominicans and Puerto Ricans have intermarried and become compadres. As we have

seen, Puerto Ricans often attend the same churches, and work in the same factories. As

Amado Vargas puts it:

We tease each other, we call each other cousins, because we are. Dominicans have really migrated in numbers to the island of Puerto Rico, a lot of them to find jobs, so they’ve assimilated within the Puerto Rican community, they melted down there and they bring that up here. But we get along great, I think. Whereas the Chileans are natural friends with the Argentinians, we’re natural friends with the Puerto Rican community, because they’ve been there, they’ve always been supportive of the Dominican community, just like we’ve been supportive of the Puerto Rican community.58

There are, however, important differences that are recognized and sometimes create hard

feelings or awkward situations, as Felicia Díaz observed: “They can come here just by

buying a plane ticket. For us it’s more difficult, you understand. They are Americans but

we have to fill out a lot of papers in order to immigrate to the United States.” On one

occasion, Díaz and her co-nationals in the Day Care Association had to take tuberculosis

shots, while the Puerto Rican members didn’t.59

Although there are many cultural similarities, small differences in food choices and

language are consistently noted by interviewees. Sometimes those differences can be

embarrassing. Sonia Rosario remembered an incident that occurred when her son was a

little boy entering school in Waterbury:

57 Garcia, April 10, 2003.58 Vargas, August 27, 2003.59 Díaz, August 13, 2003.

28

He said to a little girl, ‘Don’t be so bellaca.’ There [in the Dominican Republic] when children are mischievous you say, ‘Look at those bellacos.’ But for them it’s embarrassing. So my sister had to go to school and apologize and explain. He went back to school, but they gave him a hard time.60

Naturally, some stereotypes and misunderstandings lurk around the edges of relationships

between Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, reflecting mutual awareness of cultural

differences and the tensions between their respective political and economic positions.

Sometimes children and young people are less inhibited about expressing the tensions

that arise among people who are closely aligned and even appear the same to many

outsiders. Felicia Díaz’s son Victor, who grew up in Waterbury among Dominicans and

Puerto Ricans, remembered that as children his playmates would exchange insults. “You

eat plantains,” Puerto Rican children would say to their Dominican peers. “Yes, but you

don’t have a flag,” the Dominican children would answer. It was only when he grew up

that Victor even realized what the words meant, and he suspects that his peers didn’t have

a clue, either. Nevertheless, the words spoken by children are important barometers of

collective attitudes. Many Puerto Ricans and Dominicans affirm that they believe that

Dominicans are naturally superior at business and at saving money. When Delmaliz

Medina’s half Dominican, half Puerto Rican niece began to sell cosmetics at school, for

example, her elders nodded sagely and commented that her ‘Dominican side’ was

emerging.61

Visible Identities

As Waterbury becomes more multiculturally Latino, there is a constant interplay between

visible assertions of national and international identities. As Dominicans have

increasingly become involved in the grocery business, opened up restaurants, hair salons,

and clothing stores, the landscape of Hispanic mercantile activity has changed. Bodegas

60 Rosario, March 22, 2004. For Puerto Ricans, the word bellaco refers to a state of sexual arousal or desire.61 Delmaliz Medina, conversation with author, May 24, 2004. Yanet Baldares’ dissertation on Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and other Latinos in New Jersey provides a fascinating exploration of such stereotypes and how misunderstandings emerge between members of different cultural groups based on their respective household economy strategies, for example. Yanet Baldares, “Variations of Culture, Class, and Political Consciousness Among Latin Residents in a Small Eastern City,” Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Doctoral Dissertation, 1987.

29

used to have expressly Puerto Rican names such as “El Utuadeño” for particular

hometowns, or Borinquen Grocery for a more national statement. Now food stores are

more typically called by generic names such as ‘Hispano,’ pluralistic ones such as

‘Quisquella [sic]-Borinquen,’ or names that evoke everyone’s Caribbean homeland, such

as ‘Las Colinas’ [The Hills]. The sign above the Dominican-owned La Cazuela

restaurant on the corner of Willow and West Main proudly proclaims that it serves

‘Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban Cuisine.” Davis Record Shop and Botanica,

owned by a pionero born in Utuado, now displays a Dominican flag alongside its United

States and Puerto Rican ones. Store commercials aired on the local Spanish-language

radio station, Radio Galaxia, carefully state that they have services and products for ‘toda

nuestra gente latina,’ and sometimes even enumerate the multiple nationalities that they

serve.

One interesting exception is the Peñuelas Barbershop, now a beauty salon owned by Edil

Gómez, a woman from Santo Domingo. Gómez had worked for several years at the shop

until its Puerto Rican owner sold it to her. Despite constant questioning by her

compatriots, Gómez keeps the name—for now. “The owner was such an incredibly good

person,” she said, that she hated to change the name. Besides, she felt, the town of

Peñuelas had long-standing sentimental associations for local Puerto Ricans—it is

perhaps the major town of origin for local Puerto Ricans, and has become a kind of sister

city with baseball team exchange visits and other shared activities. Apparently, local

Dominicans don’t need to have this business specifically signposted, for it is a popular

and well-known gathering place. It is only newcomers who may have problems, and they

are quickly initiated, as we will see below.

The development of recognizable Dominican or at least Hispanic landmarks in recent

years—most notably stores and the club-- has meant that newcomers don’t have to

search very hard to find compatriots. This scattered community phenomenon at first

baffles some who come expecting to find the dense Dominican districts of New York

City, but newcomers quickly learn to negotiate this more elusive territory. When Enrique

Familia came to Waterbury in 2000:

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The first thing I did was to go to Los Chicos Alegres, a colmado. I asked, ‘Are there many Dominicans here?’ And [someone] said to me, ‘Yes, I’ll take you in a little while,’ and he took me to C-Town. That’s where I began to get to know people and to realize that there were a lot of Dominicans here. I had thought that if there were ten it would be a lot.62

As these visible institutions have attracted newcomers, they have provided

meeting places and catalysts for larger community-based and political activities.

Dominican Activism and Politics in Waterbury

Increased organization and visibility among local Dominicans has been drawing them

into leadership roles. Some of this activity is based on temperament and prior

experience. Enrique Familia, for example, was a leader in his Santo Domingo

neighborhood. As a teenager in Santiago, Felicia Díaz worked with President Joaquin

Balaguer’s sister to organize community activities. As an adult, she has used her roles as

informal community emissary and childcare provider to work for broader community

changes:

I was always interested in seeing that children from Santo Domingo got the attention that they needed, that they were enrolled in school as quickly as possible, and that they were properly evaluated and not put in grades that were too low. I was always fighting for these things in the bilingual program. I was the vice president of the Migratory Program and the Bilingual Program [of the Waterbury Department of Education].63

Dominicans such as Díaz, who have attained their citizenship and are deeply concerned

about local affairs, also work to make sure that people who represent community interests

are elected. She speaks about the needs of the Day Care Providers Association and its

potential as a political force:

We are independent, we don’t belong to anybody. What we say [to politicians] is, ‘What are you going to offer us?’ If they’re going to improve education or health care. We have the Dominican Club and the [Daycare] Association. I don’t tell them that we’re 50 people, I tell them that we’re 150. Imagine, the majority are married, the majority of us are citizens, if you take into account husbands and children older than 18 who

62 Familia, May 13, 2004.63 Díaz, August 13, 2003

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can vote. That’s how [the Association] got a van for the School Readiness program.

I always see the politicians and those who I see who are going to offer the most, I bring them to all the places, the bodegas, and I say, ‘Look, vote for this one.’ And so both sides are always looking for me, because they know that I get around in the community. They trust me.64

Díaz expressed the hope that the current generation of Dominican children, many of

whom are being raised in whole or in part by the politically conscious daycare providers,

will actively participate in local community affairs.

As Díaz’s testimony indicates, bodegas are important sites for political discussion and

interaction. The large and successful C-Town is one of the primary gathering places.

Co-owner Libio Rosado seems content with his store’s role as a political gathering place,

as well as as a nerve center where newcomers can meet old timers and learn the ropes of

the city. Clearly, politics in this setting does not just refer to discussions of what is

happening in the Dominican Republic, although, as we will see below, the homeland

remains very important. By the very nature of what they do, bodegueros, like the daycare

providers, must be intensely aware of politics as it plays out around them. Rosado and

other Dominicans, for example, are active in Waterbury’s Hispanic Chamber of

Commerce, which formed about five years ago. Rosado supported the current mayor,

Mike Jarjura, with whose family he has close business ties, for Jarjura and Sons is a

produce company that supplies stores such as C-Town:

Look, we’re all politicians. Here in the United States and locally in Waterbury, I’ve participated with some candidates, with Jarjura. We’ve known each other for ten years because we are customers. We’ve given financial support to his campaign and we’ve allowed his people to distribute their campaign literature, and to register people in the front [of the store].

We supported him because we thought he could do a good job in Waterbury, because he brought it up from rock bottom after the poor administration of Giordano, who’s now in prison. [Jarjura] works with everyone, he doesn’t have a favored group.65

64 Díaz, August 13, 2003.65 Libio Rosado, interviews by Delmaliz Medina, March 10, 2004 and April 18, 2004.

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In his excellent book on Latino politics in Queens, New York, Michael Jones-Correa

refers to a pattern in which Latinas tend to be more involved in local politics and

affiliations, while Latinos tend to stick to old country affiliations and politics.66 That

does not appear to be true for Dominicans in Waterbury, where women appear to play an

active role in both arenas. In the recent precedent-setting elections of May 16, 2004,

where Dominican nationals living overseas were able to vote for their president for the

first time from their adopted homelands, both men and women were instrumental in

galvanizing Waterbury’s Dominican voters. Not only C-Town, but also Edil Gómez’s

salon, Peñuelas Barbershop, were centers were Dominicans discussed the upcoming

election and determined to do something about it.

It could be argued, of course, that there is a continuum between local and international

concerns in this case. In recent years, the Dominican Republic has suffered a severe

economic crisis. An ongoing decline in demand for the country’s agricultural exports,

coupled with the failure of the factories in industrial free trade zones to create decent or

abundant jobs, were part of the chronic crisis that sent many Dominicans out of the

country looking for work in the first place. The collapse of several major banks in 2003

and attendant spiraling inflation sent shock waves through the country. The price of

simple commodities soared.

Dominicans living overseas in places like Waterbury felt the shock as well. The majority

had close relatives still living in the Dominican Republic, and felt the pressure to

drastically increase the amount of money they sent home to compensate for tripling or

quadrupling prices. As Libio Rosado remarked:

I don’t like the current president, Hipólito Mejía. He’s been a complete disaster for the country, a lot of corruption, and although I’m here I have family there and I have to help my family. And it’s because of poor administration that [there is inflation]. It’s affected me because my parents take medications, they have to go to doctors, they have to get

66 Michael Jones-Correa, Between Two Nations: The Political Predicament of Latinos in New York City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). See especially chapters 8 and 9, pp. 151-188.

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around, gasoline is expensive there, electricity is expensive, all the basic services there are expensive.67

Some periodically sent home packages of food as well as money. This was difficult

because they themselves were typically working low wage jobs, often more than one, in

an effort to make ends meet in a declining economy in Connecticut. The delicate

arrangement only worked if the large differential between prices here and prices there

stayed the same, but costs soared, outpacing what Dominicans abroad could do for their

families. As Juan Laras explained: “When Dr. Leonel [Fernández] was [in office], things

were different. You could support your family from here with a hundred dollars [a

month]. Now you can’t, you have to send 400 dollars to support your family.”68

Thus, many Dominicans living here felt an urgency about the 2004 presidential elections

back home. It wasn’t a matter of abstract policy or a long term desire to go home to a

better-governed country. Rather, interviewees expressed concern about the suffering of

loved ones back home as well as the impact upon their own pockets. And the majority

felt that if former president Leonel Fernández once again assumed power, the Dominican

economy would improve. As Libio Rosado said:

Dominicans are very political. They follow political activities in Santo Domingo very closely. Here in Waterbury there are many groups of Dominicans who are in favor of certain parties or certain candidates. For example, here there’s a very strong current for the PLD [Partido de la Liberación Dominicana], for Señor Leonel Fernández.69

In 1996, the Dominican government approved dual citizenship for Quisqueyanos living

abroad. The following year, these expatriates were given the right to vote in presidential

elections. Since no polling places were set up abroad during the 2000 elections,

thousands of Dominicans took flights home to vote, including people who lived in

Waterbury. Dominicans abroad—who sent billions of dollars of remittances to people

back home-- worked hard to make sure that they would be able to vote from their

adopted countries during the next presidential elections. They encountered many hurdles

67 Rosado, March 10, 2004.68 Laras, May 13, 2004.69 Rosado, April 8, 2004.

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in the process, and as of the 2004 elections, much remained to be done to create a smooth

overseas voting process. Waterbury provides an especially poignant example, since after

months of struggle, they and other Connecticut Dominicans were ultimately unable to

vote in their state of residence.

From the fall of 2003, Waterbury’s Dominicans had swung into action. From discussions

about the economy in Edil Gómez’s Peñuelas Barbershop, the idea emerged to start a

local committee affiliated with the PLD called “Waterbury con Leonel.” Others such as

Guarín Contreras, a construction worker, walked door to door in Waterbury to find

hundreds of Dominicans, among whom a substantial percentage were eligible to vote.70

Enrique Familia, who had a show on the local, Dominican-owned Radio Galaxia, bought

time in the name of the PLD and began exhorting eligible voters to register for the

election.

Working in tandem with Dominican clubs and organizations in Bridgeport, Hartford,

Danbury, and New Britain, Gómez, Contreras, Familia, and other activists trained with

representatives from the Dominican Board of Elections in New York and brought them

to Connecticut to register eligible voters. Through telephone and radio, organizers urged

people to come out, and registered them in several Sunday sessions during the fall at key

community spots, including the Dominican club, local bodegas and restaurants.

During the ensuing months, Dominicans in Waterbury called their relatives back home,

exhorting them to vote. They participated in several statewide activities. PLD candidate

Leonel Fernández visited Danbury, while other members of his party campaigned and

held fundraisers in Hartford and Waterbury.

A few weeks before the election, activists set up a PLD headquarters at a storefront on

South Main Street, lent by a compatriot, and worked to secure a local voting site for the

70 Guarín Contreras, conversation with author, May 16, 2004. Voting requirements for the 2004 election have been rather strict, effectively whittling down the number of Dominicans abroad who have been able to participate in the elections. As Ernesto Sagas points out in “The 2004 Presidential Election in the Dominican Republic,” Electoral Studies, forthcoming, only 52,000 Domnicans overseas were registered to vote, and fewer than half actually did so.

35

election.71 Rumors ebbed and flowed about the location of the polls. One day it was said

that they would be at St. Margaret’s Catholic Church [the second Hispanic Parish in

Waterbury], another, that they would take place at C-Town or the Dominican Club.

Clearly, however, Waterbury would be a key, perhaps solitary voting site for

Connecticut’s Dominicans. The debate over the location revealed two things: That

Waterbury was becoming the symbolic center of Connecticut’s Dominican community,

and that the North End was prevailing as the place where that election would be held.72

Finally, a few days before the election, it was announced that Dominicans in Waterbury

and other Connecticut sites would have to go to Yonkers, New York to vote. Organizers

chartered a school bus to wait in front of C-Town at 8 am on election day, so that those

who needed transportation could get to the out of state voting site.

As they stood in the parking lot of C-Town that Sunday morning, organizers expressed

disappointment in the outcome of the organizational campaign. According to several

organizers interviewed, the Dominican Board of Elections had told them it was the lack

of activity by other parties that had invalidated Waterbury as a polling place. As

organizers pointed out, however, there was nothing stopping other parties from being

active—they had simply chosen not to. They expressed the opinion that it was the Board

of Elections, controlled by Mejía’s government, which had made it impossible at the last

minute to set up voting in Connecticut. They claimed that the government was

threatened by the possibility of so many of these voters supporting the opposition.

Certainly, all of the political activity taking place in Connecticut suggested that the PLD

was the only party actively courting voters. The head of the Board of Elections, however,

71 Unlike in other communities, there does not seem to have been local activity by or for other major Dominican parties in Waterbury. Rather, people seem to have gathered around the PLD in order to get Leonel Fernández reinstated. Conversations with some Dominican Waterburians going to Yonkers to vote on May 16th indicated that some were normally PRD [Partido Revolucionario Dominicano] members who were disenchanted with the current president. For a contrasting discussion of more embedded, institutionalized Dominican party politics in a community abroad, see Levitt’s, “When Politics Becomes Transnational” Chapter Five in The Transnational Villagers, pp.127-158. It is possible that Dominican Waterbury’s ad hoc approach to home country politics is the sign of a still-forming community, and that its political life will eventually become more institutionalized as it is in Boston and New York [and even, to a more modest extent, in Hartford].72 All the sites suggested for the election were within a few blocks of each other in Waterbury’s North End.

36

suggested that Connecticut had simply not rounded up the minimum number of voters

needed to establish a polling place.73

Organizers were frustrated that they were not able to hold local elections, expressing the

opinion that it was difficult enough for Dominicans, pressed for time, working multiple

jobs or long hours at a bodega, to give up family time on a Sunday to vote, much less to

go out of state to do so. Some expressed the sense that, sandwiched between the larger,

louder Dominican communities of New York City and Rhode Island, Dominicans in

Connecticut were still rather invisible. However, hundreds of Connecticut’s Dominicans

still turned out to vote, and were pleased to report that they had received special

recognition for their efforts from Fernández’s newly-elected government. Connecticut’s

Dominicans, Waterburians among them, were carving a place for themselves on the

mental maps of politicians in their home country, just as they were carving places for

themselves in their adopted New England town.

73Miguel Melenciano, Junta Central Electoral, New York City, conversation with author, May 27, 2004. Ernesto Sagas suggests that the problem may have been either that Connecticut did not have the minimum number of registered voters or the required representative from each of the three major political parties to be present at the election. However, as he also points out, in certain places, such as Orlando, there were fewer than 300 registered voters and yet that city had a polling place (e-mail communication, May 26, 2004). Connecticut organizers claim that there were at least 400 people from that state registered to vote. As of this writing, it has been difficult to verify that number, since Connecticut residents were folded into the 24,333 registered in New York. (Junta Central Electoral at www.jce.do/exterior/contactovotoext.asp).

37

Bibliography

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Contreras, Guarín. Conversation with author, May 16, 2004.

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Cuevas, Victor. Interview by author. January 30, 1996.

Díaz, Felicia. Interview by author. August 13, 2003.

Familia, Enrique. Interview by Delmaliz Medina. May 13, 2004.

Garcia, Adelaida. Interview by Delmaliz Medina. April 10, 2003.

Gómez, Edil. Conversation with author. May 28, 2003.

Hernández, Francisco. Interview by Delmaliz Medina. May 2, 2003.

Lanza, Consuelo, and Linda Tirado. Interview by author. July 3, 1995.

Laras, Juan. Interview by Delmaliz Medina. May 13, 2004.

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Pérez, Grismilda. Interview by Jayra Quiles. April 22, 2003.

Rosado, Libio. Interview by Delmaliz Medina. March 10, 2004 and April 18, 2004.

Rosario, Sonia. Interview by Ruth Glasser. March 22, 2004.

Sánchez, Mercedes. Interview by Kevin Fitzpatrick. April, 2003.

Vargas, Amado. Interview by author. August 27, 2003.

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