Navigating Identity as a Dominican Immigrant

One of the baffling things that happened when my family arrived in the United States in 1960 was having

to find a term for ourselves. No one seemed to know where the Dominican Republic was.

Back then there weren’t that many Dominicans in the United States — the dictatorship

made it difficult to emigrate. So when my family was asked where we were from,

we couldn’t just say, “We’re Dominican, you know, like Sammy Sosa

or Alex Rodriguez.” Our classmates often mistook our country for the other Caribbean nation of Dominica.

“Oh, you lucky dog! We went there for spring break!” At least Dominica was

in the same neighborhood of islands. Advertisement The hyphenated nationality (Dominican-American,