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Dominicans Take Their Place as an American Success Story
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: January 5, 2005
BETTE KERR made sure to arrive at the restaurant early so she could arrange for the waitress to give her the check. There was no way she was going to let a former student, not even one as successful as Mirkeya Capellan, pay for lunch.
They had been talking about this reunion for six years, since Professor Kerr had retired from Hostos Community College in the Bronx, and as Ms. Capellan had gone from a bewildered new immigrant to an information-technology consultant with a master's degree and a Mercedes sedan.
No sooner did Ms. Capellan reach the table, though, than she blushingly admitted she had left something back in the adjoining bar. She skittered off, and returned a moment later with the missing article - 17 other Hostos alumni who had secretly gathered to thank both Professor Kerr and a faculty colleague, Lewis Levine. All but a handful of the celebrators had come to America, like Ms. Capellan, from the Dominican Republic.
During their student days, Professor Levine had taught them in his intensive, accelerated course in English as a Second Language. He required them to read The New York Times and visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art and explore the culinary mysteries of Zabar's. He pretended not to know Spanish, even as he understood every curse they uttered when he returned an essay covered with so much red ink the students called it an arbolito, a little Christmas tree.
Professor Kerr had gleaned the best of Professor Levine's progeny and, as director of academic advisement, trained them to be peer advisers to other Hostos students. She had all those rules, about not chewing gum or wearing jeans, and the only excuse for missing her Tuesday afternoon session was death. When it came time for Professor Kerr's protégés to finish their associate's degrees and apply to senior colleges, she alerted them to scholarships and wrote recommendation letters so eloquent that several students ultimately framed them.
And on this festive Saturday shortly before Christmas, they surrounded her. There sat Robinson de Jesus, the son of a barber with a second-grade education, now working as a corporate auditor. Nearby was Fenix Arias, who arrived in New York at age 17 in 1993 knowing only a few English words from a Dominican pop song. These days she is the director of testing for York College in Queens.
Beyond its poignancy to the participants, this reunion touched on a much larger phenomenon. It attested to the striking and yet unheralded success of Dominican immigrant students in higher education, and specifically in the City University of New York system, that legendary ladder of upward mobility for earlier waves of newcomers.
All but invisibly to much of Anglo society, the percentage of Dominicans age 25 or older with some college education more than doubled from 1980 to 2000 to 35 percent of American-born Dominicans and 17 percent of Dominican immigrants, according to a new study by Prof. Ramona Hernandez, a sociologist who directs the Dominican Studies Institute at CUNY. (For all Americans, the percentage with some college is 52, the study found.) These accomplishments occurred even though, of all the ethnic and national groups in CUNY, Dominican students were from the poorest households and had the least-educated parents.
Clearly, however, those parents are investing their children with some classic immigrant aspirations. "We came here to make it," said Professor Hernandez, who moved to New York herself in her late teens. "When we leave home, we really leave. This is it for us. You have this immigrant courage, energy, desire."
Parents who work at draining jobs for meager wages - janitors, cabbies, seamstresses, hairdressers - point to their own toil as the fate their children must avoid. A popular Dominican aphorism, mindful not only of low-wage labor but the presence of some Dominicans in drug-dealing, makes a similar admonition. "No quiero ser una más del montón," it says, which translates as, "I don't want to be part of the pile."
Ms. Arias remembers her father's rewarding her with $10 and a dinner of the savory soup known as sancocho for every A on her college transcript; he cried on the day she received her acceptance as a transfer student to Columbia University. Mr. de Jesus's father took such pride in Robinson's graduation from Baruch College that every afternoon for a month before commencement exercises he would put on his only suit.
In the 39 years since the United States reopened its doors to large-scale immigration, it has become sadly routine to hear and read criticisms of these arrivals from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean Basin and Latin America as somehow more clannish, less devoted to America and the English language than their European forebears in the period from roughly 1850 to 1920. Any cursory look at the nativist lobby's publications and Web sites would lead one to believe that post-1965 immigrants, especially Hispanic ones, present nothing less than a threat to the republic.
BUT if it is accurate to call Korean immigrants the new Jews - a largely educated, urbanized population in its homeland that rapidly surged into higher education and the professions in America - then the Dominicans may be the modern-day equivalent of the Italians. In this case, the peasantry has come from the Cibao valley or the Santo Domingo barrios instead of the Mezzogiorno, but the upward mobility through public education and small business follows the same trajectory.
As Professor Hernandez's survey suggests, the concern about Dominicans should be not that they Americanize too slowly but too fast, or perhaps too selectively. Between 1980 and 2000, even as Dominican immigrants became more likely to earn a high school diploma, the share of American-born Dominicans whose formal education ended with a high school diploma dropped markedly - from about one-third to one-fifth. More students either dropped out or moved up. Those numbers tell a chastening story about what happens when the immigrant drive doesn't lift a family into the middle class and the next generation adopts the most self-destructive attitudes of poor, urban America, about how doing well in school is just for chumps.
"When people said, 'You can't make it,' I wanted to show them," Ms. Capellan put it. "My first year at Hunter College, I was pregnant, and people would say to me: 'Too bad. You're like my friend's daughter. She never went back to school.' But I told myself, 'No way.' "
E-mail:
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Dominicans take their place as an American success story.
