Did you know that if you click on the pictures, a bigger sharper version will pop up in a new window? I didn't. FYI.
Above is a view of Santurce. Or Miramar. I'm fuzzy on the boundary. Anyway, the moral of the picture seems to be, "buy now, if you can."
Or not. Did the Fed really directly purchase mortgage-backed securities yesterday? Not a good time to invest in any sort of real estate. Armageddon is a step closer. Then again, socialism, in the form of central banks, will probably save us.
But that's not the point of today's missive. Today's missive is about why the Dominican Revolutionary Party has an office in San Juan.
It turns out that Santurce is ground zero for Dominican immigrants to Puerto Rico. There are 33,000 Dominicans in San Juan, and an additional 28,000 in the rest of the Free State. Since overseas Dominicans can vote, the PRD maintains a presence here. The PRD got crushed in the 2004 election, so it needs all the support it can get, but in point of fact the Liberation Party and the Social Christians also have overseas offices here and on the mainland.
The U.S. and the Dominican Republic have deep links, all the way back to President Buenaventura Báez's almost-successful attempt to sell his country to the U.S. We invaded the place as recently as 1965. (Foreign occupations never succeed? You sure about that?) And nowadays CAFTA has granted the U.S. almost total control over the D.R.'s trade and investment policies. Combine the D.R.-U.S. relationship with Puerto Rico's geographic location, and the presence of a growing Dominican community on the island shouldn't surprise anyone.
Interestingly, the first Dominican migrants to Puerto Rico in the 1970s were more skilled than the native population, which made sense: an unskilled worker could make a lot more on the mainland than in Puerto Rico, assuming that he or she could get a job on the island at all, whereas a professional could earn good money in Puerto Rico without having to learn English. By the 1990s, though, that had changed: now Dominican immigrants to Puerto Rico were less educated and more concentrated on the lower rungs of the service economy than the Puerto Rican-born population. In fact, recent Dominican immigrants to Puerto Rico tended to be less educated, less documented, and more concentrated on the lower rungs of the service economy than recent Dominican immigrants to the mainland United States.
The reason for that shift isn't completely clear, but the severe problems of the Dominican economy during the 1980s and early 1990s appear to have been the main factor. The collapse in Dominican living standards pushed poorer people out. Puerto Rico was nearby, relatively rich, and Spanish-speaking. Therefore, when emigration spiked, a lot of it went through Puerto Rico, and a portion of the lower-skilled part of that migration chose to remain at their first port of call. The recovery of the Puerto Rican economy also helped, providing unskilled Dominicans with greater job opportunities, particularly in construction and personal service.
The first recorded illegal sea passage to Puerto Rico occured in 1972. Today, passage on a yola costs about $300, and the Coast Guard intercepts between 200 and 6,000 people a year.
In an irony, the Dominicans here aren’t liked very much. I spotted a very nasty bit of anti-Dominican graffiti in Miramar. Among the printable part it refered to "black Dominicans," which explains part of their poor reception.
The irony does not stem from the fact that Puerto Ricans face discrimination in the U.S., although they do. After all, the Puerto Ricans here aren’t the Puerto Ricans who emigrated. They are the people who chose to stay or return home. Why wouldn’t you expect people who chose not to emigrate to look down on immigrants?
No, the irony is that back in the 1980s I spent a lot of time with a group of mostly Dominican kids in Manhattan who did, in fact, look down on "Rican losers" who putatively couldn’t hold down a job to save their life. Many New York Dominicans, in fact, for reasons that didn't make any sense at all, held Nuyoricans in relatively low regard. That's an irony.
In a distantly-related irony, the only dude besides the assistant coach of a team called the Harlem Striders who any connection to the geographic area traditionally known as Harlem (even when defined broadly) was … uh … me, the güero, the second palest guy on the team.
Without irony, we'd all die of anemia, I suppose.
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