Sagas, Ernesto, and Sintia E. Molina, eds. Dominican Migration: Transnational Perspectives.

• Author: Dawsey, James M.
• Position: Book Review

Sagas, Ernesto, and Sintia E. Molina, eds. Dominican Migration: Transnational Perspectives. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004. 284 pages. Cloth, $59.95.

The de facto rule of General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo y Molina from August 1930 to May 1961 brought unprecedented migration of Dominicans, principally to the United States and Spain. Not different from the Irish, Italian, and Chinese immigrants of the nineteenth century and the East European Jewish immigrants of the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries, the Dominicans tended to settle together in kindred groups in specific communities in the United States in New York, South Florida, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. (In Spain, for the most part they settled in Madrid.) And like earlier immigrants, they adapted themselves to their new environment, adopting much of the surrounding culture and way of life, while at the same time holding on to precious aspects of their Dominican heritage.

Yet different from the immigrants of a hundred years earlier, the Dominicans have been able through modern technologies of communication and travel to remain fairly well connected to their parent country and to the broader community of Dominican exiles in general. Thus, Sagas, Molina, and the book's other authors approach their study of Dominican migration from a special optic. This work is especially interested in the Dominicans' movement back and forth across international borders and within the community of immigrants, and in showing how the Dominicans have striven in the process to bring unity and order to the new and old values accrued.

This type of study, technically termed a study of transnational and transcultural immigration, fits with the tendency developing since the 1980s to study migration with one eye fixed on globalization, as "a multilevel, multinational phenomenon that encompasses a complex web of interconnected locations" (p. 4). Following the lead of Eugenia Georges (The Making of a Transnational Community: Migration, Development, and Cultural Change in the Dominican Republic, 1990) and others, Sagas and Molina claim that by looking at Dominican migration one can see in a textbook way the transnational forces at work. That is true, and for those wishing to pursue the sociological and anthropological foundations for a transnational perspective, the editors provide a bibliography of significant works at the end of their Introduction (pp. 26-28). It is a nice aspect of this...