BANISHED TO THE HOMELAND

1. The official U.S. figure of Dominicans deported during this time frame is 30,000; however, in a report in the Santo Domingo newspaper el Listin Diario (Corcino, 2006, p. 6), the National Police stated that they have 19,000 registered as deported, whereas the National Council for the Control of Drugs said that they have a further 27,000 listed as deported. Another recent report from the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights estimated unofficially that 50,000 Dominicans were deported between 1996 and 2008 in contrast to the “official” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement figures (Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights, 2009).

2. An important coedited work recently published by De Genova and Preutz (2010) that contains deportation, illegal immigration, and asylum-seeking case studies from around the world should also be noted.

3. There has also been a report published by an advocacy group in cooperation with the immigration law clinic of New York University on the social and legal trauma of deportation (Northern Manhattan Coalition on Immigration 2009). Another unpublished analysis of secondary data based on the case files of 475 deportees was performed by Venator-Santiago, 2005a.

4. In this recent report from the immigration law clinics of UC Berkeley and UC Davis, legal researchers estimate that, between 1997 and 2007, more than 80,000 legal permanent residents have been deported, leaving behind more than 100,000 children, 44,000 under the age of five. The report states that directives from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued in 2009 will result in an increase in deported “green card” holders and therefore an increase in the collateral consequences for young U.S. citizens and their families.

5. For example, Janowitz (1978) suggests that social control rests on a societal value commitment that has at least three goals: the reduction of coercion, the elimination of human misery, and the elevation of the role of rationality in social organization and interactions. Park and Thomas saw immigration within a constellation of broader influences. For example, “The immigration problem is unique in the sense that the immigrant brings divergent definitions of the situation and this renders his participation in our activities difficult. At the same time this problem is of the same general type as the one exemplified by ‘syndicalism,’ ‘bolshevism,’ ‘socialism,’ etc., where the definition of the situation does not agree with the traditional one. The modern ‘social unrest,’ like the immigrant problem is a sign of the lack of participation and this is true to the degree that certain elements feel that violence is the only available means of participating” (Park and Thomas 1927:52).

6. It could be argued that Lewis drew attention to the effects of race, class, and gender structuring in the U.S. inner city with respect to the immigrant, much as Dubois had drawn our attention to the color line in his revisionist masterpiece of Reconstruction (see Dubois 2006/1935).

7. In a recently acclaimed study of second-generation “incorporation” into the U.S. mosaic (see Kasinitz et al. 2008), the authors summarize data that included interviews by phone with more than 3,400 subjects, with another 333 in-depth interviews and 172 follow-up interviews, and ethnographies “where second generation and native groups were intersecting” (p. 13). Much of this data collection took place in the city’s poorest neighborhoods from 1998–2003. Subjects were asked to recall their experiences of immigration during a period in which New York State prisons boasted almost 70,000 inmates, approximately 90 percent of whom were nonwhites coming from many of the same neighborhoods as the interview subjects. Remarkably, in this narrative of successful immigrant integration there is but one mention of prison, one mention of the criminal justice system, and no mention of deportation.

8. Small wooden boats.

1. The creation of the moral conscience is the final goal of social evolution. To strive to be a human being is a good thing. The beautiful thing, the useful thing, the just thing and the real thing all aimed at the establishment of a society in which the social conscience is so educated and evolved that kindness becomes a natural principle exercised by all men and women. (Translated by the authors).

2. The Taino were a nonslave-holding subgroup of the Caribbean Arawaks, many of whom were murdered or worked to death within three decades of Columbus’s arrival or died from European diseases against which they had no resistance.

3. Approximately 48,442 square kilometers, or approximately 18,000 square miles.

4. Three key military figures are remembered in this feat alongside the people: Colonel Rafael Tomás Fernández Domínguez, Colonel Francisco Alberto Caamaño and Colonel Manuel Ramón Montes Arache.

5. Famed Dominican-American author Junot Diaz describes Balaguer as: “a Negrophobe, an apologist to genocide, an election thief, and a killer of people who wrote better than himself” (Diaz 2007:90).

6. Social Christian Reformist Party (PRSC).

7. Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD).

8. Dominican Liberation Party (PLD).

9. In 2007, 602,093 Dominicans were living in New York City, which was 25.8% of the New York City Latina/o population: distribution by boroughs: Bronx, 32.8%; Manhattan, 41.9%; Queens, 15.5%; Brooklyn, 18.5%; and Staten Island, 3.7%. These numbers do not include the hundreds of thousands of undocumented Dominican citizens (Limonic 2007).

11. The criticism of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) is virtually the same as that of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In the name of opening markets among these countries, NAFTA ensures that the benefits of the abolition of tariffs on a range of imports and exports realized largely by the heavily subsidized agribusinesses of the United States at the expense of local farmers. The same is true of most other large firms that exercise their comparative advantage on a very unequal economic playing field.

12. Between 1983 and 1985, the state sugar industry produced the highest tonnage in its history, roughly 800,000 tons per year, which amounted to 60% of the country’s needs. In 1986, the directorship of the industry was handed to Carlos Morales Troncoso who was also in the pay of the Central Romana Corporation, a private sugar-producing company. In terms of dependency, the Dominican Republic’s alignment with CAFTA ensured that economic development will be tied to U.S. interests to a greater extent than before. To emphasize this policy, President Fernandez abolished the tax on high-fructose corn syrup, which was designed by the Dominican Congress to protect the country’s vulnerable sugar industry. This decision was made at the behest of the U.S. soft drink industry, which claimed that such “protectionism” would preclude the Dominican Republic from joining CAFTA. Nothing was said of the massive subsidies given to U.S. corn producers or the extraordinary political and economic power wielded by soft drink companies such as Coca-Cola (information courtesy of historian Frank Maya-Pons).

15. During this period, however, and especially during the first administration of Leonel Fernandez (1994–1997), the economy was “liberalized” by dismantling many of the paternalistic supports of the Balaguer years and replacing them with so-called free market mechanisms of wealth creation and distribution. The result has been growth of the middle- and upper-middle classes, which can be seen in the mushrooming condominiums in new urban and suburban zones, U.S.- and Spanish-financed shopping malls, and several new private schools and universities. The indigenous class reconfigurations also include the many Dominicans who have made their money in the United States or in Spain and who now invest in the private property market, either to speculate or to claim their holiday home in the sun, a sure sign of status for the successful, socially ascending emigrant.

1. Our orientation to this concept comes from the work of Cullen (2003). Cullen argues that the concept of the American Dream has a long history and has at least four connotations. First, it is a dream that filled the imaginations of many early religious dissenters who sought a space to practice their own particular worship of God. Second, it is found in the notion of upward mobility and is a crucial part of America’s dominant culture and ideology as found in the early work of Adams (1931) called the “Epic Dream.” Adams describes the dream as that “of a land in which life should be better, richer and fuller for every man.” Third, Cullen argues that the dream is contained in the notion of home ownership, as embodied by the Homestead Act of 1862 and more recently by the suburbanization of America; one might point to the recent subprime mortgage crisis as an indication of the yearning for this dream to become a reality. Fourth, Cullen states that the dream conveys the notion of personal fulfillment; although this idea is contained in the statements of Lincoln and of the Puritans, it is particularly virulent in the culture of Hollywood and the consumer ideology that pervades much of our lives.

2. Sometimes subjects did not really understand or want to respond to questions on poverty, and there were a number of reasons for this reticence. One is that their current state was still characterized by extreme deprivation, and so to think back to another period in the poverty cycle appeared redundant. It might have been different if they had moved on economically, but instead they had emigrated and done their best to attain a dignified living situation, and now they were back, not far from where they had started. Second, the terminology we were using was too condemning, too stigmatizing. For people who had experienced the United States and its culture of “blaming the victim,” to openly discuss one’s experience of poverty is to situate oneself as The Other, which was too painful coming on top of their already stigmatizing label as a deportee. The third reason was that many left the Dominican Republic in early childhood and could not recount much of that earlier period easily. Certainly they were told something about their prior circumstances by their parents and other family members, but even these memories were not easy to recall, which might also reflect the tendency of immigrants to look toward the future and not to the past.

3. We are aware that European democracies such as Portugal and Spain also have never had a full accounting of their authoritarian and fascist pasts.

4. According to a local priest, “Of course the local military take a cut from all those trying to leave. Rarely is anyone stopped from going, as long as you pay your way. I see them all the time in my congregation, saving up to make it across. How else can they go? They can’t get visas so they take their chances on the sea.”

1. In their book on second-generation New Yorkers, these researchers point out that Dominicans were the least likely to see upward social mobility. It is worth quoting their findings in more detail: “The Dominicans probably present the clearest case for concern. With a comparatively high level of African ancestry, Dominicans face high levels of discrimination, both in the public space and in the housing market. Unlike the parents of West Indians, few of their parents spoke English on arrival. They arrived in the United States with very low levels of education and continue to have low incomes. Their nearest “proximal host” population, Puerto Ricans, are also quite poor, and the neighborhoods they share have some of New York’s worst schools. . . . It is not clear whether Dominicans, caught between remaining in one of the poorest immigrant communities and assimilating into the poorest of the native communities, enjoy much second generation advantage.” (2008:363–364).

2. It might be easier to come up with such categories to explain sociocultural “acceptance” or “rejection,” or, as Zhou puts it, how immigrants become “absorbed by different segments of American society, ranging from affluent middle-class suburbs to impoverished inner-city ghettos, and that becoming American may not always be an advantage for the immigrants themselves or for their children” (1999:210).

3. “Making it in America is a complex process, dependent only partially on the motivation and abilities that immigrants bring with them. How they use these personal resources often depends on international political factors—over which individuals have no control—and on the history of earlier arrivals and the types of communities they have created—about which newcomers also have little say. These complex and involuntary forces confront the foreign born as an objective reality that channels them in different directions.” (Portes and Rumbaut 1994:93)

4. This is not to overlook the fact that many participants talked of their family sending money back to their grandparents and other family members in the Dominican Republic or of buying small properties in their homeland for visits during vacation.

5. In New York City, the school names attended by the subjects are familiar. Most of them are large schools with several thousand students and are often synonymous with low graduation rates, low test scores, high rates of violent incidents, and high teacher turnover. It is only in the last few years that New York City has been held accountable for the fact that it has short-changed the city’s public schools by billions of dollars while overseeing a clearly inequitable schools budget formula. The previously elected New York State governor, Elliot Spitzer, pledged to end this injustice (see Spitzer’s budget speech, January 30, 2007).

6. When this interview was carried out, Chino was just another heroin junky in Santo Domingo; at the moment he is in rehabilitation for the fourth time in the last six years.

7. Sassen (2001) describes the structuring of New York’s labor market from the 1970s to the 1990s and shows how it has become increasingly stratified, offering fewer and fewer avenues for low-end workers as manufacturing has declined rapidly and has been replaced by low-paying service jobs and occupations geared to the educated middle and upper classes. Pessar (1986) also noted the increasing bifurcation of the labor market in the 1980s and its effect on Dominican male and female workers. Portes and Zhou (1992) meanwhile emphasized the importance of social capital for Dominican settlement, based on what they call bounded solidarity and enforceable trust, which has played an important part in the economic heterogeneity of the Dominican community, belying its stereotype of being locked into low-end occupations and the drug trade.

1. Of course, in other locales the spatial distance between the classes may be much greater.

2. D.B. (author) tried to ask Manny on various occasions about his child without success.

3. In discussing conservative positivism and liberal structuralism, Young says, “Both have very simple rational/instrumental narratives. In the first, crime occurs because of choice—depicted as an availability of opportunity and low levels of social control, particularly where individuals are impulsive and short-term oriented. Curiously (or perhaps not), every intellectual attempt is made to distance crime from structural inequalities and social injustice. Rather, we have pallid, calculative individuals committing crime where it is possible, coupled with putative victims who as likely targets are in turn attempting to calculate their optimum security strategies” (Young and Brotherton 2006).

4. When I (D.B.) last interviewed Alex in Santo Domingo, he was indigent and begged me to find him some work; he was a trained printer and knew carpentry. But his depression, the demons of his past, and the lack of any meaningful future were perhaps too much for him. According to other deportees, Alex overdosed on heroin at the end of 2003, not long after this interview, and his body was never found.

1. The subject here is talking specifically about an immigration attorney; generally such representation is either deficient or completely absent. Another report on Dominican deportees (Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights 2009) confirmed this finding. In an analysis of removal proceedings against Dominicans between 2004–2007, more than half of the defendants had no representation at the proceedings. It should also be noted that one of the busiest immigration lawyers in the Washington Heights area was a man named Victor Espinal, whom we interviewed early in our study. The New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein recently revealed that Mr. Espinal was a fraud and possessed no legitimate legal credentials to practice in the United States. He has since been arrested and awaits trial on multiple charges of professional misrepresentation, fraud, and grand larceny (Bernstein 2009).

2. The worst representation seemed to be reserved for the immigration appeals court, where the court is not obliged to provide a lawyer because the subject is not a U.S. citizen and therefore is not entitled to the same constitutional rights of due process (see next chapter). Only 35 of the original 65 subjects reported having a lawyer defend them in these hearings.

3. Between 1980 and 1992, the average maximum sentence for a violent offense declined from 125 months to 88 months; however, the reverse was true for drug offenses, which increased from 47 months to 82 months (Beck and Brien 1995). Moreover, the number of people going to prison for drug offenses also increased exponentially. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, between 1980 and 1992 court commitments to state prisons based on drug charges increased by 1000 percent; during the same period, convictions for violent offenses only increased by 51 percent (Maguire and Pastore 1996).

4. In 1998 a grassroots organization called Critical Resistance was formed “to build an international movement to end the Prison-Industrial Complex.” Its first major conference was held at the University of California, Berkeley in the same year.

5. Examples include the ban on the use of public housing, being barred from a wide array of occupations, prohibitive restrictions on associations for return inmates, and the constant drug testing and surveillance that is required by probation officers.

6. These high rates of prison spending in many states, in light of the fiscal crisis, have become untenable. We now see radical measures to reduce prison spending and the prison population in states like New York, California, and Arizona (e.g., Archibold 2010).

7. Perhaps this was due to the deep feelings of resentment toward the U.S. criminal justice system; perhaps this was due to the vast majority of interactions between inmates and guards at that institutional, dehumanized level as maintained by Zimbardo (2008).

8. This is no longer the case regarding the Trinitarios, as there are reports of the group throughout the United States as well as in Europe and the Dominican Republic.

9. The Asociación Ñeta is a self-described prisoners’ rights organization founded in 1979 by Carlos “La Sombra” (the shadow) Torres-Irriarte (although his birth name is Melendez) while he was serving time in Oso Blanco, the correctional facility located at Rio Piedras in Puerto Rico. Torres-Irriarte started the group to heighten the solidarity of inmates, to stop the rampant abuse by prison guards, and to provide mutual protection against a predatory prison gang called “G27” or the “Insects.” On March 30, 1981, “La Sombra” was murdered on orders by the leader of the Insects, El Manota, who himself was murdered in revenge on September 30, 1981. There are five basic goals or “norms” that the group struggles to achieve within the prison culture: share, peace, education, harmony, and respect. A sixth principle of the group often mentioned in their texts is the commitment to the struggle. The group remained in Puerto Rico primarily as a prisoners’ organization throughout the 1980s, eventually becoming the biggest inmate organization in the system. Because inmates in Puerto Rico can vote in elections, this gave the group power and leverage with both prison authorities and politicians.

10. It is difficult to say exactly when the Latin Kings started. Some say that it was in the Illinois prison system during the late 1940s, originating as a prisoner self-help group for Latino inmates; community leaders in Chicago recall that it began as a street group called the Latin Angels during the 1950s, later becoming the Latin Kings during the 1960s. Another explanation for the group’s origin is that the group was formed in 1966 after youth workers organized a “shout out” to gang members from the Spanish Kings, Junior Sinners, and the Jokers (Knox 2000). In time, the Chicago Latin Kings developed an auxiliary wing called the Latin Queens, a group that had a similar manifesto and owed allegiance to the organization’s Supreme Crown, Gustavo Colón (aka Lord Gino), also known as the “Sun King.” During the early to mid-1980s, the Latin Kings spread beyond Chicago to other cities of the Midwest, such as Milwaukee (Hagerdorn 1998), where a combination of deindustrialization and the anti–working class, anti-minority policies of the Reagan administration locked many inner city youth into the so-called “underclass.”

11. Alex liked to fight. He grew up in that subculture; to him it was almost second nature. Alex also liked the drama, the excitement, the sport, and the honor that goes with it. Fighting, as Katz shows (1988), is extremely seductive and allows for moments of transcendence. In the prison setting, the unrelenting boredom, the intense struggle over minimal resources, the hypermasculine culture that saturates prison life, and the conspiracies and intrigue that are part of inmate–inmate and inmate–administration relations contribute to the fighting culture. It is in this context that Alex’s account should be understood.

1. We publish this field note in its entirety for two reasons. First, because it places the reader in greater proximity to the context of subjects who are experiencing what is likely to be the most traumatic event in their lives; second, this information can help the reader understand and perhaps empathize with this process.

2. There are approximately 40 immigration detention camps in the United States, formerly run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and now under the direction of the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which, in turn, is under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security. According to ICE’s government web site (http://www.ice.gov/index.htm), there are almost 20,000 inmates in these detention facilities. Since 2004, sixty-four detainees have died in custody (Bernstein 2007), prompting a Senate amendment that calls for an office of detention oversight within the Department of Homeland Security.

1. See chapter 9 for a discussion of the different kinds of “positive” coping strategies used by the deportees to avoid the criminal justice system and find their different paths toward social and cultural integration.

2. Journalist Luis Garcia, who was at the time the director of communications at the Education Department, openly complained to the administration of the National Police because he was mistakenly labeled as a drug-related deportee in police records (Reyes 2007). As a result of this error, it was revealed for the first time that two agencies retained files of deportees: the National Police, which has approximately 27,000 records up until the end of 2006, and the Dirección Nacional de Control de Drogas (the National Council for Drug Control), which had 17,000 records as of 2006.

3. The term “1.5-generation” refers to people who immigrate to a new country before or during their early teens.

4. We have not dealt with the role played by private security in maintaining social order vis a vis the deportees, but these forces are important and play a role similar to what Huggins (1999) calls the “rent a cop.” Below is a field note of a beating given to Bory, a deportee associated with the heroin users in our sample. It is not so far removed from the methods used at Abu Ghraib. The field researcher, Yolanda Martín, interviewed Bory shortly after the incident while he was being held in a cell at the local police station:

“Bory entered La Nacional, one of the largest supermarkets in town, and decided to sit on some boxes by the exit. One of the security guards identified him as a “deportado that always steals from the store.” Bory did not have anything on him, no drugs and no store merchandise. Six of the private security guards took him to the storage room. Bory was tied to a high bar with a rope and blindfolded with a plastic bag placed on his head. He was then splashed with a bucket of water. One of the guards grabbed a stick and started to beat him on the back, head, chest, and legs. Others followed with punches. Bory was let down to the floor, still blindfolded. Guards then threw kicks at his stomach and legs; then they seated their victim, and the supervising guard started to interrogate him. They all think that Bory was working in tandem with an employee to steal hard liquor. They told Bory the hitting would continue until he gave the name of the employee. Bory had not collaborated with anyone and could not provide any names. Bory was beaten harder, again with the stick. Bory begged them to stop: “Please, please don´t. You´re gonna end up killing me.” At that moment, the police arrived. Another employee working at the supermarket had called the police to intervene. Bory tells me that, had it not been for the police, he’d be dead by now” (Martín 2010).

5. In 2003, one of the country’s most renowned lawyers, Angel Julian Serulle, proposed to the government of President Hipólito Mejia a solution for this human pollution problem, smacking of the segregationist thinking that used to be common in dealing with little understood diseases such as tuberculosis and leprosy: “In conjunction with the North Americans, it (the Dominican government [added by the authors]) should begin construction of a rehabilitation center on a Dominican island in order to confine and reeducate Dominicans deported from the United Status for serious crimes.” Serulle stated that it would allow these citizens to transform themselves into productive members of society instead of being a threat. He added that, after being reeducated, these convicts should be “thrust into the productive market” (Perez 2003).

1. For example, in an innovative view of the informal sector, Gregory describes a range of occupations and levels of entrepreneurship that are as much an expression of resistance, i.e., “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985) in a colonized political economy, as they are forms of economic subjugation and accommodation.

2. Willis (2000) refers to the purpose of work in advanced capitalist countries as a means of cultural enfranchisement, helping to frame class, race–ethnic, and gendered identities. “It brings a sense of self and maturity which is achieved through insight and experience rather than through the mere acquisition of years” (Willis 2000:89). Nonetheless, for many young people in these “advanced” societies, the world of work eludes them, “making conditional what should have been a birthright, working-class kids now have to aspire to their own necessary status!” (Willis 2000:88). In the Dominican Republic where unemployment and underemployment are the norm and not the exception, we need to rethink work’s pivotal role in the cultural production of both youth and adult societies.

3. In recent years, the Fernandez government has proposed a new set of plans to address this tourist neglect of the capital. In league with a consortium of Spanish and Italian investors, Fernandez seeks to build an island just off shore, with imported sand for the beaches and a string of upscale hotels to cater to the international leisure class. The government has presented this project to the public as the Dominican version of the “Dubai model,” in which the oil-rich sultanate, whose profits are based on the sweated labor of thousands of heavily exploited Pakistanis and Indians, has built a series of lavish resorts for the global super-rich. Of course, if such a project were to come to fruition in Santo Domingo, it will only further stratify the local work force.

4. Eddie died in July 2009. He was 56 years old and was the sole source of income for his 16-year-old son and his paraplegic brother.

5. We should also mention that, once a year, Manolo looks forward to the arrival of a Floridian named Frank who comes with a group of teenage baseball players for a summer camp in Santo Domingo. During the four weeks that the youngsters hone their baseball skills in a country obsessed with the sport, Manolo is paid a living wage to help in the camp’s daily organization. Manolo also recruits two or three other deportees to participate; with their bilingual skills and knowledge of the local area, they are able to leave their state of subsistence, at least momentarily.

6. (Santo Domingo Field Notes [Brotherton, May 1, 2005]): George is propped up in his hospital bed; the left side of his face is drooping, and he cannot speak. He talks with his eyes. He is wearing an adult size diaper because he is completely incontinent. His wife is sitting on a chair at the bottom of his bed and greets us with a hug and a kiss. Next to George’s bed is a mattress where his wife sleeps at night. His wife is his nurse and will take care of him, filling the void in care where only those who can pay are serviced. George is hooked up to some kind of “drip.” Manolo goes over to him and hugs him and tells him he’s brought his friends to see him. “Remember Davy, George? Remember the interview he did with you all those years ago?” George tries to look at me, and I go over and hug George and in his ear I say softly, “It’s me, George, it’s me, Davy. It’s so good to see you George, so good to see you.” As I retreat from the bed, George’s eyes follow me intensely; he tries to move his lips, and saliva drips down his chin as he strains to mutter something. I feel tears well up in my eyes. It’s heartbreaking to see this man, who was so animated when I last saw him, now so close to death. I turn to his wife again and she begins to tell me about the costs of the medical care. She needs two thousand pesos just to keep feeding him the medicine; otherwise he will die straight away. She then says he needs a brain scan to see the extent of the damage, but that will cost about two hundred dollars and it has to be done in another hospital. I give her fifty dollars and Luis gives her another fifty dollars, and she says she should be able to get the rest from her sister. If she can get the money by tomorrow, she can take George across town in a taxi and get the scan done, and then return to have a hospital doctor analyze the results. There is no ambulance service to take George, and the wife will have to manage the task of moving a deathly sick man alone with her family members. To the right of him are three other patients in their beds, surrounded by their respective families. We stay for about fifteen minutes more, and I hold George’s hand and wipe his sweaty brow. Manolo says that we have to go, at which Luis approaches George and begins to recite a prayer. He turns to all the patients and says the prayer loudly so that all may feel blessed. I cannot help feeling that these are George’s last rites.

7. Two weeks after this interview I (David Brotherton) saw Alex again, and this time he was more agitated. His arm was in plaster and he was obviously in pain. He asked me for some money to get his prescription pills, which would alleviate his suffering. He explained that he had gotten into a fight with some gang rivals three days previously and that the Dominican hospital did not provide any pain medication free of charge; he had spent all his money getting his arm x-rayed and set (he had broken two bones in his wrist). I gave Alex fifteen dollars and arranged to see him again when he would introduce me to more deportees from New York who had joined his organization. He said he had a chapter of thirty members, almost of them deportees. After three days I tried to find Alex, but he failed to materialize. Finally, someone who knew of him told me that he was in the infamous La Victoria prison. I never saw Alex again, even though I have persistently asked about his whereabouts. Perhaps, like George, the deportee-cum-teacher did not survive the ordeal.

8. I (D.B.) was introduced to Guido and his American-born family by his uncle, who was related to a work friend of my wife’s in Manhattan, and I came to know him well during the first phase of the research in 2002 and 2003. I visited his farm several times in 2002, but it was not until four months after we were introduced that he finally revealed to me that he was a deportee. “I don’t let anyone know about it,” he said. “They hear about it, and right away they gonna treat you differently—that’s just the way it is here.” Recently we talked about his beginnings on the farm, and in other parts of this study Guidorevealed much more about his deportation experience.

9. On a recent visit to Santo Domingo, I (D.B.) accompanied Luis2 on one of his business missions for the city. We drove to a patch of wasteland sandwiched between two major roads, one of which led to the airport. As I alighted from Luis2’s relatively new SUV, he put his pistol in his back pocket. “Do you expect trouble, Luis?” I asked. “No, not really,” he answered. “But you never know. There are squatters here, and we’ll have to move them if we sell this land.” Thus Luis2, a highly stigmatized deportee, was now working to remove other stigmatized residents of the city. I mentioned this irony to him as we drove back. “Yes,” he said. “It’s a fucked up situation all round, but we live in the Dominican Republic, how much more fucked up can it be?”

1. Ironically, Rafey Prison was severely damaged in a recent hurricane; during repairs, it was found that the facility had been built upon unsafe foundations.

2. Staying at this prison in a so-called maximum security wing but in effect living in extreme luxury was the infamous drug dealer Roland Florián Felix. Florián was killed on My 16, 2009 by the prison’s captain. Florián was supposed to be the most feared “capo” in the Dominican Republic and had served 15 of his 20-year sentence for smuggling 950 kilos of cocaine from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico.

3. This finding is misleading because most, if not all, inmates have to buy their mattresses from someone inside the prison. Of the three prisons we have visited over the last eight years, including the largest prison (La Victoria) in the Dominican Republic, we found no institutional provision of any beds!

4. Triangulation is one way to check on these accounts, e.g., ask family members about certain events and then check these accounts against those of the interviewees, or interview participants multiple times over a number of years so as to reveal discrepancies if an account is fabricated.

5. Under new judicial guidelines, six months is the maximum time a person may be held in preventive custody, but the degree to which this is being enforced is questionable, especially for those with few resources for legal advice and representation.

6. In a fairly recent reorganization of the prison system, the Procuradariá General is supposed to oversee this branch of the government and ensure some kind of transparency and accountability, but widespread reports of escapes, abuse, drug use, and violence still abound throughout the system.

1. On average, $2 billion of U.S. taxpayers’ money is spent on border enforcement in the southwest United States.

2. Transport company from Miami to New York.

3. The literal translation is “beans with sugar,” a Dominican dish that is famous in the south of the country.

4. The site or the corner where they sell drugs.

5. This is a figure of speech that is roughly equivalent to “killing time.”

6. In Spanish, this word means that something does not smell good.

7. This Spanish expression is an abbreviation for “Everything is OK.”

8. This figure differs from that of the U.S. Census Bureau, which found poverty rates of 18.6 percent for individuals and 15 percent for families. This is because New York City has raised the annual income threshold of poverty to $30,000 for a family of four because of high housing costs, whereas the federal government uses the standard measure of $22,000.

9. In a recent New York City second-generation study (Kasinitz et al. 2009), Dominicans were found to have the lowest median household income and the highest rate of unemployment; they were more economically disadvantaged than either native Puerto Ricans or African Americans.

10. This could be seen recently during the global financial crisis; a United Nations Report indicated that a large percentage of money in the banking system came from money laundering (Groendahl 2009 and Madrak 2009): “Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organized crime were ‘the only liquid investment capital’ available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.”

1. Socialist poet Emma Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus” in 1883. It was engraved at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty in 1903:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

2. The Arizona state legislature and Republican governor Jan Brewer recently signed into law the most punitive sanctions against “illegal immigrants” in the United States. Punishments for residing illegally (i.e., not having legal documents when apprehended by state agents) in a state that depends heavily on Mexican and Central American labor include six months imprisonment and fines of $2,500. The Catholic Cardinal of Los Angeles, Roger Mahoney, has likened provisions of the bill to “Nazism,” whereas the government of Mexico has said it will review all of its current agreements of cooperation with the state of Arizona (Archibold 2010).

3. Two important reports that attest to the vindictive and potentially unconstitutional actions of state agents as they pursue deportable populations have been published recently in New York City. In the first report from the Immigration Justice Clinic of Cardozo Law School (Chiu et al. 2009), the authors found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents illegally entered and searched residences while seizing non-targeted individuals “based solely on racial or ethnic appearance or on limited English proficiency” during numerous home raids on undocumented immigrants in New York and New Jersey (p.1). In a second report from the non-profit organization Justice Strategies (Shahani 2010), the author alleged that the administration at New York’s largest jail, Rikers Island, was working hand in hand with ICE, issuing “immigration detainers” that place an administrative hold on incarcerated suspected non-citizens for the flimsiest of reasons. The author states, “While Homeland Security purports to target the most dangerous offenders, there appears to be no correlation between offense level and identification for deportation” (p.1). The first author (David Brotherton) issued a report on home raids conducted by ICE in immigrant communities in Long Island during 2007 in which a basic policy of guilt by association was used to sweep more than one hundred non-citizens—supposedly connected to “gangs”—into the deportation system (Brotherton 2010).

4. To be fair, the theory of segmented assimilation has many variants. The model that explains downward mobility through what is sometimes called “dissonant acculturation” (i.e., overly rapid acculturation to the U.S. norms and values) resonates with criminology theories regarding the experience of second-generation immigrants. The descriptions of the cultural interplay are usually very thin, however, and engagement with any critical criminological literature is almost nonexistent.

5. Much of the notion of oppositional behavior comes originally from an assortment of works such as Cohen (1955), Ogbu (1978), and Willis (1977). These earlier sociological and anthropological contributions, however, are more complex than the renditions of later criminological and immigration researchers who often favor notions of social reproduction (Brotherton 2007) over processes of colonization or critiques of capitalist processes as a mode of production, a system of exchange relations, an incubator of class relations, or a driving force of contemporary global culture. In addition, there is little consideration of subcultural practices that have transformational possibilities rather than adaptational certainties (Barrios et al. 2006; Barrios 2003).

6. Gregory (2007) pursues this version of resistance in his ethnography of tourism in the resorts closest to Santo Domingo; Conquergood (1997, 1992) does the same in his long-term work with the Latin Kings of Chicago, as do Scott (1985) in his work with Malaysian peasants and Ferrell (1996, 2005) in his study of graffiti artists and dumpster divers.

7. In the recent study of second-generation New Yorkers by Kasinitiz et al. (2008), the authors were “cautiously optimistic” that their immigrant subjects were making it in New York City because, in part, of the benefits of the civil rights movement, and the various legislative efforts to combat structural racism. They found, interestingly, that such immigrants are generally more successful than their native counterparts due to the positive attitudes of their parents, who still believed in the possibilities of the American Dream; the pro-immigrant political climate of New York; and the range of “second chance” opportunities that New Yorkers are still able to enjoy.

8. However, with the Republican Party doing everything it can to suppress potential Democratic voters (e.g., as we have seen in its campaigns to maintain laws against voting for ex-felons in Florida and throughout much of the South), does the timing of this legislation have anything to do with the growth of the Latino population and its roughly two-to-one voting record in favor of Democratic candidates several months before the mid-term elections? (Palast 2010).

9. Garreau describes “edge cities” as the new suburban sites that are constructed at freeway intersections and often near major airports. They attract postindustrial corporations, such as those involved in information technology, which employ primarily middle-class workers. Such cities are planned hierarchically with housing and parkways intertwined with corporate campuses, quite distinct from the traditional modernist city’s street grids. Originally, they were designed to be free of urban ills such as crime and racial strife, but critics have pointed to the growth of class segregation within these new growth zones, and many have suffered from a massive devaluation of housing prices caused by the subprime mortgage crisis.

10. On May 3, 2010, Governor Patterson of New York became the first governor to call for a review panel to try to stop the rising tide of deportations from New York. In his press release he stated the following: “Some of our immigration laws, particularly with respect to deportation, are extremely inflexible. However, federal law allows governors to pardon individuals in certain cases in order to remove the deportation consequence of a State criminal conviction. In some small way, we hope this initiative will help set an example for how to soften the blow in those cases of deserving individuals caught in the web of our national immigration laws. We hope it will prove that justice can always find a way” (see http://www.state.ny.us/governor/press/050310Deportation.html).