Merengue and the Dominican Diaspora in New York

Merengue's life in the Dominican diaspora of New York is most reliably approached through the demographic and social history of Dominican migration, a record that documents the community's formation far more fully than the music's internal development. The largest sustained wave of Dominican emigration to the United States began in the 1960s, following the collapse of the Trujillo dictatorship^[1]. By 2024 roughly 2.5 million people of Dominican descent lived in the country^[2], a population that had become the second-largest Hispanic population in the Northeast after Puerto Ricans and the fifth-largest such group nationally^[3]. A Dominican presence long predated that wave: the earliest recorded arrival, the merchant Juan Rodríguez, reached Manhattan in 1613 from Santo Domingo^[4], and smaller numbers passed through Ellis Island across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries^[5]. Those earlier movements were modest, however, beside the post-1960s migration that built the urban neighborhoods in which Dominican music circulated.

The diaspora's cultural life took shape alongside an older and larger Puerto Rican settlement rather than in isolation. Greater New York holds the country's largest Puerto Rican population of any metropolitan area, and the city remains that community's principal cultural center^[6]; New York State alone counted approximately 995,000 Puerto Ricans^[7]. Because Dominicans constituted the Northeast's second-largest Hispanic group after this established Puerto Rican community^[3], their music matured within a densely Caribbean urban environment whose audiences already moved between several Latin idioms.

Dominican settlement also reached well beyond the five boroughs into the wider Northeast. In Rhode Island, Dominicans form the largest Hispanic group, at roughly 38.8 percent^[8], and the Providence Dominican community in particular has been the subject of ethnographic study^[9]. Such regional concentrations meant that diaspora social and musical practice was never confined to New York, even as the metropolis remained its demographic and cultural anchor.

Scholarship on the diaspora treats music and dance as central to the way Dominican migrants articulate a shared identity. In one study of Dominican migrant communities organized online, cultural practice — spanning music, dance, food, and literature — emerged as a leading medium of self-definition^[10], while pride in being Dominican formed the dominant discourse across the sites examined^[11]. That identity was anchored in language, history, ethnicity, and racial self-understanding^[12]. Migrants who retained an attachment to the homeland channeled economic, political, social, and cultural resources back toward it^[13], and such networks could draw second- and third-generation migrants into transnational community life^[14].

The materials surveyed here establish the context for merengue in New York rather than its particulars: they describe a large, regionally concentrated, and transnationally connected community for which music and dance served as durable markers of belonging^[10], but they do not document the specific repertory, performers, or venues through which the genre took root in the city. On those particulars the present record is silent, and a fuller account must rest on sources beyond this set.