Dominican American Political Incorporation and Elected Officials

As a 1.5 Black Latina immigrant from the Dominican Republic, it is important for me to document the contributions of Dominicans and Dominican American elected officials to American society and politics.

“Dominicans represent one of the largest and fastest growing Latino groups in the United States. Since 1990, the Dominican population in the United States has more than tripled, from 517,000 to nearly two million in 2019, becoming the country’s fifth-largest Latino group” (Matos and Morel, Latino Studies, 2021).

My co-authors and I are contributing to Latino/a/x studies by focusing on Dominicans and Dominican Americans. In our Latino Studies article, we argue that Dominican political incorporation is influenced by population size, institutional structure, and, importantly, civic organizations.

My co-authors and I are also have a forthcoming book with NYU Press, Politics in our Veins: the Rise of Dominican American Political Power in the United States, where we examine US Dominican political incorporation through interviews with former and current Dominican elected officials (DEOs) as well as an original survey of DEOs.

Collaborators

Domingo Morel

Dr. Morel is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Service at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University.

He studies and teaches racial and ethnic politics, urban politics, education politics and public policy. Specifically, his research explores the ways state policies help expand or diminish political inequality among historically marginalized populations.

He is the author of Developing Scholars: Race, Politics and the Pursuit of Higher Education (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018). He is also co-editor, with Marion Orr, of Latino Mayors: Power and Political Change in the Postindustrial City (Temple University Press, 2018).

Website

Dr. Domingo Morel, Associate professor of Political Science.

Michelle Bueno Vásquez

Michelle is a fourth-year political science Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University. She is a methodologist and race scholar, pursuing research agendas to uplift historically marginalized communities, particularly those who experience marginalization within minority groups, such as Afro-Latinos and Black Women.

Her work questions traditional survey methodologies and their suitability to represent those at the margins and how, currently, enumeration practices and statistics can reproduce structures of oppression.