Merengue and the Dominican Diaspora in New York City

Merengue — the national music and partner dance of the Dominican Republic — became one of the most visible vehicles of Dominican identity once large-scale migration carried it into the cities of the United States, where in the diaspora it functions less as nostalgic ornament than as a primary instrument of belonging and self-definition. New York City emerged as the demographic and cultural anchor of that diaspora, much as the same metropolis had earlier become the foremost center of Puerto Rican life on the mainland — the milieu from which the label "Nuyorican" arose.^[2] By 2024 roughly 2.5 million residents of Dominican descent lived across the United States, the fifth-largest Hispanic group nationally and the second-largest in the Northeast behind only Puerto Ricans.^[1]

The diaspora that carried merengue north is, by historical standards, a recent formation. A Dominican-born sailor turned merchant, Juan Rodríguez, is recorded as reaching Manhattan as early as 1613, and modest numbers later passed through Ellis Island during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; sustained mass migration, however, began only in the 1960s, after the collapse of the Trujillo dictatorship.^[3] That political rupture — more than any gradual economic drift — laid the demographic foundation of the New York community in which merengue would take root abroad.

The Dominican presence in New York is best understood against the older and larger Puerto Rican settlement that preceded it. Puerto Ricans are the second-largest Hispanic group in the country after Mexicans, and Greater New York holds the nation's largest Puerto Rican population while remaining its principal cultural and historical center.^[2] Dominicans thus arrived into an urban landscape already shaped by decades of Caribbean migration, and the two communities — distinct in nationality and musical repertoire — came to share overlapping districts across the urban Northeast.

Scholarship on the diaspora emphasizes that this identity is actively reproduced abroad rather than passively retained. A year-long study of Dominican migrant communities on social media found that the dominant discourse across the sites was pride in being Dominican, voiced most forcefully through cultural practice — with food, music, dance, and writing serving as the central markers of a shared identity.^[4] Within that frame merengue is not decoration but a working tool of self-definition, one the same research situates alongside language and the contested categories of ethnicity and race as further anchors of diasporic selfhood.^[4] The study also observed that systems of racial classification in the United States diverge sharply from those used in the Dominican Republic, complicating how that identity is articulated in the new setting.^[4]

The diaspora's cultural life is also intensely transnational, sustained by continual exchange between settlement and homeland. The same research notes that migrants channel economic, social, political, and cultural resources back toward the country of origin, and that digital platforms have extended these ties to second- and third-generation members who may never have lived on the island.^[5] Nor was Dominican settlement ever confined to New York: in Rhode Island, Dominicans form the largest Hispanic group,^[2] and the Dominican community of Providence has itself become the subject of ethnographic study.^[6]