The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute (CUNY DSI) at the City College of New York (CCNY) is dedicated to exploring the history of people of Dominican descent in the United States and globally. Created in 1992, it is the nation’s first university-based research center of its kind making ground breaking contributions to uncovering archival material and historical narratives of the people of the Caribbean island.
Dr. Ramona Hernandez
Director of CUNY DSI and Professor of Sociology at CCNY, Dr. Ramona Hernandez has devoted her career to advancing knowledge, understanding, and dissemination of information about the Dominican experience. She founded the first Dominican Archives—a repository dedicated to preserving documents that narrate the history and contributions of the Dominican people in the United States, which also houses approximately 110,000 pages of 16th-century manuscripts related to the colonial life of La Española and the New World. These manuscripts reveal that as early as 1540, women in La Española paid taxes and held occupations traditionally dominated by men, then as now, offering a remarkable perspective on women’s economic and social roles in early Spanish colonial society.
“It was born at a time when people were already speaking about Latinos, Latinas, and now Latinx,” says Hernandez.
As post World War ll initiatives like the Chicano and Nuyorican movements emerged as a way to fight against racial and class oppression while championing for the assertion of their cultural identities within the US, a desire to vocalize the Dominican experience emerged.
Efforts made by both groups not only impacted their respective cultures, it aided in bringing about civil liberties to Latinos as a whole within the U.S. With this, however, came a homogenization of the diaspora creating a mindset that all Latinos in the U.S. are the same.
Hernandez notes that while there is an appreciation and solidarity amongst Latino groups, she shares there was a need for Dominicans to distinguish their identity to better understand their history and as a result celebrate their culture.
“The ideology was that one voice as compared to many voices together was going to be better,” explains Hernandez. “The Dominican Studies Institute came along and said ‘this is fantastic, but we still need to speak about who we are and about our own needs that are similar, but at the same time different from the others.’”
As Dominican history had not been explored extensively compared to Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican cultures in the US, the history that is often shared centers around the island’s connection to Christopher Columbus, who coined the island “La Española”, and or then-Dictator Rafael Trujillo’s brutal 30 year regime. Hernandez notes this left an “enormous vacuum” in terms of who Dominicans were and how they were doing in comparison with other Latino groups.
The institute sought to explore outside what had already been done and beyond the gaze of the American framework. Over the years, the institute has uncovered a multitude of stories including the history of Dominican WWll veterans such as Esteban Hotesse – honored at their exhibition Fighting for Democracy: Dominican Veterans from World War II.
The institute made headlines when they discovered the story of Juan Rodriguez, the first immigrant to arrive in New York City. Rodriguez was an Afro-Latino from Santo Domingo – capital of the Dominican Republic – who, as a free man, decided to stay in New York after traveling with the Dutch. Such revelation was cause for celebration. After learning about the history of Rodriguez at El Museo Del Barrio’s exhibition Nueva York (1613-1945), actor and playwright Armando Batista was inspired to create the play, I am New York: Juan Rodriguez, exploring Rodriguez’s life story from the island to NYC.
While a monumental moment for the institute, the magnitude of the discovery left some concerned with the validity of this fact. Hernandez recalls a reporter who was working on breaking the news at the time questioning if the institute was certain that their findings were accurate.
“The person was really scared. You know what it is to say that this is the first immigrant,” says Hernandez. “That’s the thing about the institute. We only speak through written documentation which is a system that is recognized universally.”
CUNY DSI uses machine learning and data science to decipher information and documents. Their interdisciplinary approach is used in addition to the institute’s paleographers who are trained to read historical handwriting such as the found monograph of Rodriguez and his arrival to New York City in 1613.
In 2013, the institute introduced The Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching And Learning Tool. Funded by a start up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the tool is an open source digital education platform created to teach researchers how to decipher 16th and 17th century documents from the Dominican Republic.
The institute has been recognized for making strides in research related to women and blackness on the island. At a Hostos Community College-led panel in 2023, research done by Hernandez and CUNY DSI helped honor the legacy of women, like Rosa Duarte and Manuela Aybar, who played unknown yet pivotal roles in the island’s legacy.
DSI Archives
Their 2015 exhibition, Sixteenth-Century La Española: Glimpses of the First Blacks in the Early Colonial Americas, explores the lives of Black Africans and their island-born descendants in the first European colony in the Americas.
“ What you know about us and our relationship with blackness, you learn that here,” says Hernandez. The Dominican Republic has often caught flack for its colorist perceptions around blackness. While Dominicans are racially mixed with European, African and Indigenous ancestry, anti-Black ideologies from European colonization and slavery paired with Trujillo’s leadership paved the way for racism and colorism to fester.
Hernandez shares that what we know about Dominican’s relationship with blackness was learned through the American lens. Examining Hotesse’s history during WWll in particular – an Afro-Latino– and learning of how members of the island honored him after his death, it paints a different picture around blackness not commonly shared.
“I’m not saying that there’s no racism. Be careful. I’m saying that the story that they had given us about us here in that area, it’s a little bit more complicated than that,” says Hernandez.
In an effort to continue dismantling American perceptions of Dominican people and their history, an $800k federal grant from Representative Adriano Espaillat, Senator Chuck Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, will go towards funding the institute’s upcoming book series and documentary highlighting key figures in the Dominican Republic.
The book series, marketed towards children, will tell the childhood stories of these Dominican figures while the documentary will focus on their road to success and impact. Individuals like Afro-Latina Evangelina Rodriguez who was the island’s first female doctor and Salomé Ureña, poet and creator of the island’s first higher education school for women –Instituto de Señoritas (Young Women’s Institute) – will be told in conjunction with other prominent figures.
Transnational contributions made by Dominican figures will also be featured in the duo project such as the story of Normandía Maldonado. Maldonado, who donated her papers to the institute’s archives before her passing in 2018, was a Dominican born, NYC based activist who founded cultural hubs such as Club Civico Cultural Juan Pablo Duarte and Centro Cultural Ballet Quisqueya – the first of its kind in the nation.
“These are things that our children need to know,” says Hernandez. “It will give them pride for who they are and where they come from. You have to find that in both places, there as well as here.”
For those interested in getting involved in CUNY DSI, undergraduate and graduate students can apply to participate in the institute’s Summer Research Internship where they will contribute to the study of Dominican people. The institute also holds bilingual programming throughout the year for students, alumni and community members to attend. This month, Andrew W. Mellon Scholar Fellow, Oliver Vásquez de la Cruz is conducting a series of panel discussions, Aqui y Alla (Here and There), centered on amplifying Dominican LGBTQ+ voices on a transnational level.
Leandra is an early career journalist with an M.A. in Arts & Culture Reporting and Documentary Filmmaking from The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. With experience reporting for community news outlets such as The Riverdale Press and The Mott Haven Herald, Leandra currently writers for CUNY academic publications The RICC and Research in Focus.