have helped, with new immigrants find-
ing support in relations who had immi-
grated earlier. Voluntary associations
have also provided assistance. For exam-
ple, New York’s Alianza Dominicana,
founded in the 1980s, offered youth
services, substance abuse prevention,
employment training, and other services.
Ties to home remained strong; many
Dominican Americans regularly sent
money to family members left behind
and made return trips to visit them.
Dominican-American neighbor-
hoods are enlivened by Dominican cul-
ture, manifested in the dance music
called merengue, Caribbean cuisine,
community clubs celebrating Dominican
history and culture, and Dominican flags
in storefront windows, along with names
of Dominican provinces and towns.
Dominican Americans have founded
many retail businesses—grocery stores,
beauty parlors, travel agencies—to serve
their community. A study in 1991
showed that about 70 percent of all
bodegas (grocery stores catering to
Hispanics) in New York City were
owned by Dominicans.
Still, Dominican Americans were
underrepresented in white-collar occu-
pations, and their community continued
to face an array of problems, including
unemployment, drug addiction, crime,
and low educational attainment. Ac-
cording to a study by the City University
of New York, By the late 1990s more
than 54 percent of Dominican New
Yorkers over the age of 25 had not fin-
ished high school, and only 4 percent
had finished college. On the other hand,
the Dominican presence in higher edu-
cation was growing, and in 1992 a
Dominican Studies Institute was found-
ed at the City University of New York
(CUNY), where Dominicans tend to be
the largest subgroup of Hispanic
Americans.Puerto Rican Americans:
Life on the MainlandMigration from Puerto Rico to the main-
land United States slowed after the hey-
day of the 1950s and 1960s but continued.
As of 1997, about 2.7 million people of
Puerto Rican ancestry were living on the
U.S. mainland, a number equal to 71 per-
cent of the 3.8 million living in PuertoRico. If current trends continue, people of
Puerto Rican ancestry living on the main-
land United States will soon outnumber
those remaining on the island.
On the U.S. mainland, Puerto Rican
Americans remained concentrated in the
metropolitan New York City region,
though substantial populations could also
be found in Florida, Pennsylvania, New
Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts,
Illinois, and California (each of which had
between 100,000 and 500,000 people of
Puerto Rican descent in 1990). An increas-
ing number of Puerto Rican Americans
worked in white-collar professional and
technical jobs. Second- generation Puerto
Rican Americans were likely to be better
educated and more prosperous than their
parents. As of the late 1980s, median earn-
ings for Puerto Rican men were higher
than for any other Latino group in the
United States except for Cubans.
Although Puerto Rican Americans are
more likely to be poor than the general
population—and also poorer, on average,
than Mexicans, Cubans, Central and
South Americans—69 percent lived above
the poverty line as of 1999.
The majority of Puerto Rican
Americans were blue-collar workers. Like
Dominican Americans, they were hurt by
the flight of manufacturing jobs from
New York City in the late 20th century.
Many Puerto Rican Americans contin-
ued to endure poverty and its related
problems, including broken families, low
educational attainment, drugs, and crime.
As of the late 1990s, Puerto Rican–
American families were more likely to be
headed by a single parent, usually a
female, than families in any other
Hispanic-American group.
As the 20th century drew to a close,
the Puerto Rican community in New York
City was increasingly well represented in
government. By the mid-1990s more than
20 Puerto Rican Americans were serving
in elected positions in New York, includ-
ing Fernando Ferrer, Bronx borough
president since 1987, and U.S.
Congressman José Serrano. The Puerto
Rican–American community was visible in
many other ways, including the annual
Puerto Rican Day parade in June, one of
New York City’s biggest public events. It
is marked by avid waving of the Puerto
Rican flag and wearing of the pava, the
traditional straw hat of the Puerto Rican
jibaro, or farmer.204 ATLAS OF HISPANIC-AMERICAN HISTORY