On an August afternoon in Hyde Square, the merengue starts before noon. Floats roll down Centre Street, dancers in red, white and blue spin past the bodegas, and the smell of fried chimichurri carries on the warm air. This is the heart of the Dominicans in Boston, a community that turned a corner of Jamaica Plain into something the city now calls, officially, its Latin Quarter.
The Place
Jamaica Plain sits about three miles southwest of downtown Boston, a neighbourhood of triple-decker houses, leafy ponds and a long main artery called Centre Street. For most of the twentieth century it was Irish, German and Jewish working class, with corner markets and parish churches to match, much as the Irish mill workers further north in Lawrence had shaped their own city.
Hyde Square, at the southern end of Centre Street near Jackson Square, became the commercial spine of Latino Jamaica Plain. Today it is a state-designated cultural district, dense with barbershops, restaurants and grocers that announce themselves in Spanish.
The Dominican story here is not confined to one square, though. It threads through Roxbury, Dorchester and Roslindale too, following decades of rising rents and shifting borders.
How It Became Dominican
Dominicans began arriving in the Boston region in the 1950s, in small numbers at first. The trickle became a current after the assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961, the US military intervention of 1965, and the repressive years that followed under President Joaquin Balaguer.
The first arrivals
The earliest Dominican migrants did not land in an empty neighbourhood. They settled near the Puerto Rican and Cuban communities already established in the South End, in Roxbury, and in the Port area of Cambridge. Across Massachusetts, Dominican and Puerto Rican families in cities like Springfield often followed parallel paths into the same industrial economy. Many found work in the shoe factories, garment shops and manufacturing plants that still operated across the region.
Early migration drew heavily on the Cibao, the agricultural heartland in the north of the Dominican Republic, with arrivals from cities like Santiago and Salcedo. Another major source was Peravia province, west of Santo Domingo. This detail matters more than it might seem.
The village that moved north
One of the most studied migration links in America runs between Jamaica Plain and a small village in Peravia called Miraflores. The sociologist Peggy Levitt documented it in her 2001 book The Transnational Villagers, published by the University of California Press.
By 1994, Levitt found, more than sixty-five per cent of the 445 households in Miraflores had relatives in the Boston metropolitan area. People exchanged news, money and goods so constantly that village life seemed to be lived in two places at once.
Community members formed the Miraflores Development Committee, with chapters in both Boston and the village, to fund improvements back home. Chain migration of this kind, where one family’s arrival pulls a whole hometown behind it, is exactly how Hyde Square filled with Dominican faces.
Hyde Square takes shape
During the 1980s, Jamaica Plain became the most important new centre of Dominican settlement in the city. Newcomers opened bodegas, restaurants, barbershops and salons, and in doing so spearheaded the commercial revival of a Hyde Square that had seen better decades.
The biggest surge came in the late 1980s and into the mid-1990s, helped along by the amnesty provisions of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which allowed many long-resident migrants to regularise their status and send for family.
Institutions grew alongside the storefronts. La Alianza Hispana, founded in the 1960s under its longtime director Frieda Garcia, provided Spanish-language services to the growing Puerto Rican and Dominican population of Roxbury and beyond.
Pushed outward
Success carried a cost. From the 1990s, gentrification and climbing housing prices began driving Dominican families out of Jamaica Plain proper. They moved into Roxbury, Dorchester, Roslindale, South Boston and Charlestown, and further out to Lynn, Chelsea, Salem and the mill city where another large Dominican community took root in Lawrence.
The most visible casualty was Hi-Lo Foods, the Centre Street market that many called the centre of Boston’s Caribbean community. It had begun as Sklar’s, an Eastern European and Irish grocery, before John Knapp turned it into Hi-Lo around 1980 and stocked it with Goya beans, Bustelo coffee and plantains. A 1984 mural by the Puerto Rican artist Rafael Rivera Garcia, with three Taino figures, marked it as Latino sacred ground.
In 2011, Hi-Lo closed and a Whole Foods took its place. For many residents the swap became shorthand for everything that was changing, and everything they stood to lose.
Claiming the ground
Rather than fade, the community organised. The Hyde Square Task Force, working with neighbourhood young people, pushed the city to formally recognise the area’s identity. In 2016 the Boston City Council designated Hyde and Jackson Square as Boston’s Latin Quarter.
Two years later, in 2018, the Massachusetts Cultural Council made it an official state cultural district, one of a handful in the city. It was a way of writing the community’s presence into the map, even as the rents kept climbing.
The Landmarks
Boston’s Latin Quarter, Hyde and Jackson Square, Jamaica Plain. A state-designated cultural district anchored on Centre Street, home to more than 125 businesses, a large share of them immigrant-owned. It is the symbolic centre of Dominican and wider Latino life in the neighbourhood, and the route of the annual parade.
Hyde Square Task Force, 30 Sunnyside Street, Jamaica Plain. The youth and community organisation that serves as managing partner for the Latin Quarter. Its young people led the campaign for the 2016 designation, and it runs arts and college-pathway programmes from Jovenes en Accion to CAMINOS.
Mozart Park mural, Jamaica Plain. Completed in the autumn of 2022 under the artist Roberto Chao and the Task Force, the four-panel work celebrates Afro-Latin music and dance. It stands where the Hi-Lo Taino mural once carried the same role, a public statement that the culture is still here.
100% Delicias Express, 660A Centre Street, Jamaica Plain. A Dominican takeout spot that opened on Centre Street in 2018, serving the staples of home cooking. It is the kind of small, owner-run kitchen that keeps the neighbourhood’s flavour from washing out.
Former Hi-Lo Foods, 415 Centre Street, Jamaica Plain. Now a Whole Foods, but for three decades the grocery where Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans found the products and the language of home. Its 2011 closure remains the local symbol of gentrification’s reach.
Dominican Parade route, Centre Street to Franklin Park. Each August the parade steps off from Hyde Square at noon, moving down Centre Street and along Columbus and Walnut Avenue. It marks Restoration Day, the holiday commemorating the war begun on 16 August 1863 to restore Dominican independence from Spain.
Casa de la Cultura Dominicana en Boston. A non-profit dedicated to Dominican culture in the city, organising the parade, festivals and workshops. Its parade runs from Centre Street in Jamaica Plain through to Walnut Street in Roxbury, threading the two neighbourhoods the community has long shared.
Where They Came From
The Dominicans of Boston are not from one place, but the pattern is clear. Early arrivals came largely from the Cibao region in the north, around Santiago and Salcedo, and from Peravia province west of the capital.
Peravia is the source of the Miraflores connection that bound a single village so tightly to Jamaica Plain. Later waves drew on La Altagracia and Maria Trinidad Sanchez provinces in the east and northeast of the country.
What pushed them was a long run of hardship: the instability after Trujillo, the US intervention of 1965, and the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s, with falling wages, unemployment and currency devaluation. Boston, with its factories and its existing Caribbean communities, offered a foothold and a network of kin already in place. The same currents carried Dominicans to the textile cities of the Northeast, from the Dominican neighbourhoods of Providence to the silk-city blocks of Paterson, New Jersey, and above all to the founding diaspora capital in Washington Heights in Manhattan.
Boston Today
Dominicans are now among the largest immigrant groups in Boston, alongside the Chinese, and the second-largest Latino community in the city after Puerto Ricans. Around 2015, roughly 32,000 Dominicans lived in Boston, with the largest shares in Dorchester, Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. They are a young community, with a median age around 26, and a majority foreign-born.
The Latin Quarter is both a victory and a fragile thing. The designations of 2016 and 2018 gave the neighbourhood official standing, but rents per square foot along the commercial strip have risen sharply, and many businesses are small, earning under half a million dollars a year. The same forces that pushed families to Roxbury and Lawrence still press on the storefronts.
Yet the parade still fills Centre Street every August, the murals still go up, and the kitchens still fry chimichurri to order. The Dominicans in Boston have spread across half the city, but Hyde Square remains the place they come back to, the corner where the merengue starts before noon.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do Dominicans in Boston live?
The Dominicans in Boston are spread across the city, with the largest shares in Dorchester, Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. Hyde Square in Jamaica Plain, now designated Boston’s Latin Quarter, has long been the symbolic and commercial heart of the community, though rising rents have pushed many families outward.
When did Dominicans first come to Boston?
Dominicans began arriving in the Boston region in the 1950s, with numbers rising sharply after the assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961 and the political turmoil that followed. The biggest surge came in the late 1980s and mid-1990s.
What is Boston’s Latin Quarter?
Boston’s Latin Quarter is the area around Hyde and Jackson Square in Jamaica Plain. The Boston City Council designated it in 2016, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council made it an official state cultural district in 2018, recognising its concentration of Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and other Latino businesses.
What is the Miraflores connection?
Miraflores is a small village in the Dominican Republic’s Peravia province with extraordinarily close ties to Jamaica Plain. The sociologist Peggy Levitt found that by 1994, over sixty-five per cent of the village’s households had relatives in metropolitan Boston, a case study she published as The Transnational Villagers.
Is there a Dominican parade in Boston?
Yes. Each August the Dominican Parade steps off from Hyde Square and moves down Centre Street toward Franklin Park, marking Restoration Day. It is organised by Casa de la Cultura Dominicana en Boston and features floats, live music and dance.
How large is the Dominican community in Boston?
The Dominicans in Boston number roughly 32,000 as of 2015 estimates, making them one of the city’s largest immigrant groups and its second-largest Latino community after Puerto Ricans. They are a relatively young, majority foreign-born population.
If your family’s story passed through Boston, or any of the places Dominicans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Peravia to a triple-decker in Hyde Square, to wherever you are now.