Dominican businesses booming in Philadelphia

Wearing his frayed Red Sox cap and surrounded by the soft-bread

pan sobao

and other Spanish specialties, Philadelphia grocer Juan Carlos Romano was at work last week in his Juniata Park bodega.

African American kids gripping small change tore in and out. Spanish-speaking women bought milk and lottery tickets across a Plexiglas enclosure that protects the register and holds fresh white socks and T-shirts.

Depending on the hour, Romano's customers are middle aged and working class, or twentysomethings with neck tattoos and shaved heads.

Born to Dominican immigrants and educated in New York and Santo Domingo, Romano, 28, is emblematic of the often-transplanted, frequently transnationalist entrepreneurs from the Dominican Republic whose corner markets, hair salons and other enterprises are an increasingly important presence in the region's growing Latino business community.

"I think Dominicans don't like to work for someone else. They like to be their own bosses," Romano said, explaining his countrymen's motivation.

The soaring number of Dominican bodega owners would seem to bear him out. Begun in 1998 with a handful of founders, Philadelphia's Dominican Grocers' Association today numbers about 300 active members and estimates that 1,000 bodegas across the city are Dominican-owned.

"We are in the places where supermarkets don't want to be or fear to be," said Jose Joaquin Mota, 42, who owned two stores in Philadelphia and now edits El Comercial, a two-year-old, 10,000-circulation monthly that caters to the grocers who have been buying up stores once held by Puerto Ricans and Koreans.

Born in the Dominican countryside, Mota came to America in 1995 seeking "a better life." He entered through New York, lived briefly in Camden, and settled in Philadelphia for its low cost of living. In many ways he is typical of the Dominicans here who consider themselves "economic exiles" from a cherished but impoverished home.

While their numbers are relatively small - 4,300 to 20,000 in greater Philadelphia based on estimates - their influence is outsized.

From the Greater Philadelphia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, led by Dominicana Varsovia Fernandez, to the grocers' group headed by American-born Danilo Burgos, and across such industries as hotel housekeeping, home health care, and hairdressing, entrepreneurial Dominicans are making a mark in South Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania.

A recent visit to East Camden's Rumbarengue Night Club found an almost exclusively Dominican crowd, dancing bachata and merengue, and roaring at the ribald antics of the Sanky Pankies, the comic duo whose movie, Sanky Panky, spoofs the stereotype of the Dominican beach boy as gigolo.

From Hispaniola, the Caribbean island the Dominican Republic shares with Haiti (the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation), financially strapped Dominicans have migrated here in large numbers for about a decade, often with visas issued in Puerto Rico, and after struggling first with New York's high cost of living.

One factor luring them to the Philadelphia area, Mota said, is New York City's rent controls. In some cases, New York tenants of long standing pay just a few hundred dollars a month for apartments that would bring several thousand on the free market. So landlords buy the tenants out, sometimes to the tune of $50,000, Mota said. Then they raise rents for the new tenants.

Some Dominicans have taken those buyouts and resettled in eastern Pennsylvania or in Camden, where living is more affordable.

Hairdresser Norma Molina, 45, came to the United States in 1990, spent seven years in New York, then moved to Philadelphia a decade ago. In New York, she paid $2,500 a month for her apartment and small connected shop.

In Philadelphia, her overhead is half that, she said.

In 2006, her shop, Flora Unisex, near Fifth Street and Allegheny Avenue, was voted favorite beauty salon in the third annual Hispanic Choice Awards presented by the Hispanic Yellow Pages. The shop on a run-down corner is outfitted with a half-dozen vintage, helmet-style dryers.

Of the estimated 2,000 beauty salons across the city, Molina said, at least 600 are owned by Dominicans, who generally are esteemed for their hairdressing skills.

A youthful grandmother, Molina helped her children open a second salon. She also sends money to the Dominican Republic to support her parents, sisters, brothers, nieces and nephews.

With each new letter from home asking for more help, she said, she feels more like la Madre de Calcutta - Mother Teresa.

Facundo Knight, executive director of Philadelphia's Dominican Community Cultural Center, said such transfers of funds home, called remesas, made up 10 percent of the country's $62 billion gross domestic product last year. No one knows how much Philadelphia, America's 14th-largest Dominican community, contributed, but it is certainly "in the millions" annually, he said.

Another factor that keeps diaspora Dominicans connected to their roots is the Dominican law that permits them to vote in the Dominican presidential election no matter where they are living and even if they have taken foreign citizenship.

"The big difference between Dominicans and other Hispanics is that even when we are many years away from our land, we are still linked to the local politics," said Nelson Cuello, a former Dominican vice consul in Philadelphia, who with his wife, Martha, runs Isla Travel, an agency with two offices, on Rising Sun and West Allegheny Avenues.

The economic conditions that drove Dominicans here hit a cross-section of their society.

Dante Sanchez, 52, was a gynecologist in Santo Domingo before emigrating to New York in September 1992 "for a better life."

Today in Philadelphia, he is a supervisor at Comhar, the Hispanic-oriented mental-health center on West Lehigh Avenue.

Even as a doctor, Sanchez said, he earned just $240 a month in the Dominican Republic. Starting as a home health-care aide in New York, he earned that much every week.

Three months after Sanchez arrived, his wife, Altagracia, came over. Eight months later came their children: Dante Jr.; Dafney; Deyadera; and Danny, all in their 20s and, like their parents, U.S. citizens.

Dante Jr., an Army recruit, has done two tours in Kosovo.

But the family's acculturation continues, Sanchez said, a fact brought home to him whenever native Americans hear his accented English and feel compelled to say they don't speak Spanish.

"But I am talking to you in English," Sanchez replies.

The goal for any immigrant, he said, is to be competent in both cultures while retaining one's heritage.

"If I tell you I love you, don't believe me," he said, "unless I say it in Spanish."