Chapter 4: The Differentiated Meaning of Dominican Food After Migration

In exploring the meaning of cultural practices in post-migration life and its relation to feelings of home, I asked Dominicans what they considered typical Dominican cultural elements. Like Pedro, others mentioned food, followed by music, dance, ambiente, cheerfulness (alegria) and human warmth.

The previous chapter showed Dominicans’ very different attachments to the Dominican Republic in terms of home and showed that feelings of home are related to feelings concerning cultural origins, sense of community, opportunities, ambiente and human warmth. The value of opportunities, especially, showed that Dominicans are not always and only attached to their country of origin, but could also appreciate newly encountered ways of living and broadening horizons. However, this differentiation in orientation does not come to the fore in prior studies of homemaking – that is, ways in which people create a home post-migration (Dinmohamed, 2023). In the majority of immigrant homemaking studies, immigrants are portrayed as people needing to recreate practices from the country of origin. Accepting the idea that immigrant communities are heterogeneous in their attachments to the countries of origin, I am curious about how this is expressed in the practices with which they create home after migration.