Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY)

Abstract

Adriano de Jesús Espaillat is the first Dominican American congressperson in the history of the United States. He was elected in 2016 to represent New York State’s 13th Congressional District in the House of Representatives. This district includes the area of Harlem, located in New York City’s northern Manhattan, which is an iconic area of black culture and political history. Congressman Espaillat is the first nonblack official to represent Harlem in seven decades; the district was redrawn in 2012 and currently encompasses two areas of heavy Dominican concentration as well. While there have been many foreign-born members who became naturalized citizens before serving in the US Congress, Espaillat is one of the first two known to have had an undocumented immigration status for some time. His example of political ascent to Congress is relevant in the context of the current national immigration debates and marks a milestone in the political history of Dominican Americans—a group that started migrating significantly in the late 1960s and is currently one of the two largest Hispanic groups in New York City, and the fifth largest Hispanic group in the country. Espaillat’s election illustrates current interactions among minority groups in large cities and new trends in American urban politics; it also shows the great difficulties that candidates of new immigrant groups continue to face in achieving political success. Adriano Espaillat has attracted considerable attention—albeit nonuniform—from numerous printed and electronic political media. However, scholarly works about him are in incipient stages. Research on members of Congress usually takes the form of case studies, minority or Latino politics projects, or specialized encyclopedias or dictionaries. Few of them have been published since Espaillat’s election as a Democratic Representative to the 115th Congress in 2016. The process to create this bibliography has been twofold: first, this is a selection of substantive, informative, and overall balanced sources available in national and local political media, most of them primary sources and some published in Spanish. The collected materials are then placed in relation to different sets of scholarly work: Dominican Americans studies, urban politics, political incorporation of immigrants, and political ascent of ethnic politicians. They provide concepts for understanding—with depth and perspective—Congressman Espaillat’s success.