³¹ De la Garza, R.O., DeSipio, L., Garcia, F.C. Garica, J.A., and Falcon, A.: 1992. "Latino Voices: Mexican Americans, Puerto Rican, and Cuban perspectives on American Politics." Boulder, CO: Westview. P. 15. Quoted from: Bello, Jose R., 2000. "Political Participation and Political Empowerment in the Dominican-American Community: A Theoretical Model and a Survey Proposal." Masters thesis in Public Affairs. Cornell University. August 2000. p. 22


³² Flores, Henry: 2003. "Are Latinos Becoming more Republican?" St. Mary's Univeristy. Paper presented as the John W. Stromont Lecture of South Texas part of the Victorian College Johnson Symposium. February 2003. Dr. Henry Flores provides a thorough assessment of studies and polls that have taken place to assess Latino political preferences from general elections from 1990s to 2002.


³³ Their poll results have two extremes. In a few of the polls they do include Dominicans in their ethnic identity question but because of their low population the results are typically less than 1 percent. In other exit polls they fail to isolate Dominicans in the Latino ethnic question. These latter polls provide data on Mexicans, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central American, South American and Any Other Hispanic. Thus, it is assumed the latter category then includes Dominicans and those of equally mixed Latino ancestry, such as, Mexican-Salvadorian, etc.


³⁴ In this particular poll, the ethnicity question asked whether the respondent was Cuban, Cuban-American or other. Questionnaire is available at: http://www.wcvi.org/files/pdf/fl_poll_questionaire.pdf


³⁵ Berger, Joseph. "Dominicans Gaining on Puerto Ricans in City." October 9,2003. New York Times.


³⁶ Hernandez, R.; Rivera-Batiz, F.: 2003. "Dominicans In the United States: A Socioecomonic profile, 2000." Dominican Research Monographs. The CUNY-Dominicans Studies Institute. Released October 6, 2003.


³⁷ Bello, Jose R., 2000. "Political Participation and Political Empowerment in the Dominican-American Community: A Theoretical Model and a Survey Proposal." Masters thesis in Public Affairs. Cornell University. August 2000. p.2


³⁸ Mollenkopf, John and Miranda, Luis; 2002. "Latino Political Participation in New York City." Hispanic Federation. March 12, 2002. Note: this report also does not account for concerns of misrepresentation of Dominicans and other disenfranchised Latino groups.


³⁹ Recent publications produced by The Hispanic Federation are available by contacting their offices directly or by visiting the following website: http://www.hispanicfederation.org/res/publications.html.


⁴⁰ Pancho, H. and DeSipio, L.: 1994. "New Americans by Choice: Political Perspectives of Latino Immigrants" Boulder, CO. Westview.


⁴¹ Torres-Saillant, S., and Hernandez, R.: 1998. "The New Americans Series: The Dominican-Americans." Greenwood, Westport. p. 96-99


⁴² DeSipio, Louis; Pachon, Harry; de la Garza, Rodolfo; and . Lee, Jongho: 2003. "Immigrant Politics at Home and Abroad: How Latino Immigrants Engage in Politics of Their Hope Countries and the United States." Tomas Rivera Policy Institute. Columbia Univeristy, New York. March 2003.


⁴³ Despite the fact that New York State hosts 59% of the Dominican community in the US, there are more Dominican elected officials throughout the remainder of United States than in NY proper. There are also numerous appointed Dominican-American officials in various states. In NJ alone there have been over 30 appointed and elected individuals according to the Conference on Dominican Affairs of NJ (Downloaded on March 1, 2004 from http://www.dominicanconference.org/domelectedofficials.html).


⁴⁴ The Hispanic surnames are determined by the Real Academia Espanola.


⁴⁵ Falcon, A. and Hanson-Sanchez, C.; 1996. "Latino immigrants and Electoral Participation." New York: Institute for Puerto Rican Policy.


⁴⁶ Torres-Saillant, S., and Hernandez, R.: 1998. "The New Americans Series: The Dominican-Americans." Greenwood, Westport. p. 96-99.


⁴⁷ Mollenkopf, John and Miranda, Luis; 2002. "Latino Political Participation in New York City." Hispanic Federation. March 12, 2002.


⁴⁸ The mission of WCVI (www.wcvi.org) is to translate ideas into research, research into education, education into policy advocacy, and policy advocacy into action. The Southwest Voter Registration Education Project can be accessed via www.svrep.org.


⁴⁹ Flores, Henry: 2003. "Are Latinos Becoming more Republican?" St. Mary's Univeristy. Paper presented as the John W. Stromont Lecture of South Texas part of the Victorian College Johnson Symposium. February 2003. Paper provided by author upon request. The paper presents the preliminary findings of an on going research effort from June 2002 to 2006.


⁵⁰ Browning, Rufus P., et al, 2003. Racial Politics in American Cities. 3rd Edition. New York. "Chapter 4: New York: Still the Great Anomaly."


⁵¹ Graham, Pamela M.: 1996. "Re-imagining the nation and redefining the district: The simultaneous political incorporation of Dominican transnational migrants." Ph.D. Dissertation, Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina. Available through: http://www.il.proquest.com/hp/Products/DisExpress.html


⁵² We recognize that there are a multitude of factors affecting the effectiveness of minority representation in US Congress, namely seniority and numbers of congress people from the same ethnic-minority group. Bello, J.,2000. "Do Minority Representatives Make a Difference?" Cornell University. Provided upon request. In this cited article, Bello provides a thorough literature review of the issues surrounding minority representation and notes that minority representation does not automatically imply more influence or attention for minority issues. In this article he focuses on small cities with high Latino population and tests the changes in the federal funds received by Latino communities before and after a Latino congressperson holds office. Bello does not detect any meaningful changes to support the hypothesis.


⁵³ In fact, in 2000 Jose A. Suero and Angel Taveras were the first Dominican-Americans to run for US Congress. Jose A. Suero ran as a Republican against Congressman Rangel (D) and lost for Congressional District 15 of New York 5% to 92% of the votes, respectively. Mr. Taveras ran in the Congressional Primary as a Democrat to represent the Second Congressional District of Rhode Island. While he lost the race he came in third place. This was a remarkable feat for all Dominican-Americans and made all of Rhode Island take notice. In 2003, Rhode Island had the highest US Dominican elected official, State Senator Juan Pichardo.


⁵⁴ Taveras, D., 2003. "Dominican Voter Participation: A Glance at the Preliminary Data." Sixth Annual National Conference of the Dominican-American National Roundtable. Atlantic City, NY. October 10-12, 2003


⁵⁵ United States Census Bureau of the United States Department of Commerce. "Technical Assistance: Accuracy and Coverage Revision II" Prepared for the Committee on National Statistics. Dated March 12, 2003. Forwarded via a personal electronic mail communication by Robert E. Fay, III, dated September 8, 2003. Also conducted a personal phone interview with Mr. Fay on September 8, 2003. Document available through the following website link: http://www.census.gov/dmd/www/ace2.html


⁵⁶ The shift share technique is frequently used for determining economic projections. Basically, it involves the assumption that recent rates of change in the relative shares of a given quantity owned by a company or entity will continue to own into the short-term future. This assumption usually proves correct. For our purposes we are using population distribution percentages in the state to be proportional to those of congressional districts.


⁵⁷ For states were data was not provided national estimates were used for the ethnic group.


⁵⁸ This same information is obtainable from Summary File 4 which are responses based on the long-form of the census. SF4 is a different sample than the one we wish to study. Thus, if you look up the same information, say a population for a particular ethnic group the results are slightly different but still fall within the same confidence interval. Since we cannot compare numbers across data sets we extract percentage information from one data set to apply it to another data set. In order to compare our data appropriately we use the sample we are interesting in studying, namely the 108th Congressional District (100 percent, short form) based on the derived percentages from SF4.


⁵⁹ While there exists nothing to suggest that the 25 percent of misrepresentation error is a uniformly problem across the nation, this is the least we can do given the available information.


⁶⁰ This phenomenon is observed within the Cuban-American community here in the United States and in developing countries.


⁶¹ The US Census Population Divisions does projections from 2000 to 2100. Summary Documents coded NP-D1, NP-T5 and NP-T7. We only focused on 2004 to 2020 since our approximation method is most valid for shorter time frame, as is used in this report.