Dominican Americans

Dominican Americans are residents of the United States who have emigrated from or have ancestry from the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic is a Spanish-speaking nation of approximately 5.5 million people located on the western half of the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean Sea; the remainder of the island consists of the nation of Haiti. In the 2000 U.S. Census, about 765,000 individuals identified themselves as being Dominican, constituting about 2.2 percent of the total identifying as Hispanic. Dominican Americans are an ethnically diverse group whose racial ancestry includes the Spanish colonizers of the Caribbean, other Europeans, African slaves, Haitians and migrants from other Caribbean countries (who themselves may be a mix of ethnicities), and people from the Middle East and Asia. Most Dominican Americans are recent migrants to the United States; most arrived after 1960, and immigration greatly increased in the 1980s.

Because they are a relatively small and recently arrived ethnic group in the United States, few studies have been done specifically of Dominican Americans and obesity, and most United States government surveys do not collect information on Dominican Americans as a separate ethnic group. Therefore, information about the health of Dominican Americans must be gleaned primarily from studies of Hispanic Americans (with the proviso that Mexican Americans are the largest Hispanic-American group and thus dominate any statistics on that group), but also from studies of African Americans, other communities of migrants from the Caribbean or Central and South America, and of Dominicans still residing in the Dominican Republic.

Obesity is higher among Hispanic Americans than among Caucasian Americans, among both [Page 195]children and adults, and rates of obesity and obesity-related diseases such as hypertension and type 2 diabetes also occur at a higher rate. Various explanations have been proffered, including differing dietary choices and rates of physical activity, cultural acceptance of larger body types, poverty, inequality in healthcare due to language barriers or other reasons, and genetic differences.

Despite the importance of ethnically specific studies, it is important to remember that in many ways, health risks for Hispanics are similar to those for the American population as a whole. For instance, overweight and obesity have been rising in the American population as a whole, and leading causes of death for Hispanics are similar for Hispanics as for Caucasians, with the exception that diabetes is a much greater cause of death for Hispanic women where it ranks fourth overall rather than eighth. Hispanics are intermediate among ethnic groups in overall health; they have higher mortality rates than Caucasian Americans or Asian and Pacific Islanders at most or all age groups, and mortality rates than American Indians/Alaska Natives and African Americans.