It was a hot Tuesday afternoon in late August 2002, and I was in La Nueva España, a small restaurant on 207th Street in Inwood, at the northernmost point of Manhattan. The restaurant, owned and run by a Dominican, served mainly Dominican food, and most of the guests were first- and second- generation Dominican immigrants. The man sitting with me at the table was the reason I had come. These days La Nueva España functioned as his regular café. He was a friend of the owner and lived with a sister in a tenement around the corner. José Delio Marte was a Dominican immigrant who had arrived in New York City in 1965, at eighteen.1 While his first jobs in New York had been factory jobs in midtown, he had spent most of the last thirty- seven years as an owner and operator of small businesses, mostly bodegas, small, Spanish- speaking Dominican neighborhood or street- corner grocery stores, in Upper Manhattan. During these years, he had seen the city and northern Manhattan change conspicuously: he had seen the Dominican community emerge.