ANN ARBOR—”A Tale of Two Cities” takes the reader with intensity and realism to Washington Heights in Manhattan, the most emblematic Dominican neighborhood in the United States, and to Cristo Rey, the poor neighborhood north of Santo Domingo, with multicolored shanties hanging off muddy hills. It tells the story of these northern and southern cities, and of the way in which transnational migration has influenced the very foundation of their identities.

The author, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof (“A Tale of Two Cities, Santo Domingo and New York after 1950,” Princeton University Press) worked as a social worker in Latino barrios in New York and developed a deep interest in the neighborhood that is home to one in 10 Dominicans in the world. Soon he realized that the history of that narrow strip of Manhattan, where taxi drivers live among textile workers, cleaners and nannies, surrounded by hundreds of small grocery stores with Caribbean aromas, was inseparable from the history of Santo Domingo.

Hoffnung-Garskof spent years working in archives and libraries in the United States and the Dominican Republic, walking the streets and talking with overlooked yet central personalities of urban life. One such personality, an elderly man, still remembers the neighborhood of Cristo Rey when it “only had 13 families and was just a hamlet.”

“I wanted to tell the story of Washington Heights, but it was impossible to tell it without the history of the Dominican Republic,” said Hoffnung-Garskof, whose passion is to understand contemporary urban life in both the United States and Latin America, and their mutual influences, outside nationalistic frameworks. “I could not tell it from the standpoint of the official history of immigration to the United States, where migrant lives are meaningful only because they contribute to the melting pot or to ‘American’ multiculturalism.

“The Dominican population has become increasingly ‘de-territorialized.’ New York is another capital of the Dominican Republic. Washington Heights is part of the Caribbean. International migration forces us to reconsider the way we imagine urban history in both countries. But the two countries shared a history long before the first Dominican migrants appeared in New York, a history that included multiple military invasions of the Dominican Republic by the United States and a profoundly asymmetrical system of economic exchange.”

The historian points out that the debates in the U.S. Congress over the past year assume that migration is controlled by visa policy and border fences, but in reality the origins of migrations often lie in foreign policy.

“History does not stop at the border and has never been stopped at the border,” he said.

Hoffnung-Garskof documents how Dominican migrants, the largest group of foreigners in New York, forever transformed the city, while also playing a major and visible role in the life of the Dominican Republic.

“The most striking influence is remittances, modest amounts of money that Dominicans working abroad send to their relatives in the Dominican Republic, but which together contribute more to the Dominican economy than exports of agricultural products, direct investment by foreigners, and international aid,” Hoffnung-Garskof said.

The author sees transnational migration as an extremely complex process and “one of the most significant transformations in many Latin American countries in the last 50 years” that generates extra-regional ties and links between families, communities and nations—which today are organic components of the lives of many throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

The World Bank estimates that globally there are approximately 74 million “South-South” migrants, meaning from one developing country to another, and another 82 million migrants who have moved from the “South to the North.”

Though academic, the book is extremely readable because it is woven with details of daily life and popular culture. Hoffnung-Garskof not only analyzes the major historical events that affect both countries, including the occupation by U.S. troops, the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (1930-1961), the April revolution and the IMF obligatory adjustment in 1984, but also the lyrics of popular songs in both Washington Heights and Cristo Rey.

These lyrics document some of the most controversial aspects of migration, for instance, the role of migrants in the evolution of consumer culture in Latin America. He cites a text of a merengue associating New York with economic success. Pochy Familia y su Cocoband’s “El Hombre Lleg