Dominican diaspora in New York mourn victims of the nightclub rooftop collapse

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NEW YORK (AP) — Dominicans in New York City are mourning the deaths of over 200 people in Tuesday’s roof collapse at a Santo Domingo nightclub.

The city is home to the largest Dominican diaspora community, with over 700,000 residents claiming roots in the island nation as of 2020.

On Thursday, Teresa Tapia was among those visiting a growing memorial set up in the center of the Washington Heights neighborhood, featuring a dozen veladoras — prayer candles placed in glass.

“Dominicans are really grieving, I tell you,” said Tapia, 47, who has lived in the U.S. for eight years. “I’m so sad. I had to go out and walk. I had to get out.”

Among the 221 confirmed dead in the tragedy at the Jet Set club were prominent baseball players Octavio Dotel and Tony Enrique Blanco Cabrera, as well as merengue singer Ruddy Pérez.

Tapia had seen Pérez perform in his final New York concert on April 4, where she said he encouraged people to join him at Jet Set, at the next show. After shedding a few tears, she turned to a poster of the singer.

“Thank you Ruddy,” she said in Spanish, “For all the joy you gave to your country.”

Others at the memorial in the heavily Dominican neighborhood met up and greeted each other, conferring briefly over the latest headline or image from the disaster in their phones.

Above the memorial, scrawled in black pen, was a message of unity that brushed off regional and political divisions.

“Today we are not from Licey or Las Aguilas, from the PRM or the PLD,” it read in Spanish, using acronyms for political parties in the Dominican Republic. “Today we are simply a people united by grief.”

On Wednesday, mourners clutching Dominican flags filled the pews at St. Elizabeth Church for a mass in memory of the victims. Among those speaking from the pulpit was Ydanis Rodriguez, the city’s transportation commissioner who was born in Dominican Republic. He pushed back at a narrative heard online and in the streets of Washington Heights that less sympathy was due to the victims because it was an expensive nightclub.

“The people who say ‘it was millionaires there.’ No. It was Dominicans there. It was workers at Jet Set,” other workers and students, said Rodriguez in Spanish.