Zaire Dinzey-Flores, Ph.D.

Zaire Dinzey-Flores, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies and Sociology at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on understanding how urban space mediates community life, race, class, and social inequality, and has been featured in the Latin American Research Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Journal of Urban History. She is the author of Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City, which won the Robert E. Park Award of the Community and Urban Sociology Section (CUSS) of the American Sociological Association in 2014. Prof. Dinzey-Flores’ next project, titled El Ingeniero, is a scholarly documentary undertaken in collaboration with Dr. Ulla Berg, Professor of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies and Anthropology at Rutgers University. El Ingeniero brings together the Caribbean (the West Indies, the Dominican Republic, New York City, and Puerto Rico) through the physical and symbolic life of a builder, civil engineer, and constructor: Juan Vicente Dinzey Hazle, Prof. Dinzey-Flores’ father. Drawing from CUNY DSI’s research survey data and photographic and historical archives, this project will explore how Dominican immigrants to New York City engaged with their environment in the 1960s, both the city itself via the construction of buildings, and their fellow Caribbean and Black neighbors via the creation of communities. This line of thinking will perhaps add a new dimension to CUNY DSI’s Dominican Landmarks and Dominican Historic Neighborhoods projects, expanding our conceptualization of Dominican structures and presences.