Greater Santo Domingo, the center of greatest attraction and concentration of population between 1920 and 2018

From its foundation in 1496 to the present, the city of Santo Domingo has been a point of attraction for conquerors, chroniclers, writers, sailors, travelers, pirates, corsairs, tourists, and inhabitants of the different towns that make up the Dominican Republic. In 1606, Governor Antonio de Osorio made the first census to determine the socioeconomic situation of the Island of Santo Domingo, which revealed that 56% of the residents and their slaves lived in the city of Santo Domingo and its surroundings.

Since then, no other census of the same magnitude had been carried out, except for the partial parish censuses organized by the Catholic Church on several occasions, until in 1920 the American occupation government, chaired by General Thomas Snowden, through the Executive Order No. 552 ordered a census to be carried out between January 19 and December 24, 1920.

The 1920 Census showed that the Dominican Republic was made up of 894, 652 people, of which 16.4%, equivalent to 146, 652 people, lived in the city of Santo Domingo. By then, there were 12 provinces and only four (Santo Domingo, Santiago, La Vega and Azua) had more than 100,000 people, most of them living in rural areas. These data reveal that the country by then was a kind of small, poor and uninhabited village.

These and other socio-economic and legal data served as support for the North American government to implement the Torrens System of land tenure, which established the right to land ownership of all those who could prove their occupation for more. of 10 years. At this time, forgery of property titles became common, an opportunity that North American investors and other nationalities took advantage of to form large sugar emporiums and cattle ranches in the Eastern region.

This fact contributed to the fact that many peasants from the East, Southwest and Cibao were stripped of their lands because they lacked property titles and were encouraged to fight the North American troops between 1917 and 1922, carrying out rebellions such as that of the "Gavilleros" in San Pedro de Macorís, La Romana, Hato Mayor and El Seibo; of Olivorio Mateo in San Juan de la Maguana and of the Barranquita, in Valverde Mao.

The 1935 Census, which produced a total population of the country of 1,479,417 inhabitants, almost double in just 15 years, shows significant changes in the composition of the population. This is explained by virtue of the constant immigration of foreigners that took place in that period and the health campaigns carried out by the US military occupation government that made it possible to combat malaria, venereal diseases such as syphilis and intestinal parasites that affected the majority of the population. Dominican.

The Santo Domingo District, which occupied the first place in 1920, in 1935 rose to sixth place with 102,697 people, below the provinces of Santiago, La Vega, El Seibo, Duarte and Trujillo (today San Cristóbal). This is due to the negative impact that the San Zenón cyclone had on the city of Santo Domingo, the restrictive measures put into practice by the Government to limit the access of the peasant population to the cities and the incentives provided by Trujillo for the population. peasant to reduce migration from the countryside to the city.

For the 1950 census, the Dominican population reached 2,135,872 inhabitants. The country was divided into 19 provinces and the District of Santo Domingo. The five most inhabited districts were Santiago, with 259,947; Santo Domingo District, with 239,464; La Vega, with 195,424; Trujillo, with 164,674, and Duarte, with 164, 400. These data reveal that 20 years after the establishment of the Trujillo dictatorship, the controls on the migration of the peasant population to the cities had been relaxed.

Starting in 1950, the construction of extensions and neighborhoods began in Santo Domingo and Santiago to house military, police and government employees, among which the Ensanche Ozama, Ensanche Luperón, Mejoramiento Social and María Auxiliadora stand out. Similarly, the construction process of marginal neighborhoods such as Cristo Rey, La Zurza, Capotillo, El Aljibe (today Simón Bolívar), Las Cañitas, Gualey, Guachupita, Los Guandules, La Fuente, Los Mina, Los Tres Brazos and others begins. on the banks of the Ozama and Isabela rivers, due to the increasingly growing monopoly of the land that Trujillo implanted in the fields, which forced him to declare those sugarcane lands that were in the hands of the family around 1956 of public utility Vicini so that the poor sectors could build their homes.

In the 1960 census, in the final days of the Trujillo dictatorship and with Dr. Joaquín Balaguer as puppet president, the inhabitants of the Dominican Republic numbered 3,047,070. The provinces had increased to 26, including the National District. The population was concentrated in four demarcations.

The National District once again occupied the first place with 466,830 inhabitants, Santiago had 291,690, San Cristóbal 252,280 and in La Vega 247,150. This shows that internal migration controls were very meager, by virtue of the multiple external fronts that by then the Government had open with the armed expeditions and the international community, through organizations such as the OAS, for the assassination attempts of Latin American presidents like Rómulo Betancourt.

According to the data released by the 1970 census, the population amounted to 4,009,458 inhabitants. The country was divided into 26 provinces and the National District. La Romana was the new province. The National District, with 813,420 inhabitants; Santiago, with 385,625; San Cristóbal, with 324,673, and La Vega, with 293,573, had more than 30% of the national population. These data clearly reveal that the city of Santo Domingo and its surroundings had become the fundamental attraction point for the population that inhabited the Dominican Republic, being very close to one million people.

The 1981 census showed that the country was inhabited by 5,545,741 people. The territorial division was the same: 26 provinces and the National District. The National District, Santiago, San Cristóbal and La Vega lead the number of inhabitants. The National District had 1,540,786 inhabitants, which allowed it to almost double the population it had in 1970, due to the intensification of the migration of the population from the countryside to the city of Santo Domingo, as it was the center of industrial production. , commercial and administrative principal of the country. The Dominican Republic had, according to the 1993 census, a population of 7,293,390 inhabitants.

The country was divided into 29 provinces and the National District, the latter having a population of 1,315,208 inhabitants. On this occasion, a negative growth rate is revealed in the city of Santo Domingo, which is due to birth controls promoted by the State and private institutions such as Profamilia, which has been reflected in a significant decrease in the rate. fertility. Similarly, emigration abroad has had an influence, which between the years 1960 and 1990 amounted to the astronomical sum of more than a million Dominicans in the United States and more than 200,000 to Europe.

The 2002 census determined that the country had 8,562,541 inhabitants. The country was made up of 31 provinces and the National District. The most inhabited population centers were the National District, Santo Domingo, Santiago, San Cristóbal and La Vega. Greater Santo Domingo had 2,731, 294 inhabitants, the province of Santo Domingo had 1, 817, 754 people and the National District 913, 540 inhabitants. The last census of 2010 shows a total population of 9, 445, 281, distributed in 31 provinces and the National District. Greater Santo Domingo raised the number of inhabitants in this census to 3,339,410 inhabitants, of which the Santo Domingo province had 2,374,370 people and the National District 965,040.

The population censuses of the last century, but especially from 1950 to 2010, reveal that the city of Santo Domingo has the preeminence in the urbanization process and in rural-urban migration, which explains that more than half of the interprovincial migrants are attracted to the capital of the Dominican Republic.

The city of Santo Domingo currently concentrates more than 40% of the national population and is the largest urban center in the Caribbean basin. The process of increasing modernization of the country has contributed to this in all orders from the first US military occupation between 1916-1924, the government of Horacio Vásquez between 1924-1930, the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo between 1930-1961, the governments of Dr. Joaquín Balaguer 1966-1978 and 1986-1996, the governments of the PRD 1978-1986 and 2000-2004 and the governments of the PLD 1996-2000 and 2004-2018, with the establishment of a network of roads and highways that at present exceeds 20 thousand kilometers, making the Dominican Republic one of the countries with the highest road density in Latin America, thus overcoming the isolation to which it was subjected for more than four centuries.

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