Today, two-thirds of Haverstraw’s residents are from Latin America. The town has long attracted migrants seeking work in factories, including Europeans and Southern Black Americans in the brickyards at the turn of the 20th century and Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in the garment industry in the 1950s. Dominicans, specifically those from Tamboril, arrived in more significant numbers beginning in the 1980s and came to form the cultural core of the town.

Over the decades, excitement always swelled when a compatriot arrived from Tamboril, but in 2000, when word spread that the latest newcomer on Main Street was Vilma Lopez, folks were salivating. The sharp young woman with distinctive caramel hair and a red lipstick smirk was the granddaughter of Doña Lucía Reynoso, a beloved Tamboril repostera, or pastry chef. Lopez was bombarded with inquiries wherever she went—in the salon chair, at the bodega cash register, and on the front steps of neighbors’ homes. Everyone had the same question: “Can you make your grandmother’s bizcocho?” 

It’s not that bizcocho Dominicano was hard to come by in Haverstraw at the time—dozens of reposterías and many more home bakers throughout the Northeast produced the moist, airy pound cake with tropical fillings—but only a slice of Doña Lucía’s at a confirmation, wedding, or quinceañera had the power to make their home on the Hudson feel more like the one they left behind on the Río Licey. The cake’s light, buttery crumb sits on the tongue as lightly as a drop of dew on a leaf, and the filling captures the essence of pineapple or guava in a bright jam.

Fortunately for Haverstraw’s Tamborileños, Lopez had been baking Doña Lucía’s bizcocho since she was a young girl. She grew up spending evenings at her grandmother’s house, piping suspiro (meringue frosting) into hundreds of multicolored sugar flowers. “It wasn’t the easiest job,” she recalls. “The pastry bags we had were much harder to squeeze than the ones we have now.” When Lopez was 14, her grandmother sent her to apprentice with a cake decorator in the big city of Santiago, after which she became an even greater asset to Reynoso’s booming bizcocho business. Lopez says, “Of course, I wanted to be out with my friends, but I didn’t like seeing her work so hard, so I helped.” Sometimes, Lopez would break away to play volleyball at the local courts, where she eventually met her future husband, Raymundo Lopez. 

Vilma and Raymundo married on Christmas Day in 1982. He moved to Washington Heights in New York City a few years later. While the couple was apart, Vilma would mail him bizcocho in tins. She and their two children joined him permanently in 1998. After arriving in the U.S., Vilma returned to what she knew best: she started making cakes again in a repostera’s tiny apartment on 163rd Street (well, first she washed dishes for the woman, then she made cakes) while Raymundo worked various factory jobs. Two years later, friends convinced the family to move to Haverstraw, and Vilma began her own bizcocho home bakery. 

The Lopezes’ story may sound familiar to a lot of Dominican immigrants. Like many others, they came to New York City during the largest wave of migration from the Dominican Republic between the early 1980s and the late ’90s—while U.S.-backed authoritarian Joaquín Balaguer was in charge. New immigrant men struggled to support their families with jobs in the precarious manufacturing and service industries, and women did what they could to pick up the slack. Even women with professional training faced language, racial, and other socioeconomic barriers, which often forced them to return to traditionally devalued domestic labor.

In the 1950s and ’60s, a few Dominican women were instrumental in helping professionalize and monetize this labor, specifically cooking and repostería. In Santiago, Doña Ligia de Bornia taught repostería classes out of her house, which is where Vilma’s grandmother first learned to make bizcocho. Bornia went on to become a prolific cookbook author and food show host. In Santo Domingo, repostera and feminist activist Miriam de Gautreaux started the first school for feminine domestic training in the country, La Escuela Laboral María Trinidad Sánchez (named for an early Dominican freedom fighter). According to a 2023 article in El Caribe, “Most great Dominican reposteras went through her classes…through [those] courses, Dominican bizcocho was introduced to the United States, where it became one of the most in-demand cakes and led to the proliferation of Dominican American reposterías.” 

Between 2003 and 2006, Lidia Marte, an anthropologist at the University of Puerto Rico, followed several Dominican women as they established themselves culturally and economically in New York. One woman she shadowed, Fifa, cooked for a Washington Heights food truck during the day and, like Vilma, supplemented her family’s income by making bizcochos late into the night. She said, “I learned to make cakes here, watching a woman who taught me. I cook because it reminds me of my land.” Marte’s work shows how for Dominican women like Fifa and Vilma, recipes became a means of propagating cultural and economic life on new soil.

In 2011, the Lopezes expanded their home business into a full-service, brick-and-mortar repostería: Vilma’s Bakery. Raymundo no longer had to work factory jobs, and the bakery quickly became one of the most popular reposterías in the region. When Haverstraw’s annual Dominican Independence Day parade rolls around, everyone calls Vilma. When Yankees players and veterans (many of whom are Dominican) were tasked with getting a cake for the late iconic team owner George Steinbrenner’s memorial, they called Vilma.

Vilma’s is among a few notable reposterías, like Bizcocho Dominicano de Carmen in Queens and Bizcocho de Colores in Manhattan (perhaps the most famous one in New York), that get nearly unanimous positive reviews on Google. That’s no easy feat: Primas and tías procuring cake for an event are exacting. If it falls apart on the way to the venue, they’ll be the butt of bad bochinche (gossip) for months or years to come. When asked what the most challenging part of running a repostería is, Vilma says without hesitation, “Handing the cake to the customer.” She’s learned a lot of tricks over the years to ensure customer satisfaction. “I always make the cakes a little bigger than requested,” she explains. “In the Dominican Republic, when it was humid in the winter, we’d hold up sun reflectors over the cake to dry out the suspiro before it melted.” 

The Lopez family, which recently celebrated the bakery’s 14th anniversary, continues to run a tight ship. Vilma still comes in at 4:30 a.m., and Raymundo takes over at 10:30 a.m. By that time, the small storefront—lined with bride and groom figurines and cartoon cake models—buzzes with customers, all putting in their orders and inspecting pickups. Some cakes passed over the counter are traditional-style bizcochos (tiered wedding cakes, and designs depicting dresses and Dominican flags) while others represent more modern trends (Paw Patrol or Fortnite cakes covered in slick fondant, or cakes decorated with the logo—or real bottles—of Hennessy Cognac, Brugal Rum, or Presidente beer). 

The bakery is just as busy behind the scenes. Vilma’s carefully trained staff of 20 are scattered throughout the halls and huddled over workstations, expertly bringing bizcochos to life. Rene Vargas mixes dough in a giant stand mixer in one room; Carlos Lopez (no relation) carefully spreads suspiro over the cakes in another; and Pamela Germosen, AirPods in her ears, gently rotates a cake turntable while tidying the lettering on a Dog Man-themed cake in yet another room. Other reposteros make pineapple jam, guava paste, or dulce de leche from scratch to slather between cake layers. 

This well-oiled operation now produces roughly 300 to 400 cakes per week, according to Vilma and Raymundo’s son, Ray Jr., who grew up in the business. As Ray Jr. takes on more and more of the day-to-day responsibilities, Vilma is tentatively thinking about stepping back. Nowadays, she spends more time back home in Tamboril and Punta Cana when she can. As she shows off pictures of herself wearing a wide-brimmed hat and smoking a cigar with friends under palm trees, she says, “On my last trip, somebody recognized me from Haverstraw and asked if I could make them a cake. I told them, ‘Not now. When I’m here, I’m on vacation.’” 

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