It was nearly 2 a.m. when Jonathan Jourdain pushed through the door of El Deportivo and, still half-dancing, stepped out onto Amsterdam Avenue. Except for a tobacco shop and a fried chicken joint across the street, the block was dark. Saturday night was winding down.

Mr. Jourdain, 43, wore slacks and a billowy black-and-white shirt, damp with sweat. The next day was Dominican Father’s Day, and he had spent the evening with his father, Bienvenido Jourdain. They had sat at a table in the corner with El Cibaeño and his group, and had cocktails.

“My dad reminisces when he hears these old classic songs, and it rubs off on you,” he said. He didn’t grow up listening to his father’s music, he didn’t know the words. As a second-generation kid in the South Bronx, he heard Spanish at home, but it never caught on, he said. “My Spanish is, as Celia Cruz would say, ‘Not very good-looking.’

“My Dominicanism kicked in later in life. I was brought up as a hip-hop kid.”

He was working as an Amtrak police officer in the early 2000s when he went to the Dominican Republic with the New York Dominican Officers Organization. At dance clubs in Santiago, he heard fast, exhilarating merengue and típico, and was hooked. “I don’t know how to explain it to you,” said Mr. Jourdain. “The music, it just clicked.”

After a friend invited him to El Deportivo, he started coming every weekend. “At bars, people don’t look at you, they don’t shake your hand,” he said. When the club members decided to allow in 50 new members, Mr. Jourdain was encouraged to join. He went up for a vote and paid about $200 (applicants must also submit fingerprints and a letter of good conduct from the police). Now he gets discounts on drinks, a key to the door, and more important, he said, “the prestige of being a socio.”