Nowhere has been more affected by the crash than the Dominican Republic, where American Airlines Flight 587 had been due to land shortly before noon local time.
Initial reports suggest that more than half of the passengers came from there.
More than 100 relatives and friends of the estimated 150 Dominicans on board hurried to the airport in the capital, Santo Domingo, as news of the crash reached the country.
An airport spokesman, Mr Ellis Perez, said there were fears that as many as 90 per cent of the passengers on Flight 587 came from the island.
"We know it was a very ethnic flight," he said, adding that psychologists were now at the airport to counsel grieving relatives.
A government spokesman said the Dominican president, Mr Hipolito Mejia, was monitoring the situation and was in touch with his consulate in New York .
"This is a very emotional moment," Mr Bernardo Then, American Airlines operations director for the Dominican Republic and Haiti, said.
The republic - not to be confused with the Caribbean island of Dominica - has about 850,000 citizens resident in the US, an embassy spokesman in Washington said yesterday.
Many of them were drawn to the US by the chance to work and send money home to an impoverished country.