  We present a new model for the description of heavy-quark hadronization in
relativistic heavy-ion collisions in the presence of a reservoir of lighter
thermal particles with which recombination can occur leading to the formation
of color-singlet clusters. Color neutralization is assumed to occur locally,
within the same fluid cell occupied by the heavy quark and it proceeds via the
recombination of the latter with light antiquarks (quarks) or diquarks
(anti-diquarks), which are assumed to be present in the medium with thermal
abundance as effective degrees of freedom around the QCD crossover temperature
$T_c$. Typically the resulting color-singlet clusters have quite low invariant
mass, in most of the cases below 4 GeV, and in this case they are assumed to
undergo an isotropic 2-body decay in their local rest-frame. Heavier clusters
are instead fragmented as Lund strings. The possibility of recombination with
light diquarks enhances the yields of charmed baryons, in qualitative agreement
with recent measurements. The assumption of local color neutralization leads to
a strong space-momentum correlation, which provides a substantial enhancement
of the collective flow of the final-state charmed hadrons, affecting both their
momentum and their angular distributions
