Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean

4 The Dominican Republic: Danza and the Contradanced Merengue

PETER MANUEL 4 / The Dominican Republic Danza and the Contradanced Merengue I n 1890 Puerto Rican poet Lola Rodríguez de Tió wrote the oft-quoted lines, “Cuba and Puerto Rico are the twin wings of the same bird; they receive flowers or bullets in the same heart.” Rodríguez de Tió was referring to the close cultural and political ties between the two islands, which remained sister colonies of Spain until 1898, many decades after the rest of Latin America had broken free. For its part, the Dominican Republic (or Santo Domingo, as it was called prior to 1844) in 1797 fell out of Spanish sovereignty, which was only intermittently and ineffectually restored later. In other respects, including its geographical location between Cuba and Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic did seem to cohere with Rodríguez’s simile, as the body that once linked the two wings but was later lacerated by bullets, in the form of the violence and instability of its history. Such convulsions occurred primarily in the nineteenth century, which was precisely the period of the contradanza’s heyday elsewhere in the Spanish Caribbean. Hence, if the contradanza enjoyed a distinguished and colorful career in Cuba and Puerto Rico, in the Dominican Republic it struggled along as a poor, if feisty, handmaiden, which did, however, play some role in generating the rambunctious merengue of twentieth-century fame. Corresponding to the perversities of nineteenth-century Dominican social and cultural history is the woefully inadequate amount of documentation of the contradanza and related genres. If the student of Cuban music history can explore a relative abundance of musical scores and contemporary accounts dating from as early as 1803, the relevant Dominican materials predating 1900 comprise a mere handful of enigmatic musical notations and generally ambiguous and often contradictory descriptions. Reconstruction of the contradanza ’s history, as we shall see, is further impeded by confusion surrounding the meaning of the more commonly used terms “merengue,” “danza,” and “tumba.” 156 Peter Manuel The exiguity of source materials has not, however, led to a corresponding dearth of modern scholarship, as researchers—primarily Dominican—of recent decades have done their best to reconstruct aspects of their country’s nineteenth-century history, especially in poring over the few useful historical accounts.1 This chapter draws in particular on the work of Dominican writers Catana Pérez de Cuello, Fradique Lizardo, José Guerrero, and Bernarda Jorge; that of Puerto Ricans Edgardo Díaz Díaz and Ángel Quintero-Rivera; and that of North American ethnomusicologist Paul Austerlitz. However, the attention of most of these investigators has been focused on the history of the Dominican merengue, with the local version of contradanza being significant only insofar as it contributed to that genre. For the purposes of this chapter, while the merengue of the 1850s constituted a contradanza variant of clear interest, the Dominican and especially Cibao-style merengue that subsequently evolved is largely out of the orbit of the contradance family. However, the salon merengue of the 1920s–1940s, ephemeral and marginal as it was, can be seen both as a revival of the merengue contradanzeado—the “contradanced merengue”—and as a local flowering of the Puerto Rican danza; accordingly, it is relevant to this study. Moreover, the Dominican Republic did host a local version of the danza, which was modeled on but not entirely identical to its Puerto Rican counterpart . If this danza dominicana did not flourish as vigorously as its Cuban and Puerto Rican siblings, it nevertheless constitutes a distinctive and under-documented entity in its nation’s music history and in the history of the contradance family in the Caribbean. Early History to the Rise of the Tumba Dominicana European colonization of the eastern portion of Hispaniola—“Quisqueya” to the Indians, “Santo Domingo” to the Spanish colonists, and the “Dominican Republic” after 1844—got off to an early and auspicious beginning, with the island being the focus of Christopher Columbus’s interest and exertions from the 1490s. The city of Santo Domingo was the first to be established in the New World and was the leading port of the 1500s; by the 1530s a dynamic creole society had also emerged in the northern region of the island (the banda norte). However, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the island’s economic and cultural development stagnated in comparison to that of Cuba and Puerto Rico, in ways that limited the efflorescence of the contradance. Spanish colonial interest shifted to mineral-rich Mexico and...