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EDGARDO DíAZ DíAZ and PETER MANUEL 3 / Puerto Rico The Rise and Fall of the Danza as National Music P resent-day Puerto Ricans live in a world throbbing to the beat of reggaet ón, salsa, bomba, plena, bachata, rock, Dominican merengue, AfroCuban music, and, at times, the romantic and fatalistic bolero that alternates with Latin American baladas. Quite rare today would be anyone who recalls hearing of the contradanza, the variant of the European figure dance that was practiced in the first half of the nineteenth century in Puerto Rico. However, most Puerto Ricans would certainly recognize a close relative and creolized derivative—that is, the local danza—especially in the form of Puerto Rico’s national hymn, “La borinqueña,” which is heard in innumerable contexts , including as wake-up music on early-morning radio programs. In fact, whenever the “The Star-Spangled Banner” is heard in this colony of the United States, it is invariably preceded by the official local anthem, “La borinqueña,” which, unlike most anthems, is not a pompous march but a suave and romantic danza. Composed in 1868 as a symbol of resistance to Spanish colonial rule, the hymn serves as a unique but representative example of the genre that constituted the most popular dance music expression in Puerto Rico between 1850 and the 1930s. The beginnings of a distinctly Puerto Rican danza circa 1848 are documented in various newspapers and books published around those years (such as Manuel Alonso’s El gíbaro of 1849) and the later reminiscences of such chroniclers as Alejandro Tapia y Rivera ([1880] 1973) and Salvador Brau ([1885] 1977). While the traditional contradanza was a collective figure dance whose sequential group choreography was either dictated by a caller or fixed by convention, the danza was regarded as revolutionary in that, like the waltz, it liberated the couples to dance on their own, often in scandalously intimate 114 Edgardo Díaz Díaz and Peter Manuel embrace. The danza emerged musically and choreographically from the ashes of the duple-metered European contradance through the incorporation of local and regional rhythms that incited dancers to move in ways that eventually subverted whatever aristocratic and stately identity remained in this expression. Such transformations constituted creolization insofar as they represented the growth of new, indigenous forms generated by the mixture of foreign and local elements. Of potential confusion to the student of Caribbean music history is the fact that the Puerto Rican danza, in the 1840s–50s, was most commonly known as “merengue,” a term more familiar nowadays as the name of the modern , up-tempo Dominican popular music genre; as discussed in Chapter 4, although the term “merengue” has denoted a variety of genres in the Caribbean Basin, the Dominican form is by no means unrelated to the Puerto Rican one and indeed probably constitutes to some extent an offspring of it. The family of contradances, as performed in Puerto Rico in the mid-1800s, included quadrilles, rigodóns, Lancers, and Spanish contradanzas based on the “longways” style of English country dance, with its initial and recurring format of men and women in two lines facing each other. Most of these formats remained prominent in upper-class dances until the early twentieth century. Of them, only one contradanza type, with its form of two duple-metered repeated eight-bar sections alternated indefinitely, is seen by most observers as the principal tableau for the emergence of the local merengue, although chroniclers disagree as to the source of the contradanza in Puerto Rico as well as that of the variant that became the merengue. This chapter draws from original research (including that published earlier in Díaz Díaz 1996, 2006, and 2008) and the work of other prominent Puerto Rican scholars, including Ángel Quintero-Rivera, and earlier chroniclers, such as Tapia y Rivera, Brau, Alonso, and José Balseiro. It seeks to elucidate extant knowledge of the antecedents and dynamics of Spanish, British, and French contradances in Puerto Rico, their rearticulation as merengue, and the latter’s renaming and popularization as the Antillean “danza” that became not merely a dance music genre but arguably the most meaningful artistic expression of Puerto Rican culture in that period of seventy years. It may not be an exaggeration to assert that no other symbol during that period possessed the power— especially at key moments, such as the 1868 anticolonial insurrection in Puerto Rico and Cuba—to unite all social classes and mobilize Antillean...

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