Hay que venir al sur is a column from the music journalist and Songmess podcast host Richard Villegas. Winking to the campy classic from the Italian disco diva Raffaella Carrà, the column is an invitation to explore the kaleidoscopic music scenes blossoming south of the border. In this issue, a blast of Caribbean warmth as Villegas delves into the thumping diasporic rhythms of the Dominican Republic.
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People in my family don’t die where we’re born. I realized this years ago while living in liminal pockets across Long Island, New York, when I boarded with paternal relatives who emigrated from war-torn Colombia throughout the 1960s and ’70s. My dad—a rebel, a hustler, and above all a survivor—left Medellín when he was a teenager, hitchhiking through Central America and Mexico, and eventually crossing the United States border sometime around the Summer of Love. He embraced hippiedom (though he dubiously claims having never smoked grass), and upon reaching the Big Apple, he built a successful steel-door factory alongside his brothers, capping a remarkable immigrant odyssey.
In the mid-1980s he met my mother, a native New Yorker raised by my Puerto Rican grandmother, who, in hopes of achieving the false promise of assimilation, had refused to teach her Spanish. My mom attended the majority-Black Martin Luther King Jr. High School, and later entered the White-dominated corporate world as an accountant at the beacon of Empire State chicness that was Barneys New York. However, my mother’s predisposed ambivalence toward her Latina identity came back to bite her in the ass when, a few years into their marriage, my father caught the all-consuming bug to leave the United States. Colombia was still wracked by guerilla violence, so returning to the homeland was out of the question. But a few placid Caribbean vacations had elevated the Dominican Republic to an attractive prospect for my dad’s dream of suburban family life spiced with Latin American warmth, and my mom acquiesced to the adventure.
We arrived on the island in 1990. I was barely a toddler; my sister still tossed in my mother’s belly. We first settled in Santo Domingo, the chaotic, sweltering capital renowned for its colonial history as the maiden city of the new world. But that was ultimately too metropolitan for my father’s liking, so we drifted toward the rural region of El Cibao, landing in Santiago de los Caballeros. La Ciudad Corazón (as it’s affectionately nicknamed, for its location at the country’s center) had a sweet, bucolic quality, surrounded by verdant hills and an equally fertile culture of hard-working campesinos, scrappy college kids, and percussive rhythms.
My first awareness of music was discomfort. Our across-the-street neighbors, Rafael and Ana Ramírez—who, into their miraculous nineties, remain close family friends—owned a towering white pickup, which they used for moving crops and cattle at their property in the mountains, as well as their fleet of offspring. On occasion, I’d join their younger kids in climbing and leaping from the muscular vehicle, and at night they abused its speakers blasting merengue and bachata at window-shaking decibels.
That’s how Antony Santos’s “Voy pa’lla” was Clockwork-Oranged into my mind—an inevitability, since the song grew to bachata ubiquity with its squeaky guitars and longing hooks about a distant paramour. My friend and colleague Manuel Betances (a Dominican radio eminence and cofounder of the independent music blog Discolai) would later educate me on the genre’s absenting of women, who are usually leaving a man or already gone. The phenomenon has been so culturally ingrained that few female bachata singers found success, though the brassy stylings of Aridia Ventura and the millennial laments of Monchy & Alexandra prevailed.
It’s my opinion that bachata’s gritty origins in the urban storytelling of 1970s Santo Domingo have been egregiously sanitized by romantic nostalgia and historical revisionism. Most casual fans revert to the breezy feel-good melodies of the genre’s biggest exponent, Juan Luis Guerra, while non-Dominican musicians invoke the rustic sound for overly earnest ballads. In reality, the backbone of bachata is made of its sharp guitars and machine-gun güiras, a jagged canvas for melodramatic torch songs rife with sexual innuendo, once synonymous with the divey cabarets and gangster house parties of the city’s red-light district.
Guerra emerged in the mid 1980s as a decidedly un-red crooner, dismissed by his peers for making what they called pink bachata, or “bachata rosa.” In 1990, Guerra named his fifth album just that, reclaiming the dig with a string of smashes, including the title track (now a perennial fixture of Latin American weddings) and the propulsive merengue “La bilirrubina,” catapulting him to global superstardom and cementing his legacy as the Dominican Republic’s single most influential musician—for, despite his mighty pop lyricism, Guerra also proved a curious anthropologist and skillful composer on award-winning follow-ups Areíto (1992), Fogaraté! (1994), and A son de guerra (2010), where he explored musical traditions from the Antilles, Africa, and East Asia, respectively.
Though I’m partial to the urgent lo-fi pleading of classics from Luis Vargas and Marino Pérez, I admire bachata’s adaptability and constant generational renewal. In 1999, Toque Profundo’s bachata-rock hybrid “Dando aco” dominated underground clubs as well as my elementary school dances. In the new millennium, Bronx-born acts Prince Royce and the glitzy boy band Aventura—followed by Romeo Santos’s meteoric solo career—expanded bachata’s significance as a beacon of national and diasporic pride. Today, the mysterious group Los Sufridos harkens to the genre’s streetwise heyday, collaborating with edgy rap and dembow artists to update the language and context of this beloved canon.
As with every Caribbean culture, the Dominican Republic’s vast rhythmic arsenal is a confluence of traveling musical and spiritual traditions. The island—a historically strategic territory shared with Haiti—was a crucial linchpin of the transatlantic slave trade, bringing colonial horror, Catholicism, and the Spanish guitars and African drums that laid the foundation of the country’s most emblematic sound, merengue. A patchwork of the regional genres pambiche, carabiné, and mangulina, merengue can be traced back to the mid-1800s as the joyful folk music of El Cibao. Two main schools exist around the galloping beat: the first, merengue típico, or perico ripiao, the root form built on acoustic guitar, tin güira, the Dominican drum known as tambora, and a zooming accordion, introduced to the tropics by German merchants. The second—merengue’s more mainstream twentieth-century expression—is known for ostentatious big band ensembles with keys and blaring horns imported from American jazz and swing music.
If the women of bachata are largely AWOL, in merengue they are among its heaviest hitters. Standing beside all-time greats like Los Hermanos Rosario and Johnny Ventura, Milly Quezada (dubbed the queen of merengue) has been a national treasure for nearly five decades. Though she was born in Santo Domingo, her family fled the island following the U.S.-backed civil war of 1965, settling into a growing Dominican diaspora in Washington Heights, New York. She rose to fame fronting Milly, Jocelyn y Los Vecinos, an orchestra formed alongside her siblings that bounced between boleros and salsa, eventually going solo and conquering merengue with sexy, steely favorites “Volvió Juanita” and “Entre tu cuerpo y el mío.”
Across the merengue aisle and from deep within El Cibao’s campos, Fefita La Grande picked up her first accordion in 1951, at seven years old. Bawdy, strong willed, and destined for greatness, she rebuffed the era’s expected female meekness and earned the nickname “La Vieja Fefa” for her beyond-her-years savvy and spitfire tongue. Since the 1970s, Fefita La Grande has danced atop the merengue típico throne, playing nightclubs, county fairs, and ambitious US tours into her eighties. Her mastery of the accordion is inextricable from the genre, cited as foundational by everyone from veterans like El Prodigio to young stars leading a típico resurgence, including Nelly Swing and El Rubio Acordeón.
I had the honor of interviewing Fefita a few years ago for a thrilling feature orchestrated by my father through our friends in the Ramírez family. Turns out, La Mayimba (another of her many colorful superlatives) lives in our old Santiago neighborhood, and she welcomed us into her home dressed in a spangled bodysuit and her glossiest wig. Ahead of the interview she asked if we wanted the full experience, and the team, nervously, said yes. Later, during a photo shoot in the city center, she laid in the middle of the street, stopping traffic and braving the boiling pavement to achieve the coveted golden shot, reaffirming her well-deserved immortality.
My embrace of Dominican music came late in life. Growing up, merengue and bachata passed through me like an ambient soundtrack to religious conservatism and boring heterosexual hegemony. It was a disjointed relationship from the start: We were a family of foreigners, where my dad preferred ancient tangos and boleros from Carlos Gardel and Armando Manzanero, while my mom was an ’80s pop girl into Whitney Houston and Prince. I was also visibly faggy, trying—and failing—to hide my limp wrists in order to survive casual homophobia in the streets and at home. I found little of myself in the Dominican spirit; that is, until my twenties, when a friend sent me the music video for Rita Indiana’s “La hora de volvé,” a screeching hybrid of merengue and electroclash overflowing with queer androgyny, psychedelic green screen effects, and a thumping tambora beat that echoed through the far recesses of my youth.
In a previous edition of this column, I highlighted the Chilean duo Dënver for sparking a robust reassessment of my Latin American identity. Rita Indiana—an award-winning novelist, playwright, model, musician, and performance artist—didn’t suddenly make me feel Dominican, but she singlehandedly rewrote my relationship to the country and its idiosyncrasies. It was like seeing my childhood in color for the first time: no longer missing from the story (like the women of bachata), but merely delayed in finding my tribe. Indiana’s landmark 2010 LP, El juidero, was fervent in its embrace of merengue and Afro praise rhythms like gagá and pri-prí, while never compromising her own love of reggae and heavy metal. If she could contain multitudes, why couldn’t I?
Rita Indiana was my gateway into the island’s prolific indie scene, which, to my utter shock, was full of gay people and outrageous night creatures who drew me like a hipster moth to a pretentious flame. The masked, cartoonishly voiced Gallo Lester—a stranger-than-fiction creation of actor and multi-instrumentalist Raymond Jaquez—poured sci-fi, merengue, rooster crowing, and Rammstein-indebted riffs into a patented sound he dubbed mambo metal. Meanwhile, the Santiago trio, MULA, composed of producer Rachel Rojas and twin sisters Cristabel and Anabel Acevedo, merged the former’s futuristic experiments in techno, dubstep, and merengue with the latter’s dulcet folk harmonies, creating kaleidoscopic worlds with each new song.
My work as a music journalist plunged me deeper into the Dominican Republic’s experimental music movement, dating back to the 1970s folk ensemble Convite and the emergence of its leader, Luis Días, as the country’s first rock star. Días mobilized a generation of inventive jazz-fusion artists, including Toné Vicioso, Roldán Mármol, and Irka Mateo, studying the drumming and spiritual traditions of Afrodescendent communities across the island and refracting their learnings into politically charged roots music. My favorite of their contemporaries is Xiomara Fortuna, long hailed as the queen of Dominican fusion, though I more often describe her as the mother of Dominican indie for her ongoing and astonishingly current blends of rock, jazz, merengue, reggae, IDM, trap, and any other rhythmic pattern she can alchemize into an earworm.
In a poetic twist of fate, and after twenty years galavanting around the world, I decided to move back in with my parents in the Dominican Republic to restructure my life into the family-centric paradigm that once felt alien. I’ve also immersed myself in the local scene, DJ-ing frequently and making major music fetes like Isle of Light and SOLOFEST (the latter put on by the country’s hottest rock band, Solo Fernández) priorities of my annual event calendar. Plus, as an on-the-ground reporter, I’ve been able to cover the rise of fresh pop talents such as Letón Pé, Martox, and Giorgio Siladi, as well as a riveting electronic underground that I hope Yendruy Aquinx, NMNL, and Adriel.sfx will someday transcend.
I type these words from South Korea, where I’ve spent the past few weeks visiting my sister and nephew. It seems the kid will be growing up here and is already learning a cocktail of English, Korean, and whatever tidbits of Spanish my parents and I sneak in over WhatsApp calls. I see the parallels between our expatriated upbringings and worry about the challenges he will certainly face, but take heart in the world of possibilities our family’s audacious geographical choices have opened. I wonder if he’ll become obsessed with K-pop or be a feisty punk contrarian. Will he care about music at all? And where will he go when he’s old enough to choose his own adventures? I haven’t a clue, and perhaps that’s most thrilling of all. May he march to the beat of his own drum—and if it’s a tambora, all the better.
Richard Villegas is a music journalist, podcaster, and professional chismoso with bylines in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Bandcamp, and Remezcla. When not raging behind his desk in the Dominican Republic, you can find him traipsing through Latin America in search of fresh underground music and a cheap local beer.
Illustration: Jonas Kalmbach
