Dance and music form an integral part of the Caribbean cultural heritage.

Merengue and salsa are forms of dance music that are an integral part of the expression of cultural identity of the Spanish speaking Caribbean and part of Latin America. There can be no doubt that merengue is as Dominican as salsa is Cuban and Puerto Rican. However, salsa is danced with the same enthusiasm in Santo Domingo as merengue is danced in Cuba and Puerto Rico. This article looks at the singular phenomenon of each kind of dance music without losing the overall Caribbean and Latin American perspective.

Merengue: From Its Beginnings to the Present
The origin and evolution of merengue is encapsulated in the following question: How did a once decried form of popular expression transform itself into an accepted expression of national identity? To answer this we need to take a journey through time from the 18th century up to the present.

The origin of merengue is unclear. Musicians and researchers offer us various opinions: they say that it is Haitian, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Spanish or African. Julio César Paulino, the director of the National Music Archives of the Dominican Republic, affirms that it is neither Spanish nor African, but in fact a completely new product. The truth is that it forms part of an Afro-European-Caribbean transcultural or syncretistic process. Merengue spread all over the Antilles; its actual place of birth is of little importance. Dances that go by this name can be witnessed in Santo Domingo, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Curaçao, Venezuela, Colombia and Panama, although their rhythmic pattern may be different to the Dominican one. In the 19th century merengue was considered to be Caribbean, but since the period around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, it has become a singular expression of the cultural identity of the Dominican Republic.

One oral tradition claims that merengue was born following a battle that the Dominicans won over Haiti at the dawn of independence (1844). Eleven years later Juan Bautista Alfonseca (1810-1875), a military leader and one of the fathers of the genre composed a number of merengues. The emergence of this dance in a military or in a high society setting was seen as scandalous, at least by the authorities and the dominant upper classes. In the mid-19th century in Puerto Rico or in the Dominican Republic, if anyone was caught dancing merengue they could be denounced, fined or even jailed; though none of these measures stopped the Dominican people from continuing to dance merengue, along with other Caribbean dances.

Merengue developed its form from the square dance, which was the most influential element in most of the binary dances of the Caribbean and Latin America. The "habanera cubana" dance, the Puerto Rican dance and the Dominican square dance or "tumba" are all descended from the French square dance. Like all popular music and dance, the square dance was modified and took on peculiarities from each place. Moreau de Saint Mery observed black people in Port-au-Prince dancing square dances in imitation of the white people. For Carpentier in Santo Domingo, the black musicians gave the original form a much livelier feel. In fact, it was the French immigrants, accompanied by their black slaves and freemen, who disseminated the square dance in Cuba after 1791. According to Bernarda Jorge, one cannot rule out that something like this happened in Santo Domingo too[1].

Dance and music form an integral part of the Caribbean cultural heritage.

In the Dominican Republic, as in the rest of the Caribbean, a significant change took place in dance when the choreography of the square dance was broken down, and what was formation dance became transformed into a dance for couples. Merengue was the star of this transformation, which is why it was condemned and rejected when introduced into the high-society ballrooms from 1850 on. Around 1875, ballroom merengue all but disappeared from the national scene as a result of social disgrace, whilst in rural areas and among the poor, a style called typical merengue emerged. Played with accordion, bass drum, jew’s-harp and saxophone, it displaced the merengue that had been played with rustic string instruments and still exists today.

The modern form of merengue began to take shape in the country around 1915-16, a product of the confluence of typical and orchestral merengues. The latter, which were called typical dances, were basically the old ones revamped into arrangements with rich harmony and new orchestration. Following the us occupation (1916-24), the dance bands played a very varied repertory, including European, Caribbean and North American music such as waltzes, Cuban dances, Creole dances, mazurkas, polkas, one steps and two steps, with a merengue at the end of the dance session. Merengue was still not entirely accepted in the ballrooms. It had to be disguised as Cuban, played without lyrics and listened to not danced to. It was during the rule of Trujillo (1930-1961) that merengue was to become the Dominican national dance and its significance transcended the propaganda purposes of the Trujillo dictatorship. Even his assassination in May 1961 was celebrated with a merengue.

Celebrating carnival in the Dominican Republic, which has adopted merengue as its national dance.

Following the death of Trujillo, a merengue emerged that was as free as the society that spawned it. Johnny Ventura gave the most innovative expression to merengue, both musically and in the way it was danced, by fusing it with rock and roll and the twist, which had grabbed the attention of the youth and the radio stations of the times. Without knowing it, as Ventura said: "we were starting a musical revolution that was parallel to the one being started at that same time by the future salsa players in New York". Contact with the popular music of other countries led to innovations in the composition, instrumentation and execution of merengue. Changes of this kind have by no means been the first in the history of merengue; criticism of it is no novelty either. Some maestros consider contemporary merengue to be so different to the original that they call it "guarachete", "merenguete" and "anti-merengue". In any case, it is merengue that is danced in the Dominican Republic and across the world.

The story of merengue would be incomplete without the mention of the following: Juan Bautista Alfonseca, Nico Lora, Juan Espínola, Juan Francisco García, Julio Alberto Hernández, Luis Alberti, Angel Viloria, Joseíto Mateo, Papa Molina, Johnny Ventura, Félix del Rosario, Wilfrido Vargas, Rafel Solano, Fernando Villalona, Las Chicas del Can, Milly Quezada, Manuel Tejada, los Hermanos Rosario, Pochy Familia, Kinito Méndez, Proyecto Uno, Sandy & Papo, el Conjunto Quisqueya, among others. Juan Luis Guerra merits a special mention having won the Grammy Award in 1987, with millions of records sold worldwide (an extraordinary phenomenon for Dominican and Latin American music).

With the integration of merengue, bachata, son, African music, rock and jazz, a new musical culture of the highest quality has been created. To sum it all up: music for the feet and the head. Juan Luis Guerra established the consolidated merengue definitively, which, together with salsa, represents the most popular Latin American dance music worldwide.

Salsa

Tito Puente said he was a musician, not a cook.

Tito Puente was one of those who criticised the use of the word "salsa" (sauce) to designate Latin music. He used to say that he was a musician, not a cook, and that the only kind of "salsa" he knew about was for spaghetti! The term has three possible origins: the 1927 composition of maestro Ignacio Piñeyro called "Echale salsita" (Pour on a little sauce), which appears in George Gershwin's Cuban Overture; a 1950s Venezuelan radio programme called "La hora de la salsa" (Salsa Hour); and a term which was used by the group Fania when it toured Europe in the 1970s.

There is no doubt that the term salsa is a vague one, but this is not entirely so in all its senses. The relation between food and music is a real one in Latin America. For example, the eating of tasty sausages "olorosas butifarras" is alluded to in Piñeyro's Cuban Son; one of the first Dominican merengues from 1855 is a dish called "El Sancocho"; and one of the first Puerto Rican dances is entitled "Quiero comer mondongo" (I want to eat black pudding). Furthermore, salsa is not just one kind of music, rather it is a compendium of several types, such as son, guanguancó, rumba, conga, mambo, cha-cha-cha, and plena. In this sense, as expressed very well by H. Orovio, it refers to the great chili pepper sauce that is our Caribbean music, and it designates a movement - an undeniable musical phenomenon.

This process of synthesis and creation began in the heart of Cuba, where successive Cuban themes were all mixed together. There also emerged a generic name for the process. Orovio points out that in fact son, guaracha, guaguanco, conga and even bolero were all grouped under the name of rumba. So what was rumba in Cuba then? It was a fiesta and a rhythm, where different styles of dance are enjoyed (originally these were yambú, columbia and guaguancó). The same goes for bachata, cumbancha and cumbanchata which mean - a fiesta, lots of people in a crowded party. Nowadays it refers to a very popular kind of music in the Dominican Republic.

A salsa band in Havana.

Cuban salsa seasons the musical menu throughout the Caribbean including that "Antillean island" which is the "barrio latino" (Latin quarter) of New York. The main ingredient of salsa is Cuban son. The chef is the blind Arsenio Rodríguez and his assistant Severino Ramos, who, with their arrangements, create a style of musical structure made up of trumpets, piano, counterbass, percussion and backing vocals, which are all well adjusted to each other. Cooking time: 45 years; venue of banquet: New York; served from 1960 onward.

After 1970 the phenomenon of salsa spread out from New York toward the Caribbean, Latin America and the rest of the world. The new Caribbean dance music began to be called salsa, a totally commercial name created for purposes of industrial homogenisation and for the sale of an artistic product. The Dominican Johnny Pacheco was one of the main producers. Salsa as such would not exist without Johnny Pacheco, just as son would not exist without Arsenio Rodríguez, tango without Gardel and bolero without Agustín Lara. The son of musicians, Pacheco grew up listening to Cuban music. In 1946 he went to live in the United States, where he played kettledrum in the Mongo Santamaría band, substituting Tito Puente. Later he formed a quartet with the Palmieri brothers. As a musician and producer, he coined the name of Fania, which came from a piece from one of his records called "Fanía Funche". In 1971 he gave the first great concert of The Fania All Stars in the Cheetah ballroom on 52nd Street, where he brought together the best musicians of New York and the Caribbean. According to Pacheco, the word salsa emerged when the Fania group started to travel to Europe, where no one had any detailed references to Cuban music.

"What we did was to take Cuban music and gave it more progressive harmonies. We emphasised the rhythm and highlighted certain details, without changing it in essence…and as the word salsa, like sabor and azúcar [relish and sugar], has always been associated with this music, it seemed to me a good idea to call it that. Moreover, in Fania we had Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Anglo-Saxons, Italians, Jews, in fact we had all the various spices to make a salsa, so from that mixture came the name...a label to group, under the same roof; all the music that was known as tropical in Europe. Our intention never was to steal the music away from the Cubans, concealing it beneath another name...the roots are Cuban and my training took place in Cuba. Salsa is a Caribbean musical movement."

The fusion of salsa and the transformation of son into salsa could only have happened in the Latin/Caribbean quarter of New York. Here, various factors came together: the existence of a large community wherein all the Caribbean and Latin cultures interact; the marginal nature of these communities; the end of the extensive Cuban influence following the 1959 revolution; and the need for a poetic and musical form of expression for the experience of having been uprooted, for encouragement and to express a view on the contemporary world. This new music came to fill a cultural void in the world of popular dance music in the Caribbean and in a large part of Latin America[2].

Willie Colón, who was born in New York, the grandson of Puerto Ricans who arrived in the metropolis in 1923, was the first salsa idol. Willie said that: "There were Dominicans, Venezuelans, Chicanos [Mexican-Americans] - people from all over the Caribbean living on our block and all you could hear was music in Spanish…all these roots began to intertwine naturally, without disagreement. That is the history of salsa: a harmonious sum of all the Latin musical culture, brought together in New York…a musical view from the Latin American cultural perspective."

So, salsa is an urban phenomenon that absorbed and then mixed - Latin American migrants in the barrio of New York. Suffering from discrimination they could only recreate their home atmosphere in their barrio. Salsa expressed stories of the street and of marginality with an essentially metropolitan sound. Willie Colón made his debut in 1967 with the record "El Malo" (The Bad Guy), just after Joe Cuba had produced a daring and street-wise son that went: "It's really hard on the street".

The antecedents of salsa in New York go way back. We need to start with Mario Bauzá, a cultivator of Cuban son and a precursor of Latin jazz. As he himself declares, his idea was "to combine Cuban syncopation with the American one, stick them both into a mould - my mould - and there you have it...the seed of Afro-Cuban Jazz".

A revolutionary and momentous union in salsa was that of Ruben Blades and Willie Colón in 1974. The music took off on another route, it was "conscious salsa". Before and after this, however, there were many who adopted their musical name tag: Rafael Cortijo, Ismael Rivera, Rafael Ithier, Ray Barreto, Papo Luca, Johnny Pacheco, Richie Ray y Bobby Cruz, Eddy y Charlie Palmieri, José el Canario, Oscar de Leon, Andy Montañez, Cheo Feliciano, El Grupo Niche, Gilberto Santa Rosa, Tito Rojas, Perico Ortiz, among others.

The percussive accompaniment of the original Cuban music underwent some modification in salsa. The conga or "tumbadora" and the bongos remained in Cuban style, whereas the cowbells had a smaller set added to them for rhythmic counterpoint. The bass line used the Cuban tumbaos, but jazzy riffs were woven into it, and the same thing happened to the piano. The articulation of the trumpets was jazzed up even more. The use of trombones was something new, following their introduction by Willie Colón. The harmony took on a new, contemporary form. Traditional Caribbean numbers were mixed electronically like other present day music. The vocals widened the harmonic range and surpassed the linear mode of improvisation previously employed.

Salsa and merengue have given the pleasure of dance back to the people. An indispensable pleasure in an area where music that cannot be danced to is inconceivable. All that has survived in Caribbean music has been danceable. Amid the rock and pop invasion that has been underway since 1960, salsa and merengue have fought to preserve a tradition. Both types of music have managed to transform themselves into one of the most impressive Latin American cultural amalgamations ever undertaken. The consequent and necessary communion of rhythms diverse regions of the continent, from New York to Brazil. from Cali to Santo Domingo, are all poured into the same mould and share in the same project to identify, to reach out for, to blend and to renew the sounds of Latin America.

Caribbean Music: Mysterious Beginnings
Cabrera Infante has identified mysterious happenings in the transformation and evolution of Caribbean music and dance[3]. The Argentinian tango made a convoluted journey, for it began among the black people of Havana, Cuba. It then went to Cadiz, Spain, and from there, back to Buenos Aires where it became the music we all know. It landed among the black people in Río de la Plata [River Plate], who only lived in small communities in the North of Uruguay. The Pavanne came from Italy, went through Spain and ended up in France with an Italian name, but with a Spanish rhythm. The Cuban bolero has nothing to do with Spain, nor Ravel, except in name. Cuban music certainly has no coherent or logical explanation - as is the case with jazz, which was born in New Orleans, a "Caribbean" city in the United States.

Long before ragtime appeared as one of the antecedents of jazz in the US, a Cuban dance called habanera had already gone half way round the world and had become the Carmen de Bizet, a popular dance aria and orchestral tune. The same sort of thing had occurred before, with such illustrious precursors as pavanne, gallarda, giga, pascaglia, chacona and zarabanda, which are all European, though chacona and zarabanda apparently have an American origin. In America, according to Borges, habanera seemed to be the mother of tango. But we can also detect it in the obsessive base of the earliest ragtime numbers, and also in the left hand playing of Jelly Roll Morton, the Creole pianist, who swore that "I invented jazz" - and at the same time claimed that "the origin of Jazz was in Latin music".

These origins seem so unlikely; the assertions seem so absurd. What is happening in these cases? Perhaps this is the same mystery as the one concerning the origin and development of our most representative examples of national music and dance. Jazz, merengue and Caribbean salsa share the same mystery of Cuban music. Jelly Roll Morton's assertion on the Latin origins of jazz, and the discussion that took place in the Dominican Republic around 1929 between Esteban Pena Morel and Julio Alberto Hernandez, about whether jazz came out of the United States or Santo Domingo, are not simply coincidental nonsense. Rather, they amount to the extremely interesting symptom that points to the failure of our system of musical categorisation to define with accuracy or rational clarity the dynamics of our social and musical reality.

It happens that one of the most recurrent popular kinds of music in New Orleans was bambulá, which was played in the then Conga Square - now called Louis Armstrong Plaza. The architect Latrobe left us extremely valuable testimonies of the dance and its instruments. The "balsié" or "palo echao" (literally a thrown stick), and the "canoíta" (slit drum) both draw our attention. The balsié was used in the Bambulá de Samaná, and the canoíta was thought to be exclusive to the Congos de Villa Mella, both from the Dominican Republic.

Luis Moreau Gottschalk, who was perhaps the first pan-American musician and composer, and who was born in New Orleans of French parents from Saint Domingue (Haiti), shows us clearly in his book that this "black peoples' dance" was popular enough to warrant his sustained and dedicated attention. Several researchers in the Dominican Republic considered that the Dominican Bambulá, the most well preserved in the Caribbean, had come from the United States via black migrants who had been freed, and who had arrived during the Boyer Haitian occupation in 1823. As it happens, bambulá is sung in Creole and in fact only two or three of the North American black immigrants actually came from Louisiana. Two or three people cannot create a complex ritual and musical structure. Even more striking is the fact that after the Haitian revolution that started in 1791 and the Treaty of Basle, significant numbers of French people left with their slaves to go to Cuba, to the Spanish part of the island of Hispaniola (which is the Dominican Republic today), and to New Orleans. This migration left memorable cultural and musical traces and influences in all three places. Here we can see the influence or contribution that the Cuban habanera and the Haitian (or Dominican) bambulá had in the birth of jazz. Jazz is universal by merit of its diversity - it refuses to have any exclusively local or particular label stuck on it.

This problem of the origins of American music and dance (jazz, merengue, son, tango, bambulá, salsa, etc.), and the apparently pointless debate and confusion surrounding it, result from several factors:

• The lack of overall and all-embracing observation by the musicians and researchers involved in the study of the matter.
• The lack of correspondence between the name given to the music and its structure and asynchrony between dance and music (a dance is adapted to a different music, and vice versa).
• Cultural exchange and permanent migration between countries and ports in the region.
• Diversity in, and periods of different influence from, European colonisation.
• Syncretistic and multicultural characteristics of societies, music and dance.
• The creation of novelty, permanent transformation and mutual influence between sundry forms of dance music from the Caribbean that cannot be reduced to their origins exclusively.

The ethnic/cultural origin of merengue and salsa is an important starting point in their study. The diversity of the African and European contributions is only ever denied by those researchers and people with a European slant. Music and dance such as merengue and salsa cannot be defined entirely by their origins because they are syncretistic and dynamic products. Hence the problematic or mysterious character of their origins. We definitely cannot appreciate our popular music and dance if it is placed outside the gamut of insular and regional interactions and mutual influences, or if it is set apart from the racial and cultural syncretism of our peoples. The formation and actual distribution of merengue and salsa cannot be understood if we do not include them as pieces in the cultural jigsaw puzzle that makes up the picture of the Caribbean, Latin America and the European domination of America.

José G. Guerrero is an anthropologist and historian from the Dominican Republic. His e-mail is: besosyabrazos@codetel.net.do