I realized I'd never gotten a good picture of these places, even though I hang out there all the time, so I made a special trip yesterday. These two típico hotspots are across the highway from one another: Rancho Merengue and La Tinaja (here you just see the sign from the first and the Parada, or roadhouse, part of the latter).
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Güirera
Women play güira, too. Here's one of Chiqui's sisters (Rosa) playing güira as the men look on.
Lupe & Chiqui's dad
Lupe gets down on accordion while Chiqui's dad, visiting from border town Dajabon, sings.
Chiqui & Lupe's dad
Chiqui plays all the instruments. Here he's accompanying Lupe Valerio's dad, 84 years old and still rocking. He was in town from Restauracion, on the border.
Quinceañera típica
4/24/06
Life was getting more or less back to normal last week. The main task I had to accomplish was getting the rest of my permissions together for my quebradita book, which is in the final stages of editing. I sent a ton of emails and made a bunch of phone calls, and got a little closer to getting nowhere. At least, I hit complete dead ends on a couple of pictures from 1990s quebradita videos made by fly-by-nights that no longer exist. Whee. Definitely more fun than that mess was my tambora lesson with Rafaelito on Wednesday, which was also attended by a couple of neighborhood kids who can really play. While there, Carmen fed me with a banquet worthy of a king (or perhaps a cacique), including fish, shrimp, rice and beans, ripe plantains, salad, “chulos” or little sausage-shaped fried yuca balls, and some jalapenos on the side in honor of the fact that Rafaelito and I are the only people in this country who can eat them.
But then Thursday hit. I was working in the Fradique Lizardo archives at the Centro Leon in the afternoon but left early to see if I could find a call center that would make all my licensing calls cheaper. I turned on the headlights since it was clouding over and looking dark and ominous, but the lights started fading out. A minute later, not even the blinkers would work. When I got to the Verizon call center, the car had totally died, and it seemed to be the battery. Of course, it then started to pour rain. I tried to call my mechanic pal El Negro but his phone wasn’t working. Luckily his cousin Andres and Mario, the guy who fixed my timing a couple weeks ago and introduced me to Panchita the wonder chicken, were still in their shop and came to rescue me. As Mario busied himself on the underside of my car, I chatted with Andres and his teenage assistant. Mario had been saying, “I don’t like to leave anyone stuck on the side of the road like this. Anything can happen. The other day, right around here, I saw people trying to kipnap a kid, tearing him right from his mother’s side!” “Why? What was that about?” I asked. “Satanic rituals!” Andres suggested. “Human sacrifice!” “What?!?” I exclaimed. “No, no; it was to sell his organs,” the teenager said knowingly. “No!” I cried. “It was for Satanic rituals!” insisted Andres. The kid shook his head: “No really, that really happened to someone in Gurabo. They found them dead later with all their organs removed.” This story sounded suspiciously familiar. These urban legends circulate pretty widely, and it’s been going on for a while: I remember seeing a clipping in the archives a few weeks ago of a story that sounded just like the classic Vanishing Hitchhiker, only it took place near Santo Domingo. Pretty soon, they’ll even have their own Kentucky Fried Rat.
Mario got the car running fine again, and Friday went as usual, continuing in the Lizardo archives and meeting with Raul Roman to talk accordion shop. In the evening I’d been specifically asked to attend an event at the Centro Leon: an Afro-pop group was coming in from South Africa for a special performance in honor of 12 years of South African independence this week. I couldn’t attend the political talk beforehand with the South African ambassador, who had organized the event, but I did make it to the cocktail hour (have I ever refused free food and drink?) and the show. Many of the usual suspects were there to enjoy the South African wine the embassy had kindly provided: the same newspaper reporters, jazz musicians, artists, and dance fanatics I see at all the cultural events. Though things got started late and there was a bit of a drizzle, it in no way inhibited the Dominican audience who turned out to be absolutely nuts for South African music and the ambassador, as well, who gave a hilarious introduction about how beautiful South African women are and how one of the delegation was looking for a Dominican husband (shouldn’t be hard for her to arrange). The music was similar to other Afro-pop groups I’ve heard, and certainly excellent for dancing, but the real standout were the three female vocalist/dancers who sung in gorgeous harmony. The leader, an enormous woman in an equally enormous orange shirt, even sung in an impeccable male voice, imitating some other African star, at one point.
I guess all the excitement was too much for me, because I slept badly and woke up tired on Saturday, a bad thing for the Big Day – the quinceanera party of Yary, Chiqui and Laura’s daughter. When I called Chiqui to see how things were going, he said, “all these people came in from Moca and Dajabon and they’ve turned my house into a beauty parlor!” I went over around 3 to investigate this new horror and see how I could help out. When I arrived, a gaggle of ladies were in the small living room, whose chairs had all been removed in order to give us room to dance later and them room to decorate now. They were busy hanging borrowed green and white curtains to cover up one plaster wall and tying green and yellow balloons into a long bundle to string up along the top. Every so often Chiqui would come in and pop one. After a little while, Laura and I went to do some shopping at the colmado, a 2-trip deal as when the yuca was cut open we saw some was bad and had to exchange it, then caravanning over with Chiqui and a friend to pick up (a) the cake and (b) an enormous stack of plastic chairs we were renting from a funeral parlor. Afterwards, I went next door with Laura and her mother to see how the cooking was going. A huge iron stove with three burners connected to a tank of gas had been set up in the neighbor’s backyard, and an enormous pot three feet across was already simmering, filled with the meat of two entire goats. Soon rice and yuca were going too, in pots only slightly smaller, all lent by friends and neighbors. Back at the ranch, the living room had been completely transformed, the green and white cake I’d purchased looking quite lovely with the color-coordinated decorations. But night was starting to fall and the power was still out. Yary was dressed in her green and white confection (an amazing transformation of an old communion dress Laura’s had remodeled) and getting her long hair, now in loose ringlets from the salon, pinned up with flowers in the backyard. The rest of us were still in our street clothes and unadorned, however. Good thing I’d just had my hair cut and dyed – at Audrey Hepburn length it needed little work. While someone went to light the kerosene lamp, I and the other lady visitors sequestered ourselves in a dark bedroom to change. Just as we finished, the lights came on. Right in time! We turned on the music and Chiqui, his sister Yahaira, and I danced a few salsa numbers in various combinations. Then we worked on setting up a food area in the backyard. However, we didn’t have a table big enough for the planned spread. A couple of men came over carrying a dining room table that a neighbor had offered for the job, though it was a bit of a puzzle figuring out how to actually get it to the patio. It clearly was not going to fit through the front door and past the refrigerator. Neither would it fit through the door to the narrow alleyway alongside. But, lifting it up, it could go through a large window opening between the carport and the alley. The problem seemed to be solved, but another, bigger, one came up when, as they were maneuvering the monster around the last corner, they hit a water pipe, pulling it apart at a joint. Water sprayed everywhere and puddled on the ground until Laura grabbed it and held it together. A boy went and got a piece of broom handle and, with a large kitchen knife, whittled one end down to an appropriate size (everyone here is good with a machete). This was fitted into the end of the water-supplying side of the pipe and plastic wrapped around, saving us from drowning for the moment.
More and more guests began to arrive. Chiqui’s elderly and slightly drunk father from Dajabon; our musician friend Lupe Valerio and his even more elderly (84!) and drunk father from Restauracion, another border town; our favorite neighbor, the one famous for formerly adding S’s in all the wrong places. And a hundred others I didn’t know. I mostly sat around with the old men, they got a kick out of giving me homemade mamajuana to drink. The makings for this traditional beverage are sold all along Calle del Sol, but Valerio Sr had made this himself out of “5 types of twigs that grow in the country over there – they’re all medicinal! It’s good for you!” All these woody plants are tossed into a gallon jug and cured with either gin or rum. It tasted kind of like spiced rum. It’s good for hilarity as it’s rumored to be an aphrodisiac. Meanwhile, Yary was held prisoner by the photographers, both official and unofficial, who had to get pictures of her, the cake, and just about everyone in attendance. Anyway, eventually (11 PM-ish) the food service got started. We began with a juice beverage with chunks of pineapple and melon, followed by pastelitos (little empanadas filled with chicken) that Ms S and I had gone to fetch, sandwiches with a mayo-based spread, sliced ham donated by a friend who works at the ham factory. Still later, the real food made its way over – the goat, rice, yuca, a macaroni and tuna salad made by Yahaira across the street, and just for me, some cooked veggies in vinaigrette.
At this point I was about ready to fall asleep but everyone else seemed to be just getting started. The oldsters had way more energy than me, and I danced some merengue and bachata with both of them. Lupe’s dad had some especially distinctive moves, including one in which he took my hands and alternately placed one over the other in a sort of Dominican hand jive, which sent one girl into hysterics. But soon it was time to turn off the recorded music and get to the real business of merengue típico. Altogether, we had five accordionists: Chiqui, Chiqui’s dad, Lupe, Lupe’s dad, and me. I was forced to be the opener, and played 3 merengues with Chiqui accompanying me on saxophone, his dad on tambora, and some guy I’d never met before on a little dinky güira. Then things got mixed up: Chiqui’s dad switched to accordion and Chiqui to tambora, his sister Rosy on güira; then Lupe, his dad, and Chiqui, rotated through on accordion. It was fun to hear the oldsters play, and Chiqui’s dad was especially fiery on the tambora, but Lupe was the one who really shone on the accordion with his crazy solos that made the crowd (consisting mostly of a lot of young men pressed in close in the tiny living room) go wild.
This went on until close to 3 AM, at which point about half the crowd was ready to leave but the other half, still partying, turned the sound system back on at full blast. As I tried to get the family organized for a group shot, something that hadn’t been able to happen earlier with Laura running around, and others took out the trash, a police car actually showed up with its lights flashing and all! I was surprised. “What’s that about?” I asked Laura. “To turn the music down,” she explained. Wow! I’d never have expected that in a barrio in the Dominican Republic. “Barrio Seguro,” she elaborated. So I guess the president’s plan for keeping neighborhoods like this safe and secure is having some effect. Still, as I left, Laura warned me, “Don’t stop for anyone! Not even the police!” I didn’t, and made it home just fine.
Life was getting more or less back to normal last week. The main task I had to accomplish was getting the rest of my permissions together for my quebradita book, which is in the final stages of editing. I sent a ton of emails and made a bunch of phone calls, and got a little closer to getting nowhere. At least, I hit complete dead ends on a couple of pictures from 1990s quebradita videos made by fly-by-nights that no longer exist. Whee. Definitely more fun than that mess was my tambora lesson with Rafaelito on Wednesday, which was also attended by a couple of neighborhood kids who can really play. While there, Carmen fed me with a banquet worthy of a king (or perhaps a cacique), including fish, shrimp, rice and beans, ripe plantains, salad, “chulos” or little sausage-shaped fried yuca balls, and some jalapenos on the side in honor of the fact that Rafaelito and I are the only people in this country who can eat them.
But then Thursday hit. I was working in the Fradique Lizardo archives at the Centro Leon in the afternoon but left early to see if I could find a call center that would make all my licensing calls cheaper. I turned on the headlights since it was clouding over and looking dark and ominous, but the lights started fading out. A minute later, not even the blinkers would work. When I got to the Verizon call center, the car had totally died, and it seemed to be the battery. Of course, it then started to pour rain. I tried to call my mechanic pal El Negro but his phone wasn’t working. Luckily his cousin Andres and Mario, the guy who fixed my timing a couple weeks ago and introduced me to Panchita the wonder chicken, were still in their shop and came to rescue me. As Mario busied himself on the underside of my car, I chatted with Andres and his teenage assistant. Mario had been saying, “I don’t like to leave anyone stuck on the side of the road like this. Anything can happen. The other day, right around here, I saw people trying to kipnap a kid, tearing him right from his mother’s side!” “Why? What was that about?” I asked. “Satanic rituals!” Andres suggested. “Human sacrifice!” “What?!?” I exclaimed. “No, no; it was to sell his organs,” the teenager said knowingly. “No!” I cried. “It was for Satanic rituals!” insisted Andres. The kid shook his head: “No really, that really happened to someone in Gurabo. They found them dead later with all their organs removed.” This story sounded suspiciously familiar. These urban legends circulate pretty widely, and it’s been going on for a while: I remember seeing a clipping in the archives a few weeks ago of a story that sounded just like the classic Vanishing Hitchhiker, only it took place near Santo Domingo. Pretty soon, they’ll even have their own Kentucky Fried Rat.
Mario got the car running fine again, and Friday went as usual, continuing in the Lizardo archives and meeting with Raul Roman to talk accordion shop. In the evening I’d been specifically asked to attend an event at the Centro Leon: an Afro-pop group was coming in from South Africa for a special performance in honor of 12 years of South African independence this week. I couldn’t attend the political talk beforehand with the South African ambassador, who had organized the event, but I did make it to the cocktail hour (have I ever refused free food and drink?) and the show. Many of the usual suspects were there to enjoy the South African wine the embassy had kindly provided: the same newspaper reporters, jazz musicians, artists, and dance fanatics I see at all the cultural events. Though things got started late and there was a bit of a drizzle, it in no way inhibited the Dominican audience who turned out to be absolutely nuts for South African music and the ambassador, as well, who gave a hilarious introduction about how beautiful South African women are and how one of the delegation was looking for a Dominican husband (shouldn’t be hard for her to arrange). The music was similar to other Afro-pop groups I’ve heard, and certainly excellent for dancing, but the real standout were the three female vocalist/dancers who sung in gorgeous harmony. The leader, an enormous woman in an equally enormous orange shirt, even sung in an impeccable male voice, imitating some other African star, at one point.
I guess all the excitement was too much for me, because I slept badly and woke up tired on Saturday, a bad thing for the Big Day – the quinceanera party of Yary, Chiqui and Laura’s daughter. When I called Chiqui to see how things were going, he said, “all these people came in from Moca and Dajabon and they’ve turned my house into a beauty parlor!” I went over around 3 to investigate this new horror and see how I could help out. When I arrived, a gaggle of ladies were in the small living room, whose chairs had all been removed in order to give us room to dance later and them room to decorate now. They were busy hanging borrowed green and white curtains to cover up one plaster wall and tying green and yellow balloons into a long bundle to string up along the top. Every so often Chiqui would come in and pop one. After a little while, Laura and I went to do some shopping at the colmado, a 2-trip deal as when the yuca was cut open we saw some was bad and had to exchange it, then caravanning over with Chiqui and a friend to pick up (a) the cake and (b) an enormous stack of plastic chairs we were renting from a funeral parlor. Afterwards, I went next door with Laura and her mother to see how the cooking was going. A huge iron stove with three burners connected to a tank of gas had been set up in the neighbor’s backyard, and an enormous pot three feet across was already simmering, filled with the meat of two entire goats. Soon rice and yuca were going too, in pots only slightly smaller, all lent by friends and neighbors. Back at the ranch, the living room had been completely transformed, the green and white cake I’d purchased looking quite lovely with the color-coordinated decorations. But night was starting to fall and the power was still out. Yary was dressed in her green and white confection (an amazing transformation of an old communion dress Laura’s had remodeled) and getting her long hair, now in loose ringlets from the salon, pinned up with flowers in the backyard. The rest of us were still in our street clothes and unadorned, however. Good thing I’d just had my hair cut and dyed – at Audrey Hepburn length it needed little work. While someone went to light the kerosene lamp, I and the other lady visitors sequestered ourselves in a dark bedroom to change. Just as we finished, the lights came on. Right in time! We turned on the music and Chiqui, his sister Yahaira, and I danced a few salsa numbers in various combinations. Then we worked on setting up a food area in the backyard. However, we didn’t have a table big enough for the planned spread. A couple of men came over carrying a dining room table that a neighbor had offered for the job, though it was a bit of a puzzle figuring out how to actually get it to the patio. It clearly was not going to fit through the front door and past the refrigerator. Neither would it fit through the door to the narrow alleyway alongside. But, lifting it up, it could go through a large window opening between the carport and the alley. The problem seemed to be solved, but another, bigger, one came up when, as they were maneuvering the monster around the last corner, they hit a water pipe, pulling it apart at a joint. Water sprayed everywhere and puddled on the ground until Laura grabbed it and held it together. A boy went and got a piece of broom handle and, with a large kitchen knife, whittled one end down to an appropriate size (everyone here is good with a machete). This was fitted into the end of the water-supplying side of the pipe and plastic wrapped around, saving us from drowning for the moment.
More and more guests began to arrive. Chiqui’s elderly and slightly drunk father from Dajabon; our musician friend Lupe Valerio and his even more elderly (84!) and drunk father from Restauracion, another border town; our favorite neighbor, the one famous for formerly adding S’s in all the wrong places. And a hundred others I didn’t know. I mostly sat around with the old men, they got a kick out of giving me homemade mamajuana to drink. The makings for this traditional beverage are sold all along Calle del Sol, but Valerio Sr had made this himself out of “5 types of twigs that grow in the country over there – they’re all medicinal! It’s good for you!” All these woody plants are tossed into a gallon jug and cured with either gin or rum. It tasted kind of like spiced rum. It’s good for hilarity as it’s rumored to be an aphrodisiac. Meanwhile, Yary was held prisoner by the photographers, both official and unofficial, who had to get pictures of her, the cake, and just about everyone in attendance. Anyway, eventually (11 PM-ish) the food service got started. We began with a juice beverage with chunks of pineapple and melon, followed by pastelitos (little empanadas filled with chicken) that Ms S and I had gone to fetch, sandwiches with a mayo-based spread, sliced ham donated by a friend who works at the ham factory. Still later, the real food made its way over – the goat, rice, yuca, a macaroni and tuna salad made by Yahaira across the street, and just for me, some cooked veggies in vinaigrette.
At this point I was about ready to fall asleep but everyone else seemed to be just getting started. The oldsters had way more energy than me, and I danced some merengue and bachata with both of them. Lupe’s dad had some especially distinctive moves, including one in which he took my hands and alternately placed one over the other in a sort of Dominican hand jive, which sent one girl into hysterics. But soon it was time to turn off the recorded music and get to the real business of merengue típico. Altogether, we had five accordionists: Chiqui, Chiqui’s dad, Lupe, Lupe’s dad, and me. I was forced to be the opener, and played 3 merengues with Chiqui accompanying me on saxophone, his dad on tambora, and some guy I’d never met before on a little dinky güira. Then things got mixed up: Chiqui’s dad switched to accordion and Chiqui to tambora, his sister Rosy on güira; then Lupe, his dad, and Chiqui, rotated through on accordion. It was fun to hear the oldsters play, and Chiqui’s dad was especially fiery on the tambora, but Lupe was the one who really shone on the accordion with his crazy solos that made the crowd (consisting mostly of a lot of young men pressed in close in the tiny living room) go wild.
This went on until close to 3 AM, at which point about half the crowd was ready to leave but the other half, still partying, turned the sound system back on at full blast. As I tried to get the family organized for a group shot, something that hadn’t been able to happen earlier with Laura running around, and others took out the trash, a police car actually showed up with its lights flashing and all! I was surprised. “What’s that about?” I asked Laura. “To turn the music down,” she explained. Wow! I’d never have expected that in a barrio in the Dominican Republic. “Barrio Seguro,” she elaborated. So I guess the president’s plan for keeping neighborhoods like this safe and secure is having some effect. Still, as I left, Laura warned me, “Don’t stop for anyone! Not even the police!” I didn’t, and made it home just fine.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
US troops in Barahona
Be informed! Here are some articles on what might or might not be going on here:
http://www.workers.org/2006/world/dominican-republic-0406/index.html
http://ww4report.com/node/1629
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/74618
http://www.workers.org/2006/world/dominican-republic-0406/index.html
http://ww4report.com/node/1629
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/74618
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Burning Judas
Here a bunch of young cachuas are enacting the ritual burning of Judas as part of the carnival parade. The actual ceremonial burning will take place on Monday after Easter.
Cachúa and carroza
Foreground: an older cachua keeps order with his whip and a scary mask. Background: a carroza or float featuring pretty girls representing flowers.
Roba la Gallina
A whole troupe of Roba la Gallina transvestite characters from Baní, with choreography and all!
Cachúa de Cabral
This young guy in traditional cachúa dress was part of a comparsa. He and his similarly dressed companions were keeping the crowd back using their whips as a barrier. That's a traditional cachúa mask on his head, but in Cabral they almost never cover their faces anymore.
Gagá in La Ciénaga
Here's what a gagá looks like that doesn't receive any sponsorship. Even with only 2 fotutos, they still sounded pretty good.
Barahona coastline
This view of the coast near San Rafael, Barahona, is used in Dominican tourist promotional materials.
Mini-gagá
Here a group of kids work on their musical skills. They were pretty good so we gave them 10 pesos- which caused them to argue and split. Money corrupts!
Fuera Yanquis!
This revolutionary encampment was set up right across the street from a US military encampment. Some of those parked here day and night fought against US troops in the Revolution of 1965. Why are our troops here now? Good question.
Bus station
Here was the scene at the Caribe Tours bus station in Santo Domingo during Holy Week. Zoiks!
Into the South
4/16-4/18/06
After a typical day in the library and gym on Wednesday, I made a quick decision. It was holy week, the DR’s main party time, and I had to do something. My palos-playing friends couldn’t go to San Juan de la Maguana after all, so I accepted an invitation from Rafael Almánzar, the folklorist at the Casa de Arte, to join him in his yearly trip to the seaside town of Barahona in the southwest. Having made plans to leave on the 6 AM bus to avoid the crowds, I rushed home to get organized, pack, and grab a very few short hours of sleep before the alarm went off. Grumbling to myself, I stumbled into the shower and threw some clothes on and was then surprised to hear the phone ring. It was Almánzar, telling me he’d decided not to leave til noon in order to give his girlfriend a chance to join us. Argh!!!! Eventually I slept a couple of hours more but was still grumpy when we met up at the bus terminal. At least I had an entertaining mystery book to read on the way to the capital, so when we got into the bus terminal there I was in a somewhat better mood. But not for long. The entire station was literally packed wall to wall with people and an amazing heat was emanating from the ticket-selling area. We had figured to be on a 5:00 bus, and it was only 2:30, but this didn’t look likely. They hadn’t even started selling tickets for our bus yet but there was already a line a mile long, we found out after Almánzar made a daring journey through the throng to investigate and nearly passed out from the heat. Next Maribel tried, and seemed to be making some progress. That progress was illusory though. It was four hours before we finally got tickets and got on a bus to Barahona, and it was nearly dark.
My first impressions of the Southwest were thus made by moonlight. The first half of the trip, through towns like San Cristobal, Baní, and Azua, was unremarkable, but after Azua things got interesting. A good stretch of the trip seemed to look an awful lot like Arizona. Maybe it was just the light from the full moon, I thought, combined with the rugged landscape of hills, valleys, and rock faces. But no, on the trip back in daylight I confirmed it: the brown and very dry, rocky soil supported trees that looked just like mesquite and greasewood, shrubs resembling creosote, yucca plants with their tall flowering stalks, cacti similar to prickly pear and organ pipe along with another that was something like a Martian version of cholla. But it was disconcerting when, as the vegetation began to change again, the mesquite (or whatever it was) began to be interspersed with very tropical plantain trees. After the landscape re-tropicalized itself we at last found ourselves in Barahona, three hours from the capital and almost 10 hours after we’d left Santiago. There, we were met by Almánzar’s friend Zombolo, the director of the local Ballet Folklórico and a guy who knows everyone.
Zombolo isn’t Zombolo’s real name, of course. His legal name is Gustavo Diaz. Like many Dominicans, he goes by his childhood nickname, which in this case came from a pet dog his family had. His dad was always calling to that dog out their front door, so the neighborhood kids took to applying the name to young Gustavo as well. These days, Zombolo is a Mormon. I was surprised about this – not only did I not know the extent of the Dominican Church of Latter Day Saints (Zombolo estimates they have as many as 600,000 members) but one surely wouldn’t find a Mormon in favor of Fidel and Cuban revolutionary politics in Arizona. I told him he should take it upon himself to discuss politics with visiting US Mormons and convince them of the error of their ways. After our brief political discussion, he took me to my hotel – the only room available in any of the many budget options in town during this busy time, and thus, as might be expected, a sort of marginal one. Peeling, icky paint; a bathroom with cold water only – and that only when the water was on; no toilet seat; holy sheets; and only a mini-padlock with which to lock it while I was out. Still, it was cheap and I was tired, so it looked OK to me. I’d just make sure to always carry my recording equipment with me. Before I could hit the hay, though, we had to eat so we went to a nearby cafeteria with excellent batidas but questionable seafood (Maribel decided, on closer inspection, not to each the lambi or conch sandwich she’d ordered) and the slowest service ever. I think it actually took an hour to get a couple of cheese sandwiches.
Friday, thank goodness, was another day, and we had big plans. After a quick breakfast of sliced fruit, we headed just out of town to a batey, or a settlement of sugarcane workers. Last night’s sandwiches had taken so long that we missed the levantamiento ceremony, the raising of the ritual objects, that begins the gagá ritual music that goes on until Sunday. But no matter; we arrived at 10 AM and the gagá was already in full swing. This style of music is played on a set of 3-5 large tubes made of bamboo or PVC pipe, each of which produces a single musical note when blown. By playing these in an interlocking pattern the gagá group produces short, catchy melodies accompanied by a couple of long drums, a smaller sideways drum like a tambora, a güira or a güira-like metal shaker, and some other metal shakers similar to maracas. Numerous long metal trumpets also join in the interlocking rhythms, and all the trumpet and tube (fotuto) players also tap out rhythms on the sides of their instruments with sticks. Altogether it makes an amazing sound and a moving one. The sound of the tubes resembles that of a blown conch shell or a ram’s horn, giving a subliminal impression of a very ancient music.
Each gagá group is also a cofradía, or religious brotherhood, dedicated to a particular saint. The first group we came across belonged to San Elias. They were playing in a small dirt yard behind a wooden shack painted bright blue when we arrived. The gagá group consists of much more than just musicians, however, as we soon found out. It didn’t take long for us to be spotted as outsiders – not just me, but also my three Dominican companions, who also looked quite different from the batey dwellers, who are mostly of Haitian descent. Both the official alms-collectors, who carry a flag and wooden boxes for donations, and numerous dancing participants who also hoped for a handout surrounded us in a noisy throng. We gave out all the ten- and twenty-peso notes we had, and Almánzar even had some larger notes torn straight out of his hand in the madness. Now I knew why Zombolo had advised me to put a single bill in each of my jeans pockets, and give them out from there rather than reaching into my purse.
Gagá groups also include a few flag-bearers flying the colors of the group’s patron saint and twirling a plaque bearing the saint’s image. There are also several officially designated dancers who dress in sequined capes and skirts made of handkerchiefs in every color imaginable. They sometimes hold batons and sometimes machetes. Both are used to conduct play-fights, which nevertheless look quite real. Once in a while, one will throw a machete way up into the air, and when he catches it the whole crowd screams in happy relief. The dancing is really impressive as two or three men advance and retreat from each other, spinning around, squatting and jumping in a whirl of color and clash of blades. After dancing for a while in the yard, the group set off down the dirt road, going further in the batey. Many neighbors follow along, joining in the dancing and singing. Most of the songs are in Haitian kreyol, which I couldn’t understand, though there were a few in Spanish, these secular rather than religious in nature. One, a street or game song adapted to the gagá rhythm, stated, “my watch stopped; now it doesn’t work.” The chorus to another could be understood in any language: “Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson.”
As everyone else partied, Zombolo and I filmed when we could. But sometimes we just looked around. A batey is a place of real poverty: these are some of the poorest people in an already poor country. Some of this is due to persistent racism and discrimination against Haitians and their descendents, some to the nature of the colonial sugarcane economy. In some ways, it looked like any poor city barrio, but on closer examination, it wasn’t. Instead of bad pavement, there was no pavement on the streets. Most of the houses were ramshackle wooden constructions that looked like a good wind might blow them over. There were a few sturdier buildings that the sugar cane companies had built for the workers years ago, but these too looked like they had seen better days. One cement-block house we passed by looked incongruous, freshly plastered and painted in yellow and white with a porch framed in columns. But on closer inspection, one could see that it was simply a front room built onto an older house just as ramshackle as its neighbors. Of course we not only saw houses but people. A group of very small children, maybe 5-6 years old, had formed their own gagá group and were practicing while sitting on a bit of crumbling concrete patio on the side of one house. They used milk jugs, beer bottles, and a metal pipe to make a pretty good approximation of their adult counterparts. We thought they were good and gave 10-peso notes to several of the kids. But as we walked away we heard some noise and looked back: the kids were arguing and a few of the musicians took off across the street to play alone. Boy, money corrupts at any age!
After an hour or so with the gagá San Elias, we decided to go look for the other big gagá of this batey, this one dedicated to San Miguel. They were not hard to find by following the noise and looking down every street for bright colors. Besides being dedicated to a saint, most gagás these days also “belong” to a political party. That is to say, they receive sponsorship from a party that enables them to purchase items like costumes, flags, or instruments in exchange for wearing the colors of that party; whether they actually support that party is another story. At any rate, San Elias had been supported by the newly formed Red and White Alliance, which brings together the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano and the Partido Reformista Social Cristiano. San Miguel received the patronage instead of the Partido Liberal Dominicano, the one currently in power and represented by purple and yellow. Many of those following the gagá San Miguel were therefore wearing PLD t-shirts and visors, and even their fotutos were painted yellow and sporting purple bumper stickers. But Zombolo, a strong PRD man, was happy to see that, at least when we first arrived, this group had fewer followers than did the Red and White. He explained that the current government had done little to improve the plight of the batey dwellers and so was not terribly popular, while the local PRD politician (whose campaign Zombolo was endorsing through a huge stick-on poster on the back window of his van) had made an effort to get basic necessities to the sugar cane workers.
After another hour or so with San Miguel we decided to break for lunch and naps. We loaded up on rice with pigeon peas, fried carite (a local fish), and salad and rested, but when the agreed-upon time for reconvening came Almánzar and Maribel still weren’t up. Zombolo therefore came alone to collect me and took me down to the seaside, which I still hadn’t seen even though my hotel was only a few blocks away. The townspeople were there hanging out and listening to music, and although it wasn’t a sandy beach, some were swimming. Vendors sold fried fish and green coconuts out of carts. We opted for the latter. Cut into a flattened point on one side with a machete with a little flap hanging off like a lid over the hole, one can drink the abundant water inside, which my companion said is good for cleaning out the kidneys. Once you’ve drunk the water, they’ll hack the thing in half for you: with a sliver cut out of the outer shell, you can scoop out the soft layer on the inside that, if allowed to ripen, would have turned into the white coconut we’re all used to.
Back at the hotel, we found the two sleepyheads waiting for us, so we collected them and then headed back to hook up again with San Miguel, still making their circuit up and down the streets of the batey. Now they were parading less and stopping more, though, allowing for more people to join in and observe the machete dances. They also stopped to pay visits to various members of the cofradía, knocking on their doors, greeting them, and sprinkling rum on the ground in ritual fashion. One drawback was that as the afternoon wore on, people got drunker. At one point a fight broke out and there was a general fear that they might have guns, so everyone started to run, an activity made difficult by the fact that at that point we were in a narrow, rubble-strewn street between two barbed-wire fences and there was a truck coming in behind us. I ran too, attempting to get behind the truck with the rest, when word spread that it had been a false alarm. Still a little spooked, though, I went back to join Zombolo in his van for a bit and search out some cold water. It was just as well, as it was quite tiring to follow these groups through the dusty streets under the beating sun. Rejoining the group, a couple of drunken revelers tried to grab me for a dance but at this point they were dancing more reggaetón-doggie-style than traditional gagá moves, so I decided to abstain.
We stayed with this group until well past dark. As night fell, we made it to the batey’s main intersection, the only one I’d seen with a traffic light and street signs. San Miguel occupied one of the four corners here, and another gagá from a neighboring batey soon came along to occupy one of the others. I wondered if we could get two others and have a big play-off, but this didn’t happen. At about 9:00 we headed out for a not-so-quick bite to eat. Driving back into town, we headed down the malecón where a local bachata group was playing, all the many bars were filled to overflowing, and couples were making out under nonfunctional streetlights (Zombolo said it wasn’t worth it for the city to replace the bulbs, as the kids would always break them again). Just rising out of the sea was an enormous, blood-red moon. I thought it looked ominous, while Zombolo thought it looked like rain. Turned out he was right.
After dinner, all I could think of was bed, but the others just had to have ice cream. We headed to an enormous Trujillo-era hotel that looked like it must have been quite grand in the 1940s and 50s. The lobby that seemed a mile long was still pretty impressive, especially compared to where I was staying. Local nature scenes were painted onto the walls, and the big columns holding the tall ceiling up were painted in an oversized wood-grain pattern for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. I was too tired to converse with the proprietor as did the others, so I parked myself on a couch near a mosquito coil, at which point the rain started. It was really coming down. When it slowed a bit, we made a run for the van. Unfortunately, it was raining in the van as well. I had grown fond of the rust bucket, but it had definitely seen better days. One could roll down the automatic windows using the button which hung on its wires out of the door frame, but to roll them back up required the judicious application of a metal wrench to the contacts on its backside, which also produced a festive-looking shower of sparks. “Move to the back! move to the back!” Zombolo advised Almánzar and Maribel, who normally sat on the van’s middle seat. “Oh dear, now when we wake up this thing’ll be like an old mattress.” He was right, but first I had to get to my own mattress. When I entered my room though, I found out the van wasn’t the only thing that was leaky. Water had started dripping through the ancient paneling that made up my tiny box of a room’s ceiling: the tin roof above was obviously in need of repairs. I told the proprietor and he came to look. “Oh, it’s only a little drip.” He shoved my bed an inch closer to the wall. “There, that’s better.” “Well, I just hope it doesn’t start coming through the boards above my head in the night,” I shouted above the roar of the torrential downpour. He looked at that area. “Well, it is possible; it’s discolored here and looks like it might have leaked before.” “Great!” I replied. “So what do I do if it starts pouring on my head in the middle of the night?” “Move to the other side of the bed!” He advised. Then we both cracked up. I was slightly more worried about the electrical wires that ran to my fan and single lightbulb, which passed through the ceiling panels up into the presumably damp attic space, but was too hot to do without the fan and too tired to let that keep me from sleep.
I awoke feeling much improved and ready for whatever adventures the day might bring, now that the rain and hence the roof drippage had stopped. After another fruit breakfast, we were on the road in our trusty if leaky van to see the Barahona coastline. It was beautiful and quite different than the north coast I was used to. There are few beaches: instead there are mountains running right up to the sea and dropping off in cliffs, some of which in the distance appeared to be as white as those of Dover. Combined with the lush foliage and flowers, it reminded me a bit of the Amalfi coast of Italy. We passed through many small towns like Baoruco and El Paraiso, but stopped only in La Cienaga. There, as we peered out our window and down what appeared to be the town’s only street, we saw a ragtag gagá heading towards us. This rural group clearly had no political sponsorship of any kind and was much poorer than the batey ensembles. Instead of sequin capes and skirts made from hundreds of handkerchiefs, they tied just two colorful handkerchiefs together to make a sort of overshirt/cape. They had only one flag and instead of a box for the money-collector, they had only a plate. Instead of multiple PVC fotutos and metal trumpets, they had just two bamboo tubes. But what they did have was rhythm and machetes for dancing. They approached us and for our donation of 10 pesos they gave us our own private machete performance. Unfortunately, I hadn’t brought my video camera or minidisk recorder, but I did get a couple of photos.
From there we continued down the coast to Los Patos, a natural swimming hole just before a cold mountain river meets the warm sea. There is a beautiful white pebble beach there, but swimming isn’t permitted in the ocean because of a strong current. The waters are perfectly clear with little clear fish swimming around in it, and surrounded by lush greenery. On one side is a group of food and drink stands and tables, chairs, and umbrellas to be used by any customers. The water was really cold but it was a pleasant and scenic way to spend a hot morning. Still, I’m more of an ocean swimmer, so I was glad that as we headed back up the coast we made a stop at El Quemaito, an ocean beach, to have a quick saltwater dip. By this time I was starving, so I checked out the snack offerings of the beach vendors and settled on a bola de pescado, a little fried ball of yuca with a bit of salty fish inside. On the drive Zombolo told us a bit about the local culture and economy. Apparently, small planes from Colombia regularly fly over this coast to make scheduled drops of big blocks of cocaine to waiting speedboats. From there, the drugs make it around the country and, presumably, sometimes on to the US. But occasionally the speedboats have to get out of the area too quickly to make a thorough search and some blocks are left behind. No matter: some lucky fisherman will come across it, pick it up, and sell it to men who come in from the capital for just this purpose. This makes a substantial supplement to many local fishermen’s incomes, and is responsible for the fact that, as Zombolo pointed out to us, many of the poor-looking shacks we passed actually hold new refrigerators, TVs, and stereos. We passed through numerous police checkpoints along the road, which one might think would curb the problem, but no: they are mostly there to look for illegal Haitians, and at any rate, are all too easily bribed.
Arriving back in Barahona, we stopped on the city beach for a quick meal of local specialties: stewed carite fish and moro con coco, or rice and pigeon peas cooked up with coconut milk. We bought it at the fisherman’s cooperative, which guaranteed it was as fresh as could be, as fishermen’s wives almost immediately cook up and sell some of what their husbands bring in. In the time we sat there, we saw some arrive with huge catches, like an enormous marlin and a four-and-a-half-foot pointy-looking carite. Then we all took very quick showers, so we could get out to the town of Cabral in time for their carnival parade. This was only slightly interrupted by the fact that in the morning rush I’d left the keys to my padlock inside my locked hotel room. No biggie: Zombolo had a hammer and screwdriver in his car, and with a quick hit to the lock it was open. So much for security.
This time we were joined by Zombolo’s son and headed northwest into the interior to the town of Cabral, about 10 km away on a half-paved road. At the turn off for Cabral, a costumed figure on a platform showed us what we were going for: the cachúas, which are kind of the lechones of this town, the only one to hold carnival on Easter weekend itself. We’d been in a hurry to arrive, since it was already after three and word had it that the parade was to start at three-thirty sharp. Fat chance. When we got there the town’s population was milling about the park but not a comparsa (carnival troupe) or a carroza (float) was in sight. However, the town’s Judas was in place. In a tradition unique to this town, a dummy representing the traitor is erected on top of a monument at one end of the park. He wears a demonic horned mask and is dressed in a cachúa’s clothes: a colorful printed fabric jumpsuit with wings under the arms and strips of fabric or streamers flying about, a whip in one hand. On the Monday after Easter, when Cabral’s carnival ends, he’ll be taken down, burned, and whipped in a symbolic farewell to evil.
Almánzar hopped up on the stage that had been erected in the street on one side, since the judging table was up there and he was to take part. The rest of us milled about the park saying hi to our host’s many friends, including a politician, who graciously welcomed us to the town he represents and sounded pretty much like a politician anywhere. I certainly didn’t expect to run into anyone I knew here, in the middle of nowhere, but we were just settling down for a rest on the bandstand’s banister when I heard someone call my name and saw an American girl approaching me. Imagine my surprise to find it was Nicole, an intern working with my friend Kay at the Brooklyn Council of Arts who I’d met once a year before. I knew she was coming to the country for Holy Week, but we hadn’t been able to come up with any plan for meeting up since out own individual plans were so nebulous, so this was a happy and sublimely odd coincidence. As it turned out, she and her boyfriend Kareem had been wandering about the Southwest much as we had, only minus the bateyes.
It was good I had Nicole to chat with, because it turned out to be a very long wait before the parade made it down to us. They followed a whole long route, just like in other towns, but most observers wanted to get a spot around the park or near the judge’s stage in order to see the comparsas’ performances. Unlike in Santiago, each group must do a quick show of some sort, and they are judged on this as well as on their costumes. Eventually they did make it down to where I and my video camera were parked along with Zombolo, his son, and the other videographers. Besides local groups, visitors from other towns like Bani and San Juan de la Maguana were also included, as well as a number of devils from the capital in their fantastic suits with rumba-like sleeves and ruffled fabric running down the hood and back like a sort of mohawk. As the hours went by it got increasingly hard to film as the crowd pressed in on me where I sat Indian style, in spite of the police officers trying to keep them away from the performers and off of us squatters. It was decidedly uncomfortable and a little scary as the crowd got more excited and rowdy, but I filmed at least a snippet of each comparsa. They ran the gamut from traditional cachúas to a group covered in reddish slime that danced merengue zombie-style, from a colorful troupe of Robalagallinas to dancing burros. Transvestites were a definite theme, even more so than in Santiago: not only did we have the traditional robalagallina character, but transvestites appeared in many otherwise unremarkable dance troupes, and seemed to run the gamut of age from boys of maybe 12 to men of perhaps 60. Traditional occupations were also big: one group of campesinos demonstrated how they clear land with machetes and scythes, another represented the corn harvest through dancing girls in yellow dresses. One float held artisans showing how they make the wooden furniture typical of the town La Lista, and another held women pounding coffee and preparing stew. My favorite float was probably the one that showed what the cachúas would be doing the following day: on Easter Sunday, they all head down to the cemetery where they pay tribute to the great cachúas of the past by standing on their tombs and cracking their whips in a sort of 21-gun salute. Some crowd favorites included a little league team that “performed” a baseball game in reduced form, and one that showed a man preparing triculí, a typical bootleg liquor, in a trash can. Because this is illegal, the comparsa also included comical uniformed police and military men to arrest the bootlegger in dramatic fashion, nearly running me over in the process. We also got a President Leonel Fernandez impersonator surrounded by army generals and security guards. Still, the cachúas themselves were probably the most impressive and the most scary of all. Today’s lechones in Santiago try not to hit one another with their whips, just cracking them to scare and entertain the crowd. Quite the opposite with the cachúas, who periodically stage remarkably violent-looking fights, actually hitting one another with their whips and producing ear-splitting cracks in the air. They said it doesn’t really hurt (unless they take their shirts off), but I wasn’t sure about this. Also, I’d been told that lechones were originally around not only to fight one another but also to “keep order” of a sort by using their whips to keep the crowd back and prevent fighting. The cachúas did seem to be trying to do this, but often they only managed to get everyone riled up. Towards the end of the evening, a couple of cachúa troupes brought their own Judas dummies and set fire of them. As they whipped the burning dolls, flaming bits of cloth flew up into the dark sky while the crowd yelled rhythmically, “Judas, Judas, Judas, eh!” Or actually, something more akin to “Júa, Júa, Júa, eh!” in the local accent.
Hours later, things finally wrapped up. I was a little disappointed to not have gotten a picture of a cachúa with his mask actually on, but Zombolo told me that, unlike us lechones, they hardly ever pull them down off their heads. Perhaps this is so their identities can always be known and trouble avoided. At 7 PM, when the parade ended, the announcer made it known that all cachúas had to be unmasked and out of their costumes within the next half hour in order to avoid trouble with the law. Because a masked man can commit any sort of dastardly deed, this is how the town has decided to keep order. As the cachúas made themselves scarce, we wandered over to the ice cream parlor where I had a delicious scoop of ciruela (plum), and then down the street to the Doctor’s house.
Temito, as Dr. Temistocles is better known, is not only a medical doctor but also an artisan and the local folklorist. He makes tiny versions of the cachúa mask for sale, as well as the full-size deal, as well as whips. In fact, he invented a new style of whip, in which each of the hunk of natural fibers that are woven together are dyed a different color. They can be red, yellow, blue, or natural white, and thus make a striking fashion statement for any lechon or cachúa. I hadn’t seen these in Santiago so of course I had to have one. While I was trying one out, I had the second unexpected, weird reunion of the day. This time, it was anthropologist Martha Ellen Davis who I was surprised to see. I hadn’t known she usually makes a point of attending Cabral’s carnival. We enjoyed a quick chat about fieldwork and academia as Temito put the finishing touches to the 3 small masks and 1 medium-sized whip I purchased.
Once my purchases were complete, we beat a hasty retreat, as we still wanted to attend a fiesta de palos back in Barahona. We arrived at the house, a blue wooden deal in a typical barrio, only to find it looking suspiciously shuttered up. But when we turned off the car’s engine, we could hear the sound of drums coming from behind it. Heading down a narrow alleyway alongside, we arrived in the backyard to find about 30 people listening or dancing to the music being played on three long drums, maracas, and guira. At the back of the yard was a small thatch-roof shelter hung with voodoo flags each bearing a different color and a different symbol, much like what I understand to be used in Haitian voodoo ceremonies though lacking the central pillar. Next to this on the right, a goat in a black mask was tied up, presumably awaiting sacrifice, by a fire around which a set of drums were laid to heat their skins. To the left, a bunch of downy-feathered ducks were improbably running about with a couple of kittens. I talked with one of the drummers as they were waiting to begin. He said his nickname was Mero. “Mero? Like the fish? Filet of Mero?” I asked, thinking of the common Dominican dish. “Yes, exactly! Filet!” He laughed. I think I gave him a new nickname.
They began playing a rhythm almost exactly like what I’d learned from my friends from San Juan de la Maguana. Receiving the OK from Zombolo, I filmed a bit of the music and dancing, which surprised me by including a gay couple, but then Maribel grabbed me to go inside the house and chat with the santeros. As we entered the tiny room stuffed with candles, pictures of saints, and other ritual objects all arranged significantly but signifying I knew not what, I discovered that transvestites were definitely the theme of the day. The two men who sat in front of the table bearing food offerings like roast peanuts, candies, and a kind of semolina cake were both wearing women’s clothes. The man on the left was very dark-skinned and wearing a long black dress bordered in colorful ribbon, reminding me of a folklórico dance performance dress. The one on the right was light-skinned and festooned in an outlandish floor-length yellow satin number trimmed in white lace. The one on the left received me, telling me that there were many things I didn’t believe but that I needed to know and something about an interview. I wasn’t quite sure what he was getting at – did he want me to pay for a consultation or something? Was this like a tarot reading, or what? He stuffed my hands with peanuts and candy and I went on to the guy on the right. Unlike the first guy, this one was possessed, something that often happens to devotees during drumming ceremonies. Apparently, I was now speaking to the goddess Anaisa. S/he took my cupped hands between his and blew on them and shook them around. Then s/he said some kind of blessing wishing me health and money and all in a dramatic voice, and told me that the Virgin of Guadalupe watches and protects me. This part was a little eerie, as La Guadalupana is the patron saint of Mexico but not particularly big here, and he didn’t really have a reason to know I was from the Southwest, near Mexico. Did one of my companions go in and tell him this? It seemed unlikely, as he was in a trance and not up for chitchat.
Uncomfortable in all kinds of religious situations, be they Christian or voodoo, I was a little weirded out by this whole business. I felt stupid because I didn’t know what to do and was so out of place, much more so than in any other field situation I’d come in to. Not knowing if there was some other step I’d omitted, I thanked him (or her) and s/he told me, “I want beer! Bring me beer!” Oh great, I thought. Where was I supposed to get beer around here? Wait a sec- Maribel had brought me an enormous beer just before coming in here and it was still half full. Would this be appropriate? I didn’t really have any other choice I could see. I asked Maribel and she said to try to give it to Anaisa. I hurried out and back in with the beer, but Anaisa protested in dramatic fashion. “I said I wanted beer, not spit! This is spit! Bring me beer!!” Great. Even more embarrassed, I almost got into a discussion with this strange personage, protesting I didn’t know where to get beer at this hour in this neighborhood. Now I sort of felt like the whole thing was so ridiculous, I might be in a bizarre sort of sitcom. There should be a laugh track. A woman named Rosa who was attending to the ceremonies offered to show me where, and led me across the street to another house that appeared identical to all the other darkened shacks on the street, but which on the inside was actually a neighborhood bar. We took it back, and I was going to put it in front of Anaisa to make up with him or her, but Rosa took it away and poured it into a wine glass that looked like it had glass pebbles or beads in the bottom, handing it back to Anaisa, who then passed it on to another woman to taste. With the taster’s approval, s/he drunk it. I guess it finally passed the test. After that, I just wanted to enjoy the music and avoid any more weird religious encounters. But Zombolo was ready to go already and waiting at the car. Well, it had been a long day. We made a stop for sandwiches and then hit the hay.
We arose early on Sunday, expecting another harrowing day of travel. It almost turned out that way: at the Caribe Tours terminal, we found that they were completely sold out for the whole day. At the stop for the cheap buses, the voladoras, it looked to be a similar situation with a long line of passengers and luggage snaking all the way around the building. Luckily, Zombolo spotted a friend: the leader of the local drivers’ union! Thank goodness. He put us on a bus along with a few other VIPs before letting those from the line in, which not only assured us of breezy window seats but also of space to stow our luggage. It was a long, uneventful, but scenic trip back. Since then, it’s been more of the usual: writing up notes, organizing field recordings, my accordion lesson. We’re also preparing for Chiqui and Laura’s daughter’s quinceanera on Saturday, which necessitated a visit to the cakemaker and a shopping trip on Monday that I sponsored. I feel it’s a worthy cause.
After a typical day in the library and gym on Wednesday, I made a quick decision. It was holy week, the DR’s main party time, and I had to do something. My palos-playing friends couldn’t go to San Juan de la Maguana after all, so I accepted an invitation from Rafael Almánzar, the folklorist at the Casa de Arte, to join him in his yearly trip to the seaside town of Barahona in the southwest. Having made plans to leave on the 6 AM bus to avoid the crowds, I rushed home to get organized, pack, and grab a very few short hours of sleep before the alarm went off. Grumbling to myself, I stumbled into the shower and threw some clothes on and was then surprised to hear the phone ring. It was Almánzar, telling me he’d decided not to leave til noon in order to give his girlfriend a chance to join us. Argh!!!! Eventually I slept a couple of hours more but was still grumpy when we met up at the bus terminal. At least I had an entertaining mystery book to read on the way to the capital, so when we got into the bus terminal there I was in a somewhat better mood. But not for long. The entire station was literally packed wall to wall with people and an amazing heat was emanating from the ticket-selling area. We had figured to be on a 5:00 bus, and it was only 2:30, but this didn’t look likely. They hadn’t even started selling tickets for our bus yet but there was already a line a mile long, we found out after Almánzar made a daring journey through the throng to investigate and nearly passed out from the heat. Next Maribel tried, and seemed to be making some progress. That progress was illusory though. It was four hours before we finally got tickets and got on a bus to Barahona, and it was nearly dark.
My first impressions of the Southwest were thus made by moonlight. The first half of the trip, through towns like San Cristobal, Baní, and Azua, was unremarkable, but after Azua things got interesting. A good stretch of the trip seemed to look an awful lot like Arizona. Maybe it was just the light from the full moon, I thought, combined with the rugged landscape of hills, valleys, and rock faces. But no, on the trip back in daylight I confirmed it: the brown and very dry, rocky soil supported trees that looked just like mesquite and greasewood, shrubs resembling creosote, yucca plants with their tall flowering stalks, cacti similar to prickly pear and organ pipe along with another that was something like a Martian version of cholla. But it was disconcerting when, as the vegetation began to change again, the mesquite (or whatever it was) began to be interspersed with very tropical plantain trees. After the landscape re-tropicalized itself we at last found ourselves in Barahona, three hours from the capital and almost 10 hours after we’d left Santiago. There, we were met by Almánzar’s friend Zombolo, the director of the local Ballet Folklórico and a guy who knows everyone.
Zombolo isn’t Zombolo’s real name, of course. His legal name is Gustavo Diaz. Like many Dominicans, he goes by his childhood nickname, which in this case came from a pet dog his family had. His dad was always calling to that dog out their front door, so the neighborhood kids took to applying the name to young Gustavo as well. These days, Zombolo is a Mormon. I was surprised about this – not only did I not know the extent of the Dominican Church of Latter Day Saints (Zombolo estimates they have as many as 600,000 members) but one surely wouldn’t find a Mormon in favor of Fidel and Cuban revolutionary politics in Arizona. I told him he should take it upon himself to discuss politics with visiting US Mormons and convince them of the error of their ways. After our brief political discussion, he took me to my hotel – the only room available in any of the many budget options in town during this busy time, and thus, as might be expected, a sort of marginal one. Peeling, icky paint; a bathroom with cold water only – and that only when the water was on; no toilet seat; holy sheets; and only a mini-padlock with which to lock it while I was out. Still, it was cheap and I was tired, so it looked OK to me. I’d just make sure to always carry my recording equipment with me. Before I could hit the hay, though, we had to eat so we went to a nearby cafeteria with excellent batidas but questionable seafood (Maribel decided, on closer inspection, not to each the lambi or conch sandwich she’d ordered) and the slowest service ever. I think it actually took an hour to get a couple of cheese sandwiches.
Friday, thank goodness, was another day, and we had big plans. After a quick breakfast of sliced fruit, we headed just out of town to a batey, or a settlement of sugarcane workers. Last night’s sandwiches had taken so long that we missed the levantamiento ceremony, the raising of the ritual objects, that begins the gagá ritual music that goes on until Sunday. But no matter; we arrived at 10 AM and the gagá was already in full swing. This style of music is played on a set of 3-5 large tubes made of bamboo or PVC pipe, each of which produces a single musical note when blown. By playing these in an interlocking pattern the gagá group produces short, catchy melodies accompanied by a couple of long drums, a smaller sideways drum like a tambora, a güira or a güira-like metal shaker, and some other metal shakers similar to maracas. Numerous long metal trumpets also join in the interlocking rhythms, and all the trumpet and tube (fotuto) players also tap out rhythms on the sides of their instruments with sticks. Altogether it makes an amazing sound and a moving one. The sound of the tubes resembles that of a blown conch shell or a ram’s horn, giving a subliminal impression of a very ancient music.
Each gagá group is also a cofradía, or religious brotherhood, dedicated to a particular saint. The first group we came across belonged to San Elias. They were playing in a small dirt yard behind a wooden shack painted bright blue when we arrived. The gagá group consists of much more than just musicians, however, as we soon found out. It didn’t take long for us to be spotted as outsiders – not just me, but also my three Dominican companions, who also looked quite different from the batey dwellers, who are mostly of Haitian descent. Both the official alms-collectors, who carry a flag and wooden boxes for donations, and numerous dancing participants who also hoped for a handout surrounded us in a noisy throng. We gave out all the ten- and twenty-peso notes we had, and Almánzar even had some larger notes torn straight out of his hand in the madness. Now I knew why Zombolo had advised me to put a single bill in each of my jeans pockets, and give them out from there rather than reaching into my purse.
Gagá groups also include a few flag-bearers flying the colors of the group’s patron saint and twirling a plaque bearing the saint’s image. There are also several officially designated dancers who dress in sequined capes and skirts made of handkerchiefs in every color imaginable. They sometimes hold batons and sometimes machetes. Both are used to conduct play-fights, which nevertheless look quite real. Once in a while, one will throw a machete way up into the air, and when he catches it the whole crowd screams in happy relief. The dancing is really impressive as two or three men advance and retreat from each other, spinning around, squatting and jumping in a whirl of color and clash of blades. After dancing for a while in the yard, the group set off down the dirt road, going further in the batey. Many neighbors follow along, joining in the dancing and singing. Most of the songs are in Haitian kreyol, which I couldn’t understand, though there were a few in Spanish, these secular rather than religious in nature. One, a street or game song adapted to the gagá rhythm, stated, “my watch stopped; now it doesn’t work.” The chorus to another could be understood in any language: “Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson.”
As everyone else partied, Zombolo and I filmed when we could. But sometimes we just looked around. A batey is a place of real poverty: these are some of the poorest people in an already poor country. Some of this is due to persistent racism and discrimination against Haitians and their descendents, some to the nature of the colonial sugarcane economy. In some ways, it looked like any poor city barrio, but on closer examination, it wasn’t. Instead of bad pavement, there was no pavement on the streets. Most of the houses were ramshackle wooden constructions that looked like a good wind might blow them over. There were a few sturdier buildings that the sugar cane companies had built for the workers years ago, but these too looked like they had seen better days. One cement-block house we passed by looked incongruous, freshly plastered and painted in yellow and white with a porch framed in columns. But on closer inspection, one could see that it was simply a front room built onto an older house just as ramshackle as its neighbors. Of course we not only saw houses but people. A group of very small children, maybe 5-6 years old, had formed their own gagá group and were practicing while sitting on a bit of crumbling concrete patio on the side of one house. They used milk jugs, beer bottles, and a metal pipe to make a pretty good approximation of their adult counterparts. We thought they were good and gave 10-peso notes to several of the kids. But as we walked away we heard some noise and looked back: the kids were arguing and a few of the musicians took off across the street to play alone. Boy, money corrupts at any age!
After an hour or so with the gagá San Elias, we decided to go look for the other big gagá of this batey, this one dedicated to San Miguel. They were not hard to find by following the noise and looking down every street for bright colors. Besides being dedicated to a saint, most gagás these days also “belong” to a political party. That is to say, they receive sponsorship from a party that enables them to purchase items like costumes, flags, or instruments in exchange for wearing the colors of that party; whether they actually support that party is another story. At any rate, San Elias had been supported by the newly formed Red and White Alliance, which brings together the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano and the Partido Reformista Social Cristiano. San Miguel received the patronage instead of the Partido Liberal Dominicano, the one currently in power and represented by purple and yellow. Many of those following the gagá San Miguel were therefore wearing PLD t-shirts and visors, and even their fotutos were painted yellow and sporting purple bumper stickers. But Zombolo, a strong PRD man, was happy to see that, at least when we first arrived, this group had fewer followers than did the Red and White. He explained that the current government had done little to improve the plight of the batey dwellers and so was not terribly popular, while the local PRD politician (whose campaign Zombolo was endorsing through a huge stick-on poster on the back window of his van) had made an effort to get basic necessities to the sugar cane workers.
After another hour or so with San Miguel we decided to break for lunch and naps. We loaded up on rice with pigeon peas, fried carite (a local fish), and salad and rested, but when the agreed-upon time for reconvening came Almánzar and Maribel still weren’t up. Zombolo therefore came alone to collect me and took me down to the seaside, which I still hadn’t seen even though my hotel was only a few blocks away. The townspeople were there hanging out and listening to music, and although it wasn’t a sandy beach, some were swimming. Vendors sold fried fish and green coconuts out of carts. We opted for the latter. Cut into a flattened point on one side with a machete with a little flap hanging off like a lid over the hole, one can drink the abundant water inside, which my companion said is good for cleaning out the kidneys. Once you’ve drunk the water, they’ll hack the thing in half for you: with a sliver cut out of the outer shell, you can scoop out the soft layer on the inside that, if allowed to ripen, would have turned into the white coconut we’re all used to.
Back at the hotel, we found the two sleepyheads waiting for us, so we collected them and then headed back to hook up again with San Miguel, still making their circuit up and down the streets of the batey. Now they were parading less and stopping more, though, allowing for more people to join in and observe the machete dances. They also stopped to pay visits to various members of the cofradía, knocking on their doors, greeting them, and sprinkling rum on the ground in ritual fashion. One drawback was that as the afternoon wore on, people got drunker. At one point a fight broke out and there was a general fear that they might have guns, so everyone started to run, an activity made difficult by the fact that at that point we were in a narrow, rubble-strewn street between two barbed-wire fences and there was a truck coming in behind us. I ran too, attempting to get behind the truck with the rest, when word spread that it had been a false alarm. Still a little spooked, though, I went back to join Zombolo in his van for a bit and search out some cold water. It was just as well, as it was quite tiring to follow these groups through the dusty streets under the beating sun. Rejoining the group, a couple of drunken revelers tried to grab me for a dance but at this point they were dancing more reggaetón-doggie-style than traditional gagá moves, so I decided to abstain.
We stayed with this group until well past dark. As night fell, we made it to the batey’s main intersection, the only one I’d seen with a traffic light and street signs. San Miguel occupied one of the four corners here, and another gagá from a neighboring batey soon came along to occupy one of the others. I wondered if we could get two others and have a big play-off, but this didn’t happen. At about 9:00 we headed out for a not-so-quick bite to eat. Driving back into town, we headed down the malecón where a local bachata group was playing, all the many bars were filled to overflowing, and couples were making out under nonfunctional streetlights (Zombolo said it wasn’t worth it for the city to replace the bulbs, as the kids would always break them again). Just rising out of the sea was an enormous, blood-red moon. I thought it looked ominous, while Zombolo thought it looked like rain. Turned out he was right.
After dinner, all I could think of was bed, but the others just had to have ice cream. We headed to an enormous Trujillo-era hotel that looked like it must have been quite grand in the 1940s and 50s. The lobby that seemed a mile long was still pretty impressive, especially compared to where I was staying. Local nature scenes were painted onto the walls, and the big columns holding the tall ceiling up were painted in an oversized wood-grain pattern for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. I was too tired to converse with the proprietor as did the others, so I parked myself on a couch near a mosquito coil, at which point the rain started. It was really coming down. When it slowed a bit, we made a run for the van. Unfortunately, it was raining in the van as well. I had grown fond of the rust bucket, but it had definitely seen better days. One could roll down the automatic windows using the button which hung on its wires out of the door frame, but to roll them back up required the judicious application of a metal wrench to the contacts on its backside, which also produced a festive-looking shower of sparks. “Move to the back! move to the back!” Zombolo advised Almánzar and Maribel, who normally sat on the van’s middle seat. “Oh dear, now when we wake up this thing’ll be like an old mattress.” He was right, but first I had to get to my own mattress. When I entered my room though, I found out the van wasn’t the only thing that was leaky. Water had started dripping through the ancient paneling that made up my tiny box of a room’s ceiling: the tin roof above was obviously in need of repairs. I told the proprietor and he came to look. “Oh, it’s only a little drip.” He shoved my bed an inch closer to the wall. “There, that’s better.” “Well, I just hope it doesn’t start coming through the boards above my head in the night,” I shouted above the roar of the torrential downpour. He looked at that area. “Well, it is possible; it’s discolored here and looks like it might have leaked before.” “Great!” I replied. “So what do I do if it starts pouring on my head in the middle of the night?” “Move to the other side of the bed!” He advised. Then we both cracked up. I was slightly more worried about the electrical wires that ran to my fan and single lightbulb, which passed through the ceiling panels up into the presumably damp attic space, but was too hot to do without the fan and too tired to let that keep me from sleep.
I awoke feeling much improved and ready for whatever adventures the day might bring, now that the rain and hence the roof drippage had stopped. After another fruit breakfast, we were on the road in our trusty if leaky van to see the Barahona coastline. It was beautiful and quite different than the north coast I was used to. There are few beaches: instead there are mountains running right up to the sea and dropping off in cliffs, some of which in the distance appeared to be as white as those of Dover. Combined with the lush foliage and flowers, it reminded me a bit of the Amalfi coast of Italy. We passed through many small towns like Baoruco and El Paraiso, but stopped only in La Cienaga. There, as we peered out our window and down what appeared to be the town’s only street, we saw a ragtag gagá heading towards us. This rural group clearly had no political sponsorship of any kind and was much poorer than the batey ensembles. Instead of sequin capes and skirts made from hundreds of handkerchiefs, they tied just two colorful handkerchiefs together to make a sort of overshirt/cape. They had only one flag and instead of a box for the money-collector, they had only a plate. Instead of multiple PVC fotutos and metal trumpets, they had just two bamboo tubes. But what they did have was rhythm and machetes for dancing. They approached us and for our donation of 10 pesos they gave us our own private machete performance. Unfortunately, I hadn’t brought my video camera or minidisk recorder, but I did get a couple of photos.
From there we continued down the coast to Los Patos, a natural swimming hole just before a cold mountain river meets the warm sea. There is a beautiful white pebble beach there, but swimming isn’t permitted in the ocean because of a strong current. The waters are perfectly clear with little clear fish swimming around in it, and surrounded by lush greenery. On one side is a group of food and drink stands and tables, chairs, and umbrellas to be used by any customers. The water was really cold but it was a pleasant and scenic way to spend a hot morning. Still, I’m more of an ocean swimmer, so I was glad that as we headed back up the coast we made a stop at El Quemaito, an ocean beach, to have a quick saltwater dip. By this time I was starving, so I checked out the snack offerings of the beach vendors and settled on a bola de pescado, a little fried ball of yuca with a bit of salty fish inside. On the drive Zombolo told us a bit about the local culture and economy. Apparently, small planes from Colombia regularly fly over this coast to make scheduled drops of big blocks of cocaine to waiting speedboats. From there, the drugs make it around the country and, presumably, sometimes on to the US. But occasionally the speedboats have to get out of the area too quickly to make a thorough search and some blocks are left behind. No matter: some lucky fisherman will come across it, pick it up, and sell it to men who come in from the capital for just this purpose. This makes a substantial supplement to many local fishermen’s incomes, and is responsible for the fact that, as Zombolo pointed out to us, many of the poor-looking shacks we passed actually hold new refrigerators, TVs, and stereos. We passed through numerous police checkpoints along the road, which one might think would curb the problem, but no: they are mostly there to look for illegal Haitians, and at any rate, are all too easily bribed.
Arriving back in Barahona, we stopped on the city beach for a quick meal of local specialties: stewed carite fish and moro con coco, or rice and pigeon peas cooked up with coconut milk. We bought it at the fisherman’s cooperative, which guaranteed it was as fresh as could be, as fishermen’s wives almost immediately cook up and sell some of what their husbands bring in. In the time we sat there, we saw some arrive with huge catches, like an enormous marlin and a four-and-a-half-foot pointy-looking carite. Then we all took very quick showers, so we could get out to the town of Cabral in time for their carnival parade. This was only slightly interrupted by the fact that in the morning rush I’d left the keys to my padlock inside my locked hotel room. No biggie: Zombolo had a hammer and screwdriver in his car, and with a quick hit to the lock it was open. So much for security.
This time we were joined by Zombolo’s son and headed northwest into the interior to the town of Cabral, about 10 km away on a half-paved road. At the turn off for Cabral, a costumed figure on a platform showed us what we were going for: the cachúas, which are kind of the lechones of this town, the only one to hold carnival on Easter weekend itself. We’d been in a hurry to arrive, since it was already after three and word had it that the parade was to start at three-thirty sharp. Fat chance. When we got there the town’s population was milling about the park but not a comparsa (carnival troupe) or a carroza (float) was in sight. However, the town’s Judas was in place. In a tradition unique to this town, a dummy representing the traitor is erected on top of a monument at one end of the park. He wears a demonic horned mask and is dressed in a cachúa’s clothes: a colorful printed fabric jumpsuit with wings under the arms and strips of fabric or streamers flying about, a whip in one hand. On the Monday after Easter, when Cabral’s carnival ends, he’ll be taken down, burned, and whipped in a symbolic farewell to evil.
Almánzar hopped up on the stage that had been erected in the street on one side, since the judging table was up there and he was to take part. The rest of us milled about the park saying hi to our host’s many friends, including a politician, who graciously welcomed us to the town he represents and sounded pretty much like a politician anywhere. I certainly didn’t expect to run into anyone I knew here, in the middle of nowhere, but we were just settling down for a rest on the bandstand’s banister when I heard someone call my name and saw an American girl approaching me. Imagine my surprise to find it was Nicole, an intern working with my friend Kay at the Brooklyn Council of Arts who I’d met once a year before. I knew she was coming to the country for Holy Week, but we hadn’t been able to come up with any plan for meeting up since out own individual plans were so nebulous, so this was a happy and sublimely odd coincidence. As it turned out, she and her boyfriend Kareem had been wandering about the Southwest much as we had, only minus the bateyes.
It was good I had Nicole to chat with, because it turned out to be a very long wait before the parade made it down to us. They followed a whole long route, just like in other towns, but most observers wanted to get a spot around the park or near the judge’s stage in order to see the comparsas’ performances. Unlike in Santiago, each group must do a quick show of some sort, and they are judged on this as well as on their costumes. Eventually they did make it down to where I and my video camera were parked along with Zombolo, his son, and the other videographers. Besides local groups, visitors from other towns like Bani and San Juan de la Maguana were also included, as well as a number of devils from the capital in their fantastic suits with rumba-like sleeves and ruffled fabric running down the hood and back like a sort of mohawk. As the hours went by it got increasingly hard to film as the crowd pressed in on me where I sat Indian style, in spite of the police officers trying to keep them away from the performers and off of us squatters. It was decidedly uncomfortable and a little scary as the crowd got more excited and rowdy, but I filmed at least a snippet of each comparsa. They ran the gamut from traditional cachúas to a group covered in reddish slime that danced merengue zombie-style, from a colorful troupe of Robalagallinas to dancing burros. Transvestites were a definite theme, even more so than in Santiago: not only did we have the traditional robalagallina character, but transvestites appeared in many otherwise unremarkable dance troupes, and seemed to run the gamut of age from boys of maybe 12 to men of perhaps 60. Traditional occupations were also big: one group of campesinos demonstrated how they clear land with machetes and scythes, another represented the corn harvest through dancing girls in yellow dresses. One float held artisans showing how they make the wooden furniture typical of the town La Lista, and another held women pounding coffee and preparing stew. My favorite float was probably the one that showed what the cachúas would be doing the following day: on Easter Sunday, they all head down to the cemetery where they pay tribute to the great cachúas of the past by standing on their tombs and cracking their whips in a sort of 21-gun salute. Some crowd favorites included a little league team that “performed” a baseball game in reduced form, and one that showed a man preparing triculí, a typical bootleg liquor, in a trash can. Because this is illegal, the comparsa also included comical uniformed police and military men to arrest the bootlegger in dramatic fashion, nearly running me over in the process. We also got a President Leonel Fernandez impersonator surrounded by army generals and security guards. Still, the cachúas themselves were probably the most impressive and the most scary of all. Today’s lechones in Santiago try not to hit one another with their whips, just cracking them to scare and entertain the crowd. Quite the opposite with the cachúas, who periodically stage remarkably violent-looking fights, actually hitting one another with their whips and producing ear-splitting cracks in the air. They said it doesn’t really hurt (unless they take their shirts off), but I wasn’t sure about this. Also, I’d been told that lechones were originally around not only to fight one another but also to “keep order” of a sort by using their whips to keep the crowd back and prevent fighting. The cachúas did seem to be trying to do this, but often they only managed to get everyone riled up. Towards the end of the evening, a couple of cachúa troupes brought their own Judas dummies and set fire of them. As they whipped the burning dolls, flaming bits of cloth flew up into the dark sky while the crowd yelled rhythmically, “Judas, Judas, Judas, eh!” Or actually, something more akin to “Júa, Júa, Júa, eh!” in the local accent.
Hours later, things finally wrapped up. I was a little disappointed to not have gotten a picture of a cachúa with his mask actually on, but Zombolo told me that, unlike us lechones, they hardly ever pull them down off their heads. Perhaps this is so their identities can always be known and trouble avoided. At 7 PM, when the parade ended, the announcer made it known that all cachúas had to be unmasked and out of their costumes within the next half hour in order to avoid trouble with the law. Because a masked man can commit any sort of dastardly deed, this is how the town has decided to keep order. As the cachúas made themselves scarce, we wandered over to the ice cream parlor where I had a delicious scoop of ciruela (plum), and then down the street to the Doctor’s house.
Temito, as Dr. Temistocles is better known, is not only a medical doctor but also an artisan and the local folklorist. He makes tiny versions of the cachúa mask for sale, as well as the full-size deal, as well as whips. In fact, he invented a new style of whip, in which each of the hunk of natural fibers that are woven together are dyed a different color. They can be red, yellow, blue, or natural white, and thus make a striking fashion statement for any lechon or cachúa. I hadn’t seen these in Santiago so of course I had to have one. While I was trying one out, I had the second unexpected, weird reunion of the day. This time, it was anthropologist Martha Ellen Davis who I was surprised to see. I hadn’t known she usually makes a point of attending Cabral’s carnival. We enjoyed a quick chat about fieldwork and academia as Temito put the finishing touches to the 3 small masks and 1 medium-sized whip I purchased.
Once my purchases were complete, we beat a hasty retreat, as we still wanted to attend a fiesta de palos back in Barahona. We arrived at the house, a blue wooden deal in a typical barrio, only to find it looking suspiciously shuttered up. But when we turned off the car’s engine, we could hear the sound of drums coming from behind it. Heading down a narrow alleyway alongside, we arrived in the backyard to find about 30 people listening or dancing to the music being played on three long drums, maracas, and guira. At the back of the yard was a small thatch-roof shelter hung with voodoo flags each bearing a different color and a different symbol, much like what I understand to be used in Haitian voodoo ceremonies though lacking the central pillar. Next to this on the right, a goat in a black mask was tied up, presumably awaiting sacrifice, by a fire around which a set of drums were laid to heat their skins. To the left, a bunch of downy-feathered ducks were improbably running about with a couple of kittens. I talked with one of the drummers as they were waiting to begin. He said his nickname was Mero. “Mero? Like the fish? Filet of Mero?” I asked, thinking of the common Dominican dish. “Yes, exactly! Filet!” He laughed. I think I gave him a new nickname.
They began playing a rhythm almost exactly like what I’d learned from my friends from San Juan de la Maguana. Receiving the OK from Zombolo, I filmed a bit of the music and dancing, which surprised me by including a gay couple, but then Maribel grabbed me to go inside the house and chat with the santeros. As we entered the tiny room stuffed with candles, pictures of saints, and other ritual objects all arranged significantly but signifying I knew not what, I discovered that transvestites were definitely the theme of the day. The two men who sat in front of the table bearing food offerings like roast peanuts, candies, and a kind of semolina cake were both wearing women’s clothes. The man on the left was very dark-skinned and wearing a long black dress bordered in colorful ribbon, reminding me of a folklórico dance performance dress. The one on the right was light-skinned and festooned in an outlandish floor-length yellow satin number trimmed in white lace. The one on the left received me, telling me that there were many things I didn’t believe but that I needed to know and something about an interview. I wasn’t quite sure what he was getting at – did he want me to pay for a consultation or something? Was this like a tarot reading, or what? He stuffed my hands with peanuts and candy and I went on to the guy on the right. Unlike the first guy, this one was possessed, something that often happens to devotees during drumming ceremonies. Apparently, I was now speaking to the goddess Anaisa. S/he took my cupped hands between his and blew on them and shook them around. Then s/he said some kind of blessing wishing me health and money and all in a dramatic voice, and told me that the Virgin of Guadalupe watches and protects me. This part was a little eerie, as La Guadalupana is the patron saint of Mexico but not particularly big here, and he didn’t really have a reason to know I was from the Southwest, near Mexico. Did one of my companions go in and tell him this? It seemed unlikely, as he was in a trance and not up for chitchat.
Uncomfortable in all kinds of religious situations, be they Christian or voodoo, I was a little weirded out by this whole business. I felt stupid because I didn’t know what to do and was so out of place, much more so than in any other field situation I’d come in to. Not knowing if there was some other step I’d omitted, I thanked him (or her) and s/he told me, “I want beer! Bring me beer!” Oh great, I thought. Where was I supposed to get beer around here? Wait a sec- Maribel had brought me an enormous beer just before coming in here and it was still half full. Would this be appropriate? I didn’t really have any other choice I could see. I asked Maribel and she said to try to give it to Anaisa. I hurried out and back in with the beer, but Anaisa protested in dramatic fashion. “I said I wanted beer, not spit! This is spit! Bring me beer!!” Great. Even more embarrassed, I almost got into a discussion with this strange personage, protesting I didn’t know where to get beer at this hour in this neighborhood. Now I sort of felt like the whole thing was so ridiculous, I might be in a bizarre sort of sitcom. There should be a laugh track. A woman named Rosa who was attending to the ceremonies offered to show me where, and led me across the street to another house that appeared identical to all the other darkened shacks on the street, but which on the inside was actually a neighborhood bar. We took it back, and I was going to put it in front of Anaisa to make up with him or her, but Rosa took it away and poured it into a wine glass that looked like it had glass pebbles or beads in the bottom, handing it back to Anaisa, who then passed it on to another woman to taste. With the taster’s approval, s/he drunk it. I guess it finally passed the test. After that, I just wanted to enjoy the music and avoid any more weird religious encounters. But Zombolo was ready to go already and waiting at the car. Well, it had been a long day. We made a stop for sandwiches and then hit the hay.
We arose early on Sunday, expecting another harrowing day of travel. It almost turned out that way: at the Caribe Tours terminal, we found that they were completely sold out for the whole day. At the stop for the cheap buses, the voladoras, it looked to be a similar situation with a long line of passengers and luggage snaking all the way around the building. Luckily, Zombolo spotted a friend: the leader of the local drivers’ union! Thank goodness. He put us on a bus along with a few other VIPs before letting those from the line in, which not only assured us of breezy window seats but also of space to stow our luggage. It was a long, uneventful, but scenic trip back. Since then, it’s been more of the usual: writing up notes, organizing field recordings, my accordion lesson. We’re also preparing for Chiqui and Laura’s daughter’s quinceanera on Saturday, which necessitated a visit to the cakemaker and a shopping trip on Monday that I sponsored. I feel it’s a worthy cause.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Beans, mysteries, and miracle chickens
4/05-4/10/06
On Saturday Robert Baron, folklorist visiting from New York, passed back through town so I decided to set up a folklore meeting. I invited Rafael Almanzar from the Casa de Arte to join us for an evening of (what else) merengue típico and talking shop. Because 8:30 was far too early to head to any clubs, we first stopped at a colmado in the downtown area. It was in an ancient old house with the very tall, narrow doors and creaky wooden floorboards, lit by a bulb hanging from a wire. On the outside, though, the whole thing was painted with the logo of Kola Real – actually a very cheery look in lime green, red, and white. Given their sponsorship, it was surprising to find they actually had no sodas. They were also out of water. The choice was between malta, beer, and rum. Rafael and Robert order maltas, feeling it was early to start drinking, but I don’t like malta so I spent my time translating our conversation on folk dance groups rather than drinking.
Once we left, the whole colmado closed – I guess they figured they could only go so far on an all-malt menu. We took a little drive to check out the car wash and rancho situation, which then turned into a longer drive after we missed the turn-around point and had o keep going all the way to Villa Gonzalez. Robert commented on how all the little roadhouses with típico music reminded him of how blues music once was in the South. Eventually we decided on La Tinaja, as El Ciego de Nagua was playing there. Finally, my opportunity to hear this típico legend had at last arrived after a nearly two-year-long game of tag: it seemed that whenever I was in New York, he was in Santiago, and whenever I came here, he left on tour to New York. Anyway, it was definitely worth the wait to see him. Of course, his accordion technique was amazing, but his saxophonist and conguero also took some amazing solos. In addition, the fame of his singer, Chico Torres, turned out to be well-deserved. I especially enjoyed a tune Chico composed himself, which closed the set. I also enjoyed dancing Almanzar’s own, unique brands of salsa, típico, and pop merengue – a combination of his training in folk dance and of his own spontaneous inspiration.
On Sunday I was pretty tired, but still excited to attend my first palos rehearsal. They had told me to meet them “across from the basketball court on the Circunvalacion, near the bridge to La Otra Banda,” and the time was “after 4.” This is a favorite Dominican way of telling time, meaning that they might be there around 4, but they might get there substantially later. I got there around 4:10, knowing I was early, but when I called Hector, the leader, he told me he was loading up the instruments as we spoke and would be there very shortly. I entertained myself with my paperback Jung and some people-watching – a whole family, including little girls in frilly pink dresses, pulled off the road next to the empty field by the bridge and disappeared down the slope to the riverbed. A while later they came back with bunches of reeds, which they loaded into their car before leaving. Was this a preparation for Palm Sunday crafts next week? I didn’t know, but what I did know was that this palos group was late, even for Dominicans. A little after five I was just about ready to leave when one of them shows up on a motor bike and beckons to me. Turns out there is ANOTHER basketball court a little farther down the Circunvalacion. Ah, well.
Following the bike down to the next site, I found the drummers heating their drum heads around a small fire they’d built on the roadside. They told me they’d been “waiting for me for a while.” Ha ha! By this time I was both sleepy and hungry, but when they put a balsie (a small, single-headed drum) in my hands, I perked up. Unlike in other drummed religious music in the African diaspora, there are no gender restriction in this Afro-Dominican tradition. Eventually, I could work my way up even to the largest lead drums. But today, keeping the off-beat rhythm of the balsie and figuring out how best to strike the drum to (a) make a nice sound and (b) not bruise my hand was enough for me to deal with. I wanted to sing the responses, but I couldn’t have done that and not lost my way in the interlocking rhythms at this early stage. That will come in a later lesson. I particularly liked “Mama Tingo,” a song commemorating the death of a woman from Villa Mella who dared to criticize the Trujillo regime. Hector explained there are many protest songs within the palos repertoire, and when I asked why there weren’t many merengues of protest, he responded by drawing his fingers across his neck in the universal sign of “off-with-his-head.” Merengue is a highly visible popular music, but the local folk musicians who played palos were able to fly under the radar and be more critical of the government.
It was back to the routine on Monday with reading, writing, and accordion lesson (this week’s tune: La Malla Prendida); and on Tuesday with library research and a major rainstorm. However, I shook things up a little on Wednesday by adding a tambora lesson to my routine. Back at Rafaelito’s, I learned some variations on the first part merengue rhythm and started on the guinchao, a rhythm Tatico and his musicians came up with that’s kind of a cross between merengue and pambiche and whose name is apparently meaningless (though once I read in a newspaper that it came from “winch”). Rafaelito and Carmen also made sure to feed me with shrimp and rice, avocado, and both salty and sweet plantains. Then a vendor came around with his soup pot full of habichuelas con dulce, the sweet beans that are traditional eats around Holy Week. They were also the theme for La Maldicion del Padre Cardona (The Curse of Father Cardona), a Dominican film that came out late last year. In the movie, a family already held in suspicion by the natives of the mountain town of Costanza for their big city ways, makes the sweet for the whole town and everyone starts suffering from stomach trouble. The priest gets terrible gas while he’s giving mass, goes outside to shake his fist at the heavens and say, “Damn you! Damn you and your beans, Gomez family!” (or whatever their name was). Right at that moment, he is struck down by lightening, and the curse goes into effect. Apparently this batch was curse-free, though, as the habichuelas were both tasty and filling.
The next day, my auto mechanic pal El Negro had suggested I take my car to his cousin, Andres, to have its timing better regulated. So I headed out to Los Reyes, a barrio on the edge of town I’d never been to before. I had a little trouble finding the shop, but it turned out to be right behind a rancho típico that I hadn’t even known existed before. Perfect. In no time at all, I had a whole team of men and teenagers shaking their heads over my car and making fun of one another. “Hey Burro, get over here!” the air conditioning man yelled to one of the apprentices. “Now, why do you want to go around insulting animals like that?” complained the man wrestling with the underside of my car.
During the next five hours, I chatted with the mechanics, went to the rancho for a big lunch, read my book, and met Panchita, the wonder chicken. Panchita was really, really fat. When she ran, she sort of wobbled from leg to leg like a chubby man. She also eats chicken. I found this cannibalism very disturbing, but it didn’t seem to bother Panchita at all. She has become the mechanics’ pet – in fact, they had a dog at one point but then got rid of it because he bothered Panchita too much. But she was more like a dog than a chicken, in some respects. When she had been just a young thing, she was sick and skinny and looked like she was about to die, so Andres, the shop owner, took her out into the forest about 5 km away and left her there. But Panchita came back, and clearly recovered that lost weight. They told me she no longer eats corn like a regular chicken at all – only chicken and jugo de avena (a sweet oatmeal drink). She actually didn’t have a name when I got there, but I told them they really needed to fix that situation. “Give her a name that sounds like a fat lady,” I suggested. And thus was Panchita christened.
On Saturday I motivated myself to get out and hear some music at Rancho Merengue, because Fefita la Grande was playing there and I hadn’t had much opportunity to see her this year. First, I chatted with the musicians out in the parking lot. Kandy the güira player is a friend of mine, and he introduced me to the others: Victor, the singer, probably about 70 years old; Diploma, the tambora player; and some of the others. “Hey! I heard there was an American girl who played accordion, but I’ve never seen you before!” one told me. Word gets around. Eventually we made our way inside, where I took a seat at stage left with Chimonchito, the güira player for Francisco Ulloa, who was visiting. He showed me some pictures on his cell phone of amazing, artistic güiras he has made, some featuring full-color Dominican and Puerto Rican flags. I also found out why one doesn’t hear much about Ulloa these days: like Juan Luis Guerra, with whom he recorded the album Fogorate, he has become an evangelical Christian. But thankfully, this epidemic has not yet spread to Fefita. At 62 her hip-gyrating dance moves were as crazy as ever, and her voice just as good. She was wearing white pants with a silver chain belly-dance-style belt, and an midriff-length electric blue lace top with only a bra underneath. She is something else. The place was packed, and with more women than one usually finds in a típico crowd. A couple of them were videotaping and taking pictures. Wait – isn’t that supposed to be MY job? My friend Americo Mejia, the típico composer from Santo Domingo, was also there with his wife. A good time was had by all.
I stuck with my new Sunday routine of sleeping in, followed by an afternoon of reading and writing up notes until 4:00, when I go to my palos rehearsal. Well OK, I didn’t quite stick to that. Rafaelito had called me up the night before to tell me I had to go by his house and eat more holy week habichuelas con dulce, this time prepared by master chef Carmen. So I headed over to el Ingenio, where I found Carmen in the living room, conversing with her best friend and drinking coffee. My habichuelas had been put aside specially in an attractive blue jar. They were very good, flavored with lots of clove and cinnamon. Here’s how you make them: boil the beans, with cinnamon if you want. Add a can of coconut milk, a can of Carnation evaporated milk, and cinnamon, clove, and sugar to taste. Nutmeg too, if you want. Also add batata (Caribbean sweet potato) cut into pieces, about a pound for every pound of beans. Boil all that up together. Then add raisins, if desired. Serve cold with some small cookies floating on top (here they’re called “galletas de leche,” milk cookies – kind of like vanilla wafers only smaller). After explaining the recipe to me, the best friend talked me into providing accordion music for their planned mother’s day buffet dinner party. I will be paid in buffet and rum-based cocktails. They will find me a tambora player, and Jorly, Carmen and Rafaelito’s son, will provide güira.
Those plans made, I headed back down the Circunvalacion to the bridge at which I waited in vain last week, and across it to La Otra Banda. I’d never been to this area, a real barrio that seems more like a small rural town than part of the city of Santiago. The road condition was about what you’d expect – potholed, alternately paved and dirt, water running across it in several spots. But following two musicians on a motorbike I made it to a parking spot at the entrance to an alley on which Denio and Hector, the two brothers who lead the group, and their families both live. Hector showed me how to find my way back next time: there are two airplane fuselages on the roof of the building at the head of their alley. Pretty good landmark.
The others hadn’t arrived yet so we listened to a palos CD as we waited in Hector’s living room. We had to compete with the non-stop bachata coming from the colmado across the alley, but really, weepy guitar music couldn’t beat the drum power of our recording of a palos group led by a woman from Villa Mella. Hector and Denio went out and came back with gasoline to power us musicians: Brugal rum. Then we were about ready, so we took the instruments out into the tiny backyard to get a little air. We played a bit with accordion and then I switched to balsie. As neighborhood kids gathered around to hear us play and to dance, we worked on singing coro to some original songs of Hector’s. They had lyrics like “Yo vencere, yo vencere con Dios y San Miguel” (I will conquer with God and San Miguel – a popular santo in Afro-Dominican religion) and one that really had me mystified, saying something like “look on the horizon, there is a line of fire.” “Line of fire? Why?” I asked. This cracked them up. “Es un misterio! It’s a mystery, Sydney!” Misterios are important in this religion, so I guess I just have to accept the lines of fire. We finished up just after dark, and went back inside for some rice with guandules, stewed pigeon peas. I passed around the habichuelas con dulce, too.
My Monday accordion lesson was postponed to Tuesday, and the trip I’d planned to a gallera with friend Domingo to search once more for El Jefe de Maisal didn’t pan out either. Such is fieldwork. Anyway, after my rescheduled class I paid Chiqui and Laura a visit in order to make some arrangements for their daughter’s quinceanera, which is coming up quick. I had offered to pay for the cake, both as a gift and because I knew they’d be hard pressed to afford one of these things that resemble multiple-tiered wedding cakes. They’d found a woman in Cienfuegos, the next barrio over, who made them at a discounted filling. We went and looked at the photos of her previous work and decided on a two-tiered version, 6 pounds of cake with pineapple filling and white frosting with green decoration. Then, back at the house, they served me yet more habichuelas con dulce and we then played dominoes in the dark. It started out well for me as I won the first hand through actual skill rather than luck (I even counted the tiles!), but then got progressively worse, as did the weather. It started pouring rain, which blew in against our backs as we played, though the game must go on and it did. The only problem was I’d been planning to go to a film showing at the Casa de Arte that night. Monitoring the street/river situation, we eventually decided the flow had slackened off enough to allow me to drive home, providing I followed a particular low-risk route some visiting neighbors recommended.
I set off and, much like the dominoes game, things looked fine at first but quickly got worse. When I approached the intersection at Cienfuegos, which had been perfectly normal (if roughly paved and strewn with vegetable matter) only an hour or so ago, I found myself deeply regretting my hasty departure. However, standing in a good eight inches of water and surrounded by other similarly mired cars on all sides, there was no way out but forward. Of course, forward was worse still. Where the two streets/rivers converged they made a waterfall at the point where the pavement ended, and what was worse, it was impossible to make a quick run for it and try to keep the car from sitting in the water as the intersection was plugged up with stalled conchos. A number of men were running about, or rather wading, in the pouring rain and all trying to direct traffic and push the dead ones out of the way. I rolled down my window and pleaded for help, starting to panic as I recalled my bumper-boat mishaps in the Ingenio roundabout a few months earlier. One guy took pity on me, and after nearly ten minutes of labor waved me through a hastily created lane through the waterfall, assuring me my car could make it without being swept away. He was right, but I couldn’t breathe too much of a sigh of relief since the street beyond, always in a deplorable condition, was made worse by the lack of street lights and the mounds of trash and rubble caught in the flow. I decided to give up as soon as an opportunity presented itself, which it did in a few blocks in the form of a gas station. I pulled in and told the attendants I was admitting defeat and was going to wait out the storm. One assured me it wouldn’t last too long, but the others looked dubious. At any rate, I passed the next two hours freezing in the cold wind but chatting pleasantly with two young attendants, one Dominican and one Haitian, and various passersby. I was just happy to be out of the flow, so to speak. Eventually, the rainfall having slowed to half-speed, they suggested that I better get while the getting was good, because if it started raining hard again I could be there all night. We reviewed my route using my Santiago map and I set out. And I saw the route was good.
On Saturday Robert Baron, folklorist visiting from New York, passed back through town so I decided to set up a folklore meeting. I invited Rafael Almanzar from the Casa de Arte to join us for an evening of (what else) merengue típico and talking shop. Because 8:30 was far too early to head to any clubs, we first stopped at a colmado in the downtown area. It was in an ancient old house with the very tall, narrow doors and creaky wooden floorboards, lit by a bulb hanging from a wire. On the outside, though, the whole thing was painted with the logo of Kola Real – actually a very cheery look in lime green, red, and white. Given their sponsorship, it was surprising to find they actually had no sodas. They were also out of water. The choice was between malta, beer, and rum. Rafael and Robert order maltas, feeling it was early to start drinking, but I don’t like malta so I spent my time translating our conversation on folk dance groups rather than drinking.
Once we left, the whole colmado closed – I guess they figured they could only go so far on an all-malt menu. We took a little drive to check out the car wash and rancho situation, which then turned into a longer drive after we missed the turn-around point and had o keep going all the way to Villa Gonzalez. Robert commented on how all the little roadhouses with típico music reminded him of how blues music once was in the South. Eventually we decided on La Tinaja, as El Ciego de Nagua was playing there. Finally, my opportunity to hear this típico legend had at last arrived after a nearly two-year-long game of tag: it seemed that whenever I was in New York, he was in Santiago, and whenever I came here, he left on tour to New York. Anyway, it was definitely worth the wait to see him. Of course, his accordion technique was amazing, but his saxophonist and conguero also took some amazing solos. In addition, the fame of his singer, Chico Torres, turned out to be well-deserved. I especially enjoyed a tune Chico composed himself, which closed the set. I also enjoyed dancing Almanzar’s own, unique brands of salsa, típico, and pop merengue – a combination of his training in folk dance and of his own spontaneous inspiration.
On Sunday I was pretty tired, but still excited to attend my first palos rehearsal. They had told me to meet them “across from the basketball court on the Circunvalacion, near the bridge to La Otra Banda,” and the time was “after 4.” This is a favorite Dominican way of telling time, meaning that they might be there around 4, but they might get there substantially later. I got there around 4:10, knowing I was early, but when I called Hector, the leader, he told me he was loading up the instruments as we spoke and would be there very shortly. I entertained myself with my paperback Jung and some people-watching – a whole family, including little girls in frilly pink dresses, pulled off the road next to the empty field by the bridge and disappeared down the slope to the riverbed. A while later they came back with bunches of reeds, which they loaded into their car before leaving. Was this a preparation for Palm Sunday crafts next week? I didn’t know, but what I did know was that this palos group was late, even for Dominicans. A little after five I was just about ready to leave when one of them shows up on a motor bike and beckons to me. Turns out there is ANOTHER basketball court a little farther down the Circunvalacion. Ah, well.
Following the bike down to the next site, I found the drummers heating their drum heads around a small fire they’d built on the roadside. They told me they’d been “waiting for me for a while.” Ha ha! By this time I was both sleepy and hungry, but when they put a balsie (a small, single-headed drum) in my hands, I perked up. Unlike in other drummed religious music in the African diaspora, there are no gender restriction in this Afro-Dominican tradition. Eventually, I could work my way up even to the largest lead drums. But today, keeping the off-beat rhythm of the balsie and figuring out how best to strike the drum to (a) make a nice sound and (b) not bruise my hand was enough for me to deal with. I wanted to sing the responses, but I couldn’t have done that and not lost my way in the interlocking rhythms at this early stage. That will come in a later lesson. I particularly liked “Mama Tingo,” a song commemorating the death of a woman from Villa Mella who dared to criticize the Trujillo regime. Hector explained there are many protest songs within the palos repertoire, and when I asked why there weren’t many merengues of protest, he responded by drawing his fingers across his neck in the universal sign of “off-with-his-head.” Merengue is a highly visible popular music, but the local folk musicians who played palos were able to fly under the radar and be more critical of the government.
It was back to the routine on Monday with reading, writing, and accordion lesson (this week’s tune: La Malla Prendida); and on Tuesday with library research and a major rainstorm. However, I shook things up a little on Wednesday by adding a tambora lesson to my routine. Back at Rafaelito’s, I learned some variations on the first part merengue rhythm and started on the guinchao, a rhythm Tatico and his musicians came up with that’s kind of a cross between merengue and pambiche and whose name is apparently meaningless (though once I read in a newspaper that it came from “winch”). Rafaelito and Carmen also made sure to feed me with shrimp and rice, avocado, and both salty and sweet plantains. Then a vendor came around with his soup pot full of habichuelas con dulce, the sweet beans that are traditional eats around Holy Week. They were also the theme for La Maldicion del Padre Cardona (The Curse of Father Cardona), a Dominican film that came out late last year. In the movie, a family already held in suspicion by the natives of the mountain town of Costanza for their big city ways, makes the sweet for the whole town and everyone starts suffering from stomach trouble. The priest gets terrible gas while he’s giving mass, goes outside to shake his fist at the heavens and say, “Damn you! Damn you and your beans, Gomez family!” (or whatever their name was). Right at that moment, he is struck down by lightening, and the curse goes into effect. Apparently this batch was curse-free, though, as the habichuelas were both tasty and filling.
The next day, my auto mechanic pal El Negro had suggested I take my car to his cousin, Andres, to have its timing better regulated. So I headed out to Los Reyes, a barrio on the edge of town I’d never been to before. I had a little trouble finding the shop, but it turned out to be right behind a rancho típico that I hadn’t even known existed before. Perfect. In no time at all, I had a whole team of men and teenagers shaking their heads over my car and making fun of one another. “Hey Burro, get over here!” the air conditioning man yelled to one of the apprentices. “Now, why do you want to go around insulting animals like that?” complained the man wrestling with the underside of my car.
During the next five hours, I chatted with the mechanics, went to the rancho for a big lunch, read my book, and met Panchita, the wonder chicken. Panchita was really, really fat. When she ran, she sort of wobbled from leg to leg like a chubby man. She also eats chicken. I found this cannibalism very disturbing, but it didn’t seem to bother Panchita at all. She has become the mechanics’ pet – in fact, they had a dog at one point but then got rid of it because he bothered Panchita too much. But she was more like a dog than a chicken, in some respects. When she had been just a young thing, she was sick and skinny and looked like she was about to die, so Andres, the shop owner, took her out into the forest about 5 km away and left her there. But Panchita came back, and clearly recovered that lost weight. They told me she no longer eats corn like a regular chicken at all – only chicken and jugo de avena (a sweet oatmeal drink). She actually didn’t have a name when I got there, but I told them they really needed to fix that situation. “Give her a name that sounds like a fat lady,” I suggested. And thus was Panchita christened.
On Saturday I motivated myself to get out and hear some music at Rancho Merengue, because Fefita la Grande was playing there and I hadn’t had much opportunity to see her this year. First, I chatted with the musicians out in the parking lot. Kandy the güira player is a friend of mine, and he introduced me to the others: Victor, the singer, probably about 70 years old; Diploma, the tambora player; and some of the others. “Hey! I heard there was an American girl who played accordion, but I’ve never seen you before!” one told me. Word gets around. Eventually we made our way inside, where I took a seat at stage left with Chimonchito, the güira player for Francisco Ulloa, who was visiting. He showed me some pictures on his cell phone of amazing, artistic güiras he has made, some featuring full-color Dominican and Puerto Rican flags. I also found out why one doesn’t hear much about Ulloa these days: like Juan Luis Guerra, with whom he recorded the album Fogorate, he has become an evangelical Christian. But thankfully, this epidemic has not yet spread to Fefita. At 62 her hip-gyrating dance moves were as crazy as ever, and her voice just as good. She was wearing white pants with a silver chain belly-dance-style belt, and an midriff-length electric blue lace top with only a bra underneath. She is something else. The place was packed, and with more women than one usually finds in a típico crowd. A couple of them were videotaping and taking pictures. Wait – isn’t that supposed to be MY job? My friend Americo Mejia, the típico composer from Santo Domingo, was also there with his wife. A good time was had by all.
I stuck with my new Sunday routine of sleeping in, followed by an afternoon of reading and writing up notes until 4:00, when I go to my palos rehearsal. Well OK, I didn’t quite stick to that. Rafaelito had called me up the night before to tell me I had to go by his house and eat more holy week habichuelas con dulce, this time prepared by master chef Carmen. So I headed over to el Ingenio, where I found Carmen in the living room, conversing with her best friend and drinking coffee. My habichuelas had been put aside specially in an attractive blue jar. They were very good, flavored with lots of clove and cinnamon. Here’s how you make them: boil the beans, with cinnamon if you want. Add a can of coconut milk, a can of Carnation evaporated milk, and cinnamon, clove, and sugar to taste. Nutmeg too, if you want. Also add batata (Caribbean sweet potato) cut into pieces, about a pound for every pound of beans. Boil all that up together. Then add raisins, if desired. Serve cold with some small cookies floating on top (here they’re called “galletas de leche,” milk cookies – kind of like vanilla wafers only smaller). After explaining the recipe to me, the best friend talked me into providing accordion music for their planned mother’s day buffet dinner party. I will be paid in buffet and rum-based cocktails. They will find me a tambora player, and Jorly, Carmen and Rafaelito’s son, will provide güira.
Those plans made, I headed back down the Circunvalacion to the bridge at which I waited in vain last week, and across it to La Otra Banda. I’d never been to this area, a real barrio that seems more like a small rural town than part of the city of Santiago. The road condition was about what you’d expect – potholed, alternately paved and dirt, water running across it in several spots. But following two musicians on a motorbike I made it to a parking spot at the entrance to an alley on which Denio and Hector, the two brothers who lead the group, and their families both live. Hector showed me how to find my way back next time: there are two airplane fuselages on the roof of the building at the head of their alley. Pretty good landmark.
The others hadn’t arrived yet so we listened to a palos CD as we waited in Hector’s living room. We had to compete with the non-stop bachata coming from the colmado across the alley, but really, weepy guitar music couldn’t beat the drum power of our recording of a palos group led by a woman from Villa Mella. Hector and Denio went out and came back with gasoline to power us musicians: Brugal rum. Then we were about ready, so we took the instruments out into the tiny backyard to get a little air. We played a bit with accordion and then I switched to balsie. As neighborhood kids gathered around to hear us play and to dance, we worked on singing coro to some original songs of Hector’s. They had lyrics like “Yo vencere, yo vencere con Dios y San Miguel” (I will conquer with God and San Miguel – a popular santo in Afro-Dominican religion) and one that really had me mystified, saying something like “look on the horizon, there is a line of fire.” “Line of fire? Why?” I asked. This cracked them up. “Es un misterio! It’s a mystery, Sydney!” Misterios are important in this religion, so I guess I just have to accept the lines of fire. We finished up just after dark, and went back inside for some rice with guandules, stewed pigeon peas. I passed around the habichuelas con dulce, too.
My Monday accordion lesson was postponed to Tuesday, and the trip I’d planned to a gallera with friend Domingo to search once more for El Jefe de Maisal didn’t pan out either. Such is fieldwork. Anyway, after my rescheduled class I paid Chiqui and Laura a visit in order to make some arrangements for their daughter’s quinceanera, which is coming up quick. I had offered to pay for the cake, both as a gift and because I knew they’d be hard pressed to afford one of these things that resemble multiple-tiered wedding cakes. They’d found a woman in Cienfuegos, the next barrio over, who made them at a discounted filling. We went and looked at the photos of her previous work and decided on a two-tiered version, 6 pounds of cake with pineapple filling and white frosting with green decoration. Then, back at the house, they served me yet more habichuelas con dulce and we then played dominoes in the dark. It started out well for me as I won the first hand through actual skill rather than luck (I even counted the tiles!), but then got progressively worse, as did the weather. It started pouring rain, which blew in against our backs as we played, though the game must go on and it did. The only problem was I’d been planning to go to a film showing at the Casa de Arte that night. Monitoring the street/river situation, we eventually decided the flow had slackened off enough to allow me to drive home, providing I followed a particular low-risk route some visiting neighbors recommended.
I set off and, much like the dominoes game, things looked fine at first but quickly got worse. When I approached the intersection at Cienfuegos, which had been perfectly normal (if roughly paved and strewn with vegetable matter) only an hour or so ago, I found myself deeply regretting my hasty departure. However, standing in a good eight inches of water and surrounded by other similarly mired cars on all sides, there was no way out but forward. Of course, forward was worse still. Where the two streets/rivers converged they made a waterfall at the point where the pavement ended, and what was worse, it was impossible to make a quick run for it and try to keep the car from sitting in the water as the intersection was plugged up with stalled conchos. A number of men were running about, or rather wading, in the pouring rain and all trying to direct traffic and push the dead ones out of the way. I rolled down my window and pleaded for help, starting to panic as I recalled my bumper-boat mishaps in the Ingenio roundabout a few months earlier. One guy took pity on me, and after nearly ten minutes of labor waved me through a hastily created lane through the waterfall, assuring me my car could make it without being swept away. He was right, but I couldn’t breathe too much of a sigh of relief since the street beyond, always in a deplorable condition, was made worse by the lack of street lights and the mounds of trash and rubble caught in the flow. I decided to give up as soon as an opportunity presented itself, which it did in a few blocks in the form of a gas station. I pulled in and told the attendants I was admitting defeat and was going to wait out the storm. One assured me it wouldn’t last too long, but the others looked dubious. At any rate, I passed the next two hours freezing in the cold wind but chatting pleasantly with two young attendants, one Dominican and one Haitian, and various passersby. I was just happy to be out of the flow, so to speak. Eventually, the rainfall having slowed to half-speed, they suggested that I better get while the getting was good, because if it started raining hard again I could be there all night. We reviewed my route using my Santiago map and I set out. And I saw the route was good.
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Gallera performance art
Here the poet, in lab coat and mask, and a rooster look on as his work is read through a megaphone.
Julio goes gagá
Here is Julio Encarnación, one of the friendly folklorists at INDEFOLK, showing me their collection of gagá instruments.
A winning combination: Hare Krishnas & cockfight performance art
3/30-4/1/06
After two months of activity, last Saturday marked the official end of carnival season for Los Confraternos. We ended it with a party featuring rum and soda, loud music, live merengue típico, and even karaoke in our HQ in Pueblo Nuevo. The live music was provided by me in trio with two of our security force on tambora and güira; everyone else sang. The karaoke was provided by Tonito’s computer. It kept crashing after every couple of songs, which was just as well, as it was perhaps the most out-of-tune group of singers ever! The rum might not have been helping their voices any, but it did seem to make it all more amusing to the observers.
The next morning, I arose at an early hour (at least for a Sunday after a party), packed, and hopped on a bus to the capital. The occasion: my high school friend Emily was in La Romana for a wedding, so we planned to meet up halfway. I got in early, checked in to my usual hostel in Gazcue, and went out for some lunch. Afterwards, just as I was dozing off back in our room, Emily knocked on the door. We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years so we enjoyed catching up, so much so that we almost forgot to do any sightseeing. But eventually we roused ourselves to change clothes and head down to the Zona Colonial. Being Sunday, most all of the shops were closed and few street vendors were out, but we did the circuit down the Calle del Sol to the Plaza Colon, up and around the Plaza de la Hispanidad, and down Calle de las Damas. So Emily got to see the first cathedral in the Americas, the first paved street in the Americas, the first monastery in the Americas, and Diego Colon’s house, if only from the outside. After all that walking, Emily was starving, though I – unusually for me – was less so after my huge lunch, so we stopped at a restaurant back at the Plaza Colon for dinner. My pasta in an arugula cream sauce was the big hit of the evening, though the flan was also good.
It just so happened that my friend Chiqui had been called to come down and play in the capital only the day before. So we caught a cab to go across the river into East Santo Domingo and one of the few típico joints in the city, Candy Car Wash. At first I thought we were in the wrong place when I peered in and saw a very petite woman playing accordion instead of Chiqui, but then I discovered that he was accompanying her on saxophone instead. He’s a man of many instruments. So we entered, and Emily got her first car wash experience, something that puzzled her at first: “why are there cars parked in here?” I explained the car wash concept and, fueled by Presidente, Emily got to work capturing the ambience and the dancing action on film, being that she’s a photographer and all. The silly part is that we never got a picture of us together to commemorate the occasion! Some blogger I am!! Anyway, the accordionist, Maria Rodriguez, was quite good (later I found out she’s the daughter of another talented accordionist, Chichi Santos) and Emily and I got our merengue and bachata on with friends of the band, as well as the band themselves when they were on break. At the end of the night they asked me to play a few tunes. The first two went fine, but then I made a tactical error and attempted to play too technical a merengue for my half-asleep state. It came out messy and ended poorly, as I didn’t adequately cue the rest of the musicians for the end, but no one seemed to mind.
We didn’t sleep well due to air conditioner difficulties, but we did have a good breakfast in the morning with the pastries I’d bought the day before and some guava juice Laura, Chiqui’s wife, had given me. As Emily hit the road, I went off to the UASD (Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, the first university to be founded in the New World) to see José Castillo, the director of the university’s ballet folklórico. I found him in his office and gave him the ten cassette tapes he’d told me were needed to make some copies of interesting recordings for me. Then we discussed where to dance son in Santo Domingo, something I’d been meaning to do as son music has a big foothold here. From there, I crossed the parking lot to the anthropology department, of which my friend Carlos Andújar is the director. Since he was teaching a class, I borrowed his office for a while to check email.
Carlos was too busy to take a lunch break so I decided to investigate the vegetarian food situation on my own. There are two vegetarian restaurants in the area: one run by the Seventh-Day Adventists, the other by the Hare Krishnas. Choosing between the two theological options at my disposal, I went with the Dominican Krishnas, and was pleased with my decision. The food was tasty and filling, and I found that HKs around the world all use the same incense. After that, it was clearly nap time, so it was just as well that my planned interview couldn’t take place until 5:00. Américo, a recent merengue típico convert and composer of típico lyrics, showed up early and we enjoyed chatting about music, government policy, and his recording collection for the next two hours. We finished just on time for me to catch my friend Darío finishing up his work day at the Instituto de Estudios Caribeños up the street; we had a beer and some of the very, very sweet Dominican sweets Américo had brought me and then went out for a discussion of ideas for next year’s Congress on Music, Identity, and Culture in the Caribbean over some pescado al coco (Samana-style fish in coconut sauce).
On Tuesday, I was once again roused early, this time in order to visit Rafael Chaljub Mejía, the author of the only book and the only video documentary to date on merengue típico, at his house in the Zona Colonial. When I arrived, I found him in his sitting room editing a book manuscript. So familiar, somehow… but soon we got on to other things, like accordionists throughout history, and the state of merengue at present. He copied for me an interesting recording of merengue típico in Santiago circa 1950 and then he and his wife kindly invited me to stay for lunch. I did, and so got to see more of their interesting and probably quite old second-floor apartment, built as a long outdoor hallway under an overhang, allowing tropical breezes into all the rooms that opened off it. We started off with a brandy aperitif and then ate our rice, beans, salad, and arepitas de yuca at a big table next to the open-air kitchen. And thus I gained a new recipe, from commenting on the delicious little yuca balls: grate yuca root on the square side of the grater, mix with two eggs, salt, anise seeds, and just a little sugar. Fry in a little oil and enjoy.
Next on the agenda was a visit to the nearby Instituto Dominicano de Folklore (INDEFOLK). It’s in a nice big three-story building looking down on the Río Ozama, right above the pontoon bridge – the last bridge before the river meets the sea. The INDEFOLK offices are on the second floor, and they are in the process of converting the rest of it into a Museum of Dominican Carnival so there are numerous odd carnival objects lying about all over the place. Next to the staircase on the first floor, one finds giant heads of cimarrones from San Juan de la Maguana on the right and an equally ginormous Zemí, a replica of a Taíno idol done in papier mache, on the right. Going up one can enjoy murals of Catholic priests and Vodoun priestesses, carnival figures, and folk musicians. In the different rooms opening off the courtyard you’ll encounter a display of musical instruments from around the DR in one and giant puppets reminiscent of chess figures in another. Some descriptive documentation on wood plaques and paintings were just going up on the walls. It looks to have the potential of a great museum when completed.
Upstairs, I met with folklorist Julio Encarnación, who was working on the arrangements for some carnival groups from the capital area who would be visiting Navarrete the following weekend, as well as fighting out some recurrent billing problems with the phone company, when I arrived. His office is decorated with carnival masks in various sizes, from little yellow ones made from plastic funnels with teeth cut in, to spooky ones done all in feathers from Cabral, and on up to the biggest ones, from Santiago and La Vega. He made time to give me a tour, and while we were perusing the instruments who showed up but José Castillo! Turns out he has a second office over here. In that office, he has stacks of old LPs, 45s, and 78s brought to him by retiring radio DJs, which I perused until he had to leave. José, Julio, and I agreed to make contact later in case either of them could attend Secreto Musical that night with me, where the Club of Soneros convenes every Tuesday.
Continuing with my agenda, I visited my favorite bookstore, where I bought two books on Dominican music for my collection, and the streetcorner LP vendor, where I took home four records for the price of listening to the rants of the guy next to me, who thought he knew something about típico but clearly didn’t, and 100 pesos (3 bucks). I had then been planning on seeing if I could locate the offices of Zuni Records, an important label in típico, but found that my feet had really had it for the day. Instead I headed back to the ranch, otherwise known as Hostal Bella Epoca, and then out again for sustenance at Govinda’s. Turned out no one could get away in time for son... Oh well, I had to save something for my next trip!
Since returning to Santiago things have been mostly quiet, mostly because I haven’t been able to reach some of the people I’ve most been wanting to interview, and think I may just have to give up on one of them. (Sigh) But I did get some archival stuff done, as well as a grant application, and found out I actually got a grant to go to the Library of Congress for a couple of weeks this summer, which I’m looking forward to doing. Finally, excitement struck on Friday in the form of a call from Dario, who was now in Santiago for some meetings and a book reading. A friend of his had had the unusual but brilliant idea to unveil his latest volume of poetry in a gallera, of all places. Dario, his colleague at INEC Rossy, and I got there a bit late because we were enjoying our dinner so much, but no matter. The reading was still going on, with the poet in the traditional lab-like coat of the cockfight technician and a gas mask pedaling an exercise bike adorned with feathers, as a friend sitting on an outlandishly upholstered chair (it rather reminded me of a torture device) read from a printout into an electric megaphone held by an assistant in fluorescent floral overalls. Two roosters looked on, one tied to the electric chair and the other to a stand supporting a sack of rice and a hanging birdhouse. At the conclusion of the reading, one gentleman presented the poet with an “award” consisting of a bottle of lucky bubble bath and other items of witchcraft stuffed into a traditional coffee strainer as if it were a Christmas stocking. Then the bag of rice was raffled off, the cocks fought for a moment (just long enough to send a spray of feathers around the ring) and were weighed on the Balance of Justice, and then everyone exited to enjoy their complementary rum. I did this too, and then, tiring of the jostling crowd, Rossy and I went outside to check out the music going on next door: a guitar group playing bachata and merengue, and quite well too. We didn’t have long to enjoy them, however, because we didn’t want to miss much more of the Fiesta de Palos going on at the Casa de Arte. I definitely needed to get some dancing done, which I did, even with the incense in my hands that some devotee handed to me. Making plans to attend the palos group’s rehearsal on Sunday, but only if it’s not raining, I called it a night.
After two months of activity, last Saturday marked the official end of carnival season for Los Confraternos. We ended it with a party featuring rum and soda, loud music, live merengue típico, and even karaoke in our HQ in Pueblo Nuevo. The live music was provided by me in trio with two of our security force on tambora and güira; everyone else sang. The karaoke was provided by Tonito’s computer. It kept crashing after every couple of songs, which was just as well, as it was perhaps the most out-of-tune group of singers ever! The rum might not have been helping their voices any, but it did seem to make it all more amusing to the observers.
The next morning, I arose at an early hour (at least for a Sunday after a party), packed, and hopped on a bus to the capital. The occasion: my high school friend Emily was in La Romana for a wedding, so we planned to meet up halfway. I got in early, checked in to my usual hostel in Gazcue, and went out for some lunch. Afterwards, just as I was dozing off back in our room, Emily knocked on the door. We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years so we enjoyed catching up, so much so that we almost forgot to do any sightseeing. But eventually we roused ourselves to change clothes and head down to the Zona Colonial. Being Sunday, most all of the shops were closed and few street vendors were out, but we did the circuit down the Calle del Sol to the Plaza Colon, up and around the Plaza de la Hispanidad, and down Calle de las Damas. So Emily got to see the first cathedral in the Americas, the first paved street in the Americas, the first monastery in the Americas, and Diego Colon’s house, if only from the outside. After all that walking, Emily was starving, though I – unusually for me – was less so after my huge lunch, so we stopped at a restaurant back at the Plaza Colon for dinner. My pasta in an arugula cream sauce was the big hit of the evening, though the flan was also good.
It just so happened that my friend Chiqui had been called to come down and play in the capital only the day before. So we caught a cab to go across the river into East Santo Domingo and one of the few típico joints in the city, Candy Car Wash. At first I thought we were in the wrong place when I peered in and saw a very petite woman playing accordion instead of Chiqui, but then I discovered that he was accompanying her on saxophone instead. He’s a man of many instruments. So we entered, and Emily got her first car wash experience, something that puzzled her at first: “why are there cars parked in here?” I explained the car wash concept and, fueled by Presidente, Emily got to work capturing the ambience and the dancing action on film, being that she’s a photographer and all. The silly part is that we never got a picture of us together to commemorate the occasion! Some blogger I am!! Anyway, the accordionist, Maria Rodriguez, was quite good (later I found out she’s the daughter of another talented accordionist, Chichi Santos) and Emily and I got our merengue and bachata on with friends of the band, as well as the band themselves when they were on break. At the end of the night they asked me to play a few tunes. The first two went fine, but then I made a tactical error and attempted to play too technical a merengue for my half-asleep state. It came out messy and ended poorly, as I didn’t adequately cue the rest of the musicians for the end, but no one seemed to mind.
We didn’t sleep well due to air conditioner difficulties, but we did have a good breakfast in the morning with the pastries I’d bought the day before and some guava juice Laura, Chiqui’s wife, had given me. As Emily hit the road, I went off to the UASD (Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, the first university to be founded in the New World) to see José Castillo, the director of the university’s ballet folklórico. I found him in his office and gave him the ten cassette tapes he’d told me were needed to make some copies of interesting recordings for me. Then we discussed where to dance son in Santo Domingo, something I’d been meaning to do as son music has a big foothold here. From there, I crossed the parking lot to the anthropology department, of which my friend Carlos Andújar is the director. Since he was teaching a class, I borrowed his office for a while to check email.
Carlos was too busy to take a lunch break so I decided to investigate the vegetarian food situation on my own. There are two vegetarian restaurants in the area: one run by the Seventh-Day Adventists, the other by the Hare Krishnas. Choosing between the two theological options at my disposal, I went with the Dominican Krishnas, and was pleased with my decision. The food was tasty and filling, and I found that HKs around the world all use the same incense. After that, it was clearly nap time, so it was just as well that my planned interview couldn’t take place until 5:00. Américo, a recent merengue típico convert and composer of típico lyrics, showed up early and we enjoyed chatting about music, government policy, and his recording collection for the next two hours. We finished just on time for me to catch my friend Darío finishing up his work day at the Instituto de Estudios Caribeños up the street; we had a beer and some of the very, very sweet Dominican sweets Américo had brought me and then went out for a discussion of ideas for next year’s Congress on Music, Identity, and Culture in the Caribbean over some pescado al coco (Samana-style fish in coconut sauce).
On Tuesday, I was once again roused early, this time in order to visit Rafael Chaljub Mejía, the author of the only book and the only video documentary to date on merengue típico, at his house in the Zona Colonial. When I arrived, I found him in his sitting room editing a book manuscript. So familiar, somehow… but soon we got on to other things, like accordionists throughout history, and the state of merengue at present. He copied for me an interesting recording of merengue típico in Santiago circa 1950 and then he and his wife kindly invited me to stay for lunch. I did, and so got to see more of their interesting and probably quite old second-floor apartment, built as a long outdoor hallway under an overhang, allowing tropical breezes into all the rooms that opened off it. We started off with a brandy aperitif and then ate our rice, beans, salad, and arepitas de yuca at a big table next to the open-air kitchen. And thus I gained a new recipe, from commenting on the delicious little yuca balls: grate yuca root on the square side of the grater, mix with two eggs, salt, anise seeds, and just a little sugar. Fry in a little oil and enjoy.
Next on the agenda was a visit to the nearby Instituto Dominicano de Folklore (INDEFOLK). It’s in a nice big three-story building looking down on the Río Ozama, right above the pontoon bridge – the last bridge before the river meets the sea. The INDEFOLK offices are on the second floor, and they are in the process of converting the rest of it into a Museum of Dominican Carnival so there are numerous odd carnival objects lying about all over the place. Next to the staircase on the first floor, one finds giant heads of cimarrones from San Juan de la Maguana on the right and an equally ginormous Zemí, a replica of a Taíno idol done in papier mache, on the right. Going up one can enjoy murals of Catholic priests and Vodoun priestesses, carnival figures, and folk musicians. In the different rooms opening off the courtyard you’ll encounter a display of musical instruments from around the DR in one and giant puppets reminiscent of chess figures in another. Some descriptive documentation on wood plaques and paintings were just going up on the walls. It looks to have the potential of a great museum when completed.
Upstairs, I met with folklorist Julio Encarnación, who was working on the arrangements for some carnival groups from the capital area who would be visiting Navarrete the following weekend, as well as fighting out some recurrent billing problems with the phone company, when I arrived. His office is decorated with carnival masks in various sizes, from little yellow ones made from plastic funnels with teeth cut in, to spooky ones done all in feathers from Cabral, and on up to the biggest ones, from Santiago and La Vega. He made time to give me a tour, and while we were perusing the instruments who showed up but José Castillo! Turns out he has a second office over here. In that office, he has stacks of old LPs, 45s, and 78s brought to him by retiring radio DJs, which I perused until he had to leave. José, Julio, and I agreed to make contact later in case either of them could attend Secreto Musical that night with me, where the Club of Soneros convenes every Tuesday.
Continuing with my agenda, I visited my favorite bookstore, where I bought two books on Dominican music for my collection, and the streetcorner LP vendor, where I took home four records for the price of listening to the rants of the guy next to me, who thought he knew something about típico but clearly didn’t, and 100 pesos (3 bucks). I had then been planning on seeing if I could locate the offices of Zuni Records, an important label in típico, but found that my feet had really had it for the day. Instead I headed back to the ranch, otherwise known as Hostal Bella Epoca, and then out again for sustenance at Govinda’s. Turned out no one could get away in time for son... Oh well, I had to save something for my next trip!
Since returning to Santiago things have been mostly quiet, mostly because I haven’t been able to reach some of the people I’ve most been wanting to interview, and think I may just have to give up on one of them. (Sigh) But I did get some archival stuff done, as well as a grant application, and found out I actually got a grant to go to the Library of Congress for a couple of weeks this summer, which I’m looking forward to doing. Finally, excitement struck on Friday in the form of a call from Dario, who was now in Santiago for some meetings and a book reading. A friend of his had had the unusual but brilliant idea to unveil his latest volume of poetry in a gallera, of all places. Dario, his colleague at INEC Rossy, and I got there a bit late because we were enjoying our dinner so much, but no matter. The reading was still going on, with the poet in the traditional lab-like coat of the cockfight technician and a gas mask pedaling an exercise bike adorned with feathers, as a friend sitting on an outlandishly upholstered chair (it rather reminded me of a torture device) read from a printout into an electric megaphone held by an assistant in fluorescent floral overalls. Two roosters looked on, one tied to the electric chair and the other to a stand supporting a sack of rice and a hanging birdhouse. At the conclusion of the reading, one gentleman presented the poet with an “award” consisting of a bottle of lucky bubble bath and other items of witchcraft stuffed into a traditional coffee strainer as if it were a Christmas stocking. Then the bag of rice was raffled off, the cocks fought for a moment (just long enough to send a spray of feathers around the ring) and were weighed on the Balance of Justice, and then everyone exited to enjoy their complementary rum. I did this too, and then, tiring of the jostling crowd, Rossy and I went outside to check out the music going on next door: a guitar group playing bachata and merengue, and quite well too. We didn’t have long to enjoy them, however, because we didn’t want to miss much more of the Fiesta de Palos going on at the Casa de Arte. I definitely needed to get some dancing done, which I did, even with the incense in my hands that some devotee handed to me. Making plans to attend the palos group’s rehearsal on Sunday, but only if it’s not raining, I called it a night.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)