here I am, mid-dance step.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
La Captura de Saddam Hussein
New for 2007! This comparsa shows Saddam in his supposed hiding place getting surround by guys with big guns.
Taimascaro
This is a recently invented tradition from Puerto Plata that draws on Taino imagery with colorful results.
Constanza devils
I guess they're meant to a kind of devil, but this group took their inspiration from leprechauns!
Navarrete devil
The town of Navarrete, northwest of Santiago, has been working for the last ten years on developing its own unique mask style, with results such as this.
Navarrete Judas
This face of Judas, surrounded by peso coins and hellfire, is the emblem of Navarrete's carnival.
The Laws of the Land
2/16-2/21/07
I went back to Rafaelito’s to set up, finally, a time for my lesson. We did that, and he told me that week he’d dreamed of me twice. I interpreted his dreams for him. First, he had been given some cake, and he decided to share it with me. The cake, I said, represented típico music, which was also sweet: it had been given to him and he was passing it on to me. In the second dream, he was in his bathroom getting ready for something, when I walked in wearing a housedress and got right into the shower, apparently not caring that it was his bathroom and he was already in it. He made clear that I wasn’t naked or anything, but that in the dream he had found it strange that I would just waltz right in like that. I said this meant that he felt I was putting myself in places I didn’t really belong and were a strange context to find me in, places that perhaps belonged to others - like ranchos and galleras. He found my explanations “logical.”
Everyone’s discussing plans for Semana Santa already and I am going to have a hard time deciding between all my invitations. The Turbi brothers, the guys who taught me to play palos, thought we should all go together to their hometown of Las Matas de Farfan, near San Juan de la Maguana in the Southwest. Then, I finally got to see my friend Domingo Arias, and he and his wife offered to take me along with them to their hometown of Bani. Chiqui and Laura will be going to Dajabon, of course, and we’ve been meaning to take that trip together for quite some time. And Almanzar, who took me to Barahona and Cabral last year, will be returning there again – I wouldn’t mind seeing the final day of the Cabral carnival, where the Judas mannequin is burned and all the cachuas gather in the town graveyard to pay homage to cachuas who have passed on with a frenzy of whipcracks. Any votes or suggestions? This is a tough decision.
On Friday, Luis “Terror” Diaz was scheduled to play at my friendly neighborhood bar with the friendly neighborhood name, Te Matare Batista. Clearly, I had to go. I was familiar with his many musical works of the last thirty years, which run the gamut from bachata to merengue to rock and jazz, often in combination. He’s a great guitarist and a great songwriter, but I hadn’t met him in person until this week. I enjoyed talking to him, even though he expressed some ideas about the history of the accordion that could only be described as uniquely his own. (When one finds oneself in the midst of a conversation that seems to have come from a universe only roughly parallel to one’s own, I generally find the best strategy is to stay quiet.)
The gig was basically an affair among friends, which didn’t allow him to truly shine. His young wife joined him, singing in public for only the second time ever, and that was about as good as one could expect from a student making her second appearance. The bar owner then sang vocals on the Cuban tune “Chan Chan.” The most popular performance of the evening was Luis’s solo rendition of his own song, “El gringo dijo, ‘What’s your name’,” which then led the audience into a lengthy political discussion that kept us up way past our bedtimes.
After the brief interlude with my musician friends, it was back to carnival. Though I really meant for carnival to be a side project, it is a very time consuming one and during Feburary I really spend far more time on that than on things típico. But at any rate, I find myself kind of at loose ends on the dissertation research, as I have so many interviews already I don’t really want to do much more there, and I am feeling a bit overloaded with information that still needs to be analyzed. If I could think of a new tack to take with it, that might help, but such inspiration has not yet come to me.
Therefore, on Saturday, I found myself at the Centro Leon for their “tarde de carnaval.” Carnival groups had been invited from all over the region, and representatives had come from Santiago, Constanza, Puerto Plata, Cotui, Bonao, Samana, Sanchez, and Fantino. Costumes and masks were many and varied: menacing leprechauns from Constanza, papuleses in their giant robes of leaves from Cotui, animal figures from Samana, and the taimascaros of Puerto Plata in their creative Taino-inspired masks, pants covered in oyster shells. All the groups took to the streets and made a circuit of Hoya del Caimito, the barrio to the east and south of the Centro Leon to the delight of residents far from the traditional centers of carnival. Then, back at the Centro Leon, they each had time on stage to strut their stuff and to visit with each other.
I took advantage of the chance to make a circuit and made contact with folks from Bonao and Samana, and plans to visit them later. Then I chatted with my fellow Santiagueros. While lechones don’t have any particular music of their own, some of the other local comparsas do and I thought I’d try to find out more about what they played. The head of the comparsa de los Indios carries a small, tambora-like drum on which he plays a simple rhythm he calls “Areito” after the dances the Taino Indians are reported to have done at the time of the conquest. The güira and tambora that accompany Nicolas Den-Den, the dancing bear, play another rhythm that is unique to that character; they demonstrated it for me and explained that was what was used because it was “good for walking.” Robalagallina also has a guira and tambora that follow him/her around, and they reported that they always play a pambiche rhythm, which is not too fast and goes well with the traditional rhyme always shouted after the character.
Although I’d planned on dressing up and participating myself, I didn’t have the chance because of the borrowed mask situation. Still, I have to say that after seeing all the different groups, each beautiful in its own way, I felt really proud to see the lechones. Now that I understand, from inside the mask as it were, what it takes to be one year after year, and now that I personally know those who make that commitment, I feel the pride and the power that all lechones feel when they put on their costumes each year. Their expertise with the whip and their movements - the lechon “dance” – are unique and wonderful to see – a true embodiment of the carnival spirit. I’m usually on the street with and among them, but seeing the lechones on stage, spreading their special brand of joy, was a revelation.
Afterwards, I chatted with a couple of them over their free meals, provided by the Centro Leon. (I didn’t get a meal, but I did get beer!) Juan Carlos, it turns out, was only in his second year as a lechon – just like me! – but one of our companions, a guy who had gone on the trip to Monte Plata with me last year and who wears a very traditional kind of costume made simply of brightly-colored cotton fabric, has been dressing up for 16 years – since he was 7 years old. No wonder his lechon moves and whip technique are so flawless. Polanquito was there, too, and was proud to say that he’s been a lechon every year since 1965. He relished the bouncy lechon dance and loves to tell everyone, “I don’t get tired!” And it’s true. I wondered if he even slept and he assured me that he does. I also asked how he got so into the thing and he credits his childhood in the barrio of Los Pepines for that. He got involved in the years during which carnival was still very violent, and lechones would fight with knives and stones, with a scar from a well-thrown rock on his chin to prove it.
A brief aside: I’ve been surprised and pleased to find out that since I left last year, a number of my carnival friends here have now seen this blog. As a result, Betania and Juan Carlos asked me to put up this new picture of them in costume (see above). So far, all friends, teachers, and informants report who have stumbled across it report that they like it, especially Jose Reyes who says he is happy to see I give credit where credit is due. I explained that I understood what that was about, being that the majority of web sites devoted to merengue típico today have posted a history of típico that I originally wrote for my típico site back in 2001, without crediting me. Jose agrees that that sucks. So we ask that if you cite anything on my blog anywhere else in virtual, print, or spoken form, please give credit, and do not reprint any significant portion anywhere without permission.
Saturday was a long day, and there was another, even longer one, coming up next. I hit the hay early to prepare, but I had also prepared by arranging to bring my own photographer with me: my friend Laura (Chiqui’s wife), famous for cutting off everyone’s heads when she photographed her daughter’s quinceanera last year. I wanted to give her another chance to prove herself, and also I wanted some pictures of Los Confraternos and couldn’t do them myself while I was in costume. As soon as I was ready on Sunday, then, I went and picked up Laura, and then we picked up her daughter and 2 cousins who had decided to come along for the ride, and then all four of us went to Tonito’s. It was not a pleasant ride. I’d bought two bladders in preparation for the day’s parade but they turned out to be rather fresher than I’d imagined, and they filled the Millenium Falcon with an ungodly stench. It was quite possible the worst smell ever. We wrapped them in plastic and threw them in the trunk, but it didn’t help much.
Anyway, I had work to do: I had shoes to decorate lechon-style. This took a couple of hours, so it was lucky that Laura et al had children with whips and a newborn to entertain themselves with. Eventually we did finish and costumed ourselves, and then I had a few minutes in which to undertake some whip practice. I actually improved a bit! If I can get ahold of a whip – Tonito says they get them from the guy who makes them in Los Ciruelitos – then maybe I’ll actually use one next week, although I confess I had second thoughts the next day when I woke up with an incredibly sore neck and shoulder.
The day before, Polanquito had told me this week’s route was shorter than last week’s, but if it was, than I’m the dancing bear’s uncle. It took over three hours to travel the whole length, and we went through parts of Santiago I’d never seen before. The path was so long and twisty and went through so many unfamiliar streets that I became completely disoriented. At one point we were winding our way down a hill in a rather nice area with large houses overlooking what must have been the Rio Yaque, though I couldn’t see it from there. Across the way was a Hollywood Hills-style sign saying “Bermudez,” which I’d never seen before from any other vantage point. I felt as if I might have been magically transported to another city.
At that point we were in a bit of a traffic jam, so I took advantage of the few moments of rest to examine something on my leg that had been vaguely bothering me for a while. It turned out to be a safety pin that had come loose and bent so that it was scraping my leg, and it must have been doing so for quite some time because there were zillions of tiny bloody scratches covering a patch of skin about three inches square on the back of my left shin. One of our lechon assistants helped me pull the pin out and showed me how its shaft was brown: “look, it’s your blood!” “Well, sometimes you have to suffer for art,” I replied. I just hoped I wouldn’t get some kind of horrible infection from the rusty pin – were my tetanus shots up to date? No way to know.
Once we started moving again, however, I quickly forgot my pain in the rush of carnival-fueled adrenaline. There was plenty going on around to distract me: Angelo, the mask-maker, was right behind us taking part in a comparsa depicting a boxing match with its own movable ring. Behind that was a mini theater piece titled “La Captura de Saddam Hussein,” which consisted of a hideout covered in leaves under which a long-bearded Saddam was hiding (he’d apparently been there a while). When some military guys with scary-looking guns stormed the place, he ran out and they hauled him off in dramatic fashion.
It even rained a few drops on us, providing a little relief from the heat, though I was still pouring sweat inside that costume. I sent my friends off to buy me some water and, later, a refreshing Skim Ice popsicle in guanabana flavor. We passed a renovated two-story house on Abua Rodriguez street in Pueblo Nuevo where, apparently, a painter lived: the family sat on the balcony surrounded by surprisingly good paintings of lechones and other carnival scenes, watching the action passing them by. Thus I was able to keep on dancing until we returned home, pausing only to shake confused babies’ hands, and for parents to take pictures of their kids with me. Then I hastily and painfully applied some rubbing alcohol to my wounds. I couldn’t decide if I was more tired or more hungry, but eventually hunger won out and I took the whole group with me to eat some street pizza.
Back to work. My post-carnival routine has become to take the first couple of days of each week to (a) recover and (b) write up notes and organize photos, recordings, etc. This week I continued with that plan, although I also snuck a quick interview in there with Raudy, the famed Robalagallina who lives across the street. It was enlightening. When I asked what were the most important qualities a Robalagallina must have, he told me they must master the “cara de puta” (whore’s face). He had accomplished this feat by studying fashion magazines. “So it’s basically Dominican voguing?” I asked. “Exactly,” he agreed. I don’t think it would ever have occurred to me if I hadn’t had this conversation.
In addition, I went out for a night on the town on Monday. The owner of my friendly neighborhood bar had offered to take me along to a place he sometimes dances to old-school son on Mondays, and it turned out to be the same place the researchers at Centro Leon had mentioned to me. Clearly, it was a sign, so I accepted the invitation. Six of his friends, who were out celebrating a birthday, decided to join us.
It was just a hole-in-the-wall bar on a residential street in Pueblo Nuevo, no sign and no real name. Everyone simply refers to it as “Donde Dorca,” Dorca’s place. My friend explained to me on the way over that Dorca was a retired prostitute, as were many others who frequented the establishment. Perfect! Local color! I did love the place although I was getting a little weirded out about how prostitution seemed to be a theme for the week). It was about the size of my mom’s living room back in Tucson, with the band set up at one end and about ten small plastic tables along the walls in the rest of the space. The tables were populated both by couples and by male soneros sitting alone or in pairs in their dapper hats and shiny shoes. The presumed retired prostitutes sat up by the door, manning the money box.
The band consisted of lead vocalist, tres, congas, güira, bass, keyboards, and another percussionist who played bongos, tambora, or whatever was demanded. A pair of what appeared to be the thigh bones of a large animal lay on a table nearby, and though I was told they were meant to be played as claves, I didn’t see them played while I was there. I’m not a fan of synthesized horns in general, but the band was good to dancing to, and played everything from classic sones to merengue típico to boleros. Their announcer was a guy in his seventies who was pretty funny. He kept referring to the virtues of Dorca’s, as if we needed any reminding: it was “Barato! Y bueeeeeeeeeeno!” (Cheap, and good!)
I videotaped some of the more stylish dancers, one of whom was completely androgenous and somewhat disconcerting in his/her straight-legged jeans, button-down striped shirt, and short haircut. I eventually figured out it was a woman who liked to dance both roles, and for some unknown reason, she presented me with a small green paperback book of Dominican labor laws. “What’s this about?” I asked my friends. “We don’t know; just take it,” they recommended. So I did.
I went back to Rafaelito’s to set up, finally, a time for my lesson. We did that, and he told me that week he’d dreamed of me twice. I interpreted his dreams for him. First, he had been given some cake, and he decided to share it with me. The cake, I said, represented típico music, which was also sweet: it had been given to him and he was passing it on to me. In the second dream, he was in his bathroom getting ready for something, when I walked in wearing a housedress and got right into the shower, apparently not caring that it was his bathroom and he was already in it. He made clear that I wasn’t naked or anything, but that in the dream he had found it strange that I would just waltz right in like that. I said this meant that he felt I was putting myself in places I didn’t really belong and were a strange context to find me in, places that perhaps belonged to others - like ranchos and galleras. He found my explanations “logical.”
Everyone’s discussing plans for Semana Santa already and I am going to have a hard time deciding between all my invitations. The Turbi brothers, the guys who taught me to play palos, thought we should all go together to their hometown of Las Matas de Farfan, near San Juan de la Maguana in the Southwest. Then, I finally got to see my friend Domingo Arias, and he and his wife offered to take me along with them to their hometown of Bani. Chiqui and Laura will be going to Dajabon, of course, and we’ve been meaning to take that trip together for quite some time. And Almanzar, who took me to Barahona and Cabral last year, will be returning there again – I wouldn’t mind seeing the final day of the Cabral carnival, where the Judas mannequin is burned and all the cachuas gather in the town graveyard to pay homage to cachuas who have passed on with a frenzy of whipcracks. Any votes or suggestions? This is a tough decision.
On Friday, Luis “Terror” Diaz was scheduled to play at my friendly neighborhood bar with the friendly neighborhood name, Te Matare Batista. Clearly, I had to go. I was familiar with his many musical works of the last thirty years, which run the gamut from bachata to merengue to rock and jazz, often in combination. He’s a great guitarist and a great songwriter, but I hadn’t met him in person until this week. I enjoyed talking to him, even though he expressed some ideas about the history of the accordion that could only be described as uniquely his own. (When one finds oneself in the midst of a conversation that seems to have come from a universe only roughly parallel to one’s own, I generally find the best strategy is to stay quiet.)
The gig was basically an affair among friends, which didn’t allow him to truly shine. His young wife joined him, singing in public for only the second time ever, and that was about as good as one could expect from a student making her second appearance. The bar owner then sang vocals on the Cuban tune “Chan Chan.” The most popular performance of the evening was Luis’s solo rendition of his own song, “El gringo dijo, ‘What’s your name’,” which then led the audience into a lengthy political discussion that kept us up way past our bedtimes.
After the brief interlude with my musician friends, it was back to carnival. Though I really meant for carnival to be a side project, it is a very time consuming one and during Feburary I really spend far more time on that than on things típico. But at any rate, I find myself kind of at loose ends on the dissertation research, as I have so many interviews already I don’t really want to do much more there, and I am feeling a bit overloaded with information that still needs to be analyzed. If I could think of a new tack to take with it, that might help, but such inspiration has not yet come to me.
Therefore, on Saturday, I found myself at the Centro Leon for their “tarde de carnaval.” Carnival groups had been invited from all over the region, and representatives had come from Santiago, Constanza, Puerto Plata, Cotui, Bonao, Samana, Sanchez, and Fantino. Costumes and masks were many and varied: menacing leprechauns from Constanza, papuleses in their giant robes of leaves from Cotui, animal figures from Samana, and the taimascaros of Puerto Plata in their creative Taino-inspired masks, pants covered in oyster shells. All the groups took to the streets and made a circuit of Hoya del Caimito, the barrio to the east and south of the Centro Leon to the delight of residents far from the traditional centers of carnival. Then, back at the Centro Leon, they each had time on stage to strut their stuff and to visit with each other.
I took advantage of the chance to make a circuit and made contact with folks from Bonao and Samana, and plans to visit them later. Then I chatted with my fellow Santiagueros. While lechones don’t have any particular music of their own, some of the other local comparsas do and I thought I’d try to find out more about what they played. The head of the comparsa de los Indios carries a small, tambora-like drum on which he plays a simple rhythm he calls “Areito” after the dances the Taino Indians are reported to have done at the time of the conquest. The güira and tambora that accompany Nicolas Den-Den, the dancing bear, play another rhythm that is unique to that character; they demonstrated it for me and explained that was what was used because it was “good for walking.” Robalagallina also has a guira and tambora that follow him/her around, and they reported that they always play a pambiche rhythm, which is not too fast and goes well with the traditional rhyme always shouted after the character.
Although I’d planned on dressing up and participating myself, I didn’t have the chance because of the borrowed mask situation. Still, I have to say that after seeing all the different groups, each beautiful in its own way, I felt really proud to see the lechones. Now that I understand, from inside the mask as it were, what it takes to be one year after year, and now that I personally know those who make that commitment, I feel the pride and the power that all lechones feel when they put on their costumes each year. Their expertise with the whip and their movements - the lechon “dance” – are unique and wonderful to see – a true embodiment of the carnival spirit. I’m usually on the street with and among them, but seeing the lechones on stage, spreading their special brand of joy, was a revelation.
Afterwards, I chatted with a couple of them over their free meals, provided by the Centro Leon. (I didn’t get a meal, but I did get beer!) Juan Carlos, it turns out, was only in his second year as a lechon – just like me! – but one of our companions, a guy who had gone on the trip to Monte Plata with me last year and who wears a very traditional kind of costume made simply of brightly-colored cotton fabric, has been dressing up for 16 years – since he was 7 years old. No wonder his lechon moves and whip technique are so flawless. Polanquito was there, too, and was proud to say that he’s been a lechon every year since 1965. He relished the bouncy lechon dance and loves to tell everyone, “I don’t get tired!” And it’s true. I wondered if he even slept and he assured me that he does. I also asked how he got so into the thing and he credits his childhood in the barrio of Los Pepines for that. He got involved in the years during which carnival was still very violent, and lechones would fight with knives and stones, with a scar from a well-thrown rock on his chin to prove it.
A brief aside: I’ve been surprised and pleased to find out that since I left last year, a number of my carnival friends here have now seen this blog. As a result, Betania and Juan Carlos asked me to put up this new picture of them in costume (see above). So far, all friends, teachers, and informants report who have stumbled across it report that they like it, especially Jose Reyes who says he is happy to see I give credit where credit is due. I explained that I understood what that was about, being that the majority of web sites devoted to merengue típico today have posted a history of típico that I originally wrote for my típico site back in 2001, without crediting me. Jose agrees that that sucks. So we ask that if you cite anything on my blog anywhere else in virtual, print, or spoken form, please give credit, and do not reprint any significant portion anywhere without permission.
Saturday was a long day, and there was another, even longer one, coming up next. I hit the hay early to prepare, but I had also prepared by arranging to bring my own photographer with me: my friend Laura (Chiqui’s wife), famous for cutting off everyone’s heads when she photographed her daughter’s quinceanera last year. I wanted to give her another chance to prove herself, and also I wanted some pictures of Los Confraternos and couldn’t do them myself while I was in costume. As soon as I was ready on Sunday, then, I went and picked up Laura, and then we picked up her daughter and 2 cousins who had decided to come along for the ride, and then all four of us went to Tonito’s. It was not a pleasant ride. I’d bought two bladders in preparation for the day’s parade but they turned out to be rather fresher than I’d imagined, and they filled the Millenium Falcon with an ungodly stench. It was quite possible the worst smell ever. We wrapped them in plastic and threw them in the trunk, but it didn’t help much.
Anyway, I had work to do: I had shoes to decorate lechon-style. This took a couple of hours, so it was lucky that Laura et al had children with whips and a newborn to entertain themselves with. Eventually we did finish and costumed ourselves, and then I had a few minutes in which to undertake some whip practice. I actually improved a bit! If I can get ahold of a whip – Tonito says they get them from the guy who makes them in Los Ciruelitos – then maybe I’ll actually use one next week, although I confess I had second thoughts the next day when I woke up with an incredibly sore neck and shoulder.
The day before, Polanquito had told me this week’s route was shorter than last week’s, but if it was, than I’m the dancing bear’s uncle. It took over three hours to travel the whole length, and we went through parts of Santiago I’d never seen before. The path was so long and twisty and went through so many unfamiliar streets that I became completely disoriented. At one point we were winding our way down a hill in a rather nice area with large houses overlooking what must have been the Rio Yaque, though I couldn’t see it from there. Across the way was a Hollywood Hills-style sign saying “Bermudez,” which I’d never seen before from any other vantage point. I felt as if I might have been magically transported to another city.
At that point we were in a bit of a traffic jam, so I took advantage of the few moments of rest to examine something on my leg that had been vaguely bothering me for a while. It turned out to be a safety pin that had come loose and bent so that it was scraping my leg, and it must have been doing so for quite some time because there were zillions of tiny bloody scratches covering a patch of skin about three inches square on the back of my left shin. One of our lechon assistants helped me pull the pin out and showed me how its shaft was brown: “look, it’s your blood!” “Well, sometimes you have to suffer for art,” I replied. I just hoped I wouldn’t get some kind of horrible infection from the rusty pin – were my tetanus shots up to date? No way to know.
Once we started moving again, however, I quickly forgot my pain in the rush of carnival-fueled adrenaline. There was plenty going on around to distract me: Angelo, the mask-maker, was right behind us taking part in a comparsa depicting a boxing match with its own movable ring. Behind that was a mini theater piece titled “La Captura de Saddam Hussein,” which consisted of a hideout covered in leaves under which a long-bearded Saddam was hiding (he’d apparently been there a while). When some military guys with scary-looking guns stormed the place, he ran out and they hauled him off in dramatic fashion.
It even rained a few drops on us, providing a little relief from the heat, though I was still pouring sweat inside that costume. I sent my friends off to buy me some water and, later, a refreshing Skim Ice popsicle in guanabana flavor. We passed a renovated two-story house on Abua Rodriguez street in Pueblo Nuevo where, apparently, a painter lived: the family sat on the balcony surrounded by surprisingly good paintings of lechones and other carnival scenes, watching the action passing them by. Thus I was able to keep on dancing until we returned home, pausing only to shake confused babies’ hands, and for parents to take pictures of their kids with me. Then I hastily and painfully applied some rubbing alcohol to my wounds. I couldn’t decide if I was more tired or more hungry, but eventually hunger won out and I took the whole group with me to eat some street pizza.
Back to work. My post-carnival routine has become to take the first couple of days of each week to (a) recover and (b) write up notes and organize photos, recordings, etc. This week I continued with that plan, although I also snuck a quick interview in there with Raudy, the famed Robalagallina who lives across the street. It was enlightening. When I asked what were the most important qualities a Robalagallina must have, he told me they must master the “cara de puta” (whore’s face). He had accomplished this feat by studying fashion magazines. “So it’s basically Dominican voguing?” I asked. “Exactly,” he agreed. I don’t think it would ever have occurred to me if I hadn’t had this conversation.
In addition, I went out for a night on the town on Monday. The owner of my friendly neighborhood bar had offered to take me along to a place he sometimes dances to old-school son on Mondays, and it turned out to be the same place the researchers at Centro Leon had mentioned to me. Clearly, it was a sign, so I accepted the invitation. Six of his friends, who were out celebrating a birthday, decided to join us.
It was just a hole-in-the-wall bar on a residential street in Pueblo Nuevo, no sign and no real name. Everyone simply refers to it as “Donde Dorca,” Dorca’s place. My friend explained to me on the way over that Dorca was a retired prostitute, as were many others who frequented the establishment. Perfect! Local color! I did love the place although I was getting a little weirded out about how prostitution seemed to be a theme for the week). It was about the size of my mom’s living room back in Tucson, with the band set up at one end and about ten small plastic tables along the walls in the rest of the space. The tables were populated both by couples and by male soneros sitting alone or in pairs in their dapper hats and shiny shoes. The presumed retired prostitutes sat up by the door, manning the money box.
The band consisted of lead vocalist, tres, congas, güira, bass, keyboards, and another percussionist who played bongos, tambora, or whatever was demanded. A pair of what appeared to be the thigh bones of a large animal lay on a table nearby, and though I was told they were meant to be played as claves, I didn’t see them played while I was there. I’m not a fan of synthesized horns in general, but the band was good to dancing to, and played everything from classic sones to merengue típico to boleros. Their announcer was a guy in his seventies who was pretty funny. He kept referring to the virtues of Dorca’s, as if we needed any reminding: it was “Barato! Y bueeeeeeeeeeno!” (Cheap, and good!)
I videotaped some of the more stylish dancers, one of whom was completely androgenous and somewhat disconcerting in his/her straight-legged jeans, button-down striped shirt, and short haircut. I eventually figured out it was a woman who liked to dance both roles, and for some unknown reason, she presented me with a small green paperback book of Dominican labor laws. “What’s this about?” I asked my friends. “We don’t know; just take it,” they recommended. So I did.
Friday, February 16, 2007
guandules
a very old woman shucking pigeon peas (guandules) in Batey Libertad. The pea harvest had just come in, so that's what everyone in the batey was doing this particular afternoon.
bad guy
This painting is just one of many done by a Haitian artist based in Esperanza in Casco's office. It depicts one of the guys you need to watch out for, because he likes blood.
Casco's office
If you need help, you can get it from Casco Pelao (and San Miguel) in his office. The price: 57 pesos and a bottle of rum. He charges 57 since 7 is a powerful number.
Casco Pelao
that's the name by which this curandero (traditional) healer is known. He decided to pose by the portrait of one of the saints who helps him in his work.
Vodou drums
three drums for playing vodou rhythms, belonging to the curandero of Batey Libertad, Dominican Republic. The two big ones on the left are "mama tambou" and the medium-sized one on the right is a "dudu"
rice dreams
2/12-2/15/07
So I went back to the batey to see what was up and follow up my leads on the gaga group. Everywhere, men and women, the young and the old, were sitting on the ground with a big bowl in front of them and a lot of green detritus in a heap around them. They were all shucking guandules, pigeon peas that had just been harvested. Everything else was pretty much as it had been last time, except that the curandero, Casco Pelao, was around this time and ready to talk to me.
Casco was happy to be able to show me his “oficina” and talk to me about his work as a healer in the vodou religion. The small building, whose painting of San Miguel I’d noted earlier above the door, was filled with statues and beautiful murals. The first room featured Linglesou, a bad guy who wears a skull around his neck and likes blood. He was wearing a nice, button-down red shirt, but one of his hands was a claw, he had three horns growing out of his head, and his eyes looked in two different directions. Through a door to the right was found the recovery room, where patients in need of divine help could stay. It was all white, with one wall featuring five medallions depicting the five saints Casco says aid him in his ministrations. Casco himself sleeps here on days when he needs the kind of guidance that comes in dreams. The back room, the third and final in this tiny house, was painted blue and full of bottles, paintings, and statues. The one who stood directly in front of the door was of unpainted wood and held a full-size machete. On a table, bottles of soda and rum and fake flowers had been left as offerings, apparently to the Madonna of Lourdes who was painted on the wall above.
After we had finished looking through this building, Casco brought me to a separate building next door where parties and ceremonies are held. The ceiling was all hung with colorful tissue paper flags that reminded me of the Mexican papel picado we often see in Tucson, even though they were smaller and simply cut in zigzags. The back door, on which a diamond pattern was painted in blue, pink, and yellow, was open, and an old man disappeared around the corner behind it. He reappeared shortly bearing drums for me to see: a set of 2 large ones called maman tambou, 2 medium called doudou, and 1 small drum called guan, used to provide music at vodou ceremonies. They were painted with various statements, although since I don’t speak kreyol the only one I could make out commemorated “Haiti’s independence.” Casco invited me to come back in March in order to attend a ceremony and hear the drums in action, and I gladly accepted.
We discussed music and healing for a few more minutes, and I learned that Casco came into his line of business through his grandfather, who was also a curandero. One day, “los misterios (the spirits/saints) fell on me,” he reported, and he felt he was being called to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. He loves it, and he particularly loves the vodou drum music. Casco also helps to run the batey’s gaga group (although he pronounces it lala, and still prefers vodou music over it) whenever they can afford to amass the necessary instruments and items of clothing. Last year, when I went to Barahona for Holy Week (see it in my blog archives under April 2006), I noticed that the gaga groups on the bateyes there had sponsorship from various political parties. This enabled them to purchase drums, the PVC pipe necessary for the vaksin, and varying levels of sartorial splendor, although it also required them to plaster those instruments with political bumper stickers. Well, here in the north, no one, not even politicians, seems to be willing to support the local gaga so they don’t know if they will be able to play this year. I told Jon and we decided to see if we can do something to help.
Casco had some errands still to do that day, so we left and he locked up the building behind us. On the way out, he stopped to pick up a tiny girl toddling about and held her up to have me take his picture with her. He explained that the mother had been very sick while pregnant with the girl and came to Casco for help. Praying for guidance on the matter and sleeping on it, he discovered that she needed to make a devotion to San Antonio. The mother took the necessary steps, recovered, and produced a beautiful little girl. To show her thanks, she named the girl Antonia, and Casco is particularly fond of her for having helped her to come safely into the world.
I returned to Papito’s porch alone, since Jon had gone off to Esperanza to take a woman in for a doctor’s appointment. I didn’t have to wait for long, though, until a teenage boy approached me and introduced himself as Franklin. I must have looked bored sitting there, because he offered his services as ersatz tour guide. “Have you been out to the rice field yet?” he wondered. Actually, I hadn’t, so he took me out to see. It was a luscious tropical green, but it was also squelchy and looked a bit too mosquito-friendly. He explained that the rice plants had to be spaced appropriately, and the work going on now entailed searching out clumpy plants and separating them so they would grow better.
We went back into the batey, and he stopped to show me a bunch of guinea pigs a friend of his kept in a homemade cage. I told him how I’d had some as a pet when I was a kid. My parents had given me one female as a gift, and we’d had no idea she was pregnant until one morning when I went to check on her and found two additional tiny fur balls in the cage. They are called codornizes in Spanish, and Franklin wanted to know the word in English. I told him and explained how it was kind of a funny term, since they don’t look like pigs at all. He agreed it was funny, particularly since the kreyol term also includes the word “pig.” Go figure!
The entertainment potential of the guinea pig having been exhausted, Franklin now asked, “want to go look at the rice mill?” I assented, and we crossed the highway and a shallow stream where women were busy washing clothes and children playing, to reach the big factory building. The people of the batey come here not only to work but only to get water, as the place has the only functional spigot in the area. On the way over, he began teaching me some kreyol phrases – he grew up fluent in both languages, having been born in the DR to Haitian parents. We had to pass one obstacle to enter, a surly security officer with an automatic rifle. If he’d been American he would have been a redneck, and I’m not sure what the equivalent Dominican term is. At any rate, he was obviously a condescending racist type who thought it decidedly odd that I’d want to spend any time poking around industrial buildings with those of Haitian decent, but he let us pass through anyway.
Inside, the building was your average industrial food processing site, I guess – not that I have much experience of such things. It was full of tall machines painted green, and everywhere rice dust swirled throughout the air. We gave a packet of drinking water to one of the thirsty workers, then followed some pipes running ten feet above us to an outbuilding, where all the chaff was dropped into an enormous mountain. The ground around it was all spongy with years of accumulated and compressed byproduct. Behind that was a strange blackened pit dug out of the grass, its walls apparently made of burnt chaff. It seemed like the kind of thing that might be highly flammable. Behind the main building a semi was parked, its sides advertising reliable voting equipment in English. (Maybe it was sent down here after the 2000 elections in order to ensure a similarly democratic process was accomplished here – ha ha.) And in front of it was a field where ten bulls grazed, and then a field full of flourishing tobacco plants for your smoking pleasure.
That concluded the touristic portion of the day. We returned to the batey, and Franklin disappeared into the tiny shack he shared with his grandfather, emerging again with a papaya as a gift for me. Then he brought me to another friend’s house in order to sample Haitian cooking, since I told him I’d never tried any before. There was a moro de guandules that to me tasted much like the Dominican variety, served with some flavorful stewed tayota (an inoffensive green vegetable) that I enjoyed. I was wondering what he expected in return, as I always feel uncomfortable accepting presents from people in such obvious need, but didn’t have to wait long to find out. He wanted to use my cell phone to call his father in Haiti, who he hadn’t spoken to in months. I gladly agreed, feeling happy I had something with decent exchange value to offer him.
While the rest of the week certainly seemed busy, there isn’t too much to report. I met with La India again, this time joined by Raul Roman, Rafaelito’s son. We partially finalized the list of tunes we plan to record for Folkways, which will include one that combines merengue with palos drumming – a great opportunity to put my friends, the Turbi brothers of Grupo Mello, to work. I had about 15 minutes’ worth of an accordion lesson with Rafaelito, crunched in between two other students, and I visited my friends Chiqui and Laura, as well as Domingo and the rest of the Arias family, whom I hadn’t seen since last year.
I saw a great documentary on carnival and volunteered to do English subtitles for it because I liked it so much. It showed a number of interesting costume traditions from around the country, some (like Death or Robalagallina) shared by many towns, others unique, like the recently-invented Taimascaras of Puerto Plata, which use motifs from Taino petroglyps, or the spooky round faces with slit eyes of San Jose de Ocoa. I found the part about the cachuas of Cabral particularly moving. I had seen these frightening characters with their violent whips and horned masks in person last year, but I hadn’t been around for the final day of Cabral’s Holy Week carnival. On that day, the mannequin representing
I went to meet with a mask-maker who had invited me over for coffee, only to find him sewing a costume with a house full of lechones discussing all the latest carnival gossip, meaning that there wasn’t time for me. Then, as I was picking up a few items to embellish my own costume I ran into my old friend Jose Reyes doing the same. He then invited me to go see his mask-maker in Arroyo Hondo, and get a preview of his brand new, top secret, fancy mask. I’d never been to Arroyo Hondo, south of the old part of town on the banks of the river, but it was a pretty standard Santiago barrio like any other. On the way we passed through Nibaje, and Jose explained that its odd name derives from its location along the river in a former flood plain. In centuries past, before the construction of the bridges, travelers from La Vega would typically cross the Rio Yaque here, but in flood season it could be quite difficult. As they neared Santiago they would ask inhabitants about the condition of the crossing and the level of the water, and they would respond, “ni baje” (the water won’t go down). It sounds apocryphal to me, but the story is entertaining nonetheless.
It was easy to find the mask-maker’s house, as the sidewalk in front of it was full of blue and orange joyeras drying in the sun. In back, amidst walls encrusted in years of paint spatters and dozens of cages filled with squawking poultry, Jose’s glittery new creation was nearly finished. The mask-maker’s son, learning the trade himself, dried his hands next to a rose bush that itself had been attractively spattered with blue and red dots. The two of them lived in two dark cinder-block rooms with nothing attractive about them except for the dozens of masks found in every corner. They shared a bathroom, really more like a semi-plumbed outhouse, with a couple who lived in the tiny house that faced on the street. However, just a week before, the mask-maker had arisen early to use the facilities, when he saw a foot sticking out of the door. He saw it belonged to the wife, but surmising that she was only partially dressed, he went to tell the husband to check on her himself, that she had fallen or fainted or something. When they pulled her out, she was already dead, at 27, of a head wound, having slipped and fallen in her own bathroom. Yikes.
The carnival theme continued the rest of the week. On Wednesday, an exhibit opened at the Casa de Arte featuring masks and costumes of Navarrete, a town just to the northwest of Santiago that has been working on developing its own style of masks just for the last ten years, with interesting results. The town’s carnival commission decided its official symbol would be Judas, because they already had a tradition of parading a Judas figure through the city as sort of a ritual carnival week sacrifice. Artisans in turn developed a screaming Judas head mask encased in the flames of hell and surrounded by a halo of pesos, a symbol of greed. Other masks depicted animals, devils, and the two in combination.
Then on Thursday, the 43rd annual mask competition results were announced in front of the Centro de la Cultura with a large and rambunctious crowd in attendance. Performances by lechones, a jazz dance group, and the ballet folklorico rounded out the night, but the most entertaining part was the crowd itself, segments of which went wild anytime someone from their particular barrio or carnival group won a prize. After all the awards had been given out in all seven categories (traditional Pepinera, artistic Pepinera, traditional Joyera, artistic Joyera, Pueblo Nuevo, metallic, and fantasy/free theme, as well as one for beginner’s and the overall Grand Prize), I tried to go inside and look at the 132 masks entered into the competition, but couldn’t get a good look because of the throngs of folks trying to do the same. It all made me feel a little claustrophobic, so I decided to leave and come back at a less pressing time.
So I went back to the batey to see what was up and follow up my leads on the gaga group. Everywhere, men and women, the young and the old, were sitting on the ground with a big bowl in front of them and a lot of green detritus in a heap around them. They were all shucking guandules, pigeon peas that had just been harvested. Everything else was pretty much as it had been last time, except that the curandero, Casco Pelao, was around this time and ready to talk to me.
Casco was happy to be able to show me his “oficina” and talk to me about his work as a healer in the vodou religion. The small building, whose painting of San Miguel I’d noted earlier above the door, was filled with statues and beautiful murals. The first room featured Linglesou, a bad guy who wears a skull around his neck and likes blood. He was wearing a nice, button-down red shirt, but one of his hands was a claw, he had three horns growing out of his head, and his eyes looked in two different directions. Through a door to the right was found the recovery room, where patients in need of divine help could stay. It was all white, with one wall featuring five medallions depicting the five saints Casco says aid him in his ministrations. Casco himself sleeps here on days when he needs the kind of guidance that comes in dreams. The back room, the third and final in this tiny house, was painted blue and full of bottles, paintings, and statues. The one who stood directly in front of the door was of unpainted wood and held a full-size machete. On a table, bottles of soda and rum and fake flowers had been left as offerings, apparently to the Madonna of Lourdes who was painted on the wall above.
After we had finished looking through this building, Casco brought me to a separate building next door where parties and ceremonies are held. The ceiling was all hung with colorful tissue paper flags that reminded me of the Mexican papel picado we often see in Tucson, even though they were smaller and simply cut in zigzags. The back door, on which a diamond pattern was painted in blue, pink, and yellow, was open, and an old man disappeared around the corner behind it. He reappeared shortly bearing drums for me to see: a set of 2 large ones called maman tambou, 2 medium called doudou, and 1 small drum called guan, used to provide music at vodou ceremonies. They were painted with various statements, although since I don’t speak kreyol the only one I could make out commemorated “Haiti’s independence.” Casco invited me to come back in March in order to attend a ceremony and hear the drums in action, and I gladly accepted.
We discussed music and healing for a few more minutes, and I learned that Casco came into his line of business through his grandfather, who was also a curandero. One day, “los misterios (the spirits/saints) fell on me,” he reported, and he felt he was being called to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. He loves it, and he particularly loves the vodou drum music. Casco also helps to run the batey’s gaga group (although he pronounces it lala, and still prefers vodou music over it) whenever they can afford to amass the necessary instruments and items of clothing. Last year, when I went to Barahona for Holy Week (see it in my blog archives under April 2006), I noticed that the gaga groups on the bateyes there had sponsorship from various political parties. This enabled them to purchase drums, the PVC pipe necessary for the vaksin, and varying levels of sartorial splendor, although it also required them to plaster those instruments with political bumper stickers. Well, here in the north, no one, not even politicians, seems to be willing to support the local gaga so they don’t know if they will be able to play this year. I told Jon and we decided to see if we can do something to help.
Casco had some errands still to do that day, so we left and he locked up the building behind us. On the way out, he stopped to pick up a tiny girl toddling about and held her up to have me take his picture with her. He explained that the mother had been very sick while pregnant with the girl and came to Casco for help. Praying for guidance on the matter and sleeping on it, he discovered that she needed to make a devotion to San Antonio. The mother took the necessary steps, recovered, and produced a beautiful little girl. To show her thanks, she named the girl Antonia, and Casco is particularly fond of her for having helped her to come safely into the world.
I returned to Papito’s porch alone, since Jon had gone off to Esperanza to take a woman in for a doctor’s appointment. I didn’t have to wait for long, though, until a teenage boy approached me and introduced himself as Franklin. I must have looked bored sitting there, because he offered his services as ersatz tour guide. “Have you been out to the rice field yet?” he wondered. Actually, I hadn’t, so he took me out to see. It was a luscious tropical green, but it was also squelchy and looked a bit too mosquito-friendly. He explained that the rice plants had to be spaced appropriately, and the work going on now entailed searching out clumpy plants and separating them so they would grow better.
We went back into the batey, and he stopped to show me a bunch of guinea pigs a friend of his kept in a homemade cage. I told him how I’d had some as a pet when I was a kid. My parents had given me one female as a gift, and we’d had no idea she was pregnant until one morning when I went to check on her and found two additional tiny fur balls in the cage. They are called codornizes in Spanish, and Franklin wanted to know the word in English. I told him and explained how it was kind of a funny term, since they don’t look like pigs at all. He agreed it was funny, particularly since the kreyol term also includes the word “pig.” Go figure!
The entertainment potential of the guinea pig having been exhausted, Franklin now asked, “want to go look at the rice mill?” I assented, and we crossed the highway and a shallow stream where women were busy washing clothes and children playing, to reach the big factory building. The people of the batey come here not only to work but only to get water, as the place has the only functional spigot in the area. On the way over, he began teaching me some kreyol phrases – he grew up fluent in both languages, having been born in the DR to Haitian parents. We had to pass one obstacle to enter, a surly security officer with an automatic rifle. If he’d been American he would have been a redneck, and I’m not sure what the equivalent Dominican term is. At any rate, he was obviously a condescending racist type who thought it decidedly odd that I’d want to spend any time poking around industrial buildings with those of Haitian decent, but he let us pass through anyway.
Inside, the building was your average industrial food processing site, I guess – not that I have much experience of such things. It was full of tall machines painted green, and everywhere rice dust swirled throughout the air. We gave a packet of drinking water to one of the thirsty workers, then followed some pipes running ten feet above us to an outbuilding, where all the chaff was dropped into an enormous mountain. The ground around it was all spongy with years of accumulated and compressed byproduct. Behind that was a strange blackened pit dug out of the grass, its walls apparently made of burnt chaff. It seemed like the kind of thing that might be highly flammable. Behind the main building a semi was parked, its sides advertising reliable voting equipment in English. (Maybe it was sent down here after the 2000 elections in order to ensure a similarly democratic process was accomplished here – ha ha.) And in front of it was a field where ten bulls grazed, and then a field full of flourishing tobacco plants for your smoking pleasure.
That concluded the touristic portion of the day. We returned to the batey, and Franklin disappeared into the tiny shack he shared with his grandfather, emerging again with a papaya as a gift for me. Then he brought me to another friend’s house in order to sample Haitian cooking, since I told him I’d never tried any before. There was a moro de guandules that to me tasted much like the Dominican variety, served with some flavorful stewed tayota (an inoffensive green vegetable) that I enjoyed. I was wondering what he expected in return, as I always feel uncomfortable accepting presents from people in such obvious need, but didn’t have to wait long to find out. He wanted to use my cell phone to call his father in Haiti, who he hadn’t spoken to in months. I gladly agreed, feeling happy I had something with decent exchange value to offer him.
While the rest of the week certainly seemed busy, there isn’t too much to report. I met with La India again, this time joined by Raul Roman, Rafaelito’s son. We partially finalized the list of tunes we plan to record for Folkways, which will include one that combines merengue with palos drumming – a great opportunity to put my friends, the Turbi brothers of Grupo Mello, to work. I had about 15 minutes’ worth of an accordion lesson with Rafaelito, crunched in between two other students, and I visited my friends Chiqui and Laura, as well as Domingo and the rest of the Arias family, whom I hadn’t seen since last year.
I saw a great documentary on carnival and volunteered to do English subtitles for it because I liked it so much. It showed a number of interesting costume traditions from around the country, some (like Death or Robalagallina) shared by many towns, others unique, like the recently-invented Taimascaras of Puerto Plata, which use motifs from Taino petroglyps, or the spooky round faces with slit eyes of San Jose de Ocoa. I found the part about the cachuas of Cabral particularly moving. I had seen these frightening characters with their violent whips and horned masks in person last year, but I hadn’t been around for the final day of Cabral’s Holy Week carnival. On that day, the mannequin representing
I went to meet with a mask-maker who had invited me over for coffee, only to find him sewing a costume with a house full of lechones discussing all the latest carnival gossip, meaning that there wasn’t time for me. Then, as I was picking up a few items to embellish my own costume I ran into my old friend Jose Reyes doing the same. He then invited me to go see his mask-maker in Arroyo Hondo, and get a preview of his brand new, top secret, fancy mask. I’d never been to Arroyo Hondo, south of the old part of town on the banks of the river, but it was a pretty standard Santiago barrio like any other. On the way we passed through Nibaje, and Jose explained that its odd name derives from its location along the river in a former flood plain. In centuries past, before the construction of the bridges, travelers from La Vega would typically cross the Rio Yaque here, but in flood season it could be quite difficult. As they neared Santiago they would ask inhabitants about the condition of the crossing and the level of the water, and they would respond, “ni baje” (the water won’t go down). It sounds apocryphal to me, but the story is entertaining nonetheless.
It was easy to find the mask-maker’s house, as the sidewalk in front of it was full of blue and orange joyeras drying in the sun. In back, amidst walls encrusted in years of paint spatters and dozens of cages filled with squawking poultry, Jose’s glittery new creation was nearly finished. The mask-maker’s son, learning the trade himself, dried his hands next to a rose bush that itself had been attractively spattered with blue and red dots. The two of them lived in two dark cinder-block rooms with nothing attractive about them except for the dozens of masks found in every corner. They shared a bathroom, really more like a semi-plumbed outhouse, with a couple who lived in the tiny house that faced on the street. However, just a week before, the mask-maker had arisen early to use the facilities, when he saw a foot sticking out of the door. He saw it belonged to the wife, but surmising that she was only partially dressed, he went to tell the husband to check on her himself, that she had fallen or fainted or something. When they pulled her out, she was already dead, at 27, of a head wound, having slipped and fallen in her own bathroom. Yikes.
The carnival theme continued the rest of the week. On Wednesday, an exhibit opened at the Casa de Arte featuring masks and costumes of Navarrete, a town just to the northwest of Santiago that has been working on developing its own style of masks just for the last ten years, with interesting results. The town’s carnival commission decided its official symbol would be Judas, because they already had a tradition of parading a Judas figure through the city as sort of a ritual carnival week sacrifice. Artisans in turn developed a screaming Judas head mask encased in the flames of hell and surrounded by a halo of pesos, a symbol of greed. Other masks depicted animals, devils, and the two in combination.
Then on Thursday, the 43rd annual mask competition results were announced in front of the Centro de la Cultura with a large and rambunctious crowd in attendance. Performances by lechones, a jazz dance group, and the ballet folklorico rounded out the night, but the most entertaining part was the crowd itself, segments of which went wild anytime someone from their particular barrio or carnival group won a prize. After all the awards had been given out in all seven categories (traditional Pepinera, artistic Pepinera, traditional Joyera, artistic Joyera, Pueblo Nuevo, metallic, and fantasy/free theme, as well as one for beginner’s and the overall Grand Prize), I tried to go inside and look at the 132 masks entered into the competition, but couldn’t get a good look because of the throngs of folks trying to do the same. It all made me feel a little claustrophobic, so I decided to leave and come back at a less pressing time.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Angelo the mask maker
Angelo, who made my lechon mask last year, poses next to some models in various stages of completion
Costume shop
These women run a business making carnival costumes out of their home in Pueblo Nuevo, Santiago.
on the carnival road again
2/10/07
I forgot to include one memorable moment in the last week. For ages I’d been hearing about a neighbor of mine who lives directly across the street. My landlady had said, “if you are interested in carnival, you really have to talk to Raudy! And then, as I was buying vegetables from the platanero, another neighbor said, “You know, Raudy really loves carnival too. You should talk to him.” I agreed, but said I hadn’t met him yet, so the neighbor, El Rubio, offered to take me over right away. After the vegetables were safely stowed, I took him up on his offer.
It was a sort of bizarre experience, going into the house across the street, because while it looked normal size on the outside, on the inside it seemed to keep going on and on. Part of the effect was because there were so many things in the house, and El Rubio agreed, “this is the museum of the neighborhood!” A wooden elephant four feet tall, figurines aplenty, a collection of the hooks used to close the huge old doors on Santiago Victorians, paintings leaning against the walls stacked five deep. It all made sense when I found out the master of the house, Raudy, was an interior designer who hosted his own design show on TV.
Besides all the objets d’art, there were also quite a number of people stuffed into the place. I couldn’t keep track of everyone, mostly because they kept coming and going: the front door was left permanently open, welcoming in the whole neighborhood – including me. Some random guy invited me to stay for lunch, which was just being served. Raudy’s table seated 14, and we nearly filled it between the family, the neighbors, the stragglers, and the two policemen seated next to me. No one seemed to think anything one way the other about me having just wandered in off the street for a free lunch.
Anyway, I did get to talk to Raudy for a few minutes about carnival. He is one of the best known Robalagallinas in Santiago, probably the only one known to the upper classes. Robalagallina is the traditional transvestite character played by a man in a voluminous dress with enormous breasts and buttocks strapped on underneath. He seemed to naturally be a very expansive and dramatic person who loves to be in the limelight, and was therefore perfect for taking on the robalagallina role (if you catch my drift - and some others who were at the table seemed to have done so). I liked him, and after finishing lunch, I made plans to come back and interview him at a later date.
On Friday I was just in a bad mood all day, having had to waste yet another half day sitting around in the mechanic’s workshop. So it was just as well that it rained hard that night, trapping me at home and thus saving me from all social obligations. I caught up on my sleep and was ready to face another day on Saturday, which was spent in carnival preparations. Tonito and I had decided that the best solution, since I hadn’t been able to bring last year’s costume back with me, was to buy a ready-made. A couple of women ran a costume shop out of their Pueblo Nuevo home, and Tonito had seen a finished one hanging outside that he thought might do the job.
We found it hanging with several others on one side of the street, along with a couple of masks in plastic bags. On the other side of the street, a couple dozen children’s sized masks hung on a wooden stand next to an open door. After debating for a time whether the costume was worth the price (they had started at 2000 pesos, but Tonito talked them down to 1500), we walked up the steep cement stairs and entered the costume shop through that open door.
It was really just a humble private home consisting of a cramped living space in front, now taken over by sewing machines, ironing boards, bowls full of bells and mirrors, and scraps of glittering fabric, a couple of bedrooms to our left, and presumably a kitchen at the back, from where a couple of girls and a scrawy butter-colored kitten were staring at us. A girl, about 19, was stiching away at the machine, and a very fleshy woman – covered only by a very threadbare tank top and boxer shorts – was at the ironing board They were apparently used to photo requests – US born Dominicans are the ultimate tourists, whipping out expensive cameras and video equipment at every opportunity, which was fine with me, since they had made my task of ethnographic documentation that much easier. Since Santiagueros pretty much always design their own lechon costumes, providing both for freedom of expression and for cost reduction, I imagined much of their production had to be bought up by visiting Dominican Yorks.
They had me try on the yellow and red jumpsuit decorated with sequined flower shapes in one of the bedrooms, where a four-year-old boy was sleeping. Clearly accostumed to sleeping through every type of noise and activity, neither the flickering lightbulb nor my jingle bells woke him up. The costume was big on me, but not drastically so, and we agreed to purchase it if only they would replace the broken zipper.
As they got to it, we decided to visit the mask-maker two doors down in another fairly ramshackle wooden structure. Here, the living room was decorated with competition masks created to be unusual and eye-catching, such as one with three horns and two bills, one on top of the other. On the table sat another one, just finished, featuring the faces of the three founding fathers set on a patriotic red, blue, and white ground – this one would actually be used in tomorrow’s parade. The other wall decorations consisted of a blue-eyed, cherubic baby Jesus and a photo of Dr. Joaquin Balaguer. Under this last item, a three-tiered end table held as many trinkets as could be kept their without pushing the others off: Elmo led an army of plastic cartoon characters on top, a crèche dominated the second shelf, and the bottom held a collection of bottles, many painted with abstract designs in astonishing color combinations.
Angelo, the mask-maker, had made the one I wore the year before, and he was eager to show me what he was up to now. He led me through the kitchen, past the patio, and into a back room that served as his workshop, apologizing for its disheveled state: just a day or two ago he had hurriedly finished the six masks he was entering in this year’s competition, leaving a trail of paper and glitter behind. He showed me his two principal molds, one pepinero and one joyero, one of clay and one of plaster. But he had also made a brand-new mold this year for a group of transvestites from Yaguita. Together, he and they had designed their costume, dressing up a small plastic doll in a bright red dress. The face was that of an old woman, and he had molded it in clay. Once that was dry and fit for use, he set papier-mache over the mold to make the masks.
He was anxious to talk more about his work, and was proud to tell me that pictures of his masks had appeared in several books, one written by visitors from Chicago! I really must come back to talk further, he said; how about Wednesday? “OK, but what time should I come?” I wondered. “Any time. If you come in the morning, I’ll have coffee for you. If you come in the afternoon, I’ll save some lunch for you. If you come late in the evening, I don’t know, I’ll have some juice or something.” We agreed on 11 AM and the coffee, and then I picked up my finished costume and went on to do my errands.
I was scheduled to go to the town of Cotui the next day, Sunday, to see their famous carnival charactesr, the papeluses. But that night the folklorist from Cotui called me back to tell me it was really better if I could come on the 27th instead. On Independence Day, all the groups would be out, while this week only a few groups would, and they were mostly children. I agreed to the change in plans, although it left me at loose ends. Since I hadn’t been planning on joining Los Confraternos in costume this time, I hadn’t gone to buy the sequined fabric, mirrors, and trim, that Tonito had recommended in order to fill in the empty space on the back. Nevertheless, when I called him the next morning, Tonito told me to go to his house and we would “come up with something.”
I did, and we did. Tonito’s living room was already awash in fabric scraps, spools of thread, and bags of trim, much like the costume shop we’d visited yesterday. I suggested he could open his own carnival business. “Ohhhhh no,” he said decisively. “I am NOT going to make my money of off THIS.” It was definitely a lot of hassle and frustration, especially for non-professional tailors, as we noticed over the next hour and a half. Tonito did manage to get his sad-looking sewing machine working enough to stick some trim on, but not without also stitching the back of the costume to the front of it in a couple of spots. In spite of its slapdashedness, the sequined triangles we’d put together actually looked pretty spiffy when we were done. The five ten-year-old boys who’d lined up to watch the show agreed.
Everything felt strangely familiar to me as we rushed out of the door at 3:10, about an hour after we’d meant to join the parade, and over to Betania’s to zip on our costumes, roll on our morcillas and strap on our masks. Tonito helped me on with the morcilla, the stuffed cummerbund, since it was still too troublesome for me to do alone. My new green one turned out to be much longer, taking up much more of my torso than I was used to. When Tonito came to help I told him that it would go around six times, and he told me, “That’s how it should be. It always goes around a good lechon six times.” Imagine my mirth, then, when a few minutes later he put his own morcilla on, and it only went around five times. “Only five! What does that mean?” I asked pointedly. “It means I had a bad tailor,” Tonito stated in his own defense.
So eventually we did make it out to the parade, although our group had been unable to find the banner with our name written on it in large, friendly letters, and also this year we had no money for a disco lite, and also we had no water and only one security guy. Well, things weren’t exactly like last year, but at least we were all together! And although my costume didn’t match the rest, I had a loaner mask that did. The only problem was that it was too big for me and so the lower edge kept knocking against my windpipe as I frolicked and the eye-holes would slip down to cheek level so that, in order to see out, I had to lift my chin and peer down my nose in the style of a stereotypical librarian. Again, a small price to pay to be literally back on the road.
Since we still were still in protest mode and avoiding the Las Carreras parade route in order to annoy the authorities, today’s route took us through Pueblo Nuevo, then Baracoa and La Joya, and back up through Pueblo Nuevo and continued on to a grand finale in front of the baseball stadium. (It had actually started up in Ensanche Bermudez, but we joined it as it passed by our HQ.) The nice thing about this route was that it took us right by Plaza Valerio, a square in the middle of La Joya that was were the lechones of old once would come together in order to beat the crap out of one another. I felt a little nostalgic, but I was also glad I had nothing more to fear from my fellow lechones than an ear-splitting whipcrack.
As I walked, I was thinking, “what do I feel about this? What will I write about this?” And the thing is that nothing really happens while you are a lechon on the street, or at least, what is happening continues to keep happening in such a way that you feel as if nothing particularly newsworthy is going on. You zip on you costume, pull up the hood, fix the elastic straps of the mask around your head, and you go. You do the lechon step, trying to remember the feel of the shoulders, knees, and torso that you had tried so hard to perfect last year. You try to maintain a safe distance from the guy with the whip in front of you, you try to keep aware of the flaws in the pavement ahead of you since you can’t really look down, you notice the sweat pouring down your chest, you keep trying to put one foot in front of the other.
You listen for music to find a beat you can move to, and you wonder if you should go with the music ahead of you or the music behind you, because they are melding together and you can’t really separate them in your head anymore. You try to get a look at the other groups and what their costumes look like, and if you are the only gringo lechon, you also peer into people’s houses and around corners to see what their lives look like. You relish the fact that people can’t tell you are American when your mask is on and you can blend into the crowd, and you also enjoy the moment of surprise on their faces when you take your mask off for a moment to wipe the sweat from your brow.
With the mask off, I got a better look around and got to say hello to some of my friends from last year, including Polanquito, the 75-year-old powerhouse. I watched the group right behind us for a while, a carnival band consisting of snare and bass drums, güira, and one-note metal trumpets, whose banner stated that they were known as “Los Charles Chaplin” as well as a friendly invitation accompanied by a lifesaver and an anchor: “Welcome aboard!” I wasn’t quite sure of the connection between drum ensembles, classic slapstick, and ships, but I enjoyed their catchy rhythms and dance steps anyhow. I also then received the attentions of several of the small boys from the neighborhood who had tagged along with us. If you can’t be a lechon yourself, the next best thing is to attach yourself to a lechon and become his or her attendant. They vied for the opportunity to carry my mask for me whenever it came off. I also sent them to buy water for me as we passed a colmado.
At around 6:00 we made it up to the baseball stadium, which had been generally designated as a meeting place for all groups to party together at the end. That was all fine and dandy, but I was starving and couldn’t think of anything but food. Scanning the horizon in the manner of a lion hunting out a gazelle, I fixed on a fried food cart on the sidewalk outside the stadium area. It was the only food in sight so I made a beeline to it and bought myself a fried yuca ball.
It hit the spot but wasn’t enough. Luckily, I then spotted a Haitian peanut vendor amidst the crowd and purchased myself a five-peso sack, which I shared with a couple of my friends. But as I’d just given the last few to Polanquito, a lechon I didn’t know came up and asked for some. I showed him the bag was empty, and then he started to lecture me on “Haitian peanuts” and how I really should be careful about them because the Haitians “might blow on them” and do some kind of weird voodoo thing. I told him that was ridiculous, people just said things like that out of prejudice, and he became annoyed with me, yelling for a minute and then walking off empty-handed. But the real question here is, why had he been actually asking to eat the voodoo hex peanuts?
I forgot to include one memorable moment in the last week. For ages I’d been hearing about a neighbor of mine who lives directly across the street. My landlady had said, “if you are interested in carnival, you really have to talk to Raudy! And then, as I was buying vegetables from the platanero, another neighbor said, “You know, Raudy really loves carnival too. You should talk to him.” I agreed, but said I hadn’t met him yet, so the neighbor, El Rubio, offered to take me over right away. After the vegetables were safely stowed, I took him up on his offer.
It was a sort of bizarre experience, going into the house across the street, because while it looked normal size on the outside, on the inside it seemed to keep going on and on. Part of the effect was because there were so many things in the house, and El Rubio agreed, “this is the museum of the neighborhood!” A wooden elephant four feet tall, figurines aplenty, a collection of the hooks used to close the huge old doors on Santiago Victorians, paintings leaning against the walls stacked five deep. It all made sense when I found out the master of the house, Raudy, was an interior designer who hosted his own design show on TV.
Besides all the objets d’art, there were also quite a number of people stuffed into the place. I couldn’t keep track of everyone, mostly because they kept coming and going: the front door was left permanently open, welcoming in the whole neighborhood – including me. Some random guy invited me to stay for lunch, which was just being served. Raudy’s table seated 14, and we nearly filled it between the family, the neighbors, the stragglers, and the two policemen seated next to me. No one seemed to think anything one way the other about me having just wandered in off the street for a free lunch.
Anyway, I did get to talk to Raudy for a few minutes about carnival. He is one of the best known Robalagallinas in Santiago, probably the only one known to the upper classes. Robalagallina is the traditional transvestite character played by a man in a voluminous dress with enormous breasts and buttocks strapped on underneath. He seemed to naturally be a very expansive and dramatic person who loves to be in the limelight, and was therefore perfect for taking on the robalagallina role (if you catch my drift - and some others who were at the table seemed to have done so). I liked him, and after finishing lunch, I made plans to come back and interview him at a later date.
On Friday I was just in a bad mood all day, having had to waste yet another half day sitting around in the mechanic’s workshop. So it was just as well that it rained hard that night, trapping me at home and thus saving me from all social obligations. I caught up on my sleep and was ready to face another day on Saturday, which was spent in carnival preparations. Tonito and I had decided that the best solution, since I hadn’t been able to bring last year’s costume back with me, was to buy a ready-made. A couple of women ran a costume shop out of their Pueblo Nuevo home, and Tonito had seen a finished one hanging outside that he thought might do the job.
We found it hanging with several others on one side of the street, along with a couple of masks in plastic bags. On the other side of the street, a couple dozen children’s sized masks hung on a wooden stand next to an open door. After debating for a time whether the costume was worth the price (they had started at 2000 pesos, but Tonito talked them down to 1500), we walked up the steep cement stairs and entered the costume shop through that open door.
It was really just a humble private home consisting of a cramped living space in front, now taken over by sewing machines, ironing boards, bowls full of bells and mirrors, and scraps of glittering fabric, a couple of bedrooms to our left, and presumably a kitchen at the back, from where a couple of girls and a scrawy butter-colored kitten were staring at us. A girl, about 19, was stiching away at the machine, and a very fleshy woman – covered only by a very threadbare tank top and boxer shorts – was at the ironing board They were apparently used to photo requests – US born Dominicans are the ultimate tourists, whipping out expensive cameras and video equipment at every opportunity, which was fine with me, since they had made my task of ethnographic documentation that much easier. Since Santiagueros pretty much always design their own lechon costumes, providing both for freedom of expression and for cost reduction, I imagined much of their production had to be bought up by visiting Dominican Yorks.
They had me try on the yellow and red jumpsuit decorated with sequined flower shapes in one of the bedrooms, where a four-year-old boy was sleeping. Clearly accostumed to sleeping through every type of noise and activity, neither the flickering lightbulb nor my jingle bells woke him up. The costume was big on me, but not drastically so, and we agreed to purchase it if only they would replace the broken zipper.
As they got to it, we decided to visit the mask-maker two doors down in another fairly ramshackle wooden structure. Here, the living room was decorated with competition masks created to be unusual and eye-catching, such as one with three horns and two bills, one on top of the other. On the table sat another one, just finished, featuring the faces of the three founding fathers set on a patriotic red, blue, and white ground – this one would actually be used in tomorrow’s parade. The other wall decorations consisted of a blue-eyed, cherubic baby Jesus and a photo of Dr. Joaquin Balaguer. Under this last item, a three-tiered end table held as many trinkets as could be kept their without pushing the others off: Elmo led an army of plastic cartoon characters on top, a crèche dominated the second shelf, and the bottom held a collection of bottles, many painted with abstract designs in astonishing color combinations.
Angelo, the mask-maker, had made the one I wore the year before, and he was eager to show me what he was up to now. He led me through the kitchen, past the patio, and into a back room that served as his workshop, apologizing for its disheveled state: just a day or two ago he had hurriedly finished the six masks he was entering in this year’s competition, leaving a trail of paper and glitter behind. He showed me his two principal molds, one pepinero and one joyero, one of clay and one of plaster. But he had also made a brand-new mold this year for a group of transvestites from Yaguita. Together, he and they had designed their costume, dressing up a small plastic doll in a bright red dress. The face was that of an old woman, and he had molded it in clay. Once that was dry and fit for use, he set papier-mache over the mold to make the masks.
He was anxious to talk more about his work, and was proud to tell me that pictures of his masks had appeared in several books, one written by visitors from Chicago! I really must come back to talk further, he said; how about Wednesday? “OK, but what time should I come?” I wondered. “Any time. If you come in the morning, I’ll have coffee for you. If you come in the afternoon, I’ll save some lunch for you. If you come late in the evening, I don’t know, I’ll have some juice or something.” We agreed on 11 AM and the coffee, and then I picked up my finished costume and went on to do my errands.
I was scheduled to go to the town of Cotui the next day, Sunday, to see their famous carnival charactesr, the papeluses. But that night the folklorist from Cotui called me back to tell me it was really better if I could come on the 27th instead. On Independence Day, all the groups would be out, while this week only a few groups would, and they were mostly children. I agreed to the change in plans, although it left me at loose ends. Since I hadn’t been planning on joining Los Confraternos in costume this time, I hadn’t gone to buy the sequined fabric, mirrors, and trim, that Tonito had recommended in order to fill in the empty space on the back. Nevertheless, when I called him the next morning, Tonito told me to go to his house and we would “come up with something.”
I did, and we did. Tonito’s living room was already awash in fabric scraps, spools of thread, and bags of trim, much like the costume shop we’d visited yesterday. I suggested he could open his own carnival business. “Ohhhhh no,” he said decisively. “I am NOT going to make my money of off THIS.” It was definitely a lot of hassle and frustration, especially for non-professional tailors, as we noticed over the next hour and a half. Tonito did manage to get his sad-looking sewing machine working enough to stick some trim on, but not without also stitching the back of the costume to the front of it in a couple of spots. In spite of its slapdashedness, the sequined triangles we’d put together actually looked pretty spiffy when we were done. The five ten-year-old boys who’d lined up to watch the show agreed.
Everything felt strangely familiar to me as we rushed out of the door at 3:10, about an hour after we’d meant to join the parade, and over to Betania’s to zip on our costumes, roll on our morcillas and strap on our masks. Tonito helped me on with the morcilla, the stuffed cummerbund, since it was still too troublesome for me to do alone. My new green one turned out to be much longer, taking up much more of my torso than I was used to. When Tonito came to help I told him that it would go around six times, and he told me, “That’s how it should be. It always goes around a good lechon six times.” Imagine my mirth, then, when a few minutes later he put his own morcilla on, and it only went around five times. “Only five! What does that mean?” I asked pointedly. “It means I had a bad tailor,” Tonito stated in his own defense.
So eventually we did make it out to the parade, although our group had been unable to find the banner with our name written on it in large, friendly letters, and also this year we had no money for a disco lite, and also we had no water and only one security guy. Well, things weren’t exactly like last year, but at least we were all together! And although my costume didn’t match the rest, I had a loaner mask that did. The only problem was that it was too big for me and so the lower edge kept knocking against my windpipe as I frolicked and the eye-holes would slip down to cheek level so that, in order to see out, I had to lift my chin and peer down my nose in the style of a stereotypical librarian. Again, a small price to pay to be literally back on the road.
Since we still were still in protest mode and avoiding the Las Carreras parade route in order to annoy the authorities, today’s route took us through Pueblo Nuevo, then Baracoa and La Joya, and back up through Pueblo Nuevo and continued on to a grand finale in front of the baseball stadium. (It had actually started up in Ensanche Bermudez, but we joined it as it passed by our HQ.) The nice thing about this route was that it took us right by Plaza Valerio, a square in the middle of La Joya that was were the lechones of old once would come together in order to beat the crap out of one another. I felt a little nostalgic, but I was also glad I had nothing more to fear from my fellow lechones than an ear-splitting whipcrack.
As I walked, I was thinking, “what do I feel about this? What will I write about this?” And the thing is that nothing really happens while you are a lechon on the street, or at least, what is happening continues to keep happening in such a way that you feel as if nothing particularly newsworthy is going on. You zip on you costume, pull up the hood, fix the elastic straps of the mask around your head, and you go. You do the lechon step, trying to remember the feel of the shoulders, knees, and torso that you had tried so hard to perfect last year. You try to maintain a safe distance from the guy with the whip in front of you, you try to keep aware of the flaws in the pavement ahead of you since you can’t really look down, you notice the sweat pouring down your chest, you keep trying to put one foot in front of the other.
You listen for music to find a beat you can move to, and you wonder if you should go with the music ahead of you or the music behind you, because they are melding together and you can’t really separate them in your head anymore. You try to get a look at the other groups and what their costumes look like, and if you are the only gringo lechon, you also peer into people’s houses and around corners to see what their lives look like. You relish the fact that people can’t tell you are American when your mask is on and you can blend into the crowd, and you also enjoy the moment of surprise on their faces when you take your mask off for a moment to wipe the sweat from your brow.
With the mask off, I got a better look around and got to say hello to some of my friends from last year, including Polanquito, the 75-year-old powerhouse. I watched the group right behind us for a while, a carnival band consisting of snare and bass drums, güira, and one-note metal trumpets, whose banner stated that they were known as “Los Charles Chaplin” as well as a friendly invitation accompanied by a lifesaver and an anchor: “Welcome aboard!” I wasn’t quite sure of the connection between drum ensembles, classic slapstick, and ships, but I enjoyed their catchy rhythms and dance steps anyhow. I also then received the attentions of several of the small boys from the neighborhood who had tagged along with us. If you can’t be a lechon yourself, the next best thing is to attach yourself to a lechon and become his or her attendant. They vied for the opportunity to carry my mask for me whenever it came off. I also sent them to buy water for me as we passed a colmado.
At around 6:00 we made it up to the baseball stadium, which had been generally designated as a meeting place for all groups to party together at the end. That was all fine and dandy, but I was starving and couldn’t think of anything but food. Scanning the horizon in the manner of a lion hunting out a gazelle, I fixed on a fried food cart on the sidewalk outside the stadium area. It was the only food in sight so I made a beeline to it and bought myself a fried yuca ball.
It hit the spot but wasn’t enough. Luckily, I then spotted a Haitian peanut vendor amidst the crowd and purchased myself a five-peso sack, which I shared with a couple of my friends. But as I’d just given the last few to Polanquito, a lechon I didn’t know came up and asked for some. I showed him the bag was empty, and then he started to lecture me on “Haitian peanuts” and how I really should be careful about them because the Haitians “might blow on them” and do some kind of weird voodoo thing. I told him that was ridiculous, people just said things like that out of prejudice, and he became annoyed with me, yelling for a minute and then walking off empty-handed. But the real question here is, why had he been actually asking to eat the voodoo hex peanuts?
field of flowers
Carlos cuts flowers for me in his family's flower farm at El Arroyazo, Cordillera Central, Dominican Republic
Ebano Verde
park ranger Christian next to an endangered green ebony tree they've successfully grown in the park's experimental station.
Virgencita
artwork on the wall of a small chapel on the road to Constanza, Cordillera Central, Dominican Republic
Mountain stream
scenes from the Reserva Cientifica Ebano Verde, Cordillera Central, Dominican Republic
Capilla
chapel of the Virgen de la Altagracia, on the road to Constanza in the Cordillera Central, Dominican Republic
View from the top
the view from the top, on the road to Constanza in the Cordillera Central, Dominican Republic
Sunday, February 11, 2007
A walk in the tropical woods
2/7/06
Something was in the air on Tuesday. It was clearly a day not meant to be. First, having discovered the night before that my headlights had burnt out, I had to hastily have those replaced, so I headed to the mechanic’s first thing. This ended up to be more of an ordeal than expected, since I went ahead and asked him about the blinker that had never worked and the dashboard display light that had mysteriously ceased to function a few weeks ago. All of that took until 2 PM, which was kind of bad since I had a meeting set up with La India Canela at 4 PM and a lot of work to do at the Centro Leon before then. Arriving at the Centro Leon at 2:30, I worked as quickly as I could, firing off as many emails as were humanly possible before 3:45, at which point I suddenly realized I’d eaten nothing and was starving. I shoved a cheese sandwich and bean soup down my throat and ran out the door again.
It was already 4:00, but La India lived nearby, so I wouldn’t be too late – in fact, I’d be positively early if we were working on Dominican time. (I’m never sure when we are and when we’re not, though, since some people expect me to function in “hora americana” and some don’t.) But like I say, something was in the air, and it was not meant to be.
First, I couldn’t find the turnoff to Llanos de Gurabo, which should have been only a few blocks east of the Centro Leon but I seemed to have passed it by. I stopped at a traffic light to figure out where I was, and also to figure out if the traffic light was actually working – in the sun, it kind of looked like the yellow had been lit when I pulled up, but looking at it again I wasn’t sure; perhaps it was not working. In that moment, a car behind me honked and I figured that in fact the light was out, so I started to go. But that car had, in the intervening half second, attempted to swerve around my right side where I couldn’t see him, and ended up sideswiping me!
I was swearing in my best Dominican style when I pulled over behind him to examine the damage. Well, the bumper was a little bit broken and scuffed up on that side, but it had been a little bit scratched and cracked before. It wasn’t worth making a big stink about, so after we finished yelling at one another for a minute or two in the accepted manner, I said it would be fine, explaining that the car had been ugly before and now was just a bit uglier, and he and his SUV with the Che Guevara sticker on the back window drove off again. Clearly, I wasn’t meant to get to this meeting at anything even remotely resembling on time.
I set off again, made a U-turn, then meandered through a hilly neighborhood until coming out on an avenue that would take me in the right direction, although it wasn’t the one I’d been searching for. A few blocks later, although there were no signs to tell me so, I got the feeling that I might be in the correct neighborhood and turned into it. None of the streets had the name I searched for, however, so I stopped two passersby for directions and ended up on what was apparently the right street, even though the posted street signs didn’t bother to state the fact. I checked my notes: Prolongacion 9, #3. According to the guy on the corner, this was Prolongacion 9, so I started looking for the house number.
5, 7, 9 – this didn’t seem to be the right direction, but there hadn’t been any #3 yet, so I kept going. 12, 14 – ah! there it was, right between 11 and 6. Of course! I sighed in exasperation at the sense of whimsy displayed by city planners. So I’d passed the first test, but I still wasn’t sure it was the right house. I’d been to La India’s once before, but that was two and a half years ago and I didn’t have a clear memory of what it looked like or where it was, but I really didn’t remember it being on the corner as this house was. Only one way to find out if I was at the right place, though, so I rang the bell.
A teenage girl answered, opening the iron gate for me. “Is La India here?” I asked. “Yes, yes, come on in,” she told me. She didn’t look familiar, but she could have been newly hired help, I reasoned. I inquired whether I could wash my hands, as the twenty-some minutes I’d already spent on the road in the hot sun had made me feel sweaty and dusty. She showed me to the kitchen sink and provided me with soap and a towel. That done, she showed me to a chair at the dining room table and sat down with me.
She looked at me expectantly. I smiled.
She continued to wait. Another girl, younger than the first, came in and sat down, too. I smiled at her.
I pulled out my notebook, attempting to look professional and ready for the meeting to which I’d arrived so late. Another minute passed.
They both looked expectantly at me. What were they waiting for? I wondered. I’d already asked for La India and no one looked like they were making any move to bring her.
“Umm… so, where exactly is La India?” I tried again.
“La India?” the first one said in a puzzled tone. “There’s no one by that name here.”
“What?! But that’s why I asked you when I got here!” I jumped out of my chair, startled that I was sitting in a strange house, with people that must have been off their rockers, to bring me in off the street. Then I sighed once more in exasperation. Getting lost was one thing, but being lost, suffering a traffic accident, and then being shown into a stranger’s house was really quite out of the ordinary, even for me. In fact, I was still lost, I remembered, and there didn’t seem to be any escape from the situation.
“Ah. You’re looking for La India Canela, aren’t you?” the younger girl guessed.
“Yes, I am! I got lost coming here, but my notes say Prologacion 9, #3 – isn’t this number three?”
“Yes, but there’s another three, around the corner,” she explained.
But of course. I should have known.
“Around the corner – but is it still the same street, then? Prolongacion 9?”
“Yes, yes. Just go around the corner and you’ll see the other number three. It’s two stories,” she elaborated.
“Well, thank you,” I said uncertainly, moving rapidly towards the door.
“But wait! Stay a while!” the first girl insisted.
I burst out laughing. This was too much. I hurriedly explained that I was late for a meeting and really had to be going, and hopped into my car as quick as I could.
The second number three turned out to have no one home. I gave up – neither my map nor my usually stellar navigation skills could possibly be of use here, especially if “here” was, as I was increasingly starting to believe, the Twilight Zone. I had to try the phone, the instrument of last resort.
La India’s housekeeper answered, expressed sympathy for my lostness, and then explained that the house was actually at #13, not #3.
“But WHICH thirteen?” I demanded, not wanting to get caught in the same trap twice.
“The one that’s just a couple of doors down from where you are. Keep going. Ah, you’re here now,” she said, and opened the door.
I told both her and La India the story of my misadventure. They both laughed heartily. “Well, that’s Dominicans for you,” La India said, shaking her head. “Although it is strange for people to open their doors in this neighborhood – they’re very careful of their homes,” the housekeeper added. Apparently a sweaty, disheveled American girl doesn’t count as a threat. Although, I could have been a missionary, and then they might never have gotten rid of me. Luckily, I was there on other business. Tipico business, to be exact.
The excitement over, we got down to work. We had set up this meeting in order to decide on a repertoire for the CD she would be recording for Folkways, and which I was here to produce. Over the next three hours, we listened to selections from my collections of historical típico recordings and discussed our favorite tunes. We ended up with a list of twelve that we though showed a good cross-section of rhythms, time periods, topics, and composers, but we’ll go over it again on Friday with Raul, Rafaelito’s son, who is going to help us with arrangements and rehearsals.
By the time we finished, it was already 7:30 – exactly the time that a show I’d been invited to was supposed to start. Luis, who served as our guide in the mountains last year on our trip to Valle del Tetero, had finally got back in town and told me about a free jazz concert scheduled to take place at the new UASD (Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo) campus that night. I still had to get back home, wash up, change clothes, and eat a bite before I could go anywhere, too. Luckily, Luis called and told me the event wasn’t going to start on time (should I really have been surprised?) since there wasn’t yet a big enough audience.
Eventually I did arrive, and although I was an hour late, the group was only in its third piece. The auditorium, far from empty, was nearly full. And it turned out that the event, sponsored by the US State Department, was a performance of a group from Jazz at Lincoln Center. They were good! It was a quartet consisting of organ, drum set, congas, and trumpet. The audience was really into it, responding either vocally or by clapping to all the solos. In fact, when the conguero did a solo during which he improvised some vocals, the audience decided it was time to chime in and sing the tunes back to him. The piece turned into a spontaneous call-and-response number, and you could tell the percussionist was terribly amused by it all. They should have expected that Dominicans wouldn’t be able to sit silently during a great performance.
Afterwards, I spoke with a couple of the musicians. I told them that it had been a welcome change to actually feel proud of being an American for a few moments. The rest of the time, when you live abroad these days, it’s pretty much just an embarrassment. Let’s hope that some time in the not-too-distant future, we’ll all be able to enjoy a few more of those moments.
On Thursday, I decided to do something completely different and join Luis on a day trip up to the mountains. He goes frequently to an environmental preserve, la Reserva Cientifica Ebano Verde, on the way to Constanza, a place legendary in these parts for its beauty, cool temperatures, and fresh flowers and produce. I’d never been, and I could use both some nature and some exercise, so I decided to tag along.
This reserve was founded about ten years ago by Fundacion Progressio, a local NGO in order to protect the Ebano Verde, or green ebony tree, which was quickly becoming depleted. It is an endemic species only found in this particular part of the island. The local population was subsisting on cutting down these trees and other hardwoods in demand for furniture and art. The tree can grow to over 20 feet in height but the only old-growth stands left are deep in the reserve. It is difficult to grow, but the Fundacion employs technicians who work on germination projects in order to help reseed the area.
Luis and I set off from Santiago in the late morning, about an hour or so after we’d originally planned to hit the road (naturally). Heading south on the Autopista Duarte past La Vega, we passed all the usual roadside artifacts: the ceramics, the hammocks, the wooden dishes and utensils, and finally the piles of chicharron, or pork rinds. That was the indication that our turnoff, just before Bonao, was approaching. From there, we headed through the town of El Abanico up a steep and often frightening road into the Cordillera Central.
This was definitely the backwoods, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t plenty going on. Along the way we passed two barefoot children carrying ñame they’d just dug out of the jungle somewhere. Next to one house, someone had constructed a basketball hoop using an old motorcycle tire. Higher up, another young boy attempted to repair a foot-pedal Singer sewing machine sitting in front of a clapboard house whose owners hadn’t been able to afford paint in quite some time. The Singer was in surprisingly good shape, as shiny as if it had been bought yesterday.
Then we were monte adentro, deep into the mountain forest. I began to be able to recognize the piñon cubano with its pink tissue-paper flowers, the great amapola, and the yagrumo with its enormous fan-shape leaves that shine silver at night. Other plants surprised me with their familiarity: the fragrant eucalyptus, graceful stands of bamboo. Higher still, the temperature dropping to a pleasant degree, we found manacles palms, indicating that water was near the surface, mixed with the first pine trees. There was even an occasional early-blooming flamboyan, the most beloved of Dominican trees, whose flaming orange blooms are so favored by painters. The steep slopes, Alpen in everything but vegetation, were good for more than just trees, we found as we passed a group of paragliders throwing themselves off the mountain and floating gracefully down to the Cibao valley floor.
Now there were cafetales, coffee plantations; the palo de viento which quakes like an aspen in the breeze; and stands of elencho ferns covering entire slopes. Nearly fluorescent green in color, Luis explained that the plants were all females. The males, alone in the midst of their harems, resembled tiny palms with fronds drooping down to reach their mates.
Then we turned a corner, and found ourselves at the highest point on our route, at about 1200 meters. The site was marked with a small chapel dedicated to La Virgen de Altagracia. The irregularly-shaped mud walls resembled the mountain slopes around us and also looked invitingly cool, so we stopped to enter. Two women caretakers welcomed us inside, explaining that it had just been built in the year 2000 and that candles were for sale, if we wished to make a devotion. Images of the virgin were on display behind a decorative iron rejilla and rays of light came down through glass bricks that had been laid in the form of a cross into the ceiling. It was cool, quiet, and contemplative, and while we enjoyed the silence for a moment, a produce truck driver on his way home to Constanza stopped in to do the same.
A short while later, we reached the town of El Arroyazo, at the turnoff to the preserve’s interpretive center. Luis seemed to know every resident of this town, and therefore we had to stop about once every minute to inquire after someone’s health. One woman told us the mass marking the one-year anniversary of her mother’s death would be held later today. A teenage boy in rubber work boots worked to bundle tiny white and yellow flowers on long stalks into manageable bundles for market. Vast fields of roses alternated with lettuce and white-roofed greenhouses where tomatoes grew. Many Haitians were on their way to and from the fields, having immigrated in search of profitable work. One house featured a veve design rendered in wood, a reminder of the vodou religion the inhabitants practiced.
A couple more kilometers, past a few attractive cabins and one misplaced A-frame, and we reached our destination. The first thing to see was the public swimming hole, a gorgeous spot with green mountain water so clear you could easily see the rocks on the bottom far below. It looked a little cold for me, though, so I contented myself with scaling the rocks along the river’s edge to get a few pictures. Luis told me the water was populated with few fish but many jaibas, or river crabs, which make for good eating.
I still wanted to get some exercise, however, so headedup the trail for a lovely 4km walk past 2 small, creaky footbridges. It was easy to see why this mountain range is known as “la madre de las aguas,” the mother of waters. We’d passed a number of streams tumbling down the steep slopes on our way up, and here was where they began, in hundreds of little springs. At various points along the trail I could hear the water rushing below. Otherwise, all was silent save for the occasional buzz of a cicada, the chirp of the ciguita, a tiny, cheerful brown bird, the squelch of my shoes in patches of mud, or the crunch of a silvery yagrumo leaf underfoot. It was quite a change from the constant noise of Santiago.
Heading first up and then back down to the stream, I reached the second bridge and the abandoned encampment just beyond it. I paused to eat my sandwich and headed back, making a stop at the education center to see what I could learn. Park guides Christian and Luis showed me around the displays, which included illustrations of local birds, plants, and insects, and topographical models of the park territory. They estimated that there were about 90 species of birds in the park, 15% endemic, in addition to its seven endemic plants including the ebano verde. The highest point is Loma La Sal, at 1400 meters and a day’s hike away, where the tallest ebony trees are found along with several waterfalls.
Christian then showed me the young ebonies that demonstrated their successful germination experiments: eight and ten-year-old saplings, ten feet tall but only a couple of inches in diameter. As we examined the results, I got bit by an evil malle (sand fly), the bane of my existence. Luckily, they had garlic and salt on hand, which, if rubbed on the bite quickly, can abate some of the unbearable itch. And if anyone thinks that locals don’t get bit, think again: Luis the guide showed me dozens of scabbed-over welts up and down his arms where they’d gotten him in the last week, and he’s lived in the mountains all his life. We discussed insects for a while longer, but it was getting late and I had a meeting to get to, so Luis (Santiago Luis, not the other one) and I began to head back down the mountain.
We didn’t make very fast progress, however. We had to stop to talk to everyone once more, give a woman and her baby a ride to the mass, pick up a couple of squash, and shoot the breeze with an elderly couple who reported they had been married over sixty years, and the woman was turning 87 that very day. We gave them each a banana as an anniversary present.
We also had to stop once more at the home of that teenager who we’d earlier seen buried in piles of flowers. The flowers were still there, on the porch of their roughly made wooden house backed by a grove of banana trees, but they were now all neatly tied up in bundles and placed into buckets of water, ready for the market in Constanza. Also, the radio was plugged in now and blasting “It’s my life,” a snappy little bit of American techno music. The boy Carlos welcomed us back, telling us to get out and offering to cut some flowers for me, fresh out of the field. How could I say no?
Emerging from under the shady canopy of the banana grove, which also served as the family’s trash heap (the bananas didn’t seem to mind), we came out into a spacious field, where the family’s cash crop of flowers was surrounded by bananas, papaya trees, a few stalks of corn, a bit of sugar cane, and one lone orange tree right in the middle. Carlos took his clippers and cut me an enormous heap of tiny yellow salidagos and white, daisy-like montecasinos. The silence, the flowers waving in the pleasantly cool mountain breeze, the fruit falling off the trees, ready to eat, the blue-green peaks in the distance – I felt I had never been part of such an idyllic scene. I could see why Dominicans speak of pre-industrial times in such Edenic terms.
Before we left, Luis insisted upon gathering an enormous heap of bananas, both green one from the trees and ripe yellow ones from the ground, which then went into a plastic burlap rice sack. He also needed a few stalks of sugar cane, which Carlos peeled for us with his machete. Then we were on the road again, gnawing on our sweet acquisitions.
This time, as I gripped the door for dear life around the perilous curves, I also got a good look at the Cibao valley as it was laid out below us, with its patchwork of fields in different shades of green and the blue waters of the reservoir lake spilling out from between two mountains. Up where we were, someone had tacked signs to two trees, wooden ones with blue letters spelling: “I love the trees because they are dressed in silence.”
Unforunately, things weren’t so silent when we got back. I didn’t get home until 6:30 and I had an event to attend at the Centro Leon at 7. I barely had time to hurriedly sponge myself off, change clothes, and stuff some food down my throat before I ran out the door again – so much for the tranquility I’d absorbed in the mountains. Then, when I pulled my car out of the driveway, it started honking for no apparent reason. And it kept on honking, and honking, and honking. The neighbors looked quizzically at me as I raised my hands in exasperation, then pulled over again to assess the situation. Definitely, the problem was with the wiring in the steering wheel: something bad had happened two days ago when they had taken it apart to repair the blinkers. I called El Negro and hailed a passerby to see if he could disconnect the horn for me. The poor guy ended up having to spend 45 minutes on it – as we discovered, there were actually two horns on my car, one above the other. The first apparently was just to fake you out, as it didn’t work at all; the real one was hidden underneath. Needless to say, I was a wee bit late to my event. But it all turned out alright, since the speakers had gotten a late start, too.
Something was in the air on Tuesday. It was clearly a day not meant to be. First, having discovered the night before that my headlights had burnt out, I had to hastily have those replaced, so I headed to the mechanic’s first thing. This ended up to be more of an ordeal than expected, since I went ahead and asked him about the blinker that had never worked and the dashboard display light that had mysteriously ceased to function a few weeks ago. All of that took until 2 PM, which was kind of bad since I had a meeting set up with La India Canela at 4 PM and a lot of work to do at the Centro Leon before then. Arriving at the Centro Leon at 2:30, I worked as quickly as I could, firing off as many emails as were humanly possible before 3:45, at which point I suddenly realized I’d eaten nothing and was starving. I shoved a cheese sandwich and bean soup down my throat and ran out the door again.
It was already 4:00, but La India lived nearby, so I wouldn’t be too late – in fact, I’d be positively early if we were working on Dominican time. (I’m never sure when we are and when we’re not, though, since some people expect me to function in “hora americana” and some don’t.) But like I say, something was in the air, and it was not meant to be.
First, I couldn’t find the turnoff to Llanos de Gurabo, which should have been only a few blocks east of the Centro Leon but I seemed to have passed it by. I stopped at a traffic light to figure out where I was, and also to figure out if the traffic light was actually working – in the sun, it kind of looked like the yellow had been lit when I pulled up, but looking at it again I wasn’t sure; perhaps it was not working. In that moment, a car behind me honked and I figured that in fact the light was out, so I started to go. But that car had, in the intervening half second, attempted to swerve around my right side where I couldn’t see him, and ended up sideswiping me!
I was swearing in my best Dominican style when I pulled over behind him to examine the damage. Well, the bumper was a little bit broken and scuffed up on that side, but it had been a little bit scratched and cracked before. It wasn’t worth making a big stink about, so after we finished yelling at one another for a minute or two in the accepted manner, I said it would be fine, explaining that the car had been ugly before and now was just a bit uglier, and he and his SUV with the Che Guevara sticker on the back window drove off again. Clearly, I wasn’t meant to get to this meeting at anything even remotely resembling on time.
I set off again, made a U-turn, then meandered through a hilly neighborhood until coming out on an avenue that would take me in the right direction, although it wasn’t the one I’d been searching for. A few blocks later, although there were no signs to tell me so, I got the feeling that I might be in the correct neighborhood and turned into it. None of the streets had the name I searched for, however, so I stopped two passersby for directions and ended up on what was apparently the right street, even though the posted street signs didn’t bother to state the fact. I checked my notes: Prolongacion 9, #3. According to the guy on the corner, this was Prolongacion 9, so I started looking for the house number.
5, 7, 9 – this didn’t seem to be the right direction, but there hadn’t been any #3 yet, so I kept going. 12, 14 – ah! there it was, right between 11 and 6. Of course! I sighed in exasperation at the sense of whimsy displayed by city planners. So I’d passed the first test, but I still wasn’t sure it was the right house. I’d been to La India’s once before, but that was two and a half years ago and I didn’t have a clear memory of what it looked like or where it was, but I really didn’t remember it being on the corner as this house was. Only one way to find out if I was at the right place, though, so I rang the bell.
A teenage girl answered, opening the iron gate for me. “Is La India here?” I asked. “Yes, yes, come on in,” she told me. She didn’t look familiar, but she could have been newly hired help, I reasoned. I inquired whether I could wash my hands, as the twenty-some minutes I’d already spent on the road in the hot sun had made me feel sweaty and dusty. She showed me to the kitchen sink and provided me with soap and a towel. That done, she showed me to a chair at the dining room table and sat down with me.
She looked at me expectantly. I smiled.
She continued to wait. Another girl, younger than the first, came in and sat down, too. I smiled at her.
I pulled out my notebook, attempting to look professional and ready for the meeting to which I’d arrived so late. Another minute passed.
They both looked expectantly at me. What were they waiting for? I wondered. I’d already asked for La India and no one looked like they were making any move to bring her.
“Umm… so, where exactly is La India?” I tried again.
“La India?” the first one said in a puzzled tone. “There’s no one by that name here.”
“What?! But that’s why I asked you when I got here!” I jumped out of my chair, startled that I was sitting in a strange house, with people that must have been off their rockers, to bring me in off the street. Then I sighed once more in exasperation. Getting lost was one thing, but being lost, suffering a traffic accident, and then being shown into a stranger’s house was really quite out of the ordinary, even for me. In fact, I was still lost, I remembered, and there didn’t seem to be any escape from the situation.
“Ah. You’re looking for La India Canela, aren’t you?” the younger girl guessed.
“Yes, I am! I got lost coming here, but my notes say Prologacion 9, #3 – isn’t this number three?”
“Yes, but there’s another three, around the corner,” she explained.
But of course. I should have known.
“Around the corner – but is it still the same street, then? Prolongacion 9?”
“Yes, yes. Just go around the corner and you’ll see the other number three. It’s two stories,” she elaborated.
“Well, thank you,” I said uncertainly, moving rapidly towards the door.
“But wait! Stay a while!” the first girl insisted.
I burst out laughing. This was too much. I hurriedly explained that I was late for a meeting and really had to be going, and hopped into my car as quick as I could.
The second number three turned out to have no one home. I gave up – neither my map nor my usually stellar navigation skills could possibly be of use here, especially if “here” was, as I was increasingly starting to believe, the Twilight Zone. I had to try the phone, the instrument of last resort.
La India’s housekeeper answered, expressed sympathy for my lostness, and then explained that the house was actually at #13, not #3.
“But WHICH thirteen?” I demanded, not wanting to get caught in the same trap twice.
“The one that’s just a couple of doors down from where you are. Keep going. Ah, you’re here now,” she said, and opened the door.
I told both her and La India the story of my misadventure. They both laughed heartily. “Well, that’s Dominicans for you,” La India said, shaking her head. “Although it is strange for people to open their doors in this neighborhood – they’re very careful of their homes,” the housekeeper added. Apparently a sweaty, disheveled American girl doesn’t count as a threat. Although, I could have been a missionary, and then they might never have gotten rid of me. Luckily, I was there on other business. Tipico business, to be exact.
The excitement over, we got down to work. We had set up this meeting in order to decide on a repertoire for the CD she would be recording for Folkways, and which I was here to produce. Over the next three hours, we listened to selections from my collections of historical típico recordings and discussed our favorite tunes. We ended up with a list of twelve that we though showed a good cross-section of rhythms, time periods, topics, and composers, but we’ll go over it again on Friday with Raul, Rafaelito’s son, who is going to help us with arrangements and rehearsals.
By the time we finished, it was already 7:30 – exactly the time that a show I’d been invited to was supposed to start. Luis, who served as our guide in the mountains last year on our trip to Valle del Tetero, had finally got back in town and told me about a free jazz concert scheduled to take place at the new UASD (Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo) campus that night. I still had to get back home, wash up, change clothes, and eat a bite before I could go anywhere, too. Luckily, Luis called and told me the event wasn’t going to start on time (should I really have been surprised?) since there wasn’t yet a big enough audience.
Eventually I did arrive, and although I was an hour late, the group was only in its third piece. The auditorium, far from empty, was nearly full. And it turned out that the event, sponsored by the US State Department, was a performance of a group from Jazz at Lincoln Center. They were good! It was a quartet consisting of organ, drum set, congas, and trumpet. The audience was really into it, responding either vocally or by clapping to all the solos. In fact, when the conguero did a solo during which he improvised some vocals, the audience decided it was time to chime in and sing the tunes back to him. The piece turned into a spontaneous call-and-response number, and you could tell the percussionist was terribly amused by it all. They should have expected that Dominicans wouldn’t be able to sit silently during a great performance.
Afterwards, I spoke with a couple of the musicians. I told them that it had been a welcome change to actually feel proud of being an American for a few moments. The rest of the time, when you live abroad these days, it’s pretty much just an embarrassment. Let’s hope that some time in the not-too-distant future, we’ll all be able to enjoy a few more of those moments.
On Thursday, I decided to do something completely different and join Luis on a day trip up to the mountains. He goes frequently to an environmental preserve, la Reserva Cientifica Ebano Verde, on the way to Constanza, a place legendary in these parts for its beauty, cool temperatures, and fresh flowers and produce. I’d never been, and I could use both some nature and some exercise, so I decided to tag along.
This reserve was founded about ten years ago by Fundacion Progressio, a local NGO in order to protect the Ebano Verde, or green ebony tree, which was quickly becoming depleted. It is an endemic species only found in this particular part of the island. The local population was subsisting on cutting down these trees and other hardwoods in demand for furniture and art. The tree can grow to over 20 feet in height but the only old-growth stands left are deep in the reserve. It is difficult to grow, but the Fundacion employs technicians who work on germination projects in order to help reseed the area.
Luis and I set off from Santiago in the late morning, about an hour or so after we’d originally planned to hit the road (naturally). Heading south on the Autopista Duarte past La Vega, we passed all the usual roadside artifacts: the ceramics, the hammocks, the wooden dishes and utensils, and finally the piles of chicharron, or pork rinds. That was the indication that our turnoff, just before Bonao, was approaching. From there, we headed through the town of El Abanico up a steep and often frightening road into the Cordillera Central.
This was definitely the backwoods, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t plenty going on. Along the way we passed two barefoot children carrying ñame they’d just dug out of the jungle somewhere. Next to one house, someone had constructed a basketball hoop using an old motorcycle tire. Higher up, another young boy attempted to repair a foot-pedal Singer sewing machine sitting in front of a clapboard house whose owners hadn’t been able to afford paint in quite some time. The Singer was in surprisingly good shape, as shiny as if it had been bought yesterday.
Then we were monte adentro, deep into the mountain forest. I began to be able to recognize the piñon cubano with its pink tissue-paper flowers, the great amapola, and the yagrumo with its enormous fan-shape leaves that shine silver at night. Other plants surprised me with their familiarity: the fragrant eucalyptus, graceful stands of bamboo. Higher still, the temperature dropping to a pleasant degree, we found manacles palms, indicating that water was near the surface, mixed with the first pine trees. There was even an occasional early-blooming flamboyan, the most beloved of Dominican trees, whose flaming orange blooms are so favored by painters. The steep slopes, Alpen in everything but vegetation, were good for more than just trees, we found as we passed a group of paragliders throwing themselves off the mountain and floating gracefully down to the Cibao valley floor.
Now there were cafetales, coffee plantations; the palo de viento which quakes like an aspen in the breeze; and stands of elencho ferns covering entire slopes. Nearly fluorescent green in color, Luis explained that the plants were all females. The males, alone in the midst of their harems, resembled tiny palms with fronds drooping down to reach their mates.
Then we turned a corner, and found ourselves at the highest point on our route, at about 1200 meters. The site was marked with a small chapel dedicated to La Virgen de Altagracia. The irregularly-shaped mud walls resembled the mountain slopes around us and also looked invitingly cool, so we stopped to enter. Two women caretakers welcomed us inside, explaining that it had just been built in the year 2000 and that candles were for sale, if we wished to make a devotion. Images of the virgin were on display behind a decorative iron rejilla and rays of light came down through glass bricks that had been laid in the form of a cross into the ceiling. It was cool, quiet, and contemplative, and while we enjoyed the silence for a moment, a produce truck driver on his way home to Constanza stopped in to do the same.
A short while later, we reached the town of El Arroyazo, at the turnoff to the preserve’s interpretive center. Luis seemed to know every resident of this town, and therefore we had to stop about once every minute to inquire after someone’s health. One woman told us the mass marking the one-year anniversary of her mother’s death would be held later today. A teenage boy in rubber work boots worked to bundle tiny white and yellow flowers on long stalks into manageable bundles for market. Vast fields of roses alternated with lettuce and white-roofed greenhouses where tomatoes grew. Many Haitians were on their way to and from the fields, having immigrated in search of profitable work. One house featured a veve design rendered in wood, a reminder of the vodou religion the inhabitants practiced.
A couple more kilometers, past a few attractive cabins and one misplaced A-frame, and we reached our destination. The first thing to see was the public swimming hole, a gorgeous spot with green mountain water so clear you could easily see the rocks on the bottom far below. It looked a little cold for me, though, so I contented myself with scaling the rocks along the river’s edge to get a few pictures. Luis told me the water was populated with few fish but many jaibas, or river crabs, which make for good eating.
I still wanted to get some exercise, however, so headedup the trail for a lovely 4km walk past 2 small, creaky footbridges. It was easy to see why this mountain range is known as “la madre de las aguas,” the mother of waters. We’d passed a number of streams tumbling down the steep slopes on our way up, and here was where they began, in hundreds of little springs. At various points along the trail I could hear the water rushing below. Otherwise, all was silent save for the occasional buzz of a cicada, the chirp of the ciguita, a tiny, cheerful brown bird, the squelch of my shoes in patches of mud, or the crunch of a silvery yagrumo leaf underfoot. It was quite a change from the constant noise of Santiago.
Heading first up and then back down to the stream, I reached the second bridge and the abandoned encampment just beyond it. I paused to eat my sandwich and headed back, making a stop at the education center to see what I could learn. Park guides Christian and Luis showed me around the displays, which included illustrations of local birds, plants, and insects, and topographical models of the park territory. They estimated that there were about 90 species of birds in the park, 15% endemic, in addition to its seven endemic plants including the ebano verde. The highest point is Loma La Sal, at 1400 meters and a day’s hike away, where the tallest ebony trees are found along with several waterfalls.
Christian then showed me the young ebonies that demonstrated their successful germination experiments: eight and ten-year-old saplings, ten feet tall but only a couple of inches in diameter. As we examined the results, I got bit by an evil malle (sand fly), the bane of my existence. Luckily, they had garlic and salt on hand, which, if rubbed on the bite quickly, can abate some of the unbearable itch. And if anyone thinks that locals don’t get bit, think again: Luis the guide showed me dozens of scabbed-over welts up and down his arms where they’d gotten him in the last week, and he’s lived in the mountains all his life. We discussed insects for a while longer, but it was getting late and I had a meeting to get to, so Luis (Santiago Luis, not the other one) and I began to head back down the mountain.
We didn’t make very fast progress, however. We had to stop to talk to everyone once more, give a woman and her baby a ride to the mass, pick up a couple of squash, and shoot the breeze with an elderly couple who reported they had been married over sixty years, and the woman was turning 87 that very day. We gave them each a banana as an anniversary present.
We also had to stop once more at the home of that teenager who we’d earlier seen buried in piles of flowers. The flowers were still there, on the porch of their roughly made wooden house backed by a grove of banana trees, but they were now all neatly tied up in bundles and placed into buckets of water, ready for the market in Constanza. Also, the radio was plugged in now and blasting “It’s my life,” a snappy little bit of American techno music. The boy Carlos welcomed us back, telling us to get out and offering to cut some flowers for me, fresh out of the field. How could I say no?
Emerging from under the shady canopy of the banana grove, which also served as the family’s trash heap (the bananas didn’t seem to mind), we came out into a spacious field, where the family’s cash crop of flowers was surrounded by bananas, papaya trees, a few stalks of corn, a bit of sugar cane, and one lone orange tree right in the middle. Carlos took his clippers and cut me an enormous heap of tiny yellow salidagos and white, daisy-like montecasinos. The silence, the flowers waving in the pleasantly cool mountain breeze, the fruit falling off the trees, ready to eat, the blue-green peaks in the distance – I felt I had never been part of such an idyllic scene. I could see why Dominicans speak of pre-industrial times in such Edenic terms.
Before we left, Luis insisted upon gathering an enormous heap of bananas, both green one from the trees and ripe yellow ones from the ground, which then went into a plastic burlap rice sack. He also needed a few stalks of sugar cane, which Carlos peeled for us with his machete. Then we were on the road again, gnawing on our sweet acquisitions.
This time, as I gripped the door for dear life around the perilous curves, I also got a good look at the Cibao valley as it was laid out below us, with its patchwork of fields in different shades of green and the blue waters of the reservoir lake spilling out from between two mountains. Up where we were, someone had tacked signs to two trees, wooden ones with blue letters spelling: “I love the trees because they are dressed in silence.”
Unforunately, things weren’t so silent when we got back. I didn’t get home until 6:30 and I had an event to attend at the Centro Leon at 7. I barely had time to hurriedly sponge myself off, change clothes, and stuff some food down my throat before I ran out the door again – so much for the tranquility I’d absorbed in the mountains. Then, when I pulled my car out of the driveway, it started honking for no apparent reason. And it kept on honking, and honking, and honking. The neighbors looked quizzically at me as I raised my hands in exasperation, then pulled over again to assess the situation. Definitely, the problem was with the wiring in the steering wheel: something bad had happened two days ago when they had taken it apart to repair the blinkers. I called El Negro and hailed a passerby to see if he could disconnect the horn for me. The poor guy ended up having to spend 45 minutes on it – as we discovered, there were actually two horns on my car, one above the other. The first apparently was just to fake you out, as it didn’t work at all; the real one was hidden underneath. Needless to say, I was a wee bit late to my event. But it all turned out alright, since the speakers had gotten a late start, too.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Hombre/muñeco
another traditional carnival costume in the DR - the man being carried by a mannequin, or in this case, a doll. He is accompanied by a tamborero when he dances.
giant accordion
Orange, a cell phone company here in the DR, elected to decorate their tent at the carnival in La Vega with giant tipico musicians.
Las Fieras
La Vega carnival: I liked this group's cueva (HQ) for their creative and Magritte-esque shading option
Los Yankees cueva
At the carnival in La Vega, DR: Artwork on the cueva, or HQ, of a group of diablos hailing from New York
Carnival, part 1: La Vega
2/5/07
Things quieted down for a few days after my Batey visit. I spent Thursday at the Centro Leon, writing things up and getting organized. On Friday, I visited Chiqui’s mom in the hospital once again, and then had several things fixed on my car: the hatch back, which wouldn’t close; a back door, which wouldn’t open; a new gas filter; a field trip to various auto parts stores in search of a new oil cap. On Saturday, I paid some more visits, first to Tonito, from my carnival group, and then to Hector and Denio, of my palos group.
Sunday was far more action-packed. Being the first Sunday of February, it was also the official start of the carnival season. And since this year I am trying to visit some different carnivals, a friend from the Centro Leon had set up a meeting for me with a member of the carnival planning committee in La Vega.
If you read my blog last year, you might remember something about the Vegan carnival, the biggest and best-funded in the land. (If you don’t remember, you can always go back and look at the February 2006 archives.) Most Dominicans seem to thing that it is a model event, one that could serve as an example to other cities’ carnivals, but I had some concerns about commercialism and participation. It seemed to me that with all the rules the carnival committee placed on participants, and with the rising costs of costumes and masks that necessitated ever more attention paid to fundraising, the Vegan carnival didn’t allow for the kind of popular participation and freedom of expression that Santiago’s did. I wanted to see for myself how the thing worked.
I arrived at the Parque Duarte, the main square in the old part of La Vega, just before noon. Although I’d been to the national park at the ruins of Old La Vega, and to Santo Cerro, a pilgrimage site just out of town, I’d never had an opportunity to look around La Vega itself. On the south side of this square I could see the Concepcion cathedral, an odd-looking modernist structure that seemed half-finished, but was actually complete. On the east side was the Ayuntamiento, or City Hall, and on the north was the Centro de la Cultura, on whose porch I decided to stand. A stall selling crafts had been set up there, and bags with wooden and bamboo beadwork, painted gourds, coconut-shell jewelry, and satchels painted with carnival devils were for sale.
A few minutes later my guide, William Gil, arrived, and we began our tour. The “carnival zone” was to the east of us, so we left my car parked on the square and headed in that direction. The sounds of carpentry were everywhere, since all the carnival groups were still busy constructing their “cuevas,” or headquarters and staging areas.
William confirmed that there had been no groups of devils before the 1980s, when “Los Siete” first formed. Today there are, he estimates, somewhere in the neighborhood of 130 groups, including Los Broncos, a group that grew out of Los Siete. Some of the groups belong to different parts of town, as in Santiago; others, like Los Magoyos, are family affairs. One, called “Los Yankees,” is made up entirely of Veganos in New York, and it was to this cueva that we went first.
The name “cave” is somewhat misleading as applied to these structures. They were really more of a patio, I commented, since they are made up of raised seating areas, a bar or refreshment stand, and some kind of shading device, all decorated with some sort of devilish theme related to the group’s costume, but mostly covered in the logos of the group’s sponsor. Each group receives not only their costumes and masks from the sponsor, but also drinks, the cueva, and even payment for their performance. Quite a contrast to what we deal with in Santiago!
In spite of the rampant commercialism, there is still a lot of creativity in display. Instead of simply putting up a tent-like shelter from the sun, like the others, one group had strung up a net and festooned it with white umbrellas. They also had a giant tower, about 30 feet high, featuring the tiger head that is the emblem of Las Fieras (The Furies). One had made a castle with a devil’s head about the gate and two costumed dancing figures. But I particularly liked the Yankees, who had painted a mural of the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline (post-September 11), and whose emblem was a skull wearing red, white, and blue glasses, Grateful Dead style.
We stopped to talk with a couple of members of Los Nietos. This group belonged to Soto, a semi-rural area west of town, and had chosen their name – “The Grandsons” – because they were all young boys when they started. They reported that their costumes this year had cost about 16,000 pesos ($500) and weighed about 9 pounds, without the mask.
The carnival zone covers an area of about ten blocks, packed with cuevas, stages belonging to various sponsors (I saw one for Orange wireless) and official organizations (including radio, TV, and the Ayuntamiento), food stands, and wandering vendors selling tiny versions of devils’ masks, vejigas wrapped in colorful fabrics for you to whack your friends with, whistles, drinks, and snacks. Since, William told me, things usually get going around 2 PM we thought we had better get to our seats before then if we wanted to avoid the vejigazos.
One of the things for which La Vega is most famous is the violence of its vejigazos, or whacks with an inflated pig bladder. We dole these out in Santiago as well, but in La Vega they have made several adjustments to their equipment in order to give a more painful experience. First, they put several bladders one inside of the other to make them stronger and harder. These are wrapped in fabric to make them match the costumes, and the whole thing is then attached to a rubber rod to allow for greater precision and speed. The pain they could inflict was legendary, and to be quite honest, I was scared. I wanted to enjoy carnival, but I didn’t want to suffer for it for the whole week after, and I was assured that that was how long the bruises would last.
In order to avoid this sorry fate, William made sure I was well out of the line of fire, but I discussed the problem with him.
“But why do they want to hit so hard? I don’t see what’s fun about that,” I said.
“Well, it’s a peculiarity of the veganos. It’s how we enjoy our carnival. The vejigazos make us feel happy.”
“Happy?! Why, are veganos masochists? I don’t see how pain translates into joy.”
“They say that the devils hit us in order to get rid of all the evil we’ve accumulated during the year. That’s how the vejigazos got started, centuries ago.”
“Sure, but carnival doesn’t seem particularly religious these days.”
“No, definitely not. But that’s the tradition.”
I was still confused about how a vejigazo could bring joy – until I saw my first one. There was a raised ramp in front of the Ayuntamiento stage on which we were seated, and every so often, devils would parade down it. One onlooker was standing on it talking to a friend, unaware that a devil was coming up behind him. Noticing his distraction, the devil got a running start, wound up, and WHAM! The vejiga slammed into his back with a resounding crack. The man jumped and turned around, shouting expletives at the devil as the devil danced around him. Everyone around laughed, both in amusement at his misfortune and relief that we had escaped it. It was pretty funny. “Ah, what joy!” I exclaimed. “Aha! Now you understand,” William laughed.
Still, I wasn’t eager to experience the pain myself. I’d recommend to anyone attending carnival in La Vega to keep well out of the way. There appear to be two ways to do this: either arrive early, around 1:00. and find yourself a seat on the bleachers, or pay to enjoy the VIP seating provided for a cost of from fifty to three hundred pesos ($1.50-$9) in the cuevas. There, you can enjoy beverage service, too.
Since it was only the first day of carnival, just a fraction of the groups turned out in costume, and it took them quite a while to do so. We were waiting until after three, so I took advantage of the time to ask William a few more questions. For example, I had already seen several women in devil garb; when had they started dressing up? William explained that a group called “Las Amazonas” formed entirely of women had come out in the 1990s. No one believed that they were women at first, since it had never been seen before – it was practically a taboo. After they had made the circuit of the parade route, people did believe, because they moved differently than the men and tired faster in the heavy costumes. But now that the younger generation has grown up with female devils and the women have become accustomed to the job, there is virtually no difference, and women belong to many different groups today.
I also wanted to know about the comparsas, or semi-theatrical groups who go out at carnival time dressed as things other than devils. He told me that the number of comparsas had been dramatically reduced in the past two decades. Now he estimated that there were only five, compared to 130 grupos de diablos, whereas formerly, the former had outnumbered the latter.
What had caused this dramatic reduction? I wanted to know. “Money,” he told me frankly. “Since the creation of UCAVE, the Union Carnavalesca Vegana, carnival has become a business.” With the formation of this association of groups came more money from corporate sponsors, and what they wanted were colorful, impressive, expensive-looking costumes. They wanted devils, not Indians in loincloths, or Africans with body paint, or people dressed up to look like the President – all comparsas commonly found throughout the country. What’s more, comparsas generally belong to the poor, and there was little room for them in the new scheme of things.
“So the costumes became more impressive, but the comparsas died out. You gained something only to lose something else,” I suggested. He agreed. While UCAVE didn’t discourage comparsas to participate, they didn’t exactly encourage them either, since there was no money there. Back in Santiago, I asked a friend who had studied such things who it was, exactly, who participated in the Vegan carnival these days. “The children of the rich,” he told me. So the rich become richer, and the poor poorer. Sounds familiar.
Nonetheless, there were some distinctive comparsas on display on Sunday. There were the mudmen, a bunch of barefoot kids, actually, who had covered their entire bodies with yellowish mud, including their faces, which had first been obscured by a pantyhose mask. They stalked about zombie-style, and just generally looked creepy. There was also a seven-foot-tall headless priest, and the pope riding about in a chariot pulled by a white horse: a Dominican popemobile. There were even a couple of africanos, nearly naked but slicked down with engine grease and body paint, another low-budget costume. I also saw the man riding the doll, another old standby, and a troupe of Robalagallinas, the traditional transvestive character with huge buttocks and a tattered umbrella.
The rest were devils. And having said what I needed to say about them already, now I must state that they are undeniably beautiful and impressive. They come in every possible color combination, but all have voluminous costumes made of layers upon layers of artfully cut satins, lames, and sequined fabrics studded with just a few bells – not enough to make them as heavy as ours in Santiago. The masks have grown to monstrous proportions, at least two feet tall each, molded in acrylic and painted in fluorescent and metallic colors. Most depict a grimacing devil with angry brows and fearsome fangs, sprouting horns, sculpted hair and beard, and sometimes ostrich feathers out of its head.
There are a few variations on this traditional devil face, however: some with bug eyes look like extraterrestrials borrowed from “Alien Autopsy,” occasionally with pink brains on view. One group, called “Los Zorros,” had their devils wearing a flat-topped Spanish hat. And there were a dozen King Tuts sculpted in gold and lapis colors. With between ten and fifty in each group jumping and running about, the devils make quite an impression. Yet instead of the colorful, custom-made shoes we use in Santiago, they have matching, store-bought tennis shoes, usually in colors to match the costume. They may not be as creative, but they did look comfortable.
Each group is preceded by a bevy of flag-wavers bearing their standard, and many have their own theme-songs, another benefit of sponsorship. I was a little surprised, however, to find that just like in Santiago, Veganos have no concept of traditional carnival music. William didn’t remember anything about music before the formation of devil groups in the 1980s, just as I had found with the lechones in Santiago. The groups’ official songs are likely to be electronic dance music overlaid with vocals exhorting the group, “Dame un vejigazo.” I found this particularly interesting since the Vegan politicians I’d seen talking about their carnival at the Centro Leon last year had made a big deal over the fact that they don’t allow any disco lites, the pickups mounted with speakers we use to provide music in the Santiago carnival. While I had thought their beef was with the popular music they play, apparently, it was only with the look of the thing.
So it seems that the Vegan concept of “tradition” relies solely on visuals, not on sound – and even then, significant allowances are made. Twenty-plus years ago, masks were about the same size as one’s normal face, costumes were far simpler, and one imagines, sneakers were not in evidence. And while the officials had said they were proud not to have t-shirts and baseball caps on their carnival groups, at least on this first Sunday of February, that is exactly what I saw. Many were on hand in the shirts they’d designed to represent their groups of devils this year, and in the cuevas, you could even buy one for yourself.
In conclusion, the Carnaval de la Vega is well worth seeing. The costumes are beautiful, the cuevas creative, and the audience is into it. William also tells me that it is the carnival with the most popular support, never dying out over the centuries it has been practiced, even during the repressive years of Trujillo and Balaguer. But for a folklorist, it’s a mixed bag. Every carnival in the country is different now than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, naturally. People’s creativity is everywhere in evidence in the changing costumes, masks, and, particularly, musical choices. Yet in La Vega, the conflict between the maintenance of tradition and the drive to commercialize and cater to tourism is particularly in evidence. So go and see La Vega, but try to catch another as well – Cotui, Salcedo, or good old Santiago – in order to see what happens when regular folks are able to make their own decisions about carnival.
Things quieted down for a few days after my Batey visit. I spent Thursday at the Centro Leon, writing things up and getting organized. On Friday, I visited Chiqui’s mom in the hospital once again, and then had several things fixed on my car: the hatch back, which wouldn’t close; a back door, which wouldn’t open; a new gas filter; a field trip to various auto parts stores in search of a new oil cap. On Saturday, I paid some more visits, first to Tonito, from my carnival group, and then to Hector and Denio, of my palos group.
Sunday was far more action-packed. Being the first Sunday of February, it was also the official start of the carnival season. And since this year I am trying to visit some different carnivals, a friend from the Centro Leon had set up a meeting for me with a member of the carnival planning committee in La Vega.
If you read my blog last year, you might remember something about the Vegan carnival, the biggest and best-funded in the land. (If you don’t remember, you can always go back and look at the February 2006 archives.) Most Dominicans seem to thing that it is a model event, one that could serve as an example to other cities’ carnivals, but I had some concerns about commercialism and participation. It seemed to me that with all the rules the carnival committee placed on participants, and with the rising costs of costumes and masks that necessitated ever more attention paid to fundraising, the Vegan carnival didn’t allow for the kind of popular participation and freedom of expression that Santiago’s did. I wanted to see for myself how the thing worked.
I arrived at the Parque Duarte, the main square in the old part of La Vega, just before noon. Although I’d been to the national park at the ruins of Old La Vega, and to Santo Cerro, a pilgrimage site just out of town, I’d never had an opportunity to look around La Vega itself. On the south side of this square I could see the Concepcion cathedral, an odd-looking modernist structure that seemed half-finished, but was actually complete. On the east side was the Ayuntamiento, or City Hall, and on the north was the Centro de la Cultura, on whose porch I decided to stand. A stall selling crafts had been set up there, and bags with wooden and bamboo beadwork, painted gourds, coconut-shell jewelry, and satchels painted with carnival devils were for sale.
A few minutes later my guide, William Gil, arrived, and we began our tour. The “carnival zone” was to the east of us, so we left my car parked on the square and headed in that direction. The sounds of carpentry were everywhere, since all the carnival groups were still busy constructing their “cuevas,” or headquarters and staging areas.
William confirmed that there had been no groups of devils before the 1980s, when “Los Siete” first formed. Today there are, he estimates, somewhere in the neighborhood of 130 groups, including Los Broncos, a group that grew out of Los Siete. Some of the groups belong to different parts of town, as in Santiago; others, like Los Magoyos, are family affairs. One, called “Los Yankees,” is made up entirely of Veganos in New York, and it was to this cueva that we went first.
The name “cave” is somewhat misleading as applied to these structures. They were really more of a patio, I commented, since they are made up of raised seating areas, a bar or refreshment stand, and some kind of shading device, all decorated with some sort of devilish theme related to the group’s costume, but mostly covered in the logos of the group’s sponsor. Each group receives not only their costumes and masks from the sponsor, but also drinks, the cueva, and even payment for their performance. Quite a contrast to what we deal with in Santiago!
In spite of the rampant commercialism, there is still a lot of creativity in display. Instead of simply putting up a tent-like shelter from the sun, like the others, one group had strung up a net and festooned it with white umbrellas. They also had a giant tower, about 30 feet high, featuring the tiger head that is the emblem of Las Fieras (The Furies). One had made a castle with a devil’s head about the gate and two costumed dancing figures. But I particularly liked the Yankees, who had painted a mural of the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline (post-September 11), and whose emblem was a skull wearing red, white, and blue glasses, Grateful Dead style.
We stopped to talk with a couple of members of Los Nietos. This group belonged to Soto, a semi-rural area west of town, and had chosen their name – “The Grandsons” – because they were all young boys when they started. They reported that their costumes this year had cost about 16,000 pesos ($500) and weighed about 9 pounds, without the mask.
The carnival zone covers an area of about ten blocks, packed with cuevas, stages belonging to various sponsors (I saw one for Orange wireless) and official organizations (including radio, TV, and the Ayuntamiento), food stands, and wandering vendors selling tiny versions of devils’ masks, vejigas wrapped in colorful fabrics for you to whack your friends with, whistles, drinks, and snacks. Since, William told me, things usually get going around 2 PM we thought we had better get to our seats before then if we wanted to avoid the vejigazos.
One of the things for which La Vega is most famous is the violence of its vejigazos, or whacks with an inflated pig bladder. We dole these out in Santiago as well, but in La Vega they have made several adjustments to their equipment in order to give a more painful experience. First, they put several bladders one inside of the other to make them stronger and harder. These are wrapped in fabric to make them match the costumes, and the whole thing is then attached to a rubber rod to allow for greater precision and speed. The pain they could inflict was legendary, and to be quite honest, I was scared. I wanted to enjoy carnival, but I didn’t want to suffer for it for the whole week after, and I was assured that that was how long the bruises would last.
In order to avoid this sorry fate, William made sure I was well out of the line of fire, but I discussed the problem with him.
“But why do they want to hit so hard? I don’t see what’s fun about that,” I said.
“Well, it’s a peculiarity of the veganos. It’s how we enjoy our carnival. The vejigazos make us feel happy.”
“Happy?! Why, are veganos masochists? I don’t see how pain translates into joy.”
“They say that the devils hit us in order to get rid of all the evil we’ve accumulated during the year. That’s how the vejigazos got started, centuries ago.”
“Sure, but carnival doesn’t seem particularly religious these days.”
“No, definitely not. But that’s the tradition.”
I was still confused about how a vejigazo could bring joy – until I saw my first one. There was a raised ramp in front of the Ayuntamiento stage on which we were seated, and every so often, devils would parade down it. One onlooker was standing on it talking to a friend, unaware that a devil was coming up behind him. Noticing his distraction, the devil got a running start, wound up, and WHAM! The vejiga slammed into his back with a resounding crack. The man jumped and turned around, shouting expletives at the devil as the devil danced around him. Everyone around laughed, both in amusement at his misfortune and relief that we had escaped it. It was pretty funny. “Ah, what joy!” I exclaimed. “Aha! Now you understand,” William laughed.
Still, I wasn’t eager to experience the pain myself. I’d recommend to anyone attending carnival in La Vega to keep well out of the way. There appear to be two ways to do this: either arrive early, around 1:00. and find yourself a seat on the bleachers, or pay to enjoy the VIP seating provided for a cost of from fifty to three hundred pesos ($1.50-$9) in the cuevas. There, you can enjoy beverage service, too.
Since it was only the first day of carnival, just a fraction of the groups turned out in costume, and it took them quite a while to do so. We were waiting until after three, so I took advantage of the time to ask William a few more questions. For example, I had already seen several women in devil garb; when had they started dressing up? William explained that a group called “Las Amazonas” formed entirely of women had come out in the 1990s. No one believed that they were women at first, since it had never been seen before – it was practically a taboo. After they had made the circuit of the parade route, people did believe, because they moved differently than the men and tired faster in the heavy costumes. But now that the younger generation has grown up with female devils and the women have become accustomed to the job, there is virtually no difference, and women belong to many different groups today.
I also wanted to know about the comparsas, or semi-theatrical groups who go out at carnival time dressed as things other than devils. He told me that the number of comparsas had been dramatically reduced in the past two decades. Now he estimated that there were only five, compared to 130 grupos de diablos, whereas formerly, the former had outnumbered the latter.
What had caused this dramatic reduction? I wanted to know. “Money,” he told me frankly. “Since the creation of UCAVE, the Union Carnavalesca Vegana, carnival has become a business.” With the formation of this association of groups came more money from corporate sponsors, and what they wanted were colorful, impressive, expensive-looking costumes. They wanted devils, not Indians in loincloths, or Africans with body paint, or people dressed up to look like the President – all comparsas commonly found throughout the country. What’s more, comparsas generally belong to the poor, and there was little room for them in the new scheme of things.
“So the costumes became more impressive, but the comparsas died out. You gained something only to lose something else,” I suggested. He agreed. While UCAVE didn’t discourage comparsas to participate, they didn’t exactly encourage them either, since there was no money there. Back in Santiago, I asked a friend who had studied such things who it was, exactly, who participated in the Vegan carnival these days. “The children of the rich,” he told me. So the rich become richer, and the poor poorer. Sounds familiar.
Nonetheless, there were some distinctive comparsas on display on Sunday. There were the mudmen, a bunch of barefoot kids, actually, who had covered their entire bodies with yellowish mud, including their faces, which had first been obscured by a pantyhose mask. They stalked about zombie-style, and just generally looked creepy. There was also a seven-foot-tall headless priest, and the pope riding about in a chariot pulled by a white horse: a Dominican popemobile. There were even a couple of africanos, nearly naked but slicked down with engine grease and body paint, another low-budget costume. I also saw the man riding the doll, another old standby, and a troupe of Robalagallinas, the traditional transvestive character with huge buttocks and a tattered umbrella.
The rest were devils. And having said what I needed to say about them already, now I must state that they are undeniably beautiful and impressive. They come in every possible color combination, but all have voluminous costumes made of layers upon layers of artfully cut satins, lames, and sequined fabrics studded with just a few bells – not enough to make them as heavy as ours in Santiago. The masks have grown to monstrous proportions, at least two feet tall each, molded in acrylic and painted in fluorescent and metallic colors. Most depict a grimacing devil with angry brows and fearsome fangs, sprouting horns, sculpted hair and beard, and sometimes ostrich feathers out of its head.
There are a few variations on this traditional devil face, however: some with bug eyes look like extraterrestrials borrowed from “Alien Autopsy,” occasionally with pink brains on view. One group, called “Los Zorros,” had their devils wearing a flat-topped Spanish hat. And there were a dozen King Tuts sculpted in gold and lapis colors. With between ten and fifty in each group jumping and running about, the devils make quite an impression. Yet instead of the colorful, custom-made shoes we use in Santiago, they have matching, store-bought tennis shoes, usually in colors to match the costume. They may not be as creative, but they did look comfortable.
Each group is preceded by a bevy of flag-wavers bearing their standard, and many have their own theme-songs, another benefit of sponsorship. I was a little surprised, however, to find that just like in Santiago, Veganos have no concept of traditional carnival music. William didn’t remember anything about music before the formation of devil groups in the 1980s, just as I had found with the lechones in Santiago. The groups’ official songs are likely to be electronic dance music overlaid with vocals exhorting the group, “Dame un vejigazo.” I found this particularly interesting since the Vegan politicians I’d seen talking about their carnival at the Centro Leon last year had made a big deal over the fact that they don’t allow any disco lites, the pickups mounted with speakers we use to provide music in the Santiago carnival. While I had thought their beef was with the popular music they play, apparently, it was only with the look of the thing.
So it seems that the Vegan concept of “tradition” relies solely on visuals, not on sound – and even then, significant allowances are made. Twenty-plus years ago, masks were about the same size as one’s normal face, costumes were far simpler, and one imagines, sneakers were not in evidence. And while the officials had said they were proud not to have t-shirts and baseball caps on their carnival groups, at least on this first Sunday of February, that is exactly what I saw. Many were on hand in the shirts they’d designed to represent their groups of devils this year, and in the cuevas, you could even buy one for yourself.
In conclusion, the Carnaval de la Vega is well worth seeing. The costumes are beautiful, the cuevas creative, and the audience is into it. William also tells me that it is the carnival with the most popular support, never dying out over the centuries it has been practiced, even during the repressive years of Trujillo and Balaguer. But for a folklorist, it’s a mixed bag. Every carnival in the country is different now than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, naturally. People’s creativity is everywhere in evidence in the changing costumes, masks, and, particularly, musical choices. Yet in La Vega, the conflict between the maintenance of tradition and the drive to commercialize and cater to tourism is particularly in evidence. So go and see La Vega, but try to catch another as well – Cotui, Salcedo, or good old Santiago – in order to see what happens when regular folks are able to make their own decisions about carnival.
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