ABSTRACT: In an inventory of genres and instruments of African heritage within Dominican folk music, the most important is the constellation of the palos long drums associated with Afro-Dominican religious brotherhoods (cofradías). This paper surveys palos of the Dominican Republic with regard to organology, ensemble, and musical style, and situates the variants thereof geographically. The paper then discusses the cofradías as performance contexts, a living legacy of colonial society, defunct in many other sites of Afro-Latin America.

In juxtaposition with neighboring Haiti-- a “black republic” by constitutional definition since its establishment in 1804—the Dominican Republic has defined itself as a white republic, touting “hispanidad” (Hispanic heritage) as official cultural policy. As a general comparison, there is some truth in this contrast. However, the vehemence of the Dominican elite in rejecting everything African, black, and Haitian, taken as synonymous, as an intrusive and tainting “Other,” is an inaccurate representation of Dominican culture. In reality, the Dominican Republic could best characterized as a “mulatto society,” despite notable domains of cultural retentions of both European and African origin.

However, what exists ethnographically is not necessarily reflected in a consciousness about it. The Dominican public is, in fact, unaware of elements of both Taíno Indian and African heritage, both of which contribute to what is perceived as “Dominican popular culture,” part of everyday life. Members of the elite may pronunce against Haitian infiltration (a common topic), between bites of rice with pigeon peas garnished with fried plantain—a typically African lunch.

My research since 1972 has intended to balance the previously hispanically-slanted documentation of traditional Dominican culture by emphasizing its African-influenced component. My research has been followed by others—musicians of a proliferation of Afro-Dominican music/dance ensembles of the 1990s to the present—in search for “material” for staging a more inclusive sense of identity. The topic of the current redefinition of Dominican identity through music is a fascinating cultural phenomenon, in which expatriates in New York City are playing a significant role.

But this is a topic for another paper. My purpose in the present paper is ethnographic documentation of the African cultural presence in the Dominican Republic, which can then be used for various purposes, both scientific and applied. My focus is the most African of Dominican traditional music: the long-drums (“palos”): the instruments and ensembles, their musical styles, and their social contexts of performance.

History of the African musical presence in Santo Domingo

African heritage—both racial and cultural—has been present throughout the island since the earliest days of the colony. Its introduction into the cultural fabric of what is today’s Dominican Republic has occurred in three major phases:

1) During the first two hundred years of European conquest, from 1492 to 1697, when the entire island of Quisqueya (“Hispaniola”), of five Taíno chiefdomships (cacicazgos) became Spain’s first colony in the New World, Santo Domingo. A Taíno Indian/Spanish/African tripartite heritage is thus the common denominator of the island as a whole.

The first phase of the African presence were “ladinos” (Christianized blacks) from Spain, where Africans had resided for a hundred years before 1492. Soon afterward, “bozales” (untamed) were brought from Africa itself, first from the Senegambia region, and later from points increasingly south. After France was ceded the western third of the island in 1697, which became its colony of St.-Domingue, the cultural trajectories diverged due to the differing demographies—with a million Africans brought to St.-Domingue in the 18th century while Santo Domingo languished underdeveloped and underpopulated. The ethnic origins as well as numbers of African slaves also diverged, such that today’s Haitian culture is more Benin-region influenced whereas Dominican culture represents a greater Congo-Angolan presence, the source of slaves when the trade was cut off in the early 1800s.

2) During the Haitian occupation of Santo Domingo, 1822-44.

In a gesture of freeing the entire island of European domination, Haiti occupied Santo Domingo in 1822, such that the whole island was the Republic of Haiti for twenty-two years. During this time, President Boyer resettled Haitians in underdeveloped areas of the island, with land titles. And of course there was no border, allowing population to flow from the more populated Haiti to the underpopulated Santo Domingo. It is very probable that all or many of the local religious brotherhoods based on family lineages in the Central-South (Provinces of Peravia, San Cristóbal, and the Distrito Nacional), date to settlements from that period. The oral history of two important ones in fact attribute their origin to Haiti: the brotherhood of St. John the Baptist (San Juan Bautista) of Baní, Province of Peravia, which plays the music called “Sarandunga,” unique in the Republic; and the brotherhood of Our Lady of Sorrows (Nuestra Señora de los Dolores—“La Dolorita”) of Paraje Los Morenos, Sección San Felipe, Villa Mella). It is possible that the notable ethnic differences among rural communities in the Province of San Cristóbal, each with different styles of drumming—the most complex and notable being the brotherhood of the Holy Spirit (El Espíritu Santo) of Santa María—may also date from this period.

However, extended-family religious/musical enclaves founded during this time are undoubtedly intermixed with others founded previously and under different circumstances, such as by resettled runaway slaves (cimarrones). The latter is my hypothesis with regard to the founding the brotherhood of the Holy Spirit in Villa Mella, who play the “Congos” a musical style, repertoire, and instrumentation unique in the Republic.

3) During the mid-late 20th century and the rise of the modern sugarcane industry.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the sugarcane industry, which flourished in colonial times, expanded in the Dominican Southeast. An imported labor force was drawn from the Anglophone Caribbean, most notably from the British Virgin Islands (called cocolos, sometimes despectively). These were Protestant people. So their contribution to Afro-Dominican music was not in the sacred domain, but rather the secular: the fife-and-drum ensembles associated with the “mummers,” street-theatre revelers associated with the Christmas season, in the town of San Pedro de Macorís. (Such ensembles are also found among Afro-Americans in the U.S. South, such as Mississippi.)

In the southwestern province of Barahona during the First U.S. Occupation (1916-24), and in the central-south area east and west of the Capital during the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930-61), new sugarcane plantations on the one hand, and revitalized plantations on expropriated land on the other, utilized seasonal laborers (braceros) from Haiti. Haitians brought with them vodoun and rará. The former are the well-known healing societies characterized by spirit possession, with major subdivisions: the Rada, Congo, and Petro families of deities and differences in instruments and musical styles. The latter are Lenten-period vow-based religious societies which celebrate life, death, and—as part of the celebration of life--human fertility, utilizing Petro drums plus an ensemble of one-note bamboo-tube trumpets (in Spanish, bambúces or fotutos).

The continued presence of Haitians in the Dominican Republic—of over a million residents who have come and stayed—have influenced the current flourishing of Dominican vodú, the counterpart of Haitian vodoun and influenced by it. (Note: The term vodú is used only by Dominican scholars and definitely not by practicioners, for whom it rings of “Haitian black magic.”) The growth of vodú is also attributable to the relaxation of enforcement of proscriptive edicts. In addition, rará (pronunced by Dominicans as “gagá”) is found in many cane settlements (bateyes) throughout the Republic as well as in the border town of Elías Piña. In locales such as Haina (site of a major port and sugarmill just west of the Capital) second- or third-generation Haitian-Dominicans now sing gagá in Spanish. Thus, the genre is becoming a form of Afro-Dominican music. However, this paper focuses upon the older Afro-Dominican traditions of the long-drums.

The African Presence in the Dominican Sociocultural Composition

We must take care to recognize an increasing non-correspondence between race and culture in the New World, of great population movements and of cultural amalgamation, in contrast with the co-occurrence of specific physical and cultural features in world areas inhabited by the same population for millenia. Hence the previous comment about the Dominican elite of African palate but Hispanicist ideology. For what is considered general Dominican popular culture is in fact notably African-influenced, although unbeknownst to its practicioners.

Nonetheless, there are different cultural realities in the Dominican Republic—and practically any other modern nation—based on three factors: region, rural or urban location, and social class. With regard to class, the oligarchy (the landed elite) are white and endogamous, the upper-middle class are white or light, and the lower-middle class and lower class and peasantry vary according to the region. The peasantry of the southern region and the border area with Haiti are mostly black and African-influenced; those of the Cibao Valley (north), mostly Hispanic; and those of the eastern region, mixed. The cities and towns are traditionally white, ringed with black communities in the case of the Capital and southern towns—a settlement pattern determined by economics and reinforced by racism. However, this pattern is changing with rural-to-urban migration, the tremendous influx of peasants into towns and secondary cities, and the general influx into the Capital and beyond—to New York and elsewhere abroad.

It is within the rural areas of the southwest, the central-east, and the eastern Cibao, as well as La Línea (the northwest border area with Haiti) that the most notable African presence, racially and culturally, is found—probably representing the most recent stratum of African and Haitian (indirectly African) input into the national configuration.

Afro-Dominican Musical Genres

Dominican genres of notably African heritage include metered, responsorial work songs (plenas), such as wood-chopping songs (plenas de hacha); stories about animals, with their characteristic little sung responses; the semi-sacred music of longdrums (palos, atabales), the focus of this paper, associated with Afro-Dominican religious brotherhoods and used in saints’ festivals (velaciones) and sometimes vodú ceremonies; non-liturgical Salves (the Salve Regina prayer set to music) performed at saints’ festival altars; the cocolo fife-and-drum ensembles; and the Haitian-Dominican gagá society ensembles.

The Performance Context of Dominican Palos

Dominican long-drums or palos (also atabales) are associated with Afro-Dominican religious brotherhoods (cofradías, hermandades). These are a medieval Mediterranean phenomenon: guild-based societies, each associated with a parish. They are well-documented among the Africans in southern Spain of the fifteenth century, and undoubtedly there was continuity among the “ladinos” (Christianized Africans) in Hispaniola since their arrival ca. 1502. The Mediterranean cofradías, solely of males with rotating leadership positions, was reinterpreted by blacks in Hispaniola, and perhaps earlier in Spain. Likewise, the phenomenon was replicated elsewhere in Spanish and Portuguese Catholic Afro-Latin America, including the cofrarias of colonial coastal Brazil. In Cuba, they were known as cabildos (literally, “city hall” or “city government”). The cofradía was also incorporated into Spanish-dominated society of indigenous America, representing another sort of cultural reinterpretation. In Afro-Latin America, the cofradía served as a mutual aid society—including the important function as a burial society—among a social sector marginalized from social services and economic productivity.

In Spanish and Portuguese Afro-America, the cofradía was a feature of colonial society prior to the abolition of slavery; today, the cofradía has died out virtually everywhere because the Afro-Latin American sector has had increasing access to social services. The exception is in the Dominican Republic, where we are viewing living remnants of colonial society. They are found in the more African-influenced areas of the country (most areas except the central Cibao), each geographically specific.

Again, I would argue that the origins appear to vary—some dating from colonial times, others from the early nineteenth century when the border was suspended.

Today’s Afro-Dominican brotherhoods are family-based lineages of both males and females, with female leadership in inherited positions (mother to eldest daughter), whose patron saints have African-deity correspondences, and whose “voice” is represented by the long drums and the sound of their music. The slave trade to Hispaniola was drawn from incrasingly southerly points on the West African coast: first from Senegambia, later from Congo. Incomplete historical data suggest a changing predominance in patron saint of cofradías: In the eighteenth century, the most common patron saint was St. John the Baptist, whereas in the nineteenth century, the Holy Spirit had apparently taken over predominance, although using the same icon as that for St. John. This suggests intra-African syncretism, undoubtedly replicated in other aspects of Afro-Dominican folk religion, such as in the music.

The Afro-Dominican cofradía is active during the entire year, but most active for its patron saint’s festival and for death rituals for its members. The specifics vary according to the cofradía with regard to the patron saint, how he/she is celebrated, and the specific death rituals emphasized—and the degree to which death itself is emphasized. Those brotherhoods celebrating the Holy Spirit, may celebrate on the Fridays of “Small Lent,” the seven-week period between Easter and Pentecost. An enclave in Villa Mella, just north of the Capital (discussed below), which play the ensemble called the “Congos,” are the cofradía most dedicated to death rituals. They celebrate primarily the rezo, the ninth night of the novena following burial (which serves as a “second burial” --of the spritual remains, as it were), and the banco, or anniversary of death.

In addition, individually-sponsored, annually recurring saints’ festivals, may assume the structure of a cofradía in miniature, activated once a year. This is particularly prominent in the Central-Eastern area, where the larger cofradías are not found. The festival leadership structure of “king” and “queen”-for-a-day, the use of the long drums, and other features, replicate the social organization and music of the larger cofradías.

In the South-Central region, the main drum rhythms—palo abajo and palo arriba—are originally for the dead, hence are lugubrious. As a sort of compensation, the gaity is expressed in the altar music, in which musical settings of the Salve Regina prayer, include an Africanized variant in which various small membranophones— panderos (hand drums), the mongó, and others--are played polyrhythmically. These non-liturgical Salves, which often lose all or most of the sacred text, are played after the rosary and three sacred Salves de la Virgen (which are antiphonal and unmetered). This setting of the non-liturgical Salve is in fact another sort of drumming ensemble, which may be played simultaneously with the long drums, although at another spatial site: the Salves in front of the altar, the palos outside in the enramada, or rooved patio.

Afro-Dominican Palos Sacred Drum Music

The palos ( “tree” in colloquial Spanish) or atabales (from the Arabic tabl) are membranophones made of hollowed-out logs, generally with single cowhide heads (except in two enclaves, discussed below). They are played in ensembles of two or three, varying regionally, with optional idiophones: metal scrapers (güiras), hand rattles (maracas, single or double), or a stick beaten on the body of the master drum (catá, maraca). All are hand-beaten and accompany singing. The larger and deeper drum is the master drum (palo mayor), in ensembles of three flanked by the smaller drums, generally called alcahuetes (literally, “pimps”).

In the East, the palos are wide and with pegged heads, played in pairs; whereas in the South, the palos ensemble is three, with tacked heads, wide in the Southwest and narrow in the Central-South. There are further micro-regional variations with regard to size, shape, use and number of idiophones, and rhythms. The two major enclaves are the Brotherhood of the Holy Spirit of Villa Mella which play a drum ensemble called the Congos—a set of two double-headed drums, one a third the size of the other; and the Brotherhood of St. John the Baptist of Baní, which play the “Sarandunga” on a set of three squat drums held between the knees in seated position or under the arm for procession.

Drums are played for saints’ festivals—of cofradías and festivals of individual, vow-based sponsorship (velaciones)—and for the dead. The rhythms are usually different. On the whole, there are only one or two piece types for saints’ festivals and dance, with regard to rhythm and often tune as well; the variation is in the text, which is improvised in call-and-response structure with a spontaneously rotating solo. In the text, even for dance, there tend to be frequent references to death and the ancestors.

Drum dance, baile de palos, is a couple dance symbolizing ritual pursuit, in which a balancing step is alternated with a circular step, first in one direction, then in the other. In the case of death rituals, the spirit of the deceased may dance in the person of an heir.

Conclusion

I offer this introduction to Afro-Dominican palos and palos music not as yet more material on a pile of descriptive ethnography. Rather, I offer this documentation as a contribution to the basis of identity and the redefinition of national identity to include the African heritage. In the Dominican Republic, there are periodic seminars on “national identity.” However, they have no impact because they are based on sentiments without data. In a larger, Caribbean and Latin American frame of reference, I offer a Dominican building block of regional identity. The intentions behind my small contribution from the Dominican Republic have been replicated on a grand scale in Cuba by a multi-person team over ten years, which published a three-volume atlas of Cuban musical instruments, as part of their results (Instrumentos de la música folklórico-popular de Cuba, Victoria Eli Rodríguez, ed., 1997) which I reviewed for Ethnomusicology – see the forthcoming issue. This is a model of what teamwork over time can achieve. In the Anglophone Caribbean, you may be aware of the new research center for the Lesser Antilles, the Alton Augustus Adams Center on St. Thomas, a field station of the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago. During this conference and my stay in Guadeloupe, I am learning about what you are doing here. I hope my words and intention may serve as inspiration for your work in the French West Indies, as your work will undoubtedly be inspirational for mine.

It is important that each of us, in our respective corners of the Caribbean, continue individually and, if possible, collectively, document traditions as fully as possible, for both scientific and applied purposes, the latter in benefit of the people of the respective places including the musicians themselves. At the same time, it is also important for us to join together, in publications and in encounters such as this one, graciously facilitated by the Espace Musique Chano Pozo of the Médiathèque Caraïbe Bettino Lara, under the coordination of Gustav Michaux-Vignes, with great efforts toward overcoming the linguistic barriers which divide the Caribbean. Such events help us understand the themes and the variations in Caribbean musical traditions—the most significant theme and common denominator of course being the African cultural influence throughout the region.