Dominican Bachata: Another Cinderella

Deborah Pacini Hernandez’s book, Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music, is the third book I have read this semester with the rags to riches narrative of a marginalized music genre that becomes socially accepted if not emblematic of national identity. The author conducted her research in the 80s and early 90s. Up through the ‘80s bachata had been “thoroughly rejected and stigmatized by mainstream Dominican society” (p. xxii). During her first years in the Dominican republic, she found that “Dominicans were reluctant to accept bachata as a legitimate music form and that listening to bachata was considered incompatible with their desired self-presentation” (p. xiv). She states that when she asked some of her friends about bachata, they told her it was “a guitar-based Dominican form of music listened to and made by uneducated campesinos (country people) and the urban poor”(p. xiii).

In other cases explored thus far in this blog of the music of the oppressed being absorbed or appropriated by the dominant group, the issue has centered largely around race and the denial of African cultural roots. However, in the case of bachata, it was much more of a class and social issue of the urban vs rural/newly-urban or the lower vs the middle/upper class.

For example, Pacini Hernandez states that “dictionaries of Latin American Spanish define the term bachata as juerga, jolgorio, or parranda, all of which denote fun, merriment, a good time, or a spree … get-togethers that include music, drink, and food”(p. 7). This is not the only case in which the same term is utilized to refer to a party than to a type of music in Latin America – which makes me think of how truly inseparable the concept of “celebration” is from music and dancing in Latin America. I wonder, for example, whether the term rumba for example was also first used to refer to a party and then to the music genre or viceversa. In any case, Pacini Hernandez reaffirms the lower status conception of bachata by pointing out that in Dominican Republic “the word bachata also had certain class associations; upper-class parties would never be called bachatas” (p. 8).

Pacini Hernandez also ventures that the actual development of bachata was due to the new realities of migration to the city. “In the 60s,” she explains, “massive rural to urban migrations sent thousands of peasants into urban areas. Unable to find employment, people of rural origins were condemned to working for subsistence in the informal sector ad to residence in shantytowns, where traditions patterns of making music were transformed by the urban experience” (p. 32). Like many other music genres often associated with lower class in Latin America, such as tipico in Panama, bachata found its particular niches: like popular working-class bars and private parties. Pacini Hernandez’ argues, for example, that while bachata encountered “stiff competition from foreign music on the radio, the field was wide open in terms of live performances ... For example, the fiestas patronales (patron saints’ festivals) of towns of villages all over the country” (p. 80).

However, by the ‘90s and in part because of the release of Juan Luis Guerra’s, a well-respected and sophisticated musician, album Bachata Rosa and its worldwide success, bachata had become a popular and well accepted genre across Dominican society (p. xxii). Pacini Hernandez states that as “well-educated, middle class musicians like Juan Luis Guerra” started producing “sophisticated versions” of bachata, with different instrumentation and arrangements, they were differentiated from the “low-status, street-level, originals by being called tecno-bachata” (p. 15). If she labels Juan Luis Guerra tecno-bachata, I can’t imagine what she would think of today’s much more fast paced, urban-flavored, and synthesized bachata.

Pacini Hernandez’s book was published in 1995. Since then bachata’s popularity has transcended the Dominican borders and become a world wide phenomenon, with crossovers in other countries such as Colombia, Mexico and the U.S. In the NY based Latino music industry it has also become closely related to current music rage, reggaeton. In order to reflect contemporary popular lore, I will take the liberty of quoting from Wikipedia’s current entry on bachata (music):

Aventura, based in New York City, is today the best known bachata group. Their 2002 single "Obsesión" dominated airwaves in Latin America countries, the US Hispanic market, and Caribbean Spanish speaking Islands. Other popular modern artists include Toby Loe, Monchy y Alexandra, Andy Andy, Antony Santos, Zacarias Ferrerira, Luis Vargas, and Xtreme. (retrieved May 10, 2010)

Many aspects of bachata seem to have remained the same since its origins decades ago. For example, Pacini Herandez describes the sinuous bachata dance as consisting “of an alternating “one-two-three-kick” pattern, in which the “kick” is a toe step or a small hop” (p. 7), which is exactly how it is danced today. Again, Wikipedia’s entry on bachata (dance) describes (very accurately, in my experience) the contemporary step thus:

Counts 1 through 3 and 5 through 7, when taken, generate a natural hip motion. Counts 4 and 8, consists of a “pop” movement. The "pop" depending on a person’s style is executed lifting or tapping a foot or using stylish footwork while popping the hip to the side opposite of the natural Cuban hip motion. Bachata music has a slight accent in rhythm at every fourth count, indicating when the “pop” should happen. Note: The “pop” will always be done in the opposite direction of the last step, while the next step will be taken on the same direction of the pop. The dance direction will interchange at every 4th count.

However, other aspects of the genre have undergone significant changes in the past decades. For example, Pacini Hernandez states that “when the first bachata songs were recorded in the early 1960s, they were still unequivocally part of the broad, Pan-Hispanic tradition of romantic song … usually modeled after the quintessentially romantic bolero, they tended to be highly emotional expressions of lost and unrequited love” (p. 158). She argues that by the 1980s the most common themes had shifted to lust, sex, deception, bars and drinking (p. 159). The lyrics suggested “that women were unreliable because they had no sense of self-control and therefore could not resist sexual desire.” She points out that “the idea of women’s sexuality as a potentially dangerous natural force that can only be controlled by containment was part of the culturally baggage inherited from the country’s Spanish/Mediterranean colonizers.” Her argument for the rise of non-romantic lyrics is that it was caused by the changes in family structure and gender roles that came about with immigration to the cities and women joining the work force. On page 66, she states: “Women’s sexuality had been kept under control in the confines of patriarchal rural home and community settings but was unleashed when they discovered freedom of movement in the city.” She adds that “In bachata, men could also compensate for their inability to control women by bragging and other sorts of posturing that reaffirmed their masculine authority” (p. 167). Finally, she grants that “while we must consider the verbal denigration of women as a form of violence, physical violence towards women was seldom if ever mentioned in song texts. When physical violence was mentioned, it was directed at other men” (p. 168).

The truth is I came to known bachata for the first time in the 00’s and the style of bachata that has become internationally popular is characterized, once again, by romantic lyrics. Reggaeton is the only urban contemporary genre I would consider to be more popular with contemporary Latino teenagers than bachata – which in my opinion have started to displace salsa and merengue which had been the uncontested favorite Caribbean rhythms for generations. Until very recently, reggaeton largely featured violent lyrics, aggressive or diminishing towards women, sexually charged, and often inciting to physical violence and guns. Bachata, was in fact, differentiated from reggaeton, not only because they are obviously different rhythms, but because of its romantic lyrics and formal (though close) embrace for dancing. In the past year or two, however, a new form or reggaeton, literally termed “romantic styled,” which also tends to downplay the hip hop influence that become dominant in reggaeton, while featuring fusion with other Latin danceable genres, such as cumbia or, of course, bachata.

Pacini Hernandez argues that “bachata clearly belongs with a category that Charles Keil has called ‘people’s music.’” Keil coined that term in his article “People’s music comparatively: Style and stereotypes, class and hegemony” published in Dialectical Anthropology in 1985, “to define a space between ‘folk’ (with its strong connotations of ‘rural,’ ‘illiterate’) and ‘popular’ (with its denotation today of ‘mass mediated’); … he also used the term ‘working-class music’” (p. 23). As we have seen in previous entries, most if not all of what we consider to be Latin music belongs to this genre, and emerged out of the fusion of Native America, African, and European music, which became popularized and co-opted by the local and international music industries in the ‘60s.

Although considered ethnic and picturesque, if not mistaken by folkloric music, by outsiders, many of the contemporary Latin music genres are also urban music genres. As Pacini Hernandez points out: “In Latin America, the simultaneous processes of migration, urbanization, and industrialization intensified in the 1960s, spawning a new generation of ‘people’s musics,’ which … emerged at a time when the recording and broadcast industries were promoting hegemonic middle-class-oriented popular musics – some of which, such as orquesta merengue in the Dominican Republic and later salsa throughout Latin America, had started out as ‘people’s musics’ themselves” (p. 232). This statement, however places an unnecessary dichotomy, in my opinion, between the music of el pueblo (the people) and marketable or commercial music. By Pacini Hernandez’s definition, in the 21^st Century bachata has now joined the ranks of salsa and merengue and ceased to be “people’s music.” In fact, on page 38, she states: “ the term music of marginality ceases to be appropriate when a musical style created by musicians and fans who are economically and socially marginalized begins to be produced by the dominant elite and marketed to non-marginalized audiences”.

Is the popularization and commercialization of working-class music a form of cultural appropriation, then? What would that say of those of my generation who have grown up with salsa, merengue, cumbia, and bachata, not to mention reggaeton, as essential elements of our cultural Latin identity? I don’t feel the original creators of the genres been deprived of their music in any of this cases (although, yes, they have changed considerably while adapting to the mass market, but also just like all music genres form do through time), in fact I have found they are often proud of the fame the music their consider their own has achieved. Of course, both aspects of the issue are to be considered in a full picture, but ultimately the expansion of the popularity of bachata, and other such genres, from marginalized to fashionable, has increased a market that benefits Latin musicians, while at the same time fertilizing and supporting a national and sometimes pan-Latin identity for generations to come.