Merengue as a Dominican National Symbol

Merengue is the emblematic dance music of the Dominican Republic, and scholarship on Caribbean music singles it out specifically as a national symbol of the republic — a standing that places the genre at the center of debates over Dominican cultural identity.^[2] A standard survey of Caribbean music gives merengue an extended treatment, following the genre from its emergence through its style and dance to its modern orchestrated forms and its spread beyond the island.^[2]

Merengue in Caribbean-music scholarship

That survey reserves a discrete section for merengue as a national symbol, setting the symbolic argument within a longer narrative that opens with the genre's emergence and proceeds toward its modern commercial forms.^[2] It locates the older merengue típico tradition in the Cibao and treats it as distinct both from the later orchestrated styles and from the genre's international diffusion, which the survey frames under the heading of a merengue 'invasion.'^[2]

The same chapter situates merengue alongside the related genre of bachata and gives sustained attention to the songwriter Juan Luis Guerra.^[2] Across these treatments merengue emerges not as a single fixed form but as a national symbol understood through its regional roots in the Cibao, its modern commercial styles, and its passage beyond the island into the diaspora.^[2]

A national emblem and its setting

The republic occupies the eastern portion of the island of Hispaniola, sharing its western land border with Haiti; its capital, Santo Domingo, was the earliest enduring European settlement in the Western Hemisphere, and the country ranks as the second-largest Caribbean nation by area after Cuba.^[1] Merengue's consolidation as a national emblem unfolded against a turbulent modern history: the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, the 1963 removal of the elected president Juan Bosch, the civil war of 1965, and the intermittent presidencies of Joaquín Balaguer, before the country turned toward representative democracy after 1996.^[1] Independence itself had come only in 1844, when the Dominican War of Independence ended an earlier period of annexation by neighbouring Haiti.^[1]

Merengue and the Dominican diaspora

Dominican popular culture travelled outward with successive waves of migration to the United States. A field study of the Dominican community of Washington Heights in New York examined how popular culture and the rhythms of everyday life helped immigrants sustain a transnational identity as they adapted to their host society.^[3] Research among second-generation Dominican Americans found, in parallel, that the Spanish language served as a central resource for asserting a Hispanic ethnic identity and for resisting the phenotype-based racial categories imposed on them in the United States.^[4] That same research observed these younger Dominican Americans taking up the language, dress, and musical fashions of low-income urban African American youth while continuing to maintain Dominican linguistic and cultural practices at home and with kin.^[4]