Historia General del Pueblo Dominicano Tomo VI

720 Popular Music and Identity since the Nineteenth Century surpassed merengue’s popularity. In the early twenty-first century, bachata and merengue were entrenched as the predominant forms of autochtonous secular dance popular music, while various rural forms, especially palos and salve, remained popular in religious contexts. Palos drumming, dance, and song are the most widely-diffused folkloric expressions in the Dominican Republic and for this reason, the eminent folklorist Fradique Lizardo suggested that palos should replace merengue as a national symbol. 2 This musical form is closely associated with Afro- Dominican religious organizations which date to the early days of the colony. While they represent some of the most highly African-influenced institutions of the Dominican Republic, the Afro-Dominican religious brotherhoods, or cofradías , have their antecedents in Spain, where, already in the fourteenth century, Africans founded their own mutual aid societies under the aegis of the Catholic Church. The earliest documents referring to black cofradias in Santo Domingo, which were likely associated with particular African ethnic groups ( « tribes», or « naciones »), date to the sixteenth century. 3 With time, the Afro-Dominican cofradías lost many of their stated associations with particular African ethnicities, but links to specific African cultures, discernable through comparative anthropological work, remained. Early waves of African migration to Española, documented by data referring to cofradias, were heavily represented by Senegambian peoples, who were active in fomenting slave rebellions, a fact which likely influenced colonists to turn to the Guinea Coast of West Africa and the Congo regions of Central Africa for slaves beginning in the seventeenth century. With the passage of time, more Congolese and less Guinea Coast immigration became the norm, and strong Central African influences, for example, references to the Congo deity Kalunga (associated with death, the sea, and liminality) in song texts, came to characterize palos music. Palos drums demonstrate a great deal of regional variation in their construction, and while Guinea Coast influenced palos drums, which utilize pegs to fasten skins, are found in the Dominican Republic (especially in the East), Congolese influenced palos, which lack the wooden pegs, are more common. 4 Interestingly, Haiti has more West African influence than does the Dominican Republic, possibly because of French connections to that region, but also because the slave trade ended in Haiti in the late eighteenth century, while it continued in the Dominican Republic into the nineteenth century, a period that saw a greater Central African influx to the Americas generally. 5 Unlike some Afro-Cuban music, which is sung entirely in the Yorùbá language, the palos repertoire is sung in Spanish, but like much Haitian ritual music, it incorporates African terms referring, for