Historia General del Pueblo Dominicano Tomo VI

Historia general del pueblo dominicano 721 example, to Kalunga (as well as many other concepts), although the meanings of these African words have been lost to practitioners. 6 As mentioned, palos are diffused throughout the Dominican Republic. Moreover, while the sarandunga and congo repertoires of Baní and Villa Mella, respectively, are not palos strictly speaking, can be considered part of a larger palos complex due to their association with cofradias. The prevalence and persistence of such African-derived traditions amount to a musically-articulated counter- narrative of negritude within a country whose public discourse is largely Eurocentric. M erengue as an A fro -C aribbean T ransformation of the C ontredanse Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, rural Dominicans performed a large number of syncretic, secular social dances such as the carabiné , mangulina , mazurca , and polka . With the passage of time, however, merengue became more and more popular, so that by the end of the twentieth century, it eclipsed the other rural folk dances, and by the 1970s, while religious musics such as palos and salve still florished, merengue was the the only secular social dance still regularly played by rural Dominicans (although folk dance groups continued to perform the other forms). This chapter focuses on merengue because of the central role it has played in Dominican history since the nineteenth century. While it is best-known as aDominicanmusic, merengue emerged as a pan- Caribbean genre in the middle of the nineteenth century. Haiti, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Colombia each developed local forms of the genre which, with the exception of the Puerto Rican version, are still played today. Related to the danza , the Caribbean merengues were fusions of the European contredanse with local, African-derived, elements; they are thus aptly called Afro-Caribbean contredanse transformations . Allied with both the Euro-Caribbean elites and the Afro-Caribbean masses, the contredanse transformations expressed the race and class —based contradictions of nineteenth-century the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. The contredanse originated in England, where country dances bacame popular among the nobility during the mid-seventeenth century. This English country dance was introduced to the court of French King Louis XIV, who was