Historia General del Pueblo Dominicano Tomo VI

Historia general del pueblo dominicano 749 coterie of young artists and intellectuals sometimes called « the alternative generation» created a Dominican brand of nueva canción. Prominent in this movement was a group called Convite, which featured sociologist Dagoberto Tejeda and guitarist/composer Luis Días. Like the Dominican-Haitian communal work teams after which the group was named, Convite was a collaborative effort dedicated to serving the community. In addition to being a musical ensemble, Convite investigated, educated, and politicized: the group’s members conducted fieldwork and held workshops to promote their musico-political agenda. Like Lizardo, members of Convite were especially interested in Afro-Dominican music, which they considered expressions of genuine peoples’ culture. While advocating the preservation of rural authenticity, Convite also used Afro-Dominican forms as fodder for their own compositions. Groups such as Los Guerreros del Fuego and Asa-Difé, led by José Duluc and Tony Vicioso, continued to work in this idiom during the 1980s and into the twenty-first century. Dagoberto Tejeda argued that while mainstream popular music such as merengue is rooted in people’s culture, it is denatured by close association with the capitalist music industry, but Convite did not shun association with merengue, believing that, disassociated from reactionary influences, the pre- eminent Dominican popular music could promote progressive politics. A nueva canción festival called Siete Días con el Pueblo, said to be the largest such festival ever held in any country, was organized in 1974. It featured performances by sympathetic merengueros Johnny Ventura and Cuco Valoy in addition to top local and foreign nueva canción artists. Dominicans who were involved in or sympathetic to the nueva canción movement challenged traditional Eurocentric prejudices. The question of merengue’s origin was central to a debate that developed between conservative Dominicans who insisted on the Republic’s Hispanic identity and the constituency that promoted the country’s African heritage. The traditionally-minded faction claimed that merengue had little or no African influence, while progressive thinkers celebrated its African-derived aesthetic. Bandleader Juan Luis Guerra, who emerged as the most innovative presence in merengue of the 1980s and 90s, was associated with the nueva canción movement as a youth. Without negating merengue’s syncretic nature, he stresses the music’s African roots: Unequivocally, you can’t take merengue out of Africa. No matter how much you may want to, you can’t take it out of Africa. Forget it: