Historia General del Pueblo Dominicano Tomo VI

Historia general del pueblo dominicano 751 culture. Guerras’ high-profile celebrations of African roots paved the way for the use of Afro-Dominican ritual drumming by others: Kinito Méndez, for example, had several mainstream merengue hits featuring palos drums in the early 1990s. Merengue’s malleability therefore surpassed its past associations with Trujilloist Eurocentrism; as Luis Días once said, its many voiced style makes it «the most complete» of all Dominican musics. 116 T he P ersistence of A fro -D ominican R ural M usic Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Dominican music culture as a whole is the degree to which urban, mass-mediated, transnational musics coexist with rural, orally-transmitted musics created by local populations. Even commodified merengue continues to operate on local, as well as national and transnational levels. Large numbers of Dominicans continued to reside in the countryside during the late twentieth century; the 1991 population was estimated at 45 % rural. 117 And two centuries later, the «extraordinary religiosity» that Moya Pons observed in nineteenth-century Dominican culture 118 still manifesting itself in frequent Vodú and Afro-Catholic rituals in whichmusicplays a central role, andetnomusicologistDaniel Piper documents a thriving of Afro-Dominican ritual music culture in the San Cristóbal area in the early twenty-first century. 119 In 1991, this autor experienced a poignant example of the coexistence of transnational and local music at a rural Afro- Dominican ceremony held in honor of a saint. To the left, a hermitage emitted local sacred drumming, while to the right, a group of young people socialized around a car whose radio blasted the latest pop merengue hits. Some Dominican rural musics are performed only in specific localities; for example, the sarandunga is known only in the town and outlying areas of Baní. Other genres are widely diffused, but display extraordinary stylistic variation according to region; while Dominicans in most areas of the Republic perform palos, this genre’s melodies, rhythms, and dance steps vary greatly from region to region. Similarly, several stylistically-distinct rural merengue variants, together constituting a Dominican merengue complex, are played in rural regions of the Republic. These include the merengue palo echao (or pri-prí ) and gerapega of the South; merengue de atabales of the East, and merengue redondo , of Samaná. As noted earlier, the fact that all merengue variants combine