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The island of Hispaniola-the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo and first colony in the New World-was the initial diasporal crucible and cultural bridge of the Americas. Santo Domingo has since become the contemporary Dominican Republic on a divided island in which the later French colony of Saint Domingue became Haiti (Figure 1). On this island, culture has been forged from over five hundred years of cultural contacts, acculturation, and adaptive responses to local circumstance.
The early demise of the native Taino (Arawak) inhabitants and Spain's abandonment of the island for mainland mineral wealth led to a degree of neglect and depopulation that required master and African slave to cooper- ate for mutual survival. In addition, in Santo Domingo there was a lack of critical masses of specific African ethnic groups, in contrast with Havana or Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, for example-indeed in contrast with neigh- boring Haiti, which was intensively developed with African labor in the eighteenth century.
So, taken as a whole, Dominican culture and society can be characterized as a hybrid whose nature is expressed in various domains. For example, folk or popular Catholicism, the religion of some 90 percent of the national population, is in summary a cultural amalgamation. But deconstructed, it can be seen to retain elements of the various contributors to its eclectic configuration: Spanish of different regions, classes, Catholic religious orders, and even religions with regard to Judaic and Islamic features retained in Spanish folk Catholicism; West and Central African of various ethnic ori- gins; continuities of native Taino beliefs and practices; and other origins, such as the possible East Indian origin of the vodii deity of the "black"2 Guedé family, Santa Marta la Dominadora.
In the domain of music, the well-known merengue social dance is emblem- atic of the hybridity of Dominican national culture (Davis 2002, 2006). But today's merengue is actually two subgenres: the orchestrated, commercially known merengue and the folk merengue típico. Likewise, in the music of the folk-Catholic religious context, the Salve is also comprised of two subgenres: the liturgical Salve Regina ("Hail, Holy Queen"), popularly called the Salve de la Virgen,-a cappella, melismatic, and antiphonal or responsorial-and the nonsurgical Salve, an Africanized evolution of its progenitor, which is polyrhythmic, instrumentally accompanied, and in...