Merengue as a Dominican National Symbol

Merengue occupies a central place in the cultural life of the Dominican Republic, a Caribbean nation that holds the eastern portion of the island of Hispaniola and shares its western land border with Haiti.^[1] The country, whose capital, Santo Domingo, hosted the earliest enduring European settlement in the Western Hemisphere, ranks as the second-largest Caribbean nation by area after Cuba.^[1] Within scholarship on Caribbean music, merengue is identified specifically as a national symbol of this republic, a distinction that places it at the center of debates about Dominican cultural identity.^[2]

A standard survey of Caribbean music devotes a discrete section to the theme of merengue as a national symbol, framing that symbolic role within a longer account that begins with the genre's emergence and proceeds toward its modern forms.^[2] The same survey associates the older merengue típico tradition with the Cibao, treating it as distinct from the modern orchestrated styles and from the genre's later international diffusion, which it presents under the heading of a merengue 'invasion.'^[2]

The republic's turbulent political history forms the backdrop against which such national symbols took on meaning. The country endured the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo between 1930 and his assassination in 1961, the removal of the elected president Juan Bosch in 1963, the civil war of 1965, and the intermittent presidencies of Joaquín Balaguer, before turning toward representative democracy after 1996.^[1] Independence itself had been won only in 1844, following the Dominican War of Independence and an earlier period of annexation by neighbouring Haiti.^[1]

Beyond the island, Dominican cultural forms travelled outward with successive waves of migration. A field study of the Dominican community of Washington Heights in New York examined how popular culture and the rhythms of everyday life sustained a transnational identity among immigrants adapting to their host society.^[3] Research among second-generation Dominican Americans found, in parallel, that the Spanish language served as a central resource for asserting a Hispanic ethnic identity and resisting the phenotype-based racial categories that others imposed on them in the United States.^[4] The same research observed that these younger Dominican Americans adopted the language, dress, and musical fashions of low-income urban African American youth while simultaneously maintaining Dominican linguistic and cultural practices at home and with relatives.^[4]

The same survey situates merengue within a broader chapter on Dominican music that also treats the related genre of bachata and gives sustained attention to the musician Juan Luis Guerra.^[2] Across these treatments, merengue emerges not as a single fixed form but as a national symbol understood through its regional roots, its modern commercial styles, and its passage beyond the island into the diaspora.^[2]