If you were a visitor in the Dominican Republic’s capital city Santo Domingo in 1986, and looking to hear some bachata – a guitar-based music native to the island whose lyrics about love and loss are performed in a highly emotional singing style – a live performance would not be easy to find. At that time, recorded or live bachata could not be found on mainstream radio, and information about the genre was seldom mentioned on television or the newspapers – but if you did manage to learn about an upcoming bachata performance, it would be taking place in an unassuming bar in a poor neighbourhood on the city’s margins rather than in one of the city’s centrally located venues catering to more upscale residents and tourists. The bachata you’d hear in such a neighbourhood bar would be performed by three or four men playing acoustic guitars, bongos, and maracas, and like their audience members, the musicians would be dressed in inexpensive street clothes that in other quarters of the city would be perceived as unsophisticated and cheap.
Fifteen years later, by the turn of the millennium, if you were hoping to catch some bachata in New York City, things would be very different: having lost its former social stigma, bachata’s popularity among New York LatinosFootnote 1 was rising fast, and live performances by well-known touring Dominican musicians or new groups comprised of young Dominican Americans could be found throughout the metropolitan area in clubs catering to bachata fans. The bachata groups performing in New York were larger and louder than their acoustic Dominican predecessors: bachata’s signature guitar and bongos sound would still be foregrounded, but the traditional maracas would have likely been replaced by the louder metallic guira scraper more commonly associated with merengue, their guitars would be amplified, and an electric bass, keyboard, and/or a bass drum added to the ensemble. The group would be performing with a high-quality sound system, giving their bachata a clean, sharp, professional sound. The musicians, as well as their audience, most of them of Dominican and Puerto Rican origin, would be dressed in stylish clothes suitable for a night on the town.
By 2007, if you happened to be looking for the most successful bachata group in New York and were very lucky, you might get tickets to see Aventura, composed of young New York Dominicans, before they sold out their four shows in Madison Square Garden (triple the number of tickets sold for a Lady Gaga concert opening at the same time). A few years later, in 2014, you would have to be more than lucky to get tickets to hear Romeo, Aventura’s former lead singer and by then bachata’s superstar heartthrob, who was playing two shows in Yankee Stadium: tickets to both Romeo’s shows sold out within hours, a feat previously achieved only by mainstream English-language superstars such as Madonna and Paul McCartney. Indeed, by 2014, even if you lived in Australia, you could hear bachata by attending a Bachata Festival – although the featured performers at the bachata festivals sprouting up around the globe in places such as Sydney were not musicians performing bachata, but bachata dancers.
What – if anything – do these utterly different bachata events, performed in such dissimilar venues and for such different audiences, have in common? How do we explain bachata’s transformation from a style so marginalised in its country of origin that it was once hard to find live performances to such a highly successful genre with superstars like Romeo, which has spread to locations around the globe – even to regions with no direct connection to the Dominican Republic? In what ways has bachata changed as a result of its remarkable transformations?
Roots and Routes
Understanding bachata’s trajectory from a stigmatised to a widely popular musical genre requires attention to a number of interrelated socio-economic variables, such as changing migratory patterns, economic and cultural globalisation, and evolving constructions of race, class, and gender. But prior to undertaking such an analysis, it is important to briefly revisit bachata’s early history, beginning with how it emerged as a distinct genre more than a half a century ago out of the unique musical matrix characteristic of the Dominican Republic in the era of the dictator Rafael Trujillo (1930–61). Under the iron grip of the Trujillo dictatorship, travel restrictions made it impossible for Dominican musicians to engage in direct musical exchanges with developments taking place elsewhere in the region, although recordings of then-popular guitar-based musics such as Cuban boleros and guarachas, Mexican rancheras, Puerto Rican jíbaro music, could be heard on radios and jukeboxes throughout the country. Rural Dominican musicians incorporated these styles into their repertoires, alongside domestic guitar-based styles such as the popular merengue de guitarra and the more elegant música criolla; collectively, these styles were simply referred to as música popular.
After Trujillo’s assassination, thousands of poor rural folk, who had not previously been allowed to leave their land, headed to Santo Domingo in search of new opportunities, settling in the shantytowns springing up around the margins of the city. Among these migrants were aspiring musicians harbouring hopes of a recording career in the country’s fledgling music industry, which only recently had been liberated from the suffocating fear of meddling by the Trujillo family. Their repertoires included the aforementioned guitar-based musical styles that had long been popular in the countryside. Over time, the formerly rural sensibilities of these newly urbanising performers began to reflect the sounds and sentiments of shantytown life – especially the social and emotional disruptions experienced by un- or under-employed men. Some musicians, among them Luis Segura – recognised as one of the founding fathers of bachata – continued to perform the kind of romantic lyrics characteristic of rural música popular, but others began composing songs with more sexually explicit lyrics reflecting the erotic preoccupations of men whose social worlds were increasingly centred in neighbourhood bars and brothels. Women were treated harshly in these songs, appearing as treacherous and untrustworthy, with uncontrolled sexual appetites that threatened men’s emotional well-being.
Poor and working-class Dominicans embraced these changes, but the upper strata of Dominican society were scandalised by the rustic simplicity of the music and the crudeness of its often-ribald lyrics, as well as by the lack of sophistication of the barely literate musicians themselves. Indeed, Dominicans aspiring to a more cosmopolitan identity wanted nothing to do with the new style, which they perceived as a degraded form of its more respectable antecedent genres, so they began referring to it as bachata, and to its performers and fans as bachateros. The term ‘bachata’ originally referred, in a value-neutral way, to an informal backyard party enlivened with food, drink, music, and dance, but this new way of using the term was clearly intended to disparage the music, and to disavow its fans, people perceived as country bumpkins and urban riffraff. Initially the musicians resisted the term, which they knew was intended to insult their music (and themselves), but it stuck, and by the 1980s bachata had become widely accepted as the way to identify what had audibly become a distinctly Dominican style of music, related to but different from its antecedent genres. Dozens of bachata musicians such as Ramón Cordero, Marino Pérez, and Leonardo Paniagua became locally successful among consumers who, like the performers themselves, were from the lower ranks of the Dominican Republic’s social hierarchy. Their ability to succeed economically, however, was limited by their exclusion from the mainstream entertainment industry. For years, bachata recordings were virtually boycotted by the media: only one major Santo Domingo radio station, Radio Guarachita, powerful enough to transmit its programming to working class and rural audiences throughout the country, would play it at all, cementing its reputation as the poor people’s radio station. Even in rural areas far from the capital city, local radio stations would air bachata only in the pre-dawn hours, when campesinos (farmers) were getting ready to go to work. As for live performances, in both rural and urban areas they took place only in working class bars that ‘respectable’ folk would consider off limits.
Despite these obstacles, bachata continued to evolve stylistically and its fan base increased. In the mid-1980s, the original instrumental lineup of two acoustic guitars, bongo, and maracas began to transform the sound of the music as groups added electric guitars and a bass drum, and substituted the Dominican guira scraper for the maracas. In 1990, sensing a cultural phenomenon unfolding at the grassroots level, Juan Luis Guerra, a Berklee College of Music-trained jazz and merengue musician of middle-class origins and with progressive social values, released an LP recording entitled Bachata Rosa. Despite its title, the record contained only three highly stylised, elegant bachatas; the rest of the songs were merengues and salsas. Nonetheless, the stamp of approval conferred on the bachata genre by one of the country’s most well-respected musicians began opening up access to the mainstream media for the once-excluded bachateros. When Bachata Rosa won a Latin Grammy and brought the formerly scorned genre to the attention of audiences around the globe, bachata finally achieved a degree of respectability, as well as commercial viability. As a result, the next generation of bachata singers who emerged in the 1990s, such as Luis Vargas, Antony Santos, and Raulín Rodríguez, were able to afford more technologically sophisticated equipment for their recorded and live performances, and to dress with hipper, more cosmopolitan fashions, further enhancing bachata’s sound and image. Many Dominicans, especially those who had always associated bachata with vulgarity and poverty, continued to avoid the genre, but as bachata moved out of its former confines, it found a younger generation of fans more than willing to accept it as a legitimate form of Dominican popular music. This was especially true of young migrants to the United States eager to hear the distinct sounds of their homeland.
New York Arrivals
Dominican migration to the United States didn’t really begin until after the dictator Rafael Trujillo’s death in 1961, when travel outside the country, once forbidden to most citizens, became possible. In 1963, a military coup unseated the democratically elected president Juan Bosch, engulfing the country in political turmoil, civil disturbances, and eventually a US military occupation, which propelled a steadily increasing number of Dominicans to migrate to the United States. Numbering only 10,683 in 1963, the Dominican-origin population in the United States increased dramatically in subsequent decades, to over half a million by 1990. Some Dominicans settled in northeastern cities such as Boston and Lowell, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island, but the majority put their roots down in New York City, where by 1997 they numbered over 832,000 – a figure presumed to be even higher since it did not account for the undocumented (Reference AponteAponte 1999, 3–4). The earliest migrants – those who left the Dominican Republic in the 1960s – were generally of middle- and upper-middle-class status, but as the migratory streams continued to expand, increasing numbers were coming from working-class and rural backgrounds – and these carried with them an appreciation for the familiar sounds of bachata. Once in the United States, the old prejudices about bachata, already beginning to diminish within the Dominican Republic, fell away as bachata became a powerful sonic symbol of home: merengue orquestas, once considered the quintessential Dominican music, had become, to the ears of many immigrants, too commercial, international, and glitzy, while bachata’s comparative simplicity was perceived as more rootsy and ‘authentic’. Opportunities began opening up for bachata musicians in the many neighbourhood restaurants and clubs catering to nostalgic Dominican immigrants that had been springing up throughout the New York metropolitan area and other parts of the northeast where Dominicans had settled.
By the turn of the millennium, a new generation of children born in the United States to Dominican migrants further swelled the ranks of the United States’ Dominican-origin communities, and as they reached maturity, the musically oriented among them began performing bachata. The first New York-origin bachata group to achieve success was Aventura, composed of Anthony ‘Romeo’ Santos (born in the Bronx of a Dominican father and a Puerto Rican mother), and the siblings Lenny and Max Santos (no relation to Anthony); the fourth member, Henry Santos (Romeo’s cousin), was born in the Dominican Republic but raised, like his bandmates, in the Bronx. Aventura’s bachata, however, in contrast to the music of their island-based antecedents, reflected the sensibilities of young people who had grown up in the United States. On their debut recording Generation Next, released in 2000, they retained bachata’s signature sounds of the guitar and bongos, but their music was distinctly grounded in New York: as one bachata producer I interview noted, ‘If you listen to those arrangements and the guitar playing and the bass playing you can really hear the influence of the hip-hop generation and R&B … They grew up in the hip-hop generation, and the way Lenny Santos uses his guitar has some of those influences from sampled electronic music … .in every musical aspect it’s a shade different than traditional bachata’ (Reference Pacini HernandezPacini Hernandez 2014, 1035). Aventura also incorporated English into their hit song, ‘Cuando Volverás’ (When Will You Return), whose lyrics switched seamlessly between Spanish and English – the first time that English had been incorporated into a bachata. Aventura underscored their New York identities in their album cover art, in which the group posed in front of an unmistakably New York apartment building.
In later recordings, Aventura continued to weave hip-hop and R&B aesthetics into bachata, an innovation that was enthusiastically embraced by their youthful Dominican-American peers. While their lyrics shared R&B’s sentimentality, they avoided the edgier narratives characteristic of hip-hop lyrics foregrounding the harsher aspects of street culture such as drug use and violence; they did, however, address controversial themes that had not been not characteristic of traditional bachata, such as single motherhood (‘Amor de Madre’), abortion (‘El Aborto’), and child sex abuse (‘La Niña’). Over the next decade Aventura’s popularity continued to spread well beyond their Dominican fan base, to New York Puerto Ricans (many of them already familiar with bachata thanks to Dominican migration to that island), subsequently to other bilingual and bicultural young Latinos throughout the country with similarly bicultural identities and sensibilities, and then beyond to Latin America. Aventura’s strategic moves toward a closer fusion of bachata and hip-hop were similarly adopted by other US-born or raised bicultural and bilingual bachateros, among them the group Xtreme (formed in 2003), Toby Love (formerly a member of Aventura who went solo in 2006), Bachata Heightz (2008), and Prince Royce (2010).
By the time Aventura broke up in 2011, they had released five studio and three live recordings, each exceeding the last one in terms of sales and positions on the Billboard Latin charts. More notably, their recordings began crossing over from the Latin charts to the Billboard 200, first in 2005, with God’s Project, which charted at #133, and 2009’s The Last, which charted #5 on the Billboard 200. When Aventura’s lead singer Romeo began pursuing his career as a soloist, he broadened his popularity even further, to African Americans and non-Latinos of other races and ethnicities, by astutely recording duets with hip-hop and R&B stars such as Usher, Lil Wayne, Pitbull, and Drake. In 2015 Billboard magazine recognised Romeo’s accomplishments, putting him on the cover of a special issue focusing on Latin music.
While these New York bachateros sing primarily in Spanish, they also incorporate English into their music in order to establish their location in the United States rather than the Dominican Republic, using, for example, bilingual lyrics or introductory narratives in vernacular slang, and occasionally an English-only song. As these aesthetic changes moved New York-based bachata further beyond the traditional sound of island-based bachata, their style began to be referred to as bachata urbana, distinguishing it from bachata from the island, and, significantly, linking it to the US music industry’s marketing category, ‘urban’ music, that had long been synonymous with African American styles, from soul and funk to R&B and hip-hop.
Bachata Urbana: At the Intersection of National and Racial Identities
The emergence of bachata urbana was not just a musical development, it also pointed to a parallel development regarding Dominican racial identity: the social meanings of Blackness, long disparaged and denied in the Dominican Republic, were being re-imagined and reconfigured by Dominicans in the United States and reflected in bachata urbana. In the Dominican Republic (as elsewhere in the Americas) poverty correlates strongly with race, but despite the fact that most of bachata’s practitioners and fans had some degree of African ancestry, and were generally darker than the lighter-skinned elites, early bachata was not perceived as a Black or diasporic music in the same way that, say, roots reggae or early salsa were; instead, bachata was perceived simply as poor people’s music. In part this reflects Dominicans’ longstanding ways of understanding of race: dark-skinned Dominicans had long been referred to as indios rather than as Black; only Haitians were considered negros. In the United States, in contrast, where the one-drop rule determines the racial category to which an individual is assigned, dark-skinned Dominican immigrants are often perceived by non-Dominicans as Black. Dominican immigrants and their children have resisted this categorisation, instead identifying themselves nationally, as Dominican, or if pressed to choose a race, as members of the pan-national, multiracial category of Latino, whose racial boundaries are ambiguous.Footnote 2 Dark-skinned Dominicans in the United States know that, in the eyes of non-Dominicans, their skin colour locates them on the Black side of the United States’ racial spectrum, so as a strategy to distinguish themselves from their African American peers, these fully bilingual, New York-based bachata musicians foreground Spanish, or Spanglish, in order to underscore their Latinidad.
The video for Romeo’s hit song ‘Promise’ (ft Usher) illustrates how language places Dominicans firmly within the racial ambiguity of the categories of ‘Dominican’ and ‘Latino’, and distinguishes them from African Americans. It opens with images of two stylishly dressed dark-skinned young men talking to each other by cell phone; one of them is on a Manhattan rooftop, the other standing in the dark next to a chain link fence. They address each other as ‘homey’, ‘bro’, and ‘playboy’ in language and speech patterns most viewers would understand as those associated with urban African Americans. It is clear the two men have many commonalities and are close friends, confessing to each other their emotional vulnerability to the intense passion they feel for the women they are courting. Romeo and Usher’s core fans would instantly recognise each artist, but given the easy familiarity between the two men, their shared vernacular language, urban fashion sense, and the video’s New York setting, other viewers might think, at least initially, that this is an intra-racial dialogue between two Black friends rather than a dialogue between individuals with different understandings of race and their racial identity. It is not until forty-five seconds into the video, when the music begins, that a crucial distinction between the two becomes apparent: both Romeo and Usher are singing over bachata instrumentation and rhythm, but Romeo sings in Spanish, Usher in English, establishing that the former is Latino, the other, African American.
Similar strategies of playing with proximity and distancing are at work in Prince Royce’s video for his 2010 bilingual cover version of Ben E. King’s 1961 classic hit ‘Stand by Me’, which went to #1 on the Billboard Latin and tropical charts. At the Latin Grammys that year, Royce performed a duet of the song with Ben E. King himself, introducing (or re-introducing) millions of Latino viewers to the venerable African American rhythm-and-blues singer. And at the same time, viewers familiar with Ben E. King’s original were introduced to the sounds of bachata. In short, even when the musical style is heavily indebted to African American aesthetics, as in Royce’s version of ‘Stand by Me’, language serves as a powerful way of constructing distinctions between Dominican and African American racial identities. Bachata’s signature musical aesthetics themselves – the acoustic guitar arpeggios, bongo drum rhythms, and highly emotional vocals – are similarly effective ways of displaying Dominican-ness.
Distinguishing themselves from African Americans through their use of Spanish, however, creates a dilemma for urban bachata musicians, because they also understand the crucial importance of English for reaching broader audiences. In a fascinating remark in a 2012 interview, Romeo declared that he reached out to Usher because he wanted to perform with an Anglo musician (Reference BlancoBlanco 2012). Usher had not likely ever been referred to as an Anglo, which in the United States is a code word for White, but Latinos understood perfectly what Romeo was alluding to: the reality that in the English-dominant US mainstream popular music landscape, the most challenging barrier to their success in the music industry may not be race but language; hence, the best way for Romeo to cross over to non-Latino audiences was to perform with a major English-speaking hip-hop or R&B artist – while retaining his Dominican Latino identity with the Spanish lyrics and bachata sensibilities that remained the bedrock of his appeal to his Dominican and Latino fans.
Gender Transformations
Changing perceptions of gender and sexuality transforming nations and cultures throughout the globe have also impacted Dominicans, both on the island and in the diaspora, and are reflected in Dominican popular music, including bachata.Footnote 3 Bachata has always been, and continues to be, a primarily masculine domain; only two pioneering female bachata singers, Mélida Rodríguez in the 1960s and Aridia Ventura in the 1970s and 1980s, were able to achieve even a modest level of success on the island as bachateras. Bachata’s audiences, however, have been changing as the style evolved. Originally expressing the emotional preoccupations and social worlds of poor and socially marginalised men, when bachata began receiving mainstream media attention in late 1900s and early 2000s, many of the new generation of bachata musicians, such as Raulín Rodriguez and Zacarías Ferreira, abandoned the raunchier and often mysogynistic lyrics characteristic of their predecessors, relying instead more on romantic songs of love and loss – sentiments likely to resonate with immigrants longing for loved ones at home – and, more importantly, with women. This new generation of young bachateros, whose pleading voices expressed their emotional vulnerabilities, appealed to women who formerly might have been reluctant to associate with the disreputable and bawdy bachata, and who also appreciated an alternative to more masculinist genres such as hip-hop and reggaeton. Thousands of men were in the audience at Romeo’s 2014 Madison Square Garden concerts, but, as was suggested by more than one observer, many men may have been there to please their girlfriends.
In the early 2000s, a number of successful island-based male-female bachata duets appeared, the most well-known being Monchy y Alexandra, but it was not until the US-based Leslie Grace’s 2012 hit with ‘Will U Love Me Tomorrow’ that an urban bachatera achieved broader visibility. Grace’s hit song was a bilingual bachata version of the Shirelles’ 1960s song of the same name (although the Shirelles used the word “You” instead of Grace’s more contemporary vernacular “U”), which she followed up with a version of the Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’.Footnote 4 No female soloist, however, has been able to approximate the level of success achieved by male bachateros such as Romeo and Prince Royce, and bachata performance remains largely a man’s world.
It is noteworthy, then, that within this highly masculine domain, which mirrors the Dominican Republic’s traditionally patriarchal society, the issue of homophobia has been addressed sympathetically in bachata lyrics. In 2007, Andy Peña, a not widely known merengue musician at the time, released a bachata entitled ‘Quiero Volar’, which can be technically translated as ‘I Want to Fly’. The verb volar, to fly, however, is popularly used as a code word for describing gay behaviour as in ‘flighty’. Peña’s video for this song features a somewhat heavy-set man (not Peña himself) in yellow, green, and white tights and a bright pink top and cap, walking through the streets of Santo Domingo with exaggeratedly mincing steps and gestures, and singing, in bachata’s classically melodramatic style, that he wants to ‘fly’ but is constrained from expressing his true self by society, and his father. Not surprisingly, Peña began to be nicknamed el bachatero volador, or el bachatero gay. The novelty of a ‘gay bachatero’ led to television appearances in which Peña presented himself with makeup, sometimes a pink head band, and singing with an affectedly feminine voice and mannerisms. In televised interviews, however, he refused to explicitly identify as gay – or to deny that he was – insisting that it shouldn’t matter because differences are natural, and people should be tolerant of them.Footnote 5
The ambiguity only increased the public’s fascination with Peña, especially since he acknowledged that he had a wife and three children – which led some to speculate that he was merely performing (or caricaturing) gayness in order to attract attention and to further his career. A few years later, in 2014, Peña released another bachata and video, ‘Sólo le pido a Dios’ (I Only Ask God), in which he presents himself as emotionally vulnerable, asking God to spare him from hardship and hopelessness, but not as conspicuously gay – so perhaps ‘Quiero Volar’ was an act. Regardless, it is undeniable that Peña stimulated a public conversation about Dominican intolerance for non-normative gender identities.
In 2014, Romeo continued the dialogue about gender identity and homophobia with a song and video entitled ‘No Tiene la Culpa’ (It’s Not His Fault), whose lyrics (and video) narrate the story of a gay teen harassed by his peers and rejected by his father, and asking for tolerance. The fact that this was Romeo, with millions of adoring fans, making a plea for tolerance was a major milestone within Dominican and Latino cultural politics. Romeo, correctly anticipating rumours that he wrote the song because he, too, is gay, sends a strong message affirming his own heterosexuality midway through the narrative with these lines, spoken rather than sung for greater emphasis: ‘100% heterosexual. I was born like this. And you?’
Bachata Moves on Global Dance Floors
Bachata’s continued stylistic evolution and growing commercial success has propelled its dissemination to multiple new locations, not only within the United States and Latin America, but beyond, to countries throughout the globe – although along the way it has undergone significant changes in the kind of social contexts in which it is now consumed. Some of the countries where bachata has become popular have organic connections to Dominican music via migratory patterns – for example, its popularity in Spain and Italy can be explained by Dominican migration to these countries.Footnote 6 In contrast, an unexpectedly large portion of bachata’s new audiences reside in countries with no direct connections to Dominicans or the Dominican Republic; in these cases, dissemination has largely taken place through the medium of dance rather than recorded or live musical performances.
Notwithstanding the centrality of its lyrics about love, longing, and loss, bachata has always been appreciated by its fans for dancing as well as for listening, and early on a particular style of dancing emerged in the Dominican Republic, which in in its most basic form could be described as three steps followed by a fourth tap step. In the Dominican Republic as well as among US Dominicans, bachata is a social dance, meaning that dancing, and learning how to dance, takes place informally in domestic spaces such as kitchens and living rooms, or public spaces such as neighbourhood clubs and street festivals. In such informal contexts, individual dancers develop different styles according to their abilities and creativity, although the basic three steps/tap step has continued to be bachata dancing’s signature feature.
Studio dancing, in contrast to social dancing, is taught by professional teachers who teach dances to people who have not grown up dancing the particular style being taught, and whose teaching depends on structured, precise choreography that students learn by counting beats and memorising patterns of steps and turns. Studio dance teachers sometimes organise informal dances for their students, referred to as ‘socials’, although it is important to note that these events are organised by and for other studio dancers rather than by and for people of Dominican or Latino descent who have grown up dancing to bachata in family living rooms and local clubs, alongside dancers of similar backgrounds.
Interestingly, the spread of bachata dancing to non-Dominican and non-Latino audiences followed in the wake of the international popularity of salsa dancing, which similarly originated as a social dance within Cuban and Puerto Rican communities on the islands and in the United States and later spread widely through studio dancing networks.Footnote 7 Commercially oriented salsa dance studios began to appear and multiply in New York in the 1990s, and then spread internationally, well beyond salsa’s original core communities in New York, Puerto Rico, Miami, and other salsa-loving countries such as Colombia and Venezuela, to Europe and Asia (Reference HutchinsonHutchinson 2014, 35). Benefitting from increasing access to the Internet – YouTube videos, Facebook pages, blogs, and the like – salsa dancing proliferated around the world as dancers discovered opportunities to learn by watching professional salsa teachers online, and to connect to an expanding global network of studio salsa dancers. Eventually, these Internet-enabled social networks yielded a growing number of salsa festivals and congresses held in locations around the globe, where professional teachers and avid dancers could meet up in person and learn new styles. According to Adam Taub, who has taught salsa and bachata dancing at such festivals for many years, salsa festivals began opening up their dance floors to bachata around 2008 (personal communication). Initially bachata dancing was a novelty that offered salsa dancers a new Latin style to learn, as well as a change of pace, but subsequently, as bachata’s popularity continued to rise in the wake of the success of superstar urban bachateros such as Romeo and his peers, bachata-centred festivals organised along the same lines as salsa festivals began to appear in locations around the globe, even in such unlikely places as Prague, Goa, St. Petersburg, and Singapore.Footnote 8
Salsa and bachata festivals/congresses are typically multi-day affairs held in upscale hotels or resorts with large ballrooms and smaller meeting rooms for workshops, as well as amenities such as pools and restaurants – environments closer to an alluring vacation getaway than to the more mundane social dancing taking place regularly in Dominican and Latino communities. Moreover, it is bachata dancers, not musicians, who are the headliners at these festivals, one example being the superstar dance duo Ataca y la Alemana, formed by the Puerto Rican Jorge Burgos and the German Tanja Kensinger. A 2008 video of Ataca y la Alemana, dancing to the New York urban bachata group Xtreme’s 2004 song ‘Te Extraño’ (I Miss You), generated almost 90 million views. These studio-oriented environments for bachata dancing have encouraged the development of flashier dance styles – exaggerated turns and dips, and dancers dressed in glittery, often skimpy costumes, and heavy make-up – that rely on (and some might say, perpetuate) stereotypical images of Latinidad as spicy, sexy, and passionate.
Bachata music itself, whether live or recorded, is not the central focus of these dance-centric events. The bachata danced to at festivals typically consists of hit recordings by top urban bachata musicians such as Romeo, Prince Royce, or Xtreme, rather than the more traditional bachata recorded in the Dominican Republic. Some have taken note of the economic opportunities represented by dancers, and sought to strengthen the connections between bachata dancers and bachata music. In 2010, for example,Footnote 9 Xtreme invited Ataca y La Alemana to choreograph their new song ‘Baby Baby’; two videos resulted, one by Xtreme, and another of Ataca y la Alemana dancing to the song, both of which were posted on YouTube. Subsequently, Xtreme and the dance duo were invited to perform together on stage at the Sydney International Bachata Festival in Australia. Most festivals, however, cannot or choose not to incur the expense of hiring a high-profile urban bachata group such as Xtreme, so lesser known bachata artists may be hired if the economics allow for it: for example, in 2016 Karlos Rose, a seventeen-year-old New York Dominican who had recently scored a hit bachata song, performed a live concert at the tenth anniversary of the Sydney International Bachata Festival – although he was backed up by local Sydney musicians rather than a professional bachata band from New York.
Dance festivals are valued not only for the networking opportunities they offer attendees, but also because they offer new economic opportunities for entrepreneurs regardless of national or ethnic origin. Most of the professional dancers featured at bachata festivals are not Dominican, and often not even Latino, but rather, people like the German Tanja (la Alemana) Kensinger who have learned to dance in studios and at festivals. Teachers are expected to develop their own distinct styles, which they promote by performing live demonstrations in festival ballrooms and offering workshops, attracting students willing to pay to learn the featured styles; as in the case of Ataca y la Alemana, when YouTube videos of such performances and workshops go viral, the dancers’ economic opportunities also skyrocket.
Bachata dance festivals, which require travel, lodging, and registration fees, are too costly for most Dominicans, meaning that bachata dancing in these contexts are largely disconnected from Dominican communities where bachata performance and social dancing continue to thrive at a grassroots level. As a result, the economic and social benefits of the international bachata dance world (as in the world of international salsa dancing) flow mainly toward those with the economic, social, and technological capital to organise, finance, and promote an international festival. Moreover, Dominican social dancing – nowadays referred to as ‘traditional Dominican’ – is no longer a high-status style. Adam Taub, for example, has noted that his traditional Dominican-style bachata workshops attract relatively few dancers, because festival attendees are generally more interested in learning the newer styles, such as ‘sensual’ bachata: ‘Bachata in the Dominican Republic can be sensual, but if a new style is called “sensual bachata”, then that style defines sensuality. The way rooms are titled affect the way people view the dance and the music. The word traditional is boring for young people, who prefer sensual’ (personal communication).
Recently, a fledgling studio dance instruction scene has emerged on the island, and a handful of local Dominican dancers, like their international counterparts, have taken advantage of the Internet to establish a name for themselves without having to travel. One example is Yeri La Ley, a gay Dominican dancer whose YouTube videos have gone viral, earning millions of hits. Moreover, bachata festivals are beginning to be held in the Dominican Republic itself, eliminating the expense and visa problems associated with other international festivals and making it possible for local bachata musicians to perform for festival attendees, and for local dancers to participate in workshops and demonstrations.
In summary, fifty years after it coalesced as a style, bachata continues to move into new spaces and to acquire new social and cultural meanings – so where might it go next? If you look into the future and imagine attending a bachata performance in, say, 2025, what might it might sound like and where might you find it? Only time will tell.
