Urban Bachata and Dominican Racial Identity in New York

Abstract

Bachata is a guitar-centered style characterized by romantic lyrics and a highly emotional singing style that coalesced as a style in the Dominican Republic in the 1970s. Bachata’s fans and practitioners were primarily of African descent, but due to the Dominican Republic’s history of repudiating its African heritage, bachata was considered poor people’s music rather than a form of black music. Bachata’s social profile began to change when it was transplanted in New York City by Dominican immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s : in New York, bachata shed its low class identity as it became a powerful sonic symbol of the Dominican homeland. At the same time, young New York Dominicans also embraced the hip-hop and R&B dominating the city’s musical landscape, so when they began producing their own bachata, it was notably inflected with R&B and hip-hop aesthetics. The new style was distinguished from its island-based antecedents with the term “urban bachata”. This essay addresses the extent to which urban bachata’s R&B and hip-hop aesthetics reveal—or elide— racial and/or cultural affinities between New York Dominicans and African Americans. It also questions the degree to which Dominicans’ history of racial disavowal has influenced the development of a broader diasporic identity.