Merengue (dance)
Encyclopedia


Merengue
El camino
1ro de Secundaria

In popular culture

  • Merengue was mentioned as a song performed between Babs and Charlie in the song by Steely Dan
    Steely Dan
    Steely Dan is an American rock band; its core members are Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. The band's popularity peaked in the late 1970s, with the release of seven albums blending elements of jazz, rock, funk, R&B, and pop...

    .

  • Merengue was mentioned as a dance that is performed by "Lola" in the Barry Manilow
    Barry Manilow
    Barry Manilow is an American singer-songwriter, musician, arranger, producer, conductor, and performer, best known for such recordings as "Could It Be Magic", "Mandy", "Can't Smile Without You", and "Copacabana ."...

     song Copacabana
    Copacabana (song)
    "Copacabana", also known as "Copacabana ", is a 1978 song which was sung by Barry Manilow and written by Jack Feldman, Barry Manilow, and Bruce Sussman.-Song information:...

    .

  • Merengue was featured prominently in the Steve Martin comedy film "My Blue Heaven
    My Blue Heaven (1990 film)
    My Blue Heaven is a 1990 comedy film directed by Herbert Ross, written by Nora Ephron and starring Steve Martin, Rick Moranis, and Joan Cusack.It has been noted for its relationship to the movie Goodfellas, which was released one month after this film...

    ".

  • Merengue dancing was featured in the 2008 Tony award winning musical In the Heights
    In the Heights
    In the Heights is a musical with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda and a book by Quiara Alegría Hudes. The story explores three days in the characters' lives in the New York City Dominican-American neighborhood of Washington Heights....

    .

Link to Haitian Méringue/ Mereng

According to Merengue: Dominican Music and Dominican Identity By Paul Austerlitz, we will probably never know with certainty the true origin of this music, but theories about it express deep-noted feelings about Dominican Identity. One theory links Merengue to the Haitian Mereng. Although they differ in important ways, the Dominican Republic and Haiti share many cultural characteristics. Like Merengue in the Dominican Republic, Mereng (in Haitian Creole; Meringue in French) is a national symbol in Haiti. According to Jean Fouchard
Jean Fouchard
Jean Fouchard was a Haitian historian, journalist, and diplomat. Fouchard was born in Port-au-Prince and earned a law degree there. He worked as a journalist, founding the periodical La Relèvé, and as a diplomat, serving as the ambassador to Cuba...

, Mereng evolved from the fusion of slaves music such as the Chica and Calenda with ballroom forms related to the French Contredance (1988: 5-9). Mereng’s name, he says, derives from the Mouringue Music of the Bara, a Bantu
Bantu
Bantu is used as a general label for 300-600 ethnic groups in Africa of speakers of Bantu languages, distributed from Cameroon east across Central Africa and Eastern Africa to Southern Africa...

 people of Madagascar
Madagascar
The Republic of Madagascar is an island country located in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa...

(1973:110, 1988: 77-82). That few Malagasies came to the Americas renders this etymology dubious, but it is significant because it foregrounds what Fouchard, and most Haitians, consider the essentially African derived nature of the music and National identity.’ Dominican Merengue, Fouchard suggests, developed directly from Haitian Mereng (1988:66).

Dominicans are often disinclined to admit African and Haitian influences on their culture. As ethnomusicologist Martha Davis points out, many Dominican scholars “have, at the least, ignored African influence in Santo Domingo. At the worst, they have bent over backwards to convince themselves and their readers of the one hundred percent Hispanic content of their culture. This is not an uncommon Latin American reaction to the inferiority complex produced by centuries of Spanish colonial Domination”. According to the Merengue innovator Luis Alberti, for example Merengue “has nothing to do with black or African rhythms,” (1975:71). The Dominican proclivity to deny connections with Africa is related to the anti-Haitian sentiment, and relationships between the national music of Haiti and Dominican Republic have often been ignored of downplayed in the Dominican Merengue scholarship. In several standard Dominican sources that mention Merengue in Puerto Rico and other countries, competent scholars neglect to acknowledge even the existence of Haitian Mereng (del Castillo and Garcia Arevalo 1989: 17; Lizardo 1978a, b; Nolasco 1956:321-41). In fact, for Esteban Pena Morel, one of the few Dominicans to admit a connection between Merengue and Mereng, this link renders Merengue inappropriate as a Dominican symbol; he suggests another genre, the Mangulina, as more representative of National culture (1929, sec. 3:1, 3).
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