Annotations for Places: Dominican Republic

Every culture has its special days, Diaz de Fiesta. Most often, they're related to a special date in history: Fiestas Patrias, Puertorriqueños celebrate El Grito de Lares on September 23rd. Dominicanos celebrate on February 27th, the Dominican Republic's independence from Haiti. In Mexico and among Mexican Americans, Cinco de Mayo is one such day of celebration, not an Independence Day, but in memory of a battle which took place in 1862. However, as producers Laura Valera and Arthur Duncan found, the historical significance of the holiday is often lost in the midst of cultural festivities. Here's their Cinco de Mayo audio essay.

[Transitional Drum Music]

Cinco de Mayo has to do with the French forces attempting to occupy Mexico. Essentially what it deals with is the defeat of the French forces by the liberal forces of Benito Juarez in the city of Puebla, in the state of Puebla.

Do you know why we celebrate Cinco de Mayo?

All I know is it's a Mexican holiday. I don't really know what the reason is.

I don't know, is it somebody's birthday?

Ah…for me, Cinco de Mayo is a pretty good… good day.

A big event?

A big Fiesta.

That's when the Mexicans took over. They kicked the French out of Mexico!

Y ganamos los mexicanos.

The independence of Mexico.

From?

Spain.

And one last thing. Do you know why we celebrate Cinco de Mayo?

You bet. There's a battle of somewhere… I forget now.

[Transitional Music in Spanish]

Cinco de Mayo did not lead to the ouster of the French. It would represent a significant victory for the Mexicans because it taught them that they could create a real sense of nationalism for them, that they could defeat invading forces and the like. It was significant on the basis of… you know, sort of a moral strength that gave the Mexicanos.

[Transitional Mariachi Music]

We just know it as a celebration, as a fiesta. Aside from it being a festival event, it's an educational event because it is the time of the year that, for some reason, many of our people put our political agendas, our turf agendas aside, and realize that we are all one of a large majority of people in this hemisphere.

Do you celebrate Cinco de Mayo?

Well, doesn't every Hispanic?

Bueno, cuando celebramos el Cinco de Mayo vamos aquí a las fiestas que tienen en el Fiesta Garden.

Yes, a big party.

Con Mariachi, es una fiesta mexicana.

Bueno… el parque.

The typical barbecue con unas cervecitas aquí y allá. I just have a good time with the friends and family.

The most things that I do is dance.

[Corrido Music]

During these festivals, we also realize that there are no borders.

[Corrido Music]

[Change in transitional music]

The roots of Latin jazz go back at least five decades to such artists as Machito, Chano Pozo, and Dizzy Gillespie. Latin jazz has lost many of its originators in recent years, but one of them, 81-year-old Mario Bauzá keeps going strong. From Miami, Emilio San Pedro prepared this profile of the legendary co-founder of the band Machito and his Afro-Cubans.

Mario Bauzá left his native Havana for New York in 1930. When he got to this country, Bauzá became one of those responsible for making Afro-Cuban music popular in the United States and around the world.

Had to happen outside of Cuba before the Cuban people convince themself what they had themself over there. When they got big in United States, Cuba begin to move into that line of music.

[Afro-Cuban jazz music]

Bauzá remembers his days at the Apollo Theater in Harlem where he helped to launch the career of Ella Fitzgerald. He recalls his days with the Cab Calloway Orchestra and the time that he and his friends, Dizzy Gillespie and Cozy Cole, played around with Afro-Cuban rhythm and jazz arrangements and created something new: Afro-Cuban Jazz.

[Afro-Cuban jazz music]

In the early 1940s, Bauzá formed the legendary band Machito and his Afro-Cubans, along with his brother-in-law, Frank Grillo, who was called Machito. Bauzá was the musical director of the band and he composed some of the group's most memorable songs.

[Afro-Cuban jazz music]

The sensation caused by Machito and his Afro-Cubans and by other Latin musicians in the '40s made New York the focal point of a vibrant Latin music scene.

[Afro-Cuban jazz music]

It's the scene of The Mambo Kings, you know, and that's why a lot of people will say Mambo is not Cuban music or is not Mexican music. Mambo is New York music.

Enrique Fernández writes about Latin music for the Village Voice. He's also the editor of the New York-based Más Magazine.

It was here that this kind of music became very hot…that it really galvanized a lot of people…that really attracted a lot of musicians from different genres that wanted to jam with it, and that created those great, you know, those great encounters between Latin music practitioners and the jazz practitioners, particularly Black American jazz practitioners. For that, you need to recognize that New York has been, since then, probably before then, but certainly since then, one of the great centers of Latin music.

Mario Bauzá takes great pride in the current popularity of Latin and Caribbean music, but he says people are wrong to call his music Latin jazz. He says that label doesn't give proper recognition to its musical roots.

Merengue, merengue from Santo Domingo. Cumbia is cumbia from Colombia. Afro-Cuban is Cuban. That's why I got to keep [unintelligible] Afro-Cuban rhythms, and Afro-Cuban rhythm…Danzón es cubano…la Danza es cubano…Bolero es cubano…el Cha-cha-cha es cubano…el Mambo es cubano…el Guaguancó es cubano y la Columbia es cubana. So, I got to call it Afro-Cuban Jazz.

[Afro-Cuban jazz music]

After seven decades in the music business, Mario Bauzá has come out of the shadows of the group Machito and his Afro-Cubans and is being recognized for his accomplishments as one of the creators of Afro-Cuban Jazz. This year, Bauzá plans to tour with his Afro-Cuban jazz orchestra featuring Graciela on vocals. The group also plans to release another album of Afro-Cuban jazz: Explosión 93. For Latino USA, I'm Emilio San Pedro.

[Afro-Cuban jazz music]

That's the deep right. It sends Gwynn to the wall. He leaps and can't get it. It's backed up by Bobby Kelly --

Baseball, it's the all-American pastime, and for Latinos as well. The CBS television broadcast of the All-Star game featured an all-Spanish television language commercial, which ran twice.

Setenta mediocampistas en baseball profesional son de la Republica Dominicana.

Called "La Tierra de los Mediocampistas," the Land of the Center Fielders, the ad for Nike featured images of Dominican kids playing baseball in makeshift diamonds in the Dominican Republic.

More than 70 Big League shortstops, including Tony Fernández and Manny Lee, have come from the Dominican Republic.

Ken Griffey Jr. en tercera base…

The broadcasting of baseball and other professional sports in Spanish is becoming more common in this country in places like California, Texas, and New York. But now even teams in less traditional Latino cities are discovering the profit of pitching their games to Hispanic listeners.

Ingrid Lobet reports that this season, for the first time, baseball fans in the state of Washington can listen to the Seattle Mariners games in Spanish.

[Sports Broadcast Recording] Larry se espera, le da cuarda, lanza, viene, contacto! Se va hacia el centro y Ken…se va escapar, se va escapar, se les escapa!

Perched in the cramped broadcast booth, Publio Castro handles the play by play.

[Sports Broadcast Recording] Muestra señal, la manda, viene, strike! [Spanish baseball report].

Castro has worked to establish a style that's his own. He always knew he wanted to work in broadcasting, even when he was a child doing farm work in California. Through their hard work, his parents made it possible for him to go to college.

I studied TV production, and I just wanted to know how they made movies, how they make cartoons, how they made commercials, how the cartoons moved, and those sound effects, and stuff like that.

Castro and his brother started a talk radio show in a small town in Oregon. And when a producer came looking for talent to host Portland Trailblazer basketball, he didn't have to look very far.

Finley presenta lanza bien, toquecito! Ken Griffey! ¡Sacrificio cuenta! ¡Es más, salvo! Blowers a pesar de que está cogiendo, le gana a Finley.

When Cliff Zahner heard Castro's show, he knew he had a place for him. Zahner makes a business of persuading teams to air games in Spanish. He then identifies stations that broadcast in Spanish and whose formats could benefit from the games. Then he provides them the games for free.

And then they get half of the airtime that they can sell to make their own money and we have half of the time that we can sell to pay for our expenses and the announcers. So it's added programming for them, and they'll generally do it if they feel it's a sport that's interesting to their audience. And baseball is particularly interesting because of the Hispanics that play the game.

The Mariners' team alone has Omar Vizquel, Edgar Martínez, and coach Lou Piniella. By giving Spanish-language interviews, these players are now able to reach another audience. And Randy Adamack, Vice President of Communications for the Seattle Mariners, says advertisers are slowly taking interest.

Even without it being a profit center, which it is not right now, it's obviously got value to us anyway, in speaking to a large group of important people.

If advertisers stick with the games and if the present trend continues, there will be few professional teams in the Northwest that aren't broadcasting in Spanish. It's tentative, but as football training camp begins, there are plans to make fall 1993 the first season for Seattle Seahawks games in Spanish.

[Sports Broadcast Recording] Se acaba esta entrada, donde el score dice, ahora los Angelitos de California con cuatro, Marineros con dos. Regresamos, esta es la cadena de los Marineros de Seattle.

For "Latino USA," I'm Ingrid Lobet in Seattle.

This program is called Latino USA, but would a program by any other name, Hispanic, for instance, sound as sweet?

I consider myself a Hispanic. I don't like the term Latino.

When you say Latino, you get, I think, a warmer sense of who our people are; just a greater sense, a more comprehensive sense of culture.

What I call myself, I'm Chicano, seventh generation in this country.

I'm Puerto Rican. That's it, period.

I'm Cuban-Argentine, I'm Caribbean, and I'm South American.

And now we have this new thing, non-white Hispanics, non -- I mean, it's crazy.

I speak Spanish, but I'm not Spanish. I speak English. I'm not English, I'm Latina, I'm Hispanic, I'm Puerto Rican. I'm all of those things, just don't call me Spic.

I hate the categorizations. I really don't like them because I think that they pigeonhole us into a certain niche and we can't escape it.

It's not the most important issue facing Latinos or Hispanics or Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans or Mexican Americans. But the questions, what do we call ourselves, and why this label rather than the other, surfaces so regularly that it's almost an inside joke among Latinos or Hispanics or whatever. It's also one of the questions studied by a group of political scientists who conducted a study of political behavior called the Latino Political Survey.

The evidence that I see from the Latino National Political Survey and every other survey that I've seen that asks people to self-identify, demonstrates, I think conclusively that most people who we might choose to identify as Latino do not choose that as their first term of identification, who identify as Puerto Rican, as Mexican, as Mexican-American, as Cuban, as Cuban-American, and many other ways.

The term Latino is just a useful term in terms of describing the fact that there are all these different groups. The question is what does it mean politically? That's the significance of the term. Now, I guess the point is, if you put it all together, is that this is a very fluid kind of situation and it's something that changes over time in the sense that it depends on what kind of movement and context you have and what the leadership's saying, and it depends also on whether you have any kind of real social movement in place that does something with these kinds of symbols.

And right now, what we were falling into is mostly Hispanic being used by kind of a middle class of professionals by default because the term was either being used by the media or, I know in the Puerto Rican case, there were many Puerto Ricans that were using a term like Hispanic professionals because being Puerto Rican identified you as someone on welfare, that kind of thing. So it was a more acceptable kind of term, and those are kind of different political reasons that many of us would advance for using these types of terms.

Well, when I think of the term Latino, it brings to mind the diversity that exists within the Latino communities. It also brings to mind the fact that individual Latinos are not unidimensional, but they're multidimensional. I consider myself a Chicano, a Mexicano, a Mexican American, a Latino, a Hispanic, all depending on where I find myself, who I find myself with.

One of the other things I think about is there is a lot of out-group marriage that is occurring within the Latino community, and not necessarily to Anglos or African-Americans, but to other Latinos. I have two cousins who are Mexican American who married to non-Mexican American Latinos. What are their children? They're half Guatemalan, half Mexican? Are they going to go around saying, well, I'm half Guatemalan, I'm half Mexican? No, they go around saying, I'm Latino. When you're walking down the street in Los Angeles and an Anglo comes to you, he doesn't say, oh, excuse me, are you Mexican? Or Salvadorian? Or Nicaraguan? They see a brown face and they say, you are Mexican. So what's happening, while we have individual past histories as a Cuban, as a Puerto Rican, as a Central American, as a Mexican, our destinies are tied together as Latinos.

Over 60% of this country's Latinos, Hispanics, or... or whatever, are of Mexican descent. And as we hear in this audio essay, in their case, the issue of labels and identity takes on a whole other dimension.

[Chicano--Rumel Fuentes and Los Pinguinos del Norte]

When I was younger, we had to be Chicana/Chicano movement.

Hispanic is such a new term that it started off as nobody knew what it meant and now they know what it means and they like it.

Well, I really don't know why they call it Hispanic because we weren't Hispanics until recently.

Mexican American is fine. Chicana is fine.

The word Hispanic, I don't like. I'd rather use the word Indo-Hispanic.

I believe Hispanic is for the people from Spain.

Something for sure. We'd rather be called Hispanics than Chicana.

And the older generation thought that this was a derogatory term.

Actually Chicana, it's a slang word. It used to be a slang word for Mexicana.

I don't know why the Mexican American keeps changing names.

[Chicano--Rumel Fuentes and Los Pinguinos del Norte]

I am not Hispano. I'm not Latin American. I am not American or Spanish surname. I am not Mexican American. I am not any of those terms, those vulgar terms that come from Washington and the bureaucrats and the functionaries, and when they try to make sense of us and they make no sense of us. I do not label myself. I'm a Chicano.

Chicano has a lot of negative definitions. Chicano, I've been told it came from Mexico when they put the Chinese in Mexico in one certain area in Durango. So they called them Chinganos. They tell me Chicano means peon, the lowest class Mexican that there is. They tell me Chicano is a militant activist from the 60s that was a true radical on the extremist side. Also, I don't like people keeping themselves at one level when anybody can advance and should not be put into a class and kept there.

So when you have to fill out a form, what do you call yourself?

I call myself Caucasian. [Laughter]

You see, I'm not into that sort of thing really because I decided that I'm no longer a Latino. No, I'm a Hispanic, I'm a Hispanic dammit, and there is a difference. You see, when I was a Latino, my name was Ricardo Salinas, but now that I'm Hispanic, it's Brigardu Salinas.

I don't see that we have an identity crisis anymore. I think that we've overcome and passed that a long time ago. We know who we are and we're proud of it.

The more time that we spend on trying to identify ourselves, I think the more time it takes away from trying to do something about bettering our lives.

And hopefully then in the future we won't have to be concerned about what we want to call ourselves.

[unintelligible] Don’t you panic, it’s the decade of the Hispanic! [unintelligible] Don’t you panic, it’s the decade of the Hispanic!

Syndicated columnist, Roger Hernandez of New Jersey has his own views on the issue of labels. Today, Hernandez tells us why he thinks we should call ourselves Hispanic rather than Latino, and why sometimes we should reject both labels.

Over the course of history, every Spanish-speaking country developed its own idiosyncrasies, its own cultural sense of self. Argentina, for instance, is largely made up of European immigrants. Neighboring Paraguay is so influenced by pre-Colombian cultures that the official languages are Spanish and Guarani, and the Dominican Republic has roots buried deeply in the soil of Africa. We're all different, so it's more precise to say Merengue is specifically Dominican music and that Cinco de Mayo is a Mexican holiday, not Hispanic, not Latino, too generic. The point is that the all-inclusive word, whether Hispanic or Latino, is often misused. Used, in other words, to cover over ignorance about who we are and how we differ from each other. But there is something else just as important. Our diversity does not erase the reality that we all do have something in common, no matter our nationality or the color of our skin or our social class.

And to talk about what we have in common, there is only one starting point; that which is Spanish, as in Spain. Language tops the list. Spanish is a common bond. Then there is culture. Why does an old church in the Peruvian Altiplano look so much like a mission church in California? You can find the answer in Andalusia. And why does a child in Santiago de Cuba know the same nursery rhymes as a child in Santiago, Chile? Listen to a child sing in Santa De Compostela, Spain and you'll hear Mambrú se fue a la guerra and arroz con leche.

Yet the word Spanish does not describe us. It is too closely tied to Spain alone. Latin and Latino lack precision. After all, the Italians and the French are Latin too. Hispanic derives from Spanish, but it's not quite the same. It suggests what we have in common without over-emphasizing it, so it leaves room for our diversity. And no, the word was not invented by the US census. The word Hispano has long existed in the Spanish language, and its English translation is Hispanic. What we all share and what no one else in the world has is being Hispanic. For Latino USA, I'm Roger Hernandez.

Commentator Roger Hernandez writes a syndicated column for the King Features Syndicate. It appears in 34 newspapers nationwide.