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Deborah Pacini Hernandez. Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995. 267 pp. Paper $18.95. Cloth $49.95.
While cultural anthropologists are becoming increasingly comfortable with music, dance, television, and other popular cultural forms, attention to these topics is still relatively recent compared to the accumulated attention awarded more traditional themes. It is, therefore, refreshing to see a full-length ethnographic work devoted to understanding a popular musical form, especially one that claims its roots and popularity among a largely impoverished male audience in crowded shantytowns-- specifically in the colmados (grocery stores), brothels, and bars-of Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. This ethnography introduces the reader to the beloved musical form known as bachata, a genre developed in the midst of massive rural-urban migration during the 1960s and 1970s and derived from a collective experience of economic, social, and cultural dislocation. Pacini Hernandez's engaging ethnography provides a framework for understanding the evolution of musical genres in the context of dictatorship and shifting class/culture formations. It also provides insights into the development of a familiar, humorous, romantic, and macho form of male sentimentality.
The bachata, a guitar-based trio (guitar-bongo-maraca), shares with its audience a raunchy barrio sentimentality marked by bawdy humor that connects eating with sexuality, an aesthetic form celebrating heavy drinking, easily-obtained sex, and a macho delight in elaborating upon gendered "inversions" of sexuality, where powerful men are made weak by the sexual prowess of women. It emerged mostly in male public spaces (colmados, bars, and brothels) rather than family spaces, thus perhaps explaining the apparent gender distinctiveness of this musical formNmostly male performers singing about women who cause them pain, often because of unrequited or relinquished love.
Pacini Hernandez provides an interesting and provocative account of why, until 1990, the bachata was the black sheep of the country's music business. In the process, she also provides an original case that perfectly illustrates-though without explicit reference- Bourdieu's (1984) analysis of the development of taste and distinction and their relation to class formation and maintenance. Here "taste"...