Gagá Pa'l Pueblo
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Gagá Pa’l Pueblo: A Critical Afro Dominican Celebration in New York City by Daly Guilamo [email protected] The Borough of Manhattan Community College Center for Ethnic Studies New York, NY Abstract Gagá Pa’l Pueblo (GPP) is an Afro Dominican group that hosts a recurring summer religious musical event that takes place every Sunday afternoon at Manhattan’s Anne Loftus Playground in Washington Heights, a haven for Dominican immigrants in the U.S. The summer event consists of performing gagá music and hosting weekly ceremonies in honor of a Dominican Vudú loa or deity. Through the use of direct observation and interviews of specific members of GPP, this paper explores the reasons for which the participants infuse racial themes that center on praising blackness and African heritage into their musical religious sessions. Ultimately, I argue that Gaga Pa’l Pueblo is a radical celebration of Dominican blackness, evidenced through the primary participants/interviewees’ discourse on race, nation, and identity that departs from and ruptures traditional definitions of Dominicanness. Keywords: anti-Haitianism, Pan Africanism, Dominican Republic, Dominican, Trujillo, nationalism, Gagá, Gagá Pa’l Pueblo (GPP) is an Afro Dominican group that hosts a recurring summer religious musical event that takes place every Sunday afternoon at Manhattan’s Anne Loftus Playground in Washington Heights, a haven for Dominican immigrants in the US. The summer event consists of performing gagá music and hosting weekly ceremonies in honor of a Dominican Vudú loa or deity. Throughout this essay I will differentiate through spelling Dominican Vudú from Haitian Vodoun and from Hollywood Voodoo, where the latter stereotypes and maligns the West African religion aptly called Vodun. Martha Ellen Davis writes, “vodu (or vudu) is the Dominican counterpart of Haitian vodoun (or vodun). It is similar to the Haitian, indeed influenced by it, yet different, with regional differences as well” (75). The last day of the GPP summer event is the largest of performances, attracting more people, lasting longer, and where music and dancing are performed more aggressively than usual. 31 Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.9, no.10, December 2016 Gagá Pa’l Pueblo emerged in 2011 priding itself in using gagá to, as they state in their newly launched website, “redefin[e] Dominican identity through music and dance in a time of globalization,” essentially challenging the Dominican national identity constructed by the Dominican Right (Gagá Pa’l Puebo website). The GPP website displays pictorial images and videos of their events. Through the use of direct observation and interviews of specific members of GPP, this paper explores the reasons for which the participants infuse racial themes that center on praising blackness and African heritage, into their musical religious sessions. Ultimately, I argue that Gaga Pa’l Pueblo is a radical celebration of Dominican blackness, evidenced through the primary participants/interviewees’ discourse on race, nation, and identity that departs from and ruptures traditional definitions of Dominicanness. In the summer of 2015 the Dominican government stripped thousands of Dominicans of Haitian ancestry of their citizenship and impeded others from obtaining it. As a result, the Dominican Republic gained bad international press, emphasizing Dominicans’ reluctance to embrace their blackness while citing historical events of anti-Haitian wars and one genocide in 1937. These gagueros break this narrative, embracing Dominican gaga and Vudú while identifying as Pan African in identity and spiritual and artistic intent. I first came to know these gagueros through social media, meeting them at Hostos College in New York City where they performed gagá. I later spent additional time with them at Philadelphia’s 2011 Odunde festival. Odunde, as the festival is often informally called, pays homage to the African Yoruba deity Oshun. For this paper, I interviewed them sporadically throughout 2014-2015. Isabel Brown defines gagá as “the Dominican version of Haitian Vodou[n], which assimilated the vestiges of the Taino belief system in addition to the mythology imported from Africa” (74). Gagá, emanating from Haitian rara, a religious music to the tune of Haitian Vodoun, consists of musical instruments harking back to ancient African traditions, songs, dances, and religious rituals. It was in the early 20th century, with the US occupation of the entire island that Haitians began entering Dominican territory as exploited sugarcane workers that imported rara. As a result, Haitian cane workers’ intermingled with Dominicans in Dominican sugarcane fields, which eventually led to the creation of gagá. Many Dominicans, whether in the Dominican Republic or New York City, celebrate gagá, with its visibility especially salient in the Dominican Republic during Carnival in the month of February. Celebrating AfroDominican life, gagá is an African derived cultural practice that unfortunately is not accompanied by Dominicans’ national identity. Historically, the conservative Dominican elite defined Dominican national identity as white, Catholic, culturally Hispani, in opposition to Haiti. The elites base their ideas on the fear that foreign entities, consisting of the Haitian government, France, and Canada, are plotting to politically merge both the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and thereby “reduce” the former country to the poverty level of the latter. Anti-Haitianism treats Haitians as the Dominican Republic’s convenient scapegoat and thrives on defining Haitians as the country’s racial other. 32 Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.9, no.10, December 2016 Ernesto Sagas defines Antihaitianismo as “a legacy of racist Spanish colonial mentality, nineteenth-century racial theories, and twentieth-century cultural neoracism into a web of anti- Haitian attitudes, racial stereotypes, and historical distortions” (ix). Gagá, on the other hand, represents not only the physical union of both Dominicans and Haitians, since they both come together in amicable unison on sugarcane plantations, but also the spiritual fusion. The Dominican Right, in essence, deems any type of cultural fusion between Dominicans and Haitians anti-Dominican and therefore a threat to the country’s social order. Silvio Torres- Saillant writes that gagá was: born of the vibrant interaction of Haitian and Dominican folk traditions in the vicinity of sugar plantations, constitutes the coming together of two spiritual sources which are themselves differentiated expressions of the transculturation between African and European cultures… Unable to deny that Dominicans do engage in African-descended spirituality, they [conservative elites] have proceeded to ascribe that predilection to an unwelcome foreign influence, a logic that often has justified the persecution of folk religious practices as a threat to morality and Christian values. (20-21) It is common to find key figures during the GPP musical-religious sessions explicitly praising Africa, their blackness, Haitians, and their African ancestors—an uncommon phenomenon among everyday Dominicans. The participants I specifically selected to interview proclaim a radical definition of Dominicanness in complete opposition to those espoused by the Dominican Right. In one study conducted on Dominican Americans Jose Itzigosohn, Silvia Giorguli, and Obed Vazquez, found that those Dominicans who do self-identify “as black correlates with a critical view of relations between Dominicans and white Americans” (51). We can assume here that it is possible that African American notions of race, racial identity, and racial ideologies that respond to white racism like Pan Africanism and Black Nationalism may play a role in influencing these gagueros. It remains important to note that not all participants of GPP proclaim their blackness to the extent that the ones I interviewed do. In fact, the gagueros I interviewed have struggled with navigating and/or negotiating how to incorporate their radical brand of blackness into their ceremonies without “turning” off other Dominican participants who may not fully adhere to this brand of Dominican identity. One must keep in mind Silvio Torres- Saillant’s argument, that although Dominicans with their deracialized consciousness may not necessarily self-identify as black, their cultural practices, customs, and mannerisms indeed are. According to Marimer Berberena, the first and only person to my knowledge to thus far conduct a study on GPP, argues that those that actively engage in GPP as “trabajadores de la cultura (cultural promoters) perform Gagá and other rhythms as a means of reclaiming a cultural heritage forgotten by many” (2) even though it may not be “as ritually-based as the Gagás in the Dominican Republic” (5). 33 Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.9, no.10, December 2016 When observing GPP in action Berberena finds that “The community of [GPP] integrates diverse participants that simultaneously secularize and ritualize Gagá” and that “those that ‘believe in’ and practice the Twenty-One Divisions tend to be more Afro-centric while those who are there for aesthetic or political reasons rather than spirituality, tend to think of both Dominicans and Gagá as mixed cultures” (5). Gagá as a religious practice engages spirits referred to as loas that “serve as intermediaries between the living world and the supreme” entity (God) and “receive offerings and food” often “possessing the participants