Alana: Allo?

 Ezequiel: Hello Alana!

 Alana: (gasps) Ezequiel! 

 Ezequiel: Hey whats up! Do we do the...

 Alana: (makes a reggaeton horn)

 Ezequiel: Do we do that, do we do the reggaeton thing? 

 Alana: We always do.

 Ezequiel: ok, let's do it together....1,2,3, 

 Ezequiel and Alana: (make a coordinated reggaeton horn sound)

 [MUSIC]

 Alana: I’m here with Ezequiel Rodriguez Andino. Our team’s human encyclopedia. Bregadero. Radio professional. History detective for stories about Puerto Rico… and what else? 

 Ezequiel: Well I’m a pop culture like, aficionado and I love music, so you know, tu sabes (sings “me grita el corazón....ríndete que el amor te venció”....) you know, we’re singing salsa stuff and other stuff all the time. (sings) And I think that’s why when you said “we’re going to go music in La Brega Season 2” I was like “ok, I’m ready, I’m ready” 

 Alana: And for nearly two decades, Eze was also the co-host of a radio show called Frecuencias Alternas, Alternate Frequencies – it played on Radio Universidad and had this cult following. A ton of Puerto Rican musicians got their start there, particularly in the independent music scene. 

 So when we were getting going on this season of La Brega, the team was pretty surprised that you… wanted to dig into one of the biggest, most commercial pop hits in Puerto Rican history. 

[MUSIC - “Suavemente,” Elvis Crespo: “Suavemente, besame”]

Victor: yo quiero sentir tus labios besándome otra vez. Oye, qué lindo está eso? 

 [MUSIC - “Suavemente,” Elvis Crespo: “Suavemente, besame” ]

Chelsea: You know the one moment for Latinos to hit the dance floor.

[MUSIC - “Suavemente,” Elvis Crespo… “(Suave) besame besame (suave) besame otra vez,(suave) que yo quiero sentir tus labios (suave) besándome otra vez (suave). Besa besa (suave) besame un poquito (suave) besa besa besa besa (suave) besame otro ratito (suave)”]

Chelsea: It’s like the moment that we got, was this one merengue - whether you like it or not this is what you get.

Velcro: “Party Latino” Can you play Suavemente and Despacito? 

Lia: I feel like it becomes the go-to when it really doesn’t have to be, but then, you know, if I’m at a function among family, it's the classic, gets all the TIAs moving.

[MUSIC - “Suavemente,” Elvis Crespo]

Alana: It’s THE merengue that has been heard around the world. Elvis Crespo’s 1998 mega-hit, Suavemente…For SO many years now, the song has persisted: on the radio, at clubs… it’s the one Spanish song dropped in at an English-speaking wedding, high school dance or bar mitzvah , even, probably? 

 It’s been 25 years, and it’s still everywhere. The song is iconic - or infamous, depending on your tastes. But we don’t really think of it as iconically Puerto Rican, right? And that’s, in part, because it’s a merengue — a rhythm more associated with the Dominican Republic. 

 Ezequiel: Yeah, Right, it’s this quintessential Dominican genre and the song is in the voice of a Puerto Rican man. How did THAT happen, right? 

 Alana: Yeah! And, so Eze - Why are we talking about Suavemente today? 

 Ezequiel: Well, the thing is… when I think of Suavemente I think about Dubble Bubble – do you remember Dubble Bubble, the chewing gum? 

 Alana:  Omaigod, yes –  you’d bite into it, it would explode with gooey sugar. 

 Ezequiel: That’s the one. That’s the one. Gooey and sweety, Super fun, and packed with enough sugar to give you diabetes… like Suavemente actually.

 Alana: [laughs] Ok.

 Ezequiel: But it’s not just the empty calories, right? What I am trying to convey with this analogy is that there’s also a surprise — an unexpected story — hidden in Suavemente.

 Alana:: Alright, I’m intrigued, double intrigued. Let’s hear it.

 Ezequiel:  Okay! Mira, look: the thing about Suavemente is that it didn’t just come out of nowhere, right? It’s the result of a musical battle that went on for years on stages and across sweaty dance floors – a war between salsa and merengue. A war that tells us a lot about our relationship with our sister island, the Dominican Republic. I like to call it the merengue war.

 [MUSIC - Theme song]

 Alana: For Futuro Studios and WNYC Studios, I’m Alana Casanova-Burgess and this is La Brega. In this episode, Track 3. Suavemente… and the musical war that hid another war. 

 Alana: So Ezequiel, where do you want to begin? 

 Ezequiel: Well, of all the places we could begin, I want to begin in the house where I grew up. 

 Alana: I’ve been there, your parents’ place. Great vibes.

 Ezequiel: You know, I grew up in this very musical household where there were two kinds of love for music. My dad, he thinks he is a poet, right? He loves to LISTEN to music: he sits down, he takes like this black coffee, and starts analyzing the lyrics of a song. But my mother, ha!, my mother FEELS the music, she gets swept up in the rhythm. She loves to dance, she can’t hold back. Le gusta bailar.

 [MUSIC]

 Marisol: Cuando tú sientes la música, tus pies se mueven solo.

 Ezequiel: That is my mother, Marisol Andino Rodriguez. She’s been dancing since her teens – that’s when she learned to dance everything. 

 Marisol: Yo aprendí a bailar este tango. Me gustaba bailar el twist.

 Ezequiel: And 17-year-old Marisol – she was in the best place to go out to dance because if you were in 1970’s Puerto Rico, there was live music EVERYWHERE. 

 Richie: There were dances that were done every week, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday…

 Ezequiel: That’s Richie Viera – owner of Viera Discos in Levittown. He’s been working in the music business for years. 

 Richie: Because an orchestra had to play four sets of 45 minutes. They danced until two, three in the morning. 

 Ezequiel: And it was salsa that ruled the night, all night, every night. So if you could hold a beat on the congas, play a little trombone, or do a two-step while singing los coros  … then you too could have a place in a salsa orchestra, booking gigs and raking it in all week long. And really, there were SO many gigs. There was a festival every day – celebrating everything you could think of. Here’s trumpeter Edgar Nevarez. 

 Edgar: Los festivales del mangó, el festival del macramé, el festival de la china.

 Ezequiel: The mango festival, the macrame festival, a festival for oranges.  

 Edgar: Siempre todas las semanas había algo. 

 Ezequiel: Every day of the week, a festival. And a dance floor. And that’s where my mother and all the other salsa lovers were, twirling around all night long. With so much opportunity for musicians, word spread through the Caribbean like wildfire: “If you want to gig and make money, Puerto Rico is the place to be.” And then, in the mid-70s, something happened that would change the scene forever. Enter the Merengue Orquestras. 

 [MUSIC - horns and beat intro]

 Ezequiel: Groups like Wilifrido Vargas or Johnny Ventura – playing songs full of joy and freedom… like El Pelotero. 

 [MUSIC - “El Pelotero,” Johnny Ventura]

 Ezequiel: To some, merengue seemed to come like out of nowhere to Puerto Rico. But in reality it was really always there. Because Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic are, literally, neighbors. Many know there’s been a major Dominican immigrant community in Puerto Rico for decades now, but in reality it goes way back. Mira, the way Richie Viera put it to me, 

 Richie: Te montas en un avión.

 Ezequiel: You get on a flight…

 Richie: El sobrecargo te da una coca cola. 

 Ezequiel: ...and you get a Coca Cola with some ice: 

 Richie: Y te la tomas rápido porque cuando está chupando el primer hielito, estamos bajando aquí en santo domingo, a ese nivel!

 Ezequiel: And the flight is so short that you’ve still got ice in the glass when the plane starts its descent in Santo Domingo. And that geographical closeness binds us in other ways, too. We’ve had a cultural back and forth for centuries now. That’s why all the salsa bands in Puerto Rico always had some kind of merenguito in their repertoire. But the groups that started arriving in San Juan in the 1970s were true merengue orchestras. They were coming directly from the Dominican Republic…. The tambora going hard. 

 [MUSIC - Tambora beat]

 Ezequiel: Sparks flying off the guira – 

 [MUSIC - Guira beat]

 Ezequiel: And some wild and sparkling trumpets on top.

 [MUSIC - Trumpet hitting high notes]

 Ezequiel: And this merengue was something else. 

 [MUSIC - Merengue beat]

 Ezequiel: It was FASTER. 

 Marisol: Bien rapido.

 Ezequiel: Harder hitting, and.. also super JOYFUL. A jolt of pure life and enthusiasm… music that compelled you to leave all your troubles behind, and just let it go. 

 Marisol: Había muchas vueltas y había mucho movimiento.

 Ezequiel: And maybe most importantly, it was way easier to dance to.

 Richie: Merengue is a tin-ton, tin-ton, you know. 

 [MUSIC - Merengue beat with guitar, bass thump and piano]

 Richie: Two by four. Salsa has a pattern. 

 [MUSIC - Salsa beat]

 Richie: If you don't know how to dance, you fall.

 Alana: This is true, salsa’s tricky, it takes a lot of practice. 

 Ezequiel: Exactly, and in that sense, we could say that merengue was “the great equalizer” of the Puerto Rican dance floors...

 Richie Viera: With the merengue music, you throw one hip to one side and the other to the other side, and you can dance. 

 Ezequiel: For example — 

 Marisol: Sí, Miguel Angel tenía dos pies izquierdos.

 Ezequiel: My dad, Miguel Angel, had two left feet. 

 Marisol:. Yo me iba a morir. Yo me iba a morir. Pues yo dije, este tipo no baila…

 Alana: Ooooh, so your mom falls in love with him, but was mortified because he couldn’t dance. 

 Ezequiel: Exactly, but then – check this out:

 Marisol: Y mira después que se daba dos o tres cervecitas. ¡Ay bendito, se soltó el merenguero! 

 Ezequiel: You know? Add two or three beers and some basic merengue instructions and he was a full fledged dancer!

 Alana: Oh man, so merengue saved their marriage.

 [MUSIC -  Improvisación en piano, Alberto “Ringo” Martínez] 

 Ezequiel: It did save them… and I actually spoke with one of the Dominican musicians who came to Puerto Rico to bring merengue and save my father’s reputation on the dance floor. His name… is Ringo. 

 Alana: No it’s not. Ringo? En serio?

 Ezequiel: Yes… but this Ringo was no drummer from Liverpool. He’s a pianist from San Francisco de Macoris, Dominican Republic. Real name: Alberto Martinez.

 Ringo: Llegué a Puerto Rico aquí en el año 1976 de 22 años.

 Ezequiel: He arrived in Puerto Rico when he was just 22, in the mid 70s. 

 Ringo: Mi mamá me mandó aquí a Puerto Rico para que dejara la música. 

 Ezequiel: What? ¿Cómo es? En serio? 

 Ringo: Si. 

 Ezequiel: His mother actually sent him here to get him away from music, but when he got here he found a wide-open musical territory, just waiting to be seized.

 Ringo: Pero si es que hay un campo abierto esperando ser, eh, conquistado.

 Alana:  Mira: Conquistado. Right? Conquered. I heard that. Interesting choice of words. 

 Ezequiel: Ringo remembers this moment, when he realized that merengue could have a foothold in Puerto Rico – he was at a mall.

 Ringo: Yo estaba en Plaza Las Américas

 Ezequiel: Plaza las Americas, obviously. 

 Alana: Obviously. 

 Ringo: …y estaba sonando Wilfrido Vargas. 

 Ezequiel: And he hears a merengue by Wilfrido Vagas coming from the speakers. 

 [MUSIC - “El Gallo,” Wilfrido Vargas intro]

 Ezequiel: He saw how people all around stopped shopping and just started dancing – and he thought: 

 Ringo: Yo no te he equivocado. Aquí hace falta un grupo de merengue. 

 Ezequiel: “Alright, I am not crazy.  Puerto Rico needs a merengue group.” 

 [MUSIC - Merengue beat]

 Ringo: Y ahí fue donde toma, toma exactamente la decisión de hacer la patrulla 15. 

Ezequiel: So he formed this group called La Patrulla 15 – it was one of the first merengue bands in Puerto Rico. Ringo was the musical director. Their first hit was Cuchu Cucha, from 1980.

 [MUSIC - “Cuchú Cuchá,” Patrulla 15] 

 Ezequiel: And in no time, they were booked SOLID.

 Ringo: 157 bailes en tres meses..

 Ezequiel: He remembers at one point he played 157 gigs in three months. Think about it, that’s like two gigs a day, every day, for like three solid months. And that was just one band. There were others, like El Conjunto Quisqueya, and more and more were coming from the Dominican Republic every month to play in Puerto Rico. They played at clubs and town fairs, at parties. My mother Marisol remembers it.

 Marisol: Era merengue, merengue, merengue, merengue, merengue, merengue, merengue. 

 Ezequiel: She says it was like “wait a second.”

Marisol: Ahí dicen. Pero espérate un momento, yo estoy en santo domingo o estoy en puerto rico. 

Ezequiel: Am I in Santo Domingo or Puerto Rico? And that sentiment, it was not exclusive to music.

 [MUSIC - Dreamy lo fi beat]

Glorimarie: I used to stay with my dad during the weekends and in the bar. We had a  joke box and we had pool tables. My name is Glorimari Peña Alicea.

Ezequiel: Glorimari was born in Puerto Rico to a Dominican father and a Puerto Rican mother.  She goes to the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where she’s studying migration and popular culture. She told me that Dominicans left their home in the 70s and 80s for many reasons, the end of the Trujillo dictatorship, the United States occupation, and the strong-man rule of Balaguer. 

Glorimarie: It was like 12 years of a lot of violence and necessity, unemployment, um, strikes, famine.

Ezequiel: Some left the DR through official channels, with work or study visas, like Ringo from La Patrulla 15. 

Glorimarie: An example in Juan Luis Guerra’s song, Visa para un sueño, right?

[MUSIC - “Visa Para Un Sueño,” Juan Luis Guerra… “el sol quemandoles la entrana, un formulario de consuelo”]

Glorimarie: They talk about all the long lines, all the papers they had to fill, and how it was basically impossible to migrate to Puerto Rico with a visa.

[MUSIC - “Visa Para Un Sueño,” Juan Luis Guerra… “Con una foto dos por cuatro que se derrite en el silencio”]

Alana: (singing) Eran las cinco de la mañana – such an incredible song. The way it's constructed. I mean, you know, Juan Luis Guerra forever. 

Ezequiel: Yeah, because he is making, like, this catchy tune that we all love but it’s about this subject that is not, you know, that happy....

Alana: Yeah exactly. Like I remember how it ends. 

[MUSIC - “Visa para un sueño,” Juan Luis Guerra…  “(buscando visa!) carne de la mar, (buscando visa!) la razon de ser (buscando visa!) para no volver”]

Alana: Carne de la mar, la razon de ser, para no volver, the idea that someone would be lost at sea, that they would drown, that they would never return.

Ezequiel: Mhmmm, and that’s because for many people, there was no chance for a visa. 

Glorimarie: So basically, the undocumented migration seemed to be the fastest, the cheapest, and the most effective way to migrate to Puerto Rico.

Ezequiel: Many Dominicans still migrate to Puerto Rico by crossing the Mona Channel. That’s the 80 miles of open sea between the tip of Hispaniola and the tip of Puerto Rico. They cross in yolas, small and fragile fishing boats. 

[MUSIC - Dreamy lo fi beat]

Ezequiel: And those 80 miles, Glorimarie noted, are full of people who have died trying to make that crossing with the desire to improve their lives, to… 

Glorimarie: … to reach Puerto Rico, and in most of the cases, the final destination is the United States. 

Ezequiel: Glorimarie’s father survived one of those trips to Puerto Rico, and like many, he chose to stay on the island. But, for her father, and for so many others who came to make a life here, the welcome was far from warm. 

Glorimarie: It's every country. migrants are perceived as that they steal the jobs.

Ezequiel: And that’s precisely how some Puerto Rican salseros began seeing the Dominican merengue musicians who arrived: as unwelcome immigrants, stealing their music scene. Ringo says it all began with Wilfrido, the Dominican musician whose band could be heard everywhere in Puerto Rico.

Ringo: Yo entiendo que Wilfrido duraba mucho tiempo aquí.

Ezequiel: Ringo remembers that Wilfrido and his band spent a lot of time in Puerto Rico. 

Ringo:  Duraron tanto tiempo que ellos alquilaron un apartamento.

Ezequiel: So much time, in fact, that they ended up renting an apartment because it was cheaper than staying in hotels. 

Ringo: Y yo entiendo que eso le molestó a mucha gente, sabes? 

Ezequiel: And, he says, that really bothered a lot of people.  In fact, I dare to say – that’s where the merengue war really began. 

[MUSIC - Tension beat]

Ringo: Y ya en ese punto había mucho grupo de merengue.

Ezequiel: The fear was that there were so many merengue groups that the salsa bands couldn’t make that much money anymore. 

Ringo: Puede ser que le quitaran guiso 

Ezequiel: They felt that every day Dominican merengueros were taking their opportunities to play and to get paid. They started to feel well, you know, displaced… and they got angry. So… they went to where they thought they’d be heard. To La Federación de Músicos de Puerto Rico. The Musicians Federation. They were a musician's union that was founded in the late thirties. They didn’t have a lot of power, but when their members had concerns, they would take those concerns to the streets. Check this out: I spoke with Victor Guys, who managed several merengue groups at the time, and he told me about how one day..

Victor: … Estaba johnny allí tocando y en en la parte de afuera, estaban…

Ezequiel: The legendary merengue star Johnny Ventura had come from the DR to play in San Juan 

Victor: …Estaban los músicos de la federación de músicos esté haciendo huelga. 

Ezequiel: And the federation was protesting outside the show… 

Victor: Y eso era bien, tú sabes, pa mí, una cosa del otro mundo.

Ezequiel: It was… like nothing he’d ever seen before. 

Alana: Hold on – so they literally went on strike? Against what… against, like, music? 

Ezequiel: Yeah, like Victor Guys said: it was like something from another planet. I wanted to know more about these protests so I started searching for anything I could find. So, I went to the newspaper archives at the University of Puerto Rico. 

Alana: Aha, you hit the microfiche. 

Ezequiel: Indeed, I did. And actually I found several articles – from 85, with the headline:“They should take their music and go somewhere else!” And Alana, to set the scene for you a bit more, I got a voice actor with strong 1980’s vibe to read these headlines to you. 

Alana: All right, let’s hear it!

[MUSIC - Breaking news beat]

Voice Actor: Over 100 artists with the Federation formed a picket line in front of the federal building in San Juan to denounce the dissemination of visas to foreign bands who displace Puerto Rican groups.

Ezequiel: Yes! There were even pickets at the television stations, like Telemundo, where the bands would play live. And that article goes on to explain, just if you had any doubt:

Voice Actor: The foreign bands, the majority of which are Dominican…

Alana: Confirmed: the microfiche journey tells us there were actual protests against merengue.

Ezequiel: And here’s another one, from a 1980 edition of the newspaper El Mundo. 

[MUSIC - Breaking news beat]

Voice Actor: The president of the Musicians Federation, predicted that in Puerto Rico there could be a war among musicians.

Ezequiel: You caught that?

Alana: I did, the war metaphor.

Ezequiel: Mhmm. 

Voice Actor: Because allegedly, the Dominican bands are taking jobs from the Puerto Rican musicians.

Ezequiel: And you know what, I also remember that when I was a kid, I had actually seen evidence of this war between merengue and salsa. 

[MUSIC - TV commercial intro sound]

Ezequiel: There was this commercial on TV, it was for Schaefer beer.

[ARCHIVAL - Comercial Retro Cerveza Schaefer]

Commercial: Schaefer Schafer, Shafear, Shafear voy a saborear, a saborear!

Ezequiel: It was a huge production, with the band El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico representing salsa, and Wilfrido Vargas and his band repping merengue. They were on big stages on a beach doing a kind of musical battle about what was better. Salsa… 

[ARCHIVAL - Comercial Retro Cerveza Schaefer]

El Gran Combo: También prefiero la Schaefer cuando tomó más de una pero en cuestiones de ritmo como la salsa ninguna.

Ezequiel: Or merengue. 

[ARCHIVAL - Comercial Retro Cerveza Schaefer]

Wilfrido Vargas: Y dime si no es verdad, merengue es mucho mejor, pero hablando de cerveza la Schaefer es la mejor.

Ezequiel: And that’s a kind of playful way that this war came up in popular culture, but the more I looked into it….  the more I found that this anti-merengue sentiment really inspired intense reactions. 

[MUSIC - Mysterious beat]

Ezequiel: I found an article in a blogspot. 

Alana: A blogspot? 

Ezequiel: Yes, a blogspot, with like this '90s aesthetic… dedicated to Dominican show business. 

Alana: Ok I’m looking at it. It looks like an ad for a casino. 

Ezequiel: That’s the look, yes. And this article was published on June 23rd, 2012. 

The author is, apparently, a well-known and now deceased dominican musicologist named Cholo Brenes. And he writes that the introduction of merengue in Puerto Rico was… difficult.

Alana: Okay, so...“Los intentos de sofocar” – The attempts to suffocate our rhythm in Puerto Rico, la isla del encanto, were terrible. Okay, so already “suffocate” – intense.

Ezequiel: Yes. Definitely. And in the rest of the post you’re going to see more evidence of that, with allegations of trash talking, insults… even incidents of spitting. But what I really want you to look at is actually further down. 

Alana: Okay. This comment from an anonymous poster? 

Ezequiel:  Exactly.

Alana: “The protest against merengue was so strong that the car of Jackie Lera, a conga player from the band La Patrulla 15, was burned.” End quote. Wow, Ezequiel, alright so that’s written in passive voice so we don’t know who did the car burning, but you know… burning someone’s car is actually violent. 

Ezequiel: Yes, I mean, like burning someone’s car — for whatever reason — is on a whole other level. And if it was really for like coming to Puerto Rico and playing in a merengue band, yeah, that’s just wrong. So obviously I wanted to find out more, to see if this was just gossip or if things were really this dramatic. When I spoke to Ringo, I asked him about it.

[MUSIC - Tension beat]

Ringo: Yo, yo no me acuerdo si a Jackie le quemaron un carro, me suena.

Ezequiel: And… he didn’t really remember, but it sounded familiar. 

Ringo: Yo, cuando paso la página, me olvido de to’ eso. 

Ezequiel: He told me that when bad things happen he quickly turns the page, but suggested that if I wanted to dig deeper, I could go right to the source. 

Ringo: Pues yo te puedo dar el número del, y le preguntas.

Ezequiel: So he gave me the number of the conga player, Jackie Lera, and told me to give him a call…

[MUSIC - Dark merengue beat]

Ezequiel: And so that’s exactly what we did.

Jackie: Aunque ya ahí está. Grabando

Alana: This is La Brega dot blogspot dot com.

Ezequiel: We’ll be right back. 

MIDROLL 

Ringo: Qué tal amigos, le habla Ringo Martínez de la Patrulla 15. Escuchen la brega. Ahí es que están las cosas sabrosas ¡Bien sazonado! La Brega. 

Ezequiel: Estás escuchando…. la bregaaaaaa. 

Alana: (laughs)

Alana: We’re back with La Brega. I’m Alana Casanova-Burgess.

Ezequiel: And I’m Ezequiel Rodriguez Andino. And before the break, we were trying to answer a question: in the 1980s, at the height of tensions between salseros and merengueros, did Puerto Rican salsa musicians burn a Dominican conga player’s car? So we called that conga player.  

Jackie: Mi nombre es Jackie Lera. Soy de San Pedro de Macoris, República Dominicana.

Ezequiel:  This is Jackie Lera, of La Patrulla 15, owner of the above-mentioned car. And we asked him: did he ever see any tension between the salsa musicians and merengue musicians who immigrated to the island?

Jackie: Sí. Sí. Sí!

Ezequiel:  And right away, Jackie Lera said yes: in fact…

Jackie: Incluso yo tenía una, un vehículo…

Ezequiel:  He had a car…

Jackie: una hatch back…

Ezequiel: A hatchback…

Jackie: que apareció quemada. 

Ezequiel: That had been burned. 

[MUSIC - Dark mysterious beat]

Ezequiel: He told me it happened while he was sleeping, after arriving late from a gig. Some neighbors put out the flames.

Jackie: Todo el mundo le achacó ese caso a los saleros. 

Ezequiel: He says everybody said it was the salsa musicians who did it. But –  

Jackie: Nunca tuve propiedad para asegurar eso. 

Ezequiel: He has no proof so he never accused anyone.

Jackie: Si no tengo prueba, no acuso nunca a nadie.

Alana: Okay, wow, what do you make of all this? What does it tell us about these salsa-merengue tensions? 

Ezequiel: I want to be clear that neither Jackie nor I nor anyone else found evidence that it was Puerto Rican musicians who were behind this incident. But the fact that the first thing that came to people’s mind back in the day was that it must have been salsa musicians, and the fact that this rumor is still with us today, shows us just how high that tension was....What is very clear now with the passage of time: the war against merengue was a losing battle. 

[MUSIC - Merengue beat]

Ezequiel: And that brings us to the next step in the evolution of merengue in Puerto Rico – the second boom, that happened in the 90s. 

Richie: There were 14, 15 studios recording every day. 

Ezequiel: Now, it’s Puerto Ricans who are singing and playing in the merengue bands. Merengue explodes. Richie Viera remembers it really, really well. 

Richie: There were 150 Merengue bands and all chamaquitos, you know, all kids who wanted to sing. 

Ezequiel: Richie told me how the groups always were screaming their name out… and he was so right, I remember that, because they all sounded very similar, and that was the only way you knew which band was which.

Richie: (makes merengue beats / sounds) La maquina…

[ARCHIVAL - La Makina first TV performance]

La Makina: ¡La Makina!

O Giselle… 

[ARCHIVAL - Noche de Carnaval]

Gisselle y su grupo: ¡Gisselle!

Zona Roja caña Brava!

[ARCHIVAL - Caña Brava TV performance]

Caña Brava: ¡Caña Brava!

Ezequiel: This was the boom of my adolescence. 

[ARCHIVAL - Telemundo Network]

Eddie Miro: ¡El Grupo Maniaaa!

Ezequiel: These were the groups that were on the radio and on TV constantly. 

[ARCHIVAL - No Te Duermas, Telemundo Network]

“El Gangster”: Están pegaos muchachos, están pegaos, ustedes no tienen idea de lo pegao que están ustedes...Cuanto tiempo…

Ezequiel: These are the groups that made me want to learn how to dance, because it was so popular that you HAD to learn to actually be able to socialize.... 

[ARCHIVAL - Marcano el Show, Telemundo Network]

(audience screams) Amphitrion: ¡Él es Manny Manuel!

Ezequiel: They had this new sound, called merengue bomba. Instead of sounding like the classic merengue of Wilfrido: 

[MUSIC - “Hombre Divertido,” Wilfrido Vargas intro]

Ezequiel: They sounded like THIS: 

[MUSIC - “Suavemente,” Elvis Crespo riff]

Ezequiel:  And with this new sound — by the late 90s Puerto Rico had turned into one of the world’s most fertile grounds for merengue — competing with and at times even dominating Dominican merengue in the commercial market. We are talking about merengue heavyweights like LimiT 21, Manny Manuel, Olga Tañon… kings and queens of the radio, of TV, of las fiestas patronales and senior proms. And the culmination of all this is that the biggest merengue hit IN THE WORLD -- the song that conquered dance floors and charts and in some cases INTRODUCED merengue to a global audience… was made ... by a Puerto Rican artist: it was Elvis Crespo's Suavemente. 

[MUSIC - “Suavemente,” Elvis Crespo… “(suave!) acercate acercate (suave!) no tengas miedo (suave!) solamente yo de digo (suave!) una cosa quiero. Besame! (suave!)” ]

Alana: Eze, I have a question. 

Ezequiel: Dale.

Alana: Would you call this a kind of a, mm, a cultural appropriation? 

Ezequiel: Yeah, something like that, and that’s the ironic thing for me about all of this saga – like if there was any tangible displacement, it was Puerto Ricans who took over the work of the Dominican pioneers, they effectively displaced the older groups and appropriated their rhythm and their sound. And, paradoxically, at the same time that merengue was super popular, there was this anti-dominican sentiment spreading all over Puerto Rico. 

[MUSIC - Lo fi beat]

Ezequiel: Over the years the  Dominican immigrant community continued to grow… by 1990 they made up 50% of all foreign-born people living in the archipelago. In a way, the reaction that the salsa singers had toward the merengueros was like a prelude – a fore-shadowing. I remember seeing some graffiti that echoed those headlines that we were mentioning earlier, you know the ones that said that they should go somewhere else with their music. But this time with fewer words, and much more direct: “Dominicans, out!” 

Ezequiel: Glorimarie Pena, who as we said before grew up in PR with a Dominican father… has had to live with that kind of xenophobia every day — in both large and small ways. 

Glorimarie: Microaggressions are very subtle. When a mosquito bites you it doesn't affect you. Right? But , if every day, every day you have mosquito bites, right? That bothers a lot. 

Ezequiel: People saying that Dominicans aren’t educated, that they’re inferior, that they should leave. 

Glorimarie: They are constant and they hurt… it happens a lot at school. Right. And sometimes it's enabled by teachers. That's the thing, that it's an everyday thing. 

Ezequiel: In my school, people were always making jokes about dominicans. If someone made a mistake in class, you’d hear someone say, “a no seas dominiqui” right? – Like: “don’t be dominican” – and everyone would laugh. 

Glorimarie: It's very hard to have that dual identity, when you are not from here nor there… Growing up it was like a negotiation because sometimes it was hiding as a mechanism of defense, but with the consequence of feeling very bad because you feel like you are constantly in a performance. 

[MUSIC - Lo fi dreamy beat]

Ezequiel: Today, as an adult, I’m aware that in the neighborhood where I was raised, and in the neighborhood where I went to school, there was a pretty significant Dominican population. It’s just, you know, messed up. Because I remember laughing along with the class. As boricuas, we really accept our love for merengue, we devour mangu and fried salami – but we show so little love and respect towards the people who brought those things: our  dominican neighbors.

Glorimarie: And there's no secret that racism and colorism, it's present in the Puerto Rican society and culture. It can be one of the reasons why there's so much discrimination against the Dominicans because we are so similar. 

Ezequiel:There’s this myth about race in Puerto Rico – that we are -- “quote”-- a happy mix of white Spaniards, of native tainos, and black Africans… in that order. It’s a myth in service of white supremacy. 

Glorimarie: The Dominican can be that black other, we don't, we don't want to be 

Velcro: Maybe we're not as first world as we think we are. So let's make fun of the easiest target, you know? 

Ezequiel: That’s Andres “Velcro” Ramos, a rapper and DJ of Dominican descent, raised in Puerto Rico. And he has a theory.

Velcro: The things that Puerto Ricans would make fun of regarding everyday life in Dominican Republic for example or the way that Dominicans see the world, electricity service would go out pretty much every day… a Puerto Rican making fun of something like that, is as if they were afraid of the fact that they know deep down that they're just a step away from having the same experience.

Alana: This is like when I hear, “oh yes things are so bad here in Puerto Rico, but wow aren’t you glad we aren’t the Dominican Republic?”

Ezequiel: Exactly. But now Puerto Rico is in crisis – you know, it always was… now we have criseses -- we have multiple! So what’s the difference? 

[MUSIC - Slow tropical beat]

Ezequiel: Velcro says, these days our situation kind of makes people realize… 

Velcro: *din din din*  

Ezequiel: …that we’re not so different after all. It’s easier to see us as siblings. 

Velcro: Entonces pues, hacer mas facil vernos como hermanos…

Ezequiel: And when you start paying attention, you realize Dominican culture is everywhere in our lives — from the bachata that we listen to on the beach…

[MUSIC - Smooth bachata]

Ezequiel: To the Dominican dembow that Bad Bunny likes so much.. 

[MUSIC - “Titi Me Preguntó,” Bad Bunny… “Titi me preguntooo to to”]

Ezequiel: And every time Velcro is spinning at some party in Puerto Rico and notices the dancefloor is kinda dead…

Velcro: Casi sin falta si el party está medio muerto, yo pongo un merengue y el party se levanta. Esa es la que hay. 

Ezequiel: He drops a merengue, and the party goes full swing again. 

[MUSIC - Slow dembow]

Ezequiel: That’s what I think is so important, and what I’ve always thought was hidden in Suavemente. That somehow, some way or other, that song encompasses the complicated relationship between our two islands. And I have always seen the enormous global success of Suavemente as the crowning of merengue as the winner of the war. But of course, that’s not the end of the story. Suavemente’s success was actually the beginning of the end for merengue. While salsa and merengue were feuding, reggaeton rolled in with the younger generation… and it quickly dethroned merengue. Just like Fortinbras -- it took Hamlet’s throne while barely lifting a finger. And, in the end, when the smoke from the war cleared – merengueros and salseros started seeing the common ground they always shared.

Ezequiel: Um, Alana. 

Alana: Si.

Ezequiel: Are you ready for a nice coda… like a tasty denouement, like como un cordialito.

Alana: (laughs) Dale don dale.

Ezequiel: Okay so, Jackie Lera, the conga player with the burnt out car…

Alana: Yep. I remember him. 

Ezequiel: He remembers that one day he went to the house of Elias Lopés, one of the salsa musicians who used to protest against merengue. 

Jackie: Y él me abrazó

[MUSIC - emotional cue]

Ezequiel: And… Lopés hugged him, and looked right at him. 

Jackie: Y me dijo mira.

Ezequiel: And he kind of… said sorry. 

Jackie: “Y esta casa que tú estás viendo aquí, Jackie… 

Ezequiel: He said, this house that you’re looking at…

Jackie:…Es gracias al merengue que yo la tengo.”

Ezequiel:…. It's thanks to merengue that I got it. Because eventually, Lopés came around, and he worked with Patrulla 15 and other merengue bands, and it went super super well for him. And even Jackie, with his burnt car and everything, when we asked him about his time in Puerto Rico, he didn’t think twice before saying how much he loved it.

[MUSIC - emotional cue with beat]

Jackie: Nosotros vivimos bien en Puerto Rico, el que tuvo la oportunidad de vivir esa época bonita de Puerto Rico no hay mucha comparación.

Ezequiel: What a great time he and the other Dominican musicians had. 

Jackie: Ya llegó un momento que nos veían, como saben, son de aquí.

Ezequiel: And… he felt that there came a moment when Puerto Ricans saw them as being, actually, from Puerto Rico. 

Jackie: Y en verdad La Patrulla 15 es de Puerto Rico.

Alana: Thank you, Eze. I'm never going to hear Suavemente the same way. 

Ezequiel: So I sold it? 

Alana: You and Jackie Lera sold it, yes.  

Ezequiel: ¡Es la cosa! 

Alana: ¡Ese coro! (laughs)

Alana: And that’s our episode – but before we go… this season, we’ve asked Boricua artists to cover some of the songs we’re exploring. So when it came to this episode, we hit up DJ and MC Andres “Velcro” Ramos — who you heard earlier — and we asked him to collaborate with his sister, Mireya Ramos. She’s the founder of the Latin Grammy-winning all-female mariachi group “Flor de Toloache”. They’re mom is Dominican, and they grew up in Puerto Rico  — so we thought they’d be the perfect  choice to work on a cover for this episode. 

[MUSIC - “No Tienes Corazón,” Mireya Ramos y Andrés “Velcro” Ramos] 

Alana: But instead of covering “Suavemente” — because, let’s be honest, we’ve all heard it enough — they are doing a cover of a Patrulla 15 song: “No Tienes Corazón.”

Mireya:  the original is really, really fast. We are definitely gonna slow it down and give it another vibe … 

Alana: Picking this song to cover was a way of basking in memories from their childhood in Puerto Rico:

Mireya: We would be in the living room listening to all those classic merengues on vinyl, on, on our turntable and dancing with our mom and just being happy and enjoying life and, and enjoying it….el calorsito, the warmth of, of Puerto Rico and the island.

[MUSIC - “No Tienes Corazón,” Mireya Ramos y Andrés “Velcro” Ramos… “No tienes, no tienes corazón”] 

Alana: Mireya and Velcro’s cover of “No Tienes Corazon” — along with the full La Brega cover album — will be available in March. 

[MUSIC]

CREDITS:

This episode was written and produced by Ezequiel Rodriguez Andino and Marlon Bishop. It was edited by me, Alana Casanova Burgess and Mark Pagan. 

Original art for this episode is by Fernando Norat. Additional music for this episode from Yasser Tejeda. Our '80s vibe voice was brought to life by: Mario Roche. And the guira and the tambora examples were courtesy of Otoniel Nicolas.

Special thanks this week to Marisol Andino, Miguel Angel Rodriguez, Andy Lanset, Chiquita Brujita, Lia Camille Crockett, Amanda Alcántara, Fernanda Echávarri , Emanuel Dufrasne , Elmer Gonzalez, Francisco Perez, Andres “Cucho” Perez Camacho,  Tatiana Díaz Ramos and Sujei Lugo Vazquez.

The La Brega team includes Jeanne Montalvo, Ezequiel Rodriguez Andino, Joaquín Cotler, Liliana Ruiz, Tasha Sandoval, Mark Pagán, Maria Garcia, Victor Ramos Rosado, Juan Diego Ramírez, Marlon Bishop and Jenny Lawton. 

Fact checking this season is by Istra Pacheco and Maria Soledad. 

Our engineer is Joe Plourde. Our theme song is by Ife. Original music is by Balun.

You can hear all the music featured in this episode – and this season – on our Spotify playlist. We’ve got a link in our show notes. And don't forget to tap the heart to save it to your library because we'll be adding to it each week.

This season of La Brega was made possible by the Mellon Foundation.

I’m Alana Casanova Burgess. Join us next week for Track 4: I Wonder If I Take You Home.

Bai!

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