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The video documentary, "Congo Pa' Tí", of approximately one hour, gives recognition to the resistance shown by Afro-Dominican cultural manifestations in the face of a context of poverty and denial, giving attention to the role of Black women in these communities.  It includes interviews with intellectuals, artists and residents of the community of Villa Mella who explore the issue of race since its origins until today and it includes commentaries by people about  identity and culture in the Dominican Republic, perhaps one of the only places where Black people do not want to be called "Blacks".  From a perspective of participatory action research, Melassa had the collaboration of the Brotherhood of the Congos of the Holy Spirit who were declared oral patrimony for the humanity by the UNESCO in 2001, and a group of young women who learned how to use cameras and do interviews of an ethnographic content.  Their contribution to community research and documentation of an Afro-Latina/o culture are part of the final product of this film.

For more information to obtain a copy of the video, please call

809-687-3801 or 809-856-7514 or email us at kweyland@verizon.net.do

Sponsors

This exhibition was funded by the Melassa Foundation, the Hispanic Cultural Center, the Argentine Embassy in the Dominican Republic, The Center for Latino Arts and Culture at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and the Dominican Academy of Sciences.

Articles written by those who participated in the project:

The (De)Construction of an (Afro)Dominican Identity:
From the day-to-day to the transnational

Karin Weyland, PhD.
Director of the Melassa Foundation
Professor of INTEC, Social Science Department, Technological Institute of Santo Domingo.

The project “Congo P’a Tí” was produced and sponsored by Melassa, a non-profit organization created in the year 2001 with the objective to promote collaboration between academic institutions and local communities.  This idea was born out of a proposal of participatory research action aimed at the production of a video documentary exploring the presence of an Afro-Latino/a identity in Dominican culture.  As the name indicates, Melassa –a mélange of cultures and identities that are the product of modernity imposed as a result of such productive economic systems as slavery and globalization—searches to explore the processes of creolization that were the result of the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the New World.  Melassa is particularly interested on the impact of Colonization on the formation of an Afro-Latino/a identity and the continuity of these processes in a Latin(o)American identity today.

We chose to work with the Brotherhood of the Congos of the Holy Spirit because the Congos are an autochthonous manifestation of Dominican Black identity and culture who have maintained their cultural traditions generation after generation since the arrival of slaves to the New World.  In May of 2001 the United Nations declared the Congos oral patrimony for the humanity, however, Dominican people can hardly recognize the contribution of African culture to their own identity since Africa, as a cultural referent, was eliminated from their history and day-to-day culture.  The video-documentary, Congo P’a Tí which lasts approximately one hour, recognizes the culture of resistance manifested in Afro-Dominican manifestations faced with a context of poverty and denial.  It focuses on the role of Black women in these communities, and addresses the problem of race in the Dominican Republic, perhaps the only country where Black people do no want to be called “Black”.  The video-documentary is also accompanied by 20 Black and White photographs of the community, three murals made with photo-collage and produced during an exchange between the community and students from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a short play represented by community youth in response to the knowledge they produced during the filming of the video.  The production of the video documentary gave participation to a group of young women who learned how to use cameras, do interviews, and speak of their culture and identity without inhibitions.  Their contribution to the research undertaken in the community is part of the final product of the film.

Besides from music, dance, and rituals, the video-documentary contains interviews with community residents, artists, and intellectuals who could establish a relationship, although sometimes indirect, between poverty and Afro-descendants communities in the Dominican Republic.  Despite there are many Afro-Dominican cultural manifestations such as the Congos, palos o atavales, gaga, sarandunga, Salve, velaciones, mysteries, and the Guloya theatre, the dominant hegemonic culture has not recognized the contributions of Black culture to the formation of a Dominican identity.  This in turn has created an alienation or denial, on the one hand, and imposed defense mechanisms, on the other, such as the usage of the word “Indian” for racial identification.  While it is true that Afro-descendant communities have been marginalized and excluded from projects of local and national development, it is important to mention that this marginality is expressed more strongly in areas that had been home to free and runaway Blacks from the so called “Black towns” such as Los Mina and Villa Mella whose inhabitants were brought from the French side of the island and in exchange for their labor in the informal economy that supply the Colonial City with products, there were given their freedom.
 

Nowadays, despite the situation of poverty that many predominantly Afro-dominican communities find themselves, the members of the Brotherhood of the Congos, were able to continue with their ancestral commitment with great respect, dignity and a profound spirituality.  It is worth mentioning the work of Sixto Minier, the Captain of the Congos’ Brotherhood, for his perseverance in maintaining alive the Black history of the Dominican Republic, teaching the Congo rhythm to his grandchildren and great grandchildren, and everyone else outside the community who shows a sincere interest for the Congo music and dance.  Sixto Minier’s and Pio Brazoban’s families have been able to maintain their traditions through the systematic organization of funerary rituals such as the ninth day and one year festivities as well as the final festivity called “banco” celebrated to anyone in the community who, directly or indirectly, had a previous commitment to the Holy Spirit.

The intellectual elite during the dictatorship of Rafael Leonida’s Trujillo marked an important moment in the formation of a Dominican identity giving a twist to the culture of Black  resistance and provoking racist and anti-haitian policies that eliminated from the national imaginary any referent that could associate Dominican people with their African roots.  In rejection of Blackness, therefore emerges a romanticism with the indigenous culture whose diffused cultural presence in today’s Dominican population does not present a threat to the power elites.  People create new referents based on what a dominant Hispanic ideology established using as their model for national identity a White, Catholic and Hispanic mystification.

From the part of the people then emerges a half-way protagonism.  While Afro-Dominicans give continuity to the cultural traditions of their ancestors, they are unable to develop a political consciousness that would defend them from the new policies of global development imposed by a model of United States imperialism.  These policies function with peripheric neoliberal governments engulfing not only the same traditions that day after day resist the cultural sweep but also the only forms of survival that once emerged during slavery, that is, the culture of runaway slaves and the informal economy that served and today continue to serve the Capital City of Santo Domingo but with greater difficulties.  Internal migration to the Capital City ended with the production of small pieces of land and animal raising, that in the case of the Mata de Los Indios community, helped to maintain the festivities and therefore Afro-cultural traditions.

In response to an hegemonic model of neoliberal development in the Dominican Republic and the rest of the world where every day more and more global influences stand opposed to “personal dispositions” as expressed by French intellectual Anthony Giddens, or where daily life is reconstituted in terms of a fluid dialectic between the local and the global, it is necessary the revival of identitites that in their action and way of thinking define new forms of empowerment, that  is, outside of a national context concentrated and articulated within specific community processes.  While the context of referents become “localize” in the face of an imposed globalization, new identity proyects may emerge.
 
 

Through workshops, seminars, delegations, internships and community participation, the Melassa Foundation has been able to initiate various processes of self-management in the community of Mata de Los Indios that present alternatives to a viable development for Afro-descendents communities based on a redefinition of identity.  On the one hand, in our discussions we could establish that the concept of national community is imagined or invented since the level current level of inequality and exploitation does not really matter for the nation to conceive itself through a profound and democratic sentiment of camaredery that feeds the idea of homogenization of its members under a national prototype.  In general, a prototype, or better yet a stereotype, that is rooted in a racialized herarchy that define power relations among the members of the national community.  The Peruvian intellectual Aníbal Quijano defines this herarchy in our contemporary Latin American society as the “coloniality of power” since he sees today’s racialized system as a simple continuation of the relations of power established during Colonial times guided by the way Colonizers categorized natives of the Americas, as “primitive, savage and of color.”

These first contacts are the basis to understand contemporary power relations and the conformation of the nation-state in the Dominican Republic, since “creole” people who were the sons and daughters of Spaniards and apparently as “white” as them, were never defined as “white” because there were born in America.  When speaking of nation, we necessarily have to speak of the racialization of subjects that conform the nation, since both concepts “race” and “nation” are part of the same historical discourse, this be in opposition to those who were defined or imagined as biologically “the same” or to those, biologically “different”.  In the case of the Dominican Republic, when the nation became independent from Haití in 1844, a national identity is constructed in opposition to all that stands as Black, African, or Haitian and Whiteness, Catholicism and Hispanism are invented to differentiate Dominican identity from the “other” invader and transgressor.

Following Melassa’s methodology, the Proyect “Congo P’a Tí analyzes the construction of identities of resistance and survival in opposition to the Dominican national imaginary.  From a visual perspective of participatory action, tries to give recognition to two of the most Dominican influential identities, however little recognized, a Black identity and that of the culture of women.  Faced with the effects of globalization and a supposed modernization that accompanies this process, a revalorization of the identity proyect imposed since Colonial times and implanted during the dictatorship is necessary in order to transcend both territorial as imaginary borders.  In an attempt to (re)imagine the social construction of identity beyond borders, a transnational vision allows social actors to conquer new spaces of power.  From outside the nation-state, in a context of collaboration and transnational solidarity, a new identity construction allows for social change of their hegemonic models, that is at a structural level, forcing a (de)construction of an imagined identity and replacing this with day-to-day practices that are embedded in networks of local and global knowledge that allow for an inclusive communication and action.  Given the relationship between a global economy and national economies, the dialectic between the local and the global is necessary to open new spaces for search, even better if these new spaces reflect a hybrid or runaway culture—a mélange of identities, knowledges, diversities and cultures.  The return to the community, to the local, is possible through participatory action that unifies the academic community with other communities involved, and in Mata de Los Indios we are able to address the issue of identity through the trasnational work of (Afro)Latino/as from different origins who, in collaboration with the community, gave life to a possible Internet Community Center.  In the meantime, the computers that were donated by the Secretary of State of Education function for the 1,200 students who attend the Primary School of Mata de Los Indios.

The collaboration project between the Melassa Foundation and the community of Mata de Los Indios shows that a space, imaginary or real, has to be necessarily transnational since, besides from transcending national borders, it stands in opposition to the hegemonic processes of capital that are also transnational.  Farris Thompson and Paul Gilroy have already used the concept of building a Black Trans-Atlantic that describes the African influence, its culture, art and music, in all the Black communities of Latin America.  The proyect of the Melassa Foundation that has as its primary objective the documentation of Afro-Latino/a roots of Dominican culture was born in October of 2001 when the first visual documentation and creativity workshops were implemented to a group of adolescent women from the community.  Workshop participants learnt how to use photo and video cameras, how to do interviews of social, cultural and ethnographic content in order to collect information on the traditions of the Brotherhood of the Congos of the Holy Spirit who also reside in this community.  The project becomes transnational when the Melassa Foundation organizes two delegations with students from the University of Massachusetts qho, along with the community, explore the African roots of a Latino/a identity.  As some of them have roots in Villa Mella although they live in the United States, they are able to reunite themselves with their own Black origins.

The program later on expands with the participation of exchange students from CIEE-FLACSO (Council of International Exchange that works through the Social Science Latin American University) who every semester collaborate as interns at the Primary School of Mata de Los Indios where the opening of a library and a computer lab with Internet access has been managed along with the Parents and Teachers School Board.  With the arrival of new students and the future participation of students from INTEC (Technological Institute of Santo Domingo) as interns we hope to open the computer lab as an Internet Community Center for residents of the community.  We hope that with easy access to information and a series of seminars and conferences on the use of Internet with a social vision, the waiting of being included in projects of national development will not be necessary any longer, and that the management of the community around the new technologies and the preservation of their ancestral knowledge and survival strategies will give them participation in local, national and global agendas that respect cultural diversity.  Perhaps it is time that we do not commit the same mistakes that were made during Colonization and dictatorships.
 
 

Mata de los Indios,  boomed with color

Cecilia Casamajor
Plastic artist and art critic
casamajor@arteamundo.com
http://www.artea.com.ar/casamajor/

Villa Mella, dense green territory, sits over a red soil of iron oxidant.  Given its ambiguous land whose truth we shall never know, since its secret lies beyond the enigmatic smile of their elders, the community of Mata de Los Indios grows peacefully in the green heart of Villa Mella.  Or we could also affirm that Mata de Los Indios flowers flamboyan blood by fierce combats known to their region, a premonition of the destiny of this colorful land.  What might have been, we will never know, since it happened long before the island was torn in half as two heads of the same snake pulling to each opposite side.  The methaphor fits Villa Mella where “killing” survives the hardous day-to-day, and that of resisting and growing is plenty enough to give birth to sound, mixing them to the shadow of backyards and fire bonds.  Extinguished Indians of dead hair or Black Indians of curly hair intertwin with saints, virgins, and spirits of the shrines, vehemently watched by the devotees.

I arrived in Mata de Los Indios one afternoon to share my teaching experience of color discovery with a group of young women who welcomed me with full smiles and fierce tickling of an enjoyable work.  My task consisted of guiding them, departing from clues that we design together, for the purpose of designing bidimentional compositions based on the photographs that they had taken from the community.  During the work day, they came up with ideas as well as discussed, expressed and gave their opinion.  At the end of the afternoon, the result was exhibited in the showroom of the Community Museum and the neighbors approached to recognize themselves, inbetween laughters and emotion.

 Since then, those images are more than just frozen instants put away in an archive or closet.  They were transformed into reconstructing elements that denote the strength of creativity.  As this was channeled as support of a revision that takes into account the ancestral, it sustains with its own aesthetic the goals of empowerment and full assumption of ethnic, generic and cultural identities.
 
 

Yohanny Moreno
Youth from the Melassa Creativity Group
Resident of the community of Mata de Los Indios, Villa Mella

My experience with the Melassa Foundation in the community of Mata de Los Indios has served me to advance my knowledge since, through such work in the community as interviews, research, documentaries, and self-esteem workshops, it awoke in me the interest of knowing my traditions, my values and the origin of my culture (Black, African).

It is well-known the value that the Brotherhood of the Congos have for me and the people that maintain this tradition like Sixto Minier, the Captain of the Brotherhood and Pío Brazoban, King of the Brotherhood of the Congos of the Holy Spirit.  I feel proud of my Black and African identity because it is also well known that culture and history make nations.  If the town of Villa Mella cannot recognize its own culture in the things we do it will never be able into itself and therefore it will never its history.

Marilyn Brazoban
Youth from the Melassa Creativity Group
Resident of the community of Mata de Los Indios, Villa Mella

My experience with the Melassa Foundation in the community has been good, since we have been able to meet people from other cultures, from various countries with whom we have exchanged knowledges, ideas, thoughts and worked together in the community.  Within the work that we have done we learned how to do interviews and how to dance Hip-Hop through cultural exchange.

We feel happy and proud of being Dominicans and of having been the wonderful result of three cultures, that is, the Indigenous, the Spanish and the African culture.

Mata de Los Indios: A fragmented modernity

Miguel Peña
Art Critic
AICA, International Association of Art Critics of Paris.

The images collected by the lense of Karin Weyland and Alicia Sangro in the community of Mata de Los Indios look to establish a link beyond a simple folkloric curiosity with the environment.  They attempt to penetrate a much more vast universe within a locality that until now has been able to maintain certain levels of autonomy, coexisting with a “modernity” that threatens every movement of dispersing itself with the sweeping force of an irrational rationality that predominates in our Dominican economy and politics.

The day-to-day life in the photographs reflect a women’s solidarity culture faced with scarcity of resources that lives permanently in the community of Mata de Los Indios.  Domestic work, the production of cassabe and fried pork, as well as the elaboration of flags and banners for the Festivitiy of the Holy Spirit, all chores realized by women, reveal a fragemented “reality” of a universe rich in cultural traditions and autonomous realities within a community that has known to preserve and reproduce them as an integral part of their diverse and contradictory day-to-day.

The work of preserving and maintaining the cultural expressions of the community has been their own working, a model in terms of management and self-management of its cultural knowledge, a basic principle for any human group that proposes and works with a vision of continuity.  On the other hand, the work of small groups of researchers has lack the systematization of our contemporary reality that claims for a much broader perspective, beyond the day-to-day, and beyond territorial and imaginary borders.

Expressing itself through its music, popular religiosity and particular values, the work of cultural survival and resistance developed within this small community located at only a few miles from the City of Santo Domingo does not look to establish a museum type relationship with the intellectual community of Santo Domingo neither with the groups of curious people and researchers of this “social reality”, but the natural leaders with whom the community counts are looking to establish a broader approach departing from their own cultural expressions that permeate and transform adapting to a dynamic reality of which they are a part.

The rites of passage of an organized community maintained in Mata de Los Indios the freshness and the innocence inherent of their origins and ancestors.  Their festivities are organized around their own calendar and each one of these festivities has its own specific wage on the herarchic order of the community where all generations participate together, intertwined and in synchronicity with local knowledge.  The dynamism that the festivities and rituals reflect in the photographs of Karin Weyland and Alicia Sangro show the wage of local knowledge while this stands in contradiction with a impoverished social reality by the new policies and proposals of “progress” and “modernity”.

In conclusion, this serie of images that gives sense to a “community” that stands out for its autonomy and self-management opens the door to development from a different praxis that is accompanied by an exlusionary vision regarding the wrong usage of these cultural expressions in search of its own power space that does not intent to take advantage of a guise in the name of “culture”.  Even when it sounds like an utopian way of thinking, a different articulation is necessary for the survival of this cultural minorities that are forgotten and excluded from national public political.