The bachata

In the Santo Domingo of the early 1920s, the term bachata referred to a type of social gathering. Etymologically, the word bachata, according to Fernando Ortiz, is synonymous with: fun, party, revelry.. “for long hours, between one sip of rum and the next, one dancer or another is passed around, until deep into the night everyone returns home tipsy.”

The evolution was spontaneous and anonymous, the product of an accelerated rural-to-urban migration of the Dominican population.

For domestic workers, guards, farmers, laborers and many others, “the music is a synthesis of a hundred years lived in marginality”. Starting in the 1930s, the type of celebration that the bachata was spread to the bars and to the houses of assignation.

The first bachateros created their own accelerated form of bolero, with lyrics similar to those of the boleros and a nasal way of singing with figures of speech that were often loaded with double meaning.

To these forms of song and music was added a change in the choreography of the dance, including a lifting of the feet at the end of each cycle of the dance’s movements. Juan Luis Guerra recognizes in the bachata “an Antillean bolero”, while others also observe the influence of the guaracha and the son; in the 1980s attention was drawn to the existence of two rhythmic strands of the bachata, one calm and the other accelerated.