QUE VIVA EL BAJO MUNDO: DEMBOW, RACIALIZATION, AND MUECA IN CAPOTILLO, SANTO DOMINGO

Literature on Latin urban music genres has underacknowledged Dominican dembow’s cultural contributions. Despite dembow’s emerging commercial popularity, scholars have largely ignored the genre, a product of its low socio-economic class origins. Mueca, in particular, is a popular dance among dembow listeners that has gained rapid popularity in recent years. This paper argues that dembow song lyrics that evoke mueca among participants reveal the particular experiences lower-income people confront in Capotillo, Santo Domingo. Capotillo, colloquially known as El bajo mundo (the underground), is a place where conditions of violence, drug consumption, sex, partying, and death continue to shape popular imaginaries of the genre. Through content analysis of song lyrics, music videos, and semi-structured interviews with dembow artists, this paper contributes to our understanding of dembow in three key ways. First, it demonstrates how the performance of mueca serves as a reaction to and resistance against the precariousness and socio-economic instability of the Bajo Mundo. Second, it uncovers the parallels between practices of Afro-syncretic religious expression through its bodily movements. Finally, and at a broader level, it argues for the importance of rooting widely circulated musical performance in its spatial and social contexts.