The Contradictions of Life in a Developing Nation:

Where the state cannot guarantee the safety of its citizenry, so everyone goes about armed, a people at war with itself.

Where education is in such low esteem that the poor who attend school learn just enough to stay poor, and the rich who attend private school, learn what they already know, that god and government exist to serve their interests.

Where telecommunications are among the best in Latin America, but there is no electricity to run it all.

Where a peon rides into town on a mule, and a baseball player rides out in a hummer.

Where the public realm is an arena in which private interests clash in a drama regulated by the conventions of a telenovela.

Where a president exercises the prerogatives of strong man politics in order to preserve and amplify a democratic state.

Where a pliant god colludes in the failings of mankind, since, after all, whatever happens, it is his will: Si Dios quiere.

Where progress is a gravy train for the elite and an opiate for the masses, stoned by the light of its televised spectacle.

Where ideas are censored not by the Church or State, but by the free market and the exorbitant price of books.

Where the simple virtues of country life are praised above all others, and everyone frantically tries to escape them.

Where white is the color of money, and no one is black.

Where the eternal rhythms of life are still manifest, and may be ended abruptly by the thief who kills for a cell phone.

Where a peasant will regale a guest with a meal worth three times the pocket change he would deny that same guest.

Where a mulatto people obsessively pursue a regimen of self-improvement: they straighten what is curled, they bleach what is blackened, they trade chacabanas for jeans, sombreros for baseball caps. . . . Pero no se puede corregir lo que nace doblao.

Where the beat of palos echoes through the culture, but no one is African.

Where language expresses ideology instead of ideas: like the dealings of government, it is opaque, the better to obscure the relation between intentions and actions. Appearances count for everything and conspicuous consumption is next to godliness. Xmas begins two months early to make more room in the temple for the usurers.




If it is true, as Galeano once wrote, that we are what we do to change ourselves, that our identity consists in the synthesis of our daily contradictions, then life in a developing nation may be said to be the suspension of this process, its paralysis. Thesis and antithesis forever staring at one another across the breach in which we all dangle.

El Bajapanty, or The Total Girlfriend Experience al Tropico

(in a Casa de Chicas, St. Domingo ©jon anderson)

A bajapanty (a typically terse Dominicanism which translates roughly as a panty remover, that is, something which causes the girls to lower their panties for you) usually refers to fancy items, say a sporty car—but just as effective is a fat wallet, which is carried by most gringo tourists, or so believe the majority of girls plying the Conde, the Malecon and other thoroughfares of the capital where an odd assortment of retired fat gringos can found trawling for sex. Many, though not all, of these guys are European types who come to the tropics during the cold weather months in their home towns, and take advantage of the fact that their retirement packages allow them to lead a life of luxury here in a developing nation. They run the gamut from genuinely interesting and adventurous characters to charlatans, pornographers, whoremongers and pedophiles. Though they end up spending many years here, they rarely bother to learn the lingo, nor do they ever travel further than the Colonial Zone, except perhaps to visit a beach occasionally, or one of the resort towns such as Sosúa, where the bars teem with women. They pride themselves on their knowledge of the island and its people; however, except for the few genuine adventurers, they are mostly a bunch of ignoramuses. One exemplary character was a Swiss national whom I met at my favorite watering hole, where you can find a good mix of ex pats and more or less bohemian Dominicans. This particular guy never had much to say and was famously cheap, rarely if ever buying any more than one ginger ale for the few hours he would spend quietly absorbing the atmosphere. But he was friendly enough, and I would talk to him from time to time when we crossed paths. I knew something was up with him, but I couldn’t figure him out until one day when I saw him in the Conde looking rather downcast (the Conde is the main street in the Colonial Zone, converted into a pedestrian mall). I asked him the matter, and he blurted out that he had been arrested by the police and had just been released that moment from jail. This is no small matter, of course, in a country whose legal system is somewhat tenuous, despite well written and sometimes quite progressive laws, and whose prisons are nothing short of hell holes on the order of the Midnight Express. So I was naturally concerned and curious too. While he didn’t want to admit to any shameful crime, he was compelled to talk about his experience, if only because he was clearly rattled and scared. He told me that he had been arrested on trumped up charges of pornography—someone had denounced him to the police, who raided his house and took him away along with his magazine collection—an odd detail, because there really isn´t much pornography to be seen in DR, other than the odd inky broadsheet and a few tattered magazines sold in the street. Well, news always travels quickly there, gossip, or chisme, being the favorite pastime of the citizens. (They even have an apt term for this form of communication, radio bemba or lip radio.) It soon came out that he was in fact a pornographer, and his “magazine collection” was actually photographs of the local girls that he had taken himself and then was presumably selling overseas. He got caught because of his famous stinginess: It seems that he never paid the girls fair compensation for their services, so one of them got pissed and turned him in. He was deported and never seen again. Now the worst failing of any gringo buscando chicas is to be tacaño or cheap. After all, a very good time can be had for nothing more than the price of a good dinner, and all you need to do to meet any girl is to look right into her eyes—chances are they are already staring right into yours. Everytime I walk the Conde, I get propositioned in this way, and with Emily my daughter at my side they seem to be even more interested, since I guess they like the idea of a guy who actually enjoys being out with his offspring instead of merely boasting about it.

Of all the tourist groups I see down there, the French are the ones who really know how to have a good time: they spend freely, they linger over long lunches with good wine and good smokes, and they are rewarded for their bon vivant attitude with the most beautiful morenas that the island has to offer (they infallibly go for the darkest skinned girls). The French women too seem to have a lot of fun, and I have known several to have lost their heads over the abundance of caballeros ready to squire them about (this type is called a “sanky” as in “sanky panky,” what goes on between a foreigner and a Dominican “escort”). One of these went quite nuts one night, again in my favorite watering hole, and was vociferously orgasming as she was passed from the embrace of one Dominican to the next—behavior that elicited nothing more than delighted laughter from the crowd, and which was considered perfectly consistent with local mores, states of ecstasy, whether sexual or demonic, being a part of the normal range of experience down here. Cheapness, however, will condemn the inconsiderate gringo or gringa to a lonely vacation, and in a country where a meaningful glance and an aptly phrased come on will get you a date for the night, your loneliness is truly pathetic. The look, by the way, is just one half of the customary approach: the other part is called the piropo, meant to be an artfully developed conceit expressing one´s admiration for the girl´s attributes and displaying one´s wit, but more often a rather crude compliment along the lines of hey mami, I like your tits. At the 1994 Dominican Parade here in New York, which happened to have been heavily rained upon, one of the dancing cheerleaders received just such a compliment from a crazed teenager: bursting from police barricades against the sidewalk, he ran up to the poor girl, whose nipples had blossomed under the cold and wet air, and yelled at her, ¡ay que me gusta tu pecho! One of the best known piropos is from Cuba, and is even the theme of a salsa song by Henry Fiol: “Mami, si tu cocinas como caminas, me como hasta la raspa” (or “hasta el pegao” as the Puerto Ricans put it. More or less: “baby, if you cook like you walk, I will scrape the pan.” Raspa is rind and pegao is the food that clings to the bottom of the pan). They can be rather elaborate affairs, and in a culture with high illiteracy, oral communication thus predominating, you sometimes hear some wonderfully developed bits of poetry. On the other hand, more often you hear the kind of thing I once caught up in Washington Heights, as a guy lewdly eyed a chesty girl walk by: “si fuera un catarro, me caeria en el medio de tu pecho” (if I were a gurb, I´d roll down the middle of your chest). Now the gringas among you might find this kind of attention undesirable, but among Latinas it is not entirely unwelcome. Once on a bus from Newark Airport, I was talking to a Panamanian stewardess who was lamenting the fact that she had to move out of Washington Heights, having found a nicer apartment elsewhere, because she would miss the daily piropos thrown at her by “her boys.”

I was myself accused of cheapness once, though in my own defense it wasn’t cheapness but lack of desire that prevented me from pulling my wallet out and my pants down. I think I had just begun to date my future wife, if memory serves, so I was not exactly in need of stimulation, but I was very curious about the whorehouses in Santo Domingo, which have become famous enough as to turn our little island into one of the major stops on the World Sex Tour. So when two recently acquired friends suggested that we visit the local casas de chicas I readily agreed. We caught a cab, many of whose drivers serve as middle men for the pimps running the whore houses, and had him give us a tour. The first place we went to was quite famous at the time, an upscale joint in a good neighborhood, called Casa de las Modelos. This was no mere boast. The women were numerous and beautiful. I am inclined to agree with Graham Greene, a notorious philanderer, who opined that the women of Haiti were the most beautiful in the world, so long as we can extend that definition to include the women on my side of the same island. There is something about the genetic mix of these people that tends toward a stunning corporal beauty. The mix of African, European and Indigenous characteristics results in a magnificent physique and a range of skin tones that English is not equipped to categorize. Blanca, india, trigueña, and morena, they range from a sandy white (not pink like myself) to gold and olive and brown and black. For many foreigners the most beautiful are considered the dusky blonds with green eyes.

We were ushered into the living room of a house that could easily have been lifted out of Levitown, right down to the plastic covered sofas and kitschy lamps. The women, who lolled about in different rooms, some draped artfully over the banister, some just sitting, were dressed mostly in form fitting nightgowns or short skirts with bold colors, and they quickly surrounded us. We sat around a small table and were offered beers at an inflated price. While we tried to make small talk, it was rather difficult to feel at ease with so many women standing around us and staring—not because of their extreme desirability, but because their manner was so blunt as to be rather aggressive and even threatening. You pay up, I put out. They wanted what was then about a hundred dollars, a high price for Santo Domingo in those days. You had the option of taking the girl out or having her there in one of the upstairs bedrooms. She was yours for the night. Of course, they were waiting for us to invite them to sit and fool around, but we were still trying to figure out if we wanted to, if the price was right, if in this land of plenty, there might not be a better watering hole with just the right mix of wine, women and song. Myself, I had already been to the Dominican “cabarets” and was used to their casual atmosphere, soaked in rum and tears and sad bachata music, and this more tourist oriented spot, with an almost gringo preoccupation with money, didn’t appeal to me, particularly as I was just along for the ride and wanted a good time without the pressure to buy. I admit I was enamored of the tall slim dyed blond on my left, who stared at me imperiously waiting for me to take her aside, and after I left that night the image of her haughty authority haunted me for some time. She was, within that tight space hedged round with God knows what cares and troubles, completely in command of herself and possessed of a certain power to assuage her embattled ego. Seduction is a mysterious thing: there is something in humankind that desires mastery over things and something else that seeks submission when it perceives real mastery, and the charge that either act gives you is powerfully erotic. It´s no accident that Dionysius´s fervent devotees were maenads. And no doubt that is why the teacher-student relation has erotic potential (and erotic pitfalls, as any professor accused of harassment will tell you). And in the market for sex, who can tell where power begins and ends? The fattest, dullest, loudest gringo controls the girl insofar as he controls the money, and we are taught to despise him for his commodification of the girl and his crass immorality, but in reality he is nothing more than a chicken ready for plucking, he is, as Dominicans say, pan comido, eaten bread, a piece of cake. He is a sucker, whose presence is of no more account than the passing minutes in which more like him are born. This is not to say that the almighty dollar that passes from his limp and sweaty hand does no harm. It fills the stomach and empties the heart. The government has acted on this understanding, and set out to close down the sex shops, varying from nude dance clubs, massage parlors to whore houses:

In a press conference on Tuesday, Attorney General Francisco Dominguez Brito said that prostitution centers in the Dominican Republic will be shut down. He said that centers where nude women dance or exhibit themselves will also be closed. Boca Chica sex parlors were shut down at the start of the year. Gazcue's "massage parlors" were next, with 12 shut down last Thursday in a raid in Gazcue and the Zona Universitaria. Some 102 women and 28 men were arrested in the raid.

As reported in El Nacional, Dominguez Brito said that there are many people that take advantage of poverty here to exploit women, and as a consequence the DR is known as a sex destination. He said the practice is against the dignity of the country and that of Dominican women, and thus the reason why he entrusted the prosecutors with taking drastic measures. . . He is against the DR being promoted abroad as a sex destination, and said this is why all the sex parlors will be closed.

District attorney prosecutors said that in the raid in Gazcue, drugs, synthetic penises, erotic chairs and handcuffs for sadomasochistic acts were found. Other centers shut down were La Reyna Cubana, Cisnes Club, Relax, Elegante Center, Estefany Club located on Santiago, Leonor de Ovando, Danae, Cervantes, Hermanos Deligne, Socorro Sanchez, Independencia and Dr. Delgado streets in Gazcue.

I would like to know what an “erotic chair” is. . . . I should clarify here that the raids were undertaken not to stamp out prostitution, but to put a stop to other illegal activities such as drugs. As Jorge Subero Isa, president of the Supreme Court of Justice, noted, “In our country, prostitution is still not an illegal act, but an act that is tolerated by society.” Tolerated, or rather, indulged with glee. This administration raided Boca Chica and Sosúa the last time they were in office, and the activity returned once they left office, so it will probably be up and running again soon. Pimps scour the countryside for naive girls, minors, desperate to change their lives: a certain Cristina Mendoza Coronado was among those arrested. She would bring minors from Cotui to the capital, promising them a better life, and then put them to work. It is a deeply rooted tradition, which has had a huge impetus from the burgeoning tourist industry, and the penalties for this crime are not severe: pimping earns you a sentence of six months to three years in prison and a fine of 150,000 pesos (about 5000 dollars). And there is police connivance. The Boca Chica Association, for example, argues that the prosecutors are going about this all wrong and need to tackle the combined power of the National and Tourist police in addition to the pimps. The police are smack in the middle of all this and look on it with a wink and a smile. One night coming back from the Colonial Zone with my wife, a bunch of cops passing in a car yelled out, “¡sanky panky!" I didn’t take kindly to their implication, but so it goes. I was surprised to learn, however, that my own neighborhood, Gazcue, was a center of this activity—I knew there were clubs, but I didn’t realize the extent of the operations. Gazcue is the garden neighborhood created by Trujillo and his henchmen, a bastion of the old middle class, and despite its decline, still a charming and attractive area to live. Quite expensive too. The homes were built to show off one´s wealth and evidence of Trujillo´s favor under the old regime, and the best of them had spacious yards filled with flowering trees and abundant shade. Ironically Gazcue proved to be the old tyrant´s final resting place for a short while after his assassination, since the tyrannicides fled there after killing him, taking his body with them in the trunk of an old chevy. The chevy was parked overnight just a few blocks from where I now reside. The streets named in this news flash define the borders of the best part of the neighborhood, called La Primavera. I never guessed as I strolled with my daughter down the leafy boulevards that the stately houses I daily admired and lusted after were fronts for prostitution. So much for bourgeois respectability. But nothing down here is as it seems.

The first time I had ever been to a cabaret, I was dragged along on what I initially thought was just a pub crawl with the local photojournalists. I had gone down to cover the historic ´96 elections, and a group of incredibly generous photogs took me under their wing, gave me food, shelter, and my own jeep and driver so that I could get everything without a hassle. I was impressed. Anyway, on the first day they felt like testing me, so off we went to some bar in a sleazy part of town. We entered a smallish place with a dance floor in the middle, bar in the back, walls with mirrors all round and a disco globe and lights on the ceiling. We sat in a corner, and I noticed across from us (already at about 4 or 5 o´clock in the evening) there were a few bored girls sitting on chairs. I was naïve enough not to recognize where I was until they started to get up, once we had ordered big bottles of beer, and come over to sit with us. One of them made a beeline for me, the only gringo ($) in the joint, and we had fun that night dancing and drinking. Bachata in those days, not so long ago, was slower and more mournful, made for sad thoughts and close dances (bien pegao, as they say). As it had gotten quite late, I realized that I had to make a decision. I had a girlfriend back home, and I didn’t really want to do this even though it was easy enough and without strings. My new friend Ignacio, who also had a girlfriend at the time, and unusual for a Dominican, decided not to partake, told me that if I were going any further with this there were rooms above the dance hall, but sternly admonished, “usa un condón”; and then he explained that I could merely pay the woman for the dancing, sort of like taxi dancers in the past. All in all, a better deal for the women, if you ask me, since they do not have to exchange any body fluids more potent than a few drunken tears elicited by the amargo of the bachata.

Though the women at the Casa de las Modelos were alluring, the ambience was cold and uninviting, so we pushed off in search of something more Dominican in flavor, which we found only about ten minutes away by taxi. This place, in a worse neighborhood, close by the National Cemetery over on the Maximo Gomez, had a kitschy pink heart over the doorway, a small bar at the entrance, and a small sala where the women sat on dilapidated sofas. This place had more louche charm than the upscale Casa de las Modelos: it was run down, the women were dressed down and worn out, and the house was cramped and claustrophobic. There was a small child in a bedroom just off the sala where we all sat in a tight circle, and you could tell that this group operated as a kind of dysfunctional family, the bartender-pimp being the cock of the walk in this particular barnyard. Despite his effusive friendliness, you could sense a steely hardness underneath, you knew that this man took no shit from anybody. He was bantamweight, but sinewy and hard. And he was sure to have a gun under the bar.

There wasn’t much for us to do except sit and drink, since there wasn’t room for a dance floor. The women surrounded us, the space being so small our knees knocked together. They waited for us to make a move while we were served beer, and one of my companions decided that he would have a go at one of them. Thus ensued a serious conversation about the relative merits of the various women, and the consensus fell upon a younger member, india and rather pretty. Negotiations were quick and pointed. He settled and paid the price, took her to a small room in the back, in an area separated from us by a curtain, and proceeded to business. It seemed a rather soulless affair, but the point is simply for one to get off and the other to get paid. The room is small, unadorned, with faded paint, and lit by ugly fluorescent bulbs. The girl sits on the bed, beckons you over, washes your penis, fellates you, and then fucks you. The whole thing doesn’t take long, and there is little conversation, if you don’t speak Spanish. Meanwhile the rest of us waited outside, while the girls alternately flirted and insulted us, waiting to see if someone would buy some of their time, or at least buy them a beer. It was at this point that I was called cheap, but I just laughed and we all drank more beer. If I had had better command of Spanish at the time, the whole thing would have been more fun, because regardless of the situation a Dominican always appreciates someone who can animate them with jokes and pleasantries. This social talent, the gift of gab, is highly prized and earns you the title of buena gente, or better yet muy buena gente, if you are really good at entertaining the people.

When our friend reappeared we paid our bar bill, collected our driver, and took off for one more spot. This time the driver took us to a cabaret, with a fair sized dance floor and mirrors on all the walls. But it was late and the place was empty. There were a few women sprawled on some tables, but the lights were on, and they were in the process of closing up. We sat down and were joined by a few unattractive but friendly stragglers, who looked all the more garish in the nasty flourescent lighting. With the lights full on, I danced with one of them under a tiny disco ball, the mirrors filling the forlorn room with our off kilter reflections. It was a fast merengue, strictly regulating the swaying of the hips with its tightly repeated pattern, one two, one two, one two. But the insistent rhythm failed to animate anyone, the conversation, the dance, the mechanical lifting of bottles to lips were all perfunctory by now. At some point it was decided that we had had enough, and we sauntered out, leaving the women simultaneously disappointed and relieved, since they didn’t really make any money off us, but they could finally get some shuteye.

If you are having trouble finding women (and you would have to be pretty clueless), there are plenty of tourist guides who will be happy to take you under their wing. You can find them hanging around the Parque Colon, where they will pounce on you: “ que busca, chicas? Cambio de dinero? Regalos?” The more enterprising among them have learned some English, which they pronounce in that stereotyped Hollywood bad guy Mex style: “hey my frein´ wha jew wan? Jew wan girrrls? Jew wan cheeeks?” I especially love the money changers, who approach you as though offering the most hellish of sinful delights. They hiss furtive promises of inflated exchange rates, “pssssssst, dólares, dólares, trentaicinco por uno!” while passing fat rolls of pesos alluringly in front of your face. These down at heels Virgils will conduct you through the capital´s various levels of hell for a price, the advantage being that since you are their meal ticket, they will be sure to protect you should you get into trouble. I fell in with one guy I still see from time to time in the area, a little guy with a deep bass voice, and was steered to a place up on the hill near the Duarte, which overlooks the colonial zone. This is a notorious area known for its tigueres, whores, and thieves. It is the refuge of illegal Haitians, a makeshift Chinatown, and a bargain basement shopping district. At its head is the old Mercado Modelo, the “model” art deco style market constructed by Trujillo, where I go daily to buy my chickens and vegetables, and my wife goes to purchase the various articles required by the misterios (votive candles and such). This was the area outside the colonial city walls, where the indians and slaves and white trash of the colony lived and worked. A department store called La Sirena (mermaid) sits right over the original mines where many Tainos toiled and died. In certain aisles you find yourself treading on transparent plastic flooring, through the scuffed surface of which can be seen the remains of these mines. It is also home to what was once one of the most beautiful plazas, the Parque Enriquillo, named for the great mestizo rebel slave, who fought the colonialists to a draw and was allowed to live in peace in his desert stronghold in the southwest. Each town in the Dominican Republic has a central park with a gazebo at its center. These are nice examples of public architecture, and Enriquillo is, or rather was, quite attractive, but the park is in very sad shape these days. The municipal government had closed it up in order to renovate it, but when they finally took down the barriers, surprise, surprise, absolutely nothing had been done. But the money had certainly been spent! Anyway, we entered a typical cinder block house, with a bar and fairly commodious dance floor and seating area up front and an even larger room in back, a kind of hall with pokey dark rooms along the sides where you would take the girl of your choice to do the deed. It reminded me of the brothel I had seen at Herculaneum, but much much bigger. This place was also devoid of the charming little pornographic murals placed above the lintel of each doorway in the Roman brothel, but it did have plenty of graffiti, which I could more easily read than the Latin ones in Herculaneum. This being the early afternoon, there was no music and no crowd. Two women and the bartender/bouncer, a heavily built and rather menacing character despite his gruff camaraderie, made up the entire company. We sat down at a table, ordered some beers and tried to make conversation, which was strained because of my poor Spanish at the time and my apprehension that they might just decide to jump me, being a quicker means of achieving their ends, as it became increasingly apparent that I was only there to snap some pix and had no interest in emptying my wallet, thin as it was. But in fact they were pretty accommodating, since my presence alleviated their boredom, and we spent the afternoon getting to know one another. I left a couple hours later, and the only drawback of the time spent there was when my guide put the bite on me, and though I don’t remember what I gave him, I am sure that I overpaid him outrageously. Admittedly, my first couple years travelling to the island I was pan comido: I once had to get from one end of the city to the other, a city which sprawls disconcertingly, and without knowledge of the public transit system, I stood there on the street, my finger sticking out, but without any clue as to the system of gestures needed to get me to my destination, so the conchos passed me by. But one tiguere who was just driving by in his car and had no connection whatsoever to the transit industry, decided to pluck this little chick´s feathers clean, and took me where I was going. I think I paid him 500 pesos for a trip which should have cost only about 6! Course, I was still thinking in terms of a New York cab fare, which was ludicrous but my only meaningful reference at the time, so I figured I didn’t do too badly. My hostess at the other end however was so dismayed to hear how badly I had been cheated that she made sure I caught the right concho on the return journey, walking me directly to the avenue and speaking with the chofer to make sure he would take me safely home.

Of course, many sex tourists opt for the more informal relation that can be had simply by walking down one of the main thoroughfares close to the Colonial Zone, the Malecon, or the Conde. A variety of women can be found there, keeping an eye out for the opportune foreigner. They go by various names: cueros (“skins,” I guess because they work in the nude), putas (whores), patas calientes (“hot legs” which basically refers to any women who chase after men), buscavidas (sort of like gold digger, someone who seeks a living), the orotund mujer de la vida mala, and the relatively benign chicas (“chicks”). I imagine that the younger ones do so in a spirit of longing and hope: they want something different, something exciting and novel, a bit of the world beyond their geographic and conceptual borders. They are not exactly vicious; rather, they live by a utilitarian morality that sensibly abjures starvation and heaps abuse on the pendeja (cowardly fool) who fails to take advantage of the opportunities that fate deposits in one´s path. After all, you would be a fool not to capitalize on your physical assets, the only commodity you have any ostensible control over, and which fetches a nice price in the market. They practice a kind of serial monogamy, because while the affair lasts they give it their all, they play the girlfriend with consummate attention to details. They are warm and friendly, they look after you, they clean your house, dress you, see to your needs. In return, they are treated to nice restaurants; gifts of cash, clothes, trinkets; attention from men presumably more worldly than the run of Dominicans these women are likely to know. They live for a brief period outside the daily grind of worry about money, lack of opportunity, and sheer boredom. The mere possibility of change is inconceivable for these girls, except in the form of a fairytale rescue by a foreign prince, who more often than not turns out to be an idiot Emperor parading about in a ludicrous suit of new clothes. I know of several Europeans (the Americans never stick around very long) who have fathered children, and occasionally they pay for clothing or food, but they meet their obligations in a desultory fashion. Sometimes you find a tourist who does marry the girl, but he is generally young and blind and doesn’t know what he is getting into. I met an Iowan once who had come to Puerto Plata for a vacation and found a woman at a bar. The encounter blew his mind as well as his wad. He married her, returned to the States in order to start the process of repatriating her, only to discover that such marriages, however legal they may be, are not esteemed by the INS. An illegal immigrant stateside has a better chance of getting a green card, however phony the marriage, then a would be immigrant legally married to a solvent American who genuinely wishes to preserve the union. Of course, they find all kinds of ways to emigrate—they acquire false papers, they get stateside relations to vouch for them, they get hold of a tourist visa and then overstay the allotted time, while the more desperate flee to Puerto Rico in flimsy boats called yolas that often capsize, thus delivering a tempting snack to the sharks that patrol the Mona Canal. Being a rather naïve sort, however, this Iowan worked within the system and thus was stalled by the INS. When I met him, a year had already passed, and he still had not managed to get the girl out of St. Domingo. It made me wonder about the wisdom of his course: she was an out and out tiguera, holding tight onto this walking exit visa. He spoke no Spanish, and she no English, so they couldn’t communicate and hence didn’t really know each other. And I asked myself, what would this woman do once she got to rural Iowa, with no one to talk to, nothing of her culture present in her new surroundings, and no concept of the vast country in which she would eventually reside. I imagine that once across the sea, she would leave him and light out for New York. But I never found out.

At times one hears of a story with a happy ending, and this is the case with a friend of ours, who was in fact the means whereby I met my wife. Judith comes from a very poor Haitian-Dominican family in Haina, a seaport close by the capital and one of the original sites of sugar production on the island (hence the reason, I suspect, for the arrival of Judith´s forebears to the area). The family is quite colorful, all its members typically exuberant and warm Caribbeans. Her mother is a mambo (Haitian voodoo priestess) and from time to time throws a big party in honor of the various saints—the last I attended was a party in honor of San Rafael, where there was no less than three witches in attendance. I will save that narrative for another time. When I met Judith she was about twenty nine and had two boys, both of whom quite intelligent and sweet, though undersized and skinny for lack of a proper diet and medical care. I became their unofficial papi, as their own fathers had pretty much given up on providing any real support. Haina is a dreadful place, its muddy streets clogged with traffic, its air choked with exhaust fumes and dust, its streets converted into a huge sewer when the tropical rains flood the area. There is no respite for your lungs, and none for your ears either with the swarm of pasolas and motós buzzing up and down the streets. As there is little work to be found here, Judith, like many young women, looked toward the capital to provide some means of support, and she took a succession of poorly paying jobs as a cashier or waitress. This last post paid off, at least initially, because she came into contact with foreigners and thus could hope to find someone to help her with her kids. She latched onto a fellow traveler I had met in a hotel and who had decided to buy a house in the colonial zone (right on the same street where the "Good Shepherd" goes in search of his prodigal son adrift in "Africa," and where Michael Corleone witnesses the assassination of a “Cuban” police officer, a street that also provided the scenery for one of Celiz Cruz´s last videos). He would dine at the restaurant where Judith worked, located right on the Plaza de España across from El Alcázar de Colon, the home of Diego Colon, one-time governor of Hispaniola and Columbus´s son. A deal was struck between them, the terms of which are disputed, and she moved in as his housekeeper and lover. The children were not part of the deal, though they benefitted indirectly from the money that passed from his wallet to her pocket. But relations were strained because of their very different ideas of the benefits to be gotten from the liaison. Eventually things got so bad that she was banned from the house, after she tried to impregnate herself with a disposed condom and then steal money. She didn’t give up without a fight: at one point she showed up at the house with a policeman in tow, claiming that she was pregnant and the putative father had abandoned her. Some time around then I became steward of the house in the owner´s absence, and I remember that she hit me up for 5000 pesos, a considerable sum, ostensibly for a doctor´s examination, but I really don’t know where the money went. Things calmed down afterward, and we continued to see her as a friend. She scraped by with odd jobs. I remember visiting her at her place in the back of a callejon leading off the main drag in Haina. She lived with one of her sons, Brian, in a one-room unpainted, unfinished concrete block house, the living space divided by sheets into dining room, kitchen and bedroom. We brought her a standing fan as a present, but as there was often no electricity, there would still be many hot sleepless nights and hot sleepy days. Poor homes have no ventilation. The day we visited, Brian´s blood father (papa de sangre) joined us for lunch. He displayed considerable pride about his son, whom he treated affectionately but with a tendency to forget him when the child was outside his field of vision, as though dad were suffering from attention deficit disorder. I have encountered this attitude many times: the father proud of his offspring, insofar as they are evidence of dad´s fecundity, powers of seduction, and manifest paternity—this last an important detail, for if the simulacra they engender do not in fact present a little image of the sire, then he will be derided as a pendejo who was gulled into caring for someone else´s offspring. Not that they do much of the actual caring, for they are mostly absentee dads, as with the case before me. This particular tiguere was happy to see me there too, because he knew that Judith would play me for a pendejo and get help when the need arose, though to her credit she never abused this privilege. He was a motoconchista—a motó is a little motorbike with a geared transmission, one step up from a pasola (moped) which has no gears. In most Dominican towns, if you want to get around without walking, you are forced to make use of the motóres, gangs of which hang around the hotels, the main entrance to the town, the market, in short all the important points of transit. You pay them six pesos (now ten), hop on the tiny back seat (barely enough for the ample North American backside, but often used to carry whole Dominican families), and they speed off, careening crazily through the traffic. A law was passed requiring the motoconchistas to wear a helmet, but they often don’t, and there is no helmet for the passenger unless you happen to have one yourself, so God help you if you crash or fall off, which does happen from time to time. With all the potholes and sandtraps in your way, you are lucky if you make it to your destination unharmed, but the drivers are usually very adept at providing a smooth ride, and the ability to weave through the stalled traffic is undoubtedly an advantage. Despite their ability to zip through town, most motoconchistas spend a good part of the day shooting the shit parked under a bit of shade somewhere, since there aren´t enough passengers for the thousands of motóres trawling the streets. It is easy and cheap to set yourself up in business, cheaper than acquiring a colmado or other such business. But as a result, there are far too many of them, and the competition for paying customers is stiff. Brian´s father drove just one of the many squealing bikes whose fumes choked and blinded the residents of Haina. The limits of his earning power, combined with his youth and fecklessness, discounted him as a serious partner for Judith, and she continued to look for a suitable foreigner. After all, two of her sisters had fished the tourist zones successfully and come up with good husband material. Her persistence eventually paid off: this year she married an Italian she met at her last job and moved to Italy. Her two sons are still in Haina, but she plans to retrieve them soon.

The happy endings are few and far between, so it is no surprise that the older women plying the tourist zones are cynical, they know there is almost no chance of altering their fate by dating foreigners, so they take the short view: live for today, don´t worry be happy. But it´s a pretty pathetic version of the timeworn carpe diem theme. They don’t exactly seize the day; they lazily grab hold of whatever passes close and offers little resistance. Actually, one of them seized hold of my balls once down on the Malecon. I walked there from my hotel one night to photograph the election crowds who traditionally gather along the famous avenue. At that time the man who had inherited power from Trujillo, Joaquin Balaguer, was still campaigning, and his acolytes traditionally took charge of the Malecon every week just before the actual elections—a perfect example of Balaguer´s usual political acumen, for by putting on a raucous display of popular support in such a conspicuous spot, he made it seem as though he was a shoe-in. He survived for half a century basically through surreptitious strategems (including assassination) and by coopting his opponents. (More on this interesting character in a subsequent chapter.) The parade was out in full force, cars and trucks full of people, women shaking their booties, guys honking their horns in appreciation, couples dancing. As I arrived at the corner, a woman came out of the shadows and without missing a beat grabbed hold of my crotch, looked me in the eye, and mouthed some crude compliment intended to excite my interest. I was put off by her approach, which lacked a certain coy seductiveness let´s say, as she was all business, and I was apprehensive about my nuts, which she continued to hold onto with no apparent desire to let me go, so I politely deflected her proposition, she released me, and I continued on to the parade.

I should insert a little history lesson here in order to contextualize my observations and to give you a sense of the kind of island I live on. Most people do not realize it, but when Dominicans celebrate their independence, they celebrate on two distinctive dates, the more important holiday being independence from Haiti, not from Spain, as they had already achieved a kind of de facto independence through the utter neglect of the imperial fatherland, who had long ago shifted its interest to Cuba, Mexico and South America. After Haiti´s legendary slave uprising, a truly heroic endeavor that rightly earns everyone´s respect despite the lamentable lack of leadership worthy of that tradition in the country today—after their liberation, the slave army decided to spread the revolution to the Spanish side of the island, with the usual regrettable results: just as with France and with Russia, the revolution turned into an imperialist enterprise, and the Haitians kept Saint Domingue (as they dubbed it) under their thumb for forty years. When the Dominicans finally liberated the country, their strong men (caudillos) in turn fought amongst themselves for control of it: agriculturalists in the Cibao and cattlemen of the East battled each other, but the cattlemen had a military genius named Santana to lead them, and whenever the Haitians invaded in subsequent attempts to reconquer the island, Santana was inevitably called upon to rout them. But he too was afraid of the Haitians, so he decided to sell back the island to Spain, figuring that Spain could protect the underpopulated colony (Haiti at the time had over 400,000 people while the Dominicans numbered something like 60,000. The only reason Santana fought off the numerically superior Haitians is that he could use the various cordilleras, or mountain ranges, as defensive walls from which he could swoop down guerilla style and harry the invaders). So Spain accepted and immediately started again to impose its rigid strictures on the people, who began to chafe under the disapproving eye of these martinets. The straw that broke the burro´s back in this case was, as you can well believe after reading this far, the Church´s denunciation of the loose sexual mores of the Dominicans, most of whom were not legally married and whose flouting of the Church´s most sacred institution of marriage (one of the sacraments, for those of you who are not Catholic), was causing much consternation among the authorities, who acted quickly and unthinkingly to curb the unruly mulattoes. The Dominicans, God bless them, have always had a somewhat casual attitude toward such rules, and their forthright, natural and easygoing sexuality was in jeopardy. So they revolted. They swept the Spaniards from their shores, and poor Santana was forced to shoot himself in his beautiful colonial house on the corner of Hostos and Salomé Ureña.

These peculiar informal relationships exist to this day among Dominicans as well as between Dominicans and foreigners, and a good example of this can be seen in the history of my brother-in-law´s relation with his novia. Nicknamed Morené, for her dark skin, she recently “went through the window”—or eloped informally, so to speak. It came about in this manner: Morené lived in a wooden shack on a conuco, or small farm, at the back of our little village, and because it is a bit off the beaten path, along a dirt road that skirts farm fields and grazing land, it is called “Nueva Yol” (New York). Whenever you go to visit there, you tell people, I am going to New York. Her mother is known to be a bit crazy, but maybe she is crazy like a fox—she certainly is not as crazy as our next door neighbors, one of whom I think suffers from Tourette´s syndrome and periodically shouts obscenities and blasphemes God, while the other is a reputed witch (bruja) gone over to the dark side and has a toddler she named San Elias. (San Elias is sort of the Dominican Baron of the Cemetery, so it is a bit like naming your child after Damien in The Omen.) Anyway, Morené´s mother may be more cunning than crazy because it turns out that through her strategem she was able to secure a place for her daughter in our household in Bonao. José, my brother in law, a fairly serious character for a Dominican, with leanings toward Pentacostalism, had been seeing her for some time, but has nursed a long hidden passion for a neighbor whose family is rather well off. Since the girl is wealthier than José, his pride won´t let him go out with her, because he doesn´t want people gossiping about how he is being “maintained” by his girlfriend. So he has been seeing Morené, who understandably got tired of waiting around for José to make a definitive move, and made it for him. One day she arrived at our house and told José and his mother that she was pregnant and had been kicked out by her mom. Fait accompli: she moved in, and they took over the bedroom reserved for me and my wife (which irritated Ada no end, since the house in Bonao is by right her own). About a week later, however, we learned the truth. Morené´s mom came to visit her daughter, and Estela (my mother-in-law) politely absented herself ostensibly to allow them some privacy to resolve their differences, but in fact she snuck out back and listened through the window. Far from fighting, Morené and her mom were congratulating each other on how well their plan had worked: she wasn´t pregnant and she hadn´t fought with her mom, but by claiming she had done so, Morené had secured a new home, a husband, and new status in the village. Though no formal ceremony took place, she and José were now in fact “married.” Estela was fit to be tied, and I am told that she went about for the rest of the week muttering and cursing under her breath, but she couldn’t confront the couple with what she had learned, because that would mean admitting that she had eavesdropped, that she had been outfoxed by her daughter in law, and thus that she was a pendeja, which one can never admit to. Estela has a very high reputation in the village, and one´s reputation has to be closely guarded. Moreover, Estela was loath to interfere in her son´s affairs, nor did she wish to deliver bad news, for all the obvious consequences that would ensue. So she bore it in silence, and she and Morené somehow have been living under a rather testy truce. That truce was shattered when José discovered that Morené was “pegandole los cuernos”—clapping the horns on him, cuckolding him. Some guy who has a farm nearby Nueva Yol was meeting her secretly. He apparently had a intermediary who was carrying messages back and forth between them. The neighbors, as always, already knew all about the affair and several of them had told José, who fobbed it off, loose talk being common and often mistaken; but he took the precaution one day of following Morené about, and sure enough he caught them meeting clandestinely. Apparently he did nothing about it, but some time later at the bar the messenger was there drinking and flirting with Morené, so José decided that enough was enough, and popped him upside the head a few times. That led to a huge confrontation between José and Morené, a fight that ended up lasting for a fortnight, with daily skirmishes providing the delighted neighbors with more entertainment than they have had since the last blood feud which claimed a few lives and ended with the banishing of a whole family. The would-be lover swore revenge for the insult done to his go-between, and threatened to shoot José. So Neno, my other brother-in-law, told everyone that he would start packing his pistol, because family was family, and he wasn’t going to allow anyone to shoot one of his own. Luckily, things calmed down, and there was no more talk of guns—which all sounds comical enough, but the truth is that such threats have to be taken seriously. However, with José and Morené at war, there was no peace at home. José decamped and was staying with Neno and his family, while Morené refused to leave Ada´s house, where she continued to live under the baleful eye of Estela. Morené said she wouldn´t budge because José had yet to buy her a house and a car. At this point I am sure that you are all staring at the page with raised eyebrows. Let me try to explain: in Santo Domingo the custom is to provide your wife with a house and whatever material comforts you can afford. A wife who doesn’t receive such tribute will be considered by the community a worthless creature, good for nothing, because if the husband does not fulfill his obligations they will surmise that she has done something to have earned his disapproval. So I imagine that Morené, who stoutly denies the existence of a tryst, was anxious to procure these tokens of José´s esteem in order to salvage her reputation and come out of this with some material compensation, because the relationship was beyond repair. Also, just as clearly, she is nuts! As all the neighborhood commentators agree. Anyway, the camps were at a stalemate, the transistors on the communal radio bemba overheated with so much chisme, and poor José was holed up at Neno´s without any clue as to how to resolve the matter. Morené showed up daily and shouted at him, he shouted back or tried to hide, and she would then storm off to our house in a funk. In the end she packed her bag, and my wife and Neno´s brother Luis drove her back to her casucho. I strongly suspect that we haven´t seen the last of her.

I will leave you with one final example of the relations that prevail in my adopted home. Across the hall from our apartment lived a heavy set morena and her infant white daughter. She was a good neighbor and is still a friend of ours, though she moved to another apartment in the same condominium. To this day, though, we call her la vecina (the neighbor). Her origins are humble, and she betrays all the somewhat comical pretensions of the arriviste: after having espied the contents of my apartment when we first were getting to know one another, she went right ahead and copied the layout. My living room is a kind of museum, filled with various things I have collected over the course of my half century on this earth, including pattachitra paintings from India, Taino artefacts, oriental rugs and what not—even a trapiche cut from pure mahogany, which was used in past centuries for grinding sugar cane. The purpose is not so much decorative as archival, the objects being touchstones of my various interests. Our neighbor, however, decided that the arrangement was classy, and copied it right down to the rugs, which are rarely seen in tropical households. The effect, however, was entirely off the mark, since she filled the space with ugly machine made carpets and dreadful objets d´arts, the sort of thing that is very common down there: Caribbean sunsets, flower girls, and beaches. Instead of a collection of objects rendering homage to the idea of an artisanal, pre-industrial culture, she had assembled a bunch of mass-produced kitsch—but the arrangement was practically a mirror image of my own! Thankfully, when she moved she decorated her new apartment with a different motif, and in fact it is quite a handsome place now. But her bourgeois pretensions remain a strong influence on her comportment. So much so that she has turned her daughter, who is only about four years old, into a basket case. Apparently she kept after the girl to behave in a decorous and ladylike fashion, in particular emphasizing the need to keep one´s legs crossed or closed and never to let anyone touch her “popola.” (I hope I don’t have to translate that one!) But she was rather too insistent, as it so happens, and one day she received a call from the girl´s pre-school, telling her that they were having trouble with the poor girl, who refused to dress or bathe at the school, fearing, I suppose, that someone should take unfair advantage of her popola. (The children who attend pre-school arrive wearing a uniform, but after lunch they all bathe and change because after all it is very hot and humid there.) The headmistress recommended that the neighbor take the mixed up kid to a psychologist and have her straightened out. She did so, but judging by her persistent warnings to protect the popola at all cost, which continue to this day, I fear that the little girl will never make it out of adolescence intact.

At any rate, this woman posed something of a mystery to us, which my wife immediately solved even before knowing all the facts. We would always see her, the nanny, and the daughter, with whom Emily would play from time to time, but we almost never saw the husband, a white guy who dressed expensively. From time to time we would catch him coming and going late at night or at dawn, but he was not to be seen during the day. The neighbor would explain that he was a travelling salesman, and thus was rarely at home. Though not an unlikely situation, as I myself am often forced to be away from home, my wife saw right through it and surmised that in fact the neighbor was a kept woman. And so she is. It slipped out when she once asked Ada if in truth she really was married to me, obviously wondering and with complete justification whether we had the same arrangement as the neighbor did, since most liaisons between foreigners and Dominicans are makeshift affairs of convenience. When Ada answered that in fact we were really and legally married, the neighbor was chagrined to learn this, and Ada quickly surmised that the neighbor´s “marriage” was bogus. The “husband” in fact has a legal wife, probably india, possibly blanca, but certainly not black, and he shuttles back and forth between the two families when he is not at work. Depending on your point of view, he is either an adulterer or a bigamist (possibly a polygamist, though where he gets the energy I can´t imagine), but he certainly makes the best of a good thing. He owns a very lucrative and well known retail business in gold jewelry, the bajapanty to end all bajapantys, so he can afford his double life. I will say this for him, he has certainly fulfilled all his obligations toward our neighbor, having bought her an apartment in our condominium, clothing, food, schooling for the little girl, and a huge SUV, which she wrecked, never having bothered to learn to drive or get a valid license. And la vecina, to give her her due, assiduously plays the part of the good wife. Morality is nothing if not adaptable, at least insofar as its appearance, and in a society which is regulated much along the lines of what anthropologists used to call “shame culture” (as opposed to the hypothetical “guilt culture” found in developed Protestant nations), appearances do count for a lot. There is a very funny merengue from the early 90s about a guy who wants to buy his friend´s girlfriend because of the ideal wifely qualities she possesses. It provides an interesting list of things that the average Dominican male looks for:

Te compro tu novia,
Pues tu me has dicho como es ella
Y me gustó la información
Te la compro
No voy a regatear el precio, dime pronto el valor
Te la compro
No creo que sangrie cara, aunque cueste un millon

Pues tu me has dicho
Que es linda, y apasionada
Que es buena, [y ???]
No cela nunca por nada
Y sabe hacerlo todo en la casa
No sale ni a la esquina
No habla con la vecina
No gasta, y economiza
Y todo lo resuelve tranquila
Vendela, Vendela
O dile a su madre que me fabrique otra igualita
Vendela, Vendela
Si quiere´ una mia, por ella te las cambio toditas

[I´ll buy your girlfriend, since you´ve told me what she´s like and I liked what I heard, I´ll buy her, I wont haggle over the price, tell me her value now, I´ll buy her, I don’t think you´ll be bleeding me much though she cost a million. You´ve told me that she´s pretty, passionate, good [???], never gets jealous, and knows how to do all the housework, she never goes out not even to the corner, doesn’t gossip with the neighbor, doesn´t spend but saves, and doesn’t fight. So sell her, sell her, or tell her mother to make me one just like her. Sell her, sell her, If you want one of mine I will trade you them all for her.]


Like most merengues, it is all meant in fun, and like most jokes there is a hard kernel of truth at the center. La vecina certainly conforms to the spirit and most of the letter of this ditty, so I guess in effect she is a good wife. She is certainly a good neighbor.

The New Background on this Blog

I have been hacking away at this thing as you can see. The basic template for this blog is called scribe. I like the paper image but the background was a bit too staid for my taste, and a number of people are using this template (T.O.P. among others), so I decided it was time to customize it some more. You may balk at the bold design, but it is in keeping with the desktop theme of the template. The design comes from an antique Tekke Hatchlu or Engsi rug, used by the Turk tribes inside their Yurts to divide up spaces. When the Russians finally conquered these nomads, their rugs became prized possessions of the bourgeoisie back in Europe. Some of them were used to cover writing desks, just as I have it here. This particular Engsi, which hangs in my office, was made by some Tekke tribeswoman in the 1880s on a simple horizontal loom, with consummate skill. The knots are barely visible to the eye, the work is so fine. These anonymous weavers were not only skilled craftswomen, they were great artists.

A Note on El Camino de los Negros

The log entry below is my first experiment of its kind in hacking this template and rearranging matters so that i can play with combining text and imagery in more interesting ways. What I am aiming for is to get two (or more) narratives running alongside one another while maintaining their independence. For this I had to come up with a new layout so that different bits of text could acquire separate status, and the different shapes could all cooperate while they maintained distinct trajectories. These are photo-essays, photo/grams, ideas written in light and shadow and letters. In the future I hope to add more photos to the essays that have none as yet, as well as to push these formal matters to whatever limits I can devise.

While I may be taxing the patience of the average blog reader who thus far is accustomed to briefer and less demanding reads, I see no reason not to prod them a little bit in the hopes that their habits have not calcified and that they would naturally seek the same intellectual quality that they demand of the material they find between the covers of a book. Time will tell. It always does.

El Camino de los Negros

"an old brujo was asked about the nature of his practice, and he said, "Well, the white people have their way, but this is the way of black people."

A one room shack in a barrio of San Juan where a woman mourns the loss of her only son, her only solace in a life of almost total deprivation. Death here is a common fact, no more remarkable than the open door through which you pass to escape the close walls of the hovel.


Children in the
barrios sing,

"se murió pa' tí
se murió pa' mí,
Jesús Cristo
se murió así"







The people arrive early to consult with the bruja. Eroánia prepares her altar for vengeance, or forbearance . . .

Los Conchos

Wherever you go in the Dominican Republic, you will run across a honking, wildly veering, madly gesticulating species of driver called the conchista, or if he drives a little motorbike, a motoconchista (more common in the campo). Their cars are usually in a deplorable state, the shell held together with bondo, glue and twine, the axles clanking and grinding (shock absorbers? Forget about it!), the tires bald as a baby´s butt, and the windshields a tangled mosaic of shattered glass. The driver plies a prescribed route and, with one hand clutching the steering wheel and the other stuck out the window to signal his route, he points out to prospective riders, who stand on the side of the road, where he is going. If he points straight, then you know that he is heading to the end of that particular avenue. If he throws his arm out left at a forty five degree angle (any more and he would risk losing his arm), or hooks it over the roof to the right, he will be making a prescribed turn (which everyone who rides that route understands) to the left or right and then follow that particular route to another destination.

When I stand outside my apartment complex, I can choose a car that goes straight along the Avenida Bolivar all the way to the other side of town, or I can choose a car that turns up the Maximo Gomez and heads north. I can also choose a car that heads toward " Marión Feria " or the administrative and governmental center, somewhat to the southwest of my place. If along the main route I have to head north to other neighborhoods such as Piantini (where you find many of the malls and modern shopping districts), then I get off at one of the Avenues running North/South, and hop into a different concho along a different route. The cost: ten pesos (or about 25 cents) a ride. Not bad.

Of course, you have to be adept at interpreting the hand signals, you have to know just what to say to the driver, and you have to have change, or menudo. The downside is that these cars, mostly old Subaru and Toyota stationwagons or sedans, are rather small, and each car is allowed to carry four passengers in the back and two in the front passenger seat. So on a hot day, the ride can be a bit uncomfortable. Of course, you have the option of paying for those seats, if they are empty, in order to luxuriate in the extra space if you wish. Normally this form of transport is utilized solely by the poor and the lower middle class, but I love going around this sprawling mess of a city in these cars because people are generally very nice, you almost always end up in interesting conversations with your fellow passengers, and the hair raising manner of negotiating the traffic is more thrilling than the Cyclone at Coney Island. Plus the drivers are often real characters. I remember once we were heading along the Bolívar and we picked up a fashionably dressed, tall and slender Dominican woman, good looking, obviously very vain and probably seeking work as a model, and the driver immediately started criticizing, " pero mujer, ven aca, ponte a comer, tan flaca qu´tá, no tiene carne, a mí me gu'ta la mujer con carne, me gusta agarrarme la cadera," (but woman, come on now, you gotta eat more, you´re so skinny, you got no meat on your bones, and I like em meaty, I like something to hold onto). She took it in stride because this kind of exchange is common and joshing one another is practically an art form down here, but I think when she got out of the car a few blocks further on she was quite glad to leave that driver behind!

Some may regard this kind of banter a bit too crude, and no doubt many who can afford to dispense with the conchos do so not only because of the admittedly rather tight seating arrangement but also because of a distaste for contact with the lower classes. So they buy yipetas (SUVs) with polar air conditioning, roll up the tinted windows, and ride above the fray without ever having to confront the gross inequities of this society or its rude social consequences. Myself I was never one for avoiding brute reality, and I enjoy a bit of salty humor, so I look forward to these encounters and purposely travel to countries where I am sure to find them.

But one shouldn't assume that the discourse offered by the conchistas is invariably burlesque; the flow of traffic serves to elicit from them a host of themes that run from the political to the philosophical, and the tone in which these observations are delivered range from impish to solemn. The more voluble among them provide a running commentary that is a Dominican equivalent to Joyce's stream of consciousness, governed entirely by the accidental encounters with different people, chance events, soundbites from the car radio, and other random stimuli that surge out of the commotion enveloping the vehicle. The constant motion in which they are immersed, the ever shifting balance of bodies moving in space, the cacophony of speech and coughing motors and honking horns, the accidental confluences and sudden ruptures afforded by the fortuitous arrival and departure of so many different people at every moment -- these cryptic and unique utterances of a city enthrall the mind of the conchista, who is compelled to decipher their meanings to whoever among his fellow travellers happens to take interest, much like the votaries at Delphi. Invariably, someone, or everyone, will provide their own interpretation in turn.

Of course there are favorite topics -- the incompetence of the current administration, regardless of the administration, is perennial, and while this is usually limited to grousing about taxes or corruption, a particularly keen driver will sometimes offer up a critique that is more trenchant than the pap offered by TV pundits, and can provide you with something to chew over after you reach your destination. This is one of the things I prize about them, and if you are lucky enough to capture the front seat in order to chat with them more easily, you will find the inconvenience of being squeezed into these clanking belching tin cans considerably alleviated by the camaraderie you experience with the driver and the other passengers.

Once, while I was passing along the Avenida Independencia in a concho that was abruptly cut off by a voladora, the driver, while smoothly avoiding a collision, observed, " aqui e' hombre pol hombre, e' la ley de la ma' fuelte." This observation struck my fancy, as the same thought had occurred to me many times while I threaded my way through Dominican traffic. Since I as yet have no car of my own here, and besides I am a dedicated pedestrian, by habit and by vocation, I have discovered on my many rambles around town that I am the very lowest man on the totem pole of Dominican traffic, not counting the palomas and viralatas that always seem to avoid collision in the streets. A pedestrian here counts for nothing: you step into the street at your own risk, as any oncoming vehicle considers you nothing more than vertical asphalt. The few times I have stepped into the path of a car, usually a yipeta , I have never discerned more than a mild discomfiture registered on the face of the driver, who doesn't bother to slow down or brake. On the contrary, sometimes when I enter the street, I hear the car accelerating, as if the driver figures he can beat me to the point at which we would otherwise collide, or perhaps he figures the ominous sound serves as a reminder of the pecking order, like a bit of death's cold breath on your back, and I suppose that it is as effective as any horn, which Dominican drivers use liberally in all other situations.

The fact that the rule of the streets here is something resembling Hobbes's brutal State of Nature doesn't really bother or surprise me, I am accustomed to it, having travelled in other countries where the same law prevails. In India, for example, there is a clear pecking order, but while size or might is a primary criterion, the list is mixed up with religious priorities, so it doesn't read quite the same as the Dominican list: on top we have the sacred cow, and while I am not sure about it, I imagine the elephant comes next, then tractor trailers and other vehicles with more than two axles, then flatbeds, buses, luxury vehicles, Ambassadors, compact model cars, motorized rickshaws, human-driven rickshaws, pedestrians, street urchins, cats and dogs. Monkeys seem to rise above the fray, by virtue of religious association, climbing ability, and sheer nastiness.

That there should be a pecking order based on might rather than right is not in itself a profound idea, and it was not the thing that impressed me about this particular conchista; no, what lingered with me was his effortless and virtually unconscious avoidance of any conflict, and his calm tolerance of the situation. In the face of an almost constant assault on one's senses, and a real danger of collision (thereby losing one's only meal ticket), these drivers for the most part navigate the treacherous channels with aplomb and great calm. One of the qualities that so many of these warders among the bedlamites share is their capacity for tolerating all the blows that assail them: aguantar is the word for it in Spanish. On the hottest dog days of summer, when the viralatas themselves are limp bags of bones, and even their fleas don't stir, the traffic jams become a suffocating furnace. The conchistas crawl along the shimmering black asphalt, waiting to escape the pounding tropical sun, which they deflect as coolly as they flick the excess moisture from the sweat soaked towels which they all carry to wipe their streaming faces. Were it not for that sweat, their skin would have become as cracked and brittle as the colorless dashboards.

I am often found travelling along the straightest route in the city, from one end of the Bolívar to the other, which at that point is called la Romulo Betancourt. The first part of the route is named for the famous dreamer and liberator, Simón Bolívar, while the second part is named for another great leftist leader and enemy of tyrants, who was the target of an assassination attempt ordered by Trujillo. This route, which in fact begins in the Colonial zone with la Mercedes, named for the country's patron saint (who somehow was supplanted in the peoples' hearts by Santa Altagracia), runs the entire length of the city and affords a brilliant tour of its expansion westward. Travelling along this channel is a lot like studying the face of a cliff in which the percipient geologist can read the archeology of its making and distinguish its various historical phases. My avenue is a living timeline of the city's growth and change. One passes through a narrow street fronted by sixteenth century mansions with walls of coral and limestone, past the cathedral, and finally issuing onto the Parque Independencia, where the Bolívar begins. Along the Colonial portion, the city is enclosed, " callada," full of secrets and poker-faced façades. Life was lived behind huge walls in homes built like fortresses. There are no trees, and it is as if the colonists had been at war with nature, at odds with the New World, and were compelled to build defensively.

All that changes in the Bolívar. Along here you pass by Spanish-style estates built by the successful members of Trujillo's faithful, and the intention is to impress you with their grandeur. They proudly occupy the intersections and practically crow their success. Even the many walled estates are somehow more open, more on display. They are coy: they simultaneously hide and reveal themselves, like courtesans. And the relation between nature and man is inverted: while in the colonial zone nature is contained inside the walls of the house as a patio or small garden, compelled to curb its tropical riotousness, in Gazcue the houses are surrounded by lawns and trees, some of them almost enveloped by the jungle that has grown up around them. Long stretches of this avenue are shaded by the flowering oaks that were seeded along the way. Once you reach the Winston Churchill Avenue, the Bolívar is transformed again, into a four lane, two way boulevard with a narrow median running down the middle. Here we encounter the most recent phase of the city's growth as we head toward the neighborhoods of the new middle class. Here the homes have more of a North American architecture, and the street is lined with the blandishments of consumer capitalism: fast food joints, modern spacious gas stations, consumer goods and services of every description. Public transport is less visible here, the area has a suburban feel to it. The yards attached to the houses are smaller, their growth is kept to acceptable levels, everything is proportioned to the bourgeois need for order.

I travel very comfortably along this route, as it happens to be one of the less populous and thus affords me more space in the car. I asked several drivers about this, and it turns out that indeed they make less money, but they are not exactly free to adopt another route. These are assigned by the transport companies that own them, and, as one would expect, the driver has to pay a fee for the right to work it. Nor is it a matter of simply coming up with the money for the route. As the number of drivers per route has to be regulated, the control, as with many such controls here, is in practice a rather ad hoc affair and left to the devices of a few well placed individuals who use their office to earn some extra money. The bribe is the social skeleton key here, it opens all doors, compels opportunity to knock, engages the huge machinery of government on behalf of the little man. It is the urban man's rainmaker. And one must admit that despite the drawbacks of such corruption, it is in its way an efficient system, and well tailored to the needs of a society where little opportunity exists. The buscón owes his livelihood to its existence - if you have ever had any dealings with the governmental bureaucracy here, then you have probably met this fellow hanging outside the offices. For a small fee, he will convey a bribe to the official inside and your stamped paperwork back to you in a trice, and you thus avoid having to enter the building and wait on the long lines. You waste no time, and he makes good use of an opportunity that otherwise would not have existed.

As for seizing opportunities, the conchista is an opportunist of another order. His constant effort while driving consists in taking advantage of opportunities - he trolls the streets searching for new passengers, keeping one eye on the traffic and one eye on the shoulders for potential clients. He looks sharply, swiftly, for any sign from the pedestrians that might indicate the direction they are heading, and when the desired sign is given, he swerves to the margin, stops on a dime, and waits while the passengers rearrange themselves so as to accommodate the new body. In a moment he is off again, swerving back into the flow of traffic while deftly accepting the toll and making change. The conchista is constantly looking to improve his position in the traffic, always seeking the slot he can squeeze into so as to be one car length ahead of the rest. He is always gauging distances, navigating the space between the lanes where the traffic flows and carries his charges to their destination and the curb where traffic halts and he picks up another ten pesos. He is always negotiating between the goals of his passengers and his own self interest. Opportunity. Drive. Dedication. He is a real self-starter.

The constant mobility, the incessant searching, certainly contributes to a mental acuity or febrile alertness that creates in the conchista a driver of remarkable dexterity. Though they inhabit the nether ranks of the social totem, though they are beset by all sorts of financial worries, and cling grimly to the fragile independence their meagre earnings vouchsafe for them, just as their heaps cling barely to a semblance of automotive functionability, they are in their own right and realm undisputed masters who merit our respect. The typical aggressive but nimble handling, which arrogates to itself by sheer virtuosity the right to insert the vehicle in any space it considers usable, lanes be damned, is itself a mark of the professional, the adept, the man whose unique capacities distinguish him from the crowd of hacks, presumptive pachás in their yipetas, and other pretenders who believe themselves the chosen, but in fact rate nothing more than a grudging sort of tolerance or magisterial scorn from those who truly own the clogged arteries of the capital. These drivers, members of that sprawling class of displaced rural peons adrift in the new urban social order which affords them no quarter and offers no consolation for their disinheritance - these uprooted proles, condemned to incessant wandering over the face of an inchoate and malign mass of asphalt and fumes, though they have no social standing, are the natural lords of the city's mobility. The syndicates that squeeze them for a few yellow pesos also ensure that their routes are sacrosanct and that no government with dreams of progress and development will superannuate the service they provide. Often entirely reliant on the stuttering tin traps they coax along the road with a mixture of curses, chuckles, bondo and a wrench, the conchistas are an admirable mix of tenacity and resignation, with an abiding faith that improvisation will make do when resources are lacking.

But they will probably disappear from the roads along with the horses that still bring produce from the campos to the barrios, and the government will find ways to slip their reforms past them without ever having to butt heads with their unions. The Metro subway system that is being built will likely diminish the ridership along the corridors it travels, and the conchistas will find themselves obsolete. And while the relief from the fumes that choke us and the noise that deafens us will be welcome, travel in this city will certainly become less of an adventure, a vacant transit from point A to point B, with little human intercourse between. The price of progress and convenience is boredom.

Glossary:
aguantar: tolerate, bear with, wait, endure
callada: closed off, silent
concho: public Taxi.
conchista: concho driver
pachá: Pasha, a big shot
paloma: Pigeon, dove
viralata: literally "can-turner." Street mongrels, descended from the dogs brought here by the Conquisadors, and often very quick witted.
guagua voladora: a "flying" guagua or small public bus. They stop willynilly for anyone getting on and off and they are known for wildly maneuvering the streets, though for all the unscheduled stops they make, they dont arrive any faster.
yipeta: from Jeep, an SUV.

A note on the accent: the capitalista (capital dweller) is famous for his clipped words and for converting "r" to "l".

Los Olvidados

El modelo de desarrollo de cada civilización emana de los recursos de su tierra. Si no fuera por el humilde bacalao, la industria pescadora del noreste de los Estados Unidos no se habría desarrollado y el famoso "yanqui" no habría nacido, al menos, no de la misma manera. Su cultura y sus valores salieron de esa industria. Eran pescadores, callados y constantes como el Océano.

Nosotros, los caribeños también tenemos nuestra propia historia económica que forjó una cultura fuerte y que por desgracia o por fortuna, apoyó la economía de los imperios europeos. El cultivo de la caña no solo enriqueció a los países europeos, sino que además transformó sus gustos, su dieta, aun la forma de ser de la gente, y en el proceso trituró los pueblos desarraigados que labraban la tierra - en su primera etapa: Tainos, Congoleños y otros Africanos. Ramón Marrero Aristy, autor dominicano, escribió: "La historia de tu pueblo, la de tu región, es la de la caña."

En su posterior etapa, el azúcar caribeño era mayormente una industria norteamericana, aunque empezó en los años 1870s con una mezcla de cubanos, alemanes y norteamericanos. En los bateyes que hicieron los "misters" habitaba una multitud de babel: Cocolos de St. Kitts, Barbados, Jamaica y otras islas anglo parlantes; gallegos de España; dominicanos; cubanos y haitianos. Sin embargo, el ingenio los molió a todos. Más algo quedó dentro de ellos que no fue triturado por el engranaje. De este sabroso melao humano surgió una cultura que consta de las ideas y las figuras más perdurables del caribe. Esta cultura mestiza arrebató la alegría de su sufrimiento y la fuerza nervuda de su opresión, convirtiendo las cadenas de los bateyes en adornos, sus gritos en canto meloso y su labor cotidiana en música suave y baile cadencioso. "Escuchad la canción deliciosa de los ingenios de azúcar y de alcohol" (Pedro Mir).

Ahora el azúcar no manda, los braceros no cortan, los bateyes no cuentan. Ahora las chimeneas de los ingenios no arrojan el humo de los furgones en que se hierve el guarapo, y el olor del aire melcochado no endulza el suspiro de los que comen la tierra amarga. Ahora el caribe fabrica otra forma de dulzura - playas bonitas, complejos turísticos, ocio lujoso. Y los bateyes están olvidados . . .

La migración de los Haitianos a través de la frontera no empezó con la zafra, pero no pasó mucho tiempo para que la zafra se convirtiera en "la invitación abierta" que aumentaría su flujo, hasta que finalmente fueron los haitianos quienes componían la mayoría de los braceros. Este arreglo creado por los "misters" del norte y confirmado en la Hispaniola por Trujillo y Duvalier dejó mucho tiempo atrás de tener sentido en nuestra economía. El corte de la caña ha sido sustituido por largas jornadas en los campos, sembrando semillas en las fincas o golpeando el fuerte martillo de las construcciones. Y es que, la puerta no está del todo cerrada. Un torrente de refugiados haitianos huye diariamente del caos económico y político, buscando su mejoría y dejando a República Dominicana sin medios para solucionarlo. Los bateyes perduran como un triste recuerdo mudo de la historia caribeña en que todos nosotros compartimos cuando consumimos los cristales dorados de nuestra querida azúcar crema.

Las nuevas encuestas nos dicen que el setenta porciento de los que viven en los bateyes son dominicanos. No les llamen "los negritos del batey", ni "los haitianos", mejor llámenles "Los Olvidados" por existir en el limbo de la memoria. En esos bateyes se encuentran nuestros hermanos y hermanas. Estas fotografías reflejan los rostros de los que comparten nuestra cultura, nuestra historia, nuestros valores--caribeños todos. Como dijo un bracero, "Todos tenemos la misma sangre; somos iguales."