El merengue como zona de conflicto en la obra de Ramon Marrero Aristy

My paper examines the transformation of a Dominican musical genre into a symbol of national identity at the service of a dictatorship, and the way Dominican writer Ramon Marrero Aristy incorporated that symbol into his own work in order to subvert it and to articulate a discourse of resistance against totalitarian power. During the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the style of merengue produced in the northern region of Cibao became an instrument of propaganda used to broadcast Trujillo\u27s government. The lyrics of many of the merengue songs composed in those days celebrated the end of what was perceived as a long history of failures and the beginning of a new Era of prosperity and progress. In contrast, the narrative work of Marrero associates merengue with the irrational forces that Trujillo\u27s government claimed to have eradicated to establish a link of continuity between the nation\u27s violent past and the oppressive conditions of the narrator\u27s present