Gaga Pa'l Pueblo: A Critical Afro Dominican Celebration in New York City
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gaga Pa'l Pueblo (GPP) is an Afro Dominican group that hosts a recurring summer religious musical event that takes place every Sunday afternoon at Manhattan's Anne Loftus Playground in Washington Heights, a haven for Dominican immigrants in US. The summer event consists of performing gaga music and hosting weekly ceremonies in honor of a Dominican Vudu loa or deity. Throughout this essay I will differentiate through spelling Dominican Vudu from Haitian Vodoun and from Hollywood Voodoo, where latter stereotypes and maligns West African religion aptly called Vodun. Martha Ellen Davis writes, vodu (or vudu) is Dominican counterpart of Haitian vodoun (or vodun). It is similar to Haitian, indeed influenced by it, yet different, with regional differences as well (75). The last day of GPP summer event is largest of performances, attracting more people, lasting longer, and where music and dancing are performed more aggressively than usual.Gaga Pa'l Pueblo emerged in 2011 priding itself in using gaga to, as they state in their newly launched website, redefin[e] Dominican identity through music and dance in a time of globalization, essentially challenging Dominican national identity constructed by Dominican Right (Gaga Pa'l Puebo website). The GPP website displays pictorial images and videos of their events. Through use of direct observation and interviews of specific members of GPP, this paper explores reasons for which participants infuse racial themes that center on praising blackness and African heritage, into their musical religious sessions. Ultimately, I argue that Gaga Pa'l Pueblo is a radical celebration of Dominican blackness, evidenced through primary participants/interviewees' discourse on race, nation, and identity that departs from and ruptures traditional definitions of Dominicanness. In summer of 2015 Dominican government stripped thousands of Dominicans of Haitian ancestry of their citizenship and impeded others from obtaining it. As a result, Dominican Republic gained bad international press, emphasizing Dominicans' reluctance to embrace their blackness while citing historical events of anti-Haitian wars and one genocide in 1937. These gagueros break this narrative, embracing Dominican gaga and Vudu while identifying as Pan African in identity and spiritual and artistic intent.I first came to know these gagueros through social media, meeting them at Hostos College in New York City where they performed gaga. I later spent additional time with them at Philadelphia's 2011 Odunde festival. Odunde, as festival is often informally called, pays homage to African Yoruba deity Oshun. For this paper, I interviewed them sporadically throughout 2014-2015.Isabel Brown defines gaga as the Dominican version of Haitian Vodou[n], which assimilated vestiges of Taino belief system in addition to mythology imported from Africa (74). Gaga, emanating from Haitian rara, a religious music to tune of Haitian Vodoun, consists of musical instruments harking back to ancient African traditions, songs, dances, and religious rituals. It was in early 20th century, with US occupation of entire island that Haitians began entering Dominican territory as exploited sugarcane workers that imported rara. As a result, Haitian cane workers' intermingled with Dominicans in Dominican sugarcane fields, which eventually led to creation of gaga. Many Dominicans, whether in Dominican Republic or New York City, celebrate gaga, with its visibility especially salient in Dominican Republic during Carnival in month of February.Celebrating AfroDominican life, gaga is an African derived cultural practice that unfortunately is not accompanied by Dominicans' national identity. Historically, conservative Dominican elite defined Dominican national identity as white, Catholic, culturally Hispani, in opposition to Haiti. The elites base their ideas on fear that foreign entities, consisting of Haitian government, France, and Canada, are plotting to politically merge both Dominican Republic and Haiti, and thereby reduce former country to poverty level of latter. …
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it