Why I Do Not Feel Connected to Dominican Culture

Caricatures and Cultural Distortion

Like many people who tuned into the Super Bowl halftime performance, I was enamored by Bad Bunny’s willingness to fully represent Puerto Rico and the Afro-Latino diaspora without diluting it for anyone’s comfort. Watching someone display things we share so naturally, even something as small and familiar as the kid passed out on a plastic chair did something to me. It felt like seeing pieces of a childhood I had always wanted to see validated, on one of the biggest stages in the world.

Afro-Caribbean Latino culture is distinct from Central and South American Latino culture, even though we are often flattened into one monolith. That distinction matters. Our histories, racial makeup, music, accents, and relationship to Blackness are different, and pretending otherwise has always come at a cost.

The Wrong “Latina”

I grew up in Queens surrounded by Latinos from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico. From a young age, it was made clear to me that I was not the same kind of “Latina.” People didn’t want to associate with me once they found out I was Dominican. Parents would make faces. At the time, I didn’t have language for it, I just felt that I wasn’t welcome in their circle. Like I was not Latina enough for them.

What’s ironic is that now, with the resurgence of salsa, dembow, and reggaetón, everyone wants to be part of the diaspora. Like Bad Bunny says in El Apagón, “La capital del perreo, ahora todos quieren ser latinos”.El Apagon- Bad Bunny Suddenly, everyone wants proximity. Suddenly, it is cool to be a latino and dance to dembow.

But growing up, Spanish-language media mostly portrayed places like the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and Puerto Rico as violent, poor, or chaotic. I remember friends telling their parents I was Dominican and watching their expressions change instantly, like being Dominican was something dirty or shameful. They would constantly only cycle news that painted us in a negative light.

I don’t believe conversations like this should divide the Latino community. But unity without honesty is extremely meaningless. Afro-Caribbean Latinos have been singled out for not being “white enough,” for speaking “incorrect” Spanish, for existing too loudly, too Black, too unapologetically.

Alienation

When Bad Bunny opened his halftime performance with “Qué rico es ser latino, hoy se bebe,” adapted from Dominican icon Anthony Santos, something clicked. Afro-Caribbean culture was no longer being diluted to be digestible. It was out in the open for everyone to see, unapologetic, authentic, unmistakable. And it wasn’t coming from someone appropriating the culture.

All I could think about was how disconnected I feel from my own. When I visit the Dominican Republic, I feel out of character, like I don’t fully belong anywhere. That disconnect didn’t come from rejection on my end. It came from years of being told, directly and indirectly, that who I was wasn’t acceptable. The Spanish that I spoke was not “correct” the music we listened to was “too vulgar”.

I was embarrassed to speak Spanish growing up. I was mocked for my accent, the Cibao “e,” if you know, you know. Little by little, I started losing my Dominican identity, not because of something I wanted but it’s what made everyone stop.

Annoying Caricatures

That kind of rejection creates a performance, a caricature if you will, like the hot headed loud Latina we see in sitcoms like Modern Family.

More specifically the Dominican caricature, The “I no black, I Dominican papi” meme irks me to my core. It’s not funny. It’s the product of colonialism, racism, and colorism disguised as humor. The same goes for the trending TikTok sound “How you know I Dominican papi” layered over dembow. These trends minimize who we are and reduce us to punchlines. When people say, “It’s not that deep,” it’s because they don’t want to confront what’s actually happening.

Denial of Blackness gets turned into comedy when it should be part of a much larger, more serious conversation. These are rewarded scripts like jesters performing for approval. We are not in on the joke. They are laughing AT US, not with us.

I’m not judging people for participating. I’m pointing out what version of Dominican identity is allowed to exist publicly and only for entertainment. We were never accepted as who we are. So we became what could be consumed and repackaged.

Media, Spectacle, and Cultural Distortion

Dominican media reflects this distortion. As someone studying media, I find it difficult to connect with it at all. Platforms like Alofoke, created by Santiago Matías García, recently launched a 24-hour live-feed show similar to Big Brother called La Casa de Alofoke. What these spaces reward is loudness, chaos, and extremes, while thoughtfulness is sidelined entirely. They don’t elevate us as a cultural collective, they dull us. Culture becomes something to watch and identity becomes content. We are turned into cash cows, while the world laughs at us.

We are more than a spectacle. More than the “crazy, hot-headed Latina” caricature outsiders love to assign us. And when distortion becomes dominant, it creates room for prejudice to thrive.

When Colonization Reaches the Body

Colonization runs so deep that it reaches our bodies. Our natural curly hair is labeled pelo malo “bad hair.” Straight hair is reserved for holidays, professionalism, respectability. Curly hair is something to tame or hide. I was taught from a young age that my hair had to be “done” for birthdays, holidays, and special occasions, because curly hair was seen as inappropriate.

Our food has been treated the same way. Rice, root vegetables, and starch-heavy meals tied to labor, climate, and survival are labeled unhealthy or ignorant. We’re sold boiled chicken and broccoli as discipline, while our own food gets sanitized, renamed, and sold back to us as wellness. Sweet potatoes with cheese suddenly trend online, as if Black, Afro-Caribbean, and Asian communities haven’t eaten this way forever.

Dominican History

To understand this cultural distortion, you have to understand history. And you can’t treat history like something that ended. It didn’t. History taught people what they had to erase in themselves just to get by. It trained survival instincts, and those instincts hardened into culture.

Under Trujillo, whiteness wasn’t just admired, it was enforced. Blackness wasn’t simply devalued, it was labeled dangerous, foreign, something that threatened the nation’s image and had to be pushed away if the country wanted to be seen as legitimate or modern or worthy of respect. This rhetoric is something that is still alive in Dominican society.

That message wasn’t subtle, it was enforced under violence. Anyone that challenged Trujillo had to die, I call him Dominican Hitler.

The Parsley Massacre made it unmistakable. Haitians were slaughtered for being Black, for their accents, for failing a performance of Dominican identity that was never really about nationality in the first place. And the sick irony is that many of the people enforcing that violence, and many of the people watching it happen, were Black themselves. But Blackness had already been recast as something external, something to expel, even when it lived in the bodies of the nation’s own people.

Oct. 2, 1937: Parsley Massacre - Courtesy of The Zinn Project

That logic never left, it’s something that is still alive, but very quiet.

Anti-Haitianism survived because it was useful. It gave people someone to stand on, someone to point to, someone to say, at least I’m not that. Even though we share an island. Even though we share blood. Even though our histories are tangled beyond separation. The border stopped being just geography and turned into a psychological line. Haitians became the permanent other, and Dominicans learned, consciously or not, that closeness to Blackness was a liability.

Over time, that thinking seeped into everything. Beauty standards that rewarded lighter skin and straighter hair. A constant erasure of African influence paired with the audacity to insist it was never there. An identity so uncomfortable with its own reflection that Blackness had to be joked away, minimized, explained, or turned into folklore instead of truth.

That’s why caricature feels safer than honesty. It’s also the reason why performance replaces authenticity. That’s why Dominican identity keeps contorting itself into something more acceptable to outsiders, more palatable to whiteness, more defensible against scrutiny.

And this is where the damage becomes personal. This is why the nation feels stagnant. Why it keeps circling the same wounds without healing them.

Cultural Repair and Refusal

Cultural repair doesn’t come from nostalgia. It comes from refusal, refusing to bend ourselves into something more comfortable for others. We cannot change who we are because other people don’t like it.

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you into something else is the greatest accomplishment,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote.

Bad Bunny refuses dilution. He centers Caribbean specificity without explanation. If it makes people uncomfortable, that’s not his problem. That refusal is exactly why people love him and hate him at the same time.

Cardi B bringing El Prodigio onto the Saturday Night Live stage (Link here) dressed in traditional Dominican attire (Cultivo de la Vida) flower in her hair, merengue típico playing while she performed Bodega Baddie, was huge. She refused to separate her success from her background. She placed El Prodigio and his band on a pedestal and gave them space to show who we are at our core.

Cardi B on Saturday Night Live performing “Bodega Baddie” with El Prodigio

That’s why it matters when artists like Prince Royce and Romeo Santos express frustration about never being invited onto platforms like SNL. Their talent is undeniable. But wanting a stage is not the same as challenging the terms required to earn it. Their images were palatable, deracialized, non-disruptive. Not every success moves culture forward, and they have not insisted on Dominican culture in a way that reshapes the frame. They have more so benefitted from being complacent in a sense.

An Unfinished Identity

Great art doesn’t soothe you. It provokes you. It forces you to sit with what you’d rather avoid.

That’s what Bad Bunny was doing, not trying to make anyone comfortable, but holding up a mirror and refusing to explain it away.

That’s what great art demands. It doesn’t tell you what to think. It makes you think. It makes the uncomfortable familiar so you can’t ignore it anymore, and it makes the familiar uncomfortable, it disrupts the stories we’ve inherited and asks whether we still want to live inside them.

If the work unsettles you, if it makes you defensive, if it exposes something you’d rather keep buried, that doesn’t mean it failed. It means it did exactly what art is supposed to do.

This isn’t about division. It’s about accountability. Inclusion without boundaries leads to dilution, a lesson echoed in Lo Que Pasó a Hawaii. A culture consumed without responsibility doesn’t survive. And we cannot keep inviting people to the cookout without asking what they’re actually there for.

Dominican identity is not a costume, it’s not a meme. It’s layered, painful, brilliant, and unfinished. And even now, I’m still learning how to recognize it fully in myself.

Check out more of Meleny's writing on her Substack!