Exploring Dominican Republic: History, Culture, and Cuisine with Harry Alvarez

Hema, host of The Moreish Podcast, chats with Harry Alvarez about the history, culture and cuisine of the Dominican Republic.

Harry, a Dominican-American and co-founder of Offbeat Travel,  shares insights into the cultural influences in the Dominican Republic from the Indigenous Taino-Arawak, Spanish and African people, and how those influences show up in the food from ingredients and techniques used today in preparing everyday meals.

He emphasizes the strong African influence in Dominican culture while addressing the societal reluctance to acknowledge these roots due to colorism and shadism. In this conversation they touch on how the history of Hispaniola is taught in schools, often focusing on the independence from Haiti rather than emphasizing the importance of its independence from Spanish oppression.

To close out this episode, Harry shares some thoughts on tourism and encourages visitors to explore beyond resorts to experience the rich and diverse geographical beauty of the Dominican Republic and the Dominican people.

Resources:

Offbeat Travel website

Offbeat Travel on Instagram

Trova Trip

WITS Travel Creator Summit

Listen to the Dominican Republic episode from Season 1

Transcript

Harry Alvarez: It doesn't help the cause at all that what we highlight as our independence is independence from Haiti. So you automatically make them the other, and they also happen to be Black, for the most part. Let's teach history a little different so that kids don't learn from the very beginning of school that we got our independence from our neighbors. Rather, let's, let's talk about the reality that it was 400, they, they freed us from 300 years of oppression from the Spanish. We got independence from Spain. Let's highlight those things. But you know, Spain is put on a pedestal. 

The Moreish Podcast: This is The Moreish Podcast, where Caribbean history meets culture and cuisine.

Hema: Welcome back to The Moreish Podcast. This is Hema. In today's episode, we're diving into the food history and culture of the Dominican Republic with Harry Alvarez. Harry was born in New York city and at six months old, his family relocated back to their native home in the Dominican Republic. Ever since he's lived in the cultural and physical space. Between the Dominican Republic and the United States. He currently resides in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic with his partner, Lauren. And two sons. Harry is the co-founder of Offbeat Travel at destination management company who have been working in the area for over 15 years. And they believe in the power that tourism has to support the Caribbean communities. For them, keeping local people involved is key. And the mission of Offbeat Travel is to de-colonize travel. And create equity in the travel industry by ensuring the people in the places they visit have ownership of the design, implementation, management and economic benefits of travel to their communities. With a personal and professional connection to the Dominican Republic. It felt like a natural fit to have Harry join me to share his thoughts on the country. 

Hi, Harry. How are you?

Harry Alvarez: Good, good, how are you doing?

Hema: Great. I appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast and talk about the cuisine of the Dominican Republic. But before we get there, let's backtrack and talk about how we first met. I went to a Women in Travel conference and I met the team at Trova, who introduced me to you. 

Harry Alvarez: Yeah, I am the Co-Founder and COO of a destination management company, um, in the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica. So we operate programming mostly for student travel companies and other travel brands to come down and we do all of their ground operations. So I'm based in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. 

Hema: And your company is called what?

Harry Alvarez: Offbeat Travel.

Hema: Harry, when we first had a conversation, you talked to me about where you currently live, where you have lived. So let's set the stage for who you are.

Harry Alvarez: Of course, of course. So, I'm Dominican American. I grew up in, I was born in New York in Washington Heights where a lot of Dominicans are, like, in the Heights, um, from the movie. And at six months old, my mom and dad decided to move back to the Dominican Republic. I had much older brothers, it was 1980s New York, the middle of the crack epidemic and they just wanted to go back to, to the Caribbean.

So I lived here till I was in second grade. And then my brother wanted to go to college back in the States. So we moved back up to the Bronx and from second grade through college, I was in New York, went to college in upstate New York. I was on the med school track, so I was gonna go to medical school, doing a program at Columbia and just got really depressed.

And my older brother was like, Hey man, wait, my, my, my wife did this program when she was in college, where she went to go, be a basically like a camp counselor internationally. So I did that. I applied to work for a company called Rustic Pathways and I went down to Costa Rica and led trip programming with mostly with Indigenous groups.

And I fell in love. I fell in love with travel. I realized that I had been traveling my whole life going back and forth between the US and the DR. All right. And that there's more than one way to help people. I wasn't going to be the next Che Guevara driving around Latin America like The Motorcycle Diaries, but there's other ways to do it. It's not just being a doctor. 

So, all that, and then when I came home, my mom was like, yo, that makes sense. You had been involved with a youth group in your church growing up, and you were used to working at a teen center. And then it kind of all clicked in. So I worked in Costa Rica as a program leader guide for a couple years and worked my way up that company eventually launched operations for them in the Dominican Republic and Cuba and Puerto Rico and then was a Director of Operations at that company for a while, and then decided to split off on my own and start providing experiences for more than one travel brand through my locally owned and operated destination management company, Offbeat.

Hema: You currently live in the Dominican Republic or do you move and spend your time in the U. S. and Dominican?

Harry Alvarez: That's a good question. So I historically would spend like half my year here and half my year in another Caribbean city, which is New Orleans, but since the pandemic, we moved down here full time, kind of to get the business kind of back off the ground after COVID. We don't see ourselves moving out of here anytime soon.

We're really enjoying living here in the Caribbean, living in Santo Domingo. Our kids are having a great time and, we've been down here full time for three years now.

Hema: So you have a really good rounded experience of the North American experience, the Caribbean Dominican experience, which I think is really going to be helpful, in today's podcast episode. 

I'm going to go back to our initial conversation when we were first introduced and talking about what this podcast is all about, which is the history of the people of the Caribbean and how that influences current day culture culture and cuisine. I said to you, we covered the Dominican Republic in season one, and we talked about the Indigenous population, which the Dominican Republic tourism website refers to as Taino-Arawak, as the original inhabitants of the island as a whole. And you had a couple of things to say about that. 

Harry Alvarez: Yeah, yeah, so my entire life I, you know, grew up, you know, being told that the Indigenous people of the DR and parts of Cuba and Puerto Rico and the, what they call the Greater Antilles were the Tainos. But it wasn't until really recently, just like having different experiences and researching that I realized that that wasn't a name they called themselves.

That was a name that was given to them because that was one of the words they used. So when the colonizers arrived, they heard them saying this word and they're like, Oh, these people are Taino. But, that's not the, that's not what they called themselves, which I find really interesting. With, with Taino, with Indigenous culture in the, in places like the Dominican Republic, it's the first place Columbus landed, back in 1492, and within 50 years, so by, by 1550, there weren't any, you know, that had been massacred through enslavement, through the exchange of diseases that they weren't used to, and there's actually historical fightings of also to like mass suicides, like just, you know, being encountered with this new reality.

So there's very little trace of that culture because we're talking about, you know, 1550 was almost 500 years ago 

Hema: You said Taino is not how the Indigenous people would have referred to themselves. 

Harry Alvarez: They were you know, they're Arawak Indigenous folks. They're coming up The way that the islands are populated, from what I understand, it was, you know, everyone crossed the Bering Strait all the way down to South America. And then they actually, actually came in from Venezuela, up the smaller islands to the bigger islands. to land in what is now Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica. Yeah, exactly.

Hema: All over the Caribbean to many different islands? You mentioned Christopher Columbus, who was the first European to land on the island and spend any time there. So we have the Spanish, we have the Indigenous population who did not initially get along. Who else and what other countries arrived on the island and colonized and took over?

Harry Alvarez: Yeah. So it's interesting because you have the Dominican Republic and it's, you know, one island that we know now has two countries. So originally Christopher Columbus landed on the north coast. Um, they found Santo Domingo later because it's a, has a river, a natural, natural port, easy to defend from, from pirates and from attacks.

So they founded the city of Santo Domingo and the colony on the eastern side of the island, which was then called Santo Domingo, the entire eastern part. The western part of the island was not as inhabited was, you know, not part of the, uh, there's a big mountain in D. R. which people don't realize it's like treacherous terrain to cross.

So what happened is, originally French buccaneer pirates started to set up shop on the West End part. If you look at the, uh, what is now the coast of Haiti, it's very kind of wavy. There's a lot of natural harbor from hurricanes. It's a really good spot to like, you know, take up shop if you have boats.

And then eventually the French came in on the west side of the island and set up, set up their colony, which they called Saint Domingue. The difference between the two sides is that Spanish had come and brought a lot of Spanish folks and kind of like were doing a bit of society building, whereas on the West side, the French were more treating it like a giant plantation.

So it was mostly enslaved Africans, over 80 percent of the population was enslaved Africans. So fast forward a couple of hundred years of that system, you know, at this point you're talking about 1822, the Spanish have found way bigger riches in what is Central and South America, like the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire, and the DR was kind of like a forgotten colony, or Santo Domingo was. Saint Domingue was being treated like a big plantation. There was a major slave rebellion, which turned into a revolution. And the Haitians got their independence from France. They're the first nation to get their independence from the colonial powers in the Americas after the American revolution.

Before all of South America, before Mexico, before anyone has independence from the colonial powers, Haiti has as the first black republic. What happens is, they also didn't take over the entire island, but you know, that it's not, it wasn't like a takeover as it is, which is how it's taught in most classes here in DR, because again, it was a forgotten colony.

It was a very poor place. They were like, hey, maybe these people will make it better. So for 22 years, the Haitians controlled the entire island. In my opinion, they made a couple of errors, which was trying to make French the national language. Going against the Catholic Church, you know, some things are just, it's culturally hard to accept when you, like, have spoken Spanish your whole life and that kind of stuff.

So in 1844, the, the Haitian army had gone out to the west. To go defend against an incoming armada from France, because France wasn't like, oh, I'm just going to go with my colony, which at that point was the richest colony in the world. Sugar was like gold back then. 

And in 1844, the DR kind of like takes advantage, the Haitians are gone. They declare independence from Haiti. Um, they then annex themselves back to Spain, which is kind of like a really weird system, and then they get their independence from Spain, um, through their restoration of independence, . Unfortunately, like we we're, the, the independence that we really celebrate is the one from Haiti and not the one from Spain, which kind of leads, in my opinion, to that otherism of Haiti. But then Haiti has its other, history that goes after that with like the French taxing them for independence and then not really allowing them to become an independent nation. But that, that goes into a whole other realm of history there.

Hema: That's, that's a whole other history. And it's really interesting as we, covered Haiti and the Dominican Republic in season one of this podcast, how intertwined the history of the entire island is, and then how things changed and divided because there's so much more of a French influence in Haiti and so much more of a Spanish influence in the Dominican Republic, just based on all of the history that you laid out in, in a brief little nutshell.

And so brings me to, talking about the current population. 

So according to what I've seen, it is around 11 million people with about 70 percent being being mixed background. Would you say that's correct?

Harry Alvarez: Yeah. Yeah, it would. I mean, and the thing about the Democratic Republic is that it's more similar demographically to like Brazil than it is to like Argentina or Chile. We have way more of a black and, former enslaved people's genetics in us than a lot of other places. So I would say I would say that, yes, we're mostly mixed and we have, when I did my DNA, it was like 30 percent West African, 30 percent like Iberian Peninsula, and then like a whole bunch of mixed, very little Indigenous, but there was some like Taino, as they would say, in there, but, it was, you know, mostly west African and Spanish, yeah.

Hema: So that brings us, Harry to current day. We fast forward few years, bring to us as to current day, would you say the culture currently is more of a fusion of. the African and Spanish influences, or is there something else there?

Harry Alvarez: Yeah, I would say, you know, that's a good assessment. And then you mix in a little bit of, of, of things that people don't even realize come from Indigenous too. So we eat a lot of cassava, for example, which is a yuca root, and we make, cassava bread. And that traces itself way back to like the Indigenous folks of the island. They were eating that here before then. 

But then you look at some of our other dishes, and it is kind of like a mix of like taking from here, taking from there, dishes like sancocho, for example, or even mangu. So sancocho is like our, our stew, which I like to cause it's like, it really represents all of our mixes. Cause you've got, you've got ingredients there. You've got the yams, you've got the squash based soup, which is very much from West Africa. But then you also have, other ingredients that are coming from like Spanish influences, like the sofrito. That's how they, that's kind of how they cook in Spain.

 And then you've got the yuca in there as well, which is comes from our Indigenous, so like, they're definitely, the cuisine definitely has this mix of all, you know.

Hema: So for anybody that doesn't know what sancocho is, can you describe it?

Harry Alvarez: Yeah. So, so, so Sancocho properly done is you've got a giant pot, like imagine the biggest pot you've ever seen and double it, and it's usually cooked over like a bonfire in the backyard or something because the pot's so big it doesn't fit on the stove. My mom actually, when we lived in the Bronx, because obviously immigrants have to adjust to the realities of where they're living, she would, she actually had found this like, thing connect all four burners on our stove in the apartment so she can make a bigger pot of it. But it's, it's a big soup. You start with, the meats. 

So it's supposed to have seven different types of meat in it to do it properly. So, you know, they have chicken, they have what we call gallina vieja, or like an older hen? Basically, because older chickens, you don't really eat them very often. Most of the chicken you eat at the store is very young. The older chickens are very muscly, but they have, I guess, More stuff that's good for the broth. Guinea hen, which is something that comes from West Africa, which is a different type of chicken, or fowl, pork, beef, oxtail. You add water to that, and then you add squashes, which gives it like a thicker, like, not pumpkin, but kind of like a type of squash that's found in the earth called auyama, and then you kind of cook that for like hours and hours until, and then you add in tubers, so potatoes, yuca, it's like a ton of different tubers, tubers being things like potatoes and uh, root vegetables, that you add to it. And then obviously you gotta add some platanos to it too, cause anything in there could like have, have plantains in it. And it's a big soup and you usually eat it, you got the big broth, the big soup, you get a big bowl full with like a little, like a little bit of rice and a piece of avocado on top and you're golden. It's like so good.

Hema: That's so interesting because it's what, what it's reminiscent of to me is so many other Caribbean countries have a similar type of what I would just classify loosely as a stew, right? That is often

Harry Alvarez: Yeah,

Hema: pot that is made communally that has its roots in the times of slavery, right? When people had to come together and use whatever they could find, whatever they were allowed to create a big communal, very hearty meal.

Harry Alvarez: 100%. Yeah. And, you know, you, you, you, I, I mentioned, I lived in New Orleans for a long time. You, you have the gumbo in New Orleans, which is very similar. Okra, or molondrones, which is what is the base of gumbo versus squash in the Dominican Republic, also traces itself back to West Africa because the first, seed for okra came in the pockets of enslaved Africans that came over. And we eat okra here a lot too in the Dominican Republic, so you see those connections, yeah. Yeah, 

Hema: If someone were to ask you to just generally describe the food in the Dominican Republic. How would you describe it?

Harry Alvarez: So not spicy, first of all. A lot of people assume flavorful, but not spicy. So we actually don't have spicy culture here. Which I struggle with 'cause I love spicy food. Um, but generally it, it's, you know, you have what we have what we call the La Bandera Dominicana, or the Dominican flag, which is basically the, the dish that everyone eats on a regular basis.

So it's a white rice, beans, some kind of meat, and some kind of salad. What varies here, what I love about the Dominican Republic, unlike other kind of Central American countries that mostly eat black beans, we have a huge variety of beans that we eat. We eat black beans, pinto beans, these ones that they call Jewish beans, they're like white, fava beans, you know, lentils, guandules, which are also common in, in Puerto Rico.

So I would say it's very, rice, beans, meat based, definitely very meat based. The beans are cooked for hours to get really good flavor in them, and really well done Dominican food is cooked with natural ingredients. So you have, well, you make a sofrito, which is like your original kind of like base, which is typically garlic, salt, some kind of citrus, either vinegar or, lime, oregano is a very important ingredient here. There's a lot of oregano that grows here in the DR. Dominican oregano. And that kind of forms the basis for like most dishes. And then some kind of tomato to give it some, some, some color. But I would say like very flavorful and very, the beans are kind of on top of the rice, but it's not spicy, and it's, you know, very rice and beans based. Yeah, 

Hema: Oregano that grows in the Dominican. Is that the same oregano that we would be using here in North America? 

Harry Alvarez: It's a different variety. It smells a lot like it though. It's oregano, so it's a type of oregano, but it's not Italian oregano, which is the one that we're used to eating in the States. It's also Cuban oregano, which is even thicker, but they have the same oregano smell. So just different varieties of the same herb. 

We eat a lot that's oregano is goat, which I also trace, I mean, they eat a lot of goat in West Africa as well. We have a lot of desert in the DR. People don't realize a lot of areas are really arid. So goats are really good at finding water on their own and like not needing a lot of water. So the, a lot of goats out in the border regions, um, and that's also with the oregano goats. They say that goats feel good because the goats eat the oregano. So they're already naturally seasoned.

Hema: I have heard that. 

I've heard people say, make sure you feed your goats, some kind of herb so they're all naturally seasoned.

Harry Alvarez: Yeah.

Hema: I find it interesting that, you know, you have said it's not spicy, it's flavorful, but nowhere have you mentioned. Whether it's in the dishes or in the sofrito, any kind of hot peppers. that's really interesting to me because there are so many Caribbean islands that, that heat and spice plays a role. 

Harry Alvarez: There will be like a little picante on the side, for like Tabasco usually. And some people also do make like these vinaigrettes, like homemade vinaigrettes with aji titi, which is like a really spicy, almost like the ornamental peppers that we see back in the States. They're really spicy. So people make those, but it's always like something you add to it, not usually something that's included by default.

Hema: If we break down the dish where you just talked about, it is rice, some kind of bean, meat and a salad. Many of these elements come from the time of colonization, right? That seems to me to have a very Spanish influence with the rice and the beans. 

Harry Alvarez: Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't realize that until I went to Spain for the first time in December. My wife actually studied abroad there. And we went to stay with her whole family, which is awesome that she still has that connection. I was surprised. I mean, I always did it with paella, which is rice based. I always knew that there was, and I realized how strong the beans were there too, though. Like, so I had a lot of garbanzo dishes and yeah, like I, making those connections. The interesting thing about the rice too, though, is that rice, it's really like an Asian thing, but I think another reason it's taken off so much in Latin America, like same as sugarcane, which is also from, from Asia, is because of the, like, the similar weather that we have.

Like, my, my family, they are rice farmers. So, they, they grow a lot of rice here. So, it's all domestic now, but it's not originally from here. 

Hema: That one standard meal that you've talked about influences from so many different places, but not the Indigenous population. 

Harry Alvarez: Nah, I mean, people will have cassava in the house always. And people will have cassava with any meal, because you can basically take the gravy from anything and put it on it and eat it, but that's about it. And I don't think people realize even how, I don't think, I didn't realize the connection to the Indigenous until like recently, you know?

So growing up, I ate it, but I didn't realize that it was something that had been around here for so long. We haven't talked about platanos, plantains, are like life here. So people can eat plantains breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I'm not even exaggerating, like you make mangu for breakfast. So mangu, from what I, from what I, my research, it actually comes again from a mashed plantain or mashed tuber dish from West Africa that had a similar name. But Mangu is basically our version of mashed potatoes. You take, the plantains, you boil them in hot water. You then take them out, drain them, mix butter and salt, and you mash them up. Serve that with some fried eggs, some fried cheese and some fried salami. And you've got what we call Los Tres Golpes, which is kind of like our, our typical breakfast, the three hits. It's high in cholesterol breakfast. I don't recommend it every time, but it's delicious.

So the people will have mangu for breakfast. Then at lunchtime, anytime you have the La Bandera Dominicana, the rice beans, and you know, you also usually have someone making tostones, which are like, you know, you take the plantains, you cut them into slabs about this big, you fry them once, you smash them, and you fry them again, and you have those tostones, or something they call patacones.

 So you have those, those are like our french fries, you dip them in ketchup, it's delicious. And then at dinner, you might have just boiled plantains with like a piece of like fresh fish, cheese or something. My mom will actually have plantains or yuca boiled and she'll cut it into pieces and have it like cereal with milk. She said she grew up eating like that too. 

Hema: In the Dominican Republic, you're, you've been saying plantain. I'm, my family is Trinidadian, so we call it plantain. So it's

Harry Alvarez: Yes.

Hema: it's one in the same. We just pronounce it a little bit differently. Do you guys normally eat plantains when they're on the greener side or on the riper side?

Harry Alvarez: Ooh, good question. Both. So all the stuff that I just mentioned with the, with the green ones, but then when they're ripe you can make maduros, which is you, again, you cut them up and you fry them, but they're sweet. We also have a dish called Pastelón de Platano Maduro, which is like, like a lasagna of, ripe plantains.

So you literally take all the ripe plantains, you mash them up and you get a layer of them at the bottom, a layer of ground beef. Another layer of that on the top and then a layer of cheese on top and that's like, uh, with the sweet plantain. It's like a, yeah, Dominican lasagna.

Hema: That I've never heard of before. I'm going to have to look that up and, and try it myself.

Harry Alvarez: Yeah, it's really good and then it'll also be served as a dessert. So you'll take like an entire really ripe plantain and you'll stick a piece of cinnamon in it or you'll put cinnamon powder on it and put it in the oven, kind of like a banana foster almost. And you take it out and you serve it warm with some ice cream. It's delicious. 

Hema: You, you refer to, the plantain being used in the fashion that would have been used in West Africa. So the sort of the pounding of the green plantain

Harry Alvarez: Yeah.

Hema: a dish. And that comes from West African traditions of pounding, whether it's yams and in some places cassava, it sort of moved over into the Caribbean regions. The enslaved people took the techniques that they were used to, using ingredients that they could find locally and created new and unique dishes that we now eat all over the Caribbean.

Harry Alvarez: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, we still eat the mashed yuca, the mashed plantains, um, there's a bunch of other tubers and yams that, you know, come in tons of variety that people do like that, you know, the different purees definitely is still a big part of, of our culture here.

Hema: The techniques remain and created entirely new ways of eating based on the ingredients available in the Caribbean or

Harry Alvarez: Yeah,

that were brought 

Hema: to the Caribbean. Are there other cultures that have influenced the cuisine and culture in the Dominican Republic? So we've talked about the Indigenous, we've talked about the enslaved Africans, we've talked about Spanish, but are there other influences?

Harry Alvarez: There's, there's some really interesting ones that people wouldn't like for exactly the huge Lebanese population here. The current President, traces himself back to that Lebanese immigration. There is a big Lebanese, country club not far from my house. So in Lebanon, they have the kibbeh, which is kind of like a, like a bulgur wheat or falafel type thing.

Here we have kipes and they're street food and it's the same kind of like outside masa and they have like ground beef in the middle. I didn't realize until very recently that that wasn't just Dominican, but that was actually from this Lebanese influence, which I thought was really interesting.

Up in the mountains in Constanza, it's now known as like, strawberry central. But those strawberries are originally brought by Japanese immigrants that came up to the Dominican Republic and like have set up in Constanza. Obviously we've got like, like influences from Haiti and some dishes that come over from Haiti as well. A lot of the goat that influences, they eat a lot more goat in Haiti. 

Another interesting one is in the peninsula of Samana, you've got communities of black folks that actually came, there were freed enslaved folks from the U. S. that were trying to go back to Africa and ended up in Samana. So you had these English speaking folks that ended up in Samana like in the 1800s, so you've got like collard greens, you've got, you know, some of the southern influence, southern, like what you would think of southern black food being consumed in those areas too, which is really interesting.

Hema: I love that we can trace people's movements and migrations around the world through food, right? And we can see the similarities, as you've mentioned a couple of times now in, New Orleans, for instance, right? And other places in the U S and we know that these similarities come because of the migration of people or the movement of people, whether it's forced migration or voluntary.

Harry Alvarez: Yeah, yeah. Another good example of that is mofongo, in Puerto Rico, which is basically like mangu, just done a little differently. You have these things that were like, the same ingredients were put into the pot, the same, cultural ingredients to put into the pot, but things develop very differently. Um, but it's interesting to see those comparisons and it, it's a beautiful thing 

Accept it all. Well, one of the issues that we have, I personally have in the DR is there's like a, not so much of an acceptance of the African roots, and we were working on that. Things are getting way better.

My brother has dreads. When he came, when he first got dreads in 98, he would come down here and he'd be like, everyone would look at him like he was crazy. He'd get stopped at customs. Now you see dreads all over the place here, which is awesome. So things are definitely heading in the right direction, but I always like to caution this because while I do know we need to acknowledge our Indigenous culture Sometimes it is weaponized as a way to not accept our African culture.

Hema: So people are going to go, well, I'm not black. I'm Indio. Like, well, sure. We're all of those things, but you have to accept them all. You can't like pick and choose, you know? When we were researching, the history of Dominican Republic for the episode in Season 1, I came across the terms Indio, Mestizo, Mulatto, Moreno, and we also came across a book by Dr. April Mayes who talks about the Mulatto Republic and the colorism and shadism that is really in play and how people seem to want to identify as one thing to, I'm paraphrasing some of what I read through her book, to identify more as Indigenous or European and white and less as African.

Harry Alvarez: Yeah.

Hema: about that?

Harry Alvarez: Yeah. No, a hundred percent. You know, our cedulas until recently, which is our national ID here, said Indio. And, you know, if you do any kind of genetic study, you find that while we do have Indigenous roots, it's a minority of our DNA these days, because of what happened. So I think saying that one erases the history of what we did to those folks, which is not good.

Um, and then there's also like an internal racism and otherism. Which doesn't help because of the fact that we have our neighbor Haiti, which is mostly black, and we, it allows us to other them as well. So, I think it's one of the things that we have to battle the most in the DR is, you know, something I actively try to build bridges for, but it's very taboo here.

 People still, a lot of folks still, you know, don't accept that the reality is that we're mostly Black. And that's okay, that culture also brings tons of value to what we, to who we are. At the same time, I do see progression in the right direction. Recently there was a law that was passed that, you know, made it so that girls didn't have to like straighten their hair to be in public school anymore or, or have it in pig tail, like, or have it like in braids.

They can just wear their hair natural. You know, the, the acceptance of, of, more of the music too. We have all these, people always associate the DR with like, merengue and salsa, yes. Those are also the ones that use the most Europeanized instruments. Whereas, palos, and all these other genres of music that use more like drum beats and African beats are not popularized, but they're starting to become more popular now and more accepted.

Before, if you heard it, you'd be like, oh my god, that's like some, some like, that's some, some, that's sketchy stuff. Now you hear like, oh no, that's cool. I like that. I like that. I like that beat. I like, you know, you can kind of accept it in some circles. I think we're moving in the right direction, but it's a long way to go.

And it all comes down to a certain level of racism that we've seen across the globe. You know, when, when the, when Dominicans look at TV, and they see or they look at pop culture and they see how, how Blacks are treated around the world. They're like, Oh, I don't want to be that, you know,

Hema: And do you think that's where it stems from? Or do you think there are, longstanding racism, colorism, shadism happening that people have just continued adopting that?

Harry Alvarez: I think it's both. I actually think it doesn't help the cause at all that what we highlight as our independence is independence from Haiti. So you automatically make them the other, and they also happen to be Black, for the most part. So, I don't, I think that's probably like, I think if I was going to give any advice to like historians or folks, like, Hey, like, let's teach history a little different so that kids don't learn from the very beginning of school that we got our independence from our neighbors.

Rather, let's, let's talk about the reality that it was 400, they, they freed us from 300 years of oppression from the Spanish. And then we then realized when we went back to Spain, that wasn't any better. We got independence from Spain. Let's highlight those things. But you know, Spain is put on a pedestal. 

Especially now with like Spain giving citizenship to more and more people from the diaspora, that's something people really want, you know? Um, because of the privilege it brings. So it's just, it's a tough battle.

Hema: Yeah, there, there is so much history that happened on that one island that is now two different countries that, like you said, you know, the otherism with the people from Haiti and celebrating the independence from Haiti when in fact all of that wouldn't have happened had it not been for the colonization of the island unto itself.

Harry Alvarez: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And you know, I talked to this historian, a while back in training my staff because, you know, I run a tour operator and it's very important for our staff to like, know the history that they can like, when tourists ask, so, and we try to give like, not a, you know, the sugar coated version of history, you know, so we had this historian come in and talk to our staff and something that he, he said, he mentioned to us really hit home was that, you know, when Haiti came in the DR people were mostly mixed already because they had been living up like it had been a colony for hundreds of years and they were kind of welcomed because you know like you're just like us and the way that history is being told doesn't do justice to that And it's frustrating.

Hema: I I'd like to, to go over a couple of terms, because I think you can probably help clear this up. You talked about Indio, and when I was doing the research, Indio and Mestizo were a being said as they were referring to the same mix. Is that, would you say that's correct?

Harry Alvarez: Uh Yes, and no, so I mean The way it's used, yeah, it's like, my mom would say she's Indiacita. She has no Indigenous roots. She just is like brown, versus black. So I think they're used interchangeably. Um, Indio should really, if you look at the definition of the word, it really should be like Indian or, you know, Indigenous because, you know, Christopher Columbus don't even got to India. That's where the Indio comes from. It's like, it's the word for Indian. 

Hema: Some of the other terms that have come up is Moreno.

Harry Alvarez: Again, so funny. Moreno, like my brother is moreno. He's just, he's black. So instead of saying black, they use Moreno as like a euphemism. It's mostly, it's brown, yeah. Because negro would be like black, black. But, uh, Moreno is like brown. Going more towards black. Moreno and Indio still are used locally and frequently.

Hema: You mentioned, Lebanese population. How did, how and why did people from Lebanon, get to the Dominican Republic.

Harry Alvarez: I mean, you, you're stumping me there. I actually, I'm, I'm not super familiar with the history. I think it has something to do with, the oil crisis in the 80s, but don't quote me on that.

Hema: That that's just more research for me to do.

Harry Alvarez: Yeah, me too. Me too. I'm constantly having to like, that's the thing about these kind of things, like they don't teach it to you. You have to really seek it out, because there are parts of history that are not part of like the majority of narrative. So you really have to like find these little nuggets of information.

Hema: Absolutely. And, you know, doing the research, what I'm finding is that there is what research that's in the history books and the stories that are told are very often from one perspective and to find the real answers, what's going on truly in the country is a little bit harder to find, which is why I'm reaching out to people like you who can actually give me answers of what, what is the current culture like? What is the current cuisine like? And how does it feel, for someone living there currently versus just reading the history?

Harry Alvarez: Yeah, no, it's good. And something interesting about DR cuisine we're seeing right now is that, the DR is one of the fastest growing economies in Latin America. Um, we would say, I, I hate these terms, but they're, they're kind of going from being a developing country to being a developed country in some ways.

So you're seeing that in the restaurant industry. You know, we have our first Michelin rated restaurant recently. I, me and my wife and I went out to this restaurant over the weekend that it's called Temporada or season. And they changed the menu every season to a different part of the world. So you're seeing like these different mixtures of food coming in with affecting our local cuisine in interesting ways.

I had bun the other day, like Vietnamese bun that was goat and infused local oregano. It's interesting to, I'm curious to see where, what comes next. Especially right now we have a big Venezuelan population coming in due to the crisis there. So we're having arepas pop up and cachapas pop up and like Dominicans are intermarrying with Venezuelans and something like that.

That culture is mixing and those foods are mixing. So it's interesting to see what the next iteration of it is. 

We also have a huge and growing Chinese population. So our Chinatown is bustling now, and they're really getting organized, so Sunday morning there's a huge Chinatown market with like fresh fruits and vegetables and then all types of stalls with like all types of like dumplings and all types of Asian food and um, now like chofan has become like a typical term here.

Like people will make it at home, like stir fried rice and that kind of stuff. So it's interesting to see how these things influence. 

The Chinatown is very, very beautiful.

There's a really good, Chinatown organization. The Dominican government has actually signed an agreement for tourism of China now as well too. So it's really interesting. Like I think it's I wouldn't see it, given how different the cultures are, but, allow most, you know, the one of the biggest conflicts is that most of the fried chicken places are now, Chinese owned and they're the ones making most of the fried chicken here, so there's like a battle of who makes the best fried chicken.

Hema: I would raise my hand to say, I'll come there and try them all and tell you what I think.

Harry Alvarez: Yeah, whenever you want. Whenever you want. Yeah, yeah,

As we 

Hema: wrap I want to mention that, you know, for Canadians, which is, you know, where I am and maybe from the North American perspective, the Dominican Republic is a vacation spot, right? There are a ton of resorts, there are cruise ships that dock there, and it's not necessarily necessarily um, where people would tend to explore outside of outside of the, the, the given tourist locations.

Harry Alvarez: yeah.

Hema: What do you think is important for a tourist or somebody considering visiting the Dominican to know about the country beyond the resort?

Harry Alvarez: You teed me up pretty good, because that's exactly what we, we try to do. So our company, we focus on ecotourism, but we focus on locally owned operations. So the DR is known for its beaches and the resorts and Punta Cana, but the reality is that we have the highest peak in the Caribbean. We have tons of microclimates. We have rainforests, cloud forests, waterfalls, all types of other beautiful things to see. So what we focus on is travel outside of the four walls of the resort, that's completely safe, you know, we'll take you to beautiful places. You have all the comforts, same comforts, just you might be in Samana and you might get to see humpback whales, or you might go to Los Haitises National Park and like stay at an eco lodge. You might get to have like, do a homestay with a family or something outside the boundaries of the resort? Because the biggest issue, I love a resort every once in a while. I'm not gonna knock down the resort, it's beautiful. But the problem is, is like, the economic impact sometimes is not as good as it could be.

A lot of the places are foreign owned. The benefits of travel don't stay in the community that you travel to. So what we try to do at Offbeat is try to put as much of the economic benefit of travel with the people and the places that we're visiting. So by using locally owned lodges, locally owned restaurants, that kind of stuff.

Reducing what we call leakage. So, for anyone traveling to the Dominican Republic, I would say, like, do the resort if you want to do a couple days of that. But do venture out. It's not dangerous outside the walls of the resort. There's a bunch of beautiful things to see. Santo Domingo is an amazing city with both a modern and historic sector that are both worth checking out.

We have incredible mountains. When you can do such like rafting, you can do kayaking, you can do hiking, you know, so many things to do outside the walls of the resort and um, yeah, like I think you definitely check those things out, while you're here. 

Hema: If people are interested in learning more about the Dominican Republic, would you say that reaching out to your company or looking at Offbeat 

Harry Alvarez: Travel

yeah.

Hema: is a good, a good starting point?

Harry Alvarez: Of course. Yeah. You can always reach out. We're at offbeattravel. com. You can also check us on Instagram, offbeattravelexperiences or reach out to me. Harry at OffbeatTravel. com. I'm always available, love to talk about the DR and kind of get people to see a different side of tourism. So yeah, definitely reach out if you have any questions or any thoughts. 

Hema: Thank you so much, Harry, for sharing your knowledge of the DR, the region, the island as a whole with us today. We could probably talk a lot more about.

Harry Alvarez: Yeah. Yes.

Hema: that much time. I will leave all of the links in the show notes to reach out to Harry or look at the website, and some of the other places that we talked about and other resources so you can get a full rounded view of the Dominican Republic beyond just vacation spot. So thank you so much

The Moreish Podcast: Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Moreish Podcast. Connect with us on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok at themoreishpodcast. See you for the next episode.