Rafael Petitón Guzmán was a Dominican composer, pianist, arranger and bandleader. He was born in Salcedo and he is the reason merengue was heard in New York ballrooms decades before anyone thought of it as an export.

Salcedo, San Juan, New York

His first teacher was his father, Edilio Petitón, a good amateur musician. A Dominican government scholarship then sent him to Puerto Rico for three years to study under Julio de Arteaga and Ramón Morlá, and he stayed on the island long enough to take a seat in the original Rafael Muñoz Orchestra, one of the most respected Puerto Rican bands of the day.

He travelled through much of Latin America before settling in New York in the middle of the nineteen-thirties, and once there he enrolled at Juilliard, where he studied under Leopold Stokowski. A Dominican from a small Cibao town, holding a conservatory place in Manhattan in that decade, is not a common biography.

Orquesta Lira Dominicana

The band he formed was among the first Dominican-led orchestras in the city, and among the first to put merengue in front of an audience that had never heard it. He was called the merengue ambassador for it, and the title was earned in rooms rather than in interviews: Radio City Music Hall, the Stork Club, the Copacabana.

The recordings that survive show what he actually did with the form. El Llorón and El Merengue en Nueva York are merengues, but Vibraciones is a danzón, Bésame a bolero-son and Amor y Pasión something else again. He was writing for a Latin New York in which Dominicans, Cubans and Puerto Ricans shared the same bandstands, and the merengue had to hold its own beside everything else on the stand.

The last years, and the archive

He spent his later working life teaching, arranging and composing. He died in San Juan in December 1983 and, at his own request, was buried in Salcedo.

What he left is unusually complete: more than eighteen hundred scores, lyric sheets, recordings, documents and photographs, given to the Dominican Archives at the City College of New York in 2007 by his daughter and two sons. Very little Dominican music of that generation survives in that shape.

Recovered rather than remembered

For most of the last forty years he was a name in specialist bibliographies and nowhere else. That has begun to change: the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute assembled a three-part tribute in 2021 and issued an album of his work, the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA has run a project on him, and in 2023 the Latin American Music Review published a study that opens by saying his work has had almost no attention until now.

It is a fair summary. The music that started in a New York ballroom in the nineteen-thirties is only now being read off the page again.