La India Canela — Lidia María Hernández López, known as Mery Hernández — is a Dominican accordionist, singer and bandleader in merengue típico, from El Limón, in Villa González, a tobacco-growing district of Santiago province. Leading her own conjunto for more than three decades, she recorded «Merengue Típico from the Dominican Republic» (2008) for «Smithsonian Folkways», an album the Dominican press greeted as the first merengue típico record in the Smithsonian’s world-music collection.

El Limón

She is the first professional musician in her family: her father played tambora for fun, and her older brother kept an accordion at home, which, in a house with no television or radio, she took up as a toy. Seeing her talent, her father sent her to learn with Miro Francisco, a saxophonist who also played accordion, and the two travelled the Línea region by motorbike to play, with accordion and saxophone on board.

Santiago

Juan de Dios, a saxophonist who had played with Fefita la Grande, heard her at home and put a group together around her; at fourteen, once her father had been persuaded, she left with it for Santiago. There she learned from the accordionists Siano Arias, Rafaelito Polanco and Lupe Valerio and from Rafaelito Román, and counts El Cieguito de Nagua among her influences. In the 1980s she formed three different groups before settling into a career of her own. Her records include «¡Que siga la fiesta!» (1989) and «En vivo» (1998), and her repertoire mixes traditional pieces with merengues of her own and by friends such as Rafaelito Román and David David: «Apriétame así», «El rancho», «El cuchicheo». She is also known for «Las siete pasadas», the instrumental showpiece of the típico repertoire. The notes to her Smithsonian album credit her with two Casandra awards.

«Smithsonian Folkways»

«Merengue Típico from the Dominican Republic» was produced by the ethnomusicologist Sydney Hutchinson, recorded in Santiago and mixed in Washington, launched at the Dominican embassy there in March and presented at the «Centro León» in Santiago in July. In February 2009 the columnist Alfonso Quiñones objected in Diario Libre that she had been left out of that year’s Casandra nominations despite it. That summer she played the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, in its «Las Américas» programme.

Stages

In July 2007 she was part of the Dominican delegation to the 27th «Festival del Caribe» in Cuba, where she gave some ten shows in Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo with a seven-piece group — accordion, tambora, güira, saxophone, tumbadoras and bass. She recorded the duet «Te falta lo principal» with Johnny Ventura, later included on his album «Los rostros del merengue». She also recorded a Christian típico album, «En la iglesia sí se goza», in 1998–1999, and in 2023 wrote «Un tesoro para mi familia» for the Archdiocese of Santiago’s family walk.

Legacy

La India Canela belongs to the line of women who lead típico conjuntos from the accordion, after Fefita la Grande and María Díaz and alongside Raquel Arias. She has said that younger women accordionists have told her they followed her example, and her Smithsonian album carried merengue típico to audiences in the United States.