Milly, Jocelyn y Los Vecinos was a Dominican merengue orchestra formed by four siblings of the Quezada Borbón family in Washington Heights, Manhattan, in 1975, one of the first female-fronted merengue acts and a formative outlet for Milly Quezada, later known as La Reina del Merengue.

Washington Heights

The family had left Santo Domingo for New York during the Dominican civil war of the mid-1960s, and the group grew out of street singing among the siblings in the growing Dominican neighbourhood of Washington Heights. The oldest brother, Rafael Quezada, directed and arranged for the group; Milly Quezada and her sister Jocelyn sang lead, with another brother, Martín, also in the lineup. The band first performed as Milly y Los Vecinos before taking the fuller name once Jocelyn was singing lead alongside her sister.

A woman-led merengue

Through the late 1970s and into the 1980s and 1990s the group built a following among the Dominican diaspora with songs such as «La Guacherna» and «Volvió Juanita» — both written by the Colombian composer Esthercita Forero, of Barranquilla — «Tengo» and «Lo mío es mío / Amanecemos parrandeando», written by the Colombian musician Israel Romero. Their records include «Ahora es..!» (1989) and «7+1 = Vecinos» (1990), the latter opening with «La Reina» and including «Viejo Luis», a bachata. In 1990 the group says it played a Presidential Inaugural Gala for George H. W. Bush in Washington, D.C., and it toured Japan, giving some of the first live Dominican merengue performances there, in Tokyo, Nagasaki and Nagoya.

Legacy

The group’s run effectively ended when Milly Quezada launched her solo career in 1997, after the 1996 death of her husband and manager Rafael Vázquez. Milly, Jocelyn y Los Vecinos is remembered as one of the first orchestras to put a woman at the front of Dominican merengue, at a time when the genre’s bandstands were almost entirely male.