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La India Canela
Accordionist, bandleader, songwriter

In at least two ways, the Dominican accordionist known as La India Canela is unusual among the Latin American musicians who have gained exposure outside their native countries. First is the fact that she is a woman: female instrumentalists are rare in Latin American popular music, although La India herself was preceded by other women in her merengue típico genre and has in turn inspired younger female players. A second unusual feature of La India's music is its genre: merengue típico (mer-AYN-gay TEE-pee-co), while popular in the Dominican Republic, has been less often heard abroad than the orchestral, brass-and-wind-driven merengue heard in countless Latin American dance venues.

The Spanish designation La India Canela literally means "The Cinnamon Indian"; the word "india" in the Dominican Republic often means a woman of mixed-race descent rather than one of specifically Native American background. La India's birth name has been given as Lidia Mari'a Hernández López or Mery Hernánez. She was born in El Limón, in Villa González, a tobacco-plantation region in the Dominican Republic's Santiago Province.

La India's rural home had no television and no radio, so the family made their own entertainment. La India's father occasionally played the tambora, a two-headed Afro-Caribbean drum, for fun, and her older brother played the accordion a little. La India took up the accordion herself, but from the start it was more than a diversion for her. "Accordion is very profound, and you feel it probably from the moment you are in your mother's womb," she told Andrea Seabrook of National Public Radio. "There is no formal education for an accordionist."

At first, La India had to practice the accordion secretly; women accordion performers like the merengue típico player Fefita la Grande did exist, but were rare, and her father believed it was improper for a girl to play the instrument. Merengue típica, featuring an accordion backed by tambora, often conga drums, a güira scraper, saxophone, bass, and other instruments, was a semi-traditional music that arose in the countryside of the Dominican Republic's northern Cibao region, and it had, from the viewpoint of some upper class Dominicans, low social status. La India's obvious talent eventually changed her father's mind, and he arranged an apprenticeship for her with the bandleader Miro Francisco.

The young accordionist traveled around the Dominican Republic with Francisco—on two wheels. "Sometimes from Guananico we would go to Hatillo Palma, traveling the whole Línea region on a motorbike he had. We had to get on that little bike with accordion and saxophone and fight our way through all those hills to go there, and then we would return at two in the morning," the accordionist recalled, as quoted in the booklet accompanying her Smithsonian Folkways album La India Canela: Merengue Típico, from the Dominican Republic. "It was 70 or 80 kilometers, and sometimes our gas would run out. We'd have to stop people to give us a little gas, and it was cold up there!" The apprenticeship paid off, however. When La India was 14, Juan de Dios, the saxophonist in Fefita la Grande's band, listened to La India play and suggested that she form a new group with some musicians he knew and move to the large city of Santiago de los Caballeros.

La India's father was once again reluctant to agree to the plan, but other family and friends convinced him that she might have a future in the business. La India began playing in Santiago clubs. It was around that time, she told Seabrook, that she acquired her stage name: she met a radio host who looked her over and said, "Your name is ‘La India. La India Canela.’" La India impressed listeners with her rendition of the difficult instrumental piece "Las Siete Pasadas" (The Seven Passages), but her career progressed slowly at first. During the 1980s she formed three different groups. Her husband, a music promoter, served as her manager at first, but after the couple divorced, La India took control of her career. She was influenced by leading merengue típico players in Santiago, including her teachers Siano Arias, Rafaelito Polanco, and Lupe Valerio, but she also began to write material of her own.

It was a La India original with accordion-related word-play, titled "Apriétame Así" (Squeeze me Like That), that established her as a famous musician in the early 1990s. She followed that up with other hits, including "El Rancho" and "El Cuchicheo." La India went on to forge a repertoire consisting of traditional pieces, music in modern styles, and her own compositions. Merengue típica was changing as Dominican society prospered and urbanized in the 1990s and 2000s, and La India found a place for various elements, including mambo and other Afro-Caribbean rhythms, in her music. But she believed (as quoted by the Merengue Típico Web site) that "la música típica shouldn't lose its essence. Because if it loses its essence, it loses its roots."

Recording several albums for the José Luís label, La India twice won the Casandra, the Dominican Republic's top arts prize. She took another step forward in her career with the release of La India Canela: Merengue Típico, from the Dominican Republic in 2008. The album appeared on Smithsonian Folkways, a prestigious U.S. label that explored roots music forms in many countries. The album contained some of the most famous pieces from the merengue típica tradition, along with a new version of "Apriéme Así." The release brought La India attention from music buyers in the United States and beyond. La India toured in U.S. venues and appeared on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Her growing renown began to inspire younger women to play the accordion and she was quoted as saying in the liner notes to the Smithsonian Folkways album, "It has been a great satisfaction for me that some of the young women have come up to me and said that they have seen in me an example to follow." With the release of more than 50 of her earlier tracks in digital download form in March of 2009, La India Canela added another dash of her distinctive Caribbean flavor to the roots music scene of the Western Hemisphere.

Selected discography
Que Siga la Fiesta! (Let the Party Begin), José Luís, 1997.
En Vivo! (Live), José Luís, 1998.
La India Canela: Merengue Típico, from the Dominican Republic, Smithsonian Folkways, 2008.

Sources
Online
"La India Canela," Latino Arts, http://www.latinoartsinc.org/display/router.asp?docid=551 (April 29, 2009).
"La India Canela," Merengue Típico, http://www.merengueripiao.com/india.html (April 29, 2009).
"La India Canela: Dominican Accordionist," Smithsonian Global Sound, http://www.smithsonianglobalsound.org/feature_28A.aspx (April 29, 2009).
"La India Canela: Hot-Blooded Accordion," Interview, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, April 13, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8918 9077.
Additional information ws obtained from La India Canela: Merengue Típico, from the Dominican Republic, Booklet notes, Smithsonian Folkways Records.

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