There is a corner of the Colonial City that was never on the plans, yet it remained and transcended as a bastion of popular culture
SANTO DOMINGO.- When Nicolás de Ovando laid out the straight streets of Santo Domingo, to the northwest of the wall there was a piece of land left undivided into lots, a slope towards the Ozama where the stonemasons who extracted the limestone to build the Cathedral, the Casa del Tostado and the rest of the buildings of the town that tourists visit today gathered.
That piece of land was called Santa Bárbara, and the documentary filmmaker Oscar Grullón, who was part of the organizing committee of several editions of the Marginal Biennial, has described it as the first marginal neighborhood of the American cities founded by Spain and the backyard of the Alcázar de Colón, where slaves were kept before being taken to be sold in the plaza.
From that humble origin, Santa Bárbara preserved for centuries a vocation as a neighborhood of trades and working people.
Therelived the stonemasons, the fishermen, the dockworkers of the nearby port, and also,on the old street of Commerce, today Isabel la Catlica, the family of a Spanish merchantanda Dominican woman from El Seibo whose son would bebaptized, on February 4, 1813, in the font of the church of the neighborhood: Juan Pablo Duarte, the future father of the homeland.
The baptismal font, according to church chroniclers, is still preserved in what is now the Santa Bárbara Military Cathedral.
And yet, when the 19th century arrived and the city opened up to new fortunes, something changed, according to architect Omar Rancier, dean of the School of Architecture and Urbanism at Pedro Henríquez Ureña University.
He explained that the emergence of a bourgeoisie in Santa Barbara at the beginning of the 19th and 20th centuries completely transformed the morphology of its residences, and on that same marginal land grew a group of mansions, on España Street and its surroundings, with wrought iron balconies and French-inspired ornamentation, very different from the colonial sobriety.
The republican splendor did not last. The 20th century brought abandonment, and of those stately residences only the shells remained, later occupied by printing workshops, carpentry shops, tailor shops, and by families that the formal city pushed towards its margins.
Santa Barbara became, in a way, what it had been at the beginning: a neighborhood that Santo Domingo looked at askance.
It was precisely this marginality that attracted, in the late eighties, the painter Silvano Lora, who, dissatisfied with the official circuit of the Biennial of Visual Arts organized by the State, devised a response from the streets: the Marginal Biennial, which celebrated its first edition in 1992, in the middle of the year of the Fifth Centenary, when the whole country was preparing to celebrate the discovery of America.
As Grullón himself recalled, the Biennial arose as a direct response to the deterioration and overcrowding of the limits of the Colonial City.
And while the official power set up its salons, Silvano Lora invited dozens of artists to exhibit on the walls of the dilapidated houses of Santa Bárbara, among clothes hanging in the street and stray dogs.
The neighborhood residents themselves joined in with their works, working alongside renowned Dominican artists, and for several days Santa Barbara became the only gallery in the world made of zinc, wood and cracked cement.
The Marginal Biennial was repeated for years, until Lora's death in 2003, and its spirit did not die out completely: today it is continued by the MODOFOCA collective, which has turned a good part of the facades of the neighborhood into an extensive open-air mural.
Santa Bárbara also holds another endearing legacy. Luis "El Terror" Díaz, the guitarist from Bonao whom the city would eventually call the father of Dominican rock, also walked its streets, and in that labyrinth of colonial and republican houses he found the same rebellious spirit that Silvano Lora had sown with his biennials: that of a neighborhood that never fully accepted the rules of the city center, not even when the center ended up enveloping it.
Today, anyone walking through Santa Barbara on a Sunday morning finds the two layers of its history superimposed: the colonial stone that built the official city and the murals that challenge it, the ruined republican mansion and the graffiti that resurrects it in its own way.
Few neighborhoods in America tell such a complete story of what the city decides to leave out, and what that "outside" ends up, sooner or later, returning to the city, as art.
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