I wrote Bees and Honey in 2017 after being inspired by Juan Luis Guerra’s “Como Abeja Al Panal.” The moment you hear the guitarra in a rapid succession of notes you know you’re in for a treat, un dulcecito pa’ los oído. The first time I heard this song, I was young, too young to know anything about romance, and yet even I knew it was the most beautiful sound to ever touch my ears and my heart. To this day, even after hearing this song a million times, it still reaches the deepest recesses of my soul and forces me to want to fall in love…if only for four minutes. I’m immediately wrapped in a melodic tale of lovers torn apart by preconceived notions of who you should be with, á la Romeo y Julieta. The lyrics themselves are poetry, ‘love is honey and I’m the bee searching for my beehive’. The desire to want to love, despite all odds is what runs deep in Bees and Honey. A love story set to the rhythms of merengue and bachata. But don’t try to translate the song itself to English, because everything sounds more romantic in Spanish…including the dropped s’s and abbreviated words of mi gente.

Bees and Honey is not only a love letter to Dominicans, but also a love letter to a city that has wrapped its arms around me and said qué lo qué and welcome home. The only Dominicans I grew up around were my family. Don’t get it twisted, I love Chicago, the city that raised me and made me who I am. The sounds of the Heights remind me of the sounds of Humboldt Park, my neighborhood in Chicago. The Afro Boricua beats of bomba y plena that were lullabies and morning salutations. But, there’s just something about Nueva Yol. Whether it’s the melodic up and down of the Dominican accent you hear when walking down Dyckman, or el merengue that pierces the morning air (actually it never stops), or the smells of plátano frito that waft through neighbors’ windows, I have come to love New York deeply. And every second Sunday in August, Sixth Avenue fills with a sea of red white and blue flags ushered by the sounds that have raised generations of proud Dominicans.

Bees and Honey, set in Washington Heights, Nueva Yol. The excitement to have a play produced that portrays a Dominican couple, written by a Dominican playwright, directed by a Dominican director, performed by Dominican actors. Fam, what? On an Off-Broadway English speaking stage? ¿Qué qué? That’s pure plátano power. The precedence wasn’t lost on me and it wasn’t lost on a community that rarely sees itself on stage. A community that makes up the largest group within the Latinx diaspora of New York City. Dominicans are largely ignored in NYC theaters, so when LAByrinth Theater Company and The SOL Project teamed up to produce this play, I was elated. And all the Dominicans I knew were hype and ready to support a show that repped them. By us, for us. Like real talk, New York theater stages have A LOT of work to do in better reflecting the people that live here, but that’s for another article. 

As COVID-19 continued its ravage, protests all over the world erupted. Black Lives Matter hashtags were everywhere, including in Ann Taylor emails. OK pause… You know you have everyone’s attention when a company like Ann Taylor is acknowledging the racism in its company and in this country. Everyone made statements, people that didn’t agree with the sentiment of Black lives mattering when the movement was first created as a hashtag, all of a sudden got on board. George Floyd’s name became the rallying call. And then, I woke up June 3 to #Dominicans trending on Twitter. I wish it was for some dope ass art, or great music, or amazing medical advances in combating COVID-19 on the island, pero, nope. It was for racism. Sigh. Gimme a moment, sometimes I just need to collect my breath… It’s no secret that racism and anti-Blackness are prevalent in Latin America (as much as many like to deny the fact). But it happens many times that DR is held closer to the fire when it comes to these criticisms. And there’s historical reason for it too. In 2012 the Dominican government decreed for documented proof of Dominican lineage dating past 1929, leaving hundreds of thousands of Haitians stateless. Only after international outcry and pressure from the United Nations did DR outline plans for Haitians to establish citizenship. But before this plan was put in place, what was the major determining factor in differentiating a Dominican from a Haitian? Skin color. Pero like not really because how do you differentiate a Black person from a Black person…but I digress. Similarly in the 1930s, in an effort to whiten Dominican Republic, dictator in charge Rafael Leónidas Trujillo rounded up over 20,000 Haitians and murdered them. The determining factor that time? Again, darker skin color and the inability to roll the Spanish R. Hold up, lemme just breathe for a hot second… DR has a long history of anti-Blackness (and specifically anti-Hatianism) that dates back to the 1800s. It’s one of the reasons it took a white Dominican to make bachata an accepted and celebrated form of music in DR and globally. A music form I like to compare to the blues, not just in that painful melancholy that defines the lyricism and the instrumentation, but the disregard of general society that in its nascence described the genre as vulgar and for poor people. Juan Luis Guerra “elevated” the genre and made it more palatable to the naysayers. Ha! You thought I wasn’t gonna comment on the irony of the song choice in my play and the issues of anti-Blackness in DR? Naw fam, we’re aware. Sidenote: I do get annoyed when folks point to DR’s anti-Blackness, and not Argentina’s complete genocide of its Black population or Mexico’s disregard of its over 1.5 million Afro Mexican population, but again, I digress…I do that a lot.

After the well-deserved “pela” we received on Twitter and other social media platforms, Dominicans everywhere rose up exclaiming our Blackness and airing out our own dirty laundry. Real talk, for every come mierda person that denies who we are, there are many more doing the work of combating racism, anti-Blackness and anti-Hatianism in our community. On June 6, New York Dominicans banned together with Haitians and other communities and marched together. In solidarity, and in a fight that affects us all. Protests occurred in Dominican Republic causing dozens of protesters to be violently jailed. Somos Negros, regardless of the millions of cute names we use (trigueño, jabao, morenito, mulato, etc.) to say otherwise. We have a lot of work to do, this is true, but trust that there are folks dedicated to educating our community. 

This COVID cut season was one of the most exciting season that had the biggest number of Asian, Latinx and Black shows being produced (although Indigenous shows still went with the least productions). But it also ushered the stop-in-everything we needed to address the giant issues society kept ignoring: racism, anti-Blackness, financial inequalities, and the need for the redistribution of resources. It uncovered inequities in every aspect of our lives. The reality is we’re fighting multiple pandemics. And racism and anti-Blackness are global problems that we have to address together. White Supremacy and racism didn’t happen overnight. It’s a chronic infection we’ve had for centuries that’ll take time and care, and dedicated people doing the work round the clock. We can keep the pressure so it doesn’t keep popping up in the violent ways it does, and eventually, it’ll subside. I believe in us. And I believe en mi gente. We can be better and we can continue this work together. And when we’re able to congregate again, we’ll continue telling stories where we love, laugh and drink.

This is Washington Heights. This is Little Dominican Republic. This is Johaira and Manuel. This is Bees and Honey.

All media courtesy of the writer.