[LINK] "Curly-centric hair salon teaches Dominican women to love their pajón"

[rfmcdonald]

Kate Kilpatrick at Al Jazeera writes about the complex relationship between hair styles, racism, and national identity in the Dominican Republic.

Carolina Contreras still feels the heat smolder beneath her cheeks whenever she recounts the time a bouncer denied her and some friends entry to a trendy Santo Domingo bar because of their hair.

“He said our hair was not appropriate for the bar,” said Contreras, her sideswept bangs tucked beneath a bouncy bouquet of black curls. “My hair is considered informal, unprofessional, ugly. It’s considered dirty.”

In a country where more than three-quarters of the population is of mixed African and European ancestry, it may surprise foreigners that curly hair — pelo rizado — could command such attention, let alone disdain. After all, the Dominican Republic ranks fifth among countries with the largest black population outside Africa, according to the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, a Berlin-based nongovernmental organization, behind Haiti, with which the D.R. shares the island of Hispaniola.

But in the Dominican Republic, straightened hair is not only big business; it defines the standard of beauty. There, Afro-textured hair is unabashedly called pelo malo, or bad hair. Dominican hair salons are renowned from Harlem to Houston for their smooth blowouts and chemical straightening treatments that coerce the most stubborn curl into submission.

And so Contreras, who was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in the U.S. since the age of 4, is on a mission to teach Afro-Latin women to embrace their natural curls. At her Miss Rizos salon, which opened in December 2014, curls are defined, protected, appreciated — and never straightened. She is part of a broader wave of young Dominicans raised or educated abroad who are bringing a new sense of black identity and pride to their culture. Academics say these transnational Dominicans, or members of the Dominican diaspora, are more inclined to draw parallels between negrophobia they have witnessed elsewhere (for example, how black Americans are treated in the U.S. or Dominicans are treated in Puerto Rico) and the pigmentocracy and anti-Haitianism they witness in the D.R.

“Certainly there are a lot of Dominicans that are aware of their blackness and embrace it. But those are the minority. I think the biggest influence is those of us who lived abroad and come back,” said Yesilernis Peña, a researcher at the Instituto Tecnologico de Santo Domingo who studies race in the Latin Caribbean.