Santiago Cerón was a Dominican musician and artist whose career spanned the middle decades of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first, connecting the traditions of an older era to the musical environment of the present. Born in 1940 in Santiago de los Caballeros, the cultural capital of the Cibao region, he grew up in a city with a storied musical heritage and developed his artistic practice in dialogue with the rich popular music traditions of that region. The Cibao valley has been central to the development of merengue and other forms of Dominican popular music, and Cerón's formation in that environment gave him a deep grounding in the sounds and sensibilities that define Dominican culture at its most locally rooted. He contributed to Dominican musical life over a career of several decades before passing away in 2011 at the age of 71.