María Díaz, billed as La Reyna, is a Dominican merengue típico singer and composer from Santiago de los Caballeros, born on 26 September 1968. She has been working the típico circuit for more than three decades.

A woman who writes

Merengue típico is a male genre at the level of who gets credited. Women sing in it and always have, but the accordion, the bandleading and the writing have stayed largely in men’s hands.

She is the author of a long list of merengues, and the Dominican press has singled her out on exactly those grounds — one of the few merengueras whose name is on the songs as well as on the record label.

The songs

El Cañaveral, El Hombre Que Quise and Se Fue Llorando are the older ones. Ese Hombre Es Mío is recent, and she released it directly to the women in her audience, asking them to send in their own videos.

That is a modern way to work a very old circuit, and it fits her: típico has always been participatory music, and the phone has only changed the mechanism.

The circuit

She was performing in New York by 1989 and has kept the diaspora and the island going in parallel since. At home her stages are the patronales — Jánico, Cejitas, Villa González — the town-by-town calendar that keeps típico alive whatever the industry in Santo Domingo is doing.