The people and their customs have origins mixing of Spaniard, African and Taino roots. The Dominican Republic was the first Spanish colony in the New World. Diseases inadvertently brought by the Spanish previously unknown to the native inhabitants wiped out the vast majority of the Taino Indians on the island; the colonizers thus began importing massive numbers of African slaves to replace the natives. After the Haitian liberation of the entire island, slavery was abolished and free blacks (and those of mixed race) could be found all over the islands. The Dominican republic's meals consist of mostly beef, chicken, pork, or fish. The most important meal for them is lunch. What Dominicans tend to eat depends highly on where they live, so pigs are farmed heavily.
However, there are differences in class and education that separate different groups. The wealthy privileged status elite are mostly of Spaniard, (others include Italian and French) and to a lesser extent, African descent, while the majority of the lower class are Mulattoes of primarily African descent. The metropolitan culture available to the upper class and vanishing (due to economic turbulence as of late) middle class is often comparable to the life of city dwellers in the rich countries of Western Europe and the United States. But this metropolitan culture doesn't reach the poorest people, who may not have the most basic amenities, necessities, running water, electricity, sanitary facilities nor consumer electronics.
Famous quotes containing the words culture of, culture and/or republic:
“Unthinking people will often try to teach you how to do the things which you can do better than you can be taught to do them. If you are sure of all this, you can start to add to your value as a mother by learning the things that can be taught, for the best of our civilization and culture offers much that is of value, if you can take it without loss of what comes to you naturally.”
—D.W. Winnicott (20th century)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)