At the Dominican Salon, a Tangled History All Comes Out in the Wash, and Set

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At the Dominican Salon, a Tangled History All Comes Out in the Wash, and Set

By Teresa Wiltz

Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 14, 2007 

The women are specialists in the subduing of spirited hair -- wizards of blow-dryers and curling irons, of brightly colored rollers and creamy Caribbean unguents, of bobby pins and potent frizz fighters. Kinks and coils are not welcome. Curls are to be quashed into submission, lassoed around restraining devices, baked under a bonnet and then brushed and brushed until they concede defeat.

At the Sashelvis Hair Salon & Spa in downtown Silver Spring, the only good curl is a curl that knows its place: prone.

There are those who like it like that, notwithstanding the fraught nature of race and hair. And because of this, women queue up by the dozens at the salon, waiting to partake of this particular brand of communion: the Dominican blow-out, a multi-layered process that results, in the words of a '70s hair commercial, in bouncin' and behavin' hair. "Dominican" is a key component of this particular species of blow-out, a branding that sends its devotees scurrying to find a salon in Phoenix or Dallas or London, posting frantic missives on Web sites: "Bad hair day . . . Desperately looking for a Dominican salon in downtown Toronto."

Which is why, at 8 a.m. on a Saturday, 18 women line up on Wayne Avenue outside Sashelvis, Starbucks lattes in hand. Once inside, all is quiet, save for the hush of hair dryers, the soft murmur of Spanish, the trickle of running water. Then a brusque refrain, one that will be heard again throughout the 11-hour day, punctures the peace: "Next!"

"We work all day long," says Ana Marmolejos, who co-owns Sashelvis with her sister, Carmen. "And at Easter time? Oh. My. God. We've got people lined up, waiting for dryers. Some days, you get those big bushes of hair, no chemicals. We feel like running away."

On this day, Marmolejos and her 15 stylists will coif the tresses of 116 women and girls. (On a really busy day, she says, they'll see as many as 160.) The overwhelming majority of those women will be African American -- 98 percent of their clientele -- with a handful of Dominicanas, West Africans, Jamaicans, Central Americans and the stray white girl tossed into the mix.

The popularity of the Dominican salon -- even in Washington, which has only a microscopic population hailing from the Dominican Republic -- embodies a perfect storm of racial aesthetics, cultural conditioning and a strong hand with a blow-dryer. (In downtown Silver Spring, there are six Dominican hair salons, including one owned by another of Marmolejos's sisters and one that she rents out to another hairstylist. (There are others scattered around the region.) Burbling under the surface is a shared legacy of slavery and miscegenation, of ancestors who survived the Middle Passage, ending up in different ports of call all across the Americas. Dominicans, the descendants of Africans, Europeans, Taino Indians and a few other strains thrown in for good measure, are famous for knowing their way around highly textured hair, renowned for, as Latina.com declares, "the best damn blow-outs in the country." Because of this, Ana and Carmen Marmolejos boast on their business cards, "YES, WE ARE DOMINICANS!"

That's what folks come for.

"Whenever I come here, my hair looks so light and shiny," says Danielle Balfour, 29, a sweet-faced elementary school teacher from Charlottesville, as she stands in line with sopping-wet hair, waiting to have it set on rollers. Every month, she says, she makes her pilgrimage to Sashelvis.

"I can't do [what they do]," Balfour says. "Other salons can't do it. So I stick to here. Everyone who comes here tries to figure out 'What's the mystery of what they do here?' "

Perhaps it's not that big of a mystery. In the Dominican Republic, where it is estimated that 90 percent of the population has at least some African ancestry, straight hair is revered as a symbol of beauty. Over the years, Dominicanas developed techniques to manage curly hair in a tropical climate, mastering the art of the roller set and concocting conditioners in the kitchen.

"It's the technique," observes New York-based beauty editor Tia Williams, who's chronicled her love for the Dominican blow-out in her blog, "Shake Your Beauty."

"It's all in the wrist, some kind of wrist action they have combined with the roller set. No matter how well you do roller sets at home, they do it better. The blow-out that you get is smoother and shinier than you can get at any other salons."

Unlike those pricey retreats where you're served cappuccino and white wine, Sashelvis is strictly no-frills: a handful of seats in the front, a few pictures of glammed-out hair models on the walls, a few religious portraits along with the American flag stuck in a glass vase, impersonating a flower.

Folks come here because it's quick. (Well, relatively, about two hours, start to finish.) It's cheap. (Again, relatively. Cheap for D.C., with prices starting at $35; it's cheaper in New York, the epicenter of the Dominican American beauty parlor.) It's convenient. (Open seven days a week, no appointment necessary.)

It works something like this: You come in, asking for a "wash 'n' set." The receptionist gives your hair the once-over. If your hair is long, you pay $10 more. If your hair is naturally curly or kinky and untouched by chemical straighteners or relaxers, you pay $10 more.

After the initial assessment, you're sent back to the shampoo room, where you get scrubbed down with products hailing from the D.R. and Europe and then slathered with ultrahydrating conditioners. Then it's under a long, conical dryer for 10 minutes while the conditioner does its work. After a quick rinse, you're plopped down in the stylist's chair, where she painstakingly sets your soaking locks on big plastic rollers. Then it's back under the hairdryer for an ear-scorching 50 minutes. Then back to the stylist's chair, where she takes out the curlers and, armed with a blow-dryer and a brush, steamrolls out any remaining bumps and kinks from the hair. Then, you're finished off with a curling iron, ensuring that any remaining hint of frizz is obliterated.

(Frizz is the enemy here. On the way out the door, a receptionist proffers a shower cap to don as you cross the street. It's raining, she points out. Rain equals frizz.)

By the time the first batch of clients are going through the final stages of their transformation, a haze hovers over the salon, the byproduct of multiple blow-dryers going at full blast at the same time. Over the speakers, Dominican balladeer Bonny Cepeda croons about lost love, begging and begging for what once was and what now isn't. Some of the stylists sing along sotto voce, egged on by Marmolejos's 13-year-old daughter, Sasha.

"¡Dale, dale! " she teases, tossing her mane of perfectly straightened hair. "¡Canta!"

Go on! Sing!

* * *

Back home in Santo Domingo, there's a beauty shop on every corner. Office workers are expected to adhere to a strict dress code, Marmolejos says -- carefully coiffed hair, no ponytails, or buns -- and so women haunt salons, popping in every few days for a touch-up, trying to beat the heat and humidity.

"Every Dominican girl knows how to roller-set their hair," says Angelina "Gigi" Alcantara, the salon's 24-year-old receptionist/bookkeeper. "It has to be real straight."

Sometimes, of course, a hairstyle is just a hairstyle. But some see this obsession with straightening hair as a desire to erase all traces of any connection to the Mother Land. In his upcoming novel, "The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," Dominican American novelist Junot Diaz writes about the color complexes of Dominicans at home and abroad, how straight hair is a status symbol, something to indicate that you are more Taino or European than African, and therefore somehow better.

Observes Bernadette Sanchez, a Dominican American psychologist in Chicago: "Based on my own experience with my family and with other Dominicans, there is a complex about having black ancestry. There are many Dominicans to me who are clearly black but will not identify as black. A lot of shame in the Dominican culture about having black heritage." And historically, Sanchez says, that attitude translates into prejudice against black Americans.

Much like African Americans, the stylists here, all Dominicanas, are an assortment of colors and hair textures, from fair-skinned and kinky-haired to deep brown with silky, straight tresses. But they seem to like it best serving up hairstyles with a healthy helping of lye.

"A lot of stylists don't want to deal with, let's say, African hair," Marmolejos says. "They're afraid of it. But we are black. We're all mixed, but how can I consider myself white?"

"You have this perception that women from the islands think they're better," says Carol Walls, a 46-year-old author and poet who lives in Southeast. "But they're women just like us. That was a different perspective, seeing other women from different cultures going through the same stuff."

By 5 p.m., the last of the clients trickle in. In one chair, a Cameroonian woman, dressed in traditional dress, chats on her cellphone, gossiping and laughing in her native language. Fewer clients emerge from the shampoo room. One by one the stylists with wet hair begin to take their places in chairs, towels draped around their necks. Now it's their turn.

Marmolejos finishes her last batch of customers, with her own hair half-wet and blow-dried straight. "I never have time to do my hair," she says. Stealing a minute, she plops down into her own chair, as one of the stylists finishes her up.

By 7, the last of the clients have gone and the workers get down to the final business of the day: Taking care of each other, wielding blow-dryers and scissors, curling irons and bobby pins, winding hair round rollers, then baking it until it does their bidding.

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