In the mid-1990s, Castro was walking around Queens and Brooklyn when he heard an unfamiliar music on the streets and in homes. He remembers it as romantic and sexy.

He subsequently learned more about bachata music from young church members. As a Mormon missionary, he couldn't listen to it in private but he asked friends to buy him CDs for his eventual return to Utah.

"I would watch people dancing it all the time, and . . . it made me want to experience it," he said. "But I had to wait until I got home."

Now, 11 years later, Castro is in Utah promoting a concert featuring Monchy y Alexandra - an internationally known bachata duo from the Dominican Republic.

But is bachata, a style of music and dance most popular in Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican cultures, even heard in Utah?

"It's been growing slowly but surely," said Castro, who lives in Provo with his wife and two kids. "It's become a mainstream sound [in the Latin market] known by everyone."

Bachata emerged in the early 1960s in the shantytowns of the Dominican Republic as romantic guitar music. It was usually played by trios or quartets made up of guitars, bongo drums and maracas or wooden sticks. Musicians were influenced by other Latin sounds, including Cuban bolero, Mexican rancheros and Colombian-Ecuadorian pasillo, according to Bachata: A social history of a Dominican popular music, by Deborah Pacini Hernandez.

Bachata, similar to rap in the United States, "began as the music of the poor and dispossessed," she writes. It started with ultra-romantic lyrics but later turned to sex, violence and drinking alcohol. The music was shunned by the media, mainstream musicians, and middle-and upper-class Dominicans mostly because the lyrics were considered vulgar and worthless. It wasn't until 1992, when bachata musician Juan Luis Guerra won a Grammy, that the music was internationally recognized, according to Hernandez.

Castro speculates that bachata migrated to the Beehive State in the early 1990s.

In 1997, when Castro returned to Utah following his Mormon mission in New York, he worked construction during the day and started deejaying at a club in Provo that had a Latino music night. That's where he started playing a bachata song here and there, but people weren't very familiar with it and didn't know how to dance to it.

"Utah just doesn't like change," said Guillermo Sacriste, a Salt Lake City deejay also known as Will Sounds. "It doesn't relate to everybody."

People couldn't listen to bachata on the radio, either, because there were just a handful of AM stations that played mostly Mexican music. Some 70 percent of Utah Latinos are of Mexican descent, according to the U.S. census.

Eventually, Castro said, more Utahns started dancing to bachata and liking it, perhaps due to growing numbers of people moving here from the East Coast who asked deejays to play it.

"If deejays wouldn't have continued to play it, it would have died here in Utah," said Castro, 32, who is known as DJ Azuquita.

About three years ago, Castro said bachata became part of the Latino music scene in Utah, along with salsa, meringue, cumbia and reggaeton. Most clubs with Latino music nights along the Wasatch Front play bachata and some even have bachata dance classes.

"You have to play it now," said Castro, who was born in Chile and moved to Utah in 1991 with his parents.

Sacriste said bachata will never be big here or have it's own radio station because people like a variety of Latino sounds and some Latinos think it's too "soft."

"They like it, but they like it in the clubs," he said.

Still, Castro said bachata continues to grow, so much in fact that such artists as Toby Love, Monchy y Alexandra and Aventura are adding Utah to their tour schedules.

jsanchez@sltrib.com

Experience it

* The bachata duo Monchy y Alexandra perform Friday at 8 p.m. at Studio 600, 26 E. 600 South, Salt Lake City. Tickets are $35 in advance at 801-427-7991; $50 at the door.

* For more information, visit www.djazuquita.com.

Want to dance bachata? Check out the following Latin-music nights in Salt Lake City:

* Thursday: Sky Bar in the Red Lion Hotel, 161 W. 600 South

* Friday: Bliss Nightlife, 404 S. West Temple

Club Karamba, 1051 E. 2100 South

* Saturday: Club Manhattan, 5 E. 400 South

Studio 600, 26 E. 600 South

Club Karamba, 1051 E. 2100 South