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The Other Afro-Latino: Hidden Sounds from Ecuador, Bolivia, and Uruguay
This week, Afropop Worldwide explores some of the little-known Afro-Latin sounds from countries that have largely escaped notice in the global scene. Whereas just about anybody can pinpoint a Cuban salsa groove or the boom of Brazilian samba bloque, few have ever heard of the Bolivian saya or Uruguayan candombe. Producer Marlon Bishop shares some experiences from his travels in search of lost sounds and stories
from some of Latin America’s
black minorities. Throughout
this feature, you will find links
to further sources.
I spent a year traveling in Latin America with a fellowship from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation to record and learn about Afro-Latino music. I was inspired to take this journey while interning at Afropop, where I began to realize that we were only hearing a sliver of the music and history of black Latin America. It goes much deeper than we thought.
There are half-a-billion people of some African heritage in the Caribbean and Latin America, by some estimates. History rarely speaks of the Spanish slave trade, but the colonists brought huge numbers of Africans to help bring back riches for Spain. Today, Latin America’s racial history is complicated and hard for outsiders to grasp. Latin American nations often promote the idea of mestisaje, or mixed-ness, as a national ideal and culture, hiding the fact that resources and power are often hugely concentrated in the hands of the lightest-skinned few. The needs of black communities have been often ignored by the powerful, and often left in poverty far below the standards of their societies. Until recently, there has been very little in the way of overt black consciousness.
Now, things are changing fast. Black political and cultural organizations are sprouting up around the continent and organizing themselves, learning how to fight for their rights. More often than not, music is a major part of this struggle. From the unique marimba music of Ecuador to the candombe beat of Uruguay, the other Afro-Latino grooves you didn’t know about are hot. Beautiful, hypnotizing. Music for these communities is also more than just entertainment; it’s the greatest political and cultural tool people have to make a better place for themselves in their societies, and a living link to their past.
Marimba - Esmeraldas, Ecuador
Ecuador, like most Andean nations, is typically associated with the indigenous Quichwa culture, llamas, and panpipes. Few realize that around 10% of Ecuadorians have African heritage. The majority of these Afro-Ecuadorians live on the coast, specifically in Esmeraldas province, a jungle-studded wilderness of rivers and mangrove forests. For most of its history, Esmeraldas was a free black territory of sorts.
Legend has it that a slave ship mutinied and shipwrecked near present-day Esmeraldas city, led by a Spanish-born African named Alfonso Ilescas, who married a local Chachi woman. Over the years, they were joined by enslaved Africans from Colombian mines in the north, who had heard of a land untouched by Colonial authorities. The impenetrable geography of the region made it hard to control, and the colonists and Ecuadorian government that succeeded them were constantly thwarted in their attempts to build access the region, finally finishing a road only in 1950.
As a result, music from Esmeraldas is deeply African stuff. Traditionally, music from the region is played on marimbas and bass drums that hang from the rafters of “marimba houses” dedicated to serious dance parties. One player plays a bordon, or bass part, while another improvises melodic phrases of mind-boggling rhythmic complexity. Each marimba song is played around a tema, or theme, that is based on a story or aspect of daily life.
One such theme is called “Torbellino,” and tells the story of a trouble-making child who has gotten lost in the forest, sending his mother out to look for him. There is a lead singer, called a glosador, who makes up verses around this theme, and a trio of women who respond with the chorus and drive the beat forward with shakers.
I started my exploration of Esmeraldan marimba with a trip to the Northern part of the province, where modernity has barely encroached on the old ways. Most people there live in stilt towns lining the rivers and mangroves. I went to Borbon to visit the most illustrious marimba player alive today, Papa Roncon. I traveled as passenger in one of the long dugout canoes that serve as transportation in the area. Accompanied only by the steady hum of the motor, we glided swiftly towards the town, glimmering in the thick jungle darkness. Borbon is a rough-and-ready timber town filled with Pentecostal churches and dockside shacks serving up coconut-slathered fish. In early morning, the riverside bustles and seethes with traffic coming from isolated communities further upriver, their canoes laden with bright bunches of lime-green plantains. It wasn’t hard to find Mr. Roncon—he’s quite the village celebrity—and by the time I got to his house he was already waiting for me. He lounged in a spacious room, shirtless and swinging on a hammock. Around him, a dozen marimbas swayed on their cords in the afternoon breeze.
Papa Roncon, whose name translates to something like “Daddy Big Snores,” is a man who seems as old as time. Despite his age, he moves swiftly and precisely, and speaks in a hoarse growl. This is a man of unquestionable gravitas. He emits a nameless sense of power and knowledge. I was warned in advance that Papa was a great teller of tales, and soon the room echoed with his slow and deliberate storytelling, mischievous smile pasted on his lips. He told me about his childhood, long before electric lights twinkled on the rivers, how he worked running canoes up the River Cayapa and learned the play the marimba in a village of indigenous Chachi, who would slap his hands with mallets when he played a wrong note. He showed me how to play the bass part of the bambuco, one of the most important temas, and banged out a lazy bolero on the guitar. Papa is left-handed and plays the guitar upside down, like Jimi Hendrix. He claims the devil came to him one night and taught him the chords.
Further south, Esmeraldas City is a world apart, a place of honking modernity in all its reggaeton-grinding glory. Esmeraldas is the terminus of the trans-Ecuador pipeline that carries Amazonian crude to the world market and the gateway to popular beach getaways for wealthy highlanders. Here, Alberto Castillo and other dedicated marimberos fight for the future of the dying marimba beat, operating a school where children are rigorously taught traditional temas alongside Mozart on modern, chromatic marimbas. Today, the marimba houses have long shuttered their doors, unable to survive in the age of sound-system salsa. Yet the marimba fights on, its future in the hands of these tiny mallet-wielding children who play the marimba with glee as the city and all that has changed honks through the windows.
Links:
http://www.centroafroecuatoriano.com/ - website of the Casa Cultural Afroecuatoriano, the largest black cultural organization in the country. In Spanish. Buen suerte!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybz9HzAaPl4 - a video of “Marimba Perreo,” a marimba-reggaeton hybrid song featured on the show.
Bomba – Chota, Ecuador
Sitting high above the sea, there is another Afro-Ecuadorian community located in Chota, an arid desert valley in the Northern Andean sierras. The Chota community, who live in about 30 rural towns scattered throughout the valley, are a people apart from the coastal Esmeraldeños, with an entirely different history and culture, and, of course, music. They speak in the slow, pronounced Spanish of the highlands and eat the hearty, bland food of the Andes. Chota is located in Imbabura province, famous for the strength of old Incan ways. A short jaunt down the Pan-American highway takes you to Otovalo, the largest indigenous market in the country and home of the biggest celebrations for Inti Raymi, the Incan sun-worship festival. In Ecuador, Chota is best-known for producing the lion’s share of professional soccer players in the country. However, the valley has gotten new attention for its infectious bomba music, which has become such a fad throughout the highlands that everybody from brass bands to mariachis are required to throw a few bombas in their sets. (Note that this is distinct from the better known bomba style of Puerto Rico.)
On my first night in the region, the municpality’s minister of culture graciously offered to introduce me to some musician friends of his from the valley. As we descended into Chota from nearby Ibarra, a hot breeze suddenly replaced the cold Andean air and the mountain forests thinned into barren rocky hills. The settlements in Chota were founded by Jesuit Order, who conspired to take advantage of the semi-arid climate to grow sugarcane and other crops ill-suited to most of the highlands. They brought enslaved Africans to work the land. The Jesuits were brutal overlords, and the legacy of their abuse lives on in the valley, where nascent land-reform movements have failed to bring tenancy to most Afro-Ecuadorian families on the land they have farmed for hundreds of years.
We arrived in Carpuela, a small town of low-slung cinder block dwellings, and pulled up at the clubhouse and rehearsal space of Los Autenticos del Valle, one of many professional bomba groups that gigs up and down the country. Inside, a group of men sat playing cards in the bare-bulbed room. They jumped to their guitars for an impromptu jam session upon our arrival.
They strummed out the melancholic chords of bomba tunes, all the while taking occasional swallows home-brewed aguardiente, the sickly-sweet Chota rum that renders the most seasoned drinkers to their knees. Bomba is, in a sense, is the most exemplary music of mixing in the Americas, an even blend of European, African, and Amerindian styles. At first listen, it seems similar to Andean musica folklorica favored by rural populations here, which adapts indigenous pentatonic harmonies and melodies to Western instruments. Listen carefully to the high pitched requinto guitar, however, and you will here the ornamental flourishes of the Spanish string music lauded by Quiteño elites. The unmistakable African flavor is in the four piece percussion section, who remix the plodding Andean sound with a fiery breakneck beat, turning the blues-mentality songs of lost love and personal ruin into undeniable dance music.
The valley is also home to one of the world’s great musical curiosities, the “banda mocha,” an entire orchestra of vegetable instruments. The town of Chalguayaco is home to the last living banda, whose members play trumpets and tubas made out of gourds, reed flutes, bamboo trumpets, and a folded-over lemon leaf that shrieks like a Klezmer clarinet. The result is a boisterous and amazingly in-tune imitation of a military big band, which has a strong tradition in Ecuador. The tradition arose from a time when every Ecuadorian village was expected to have a town band to play on holidays, but the dreadful economic conditions of Chota made metal instruments impossible. As conditions improved in the valley, most bands switched over to real instruments and the home-made bands that remained faced the ridicule of younger Afro-Ecuadorians embarrassed at the band’s display of poverty in the black community. Now, the tradition is on the brink—the average age of musicians in the solitary Chalguayaco group is over 60.
I accompanied Los Autenticos and the Banda Mocha on a trip play a concert in Quito’s Teatro Sucre, the hallowed home of the operas and ballets of the Euro-centric upper classes. It was a historic moment, a concert honoring local black culture in a venue that has always turned its nose from anything remotely Afro. The gentlemen of the Banda Mocha were stupefied as they descended the tour bus in front of the gleaming theater. Backstage, they were greeted by flashes and television crews; excited ethnomusicologists clamoring about how they construct their instruments. As they sauntered onto the stage and began to play, the bespectacled urban youth in the audience stood up to sing along, “ya no quiero vivir en este Carpuela…” In that second, it became crystal clear. Something was changing in Ecuador.
Links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4yl7AiZlSQ - a amateur documentary from Ecuador about the Banda Mocha. In Spanish.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwCL9FVwAdE - a video of Marabu, the top band coming out of the valley today, featured on our program.
Saya – Bolivia
“We are here to tell Bolivia and the world that we too are a part of this country, that Bolivia is not only Aymara or Quechua. There are more than 35 peoples in this country, and among them, we are here as a people, a people with our own history, our own culture, our own identity.”
These are the words of Jorge Medina, a prominent voice for the tiny community of some 35,000 Afro-Bolivians adrift in South America’s most indigenous nation. High in the offices of CADIC (The Afrobolivian Center for Integrated Community Development), Jorge’s office looks out on the living contradiction that is La Paz, Bolivia’s capital. Glass office buildings soar behind endless market stalls, and briefcase-toting businessmen share sidewalks with the omnipresent cholas, indigenous women dressed in bowler hats and seemingly endless layers of skirts. Whereas many of the Afro-Latino organizations sprouting up across the continent work with various civil rights issues, CADIC confronts the additional challenge of having to show people that Afro-Bolivians, to begin with, exist.
When members of the black community began moving to the cities in the 80s, most Bolivians had no idea there was such a thing as a black Bolivian community, and assumed that they were coming from Brazil or other neighboring countries. Most Afro Bolivians, to this day, live in Los Yungas, a lush, green area straight down the mountain from La Paz. Before the new paved highway was finished in 2008, the only access to the area was by what the UN declared “the world’s most dangerous road,” a one-lane dirt path that hugs mile-high drops as it winds and curves its way down the mountain. I visited Tocaña, the largest Afro-Bolivian settlement, and stayed with the wonderful family of David Zabala. Every day of the week, he and his wife hike through the dirt tracks to their steep fields at daybreak to pluck coca leaves, that most controversial Bolivian export, and the only crop that they can subsist on. They chew the leaves at lunch to alleviate hunger, and come home to dine, perhaps, on one of the cuy, or guinea pig, that scamper around the kitchen. It is no easy life, and the work never ends. The walls of the room I stayed in are covered in the school awards of their daughter, who is now in university in La Paz, the first in her family to get a higher education. For David, this makes all the toil worth it.
Jorge and his group use music to fight for recognition in Bolivian society. Their beat is the saya, its polyrythmns pounded out on big Andean bass drums and sung in call and response. As well as accompanying their frequent street demonstrations, Jorge’s group has regular gigs around La Paz. I saw them at a packed nightclub in the city’s sleek Sopocachi district. A few hours into the set, the group climbs on top of the bar with their drums as the light-skinned cultural jet set below parties as if they are listening to the electronica that might normally pour from the speakers.
While great steps are being made, Afro Bolivians face a country with a tense racial reality, past and present. The long-oppressed indigenous majority has recently made their voice heard through rabble-rousing president Evo Morales, whose is locked in struggle with the mestizo elites who have long controlled the country over his attempts to refashion Bolivia along indigenous concepts of law and society. However noble his intentions, Afro Bolivians are getting lost in the discourse of “original peoples versus white oppressors.” Jorge Medina is fighting in 2009 for inclusion for blacks in Morales’ new constitution. “Bolivia is not only indigenous. Yes the indigenous have been oppressed. But this not an opportunity for vengeance,” says Medina. “Each people have their history and culture, and each group has been mistreated in the past. We have hope that it will change, it must change. And in the moment that we all respect each other as we are, we will grow together.”
Links:
http://www.weofthesaya.com - Website/blog of “We Of the Saya” a documentary in the making about the Afro-Bolivian community’s path to getting included in Evo Morales’ new constitution. Barbara has been living and shooting in Bolivia, all the while writing about her experiences in this complex and beautiful country.
http://cadic.org.bo/ - The website of CADIC, Jorge Medina’s Afro-Bolivian political/musical organization. In Spanish.
Uruguay – Candombe
On the day of the annual Llamadas parade during Carnival, thousands of drummers will march down Isla de Flores in hundred-man blocks, accompanied by troupes of dancers and costumed characters. Onlookers will pack the streets, pouring out of every balcony, crowding every rooftop. But a few days before the big event, the street is quiet except for the determined preparations of the local comparsa, as a carnival troupe is called. Neighbors and relatives paint costumes and props as men warm the drumskins around a sidewalk fire; anticipation is in the air. Isla de Flores street is the cultural lifeline of Uruguay’s black community, running across the historically black neighborhoods of Sur and Palermo. During the final rehearsal, the street explodes into the sound of candombe, the rhythm of Afro-Uruguay, and the dancers rock their hips to the samba-like two-step. Another year’s hard work is about to be tested.
Uruguay is small nation of 4 million people sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil on the Atlantic Coast. With the moniker “the Switzerland of the Americas”, Uruguay is known for its stable government, secular worldview, progressive social attitudes, and large middle class, an anomaly in class-stratified Latin America.
The vast majority of Uruguayans are descended from Europeans,and their culture is known for the gauchos, barbequed meat, and a unhealthy obsession with mate, the bitter tea drunk across the region.
Yet it is the country’s 200,000 Afro-Uruguayans who are responsible for the rhythm that has come to define a large part of Uruguayan identity. Candombe is not music for listening to on a CD or playing at home. It is a mobile dance party, with large numbers marching through the streets, locked in an animated, roaring conversation between three kinds of drums.
It is a cry of rage and joy, an unhinging of oneself from quiet everyday reality and exploding into noise, hitting the drum head until your hands bleed. It is a social force, it is ritual, and for many Afro-Uruguayans, a confirmation of their identity. Nowadays, Uruguay is candombe-crazy, and the music is played every weekend in every neighborhood, by every class and race. It lurks in every page of Uruguayan history, and is even one of the roots of tango, its whispers hidden within tango’s rhythmic architecture.
While candombe is played all year round, it takes on a special dimension during Carnival, when the drummers are joined by a cast of characters rooted in the theatrical dances found in various parts of Africa. Among them is the gramillero, a man who dances jerkily with a cane in one hand and a basket of herbs in the other, said to represent the African medicine man or spiritual leader. He is joined by the Mama Vieja, the matriarch, and the escobero, who wields a broom in a display of military prowess. They are joined by hundreds of flag wavers, standard bearers, and dancers in tiny amounts in clothing. Normally, mild-mannered, Montevideo’s citizens inevitably storm the streets. It is Carnival, and anything can happen.
I got a chance to meet up with candombe heavyweight “Perico” Gularte at his home in Montevideo’s old city. Perico plays the repique, the most difficult of the drums, which improvises syncopated phrases on top of the beat. In the candombe world, people guard their repique style closely, and fondly commemorate individuals whose innovations have been absorbed into the music.
Perico’s hands are studded with calloused, roadmaps of a life spent pounding drumskins through the balmy Montevideo night. On the wall, there hangs a faded photograph depicting a narrow street lined by rows of French-style apartments with large, stately doors. This is Ansina, one of several famous all-black tenements where Perico grew up and learned to play. The conventillos, as the buildings are called in Spanish, are the fabled epicenters of Candombe history, places where tightly packed families fostered deep communities, and black Uruguayan culture flourished. Each tenement developed their own unique take on the candombe beat, and today, the three main schools of playing are named Ansina, Cuareim, and Cordon, in honor of the places they were developed. Comparsas around the city choose whether they want to play the sauntering, groovy feel of Cuareim or the frantic battle-cry of Cordon.
While the military junta was in power in the 70s and early 80s, all three conventillos were demolished in the wake of shady real-estate deals, forcing their residents to disperse around the city and largely contributing to the wide dissemination the music has today. Perico counts the evictions as the fundamental tragedy of his generation, the unraveling of a dynamic, living community. On the day before the demolition, everybody got together and played one last bittersweet llamada, or calling, as candombe sessions are known. Like they always did at wedding and funerals and protests, they played the drums, a great roaring, seething, a cry out. Nowadays, the Ansina people who stayed on in the neighborhood still play every Sunday night, and people from all around the city flock to drink and march in the streets. Where the Ansina tenement once stood, half-built apartment blocks languished, unfinished for twenty years. As the drummer’s pass by, they all turn and face the hulking mass in salute.
Candombe has lurked behind the entire history of Uruguayan popular music. Musicians, white and black, have incorporated it in their sounds since the early 20th century, when composers wrote tangos with candombe drums.
Since then, it has mixed with psycodelic rock to form “candombe-beat,” used as the basis of folky protest music of the 70s, flavored home-grown jazz fusions, and, recently, been sampled n electronic and hip-hop.
Today, candombe is everywhere, and many Afro-Uruguayans are torn between embracing their music’s mainstream turn and preserving its deep history. The city has introduced large cash incentives to the year’s best carnival group, leading candombe groups to get brasher and flashier every year. There has even been whispers of taking the annual Carnival event out of Isla de Flores Street and making a Candombedrome in the style of Rio’s bombastic Sambadrome. The balance is a careful one. In the mean time, innovations abound: last year introduced the first-ever all-female comparsa, who were accompanied by male dancer’s and stilt-walkers and took a high place in the competition.
Links:
http://www.candombe.com/english.html - A good intro to Candombe and its artists, with information in English.
Marlon Bishop is a producer, and writer based in New York City. He is a Watson Scholor and specializes in music from Latin America and the African diaspora. He can be contacted at marloniousthunk@gmail.com
More photos:
Contributed by: Marlon BishopFirst published: www.afropop.org
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