diaspora, migration, economic globalization, fracturing of group identities, and greater choice of personal identities—make it difficult to pin these terms down.
Caleño subjectivity encompasses a definitive sense of self that operates on three interrelated levels. On one level, it incorporates Colombian (and in some instances, larger Latin American) norms about personhood in relation to immediate social groups (family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers) and in indirect relation to the state. These norms are complicated and elaborated through ideas and discourses about race, class, gender, and age. On a second level, I see Caleño subjectivity as an assertion of difference from other Colombian regions and from national cultural, economic, and political currents that are controlled by political and economic elites in the country’s center. This is the subjectivity that led to the embrace of salsa and música antillana, which in turn flowed into the construction of the popular image of Cali’s citizens as fun-loving, dance-crazy, music-loving, party-oriented merrymakers. On this level, Caleño subjectivity flows directly into what I consider to be popular identity—that is, the codes and images shaping recognition of self and community from within and by others. On a third level, however, subjectivity can also be understood as the sense of self that frames individual, context-specific experience. Here it becomes tied to the subjectively experienced spaces of local popular life: family parties, nightclubs, the annual Feria, listening to records at home, going to salsotecas, dancing, and so forth. Some of the spaces that shaped local subjective experience are historical—for instance, the teen agüelulo dances of the 1960s and the adult griles of the 1970s. Interestingly, as I discuss in chapters 2 and 3, memories of these spaces prevailed long after they themselves had disappeared, serving as the basis for new contexts in which to revive and maintain a historicized subjectivity associated with these early venues and their role in shaping Caleño popular culture. In the following chapters, my analysis moves fluidly between the three levels outlined here in order to demonstrate how different forms of Caleño subjectivity have influenced and shaped local cultural practice and identity.
Race, Ethnicity, and Class in Cali
A challenging issue that emerges in the study of salsa’s rise in Colombia concerns its adoption by a working-class population that is also of predominantly Afro-Colombian heritage, that is, black and mulato. (Owing to the difference between Colombian and U.S. racial politics, I have chosen to use the Spanish spelling for the category of mulato [mixed black and white heritage] rather than the English “mulatto,” since these terms are not easily inter-changeable in terms of their social meanings and the race-class background they denote.) Although Cali’s population is ethnically quite diverse, its geographical proximity to the Pacific Coast region (populated predominantly by Afro-Colombians) and its own colonial legacy of hacienda slavery has made it the city with Colombia’s largest urban black population (Wade 2000: viii). In the national context, Cali is strongly identified as black and mulato or mestizo, in contrast to the white and mestizo identification of the country’s interior. Indeed, Cali’s racial identity in the national eye is quite similar to that described by Peter Wade for the Atlantic Coast region (2000).
How, then, do we position salsa’s rise in Cali? Angel Quintero Rivera notes that a fundamental underpinning of salsa’s significance in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean has to do with an empowerment of subaltern populations. Salsa revindicates black and mixed-race culture and music by freely drawing upon several Afro-Caribbean traditions in defiance of dominant Eurocentric cultural canons (1998). In the counter-plantations made up of freed blacks and maroons, rural Indians and mestizos, and outcast Andalusian (Arab Spanish) peasants, the cultural dynamics that fed into salsa’s roots emerged beyond the jurisdiction of the state (Rowe and Schelling 1991:101). What does it mean, however, for black, mulato, and mestizo proletariats in Cali to have embraced these Caribbean sounds as their own? There is no tight fit between race and class position that could have predetermined the adoption of salsa by Cali’s dark-skinned working classes. Yet, an understanding of the complicated nexus of race, ethnicity, and class is absolutely crucial for analyzing this cultural process.
Colombia is a complex nation, marked as much by the diversity of its cultural and ethnic groups as by the sharp contrasts of its geographic regions. The country can be seen as a microcosm of South America’s so-called triethnic heritage,15 and the mixing of indigenous, African, and European peoples and cultures is invoked and manipulated in many ways to support competing versions of national and regional histories (Wade 2000). Colombian national identity, nonetheless, has been blanketed under the incorporative ideology of mestizaje (cultural or racial mixing), which reinforces concepts of social and cultural equality it the same time it obscures the ways in which indigenous and black peoples have been systematically marginalized. Political and economic elites in Colombia’s mountainous interior have promoted white and mestizo images of national culture while ignoring or downplaying the contributions of other groups. In Colombia people claim not to “see” race; although phenotypical features are recognized, they are not correlated directly to socioeconomic standing and poverty. The rub is, as Winthrop Wright points out for neighboring Venezuela, to a great extent people are poor because they are black or indigenous (1990). Ultimately, racial categories denote ethnicity, not immutable biological classifications. As such, however, they are complex identity markers, shot through with elements (themselves socially determined) related to biological phenotype and socioeconomic status. Difference is acknowledged as a legacy of Colombia’s triethnic heritage, but it is reconfigured as part of a colorful mosaic—difference is not supposed to really be different. Rather than being merely invisible, however, indigenous people and especially Afro-Colombians have long suffered from negative images that have served as points of reference for elite superiority (Wade 2000: 32). According to Peter Wade, mestizaje does not mean a literal blending of races into indistinction, for such homogenization would dismantle the very social hierarchies that lighter-skinned elites have a vested interest in maintaining. Rather, cultural difference is constantly present in concepts of mestizaje and is invoked in various ways to support competing discourses of cultural heterogeneity or unity depending on the agendas at stake (Wade 2000: 210–12).
As in other Latin American and Caribbean nations (see Whitten 1981; Whitten and Torres 1998), distinctions of socioeconomic class in Colombia are often also distinctions of ethnic difference, tied up with biological concepts of race that have been inherited from colonial times. Despite prevailing ideologies about a colorblind “racial democracy,” the legacy of slavery and genocide that shaped Colombia’s colonial history has resulted in a tight weave between race and class in defining structural positions in Colombian society, which determine access to economic and political power and resources (Wade 1993). Unlike the one-drop system of ethnic identification that prevails in the United States, “black” and “white” are not essentialized as polar opposites in Latin America. Rather, they are conceived of as a continuum where the makeup of one’s ancestry (i.e., the percentage of black or indigenous blood that one has) is combined with aspects of social style, wealth, and other class markers in determining one’s position up or down the social ladder.16 The fact that in many Latin American countries people with “Indian” or “black” physical characteristics consider themselves to be upper-middle class and hence “white” points to some of the problems in conceptualizing race in contemporary Latin America.
In Colombia the marginalization of blacks has been particularly strong.17 Wade asserts that in Colombia, racism—as a “set of ideas about the inferiority of blackness”—and fluid racial categories are “woven into specific sets of unequal social relations.” At the core of racist dynamics lie discursive formations that associate blackness with backwardness and impoverishment. Wade analyzes in detail the ways in which these notions of inferiority are manifested and internalized in different local and regional contexts. Notably, those few Afro-Colombians who have successfully climbed the social ladder have had to “whiten” themselves, leaving behind cultural markers of their blackness (such as speech patterns, cuisine, style of dress, choice of marriage partners, and musical tastes) in order to do so
