Africans first arrived in Colombia with the fortification of Cartagena de las Indias in 1533. They were brought to work in agricultural settlements on the Atlantic coast and to mine for gold in the country’s Pacific Coast region.19 Slave labor also supported the haciendas of the southwest Cauca Valley (around Cali), which provided food for mining activity in the Pacific and also for the colonial administrative center of Popayán. After Brazil, Colombia has one of the largest black populations in South America (Wade 1998: 312). Population figures for people of African descent in Colombia vary widely, depending on which sources you consult. The 1995 census officially designates 21 percent of the population as of African origin,20 but this does not include mestizos, who may also recognize a black relative or ancestor even if they do not identify as mulato. The substantial presence and contribution of black peoples to the country’s economic and cultural history, however, has been little recognized. Despite their significant numbers, Afro-Colombians were not officially acknowledged as a distinct ethnic group until the 1991 constitution, and only then as a result of intense lobbying by Afro-Colombian organizations. Indigenous communities, on the other hand, who officially constitute about 2 percent of the nation’s population, have consistently received more political and cultural recognition during the twentieth century.
Such discrimination has had direct consequences for black communities. Owing to Afro-Colombian concepts of communal land ownership, most of the Pacific coastal lands and rivers populated and worked on by Afro-Colombians for centuries were not registered under individual names and were hence officially categorized as baldios (vacant properties) until the ratification of black land rights in 1993. This made Afro-Colombian territories open for development and resource extraction without any due consideration for the area’s actual residents (Arocha 1992). Underscoring the lack of political rights, the Pacific has been among the nation’s most economically underdeveloped regions, and migrants from the Pacific coast to urban centers such as Cali, Medellín, and Bogotá tend to live in the poorest and most underserviced neighborhoods (Wade 1993).21
Economic and political marginalization of Afro-Colombians has paralleled their invisibility and disparagement in academic and popular discourses. In 1965 a colleague told the anthropologist Nina S. de Friedemann (one of Colombia’s leading scholars on black culture) that studying Afro-Colombians was not a legitimate endeavor, on the grounds that they were an insignificant cultural group in the national context (1984: 509). Despite increased interest since the 1980s in exploring and reconstructing Afro-Colombian history and culture,22 research on Afro-Colombian communities and cultural practices remains secondary to the study of indigenous groups. Images of blacks in Colombian popular discourse have been even more disheartening. For generations black people have been characterized as backward, lazy, infantile, stupid, and sexually promiscuous. Racist jokes and media images still abound in Colombia—until 1997 racist “humor” was a mainstay on a nationally televised Saturday evening variety show.23 While many Colombians like to believe that they do not live in a racist country, for Afro-Colombians the experience of racial discrimination is real.
Given their historical experience of marginalization from the nation’s cultural, political, and economic arenas, it is perhaps not surprising that black and mulato Caleños would have adopted a style that signified opposition to a similar system of discrimination in the Caribbean. There is a strong degree of racial essentialism among dark-skinned Colombian salsa fans, who often explained to me that they loved this music because it was “born in their skin” or “in their blood.” I heard such claims not only in Cali, but from Afro-Colombians of different socioeconomic classes in the rural black towns of the Cauca Valley, in Buenaventura, in Quibdó, and in Cartagena and Barranquilla, on the Atlantic coast. While these ideological assertions flow more from socially constructed notions of racial identity than from any “natural” correlation between ethnicity and musical preferences, there are strong historical precedents for the successful entry of música antillana into Cali’s black and mixed-race culture.
Elsewhere I have explored the role that transnational popular styles of the African diaspora have played in establishing contemporary, self-affirming identities for people of African descent in Colombia (Waxer 1997). Following Paul Gilroy (1993), we can link this process to the Black Atlantic—a transnational space born out of the terrors of the slave trade, in which black people’s double consciousness about being simultaneously self and other has given rise to a particularly cosmopolitan approach to expressive culture. If the contributions of black people have been crucial for the rise of modernity, as Gilroy and other scholars maintain, it is hardly surprising that people of African descent have asserted their own modes of participating in the contemporary world: after all, this world was virtually constructed on their backs. In the case of Colombia, however, the necessity to index cosmopolitan identity has been made all the more urgent by the historical placement, in national discourse, of black people on the margins of time and space.
Gender and Generation in Cali
When I arrived in the field in the mid-1990s, I discovered several local all-woman salsa bands active on the scene. Founded between 1989 and 1995, these bands, known as orquestas femeninas, mark an unprecedented and unique development in international salsa. The women in these bands were overwhelmingly young, in their teens or early twenties. My curiosity about these all-woman bands led me to larger questions about gender in Caleño society and generational shifts in gender patterns and social roles among men and women. What opportunities did these young salseras have that their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers did not? How did this relate to changing gender roles for women and men in Colombia and Latin America generally? Is this reflected in other areas of salsa’s local consumption in Cali?
Between the 1970s and the 1990s, economic shifts for women in Colombia and Latin America in general resulted in a transformation of gender roles for Caleño men and women. These changes were particularly notable along generational lines: younger Caleños were raised in an environment of increasingly open economic and social opportunities for women to participate in domains that had been previously restricted to men. I explore the ways this played out in local salsa consumption and musical performance in the following chapters, but it is worth establishing a larger context for understanding these developments here.
In her book Listening to Salsa (1998), Frances Aparicio analyzes at length the ways in which salsa music has been produced as “a man’s world.” This construction relates to general codes of patriarchy and male dominance in Latin American cultures, which have traditionally operated to keep women from assuming public roles as performers. Few Latina musicians have received attention in the history of salsa and its Cuban and Puerto Rican roots. Women instrumentalists are even further obscured, and so only vocalists such as Celia Cruz, La Lupe, and La India have become famous (172–73). Although Latina singers and instrumentalists have gained increasing international prominence since the mid-1980s, their careers have still largely fallen under male control. Men control the music industry and own the nightclubs. Most Latina artists and all-woman bands have male managers, who exert an enormous influence on their public image. The fact that many women perform songs that are written by men also subverts the notion that women’s voices are finally being heard in Latin music. Salsa tunes tend to reinforce patriarchal standards in Latin American society, exalting macho definitions of maleness in lyrics that center around male bravado and sexual conquest. In the rituals of salsa dancing, men enact their relative superiority over women through ballroom dance styles in which the man leads the woman.24 In Latin America, men can also exert control over “their women” (wives, girlfriends, and sisters) off the dance floor through social codes that regulate how and with whom women can interact. Where, then, do we begin to understand a phenomenon such as Cali’s all-woman bands?
In Cali people often cite the adage that Caleña women are the prettiest in all Colombia. Those who hail from other cities (particularly on the Atlantic coast) are wont to contest this, but the saying did become the basis for one the first Colombian salsa hits, “Las caleñas son como las flores” (Caleña Women Are Like Flowers), recorded by the Caleño salsa pioneer Piper Pimienta
