In a mere decade, dozens of local salsa bands were formed, with a frenzy that mirrored the invention of salsa dance steps a generation earlier. Internationally famous Caleño orquestas such as Grupo Niche and Guayacán emerged during this period, and lavish marathon salsa concerts became a key attraction of the annual Feria. While the rise of a live scene might suggest that real musicians had finally come to replace sound recordings in local popular culture, Cali’s live scene was indelibly marked by the centrality of recordings in other spheres, in ways that complicate the relationship between live and mediated musical expression.
In chapter 6 I explore the ways in which dancing, listening, and live music coalesce as performative practices during Cali’s annual Feria. This annual celebration, heightened by its calendrical proximity to two other important celebrations, Christmas and New Year’s, is a vivid reaffirmation of Caleño popular culture. As in other carnival celebrations, the tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions of daily life are revealed and embraced in a transgressive revelry (Stallybrass and White 1986) centered around salsa music. If “Cali Is Feria,” as a local salsa song put it, Cali’s Feria is salsa, in a vociferous, joyous and kinetic commemoration of salsa and música antillana that lies at the heart of local popular life.
As interrelated spheres, dancing, listening, musical performance, and the Feria are deeply embedded in Caleño subjectivity. In the following chapters I look at the ways in which public space, cultural topographies, kinetic movements, and other activities have framed these scenes, embedding physical and bodily locations for popular memory. The strands of this social history are taken up in the epilogue, where the themes of transnational culture, cosmopolitan identity, and urban life in Latin America are drawn together.
1
“In Those Days,
Holy Music
Rained Down”
Origins and Influence
of Música Antillana
in Cali and Colombia
One evening my husband and research collaborator Medardo Arias Satizábal took me to visit the artisan Hernán González. A colorful person much loved by his neighbors, González is renowned for the carnival masks he makes in his home in the older working-class barrio of Loma de la Cruz. He is also a veteran of Cali’s popular music scene during the 1940s and 1950s and maintains his passion for that era by collecting videos of old movie musicals. González was a youth when Cuban (and to a lesser extent, Puerto Rican) styles were spreading throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, gaining enormous popularity in urban centers in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Venezuela, and Panama, and in the Latino community in New York City. These sounds also spread to Colombia, where they took hold in the Atlantic coast ports of Cartagena and Barranquilla, and in Cali.
González led us back to the dining area behind the grocery store that he also runs out of his house, where he turned on the television set and videocassette player to show us some choice excerpts from his collection. As we watched famous stars croon and mambo their way across the screen, he regaled us with anecdotes about Cali’s scene in those days—famous dancers who knew all the Cuban styles; the bars, cabarets, and brothels where you could hear the latest recordings of this music; the movie houses where you went to learn the dances from new musicals; and the ballrooms where local bands performed música antillana. Flashing us his mischievous and charismatic smile, González said, “En esos días llovió música sagrada sobre Cali” (In those days, holy music rained down on Cali).1
González’s remark is hardly the raving of a lone music fan. His attitude is typical of working-class Caleños of his generation, who embraced Cuban and Puerto Rican sounds during the 1940s and 1950s. While the music they love is hardly “sacred” or “holy” in the literal sense (especially given its initial rise in the city’s red-light district), it certainly is revered as both the root of contemporary local tradition and the glorious musical emblem of a bygone era. González’s recollection of his youth as a time when “holy music rained down on Cali” points to a widespread Caleño origin myth in which the arrival of música antillana is constructed as a virtual genesis of the modern city. Indeed, his remark invokes the Old Testament book of Genesis, in which holy rain figures not only during the Creation, but also during the biblical flood that washed away the old and renewed the Earth again (Genesis 2:7 and 7:12).
Origin myths are a vital part of cultural beliefs, whether in the context of nations, ethnic groups, or subcultural scenes. They are intricately tied to discourses about authenticity and purity, anchoring subjectivity and social identities through a number of codes, representations, and practices.2 In this chapter I explore the roots of Cali’s contemporary origin myths by looking at the city’s history in regional and national contexts, linking this to the development of música antillana and its influence in Colombia and Cali from the 1920s through the 1950s. I situate the emergence of música antillana as a widespread cosmopolitan dance music in Latin America, analyzing the political economy that led to the predominance of Cuban genres in música antillana but also made space for Puerto Rican elements and artists to be included. The transition from música antillana to salsa is explored through the influence of two pivotal groups that, not surprisingly, had a great impact in Cali—the Sonora Matancera and Cortijo y su Combo. I also explore the role played by música antillana in the formation of Colombian música tropical (“tropical” dance music based on Atlantic coast genres) and look at the ways in which both música antillana and música tropical competed for attention in Caleño musical life in the middle of the twentieth century—later replaced by the origin myth about música antillana’s predominance. This chapter contextualizes how struggles over local, national, and cosmopolitan identities in Cali set the stage for many cultural practices that I analyze in the rest of this book.
Cali in the Regional and National Context
Cali is located in southwest Colombia, two hours’ drive inland from the Pacific coast, in a broad valley between the western and central ranges of the Andes Mountains. The old part of the city lies on the banks of the Río Cali, a western tributary of the Río Cauca. As the main artery and primary waterway of the Colombian southwest, the Cauca River flows thousands of kilometers to the north, coverging with the Magdalena River to empty into the Caribbean Sea. Urban expansion in the middle of the twentieth century filled in the pasture and swampland between Cali’s historic downtown and the docks (now demolished) on the Cauca, and Cali now extends from the western mountain foothills eastward to the banks of the Cauca. The construction of luxury condominium towers and sprawling shopping centers during the economic boom of the 1980s and early 1990s has further expanded Cali’s urban landscape, yet the city retains the lush tropical climate and pleasant, tree-lined ambience that have been its hallmark for generations. Average year-round temperatures hover around 78° F (25° C), and every afternoon the midday heat is dispersed by a refreshing breeze that blows in from the Pacific coast over the mountains that line the city’s western reaches. Indeed, the celebrated congeniality of Caleños is often attributed to the tempering effects of the tropical sun and the delicious afternoon breeze.
Founded in 1536 by the Spanish explorer Sebastián de Belalcázar, Cali was established as a secondary administrative center during the colonial era, linked to the governor’s seat in Popayán, 150 kilometers to the south. Through the sixteenth century, warrior bands from the various Carib-speaking tribes that lived in the Cauca Valley3 made repeated attempts to oust the encroaching Spaniards but were finally quelled through military force. The names of tribes and caciques, or native chiefs, remain as geographic place-names throughout the area (e.g.,
