música antillana is common among Caleños; I heard several other observers cite this same reason. It is another version of the origin myth introduced at the beginning of this chapter. In a country whose geographic and cultural diversity is paralleled by the wealth of its musical styles, however, this statement is highly peculiar. What stake would Caleños have in claiming that they had no local tradition prior to that established by the adoption of música antillana and salsa? Clearly, the concept emerges from local origin myths that position the flowering of contemporary popular culture and identity with the arrival of música antillana. Caleño musical life certainly predates this moment, although in ways that did not anchor a distinctive Caleño identity. In order to clarify the significance of Ulloa’s claim, however, we must first understand the nexus between music and regional identity in Colombia.
Colombian regional identities are strongly articulated by musical style and other cultural practices, in ways that are closely tied to struggles over economic and political control of the nation. In Colombia, cachacos (people from the interior, particularly in or near the capital city of Bogotá) and paisas (people from the Antioquia region) have long been identified as the two groups that have held the political and economic reins of the nation. Accordingly, through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the representative national style was long identified with música andina, or music of the Colombian Andes, which features such lyric genres as bambuco and pasillo, played by string trios of tiple, bandola, and guitar (see Abadía Morales 1973). Associated with the mountainous interior regions of the country (the provinces of Antioquia, Cundinamarca, Boyacá, Santander, Caldas, Tolima, and Huila), this tradition is distinct from the music usually thought of in North America and Europe as “Andean,” that is, the highland traditions of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Música andina is also played in the northeastern part of Valle province, only an hour’s drive from Cali. The promotion of Colombian música andina over other regional styles during the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century was closely tied to the economic and political power historically held by the interior. Indeed, the term música colombiana (Colombian music) was commonly understood through the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries to refer to bambucos and pasillos (Wade 2000: 51–52). In terms of regional cultural stereotypes, the rather serious, refined and introspective air associated with música andina is also that associated with the character of people from the interior.
During the 1930s and 1940s, music from Colombia’s Atlantic or Caribbean coast began to replace música andina in the national eye. In Colombia, this region is usually referred to as La Costa (the coast), despite the fact that Colombia has another coast on the Pacific (usually referred to as el litoral pacífico [the Pacific littoral]).10 Costeño (Atlantic coastal) traditions combine African, European, and indigenous influences, typified in the flute-and-drum ensembles that perform cumbia, porro, gaita, fandango, mapalé, chandé, bullerengue, and other genres (see Jaramillo 1992; Camargo 1994). As La Costa began to play an increasingly critical role in national political life, urbanized versions of porro, cumbia, and gaita formed the basis for the dance-band adaptations of Costeño rhythms that swept into national circles as música tropical during the 1940s (Wade 2000). Since the 1970s, vallenato, an accordion-based style related to cumbia and música tropical, has become the most popular Costeño genre, replacing the big-band sound of música tropical as a national style. As Peter Wade discusses at length in his book Music, Race, and Nation, the sensual, playful, and carefree associations of música tropical are closely tied to national images of Costeño identity.
Colombia’s other coast, the Pacific, is populated by a predominantly Afro-Colombian population, with two distinct traditions: the chirimía bands in the northwest Chocó province and the marimba-based currulao tradition that prevails along the southwest littoral of Valle, Cauca, and Nariño provinces and into Esmeraldas, the northwest corner of Ecuador. The Chocoano chirimía tradition is similar to Costeño town bands that adapted European wind-band instrumentation to black musical aesthetics and stylistic practices. Featuring clarinets, trumpets, euphonium, and European percussion, they differ from the fife-and-drum ensembles used in the indigenous and mestizo processionals that range from Mexico down through the Andes and are also found in southern Colombia. In the southwest Pacific Coast region, the currulao represents a more direct connection with African diasporic roots, employing marimba, single-headed drums, and shakers modeled on West and Central African instruments and a dense polyrhythmic texture in 12/8 meter similar to those of many sub-Saharan African styles. Like that of the Atlantic Costeño people, the music and culture of Afro-Colombians from the Pacific is also seen as sensuous and playful.
Other musical traditions frame Colombian regional diversity. The grassy plains of the southeast, which are geographically and culturally linked to the Venezuelan grasslands, form the heartland of the courtship dance known as joropo, which is associated with the cowboy culture of the region. Performed on harp, bandola, cuatro, and maracas, joropo is a dynamic, polyrhythmic mestizo style that fuses Andalusian, African, and indigenous elements. In rural and semiurban areas of Antioquia province, the guitar-based carrilera is associated with the urbanizing peasant or worker class, where economic suffering is configured into mournful songs of romantic loss in a manner similar to the one Deborah Pacini Hernández describes for bachata in the Dominican Republic (1995). Throughout Colombia, a number of indigenous traditions are also practiced within small native communities located along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and in the Sierra Nevada, the highlands of Cauca and Nariño provinces, and the southeast Amazon region. In the highland region bordering Ecuador, mestizo and indigenous peoples perform a style of Andean music distinct from Colombian música andina and similar to Ecuadorian and Peruvian genres. Another Afro-Colombian tradition relevant to this study is the body of religious songs specific to the rural towns and settlements of the Cauca Valley that flank Cali’s southern limits. This repertoire, adapted from Catholic songs and hymns, is performed by small brass-and-wind bands and played during the Fiesta del Niño Dios in January, and also for funeral rituals.11
Urban popular styles also coalesce around regional and even local identities in Colombia, although, as Wade notes, the intensified pull between processes of hybridity and homogeneity make it impossible to correlate these to specific social groups in any absolute terms (2000: 23–25). Several urban sounds in Colombia have transnational origins, reflecting the ways that Colombian cities have been entry points for international influences. In general terms, vallenato, salsa, and rock are the most widespread urban styles in Colombia. Vallenato, a Costeño style, has been predominant mainly on the Atlantic coast, but in the early 1980s it followed música tropical’s footsteps into the interior, becoming prominent in Bogotá and Medellín. Only in the late 1990s did vallenato finally puncture salsa’s foothold in Cali to gain audiences there. Salsa’s spread in Colombia has been concentrated primarily along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Apart from Cali—a city with close economic ties to the Pacific coast—salsa’s most significant urban nuclei have been Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Buenaventura, all coastal port towns through which Cuban and Puerto Rican sounds first entered the country. Contemporary rock en español—Spanish or Latin American rock—first flowered in Bogotá and Medellín, the cities with the strongest economic and cultural ties to the international rock scene. Reflecting recent trends throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, however, rock en español has swept the country, its youthful audience defined more along lines of age than of region. Indeed, the Barranquilla native Shakira (an MTV darling) and Bogotá’s Andrea Echevarría (of Los Aterciopelados) have become icons of current Colombian youth culture and its most visible symbols abroad (see Cepeda 2001).
Also important, although less widespread, has been the localization of Argentine tango in Medellín and Manizales, where it functions similarly to salsa and música antillana in Cali as an emblem of cosmopolitan identity. Likewise, among Afro-Colombian inhabitants of Cartagena and Barranquilla the adoption of soukous, Afro-pop, mbqanga, soca, zouk, and other African and Afro-Caribbean genres into the style known locally as champeta or terapia has become an emblem of black cosmopolitanism on Colombia’s Atlantic coast since the 1980s. Significantly, champeta emerged after Afro-Costeño forms were appropriated (as
