a distinct Afro-Colombian subjectivity and experience (Pacini Hernández 1993; Waxer 1997).
Other transnational styles have entered Colombian urban life, reflecting popular currents in other parts of Latin America. Balada, or Spanish romantic pop music, was popularized primarily as a result of control by Latin American music industries (Manuel 1991). Balada’s influence in Colombia peaked during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the nueva ola, or new wave, of romantic crooners such as Julio Iglesias, Leo Dan, Sandro, and Rafael washed up on Colombian shores. Dominican merengue, which swept several Latin American and Caribbean countries during the 1980s, made inroads into Colombia, but only in the Atlantic coast cities of Barranquilla and (to a lesser extent) Cartagena. When I arrived in Cali in 1994, merengue still faced a virtual blockade on local airwaves and in clubs that was not broken until later in the decade. Interestingly, the Dominican bachata, which has become very important for U.S. Latino audiences (especially in the northeast), was still unknown in Colombia by the year 2000, pointing to uneven processes of distribution and marketing within the Latin American music industry.
To return to the question I pose at the outset of this section: what stake have Caleños had in maintaining that no local tradition existed before the adoption of música antillana and salsa? Certainly, the diversity of musical styles that compete for attention on the national cultural landscape offers one explanation. Given that regional difference in Colombia is strongly marked by musical and cultural distinctions, the shaping of Caleño identity has been stimulated by the need to develop a distinct musical emblem for the city. Why, however, were local genres not remembered or performed? Many of the musical styles played in Cali during the early years of this century were dominated by national tastes adopted from the interior of the country. Although Cali has been marked by economic and political isolation from the Colombian interior since colonial times, local cultural tastes tended to follow national norms. This can be attributed in part to control of the city by elites who felt a need to maintain the appearance of being “cultivated” along national standards, even if other ties to the interior were weak. Through the 1940s and 1950s, however, burgeoning industrial and urban expansion fostered the rise of a new middle and upper-middle class with less allegiance to national standards and cultural images from the interior. This growth was reinforced by new social and cultural forces that entered the city and further ruptured allegiances to earlier musical practices. Certain key influences affected Cali’s musical landscape through the mid-twentieth century, and a number of factors led to the displacement of earlier local genres by a transnational one—música antillana.
Música Antillana: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan
Latin American Dance Music
In Colombia, Cuban and Puerto Rican genres from the 1920s–50s are usually referred to as música antillana—music from the Spanish Caribbean islands. I have also heard the term música caribeña (Caribbean music) used, but this is less frequent, perhaps because Colombia already has a rich vein of traditions from its own Caribbean coast. Indeed, música antillana and música caribeña are terms that are commonly used throughout Latin America, but their meanings have different nuances from country to country. In Puerto Rico, for example, these terms refer generally to any Caribbean popular dance style, especially those from Hispanic Caribbean nations, regardless of epoch.12 This can include old Cuban son and guaracha from the 1930s, Puerto Rican bomba and plena, contemporary salsa, and commercial Dominican merengue. While theoretically connected to musical genres from throughout the Caribbean, however, in Colombia “música antillana” usually refers to the Cuban and Puerto Rican popular musical styles diffused to the rest of Latin America from the 1920s through the 1950s. This probably relates to the fact that Cuban and Puerto Rican artists were better known in Colombia than were music and musicians from the Dominican Republic or other Caribbean nations. Indeed, the isolationist policies of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo curbed the widespread dissemination of merengue, the principal genre of that island, and it was only after the large wave of Dominican migration to New York in the 1970s and 1980s that merengue began to enjoy the same level of international popularity that Cuban music had attained during the first half of the century (Austerlitz 1997: 73–74). The predominance of Cuban and Puerto Rican artists on the international Latin market during the 1940s and 1950s appears to have reinforced the association in Colombia of música antillana with Cuban and Puerto Rican sounds from the epoch. Following Colombian usage, I shall refer to Cuban and Puerto Rican popular music of the 1920s through the 1950s as “música antillana” and use the term “Cuban music” when referring specifically to Cuba alone.
Style and Structure in Música Antillana
Música antillana is defined by a number of basic elements and stylistic procedures emerging from its mixed African and European roots.13 Although there are also vestiges of indigenous musical influence in the presence of maracas and güiro (a notched, scraped gourd), the indigenous populations of Cuba and Puerto Rico (the Siboney and Taino Indians) were wiped out during the first century of colonial encounter. Cuban and Puerto Rican popular genres are characterized by simple European harmonic progressions and melodic lines, string and wind instruments, the use of the Spanish language, and certain harmonic and melodic patterns typical of Iberian music. Many of their musical elements, however, point to a strong sub-Saharan African influence. These include a variety of drums and other percussion instruments; interlocking polyrhythmic, timbral, melodic, and harmonic ostinati; a percussive approach to playing; call-and-response vocals, and a preference for dense or buzzy timbres. Harmonic progressions in musica antillana songs are very basic, for example, ||: I–V–V–I : || or ||: I–IV–V–I : || or ||: I–VI–II–V :||. These repeated harmonic patterns, voiced in the bass and piano or guitar, underscore the other interlocking rhythmic and timbral patterns.
In Colombia, the term “música antillana” also indexes the commercial sound of cosmopolitan urban culture through the use of instrumentation that came to predominate in urban ensembles in the Americas during the first half of the twentieth century. Perhaps one of the most prominent features of música antillana ensembles of the 1940s and 1950s is not only their use of Afro-Caribbean percussion (usually Cuban), but the increasing prominence of dance-orchestra instrumentation, modeled on North American popular dance bands. These groups usually featured full trumpet, trombone, and saxophone sections (with four or five musicians in each section), plus piano, bass, and drum set or other percussion. In Latin America, Cuban instruments such as the conga drum, bongo, and maracas were often used in place of the drum set typically employed in North American bands. These bands were sometimes referred to in Latin America as jazzband, even though they did not really perform jazz, but more often this format was simply known as an orquesta. Such groups typically performed for the middle and upper-middle classes in the elegant ballrooms of private social clubs, but they also played for the general urban populace in radio theaters, nightclubs, and hotel salons. In other words, not all Cuban and Puerto Rican genres or styles are recognized as música antillana—for example, rumba, guaguancó played in the traditional percussion-and-vocals format would not be called música antillana but Cuban music. (A commercial dance-band tune labeled a “guaguancó,” however, would be recognized as música antillana.) The orquesta or jazzband format became a significant marker of cosmopolitan identity during the first half of this century, and was widely adopted in cities throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.14 Even the small Cuban conjunto (combo), which originally featured only string and light percussion instruments, expanded in the late 1930s, adding horns, piano and heavier percussion, partly as a result of this influence.
Figure 1.1 Clave pattern
Cuban genres—whether performed by Cuban or Puerto Rican artists—are characterized by a number of specific elements not necessarily present in Puerto Rican forms. The most important element is the clave
