Music and the Formation of Black Identity in Colombia
Wade, Peter
During my fieldwork in Colombia, I found that music and dance were important to understanding patterns of racism and racial identity Peter Wade is Professor of Social Anthropology at the...
...Some middle class commentators in 1940s Bogota identity ir decried the arrival in their city of this "primitive" and "licentious" black music from the Caribbean coastal region--even if it was increasingly played by non-black musicians...
...7089...
...While chirimfa was too rustic, cumbia had long consciously a since gone over the cusp of fash- the Colombi ion...
...3, 1998, pp...
...In 2001, it was suddenly taken up by national radio stations and music producers as the new fashion and began to feature in the parties of middle class kids in the cities of the interior of the country...
...Salsa is an international genre that, while it has clear roots in Afro-Cuban music, is not straightforwardly a "black" style: While many famous salseros-Celia Cruz, Ismael Rivera and Oscar D'Leon, for example-are classifiable as more or less black in both North American and Latin American schemes, others, such as Willie Colon, Ruben Blades, Hector Lavoe and Eddie Palmieri, are not...
...While black people recognized that, in many Yet other black people I knew-often men-clearly ways, they were at the bottom of the pile in a society enjoyed and were proud of their personal reputations dominated economically and politically by non- as music-lovers, good dancers and party-lovers and blacks and aesthetically by representations of white this was integrally linked to their own identities as people in the media, they also took pride in who they blacks...
...Cumbia had once been identified as a black music, how- ways to expre ever...
...In the low-income settlements that Instead of a group of people having a ready-formed formed on the outskirts of the city, or sometimes as identity which they then signify, to themselves and invasions in marginal interstices of the more central others, with a given form of music, identities are in a areas, some residential concentrations of black constant process of formation and change and general- migrants formed and often one or more of them would ly do not easily correspond to clearly defined cate- set up an informal dance hall, perhaps only at the gories or groups of people...
...These places became meccas for other black process of formation and change...
...On this and the black movement generally, see Jaime Arocha, "Inclusion of Afro-Colombians: An Unreachable Goal," Latin American Perspectives, Vol...
...2, 1995, pp...
...These spaces were often black people's images of themselves...
...Rap music, for example, has enjoyed a boom among young urbanites...
...Such transnational tactics always intersect with a sense of regional rootedness and it was interesting to see, in 1997, these same young black people celebrating music from the Pacific coastal region itself...
...I found as many folkloric dance groups in the barrios as I did rap crews, and the same kinds of people were ack people in rapping as were dancing and playing the traditional marimba being shaped music of the Pacific region (generically known as curruusic that was lao...
...Peter Manuel, Kenneth Bilby and Michael Largey,Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995...
...6, 2001, pp...
...Black people were part of black identity in the city...
...Another way of grasping the relationship between music and black identity at the time is to ask what other kinds of music might have been contenders in the identity game...
...They could hardly deny their blackness or, for most of them, their working class status as domestic servants and construction workers, yet they not only creatand reggae by s in Cali is selfsearch beyond + ,+ -f ed refuges for themselves and their ways of life, they actively asserted their presence at certain times and in certain locations, and music was a key part of this assertion...
...And they recognized that seen as clod-footed and less moved by music-traits amongst non-blacks there might also be a certain ele- often stereotypically associated with non-blacks...
...6, movements...
...I do not want to argue that salsa and vallenato were "music of resistance," in a simple sense...
...Mainstreaming does not mean that the music ceases to figure in expressions of black identity, but these expressions do seem to have an elective affinity with musical styles that are less middle of the NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 26REPORT ON RACE AND IDENTITY The vallenato band of Alejo Durdn...
...In the Suizo [a city-center of pride about aspects of black culture...
...i, %.%AJ iL" A % i, A t the turn of the twentys and make an first century, the situation is distinct from what Colombia...
...The marimba is a wooden xylophone of African origin...
...Although salsa was increasingly popular among the middle classes, it still had a strong working-class following, while vallenato was looked down upon by the middle classes as trashy and quintessentially working class...
...The fate of champeta is as yet uncertain...
...According to these farmers and merchants, and the way they chose to enjoy music and dance...
...The most popular styles among black people there were salsa and vallenato, but these were by no means listened to only by black people...
...Black communities in Colombia have received particular recognition, including rights to apply for land titles in the Pacific coastal region...
...Music and dance bars playing Argentine tangos and Mexican rancheras were seen as linked to sexual encounters and los were dominated by lighter-skinned mestizos from the negros were also supposedly uncontrolled in their sexhighland interior of the country who congregated to ual and family lives...
...2. Marisol de la Cadena, "Reconstructing Race: Racism, Culture and Mestizaje in Latin America," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...Other black people, while recognizing that music and dance were important features of black culture and sociality, were also critical of what they saw as the negative aspects of these features, which they thought eroded self-discipline and impeded upward mobility, and critical of the stereotypes non-black people might purvey about these features of black culture...
...Cumbia started as a traditional peasant music of the Caribbean coastal region, but from the 1940s, it was taken up by urban "jazz-bands," as they were known, and turned into a national commercial pop music, purveyed increasingly by non-black musicians...
...1 0 Many black-and non-black-people in Colombia looked down upon The use of rap this music as too plastic and rhythmically bland and over- young black: simplified...
...It remains to be seen what effect this will have on its role as an emblem of Caribbean coastal working-class identity...
...Peter Wade, "Working Culture: Making Cultural Identities in Cali, Colombia," Current Anthropology, Vol...
...In sum, music and dance played a complex role in constituting black identities in Colombian society in the 1980s...
...Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 1-28...
...Its lyrics make very little reference to blackness or black roots, instead glorifying partying as a lifestyle and bewailing the misfortunes of love...
...In Colombia, as in several other Latin American countries, there has been an official recognition of cultural and ethnic diversity in the nation, ever since the revised 1991 constitution...
...a On the other hand, people might refer to themselves non-black house] you feel timid, you're watching personally and to whole categories of people as los everything you do and you do everything timidly...
...5 have "natural" propensities in relation to music and Again, music and dance were vital aspects of racial dance, whether in terms of a person being said to have identities and interactions...
...The role of music in the formation of black identity has been strongly conditioned by this last aspect...
...Claudia Mosquera and Marion Provensal, "Construcci6n De Identidad Caribefia Popular En Cartagena De Indias a Travys De La Misica Y El Baile De Champeta," Aguaita: Revista del Observatorio del Caribe Colombiano, Vol...
...7. See Peter Wade, "Man the Hunter: Gender and Violence in Music and Drinking Contexts in Colombia," in Peter Gow and Penelope Harvey, eds., Sex and Violence: Issues in Representation and Experience (London: Routledge, 1994), 115-137...
...The presence of certain types of music, and because these images of black people as "naturally" where appropriate dance, was a vital means of open- open, relaxed, musical and party-loving are as easily ing and defining spaces where blackness was a domi- part of a primitivist, romantic view of blackness, from nant presence despite the overall non-black context of the point of view of white society, as they are part of the village and the city...
...Commercialization can therefore both help foment broader and more politicized versions of black identity and also lead to the depiction of black culture as spectacle, with little political content...
...Often the term was avoided, as potentially derogatory...
...These tastes often enter the mainstream and in so doing thrust black identity onto the national scene, creating new opportunities for broadening and perhaps politicizing notions of blackness and, at the same time, threatening to confine blackness to an enjoyable spectacle, divorced from the contexts of racism and poverty in which these musical styles found their resonance...
...Some salsa song lyrics make reference to black roots: "sin negro no hay guaguanc6" (without blacks there is no guaguanc6) or "moreno soy, porque naci de la rumba y el sabor yo lo heredie del guaguanc6" (I am brown [or black] because I was born of the rumba and I inherited the flavor from the guaguanc6...
...2 This by the local mestizos to explain the position of black does not mean that ideas about biology, physical bod- people in the local economy...
...Peter Wade, "The Cultural Politics of Blackness in Colombia," American Ethnologist, Vol...
...They could be seen in different ways by both black and non-black people, without a simple link between racial identity and views about music and dance...
...Certain bars in the city cenan individual gift or a whole category of people being ter became haunts for these black migrants, especially thought to have a generic predisposition to prefer cer- as Sunday meeting places for the female domestic sertain types of music or be good or bad at performance...
...As a musical style it is best known for quite slow, romantic songs (although it does have more upbeat sub-genres) and, while it is a dance music, it is very different from salsa which shares the polyrhythmic syncopations and overlapping call-response elements that are common to much New World music of black origin...
...22 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON RACE AND IDENTITY Their reactions to this awareness were complex and double-edged...
...What matters is which effect is the predominant one...
...Sabor is rendered literally here as "flavor," but might be translated as "spice" or "heat...
...His publications include Blackness and Race Mixture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), Race and Eth- nicity in Latin America (Pluto Press, 1997), Music, Race and Nation: MO-sica Tropical in Colombia (Chicago University Press, 2000), Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspec- tive (Pluto Press, 2002...
...Medellin: "If you go to an Antioqueflo house [i.e...
...Vallenato also has an ambiguous racial identity...
...This is a mixture of West African and Caribbean styles, based initially on imported records and later on local black musicians creating their own versions...
...342-358...
...road...
...In the case of cumbia, I think this music was seen as overly whitened and commercialized...
...Often the genres that seem to express and form black identities end up becoming more mainstream...
...5, No...
...The music itself was intricately involved in these complex social dynamics...
...It may have been associated at first with a particular sub-group of young, black fans, but it quickly became popular among the black working classes of the region more generally...
...It comes from the Caribbean coastal region of Colombia, which has some notable concentrations of black people, but it originates-or is said to originate-from a specific area, around the town of Valledupar, which is not particularly black...
...Music-listened to, danced weekends in a private residence that became an open to, performed, talked and written about-is part of the house...
...was supposedly "in the blood"rated in practice...
...A good example of this is the champeta of the Caribbean coastal region, which has become increasingly popular, although it dates back to the 1970s...
...Both musical styles could thus work in the formation of black identity, in the sense of helping to constitute particular spaces in the city center, in lowincome settlements on the weekends and in private parties, where blackness was the order of the day...
...Generally, the migrants, being in In Ungufa in the 1980s it was apparent that patterns a minority, adapted to some extent, but it was plain of cultural expression and consumption interwove that these musical and festive expressions were a vital with the town's political economy...
...449-471...
...Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990...
...On the other hand, commodification can also exploit symbols of blackness for money, turning them into spectacles for nonblack audiences...
...This is heard especially in times of carnival-like patron-saint festivities...
...Acc16n Colectiva, Estado Y Etnicidad En El Pacifico Colombiano (Bogota: Instituto Colombiano de Antropologla e Historia, Colciencias, 2000), 259-285...
...The key piece of legislation is Law 70 of 1993, also called the Law of Black Communities...
...fer terms such as moreno (brown...
...These might black bar] or among one's own people you can shout, include the idea that black people were hard workers, behave as you're used to, use nicknames, call out to a that they were open and hospitable, that they were friend from the other side of the room, and all that: more peaceful and less aggressive than mestizos from You feel in your element...
...There is a sense in which some of the black people I knew in Ungufa and Medellin deployed what they saw as white people's romantic understandings of black culture in order to gain a sense of superiority in specific contexts: It was a case of black people looking at white people looking at black people in an everrepeating series of mirrors...
...central Antioqula is populated mainly by lightskinned mestizo people...
...In contrast, on dancing and such leisure pursuits...
...It was as if, with the mainstreaming of salsa and vallenato-their adoption not just by the middle classes but also by the rest of the country-the potential of these styles to signify a regional-racial identity was diminished, leaving space for a new style to do the job...
...4 because the slippage between part Of the process of Some years later, I moved to nature and culture is quite evi- formation and change...
...In short, the music was "black" as much because black people were listening to it, as because of some objective musicological traits...
...Michel Agier and Odile Hoffmann, "Les Terres Des Communauths Noires Dans Le Pacifique Colombien...
...Interpretations De La Loi Et Strategies D'acteurs," Probl~mes d'Ambrique Latine, Vol...
...40, No...
...Another contender might have been cumbia, a style, with clearly African origins in the powerful drum rhythms that underlie it, that originates in the Caribbean coastal region...
...rap Ide and Jamaican reggae and ragga- ntity for muffin (a reggae offshoot) inter- Call was thus weave with salsa in their musical world to create an assertive ver- as much by n sion of black identity that draws regional as by on global commodity circuits, city council funding schemes for transn community projects and local social relationships with other rap crews...
...It is almost as if the idea is to keep one step ahead of the rest, listening to and performing music that can express a sense of difference...
...In many Latin American countries, blackness has recently achieved a greater public and political profile than before and is increasingly recognized by black and non-black people alike-and especially by governments-as a legitimate part of the nation...
...Bands such as La Contundencia, which played updated versions of currulao-and of the chirimia music that had so little place among black migrants to Medellin in the 1980s-were feted...
...This was the first time the city authorities had given a public platform to black culture and the venue-located in a middle-class and non-black part of town-was packed with black people, young and older...
...Parment of admiration, even envy, of aspects of black tying was seen as part of the good life, as part of a culture...
...Deborah Pacini HernAndez, "Sound Systems, World Beat and Diasporan Identity in Cartagena, Colombia," Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Vol...
...and stereotypical views held of blackness, in which, when blackness is recognized as present in the nation, it is seen as marginal, uncouth and vulgar and/or exciting and alluring by virtue of supposed "primitive" powers, expressed particularly through sexuality and musicality...
...6. Antioqufa is the province of which Medellin is the capital city...
...way of life that was relaxed, open, honest and In Ungufa and Medellin, I found that music and straightforward...
...In this way, music, dance, (im)morality p.16] Latin American forms of racial thinking are and poverty were all linked together in a vicious circle based to a large extent on cultural differences...
...admitting both traditional folkloric groups and orchestras that played "modernized" versions of currulao (i.e., fused with jazz, salsa, etc...
...Black migrants were at the bottom of the pile in both places (although they were not alone there in either place) and, in Medellin, they were an embattled minority...
...At this time, a politicized view of black identity among black people was very incipient, confined to a small minority among urban, educated black people, often university students, inspired mainly by the black movement in the United States and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa...
...Guaguanc6 and rumba are both styles of Afro-Cuban music...
...The use of rap and reggae by young blacks in Cali is self-consciously a search beyond the Colombian I a context for ways to express and make an identity in Colombia...
...16-23...
...In the case of chirimia, I think it is because it was seen as too provincial by these urban black migrants, too "folkloric...
...frequently, regional labels, such as costefio (coastal dweller), were used, as black bars and dance halls, private parties or open Colombia's coastal regions have concentrations of houses...
...As one young black student told me in dark-skinned people...
...Black people define musical tastes for themselves, which are often neither unique nor exclusive to them, which may draw from both local and global musical networks, and yet which manage to express a black identity in a given context at a given time...
...role...
...populated predominantly by black people, descendants On the other hand, it is widely held that some people of slaves taken there by the Spanish to mine gold...
...Rhythm that the two are not easily sepa- expression of identity...
...formation...
...Martin Stokes, "Introduction: Ethnicity, Identity and Music," in Martin Stokes, ed...
...429-466...
...Why did neither type of music come to constitute black identity in the city...
...22, No...
...VOL XXXV, No 6 MAY]JUNE 2002 23REPORT ON RACE AND IDENTITY El Parque Berrio in Medellin on a Sunday afternoon...
...In the city of Cali, near the southern Pacific coast, there are scores of black rap crews which vary enormously in their outlook...
...34, No...
...the second, "Moreno soy" is by Bobby Valentln...
...and stone-throwing...
...1 1 This official recognition has spurred the growth of the black social movement, leading to the proliferation of black organizations...
...But as commercial products, they were available to multiple audiences and, by listening and dancing to them-often at high volume and more or less unmixed with other styles-black migrants in Unguia and Medellin created for themselves spaces that were distinct from non-black working class spaces and, even more, non-black middle class spaces...
...9. See Alan Lomax, "The Homogeneity of African-AfroAmerican Musical Style," in Norman Whitten and John Szwed, eds., Afro-American Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1970...
...One outcome of this tension seems to be a continuous process of invention and appropriation...
...1 3 The role of commercialization in all this is doubleedged...
...Marta E. Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995...
...9 In the context of Ungufa and Medellin at the time, however, these musical styles were associated with black people, because they were the preferred music of many black people in these two locations, as well as in their regions of origin, and because they were evident features of the places and times that were being defined as "black" (e.g., a city center bar on a Sunday afternoon...
...It did not chime well with their urban aspirations...
...Mieke Wouters, "Derechos Etnicos Bajo Fuego: El Movimiento Campesino Negro Frente a La Presi6n De Grupos Armados En El Choc6," in Mauricio Pardo, ed...
...8. The first song, by Angel Lebr6n, can be heard on The Lebr6n Brothers, Super Hits (Philips 8485822, 1991...
...For example, a "traditional" style in the Choc6 province in the northern Pacific coastal region of the country, whence many black people in Ungufa and Medellin had come, is chirimia, a term that refers mainly to the small brass bands, with snare drum, bass drum and cymbals that play a variety of European-derived tunes-mazurkas, polkas, jugas (from fugues) and contradanzas...
...other blacks] I feel good, I feel happy, free, sense of "black is beautiful," there was a certain sense like without any clothes...
...3 salsa and vallenato...
...generally subordinate to the highland mestizos who Black people in Ungufa and Medellin were often dominated the region's cattle-farming and commercial aware of the negative views non-blacks held of them economy...
...Identity for black people in Cali was thus being shaped as much by music that was regional-for which public space had been given by the local state-as by music that was transnational...
...5. Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia...
...For some, the music is part of a project VOL XXXV, No 6 MAY/JUNE 2002 s 25REPORT ON RACE AND IDENTITY of anti-racism, community development and the affirmation of black identity...
...To understand this, it is useful to outline briefly what "black identity" meant in Colombia in the 1980s...
...34, No...
...But when I'm with three or four paisanos [compatriIndeed, although this did not equate to a politicized ots, i.e...
...Not all Colombian rappers are black, but many are...
...the city of Medellin-located in dent in people's ideas about the region of origin of many of music and the dancing that fre- these highland mestizos-and quently goes with it...
...What constituted "black music" in Ungufa and Medellin was not an obvious matter...
...oth in the 1980s and since 1991, there is a sense in which Afro-Colombians, especially of the younger generation, have sought musical styles that are not mainstream, whether these have been transnational styles, such as salsa and rap, that, at least initially, were outside the Colombian musical mainstream or styles that have a particular regional identity...
...This could certainly be heard in Medellin, but more likely in non-black and perhaps middle-class 24 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS I y f s 5 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 24REPORT ON RACE AND IDENTITY parties and dance halls...
...Other images that are not so obviously "black"-such as the Nike logo-acquire that meaning as a result of being repeatedly shaved by razor blade into the hair stubble of numerous young black men...
...This dynamic is surely, in part, a question of generational identity, but there is also a clear racial dimension to it...
...On the one hand, rap crews such as Ashanty fuel themselves in part on the images of blackness that circulate as global commodities...
...vants and the male construction workers who constiBut music is not just an expression of identity...
...During my fieldwork in Colombia, I found that music and dance were important to understanding patterns of racism and racial identity Peter Wade is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester...
...At the same time, many ies, heredity and "blood" are thought that black people had a absent, but rather that they are "natural" predilection for music intertwined in complex ways Music is not just an and dance and were often "natuwith ideas about culture such rally" good at dancing...
...On the one studied black migrants to the city...
...This bia's violent society), and that they were expressive conveys a sense of relief, rather than pride, a feeling and realized the social and emotional value of festive- of security in a hostile environment, rather than a ness-in which music and dance played an important feeling of personal or collective self-respect...
...dance were key aspects of sociality among black peo- There is a difficult balance to be struck here, ple...
...The rap crew Ashanty, for example, located in the Aguablanca district-a huge and recent settlement of migrants-has such an agenda and, for them, blackness is linked into globalized representations of Caribbean, U.S...
...This is true of salsa from the 1980s and, more recently of vallenato, which, mainly through the medium of actor-singer Carlos Vives, suddenly lost some of its vulgar image and became acceptable to a middleclass market...
...Yet this style had no place in Medellin...
...See, for example, Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the '"Vulgar" Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1993...
...Salsa and vallenato, in contrast to cumbia, were both, at the time, still seen as fashionable urban popular music, with connotations of working class status and blackness...
...hand, music and dance styles are recognized as specif- Many of them came from the Pacific coastal region, an ically cultural practices, acquired through learning and infrastructurally underdeveloped and very poor area, particular to specific regions or categories of people...
...By the 1980s, in any case, working class urban black migrants sought out newer styles more strongly associated with their class position and racial identity in order to constitute their identities...
...7 There was here an element of scorn for those were and what they did...
...98-114...
...Among other black people, ideas about blackness were very varied...
...tuted many of the migrants...
...it has also increased the public attention paid to black culture...
...At the same time, the very style drink and talk rather than dance, of dancing that could be observed in the dance halls As Marisol de la Cadena pointed out in an earlier was thought by many highland mestizos to be licenissue of this NACLA series on race and racism in the tious, with too much close dancing and grinding hip Americas ["Reconstructing Race" in Vol...
...Yet the group's black director told me that the commercial sound and style he was aiming for was, for him, a precursor to airing other more political themes about blackness and social problems...
...32, 1999, pp...
...Music is both within and beyond the Latin tion of racial identities partly of the American context...
...On tionships between changing and overlapping sets of occasion, such disagreements led to physical violence people...
...The increasingly prominent national profile of the Pacific coastal region, in the wake of Colombia's legislative recognition of its black population, has translated into the possibility for regional cultural forms to play a more central part in black identity formation...
...People might pre- Black migrants from the pacific coastal region socializing at the Salon Suizo in Medellin...
...As with salsa, it has some famous black exponents, but most artists are not easily classifiable as black...
...25, No...
...Meanwhile, the migration of black people from the rural areas and towns of the Pacific coastal region to cities such as Cali, Bogota and Medellfin has increased apace, fuelled partly by the intensifying interest of capitalist business and the state in the region, and more recently by the associated rise in violence as paramilitaries and guerrillas vie for control of the area.12 In this context, music is as important as ever to the formation of black identity...
...Peter Wade, Music, Race and Nation: MOsica Tropical in Colombia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000...
...Colombia's recent redefinition as a multicultural society has, I believe, given a new twist to this dynamic, rather than radically changing it...
...I think the people go there the highland interior (an important claim in Colom- [to the Suizo] because they feel good there...
...A key element in the constitution of black identity is also a key element in the restrictive stereotyping of black people by others...
...The formation of black identity in Colombia, and in Latin America more generally, has been a process conditioned by two powerful and linked forces: the resistance or at best indifference of non-black people to the idea of blackness as an on-going, dynamic aspect of national identity...
...it was two decades earlier...
...1 4 In 1997, too, the city music that was council first sponsored a yearly festival of Pacific coast music, tional...
...3. Simon Frith, "Music and Identity," in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996), 108-127...
...As such, particular migrants, but they also incurred the wrath of local styles are not tied in a simple fashion to specific mestizo neighbors who were appalled by what they groups: Instead, music is integral to the complex rela- saw as excessive noise, music and rowdy behavior...
...These bars played only rather it helps to form and constitute that identity...
...4. Many studies have noted the connections made between black music, or music seen as "black," and supposed immorality...
...In the early 1980s, when working in the village of Ungufa, near the Panamanian frontier, it was evident that racial and ethnic identities were linked to musical preferences.1 Although racial identities were not clear cut in this context, with people of many types of physical appearance and regional origin interacting fairly freely, I could see that, for example, the local bailaderos (dance halls) were run and frequented predominantly by (younger) blacker people from Colombia's Pacific and Caribbean tropical coastal regions who danced mainly to international salsa music and VoL XXXV, No 6 MAY/JUNE 2002 21REPORT ON RACE AND IDENTITY local Colombian vallenato (accordion music from the los negros (the blacks) wasted their time and money Caribbean coastal region of the country...
...3, 1996, pp...
...17-42...
...4, 1999, pp...
...and African blackness in the form of such figures as Bob Marley, Michael Jordan and Nelson Mandela...
...6 negros with little sense of embarrassment or shame...
...1 5 Champeta was derided, including by local blacks who prided themselves on their respectability, as vulgar, overly flamboyant and erotic, and associated with criminality and violence--champeta means a kind of machete-yet the music was a very clear expression of a forceful and assertive black identity, linked symbolically to Africa, even if it did not have the more overt political meanings linked to rap...
...The key here is the effects that consumption of the musical product has: Bob Marley has been turned into a global commodity but, as such, his image can be both vital to such as Ashanty, in the formation of a selfassertive black identity which seeks to address racism and social inequality, and it can also be pigeon-holed conveniently into romantic ideas about individual black heroes which evade issues of racism and inequality...
...Both were then, and are now, highly commercialized genres, strongly controlled at the production end by big record companies...
...VOL XXXV, No 6 MAY/JUNE 2002 Music and The Formation of Black Identity in Colombia 1. Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993...
...In 1997, for example, I saw a Calibased group, Los Generales, fronted by four young black singers, make use of Rasta colors, dreadlock wigs and black hip-grinding female dancers to entertain with merengue, salsa and raggamuffin a mainly non-black audience at a gig that few black people could afford to attend...
...8 But most others do not...
...The lyrical emphasis in both salsa and vallenato on having fun, partying and dancing interwove well with the other key lyrical theme of both genres-romantic love, commonly portrayed as a star-crossed experience, reminiscent perhaps of the tough and difficult lives of many urban migrants...
...3, 2000, pp...
...rather it helps to form and a stereotype about black people Music is an interesting realm that is probably familiar to many in which to examine the forma- constitute identity...
Vol. 35 • May 2002 • No. 6
