The Coloniality of Power, La Bomba, and Afrochoteno Identity

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2011 La Bomba es Vida (La Bomba Is Life): The Coloniality of Power, La Bomba, and Afrochoteño Identity in Ecuador's Chota- Mira Valley Francisco D. Lara

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COLLEGE OF MUSIC

LA BOMBA ES VIDA (LA BOMBA IS LIFE): THE COLONIALITY OF POWER, LA

BOMBA, AND AFROCHOTEÑO IDENTITY IN ECUADOR’S CHOTA-MIRA VALLEY

FRANCISCO D. LARA

A Dissertation submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2011

Francisco D. Lara defended this dissertation on November 3, 2011.

The members of the supervisory committee were:

Frank D. Gunderson Professor Directing Dissertation

Michael A. Uzendoski University Representative

Michael B. Bakan Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the [thesis/treatise/dissertation] has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

For Diana and Noah

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation was made possible by the generous support of several institutions and individuals in Ecuador and the United States of America. Pre-dissertation field-work in Ecuador was funded in part by a Carol Krebs Award, a research-travel grant awarded through the musicology department of The Florida State University College of Music. Institutional support throughout the dissertation research phase was provided by the The Florida State University, Fundación CIMAS of Ecuador, the Fulbright Commission of Ecuador, the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino, FECONIC, the Fundación Piel Negra, the Centro Cultural Afro-Ecuatoriana, the Fundación De Desarrollo Social y Cultural Afro- Ecuatoriana “Azucar,” the Ecuadorian National Archive, the municipality of Ibarra. Many thanks are also in order for the institutions of The Ohio State University and Monmouth College in addition to those participating in the Illinois I-Share program (especially the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana and Knox College) for their generous academic support during the writing phase of the dissertation. I wish to thank my advisor, Frank Gunderson, and committee members Michael Bakan and Michael Uzendoski for their input, patience, and support. Their challenging questions and encouragement greatly informed and facilitated the course and completion of this dissertation. A special thank you is also in order for Dale A. Olsen, whose input during the preliminary stages of this dissertation and enthusiastic support during my tenure as a graduate student at The Florida State University College of Music likewise proved invaluable to my continuation with and completion of the dissertation. I am grateful to the musicology faculty and fellow graduate students as well as faculty and staff of the FSU College of Music for their support and help over the years, including Sara Gross, Meghan McCaskill, Lauren Smith, Theodore Stanley, Seth Beckman, Denise Von Glahn, Douglass Seaton, Charles Brewer, Benjamin Koen, Trevor Harvey, Robbie Frye, Jeffrey Jones, Plamena Kourtova, Janine Tiffe, Stephanie Stallings, León García, Sara Arthur, Holly Wissler, Mark Hertica, and Laura and David Pruett among others. Thanks also to Emily Walmsley, Joseph Hellweg, Jean Rahier, Daniel Avorgbedor, Larry Crook, Welson Tremura, Gini Gorlinski, Sarah McFarland Taylor, Ileana Rodriguez, Lucia Costigan, Terrell Morgan, Richard Gordon, and Ignacio Corona among other academics for their inspiration, help, and encouragement along the way. A special thank you is in order for Dolores López Suárez and Dr. José Suárez, directors of the Fundación CIMAS of Ecuador, as well as the Suárez family (José Ricardo, Luis, and Gabriela) for their lifelong friendship and encouragement throughout my graduate school career. Their emotional as well as logistical support made possible dissertation research in Ecuador. I am also grateful for the support of numerous other family friends over the years, including Cyntia and Pachi López, Joe Zachmann and John Bullough, and the Englund, O’Brien,

Truchinski, Majerle, Tilsen, Weiss, Costain, Levins-Morales, Moreno, Lindstrom, Alemayehu, Urbain, Ryan, and Curbelo families. My apologies to the numerous other lifelong friends whom I have failed to mention in this list but whom have encouraged and inspired me no less. I am grateful also to Karen Aguilar from the Fulbright Commission of Ecuador, Edison León (director of the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino), Renán Tadeo (then president of FECONIC), Salamón Acosta (former president of FECONIC), José Chalá (director of CODAIE), Juan Mullo Sandoval, Diego Chiriboga Ati (and family), Jhonny García, Mauricio Sanchez, José Luis Narvaez, and Alex Schlenker for their support, encouragement, and feedback during the research phase of the dissertation. I am most grateful to the individuals and families of the Chota-Mira valley and of the cities of Ibarra and Quito for graciously sharing their homes and lives with me during the research phase of this dissertation, including “Billy” Lara Muñoz, Manuel Lara Muñoz, Viviana and Romulo, Teodoro Mendez, Milton Tadeo, Plutarco Viveros and the Bomba group Marabu, Plutarco Chalá, José Chalá, Oscar Chalá, Nelly Calderon, Fidel Calderon, Daniel Lara and the members of Sol Naciente, Marisela Lara, Zoila Espinoza, Salamon Acosta, Renán Tadeo, Cristóbol Barahona, Gualberto Espinoza, Roy Diaz, Karla Aguas, Segundo Isidro Yepez Mendez, the members of the banda mocha of Chalguayaco, Milton Carabalí, Oswaldo Torres, Neri Padilla, Iván Pabón, and Humberto Diaz and his family. A special thank you is in order for Michele Aichele for notating the transcriptions included in this dissertation as well as to Diana Ruggiero for editing my Spanish to English translations. Numerous friends have encouraged me along the way, including Trevor and Sara Harvey, Charles Martinez, Scott and Rebecca Macleod, Fred and Nancy Witzig, Chris and Steph Annear, José Ricardo Suárez, Daniel Williams, Peter Majerle, Benjamin Conwell, Christine Lattin, Natalie Wozniak, Marisol Lara, Tim Lacy, Hannah and Martin, Michael and Clay, Dan and Terri Ott, Tim Gaster and Claudia Fernández, and Bee and Marcus Schuman. I am grateful to my family both here in the United States and Ecuador for their encouragement and support. My interest in ethnomusicology stems from my upbringing, and I am forever grateful to my parents for passing on to me a passion for the music and culture of my father’s homeland, Ecuador. Their love, support, and encouragement helped keep me on track and I am forever grateful for their belief in me and my abilities. I wish to also thank my siblings Luke, Nicolette, Carmen, and Violeta for their love and support over the years. The topic of this dissertation and my thoughts on the matters of race and racism in Ecuador are likewise an outgrowth of my ongoing conversations with family in Ecuador. Many thanks, therefore, go to my family in Ecuador, including but not limited to my grandmother Maria Georgina and her sisters, my aunt Flor, cousin Mercedes, Jelma Gonzalón, Alfredo Franco, and my numerous second cousins and other extended family residing throughout Quito and the Chota-Mira valley. Last but not least, I am most grateful to my wife Diana and son Noah for their love, patience, and support throughout the dissertation research and writing phase.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables ...... viii List of Figures ...... ix List of Musical Examples ...... x Abstract ...... xi 1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1 Background ...... 4 Literature Review...... 6 Scholarship on Afro-Ecuadorian History and Culture ...... 6 Scholarship on Music and Music Making in the African Diaspora ...... 10 Music, Race, and Nation in Latin America and Ecuador ...... 18 Music, Race, and Representation ...... 24 Theory ...... 27 Race, the Coloniality of Power, and Music ...... 27 Music as the Colonial Difference ...... 30 Music as Process ...... 32 La Bomba es Vida: La Bomba, the Coloniality of Power, and Afrochoteño Identity ...... 35 Methodology ...... 37 Organization ...... 43

2. THE COLONIAL DIFFERENCE AND CONTEMPORARY REPRESENTATIONS OF LA BOMBA AND AFROCHOTEÑO IDENTITY ...... 48 Interculturalidad and Etnoeducación ...... 54 El Color de la Diaspora and Afrodescendientes ...... 59 El Color de la Diaspora ...... 59 Afrodescendientes ...... 63 La Bomba Tradicional (Traditional) and La Bomba Moderna (Modern): Marabu and Sol Naciente ...... 66 Marabu and Bomba Tradiciónal (Traditional Bomba) ...... 66 Sol Naciente and La Bomba Moderna (Modern Bomba) ...... 69 Discourse about La Bomba and Afrochoteño Identity ...... 73 Conclusion ...... 78

3. VIGNETTES IN THE STYLE OF COPLAS ...... 80

4. LA BOMBA AND THE COLONIALITY OF POWER: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ...... 106 The Coloniality of Power and Afrochoteño History: Origins and Development ...... 107 Black Presence and the Slave Trade in Ecuador ...... 108 Slavery in the Chota-Mira Valley (1575-1854) ...... 111 Slave Manumission and Emancipation (1820-1854) ...... 113 Huasipungo Era (1854-1964) ...... 115 Post Agrarian Reform ...... 118 The Afrochoteño Experience of the Coloniality of Power ...... 121 The Colonial Period: Slave Treatment, Family, and Land ...... 122 Huasipungo Period (1854-1964) ...... 125 Post Agrarian Reform (1964-Present) ...... 128 The Coloniality of Power and La Bomba: Origins and Social Significance ...... 129 Origins and Context ...... 130 Function and Social Significance...... 131 Continuity and Change in Function Post Agrarian Reform ...... 134 Conclusion ...... 136

5. LA BOMBA, HYBRIDITY, AND THE COLONIALITY OF POWER: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF LA BOMBA, 1700-2007 ...... 138 Period of Origination (ca. 1700-1860): The Bomba Complex ...... 139 Period of Consolidation (ca. 1860-1970) ...... 141 Instrumentation ...... 142 Bomba Coplas and Song Texts ...... 151 Period of Commercialization, Decline, and Dissemination (ca. 1960s-1990s) ...... 157 Period of Revitalization, Bifurcation, and Transformation (ca. 1990s-2007) ...... 163 Conclusion ...... 168

6. LA BOMBA, COMPLEMENTARY DUALITY, AND THE COLONIALITY OF POWER: A MUSICAL ANALYSIS ...... 170 The Bomba Drum and Complementary Duality ...... 171 Complementary Duality in the Rhythmic and Tonal Organization of La Bomba and La Bomba Moderna ...... 176 Traditional Bomba ...... 176 La Bomba Moderna ...... 184 Bomba Coplas, Complementary Duality, and Encompassment ...... 191 Listening Analysis ...... 196 La Bomba, Complementary Duality, and the Coloniality of Power ...... 203

7. CONCLUSION ...... 206 The Coloniality of Power, Music, and Agency in the African Diaspora ...... 212

8. REFERENCES ...... 214

9. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 240

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LIST OF TABLES

6.1 Tonal Areas for Sol Naciente Repertoire ...... 188

6.2 Guided Listening, “Sol y Luna” ...... 197

6.3 Guided Listening, “Aunque no Pienses” ...... 201

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LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 Map of the Chota-Mira Valley (from Noboa 1992b) ...... 2

6.1 Bomba Basic Rhythmic Patterns: Simple Duple Sol/Tierra and Compound Duple Sol/Tierra ...... 173

6.2 Bomba-Cumbia Basic with Variation ...... 175

6.3 Guitar Basic in Simple and Compound Duple Meter ...... 176

6.4 Scraper/Shaker in Simple and Compound Duple Meter with Variation ...... 177

6.5 Bass Guitar in Simple Duple Meter with Variation ...... 177

6.6 Bass Guitar in Compound Duple Meter with Variations ...... 178

6.7 Bomba Rhythm Instruments in Simple and Compound Duple Meter ...... 179

6.8 “Sol y Luna” Antecedent and Consequent Melodic Phrases ...... 181

6.9 “Sol y Luna” Instrumental Interlude ...... 182

6.10 “Coplas de mi Tierra” Antecedent and Consequent Melodic Phrases ...... 182

6.11 “Necesito” Antecedent and Consequent Melodic Phrases ...... 189

7.1 Generative Model of La Bomba ...... 211

LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES

1. “Dueña de mi Corazon” by Sol Naciente. Used by permission ...... 185

2. Untitled Instrumental Track 1 by Sol Naciente. Used by permission ...... 185

3. “Aysha” by Sol Naciente. Used by permission ...... 185

4. “Aunque no Pienses” by Sol Naciente. Used by permission ...... 188

5. “Necesito” by Sol Naciente. Used by permission ...... 188

6. “Pienso en Ti” by Sol Naciente. Used by permission ...... 189

7. Untitled Instrumental Track 2 by Sol Naciente. Used by permission ...... 190

ABSTRACT

In this dissertation, I present an ethnography, social history, musical analysis, and discussion of Afro-Ecuadorian Bomba in its relation to afrochoteño identity based on ethnographic field- research conducted in the Chota-Mira valley, and the urban centers of Ibarra, and Quito, Ecuador between August 2007 and August 20008. La Bomba refers to a drum, rhythm, music and dance genre, and sociomusical event unique to the black communities of the Chota-Mira valley: a region straddling the rivers Chota-Mira and encompassing the provinces of Imbabura and Carchi in Ecuador’s northern highlands. The afrochoteños, as many today self-identify, are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans brought to labor the region’s sugarcane plantations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their origin and sociohistorical trajectory distinguish them historically and culturally from the coastal black population of Esmeraldas. La Bomba is today thus nationally recognized as a prominent signifier of a distinct, highland black ethnic identity. The conceptualization and projection of identity among Ecuador’s afro-descendant population in terms of race and ethnicity, however, is a recent phenomenon. This study seeks to better understand the relationship between La Bomba and afrochoteño identity beyond the question of Africanisms and the issue of representation. To this end, I situate La Bomba not in relation to race as culture, ethnicity, and heritage, but to those historically situated dynamics of power structuring and embodied in the very concept of race itself. Specifically, I consider the implications of Latin American postcolonial theories of race and subaltern identity, namely Aníbal Quijano’s notion of the coloniality of power and Walter Mignolo’s related concept of the colonial difference, for an understanding of La Bomba’s function, development and form as a musical genre, formal musical characteristics and structure, and, ultimately, significance in relation to afrochoteño identity. As I argue throughout, La Bomba embodies and thus (re)constitutes and mediates the particular afrochoteño experience of the coloniality of power in its negotiation and expression of the colonial

difference. As such, La Bomba marks the coloniality of power in its development as a musical genre, social significance, and its formal musical characteristics. Indeed, a musical analysis sensitive to the relationship between the colonial difference and the coloniality of power reveals the extent to which La Bomba embodies and constitutes the relational dynamics structuring the potential expression of afrochoteño identity. In emphasizing the encompassment of duality in its very rhythmic, tonal, and textual structure and organization, La Bomba illuminates the unspoken truth about race and thus reveals its counterhegemonic potential. In approaching race and music in terms of postcolonial theories of race and subaltern identity, this dissertation contributes to a growing body of academic literature critically assessing the relationship between music and identity in the African Diaspora. It also seeks to redress an apparent lack of critical engagement on the part of black-music scholars with the formal and structural elements of the musical sound object itself as they relate to the experience of race and racism. That music of black communities in the African Diaspora emerges from and expresses the difference produced by the power dynamics structuring and informing the development of black identity is all the more reason to “listen” attentively to what the music itself communicates about the experience of blackness in the Americas.

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

This dissertation presents an ethnography, social history, musical analysis, and discussion of Afro-Ecuadorian Bomba in its relation to afrochoteño identity based on ethnographic field research conducted in the Chota-Mira valley, and the urban centers of Ibarra, and Quito, Ecuador between August 2007 and August 20008. La Bomba refers to a drum, rhythm, music and dance genre, and sociomusical event unique to the black communities of the Chota-Mira valley: a region straddling the rivers Chota-Mira and encompassing the provinces of Imbabura and Carchi in Ecuador’s northern highlands (see Figure 1.1).1 The afrochoteños, as many today self identify, are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans brought to labor the region’s once plentiful sugarcane plantations in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Their origins and sociohistorical trajectory distinguish them historically and culturally from the coastal black population of Esmeraldas. As such, La Bomba is today a prominent signifier of a distinct, highland black ethnic identity. This study seeks to better understand the ways in which La Bomba embodies and informs afrochoteño identity beyond the question of Africanisms and the issue of representation. Afro-Ecuadorians, as with other afro-descendant communities in the Americas, have a long history of marginalization and exclusion extending back to colonial slavery. As this dissertation will show, the power dynamics that are the legacy of colonialism circumscribe and inform, though not determine, the development of afrochoteño identity and culture. This much is indicated by the current dynamics of race and racism in Ecuador informing representations of

1 Within the context of this dissertation, specific reference to the bomba drum is distinguished from Bomba as a song and dance genre and sociomusical event in the use of the lower-case letter “b” for the sake of clarity.

Figure 1.1: Map of the Chota-Mira Valley (from Noboa 1992b).

afrochoteño identity, a relatively new construct within the nation’s racial imaginary speaking to the current sociopolitical struggles of Ecuador’s afro-descendant population. La Bomba’s recent transformation from an obscure and marginalized genre previously associated with a regional pan highland identity to a celebrated symbol of highland black ethnicity and national diversity may be understood, therefore, as the most recent manifestation of the greater underlying sociohistorical and sociopolitical dynamics shaping perceptions and representations of blackness in Ecuador. This dissertation, therefore, seeks to situate La Bomba not in relation to race as culture, ethnicity, and heritage, but to the power invested dialectic constitutive of and embodied in the concept of race: a historically situated relational construct the various manifestations and transformations of which are the result of the continual dialogue between its polar opposites (white/non-white; self/other; sameness/difference). Drawing on Latin American postcolonial theories of race and power, namely Anibal Quijano’s notion of the coloniality of power and its elaboration in Walter Mignolo’s conception of the colonial difference, this study considers the implications of the above understanding of race for the development, function, form, structure, and meaning of La Bomba. A close reading of ethnographic and historical data alongside the extant academic sources on La Bomba, Afro- Ecuadorian history and culture, and Ecuadorian music reveal the extent to which La Bomba is indeed implicated in the mediation of this dialectic as a sociomusical process enabling the formation, transformation, and expression of collective identity in the Chota-Mira valley. La Bomba’s perceived hybridity, the focus of previous studies on the subject, is no less than the emergent quality of this transformative process made manifest. In such a context, the question of cultural origins and change gives way to a consideration of the ways in which music, as social activity and sound, constitutes identity. An analysis of La Bomba suggests that the processual aspects extend beyond the social to encompass the formal defining structural elements of the genre itself. The symbolic significance of the bomba drum as a representation of matrimony indicates that a notion of complementary duality is fundamental to the genre itself. An analysis of the characteristic rhythmic, tonal and textual structures of La Bomba indeed reveals the pervasiveness of this symbolic dimension as reproduced in homologous fashion throughout. Rather than understand this as a vestige of African beliefs or the result of cross-cultural borrowing, I argue that La Bomba embodies and thus constitutes in the very act of its performance that colonial difference today expressed as

afrochoteño. It is in this sense that, as one afrochoteño collaborator emphatically expressed, “La Bomba es vida” (La Bomba is life). This dissertation builds on and contributes in its topic and approach to a growing body of academic literature on Afro-Ecuadorian, Afro-Andean, Afro-Hispanic, and African Diaspora history and culture. As the following literature review shows, it presents the first dissertation- length ethnomusicological study of La Bomba and the first critical treatment of the genre as it relates to afrochoteño identity beyond the issue of representation. The theoretical orientation adopted in this dissertation, initially informed by observations, communication, and interpersonal experiences in the field, reflects the need to approach the question of black culture in the African Diaspora in a more thoughtful and creative way. In situating blackness in relation to the historically constituted dialectic from which it emerges, this study seeks to move beyond the issue of representation and engage more earnestly the ways in which music in both its social and formal dimensions constitutes and mediates the experience of blackness in the Americas. Indeed, the inability to circumvent the issue of representation has inadvertently led to a dismissal of the music as sound in its relation to black identity. This dissertation thus seeks to redress this problem and advance discussion on music and black identity in the African Diaspora in properly recognizing race as a historically grounded and power invested relational construct. That black musics in the African Diaspora emerge from and express the difference produced by this dialectic is all the more reason to “listen” closely to the music itself for what it has to tell us about the experience of blackness in the Americas.

Background

La Bomba is a genre of music and dance unique to the afro-descendant communities of the Chota-Mira valley. As an oral tradition, its exact origins and development remain obscured, though afrochoteños assert that it emerged sometime during the colonial period among the region’s enslaved black population. Its ambiguity is exacerbated by a relative dearth of written documentation on afrochoteño history and culture prior to the mid-twentieth century. What can be known about La Bomba resides in the collective memory of the afrochoteño communities, and in the extant documentation and contemporaneous manifestations and uses of La Bomba.

The term bomba today connotes a specific drum, rhythm, genre of song and dance, and social event. The drum, which is constructed entirely of natural materials, is believed to symbolize in its physical and sonic dimensions the cosmology of the afrochoteño communities. As a genre of song, La Bomba is said to record the particular social and cultural dimensions of afrochoteño history in its tendency to draw and comment upon local events, expressions, and conditions of life and work. Similarly, the Bomba ensemble marks changing trends and ways of life in the region in its continual adaptation of new musical instruments. A typical Bomba ensemble consists of a bomba, a bass, rhythm, and lead guitar (typically played on a requinto), a shaker or scraper, and lead and secondary harmony vocalist. Recent additions to the Bomba ensemble include: electric keyboards, an indigenous style bombo, timbales, a drum set, congas, and bongos. Today, La Bomba is a central aspect of local and regional familial and communal celebrations for afrochoteños in the Chota-Mira valley as well as in Ibarra and Quito. While its use is most often associated with socioreligious contexts such as weddings, baptisms, Carnaval, saint-feast days, and so forth, it is commonly heard, played, and danced to wherever a gathering of friends and family occurs and whenever those involved may feel so inclined. It is also not uncommon for Bomba to be heard in the nightclubs, buses, taxis, and tourist oriented hostels, restaurants, and hotels, of the Chota-Mira valley, Ibarra, and Quito. The continued proliferation of commercial recording and performing Bomba ensembles since the 1980s contributes to the dissemination of La Bomba beyond the confines of the Chota-Mira valley. As a symbol of a distinctive regional black ethnic identity, La Bomba is prominently showcased in local, regional, and national social, cultural, and political events and festivities celebrating black culture and cultural diversity in Ecuador. As a result, in part, La Bomba is today intimately associated with the distinctive culture of the highland black communities among Afro-Ecuadorians, the indigenous population, and urban mestizos alike. Despite the association between La Bomba and afrochoteño identity evident today, little is known about La Bomba’s history, development, and significance for local identity beyond its representation of African roots and cultural heritage. Indeed, Afrochoteño testimonies, as well as the extant academic literature concerning La Bomba, reveal that the connection drawn between La Bomba and black ethnicity is relatively recent. This evidence suggests that a concept of black ethnicity emerged sometime during the mid to late 1990s in response to greater social and

political dynamics shaping discourse and representations of national identity in Ecuador. As such, this dissertation seeks to situate La Bomba not in relation to race and ethnicity per se, but to the sociohistorical and sociopolitical dynamics structuring and informing perceptions and representations of local identity.2 Within the context of the Chota-Mira valley, this means considering the ways in which afrochoteño identity indexes and responds to the particular afrochoteño experience of subjugation, exploitation, and marginalization in Ecuador. How La Bomba is informed by and informs afrochoteño identity relative these dynamics of power is the primary question addressed by this dissertation. In the process, it considers the implications of those dynamics for an understanding of La Bomba’s development, function, formal musical characteristics, and meaning.

Literature Review

Scholarship on Afro-Ecuadorian History and Culture

Though academic scholarship on Afro-Ecuadorian history and culture did not begin until the mid-twentieth century, there are a few notable and informative though anecdotal observations recorded in nineteenth century travelogues. To his credit, Paulo de Carvalho-Neto (1964) includes this non-academic literature among the known academic studies of the time in his bibliography and anthology of Latin American black studies. Most relevant to this particular investigation are the descriptions of a staged music and dance performance and Easter celebration in the Chota-Mira valley provided by Frederic Hausserek (1868, 344-346) and E. Festa (1909, 307-308) while passing through the region in the early 1860s and mid 1890s respectively. A Viennese born U.S. diplomat to Ecuador, Hausserek is treated to a style of festive music and dance typical of the region’s black population while visiting the hacienda (plantation) of Chamanal. The musical event, referred to as bundi, involved a series of songs and

2 In the context of this dissertation, I critique the terms race and ethnicity in terms of their popular and, until recently, uncritical academic use to connote and identify sociocultural differences perceived to originate in and propagate through biological factors (i.e., genetics). It is against the reifying and naturalizing tendency of this uncritical use of these terms that I employ the concepts of the coloniality of power and the colonial difference. For critical perspectives on the term race as it relates to black music and black music scholarship, see Paul Gilroy (1993), Ingrid Monson (2007), Ronald Radano (2000, 2003), and Radano and Bohlman (2000), to name a few.

6 dances performed in succession to the incessant rhythmic backdrop of a drum and shaker specifically identified as a bomba and alfandoque respectively. Though the exact relationship between the bundi and La Bomba remains uncertain, Hausserek’s detailed account of the event in its social and musical dimensions bears striking resemblance to that of Festa and other later descriptions of musical events involving the bomba drum (see De Costales and Costales 1958, 128-137). These accounts make evident from an historical perspective the centrality of music and dance in the region as a participatory, communal, and process oriented activity closely associated with socioreligious festive contexts. As will be explained in subsequent chapters, this is significant in developing and affirming my approach to La Bomba and afrochoteño identity as a sociomusical process intimately linked to sociohistorical circumstances. Travelogues and cursory anecdotal accounts notwithstanding, earnest academic scholarship on Afro-Ecuadorian music emerged during the late 1950s with the pioneering studies of Piedad Peñaherrera de Costales and Alfredo Costales Samaniego (1958, 1959, 1961a, 1961b), Paulo de Carvalho-Neto (1964, 1971), Norman E. Whitten Jr. (1965, 1974, 1975), Alberto Carlos Coba-Andrade (1980, 1981), and Segundo Obando (1985). Carvalho Neto’s dictionary of Ecuadorian folklore and bibliography/anthology of black studies in Ecuador, among other Latin American nations, is a necessary launching point for any scholar interested in researching Afro- Ecuadorian history and culture. As Carvalho-Neto (1981, 249) notes, Piedad and Alfredo Costales (1958) present the first major academic study of Afro-Ecuadorian history and culture in their discussion of the black communities of the Chota-Mira valley. Their discussion of the manumission process in Ecuador, the huasipungo system and its social and economic impact on the communities of the Chota-Mira valley, and ethnographic description of a Christmas celebration involving La Bomba are especially helpful in contextualizing La Bomba’s development and in understanding its social significance during that particular period in time. Addressing La Bomba specifically in terms of oral poetry, Coba-Andrade (1980) documents and discusses highland afrochoteño Bomba and coastal afroesmeraldeño decima texts in relation to the sociohistorical development and socioeconomic conditions of the respective black highland and coastal communities. His documentation of fifty-five Bomba texts collected in the Chota- Mira valley during the mid 1970s provides a crucial point of reference for comparative purposes as they point to textual compositional practices today largely absent as a result of the increasing influence of commercial music industry trends. Obando’s (1985) overview of afrochoteño

culture is likewise helpful in contextualizing present day cultural practices in the region. Most useful is his inclusion of seven Bomba texts composed by Milton Tadeo and Fabian and Euletorio Congo, many of which are still popular today. Though focusing entirely on the black coastal population, Whitten’s (1974) ethnography and analysis of the afroesmeraldeño marimba and its accompanying rhythms and dances is significant not only in terms of comparison, but in its treatment of music as a social phenomenon (as opposed to the textual analysis of Coba- Andrade). Though only Coba-Andrade (1980) approaches La Bomba specifically, these early studies as a whole provide an invaluable historical record of the socioeconomic conditions and cultural traditions of the afro-descendant communities during the time of their respective publication. Academic interest in and scholarship on Afro-Ecuadorian history and culture has increased considerably since the 1990s. Though this literature reflects a diversity of disciplinary methods and perspectives, they are fundamental to an understanding of the sociohistorical and cultural development of Ecuador’s black communities and of the ways in which local constructions and representations of blackness engage the nation and the greater African Diaspora. This literature includes studies on the history and dynamics of colonial slavery and its abolition in Ecuador (Martinez 1962; Mayorga 1999; Salmoral 1994; Tardieu 2006; Townsend 2007), Esmeraldas, the Chota-Mira valley, and other specific regions in Ecuador (Argentina 1992; De Polit 1992; Garay 1992; Gomezjurado 1999; Noboa 1990, 1992a, 1992b, 1995; Savoia 1992a, 1992c; Savoia and Ocles 1999), the sociohistorical and cultural development of the black communities of the Chota-Mira valley and Esmeraldas (Batallas 2007; Chalá 2004; Chalá-Cruz 2006; Feijóo 1991; Jaramillo 1994a, 1994b; Kapenda 2001; Noboa 1995; Pabón 2007; Savoia 1992b), the literature, folklore, and cultural traditions of the highland and coastal black communities (Bueno 1991; De Costales and Costales 1995; Fondo Documental 2003a, 2003b; García 2006; García Salazar 2003a, 2003b, n.d.; Handelsman 2001; Peters 2005; Rahier 1999a; Rodriguez 1992; Schechter 1992, 1994; Ruggiero 2010; Whitten 1998) and, more recently, on the current social and political circumstances and mobilization of Ecuador’s black population (Antón 2007a, 2009; Camacho 2005; Chalá-Cruz 2007; Girardi 1994; Handelsman 2008; León and Restrepo 2005; Medina and Castro 2006; Tadeo 1999; Walsh 2006; Walsh and Santacruz 2007) and issues of identity (Basante 2005; Guerron 2000; Klumpp 1998; León and García 2006; Pabón 2007; Walmsley 2004), cultural change (Chávez 2004; Medina 1999; Ruggiero 2010),

representation (Antón 2007c; Rahier 1999c) and race and racism (Antón 2005, 2007b; Merchán 2003; Rahier 2003, 1998; Ruggiero 2010; Walmsley 2004; Walsh 2004, 2009; Whitten 1999, 2007; Whitten and Quiroga 1998; Whitten, Quiroga and Savoia 1995). For the purposes of this dissertation the studies of Julio Jaramillo, Lourdes Rodriguez, Iván Pabón, and José Chalá in particular are most helpful in constructing a broader historical narrative of the development of the afrochoteño communities while those of Julio Bueno, John Schechter, and Diana Ruggiero inform my own understanding of and approach to La Bomba and its relation to afrochoteño identity. In all, four studies of varying scope and depth address La Bomba specifically. Bueno’s (1991) article and Schechter’s (1994) chapter complement Coba-Andrade’s (1980) compilation of Bomba texts in illuminating the genre’s musical characteristics while Ruggiero’s (2010) dissertation contextualizes its current symbolic value as a positive signifier of highland black ethnic identity. Bueno synthesizes the extant academic and non-academic literature on La Bomba, afrochoteño oral testimonies, ethnographic observations, and academic perspectives on oral tradition and genre in hopes of more clearly defining La Bomba’s distinctiveness as a genre unique to the Chota-Mira valley. Unlike Coba-Andrade, Bueno does not restrict himself to a discussion of the text alone, briefly addressing the drum itself in terms of its construction, performance, rhythms, and its symbolic significance as well as the instrumentation of the ensemble and dance. For this reason, Bueno’s study may be considered the first truly ethnomusicological consideration of La Bomba despite its lack of critical engagement with the oral testimonies and its cursory and descriptive treatment of the music itself. Schechter’s thorough musical analysis of the repertoire of Milton Tadeo and Los Hermanos Congo therefore marks a significant advancement in musicological knowledge about La Bomba. A specialist in highland Ecuadorian indigenous musical traditions, Schechter illuminates the indigenous, European-mestizo, and African influences that constitute La Bomba’s defining musical characteristics while noting stylistic changes evident in Milton’s repertoire in the ten-year span examined. Though Schechter concludes that La Bomba is reflective of a more generic regional Ecuadorian highland identity in its shared musical characteristics with neighboring mestizo and indigenous musical traditions than of a more specific notion of black ethnicity, his keen observations concerning the phenomenon of bimodality and of the extensive use of paired phrases greatly informs my own understanding of and approach to the formal musical

9 characteristics of La Bomba.3 Schechter’s engagement with the music, however substantial, is yet somewhat superficial in the sense that it serves solely to illustrate the ways in which La Bomba comes to represent or manifest its various cultural influences. Though Ruggiero’s dissertation fails to engage La Bomba at the level of sound beyond a consideration of its instrumentation and stylistic trends, she nonetheless greatly advances discussion of La Bomba in approaching the genre critically as a representation of black ethnic identity inextricably linked to the shifting dynamics of race and racism in Ecuador. Ruggiero’s deconstruction of afrochoteño discourse about La Bomba and afrochoteño identity, in its sensitivity toward afrochoteño sociohistorical and sociopolitical struggles, provides a useful theoretical perspective that resonates with current approaches to music and blackness in the African Diaspora that understand music and identity to be dynamic, discursive, and indexical of the dynamics of power referenced in the terms race and racism. It is in building on the theoretical perspectives informing Ruggiero’s approach, discussed below, and in applying them specifically to a more critical musical analysis of La Bomba itself that this dissertation seeks to contribute to the above literature on Afro-Ecuadorian music and culture.

Scholarship on Music and Music Making in the African Diaspora

The extant scholarship on Afro-Ecuadorian music and culture, viewed from a historical perspective, reflects broader shifts in theoretical and methodological orientation in the study of culture and identity in the African-Diaspora. In general, this move can be characterized as one from a positivist concern with the content of black culture and identity to a postmodern consideration of its construction and representation. The former seeks to assess the relationship between Afro-America (in the broadest sense) and Africa as made evident in the material and expressive culture and cultural practices of Afro-American communities, while the latter attempts to understand the ways in which representations of blackness implicate race as a social construct and index the work of racism. Approaches to music in the African Diaspora have responded accordingly from approaching music and music making as artifacts of culture—

3 Schechter (1994, 290) uses the term bimodality to refer to the phenomenon of modal mixture (relative major/minor) observed in the harmonic and melodic compositions of Afro-Ecuadorian Bombas and in the music of neighboring highland indigenous communities.

10 vestiges of an African heritage or manifestations of a new cultural identity—to understanding them as dynamic and discursive constitutive elements thereof. The following traces the intellectual trajectory informing approaches to music and music making in the African Diaspora as a means of situating the present study. It is by now well recognized that the origins and intellectual foundation of black studies extends beyond the work of Melville Herskovits and the academic locus of North America (see Yelvington 2006a, 11). The contributions of black scholars and activists such as W.E.B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Zora Neal Hurston, E. Franklin Frazier, and those of Latin American and Caribbean academics and writers such as Franz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Jean Price-Mars Fernando Ortiz, Arthur Ramos, and Raymundo Nina Rodriguez, among others, are today recognized as integral to the formation of a truly transnational and interracial dialogue on black culture in the Americas (see Ibid. 2006b). That said, it cannot be denied that much of the academic literature on music and culture in the African Diaspora to emerge from both hemispheres during the greater part of the twentieth century engages either explicitly or implicitly the central ideas about Afro-American culture and intercultural contact put forth by Herskovits; most notably those of African cultural retentions and the process of acculturation. During the early part of the twentieth century, Herskovits developed a culture area and diffusionist approach to the study of Afro-America informed largely by his studies as a student of anthropology under Franz Boas and his subsequent fieldwork observations in various parts of West Africa, the Caribbean, and Brazil (Raboteau 1978, 49).4 Herksovits recognized that though the dynamics of slavery made it difficult for any one particular sociolinguistic group to survive intact in the New World, there were nonetheless shared or similar unifying cultural elements between those regions from which the majority of African slaves were taken to constitute a culture area. According to Herskovits, this homogenous cultural unit would serve as a baseline for the development of black culture in the Americas. In applying the concept of culture espoused by Boas, Herskovits sought to circumvent and undermine the prevailing and racist biologically grounded assumptions of race informing studies of African American communities

4 For further information about Melville Herskovits, his life, career and contribution to the anthropological study of African American culture, see Yelvington (2006b), Baron (1994), Dillard (1964), Gershenhorn (2004), Jackson (1986), Mintz (1964), Stockings (1974), and Szwed (1972).

11 up to that point (Raboteau 1978, 48; Yelvington 2006a, 10; see Herskovits 1958[1941]). He posited, in short, that contemporary African American culture, in its material and expressive content, would, to varying degrees, exhibit identifiably African traits that could theoretically be traced back to their point of origin in Africa. For Herskovits, these African retentions, the survival and continuity of which are commonly referred to as Africanisms, are what endow African American culture with its distinctiveness (see Holloway 1990; Raboteau 1978; Sydney and Mintz 1992[1976]; Yelvington 2006a, 2006b). Herskovits’ concern with the processes of intercultural contact and his notion of acculturation arises as a result of his attempt to make sense of the disparities in African retentions evident between black communities in the United States and the Caribbean and Latin America (Rabateau 1978, 49; Brazil specifically). The particular context and conditions of enslavement, determined Herskovits, prevailed in determining the degree to which such Africanisms survived (Ibid., 53). Though later criticized for his static and homogeneous notion of culture (see Mintz and Price 1992 [1976], 13), he himself acknowledged that a closer examination of aesthetics, value systems, and social interaction could potentially yield such survivals despite their absence in material cultural (Ibid., 11). Seeking to build on and modify Herskovits’ ideas of intercultural contact, Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price (1992 [1976]) called for a more subtle approach to the question of Africanisms that drew upon existing models in transformational linguistics. They suggested that an emphasis be placed not on the formal and material aspects of culture and the generation of and systematic categorization of trait lists, but on the underlying “grammatical” principles informing social behavior as a means of better accounting for change and diversification (Ibid., 9). This meant paying closer attention to social interaction rather than merely the materiality of culture itself. An emphasis on social process, furthermore, allowed for the recognition and celebration of the creativity and heterogeneity evident in Afro-American communities. Rather than understand Afro-American culture as the homogenous product of a gradual loss or retention of culture, Mintz and Price sought to foreground instead the ways in which black communities forged New World identities (hence the title of their book, The Birth of African-American Culture; Ibid., 18). As critics such as Paul Gilroy (1994, 31) would later contend, this shift, though crucial in recognizing the heterogeneity and dynamism of black culture in the Americas, would nonetheless result in an equally essentialized and uncritical notion of blackness.

Following Herskovits and Mintz and Price, scholarship on the music of Afro-American communities for much of the twentieth century engaged in one form or another with the central question first posited by Herskovits in his consideration of Africanisms: what, if any, relationship do the afro-descendant communities of the Americas have with Africa, and how might this be recognized? That this is the case within ethnomusicology is a direct result of the field’s inheritance and application of the Boasian culture concept as transmitted via Herskovits himself to Alan Merriam and Richard Waterman, among the founding members of contemporary ethnomusicology (Radano and Bohlman 2000, 23). Indeed, it is the notion of culture and its centrality in understanding music and music making that largely differentiated and came to define ethnomusicology as distinct from its earlier comparative manifestation as well as from its Western art music counterpoint, historical musicology (see Myers 1993; Merriam 1960, 1964; Nettl 2005, 8). This much, as Helen Myers (1993, 7) notes, is evident from the various definitions of ethnomusicology proffered in its formative years.5 Whether conceived of as the study of music in or as culture, ethnomusicology’s insistence on the notion of culture itself allowed ethnomusicologists to contribute to the anthropological discussion on Africanisms. Thus it is that the extant ethnomusicological literature is replete with studies attempting to resolve the disjuncture created by the transatlantic slave trade and illuminate and affirm the distinctiveness of Afro-American music and culture either with recourse to Africa or Afro- American creativity. Various studies, following Herskovits, attempt to identify and catalogue African cultural retentions visible and audible in the material and formal aspects of Afro- American musics (e.g., Bettelheim 1976; Brandt 1994; Coolen 1982; De Carvalho-Neto 1962; Epstein 1975; Evans 2001; Katz 1969; Kubik 1979, 1990; Lawel 2004; List 1980; Monsanto 1982; O’Brian 1982; Ping 1980; Smith 1985; Welch 1985; Wilson 2001), while yet others, reflecting Mintz and Price’s focus on processes of social interaction, ethnographically document specific music traditions and illuminate aspects of music making among black communities in the African Diaspora arguably informed and differentiated by distinctly African derived aesthetics, values, and beliefs (e.g., Ayorinde 2004; Burnim and Maultsby 1987, 2006; Daniel 2010; Floyd 1995; Fryer 2000; Gantt 2010; Jones 1963; Lewis 1992; Levine 1977; Lovell 1972;

5 For a concise overview of definitions of ethnomusicology proffered in the discipline’s formative years, see Merriam (1977).

Maultsby 1990; Roberts 1974; Small 1987; Waterman 1948, 1952). Just as Mintz and Price, critics of the former position take issue with the homogenous and static notion of culture assumed in the trait list approach. They advocate instead a consideration of musical aesthetics and approaches to music making as a link with Africa and unifying thread among the disparate musical practices of the African Diaspora (e.g., Small 1987; Maultsby 1990). The strength of the aesthetics approach derives not only in its consideration of New World creativity and heterogeneity, but also in its recognition of agency. Indeed, though the insistence on retentions itself implies resistance to cultural homogenization in its emphasis on heterogeneity and subalternity, a focus on individual and collective creativity in the process of the development of black culture allows for even greater emphasis on the possibility for black resistance, hence the numerous studies dealing with music and resistance in the African Diaspora (e.g., Crook 1993; Galinsky 1996; Lewis 1992; McAlister 2002; Floyd 1995; Fryer 2000; Gilroy 1994; Munro 2010; Small 1987; Suzel 2001). From the perspective of this literature, distinctly African informed sensibilities to music making not only distinguishes Afro-America, but forms the basis of its counterhegemonic potential. Molefi Asante’s notion of afrocentricity and other Africa-centered projects hailing primarily from intellectual and activist black scholars throughout the African Diaspora constitute an extreme expression of this very position (see Asante 1988; Walker 2001, 7). It is to this equally essentializing move toward an understanding and validation of Afro-America entirely with recourse to African origins that critics of the Africansisms approach in both its formal and aesthetic standpoints object (see Adeleke 2009; Fox 1999, 368; Rahier 1999a, 291; 1999b, xxiv; Walker 1991; Gilroy 1993; Monson 2000). More recently, scholarship on music in the African Diaspora responds to two interrelated positions that arise in response to the faults and shortcomings of the previous Herskovitsian culture-centered approach to Afro-America. The first, reflecting the postmodern turn, seeks to circumvent culture altogether and thus de-emphasize Africa in recognizing the constructedness of racial and Diasporic identity (e.g., Averill 1994; Behague 1994; Bermúdez 1994; Brandt 1994; Davis 1994; de Carvalho 1994; Duany 1994; Fox 1999, Walker 1991, Rahier 1999; Rivera 1994; Rodríguez 1994; Romero 1994; Smith 1994), while the second likewise privileges Diaspora as the site and means of transnational black creativity and recognizes blackness as a social construct, yet differs in considering the place of race, as in the asymmetrical relations of power which are the lasting legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, in the construction and representation

14 of racial subjectivities (e.g., Aparicio 2000; Averill and Yih 2000; Busdiecker 2006, 2009; Brown 1998; Codrington 2009; Davies 1999; Dennis 2008; Erlmann 2000; Feldman 2005, 2006; Fernandes and Stanyek 2007; Gaines 2000; Gilroy 1993; Guilbault 2000; Hunter 2000; Jackson 2000; Gerstin 2000; Harris 2000; Monson 2000, 2007; Moore 1997; Radano 2000, 2003; Radano and Bohlman 2000; Ruggiero 2010; Scanlon 2000; Smith and Fiske 2000; Wade 1999, 2000, 2006; Waterman 2000). Both perspectives attempt to de-center Africa in foregrounding the dynamic and discursive dimensions of blackness as represented by the concept of Diaspora while simultaneously, and as a direct result thereof, direct attention toward the asymmetrical dynamics of power circumscribing and informing the construction and representation of specific racialized identities. The first position is most evident in the work of cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall (see 1990, 1999) who seeks to foreground the concept of Diaspora and experience of disjuncture, rather than Africa, as the foundation and reflexive point of departure for the development of black subjectivities in their plurality. As Hall (1990, 235) notes, the “diaspora experience . . . is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity.” Music, as Hall here suggests, thus becomes an expression not of a static essence, but of the unique particularities of the differing experiences of Diaspora. The strength of this position is in its ability to address musical change and meaning not in terms of culture contact and African aesthetics, but in terms of the changing needs and circumstances of black communities. In short, music comes to reflect and respond to a given social rather than biological reality. Paul Gilroy (1993), yet another cultural studies scholar, is a seminal figure in advancing the second perspective of black culture in the African Diaspora. In the Black Atlantic, Gilroy criticizes pluralizing notions of black culture such as the one espoused by Hall for being equally essentialist in its evocation of a particular black sensibility as well as “insufficiently alive to the lingering power of specifically racialized forms of power and subordination” (Ibid., 32). He calls instead for an anti-anti-essentialist standpoint that acknowledges the discursive transnational dimensions of the African Diaspora while firmly situating black subjectivity in the work of race and racism (Ibid., 102). While Gilroy has been criticized by Latin American scholars for de-emphasizing national differences in the formation of black identity (see Chivallon

2002; Lipsitz 1995; Lott 1995; Williams 1995), his position allows for a consideration of how particular nationalist perceptions and representations of blackness are informed by intra- Diasporic flows. Of significance is the fact that, for Gilroy, the primary mode and means of Diasporic black creativity is music (Ibid., 36).6 The reconceptualization of blackness as a social construct inextricably bound to race rather than as that which is given in nature, as implied in the culture-centered approach, allows music scholars to move beyond questions of origins, authenticity, and cultural change to address instead the ways in which music and music making in the African Diaspora index particular experiences of blackness and respond to local and global sociohistorical, and –political circumstances. It also invites critical reflection on the history of Afro-American scholarship and the ways in which racialized forms of power work in and through academic approaches, interpretations, and representations of Afro-America (Yelvington 2006a, 4; e.g., Yelvington 2006b; Radano and Bohlman 2000). Examples of such anti-anti-essentialist approaches hailing from musicologists specifically may be found in the edited volumes of Ingrid Monson (2000) and Radano and Bohlman (2000). Following Gilroy, Monson (2000) acknowledges the significance of the experience of disjuncture and racial oppression as a unifying and formative factor in the constitution of black identity in Diaspora and recognizes the centrality of music in its mitigation. Yet she takes issue with the tendency often observed in cultural studies to over emphasize black music’s counterhegemonic potential and thus generalize music in the African Diaspora as an embodiment of black resistance. Indeed, though Gilroy (1993, 37) is keen to develop a truly anti-essentialist perspective of black cultural identity in the African Diaspora, he nonetheless succumbs to a homogenous and static notion of music in attempting to illuminate the counterhegemonic quality of blackness. As Monson (Ibid., 2) notes, “the idea of a transnational black music has been synthesized in opposition to racial subjugation,” resulting in an equally essentializing perspective of blackness that fails to account for intracultural contestations. Monson therefore rejects any such notion of a pan Diasporic black ethos in favoring, instead, specific practice and process

6 While Gilroy advocates a closer examination of musics’ distinctive counterhegemonic qualities, no known musicologists to date have invoked or applied in any serious theoretical way Gilroy’s notion of the politics of transfiguration and the politics of fulfillment (se 1994, 37).

16 centered models of inquiry, reflecting ethnomusicology’s persistent resistance to grand theories and metanarratives. Authors contributing to the edited volume therefore situate their respective discussions of music and music making in the African Diaspora within specific, ethnographically and historically informed case studies illuminating the significance of music and music making as a predominantly social and communicative activity responsive to “changing local, regional, national, and global contexts and conditions” (Ibid., 10). While Monson et al. seek to circumvent race and racism in focusing on process, Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman (2000) make a case for placing race at the forefront of musicological considerations of music and music making. Radano and Bohlman (Ibid., 5) understand race not as a “fixity, but as a signification saturated with profound cultural meaning and whose discursive instability heightens its affective power.” In keeping with Gilroy, they recognize the ways in which race works in and through music as that which is “at once constituted within and projected into the social through sound” (Ibid.). As a “soundtext,” music makes audible the work of race while discourse about music (both academic and popular) similarly emerge from and reify racial categories inextricably linked to historically situated racialized forms of power and knowledge.7 Indeed, Radano and Bohlman (Ibid., 21) convincingly argue that the occlusion of race from ethnomusicological discourse stems precisely from its foundational premise on the notion of cultural (i.e., racial) difference, as noted previously in this essay. Uncritical approaches to the concept of race, which use race merely as a descriptive connoting cultural and ethnic heritage, overlook, argue Radano and Bohlman, the ways in which race informs not only scholarship about black and other “ethnic” musics, but European/occidental music as well (Ibid., 20). This shift from culture to race makes possible a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which racialized categories are themselves constructed by and help to maintain the apparatus of racism. Radano and Bohlman, as do the contributing authors, conceive of their work as a form of activism which seeks to write against the racial imagination. With this focus in mind, the contributing authors to Music and the Racial Imagination seek to make evident how constructions of difference inform perceptions and representations of music and racial subjectivity. In so doing, however, these studies as a whole likewise fail to address music at a level beyond the social, historical, and aesthetic.

7 This position is exemplified in Monson’s critical reading of Jazz history relative the African American experience of race and racism in Freedom Sounds (2007).

Music, Race, and Nation in Latin America and Ecuador

Until recently, Latin Americansists have resisted the framing of Afro-Hispanic studies in terms of race and Diaspora, choosing instead to focus on national dynamics of racial identification (e.g., Béhague 1993; Feldman 2005, 2006; Ruggiero 2010; Wade 1993, 2000; Walmsley 2004; Whitten and Torress 1998). That this is the case speaks to differences in the sociohistorical trajectory of Latin American and Caribbean afro-descendant communities and to the complexity of ethnic and racial identification in Latin American nations evident in the nationally varied spectrum of ethnic categorizations stemming from five-hundred plus years of race mixture. Indeed, master narratives of national identity founded on biological notions of race mixture (referred to as either mestizaje, criollismo, and mestizagem, depending on the nation) and exercised throughout much of the twentieth century complicate the question of racial identity (see Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt 2003; Wade 1993, 1997; Whitten and Torres 1998). Scholars such as Norman E. Whitten Jr., Peter Wade, Nancy Appelbaum, and Jean Rahier, among others, have shown how these metanarratives betray an underlying ideology of whitening as a means toward national social and economic progress. Until recently, the internalization of this baseless equation of racial blending with upward social and economic mobility by afro-descendant populations has had a detrimental impact on perceptions of and self- identification with blackness. This has led to the systematic exclusion of Afro-Hispanics in representations of national history and culture as well as to the persistent denial of racism. The marginalization of Latin America’s afro-descendant population has led to the popular misconception that, apart from Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, Latin America is solely indigenous and mestizo in its ethnic and cultural constitution. It is perhaps also for this reason that Latin Americanists until the mid 1990s failed to recognize race and racism in ethnographic contexts (see Béhague 1993). John Schechter (1993, 300), for example, assumes the position informed by his fieldwork that there is no conception of black ethnic identity in the Chota-Mira valley. This he corroborates with his analysis of La Bomba wherein he shows the extent to which it shares features common to surrounding highland indigenous and mestizo musical traditions. Aside from the “Africanate” drum, notes Schechter (Ibid., 289), La Bomba in its formal musical characteristics reflects a pan-highland regional identity encompassing European, indigenous, and African derived influences. Thus he concurs with Coba-Andrade’s (1980, 185) characterization of Afro-Ecuadorian culture as an “Indo-

Hispano-Afroecuatoriana” hybrid (Schechter 1993, 289). While this certainly may have been the case during the period in which Coba-Andrade and Schechter were conducting their field research, it is clear that afrochoteños today conceive of and represent their identity specifically in terms of race and ethnicity. Since the 1990s, however, scholars of Afro-Hispanic music are recognizing and making increasingly known the ways in which representations of blackness, and the lack thereof, engage national ideologies of race and race mixture and the Diaspora-wide transnational discourse on race and racism (e.g., Busdiecker 2006, 2009; Crook 1993; Davies 1999; Dennis 2008; Feldman 2005, 2006; Ritter 1998; Ruggiero 2010; Wade 1999, 2000, 2006; Walmsley 2004). Today, Afro-Hispanic communities in the Andes and Southern Cone region that previously conceived of their identity in terms of race mixture are increasingly re-imagining their identity along ethnic/racial lines. This is in part due to local sociopolitical circumstances as well as greater geopolitical forces. As such, black communities are now mobilizing around a conception of black ethnicity that frequently draws upon Africa (the past) and transnational discourses and representations of blackness in empowering local communities and sociopolitical agendas. The increasing visibility of Afro-Bolivian, Afro-Ecuadorian, Afro-Peruvian, Afro-Colombian, Afro- Argentine, and Afro-Uruguayan populations as manifested in the appearance of numerous local, national, and international afro-specific cultural and political organizations has led many scholars to address this phenomenon (see Andrews 2010; Busdiecker 2006, 2009; Feld 2005, 2006; Jordan 2008; Handelsman 2008; Hooker 2009; Paschell and Sawyer 2009; Ruggiero 2010; Wade 2000, 2006; Walsh 2009; Walsh and Leon 2005). No longer able to ignore or downplay race, scholars are now forced to reflect on the ways in which contemporary representations of Afro-Hispanic identity and culture strategically engage local and global dynamics of race and racism. Indeed, the need to redress what scholars often refer to as the invisibility of Latin America’s black communities as a result of racism has provided much of the impetus for recent scholarship on Afro-Hispanic history and culture.8

8 The term invisibility refers to the systematic exclusion of black communities in representations of national history, culture, and identity, and alludes to the subaltern status of blacks within the nation (see Phillips 1995, viii).

Most relevant for this dissertation among the above studies is the work of Whitten, Wade, Rahier, Ritter, Walmsley, Feldman, and Ruggiero. Based on his research and experience in Ecuador’s Esmeraldas province, Whitten posits that the invisibility of blackness in Latin America stems from the racist ideology of whitening inherent in the concept of mestizaje (race mixture; Whitten and Quiroga 1998, 78). When examined in terms of class, a stratified social structure clearly emerges wherein white-mestizos occupy a place of social and economic privilege relative indigenous and black populations. Whitten conceives of this social structure as fluid, however, in recognizing the possibility of “improving,” as it were, one’s social and economic standing through interracial mixing (Ibid.). Hence the myriad identifications recognizing various degrees and types of race mixture (i.e., mulato, zambo, mestizo, criollo, etc.). These categorizations, as Whitten and other scholars note (see Wade 1993, 8), have their roots in the colonial period where the degree of racial purity and mixture likewise determined, in large part, social status and its accompanying privileges or lack thereof. Wade (1993, 21) modifies this model considerably, however, in recognizing that mestizaje, in its structural dialectic (white/non-white), though ideally seeking to negate racial difference, nonetheless necessitates a conception of otherness in order to construct any such notion of racial and cultural superiority. Thus, a tension is created within this model between homogeneity and heterogeneity which individuals can and do exploit, as he shows through various ethnographic examples, in the pursuit of their particular socioeconomic agendas. Furthermore, Wade makes clear that racial distanciation occurs not only along color lines and the gradual biological erasure of blackness, but along cultural lines as well (Ibid., 23). This helps explain how blacks in parts of Latin America can access certain social, political, and economic privileges and be accepted by white-mestizos without negating the premise of white superiority upon which mestizaje is founded. This also helps explain how music associated with blackness in Colombia can be adopted by white-mestizos and take a place of privilege within the nation as an international representation of Colombian national identity. Wade ultimately shows how differing contexts allow for the negotiation of social positioning through various strategies of cultural/racial approximation and distanciation. This introduces the possibility for individual agency and for moments of seeming contradiction. As Wade makes clear, however, these contradictory moments are in and of themselves part and parcel of the dialectic structuring and structured by racial difference (Ibid., 22).

Rahier (1998), building on Wade, shows how this dialectic is mapped not only onto physical bodies and the national imaginary, but onto the geocultural and geopolitical distribution of the nation as well. The racial topography of Ecuador in particular makes this argument most apparent, as black populations brought to the Audencia de Quito arrived to and became associated with specific regions: specifically, the northwest Pacific littoral encompassing the province of Esmeraldas and the highland region today referred to as the Chota-Mira valley (Ibid. 422). These regions are frequently constructed in opposition to the nation’s predominantly mestizo urban centers and are thus commonly associated with the plethora of negative and exoticized stereotypes commonly heard about black people in Ecuador. These regions are thus typically conceived of as lacking in education and culture, dangerous, poverty-stricken, non- productive, and charged with sexual potency (Ibid.; see also Rahier 2003; Walmsley 2004, 19). Rural emigration to urban centers, a common occurrence in the Chota-Mira valley since the agrarian reforms of the 1960s, may be explained, in part, by the conversely positive association of urban centers with social and economic prosperity, reflecting Wade’s notion of a strategic distanciation from blackness (Wade 1993, 23). Though blacks now occupy urban centers throughout Ecuador, the association of race with place is evident even within cities such as Quito where predominantly black neighborhoods such as Carapungo and La Bota along the margins of the city are conceived of as in opposition to wealthy white-mestizo neighborhoods and are becoming increasingly associated with these same stereotypes (personal correspondence). Following Wade, Rahier (2003) shows how Afro-Ecuadorian women strategically play on these stereotypes in pursuit of their individual economic agendas. A similar argument may be made for the numerous Afro-Ecuadorian males who pursue careers in athletics and the armed services, including the military, police, and private security. Ritter (1998) and Feldman (2005, 2006) show how music reflects this strategic positioning and informs notions of black identity in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, and Peru respectively. Just as with La Bomba in the Chota-Mira valley, the coastal marimba and its accompanying rhythms and dances are today emblematic of coastal, afroesmeraldeño identity. Ritter deconstructs this identity in problematizing the marimba’s relationship to Africa and in contextualizing musical representations of afroesmeraldeño identity within the broader sociopolitical and –economic struggles of the afroesmeraldeño population. In so doing, he shows how the (re)presentation of certain traditions such as the marimba are themselves invested

21 in local struggles and reflective of local, national, and transnational discourses of race. As Ritter shows, afroesmeraldeños represent the marimba in terms of its Africanicity as much because of its marketability to tourists as because of its valence as a symbol of afroesmeraldeño cultural difference and resistance to white-mestizo assimilation and domination. Similarly concerned with discourse about race, Feldman reveals how the Afro-Peruvian revival that began during the mid-twentieth century was itself reflective of the dynamics of race and racism in Peru. Efforts to validate and reaffirm black identity with recourse to music and dance on the part of Afro-Peruvian intellectuals and artists such as José Durand, Nicomedes and Victoria SantaCruz, and Susana Baca and black dance and theatre companies such as the Pancho Fierro company, Cumana, and Perú Negro sparked creative reinterpretations of once forgotten music and dance traditions such as el son de los diablos (the song of the devils), the landó, festejo, and zamacueca. Feldman (2006, 11), as Ritter, deconstructs these representations of blackness not as a means of undermining the validity of certain claims to cultural authenticity, but rather to illuminate the ways in which such claims respond to local struggles against racism. Feldman and Ritter most significantly contribute to the literature on black identity in Latin America through their consideration of transnational circum-Diasporic borrowing in the construction of local black identities. Building on the above perspectives on blackness as a strategic construct in the Andes, Sara Busdiecker (2006, 2009) and Ruggiero (2010) consider how music is resourced in the sociopolitical struggles of black communities in Bolivia and Ecuador’s Chota-Mira valley. In a way similar to Feldman, Busdiecker shows how cultural music and dance organizations served as a site and vehicle for positive constructions of blackness and the development of Afro-Bolivian sociopolitical agendas. Though Afro-Bolivians, more so than in other parts of Latin America, share strong cultural similarities with neighboring indigenous and mestizo communities, attempts to reconceptualize Afro-Bolivianness in terms of its African heritage has led to a reinterpretation of local culture and identity along afrocentric lines (Busdiecker 2009, 125). As Ruggiero (2010) shows, this is equally the case in Ecuador where local black intellectuals, scholars, community leaders, and sociopolitical organizations are currently pursuing a similar agenda of cultural recuperation. The Afro-Ecuadorian movement and project known as etnoeducación (ethnoeducation), instigated by Afro-Ecuadorian Juan García Salazar, is forthright in its aim to validate and reaffirm Afro-Ecuadorian identity through knowledge and maintenance of local

22 history and cultural traditions primarily as a means to engage in the broader national sociopolitical process and discourse known as interculturalidad (interculturality; Ibid. 79).9 This discourse, also operative in other Andean national contexts, represents the gradual move away from the notion of a homogenous, mestizo nation-state toward a heterogenous conception of pluri-nationality.10 Within Ecuador, as in other Diasporic contexts, “ethnicity” thus constitutes political currency at the national and international level. The veracity with which the issue of cultural authenticity is debated within such political contexts as those of Boliva and Ecuador reveal the extent to which such representations are implicated in local sociopolitical struggles (see Mullings 2009, 6). Moving beyond representation, Walmsley (2004) considers how blackness in Esmeraldas is embodied through music, dance, and food. Though her primary concern as an anthropologist leads her to focus her study specifically on gastronomy in its materiality, she, as her mentor Wade, nonetheless recognizes the centrality of music and dance in the formation of black identity. Following Wade, she observes how black identity is negotiated in part through musical choice and the ability to dance. Focusing on the urban context, she notes how the association between certain dance music such as salsa with blackness make it possible for urban youth otherwise considered mixed or non-black along the race-mixture spectrum to be accepted as and even become “black” (Ibid., 33). Thus race in Esmeraldas, notes Walmsley following Wade, is not so much a product of one’s biology and phenotype as it is of cultural practices (Ibid., 30). Most significant is her treatment of music as not so much a symbol of blackness but as an embodying practice that, along with other similar embodying practices and discourses, shapes and transforms physical bodies (Ibid.). This is significant in affirming blackness not as a construct residing solely in the imagination, but as a physical and social reality grounded in shifting and sociohistorically informed ways of knowing and being. The above studies collectively affirm the need to consider both the nation and transnational, intradiasporic flows in the constitution and representation of blackness. As

9 For further information about etnoeducación, see García (n.d.), Pabón (2007, 2009), Walsh (2004, 2006), and Walsh and Santa-Cruz (2007).

10 For discussions of plurinacionalidad, interculturalidad, and their relationship to indigenous uprisings in Ecuador, see Becker (2011), Clark and Becker (2007), Puente (2005), Viatori (2009), Walsh (2006, 2008, 2009), and Pallares (2002).

Ruggiero shows, afrochoteño identity and its representation indeed responds to these overlapping dynamics as is likewise the case in Esmeralda and Colombia. The recent strategic adoption of racial identification in the Andean region by afro-descendant communities affirms the notion of race as a dynamic and discursive construct responsive to specific sociohistorical and sociopolitical contexts. As Wade notes, this allows for a more nuanced understanding of mestizaje as a fluid and thus non-deterministic social structure allowing for individual agency within an ideological space defined in terms of degrees of sameness and difference. That Afro- Ecuadorians identify variously as Ecuadorian, Afro-Ecuadorian, afrochoteño, afroesmeraldeño, negro, mulatto, or mestizo based upon on the context of conversation speaks to the ambiguity of mestizaje. Deconstructions of such representations with recourse to music, as those provided by Crook (1993), Dennis (2008), Feldman (2005, 2006), Ritter (1998), Ruggiero (2010), and Wade (1999, 2006), illuminate these underlying social and political dynamics and reveal the extent to which music is both implicated and resourced in local struggles against racism. To speak of music and race within such a context is to necessarily make reference to these underlying sociohistorical and sociopolitical dynamics. While such deconstructions are a necessary point of departure for understanding the complexity of the relationship between music and identity in the African Diaspora, they are often employed as an end in themselves and thus fail to delve beyond the issue of representation. As shown in the following section, this has implications for the ways in which the music itself is addressed and treated.

Music, Race, and Representation

With a few notable exceptions (e.g., Gilroy 1993; Monson 2000; Radano 2003), there remains an overwhelming tendency among academics of diverse disciplines to approach music and identity in the African Diaspora in terms of representation. By this, I mean not only the ways in which music reflects the particularities of afro-descendant identities in the Diaspora, but also indexes the power laden historical, social, and ideological processes and dynamics informing the perception, manifestation, suppression, manipulation, scholarly investigation, and academic, popular, and commercial projection of blackness. While this trend in and of itself is not problematic, and is indeed necessary considering the continued marginalization of black communities in the African Diaspora and the conspicuous absence of race in academic

24 discussions of music (see Radano and Bohlman 2000), it does seem to have limited discussion of music primarily to the social, historical, and political. There is a surprising reluctance among music scholars to engage music in the African Diaspora at the level of sound (i.e., the musical sound object). When invoked, it is often discussed in terms of aesthetics and the signification of particular interpretations and manipulations thereof (e.g., Averill and Yih 2000; Feldman 2005, 2006; Gilroy 1993). A consideration of the deployment and subversion of style become a means of hearing the power of race or, rather, of the racial imagination (see Radano and Bohlman 2000; Radano 2003). In yet other instances, music is addressed in terms of its communicative and intersubjective aspects (e.g., Erlmann 2000; Jackson 2000). The sonic structuring of time and space enables discursive modes of communication between musicians, musicians and participants, and between all participants with the past (tradition) and with the ideologies of race that condition and structure that very musical experience. Most often, however, music in the Diaspora is discussed in terms of its social and historical exclusion and acceptance (e.g., Wade 2000; Béhague 1994; Moore 1997; Quintero-Rivera 1994; Radano and Bohlman 2000; Radano 2000, 2003), its transformation as an expression of the hybridity of blackness (e.g., Averill 1994; Bermúdez 1994; Rahier 1999a; Schechter 1994), its manipulation as a form of domination or resistance (e.g., Crook 1993; de Carvalho 1994; Feldman 2006; Fryer 2000; Romero 1994; Ritter 1998; Ruggiero 2010) and its communal and participatory aspects (e.g., Small 1987; Maultsby 1990). Music as conceived in these studies takes its rightful place as a social activity central to the constitution and contestation of cultural (including racial) identity, a position reflective of Alan Merriam’s definition of ethnomusicology as the study of music as culture (rather than in culture). Yet despite the move on the part of musicologists toward more critical perspectives on music and racial subjectivity in the African Diaspora, there remains a lack of critical engagement with music as it relates to black identity at a formal and structural level. The apparent lack of critical attention devoted to the formal aspects of music and identity in the African Diaspora on the part of black-music scholars is too wide spread to be a coincidence of differences in individual specialization and research interests. This is not to say that it is intentional, but that it may, in fact, be reflective of a more ideologically grounded problem concerning the perceived relationship between musical analysis and a positivism aligned with the project of colonialism (Radano 2003, 32). Ghanaian-born music theorist Kofi

Agawu illuminates as well as problematizes this issue in relating his own personal experience submitting an article on West African drumming for publication in the journal Ethnomusicology (2003, 175). Met with controversy, the article underwent several revisions in response to referee concerns with Agawu’s application of analytical techniques culled from Western art music theory. The major point of contention, according to Agawu, was the apparent lack of ethnographic contextualization informing his analysis. When published in 1986, the article appeared alongside an article by James Koetting offering a more conventional, ethnographically informed ethnomusicological analytical perspective on African music, and a commentary by Ruth Stone noting the irony in difference between Agawu and Koetting’s choice of analytical tools.11 This seeming contradiction, as Agawu contends in Representing African Music (2003), speaks to the colonial origins and legacy of ethnomusicology as a discipline founded on the production of difference (152). While the privileging of analytical techniques and theories derived from local concepts and metaphors (i.e., “ethnotheories”) on the part of the journal referees speaks to legitimate concerns with (mis)representations insensitive to the relativity of cultural meaning, the tendency to represent non Western music, in this case West African as Agawu argues, as wholly distinct in essence and meaning results in equally marginalizing representations in the reification of cultural and racial differences founded and implicated in the project of colonialism (154). As Agawu clarifies (196), his position is not that scholars should randomly apply any given type of musical analysis for the sake of analysis itself, but to avail themselves of the tools and techniques that music theory has to offer as a means of illuminating the “sameness” of different musics and thereby undermine the colonial agenda implicit in ethnomusicological representations (168). Yet another possibility for the reluctance to engage music at the level of sound may lie in the seeming incompatibility of musical analysis with the critical agenda of postmodern approaches to race and the weighty issue of racism. There is little question that while music is broadly recognized as central to discussions of blackness among scholars of a broad spectrum of disciplines and fields, it is yet marginalized as a site for critical studies of race (Radano and Bohlman 2000, 39). Indeed, in his introduction to Music, Race, and Nation, social anthropologist Peter Wade (2000, viii) admits to fears of trivializing the issues of race and racism

11 See Agawu (1986), Koetting (1986), and Stone (1986).

26 in addressing them through the lense of music. And yet, as he himself concludes and other scholars concur (e.g., Gilroy 1993, 36; Radano and Bohlman 2000, 5; Radano 2003, 13), music is precisely where the work of race and racism is made audible and visible. While this line of thinking has indeed opened new avenues and possibilities for studies of music in the African Diaspora in the formulation of innovative questions and the application of contemporary critical social theories as evident in the recent growth of academic literature on music and race, it falters in its inability to yet reconcile its claims to anti-essentialism with the seemingly objectifying and reifying practice of formal musical analysis. Music centered studies of race and racism thus remain limited to the social and aesthetic. The means to circumvent this problem may be found, however, in recent efforts among Latin American postcolonial scholars such as Anibal Quijano and Walter Mignolo to write against the colonial legacy that is the foundation of and is perpetuated by modern academic discourse and representations of difference. Their recognition of race as a construct implicated in the creation and maintenance of the New World and the modern world economic system, along with the inequities of power implied therein, allows for a consideration of musics relation not to race and culture per se, but to the sociohistorical and sociopolitical dynamics informing its emergence, expression, and transformation. It is specifically in relation to Quijano and Mignolo’s notions of the coloniality of power and the colonial difference that the present discussion of music and identity in the Chota-Mira valley is grounded. The following explores these concepts and how they inform the theoretical approach applied in this dissertation.

Theory

Race, the Coloniality of Power, and Music

As previously noted, the inability to connect music with blackness in a meaningful way beyond representation is related to the ways in which we approach the question of race generally speaking. Anibal Quijano and Walter Mignolo, in their treatment of race in its relation to the legacy of colonialism in Latin America, provide a more constructive means of approaching the relationship between music and identity in the Chota-Mira valley. In recognition of academia’s role in the construction and maintenance of the power inequalities characterizing the modern

27 world and the modern world economic system, Quijano and Mignolo proffer various terms such as the coloniality of power, the colonial difference, and modernity/coloniality that more properly situate notions such as race and modernity in the historical moment of colonialism and the unequal relations of power born thereof. These terms are useful in the context of this dissertation as a means of moving the discussion of music and race beyond representation toward a consideration of music, in its formal as well as social and aesthetic dimensions, as an embodiment and, thus, mediator of the particular relations of power referenced in the term race. The following introduces the concepts of the coloniality of power and the colonial difference as well as considers their implications with regards to music and its relation to afrochoteño identity. Mignolo and Quijano understand race as a product of colonialism and as the foundation of the modern/colonial world (see Mignolo 2008). Drawing on Immanual Wallerstein’s conception of the modern world system and its implications for race and racism (see Wallerstein 1974-89; 1983, 78), Quijano and Mignolo understand the hierarchical social/racial categories that emerged during the sixteenth century onward with the creation of the New World formed the basis and justification for European, now Occidental/capitalist, subjugation and exploitation (Mignolo 2001, 433; Quijano 2008, 182; Quijano and Wallerstein 1992, 549). Simply put, terms such as negro, mulato, zambo, indio, mestizo, and criollo constitute not just descriptive labels, but markers connoting differential relations of labor and power. As Mignolo (2000, 43) and Quijano (2008, 185) note, the very possibility of the New World and of, consequently, the modern world in its division and relationship between first and third world nations and their respective economic disparities is predicated upon this difference. Thus, though colonialism as a historical moment ended in the nineteenth century, the asymmetrical relations of power upon which the New World was founded continue to maintain the social and economic disparities characterizing the modern world economic system (Quijano 2008, 188; Mignolo 2001, 433). This is what Quijano refers to when he speaks of the coloniality of power (or more precisely the colonial nature of power) and what Mignolo attempts to connote with the dual term modernity/coloniality.12 For Quijano and Mignolo, race is the difference in the relations of labor

12 Quijano and Mignolo develop these concepts over a series of publications (see Mignolo 1995, 2000; Quijano 1997, 2008; Quijano and Wallerstein 1992). For a succinct overview and definition of Quijano’s coloniality of power and its implications for identity in Latin America, see Mignolo (2008, 228;

28 and power born in the historical moment of the creation of the New World. Mignolo captures this dynamic in his expression the colonial difference (Mignolo 2008, 229, 2000, 12). Though other scholars and black intellectuals have similarly pointed out race as a dialectic and as a construct of asymmetrical relations of power (e.g., Du Bois 1989[1903] Fanon 1967[1952]; Gilroy 1993), they fail to account for its lasting endurance and continual transformation. Quijano’s notion of the coloniality of power and Mignolo’s colonial difference precisely tackles this problem in addressing the spatial and temporal aspects of coloniality as indicated in the terms modernity/coloniality and the colonial difference. The colonial difference is useful in the context of the present discussion in recognizing race as a duality (white/non-white) not only the by-product of a specific historically grounded set of power relations, but actively involved in its maintenance. Race is thus understood as neither a biological fact nor a floating signifier, but as a manifestation of the shifting difference produced by the continual dialogue occurring between the polar extremities of a power invested dialectic established in the formation of the New World and the modern world economic system. From this perspective, the recent radical change in the conceptualization and representation of Afro- Ecuadorian identity and the emergence of specific regional identities constructed along racial lines may be understood not in terms of a newfound awareness of cultural origins among Ecuador’s black population, but as a strategic manipulation of the tensions inherent in this dialectic. With this in mind, signifying practices, such as music and dance, in their incumbent form, aesthetics, use, and meaning must be understood not as mere reflections of cultural differences given in nature, but as the colonial difference and, subsequently,the coloniality of power embodied. With regards to the relationship between music and identity, the primary question thus becomes not how music represents racial subjectivity, but how music and music making at the same time index, constitute, and thus mediate the experience of the coloniality of power from which race, as the colonial difference, emerges.

2001, 434). See also Catherine Walsh’s (2002) interview with Mignolo for further clarification and thoughts on the coloniality of power and the colonial difference.

Music as the Colonial Difference

An emphasis on music as an embodiment of discursive relations of power calls attention to the processual aspects of music as it relates identity. That music plays a significant role in the mediation of identity is, by now, well accepted in ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicologists and anthropologists alike have shown how music and music making articulate and structure social relations (e.g., Becker 1992; Feld 1982, 1984, 1994; Kisliuk 2000; Lomax 1962; A. Seeger 1987, 1988, 1994; Turino 1989; Wissler 2009) and inform individual and collective identities relative time and space (e.g., Shelemay 1998, Stokes 1994; Lucy Durán 2003; Olsen 2004). Music making is given a place of prominence in the literature on music in the African Diaspora precisely because of this recognition. As previously noted, scholars such as Portia Maultsby and Christopher Small, among others, situate the distinctive sensibilities of black music specifically in relation to social and communicative qualities, which they understand to be informed by uniquely African aesthetics and values, observed in its performance. This sensibility toward process, however, must be understood not so much as a vestige of Africa but as an index of the sociohistorical conditions necessitating and informing the development of such an adaptive strategy. Understanding afrochoteño identity as a manifestation of the colonial difference, as previously suggested, allows for such a move. As an expression of the colonial difference, La Bomba arises from and responds to the particular experience of the coloniality of power informing identity construction in the Chota- Mira valley since colonialism. As such, it marks that difference, perceived and represented today in terms of race and culture (i.e., Afro-Ecuadorian and afro-choteño identity and culture), while providing the means for its mediation as a sociomusical process. Indeed, an overview of the development of the afro-descendant communities and, subsequently, cultural traditions, including La Bomba as will be shown in subsequent chapters, reveals this to be the case. It was in large part within the context of those minimal spaces allowed and circumscribed by plantation owners in the colonial period and early republic that La Bomba first emerged. Not coincidently, it was also within and through that very same intersubjective space encompassed by and permeated with La Bomba that the collective identity of the enslaved and exploited population of the region was first enabled, articulated, and mediated. Close reading of historical documents and of contemporaneous ethnographic data suggest that La Bomba was, and continues to be, significant for the people of the Chota-Mira valley first and foremost as a sociomusical event

30 wherein communal bonds are strengthened and negotiated. Furthermore, its recent development, in its transformation from a marginalized regional genre little known beyond the Chota-Mira valley to a nationally recognized signifier of afro-choteño identity, reveals the extent to which traditions conceived along and that articulate the border of the colonial difference are manipulated and resourced by such subaltern communities in the contestation of the coloniality of power (see Busdiecker 2006, 2009; Crook 1993, Dennis 2008; Ruggiero 2010; Wade 2006). Foregrounding La Bomba as a sociomusical process inextricably linked to the coloniality of power in the articulation and mediation of the colonial difference allows us to circumvent, or rather more properly situate discourses of origins and authenticity. As cultural studies scholar Homi Bhabha (1994, 3) notes, difference production necessarily involves an act of creativity, of a renewal and resignification of the past in relation to the social and political necessities of the present. “Social differences are not simply given to experience through an already authenticated cultural tradition,” he notes, “they are the signs of the emergence of community envisaged as a project – at once a vision and a construction – that takes you ‘beyond’ yourself in order to return, in a spirit of revision and reconstruction, to the political conditions of the present.” Ethnomusicologist Kay Kaufman Shelemay (1998) illuminates the ways in which music and memory allows for this act of (re)creation in the conflation of time and space and the musical juxtaposition and inscription of otherwise disparate cultural elements (language, song texts, melodies, etc.). Given the strategic creativity involved in the representation of difference, discourses of authenticity and origins speak not to pre-given ethnic or cultural traits, but to the underlying sociohistorical and sociopolitical circumstances informing their discursive necessity (Bhabha 1994, 2; Stokes 1994, 7). The notion of cultural and, subsequently musical, change in the context of this dissertation must therefore be reconsidered as the manifestation of the tensions, or discursive work, of the dialectic structuring the colonial difference today manifesting itself along afrocentric terms. Indeed, as will be shown in this dissertation, a social history of La Bomba reveals the extent to which the genre, in its formal development, is linked to changing perceptions and representations of identity in the region as informed by social, historical, and political circumstances. Just as with many other afro-descendant musical genres in the New World, hybridity characterizes La Bomba in its continual creative adaptation of disparate musical instruments, rhythms, and song forms. Far from random, however, the trajectory of its

31 transformation indexes the underlying power dynamics conditioning its very existence and expression. That La Bomba is today celebrated as symbol of afro-choteño identity and that recent musical innovations draw primarily upon the African Diaspora whereas as recently as the early 1990s the genre was more broadly associated with a pan highland, regional Imbabureño (i.e., mestizo) identity (Schechter 1994) and more prominently exhibited national mestizo and indigenous musical influences is most indicative of this relationship between music, identity, and the coloniality of power. To speak of La Bomba and its development, therefore, is to speak not of fundamental changes in music and culture among the afrochoteños, but to recognize the ways in which the coloniality of power informs the shifting perceptions and representations of the colonial difference. In sum, music, as understood within the context of Latin American postcolonial theory, constitutes the colonial difference, producing racialized bodies in the discursive act of mediating those structures of power (the coloniality of power) of which it is part and parcel. What is important is not the content of the manifestation of that difference, as it is necessarily in a continual state of discursive transformation, but the process of transformation itself and the structures which enable and are conversely mediated by that process. With regards to music, this means paying particular attention to the structural/processual elements informing the form of the sound object as well as of the musical event.

Music as Process

Recent academic approaches to music in the African Diaspora concentrate primarily on the social aspects of music making, as previously noted. While this tendency makes possible the recognition of the dynamic and discursive dimensions of black music and identity, it unnecessarily marginalizes the musical sound object in failing to consider the ways in which sound itself is implicated in this intersubjective process. That this is the case reflects in part concerns among ethnomusicologists with the efficacy of musical notation in conveying the nuances of identity in the African Diaspora and with the privileging of ethnography as a means of problematizing and contextualizing meaning production and thus circumventing the latent objectyfing, essentializing, and marginalizing potential of academic representations (see Agawu 2003, 173). Yet both ethnography and musical analysis are consistently poor conveyors of the spatial and temporal dimensions of music and music making, no matter how experimental and

32 informed the description or analysis (Agawu 1995, 185; C. Seeger 1977, 22; A. Seeger 1992). What is lost, in part, in this act of translation is the generative process which music as sound and social activity entails. Music theorists and musicologists alike have long recognized that music is experienced not as an object given to being a priori, but as a process of creation—of coming into being—that unfolds over the course of time and space (e.g., Agawu 1995; Blacking 1973; Berliner 1978; Lerdhal and Jackendoff 1983; Merriam 1964; Schenker 1954; Schutz 1971, 1976; C. Seeger 1966).13 Ethnomusicologists in particular recognize this process to be socially embedded and thus discursively and inextricably linked to local values and beliefs (see Merriam 1978). Ethnomusicological literature is thus replete with examples of different ways in which this sense of movement and becoming is generated in music, whether through the tension created by the interplay between stasis and motion as in traditional Japanese music, consonance and dissonance as in Western art music and jazz, the fundamental and its harmonics as in Tuvan music, or rhythmic density and silence as in the layered rhythmic and melodic ostinatos of many West African, Caribbean, and Indonesian musical traditions (e.g., Malm 2000; Levin 2006; Chernoff 1981; Tenzer 2000; Bakan 1999; Manuel 2006). Where a consciously theorized belief system informing these generating musical structures exists, there is a clear conception that musical structure is symbolic of and, consequently, constitutive of local cosmologies (e.g., Baumann 1996; Becker 1992, Feld 1982; Wissler 2009). In the event that no such belief system exists, however, the structural aspects of the music are often left unconsidered by ethnographers. This tendency toward selective musical analysis and the privileging of native theories in the construction of musical representations, however, runs the risk of naturalizing differences that are, in the end, the product of interpretive methods and intersubjective constructions of meaning (Agawu 2003, 164; 1995, 187). A recognition of the relative value, strengths and weakness of all types of musical analysis, whether derived from local metaphors and concepts or Western art music theory, may prove more beneficial, as Agawu (2003) suggests, than privileging one over another as a matter of arguably misguided ethics.

13 That this is the case within ethnomusicology stems, in part, from the presupposition that music and meaning emerge from and must be understood in relation to specific socio-cultural contexts (see Merriam 1960; 1964).

With regards to this particular study, a more adequate approach to musical analysis, though not unproblematic, may be found in generative models as they more adequately convey the very manifold process of creation that is music.14 Not surprisingly, given his training as a music theorist, Kofi Agawu (1995, 7) ventures such a generative model of Northern Ghanaian Ewe music premised on his understanding of local metaphors of rhythm, a concept for which there is no single linguistic Ewe equivalent, as a “binding together of different dimensional processes.” This leads him to a consideration of broader rhythmic dimensions constituting the soundscape of Northern Ewe life, such as the greater rhythms of daily society and language, providing the creative resources for musical production. Agawu posits a model wherein rhythmic expression is generated via a sequential path of semiotic transfer, from gesture (of which societal rhythms are a part) and spoken language to vocal music, instrumental music, and dance back to gesture (Ibid., 27). Implicit in this model, and most important for the purposes of this dissertation, is the recognition that rhythmic expression that begins in gesture, in the broadest sense, and culminates in stylized gesture ultimately informs, renews, reproduces, and, subsequently, transforms originary gestures (Ibid., 29). In other words, it is not only generative, but synergistic as well as hermeneutic. Music among the Northern Ewe of Ghana, as Agawu shows, is part and parcel of the social world in which they live. The ritual enactment of that world through music, as a microcosm thereof, not only serves to represent that world and its incumbent values, but to actively (re)produce it as well. This resonates with ethnomusicological and anthropological perspectives on ritual and performance, including but not limited to music, as related to local cosmology and worldviews (e.g., Baumann 1996; Becker 1992; Feld 1982; Guss 1989; Hocquenghem 1996; Kisliuk 2000; Levin 2006; Strauss 1963; Turino 1989; Turner 1967, 1995; Uzendoski 2005; Wissler 2009). Collectively, this literature shows the extent to which performative rituals, conceived of in the broadest sense, (re)enact social reality, (re)constituting identities, social relations, social structures, belief systems, and values in the process. Implicit in

14 Generative models in music theory derive, in part, from linguist Noam Chomsky’s theories of syntax, most notably his ideas about transformational grammar and its accompanying notions of deep and surface structures (see 1957, 1965). Of interest is the similarity of Schenker’s thoughts concerning fundamental tonal structures in music (the ursatz) and their transformation in the musical foreground, or tonal motion made audible at the surface level of music (see 1954). For more information on Schenker and Schenkerian analysis, see Forte (1959), Katz (1935), and Jonas (1982).

34 the prefix (re) is the dynamic and discursive nature of this process. In sum, to partake of music is to participate in and experience a process of renewal and transformation that at once captures and mediates the vicissitudes of social life. It is in this regard that music as sound must be considered as an equally integral part of this socially embedded process.

La Bomba es vida: La Bomba, the Coloniality of Power, and Afrochoteño Identity

My analysis and interpretation of La Bomba is informed by metaphors of La Bomba and afrochoteño identity encountered during field research. Most prominent and telling among these metaphors is the expression “La Bomba es vida” (“La Bomba is life”).15 This statement takes on even greater meaning when considered in relation to the history of the afrochoteño communities and the sociohistorical and sociopolitical dynamics informing the construction of afrochoteño identity. More than a metaphor, as I came to realize, “La Bomba es vida” speaks to the intimate relationship between La Bomba and afrochoteño identity and alludes to the particular relations of power shaping social reality and perceptions and representations of the colonial difference in the Chota-Mira valley since the seventeenth century. I suggest that for the afrochoteños, La Bomba is life precisely because it embodies in both its social and musical dimensions the colonial difference and indexes the coloniality of power in its origins and sociohistorical development. As a sociomusical process of renewal and transformation, La Bomba thus constitutes and mediates the experience of the coloniality of power. As shown in this dissertation, this is evident in La Bomba’s function (Chapter Four), hybridity (Chapter Five), and formal structural characteristics (Chapter Six). The particular power dynamics that arose with the historical moment of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade conditioned the emergence and development of La Bomba. Necessitated by the circumstances of colonial slavery and post-emancipation exploitation and marginalization, La Bomba as a social phenomenon, arose as a significant means of enacting community within the limited spaces provided and circumscribed by colonial slavery. Specifically, socioreligious occasions prescribed by the Roman Catholic Church, such as days of worship, saint feast days, Christmas, holy week, baptisms and weddings, were the predominant context for family and communal gatherings. It was within these spaces that La Bomba first originated and developed

15 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

35 as an intimate expression of family and community. In this way, La Bomba historically mediated the experience of the coloniality of power and enabled the formation and expression of the colonial difference. That such socioreligious occasions continue to be the predominant context for familial and communal gatherings and that La Bomba continues to pervade and demarcate these spaces shows the extent to which this continues to be the case. A consideration of the developmentof La Bomba since its origins in the colonial period similarly reveals how the coloniality of power circumscribes and informs shifting perceptions and representations of the colonial difference. Creative appropriation and adaptation of musical instruments, song forms, rhythms, harmonies, and styles from neighboring indigenous, national, and foreign popular song and dance genres is a constant and defining characteristic of La Bomba’s development. In its hybridity and continual transformation, I argue that La Bomba embodies the tensions inherent in the dialectic relations of power structuring the shifting perceptions of the colonial difference. The recent and positive association of La Bomba with a distinct regional black ethnic identity and the innovative adaptation of musical instruments, rhythms, song forms, and styles predominantly from the circum-Diaspora reflect yet the most recent manifestation and expression of the colonial difference. Local afrochoteño concerns with the issues of authenticity and of cultural change as they relate to La Bomba must therefore be understood as linked to current sociopolitical agendas in the struggle against the inequities arising from the coloniality of power. As an embodiment of the colonial difference that is today conceived of as afrochoteño, La Bomba is constant only in its continual state of flux and transformation. An analysis of La Bomba’s formal musical elements and text sensitive to the above understanding reveals the extent to which the genre as sound and form is implicated in the process of mediating the experience of the coloniality of power and constituting the colonial difference. A structural duality, alluded to in the symbolic dimensions of the bomba drum, characterized by its synergistic complementarity pervades the genre at the level of sound, text, and practice in a homologous fashion.16 While dualism may be attributed to an African retention or cross-cultural borrowing as a result of contact with neighboring indigenous communities (see

16 Though left unexamined, Schechter (1994, 290) alludes to this structural duality in La Bomba when he speaks of bimodality.

Chalá-Cruz 2006; Schechter 1994), it is more appropriate, considering the dynamics informing the development of La Bomba and afrochoteño identity, to understand this phenomenon as the manifestation of the structural, relational, and constructed character of the colonial difference.17 The emphasis on complementarity and its synergism as an integral whole in particular suggests an analogous relationship with the the coloniality of power in its encompassment of the dialectic self-other structuring the colonial difference. In short, contained in and expressed through La Bomba is the truth about afrochoteño identity as the manifestation of the particular relations of power produced with colonialism and colonial slavery. More than a representation of identity, La Bomba embodies that particular colonial difference today expressed as afrochoteño in its sociohistorical, social, and formal musical dimensions. As such, it simultaneously constitutes and expresses shifting perceptions of the colonial difference while mediating the experience of the coloniality of power as a sociomusical process of renewal and transformation. In its pervasive structural duality, La Bomba encodes and reveals the relational nature of the colonial difference and thus exposes that which the coloniality of power attempts to erase: the sameness, or fallacy, of racial difference. It is in this regard that this dissertation understands the statement “La Bomba es vida” to be not a metaphor, but an expression of a latent understanding of the coloniality of power and its consequences for social reality and identity formation in the Chota-Mira valley.

Methodology

Ethnographic fieldwork, along with ethnography, the concept of the field, the disciplines of anthropology and ethnomusicology, and academia in general are by now well criticized for their role in the construction of difference and the subsequent reification of Occidental epistemological, sociocultural, political, and economic hegemony (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1991; Agawu 2003; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Mignolo 1995, 2000; Mudimbe 1988; Radano and Bohlman 2000; Said 1978; Trouillot 1995, 2003; Walsh 2004, 2006, 2009). Critical engagement with research methods once taken for granted is thus a necessity in undermining this dimension

17 For a discussion of music and duality in the Andes, see Baumann (1996) as well as contributing chapters in Baumann’s edited volume.

37 of academic representation and knowledge production. This is especially important in the context of this dissertation considering the current dynamics surrounding representations of Afro-Ecuadorian identity and my intent in developing a truly anti-essentialist approach to the study of music and identity in the African Diaspora. Afro-Ecuadorians are currently in the process of documenting, researching, and representing their own history and culture in an effort to cultivate and preserve a sense of cultural identity and rectify misrepresentations of Afro-Ecuadorians. This much needed work is being organized, carried out, and led by Afro-Ecuadorians in Esmeraldas, the Chota-Mira valley, and the major urban centers of Ecuador. The Federation of Black Communities and Organizations of Imbabura and Carchi Provinces (FECONIC) and Fundación Piel Negra (Black Skin Foundation) in the Chota-Mira valley and Ibarra, and The Centro-Cultural Afro-Ecuatoriano (Afro- Ecuadorian Cultural Center), Fundación De Desarrollo Social y Cultural AfroEcuatoriana “Azucar” (Afro-Ecuadorian Social and Cultural Development Foundation “Azucar”), and the Fondo Documental Afroandino (Afro-Andean Documentary Foundation) at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (Andean University Simón Bolívar) in Quito, are just a few of the major local organizations and institutions generating and housing this local production of knowledge. Any serious scholarly endeavor dealing with topics concerning Afro-Ecuadorians must necessarily engage these institutions and scholars as well as the work they produce. As might be expected, there is a sense of propriety among these institutions, local scholars, and Afro-Ecuadorian community leaders with regards to the topic and representation of Afro-Ecuadorian history and culture. Considering the history of marginalization and exploitation suffered by Afro-Ecuadorians, there is good reason to distrust outsiders, especially scholars who are often perceived to build lucrative careers on that which pertains to the Afro-Ecuadorians themselves. It is not uncommon to hear afrochoteños grumble, for instance, of promises unfulfilled by outsiders, whether academics, politicians, volunteers, or foreign non-governmental organizations. In such an environment, local discourses of music and identity and of other facets relating to Afro-Ecuadorian history and culture are politically charged. It became exceedingly clear that I would need to grapple with my own subjective positioning in the process of negotiating and making sense of the power dynamics surrounding and informing perceptions and representations of La Bomba and afrochoteño identity.

Narratives of fieldwork are often framed in terms of an entrance into and exit from the field. My ambivalence with this construction and the mythical space which it connotes stems not just from my academic training and exposure to deconstructionist and postcolonial literature but from my not so uncomplicated relationship to Ecuador and the Chota-Mira valley being the son of an Afro-Ecuadoran now residing in the United States. Originally from the Chota-Mira valley, my father emigrated from the region to Quito with his mother and siblings at the age of eight. There, he would spend the remainder of his childhood until meeting my mother and leaving Ecuador for the United States in the late 1970s. It is indicative of the sociohistorical and socioeconomic circumstances in Ecuador that my grandmother, father, and subsequently his siblings and other extended family members, left the Chota-Mira valley in search of greater opportunities in the nation’s urban centers and abroad. With family in Quito, Ibarra, the Chota- Mira valley, the United States, and even Europe, facile distinctions between field and home are blurred, though not entirely negated. As Jameson and Gupta (1997, 15) make clear, the field is not so much a geographic site as a conceptual one that in this instance marks the boundaries of familiarity. Within Ecuador, I found that this boundary continually shifted from one social (not geographic) context to the next. Whereas I was at “home” and unquestionably an “insider” among my family in Quito, Ibarra, and Cuajara in the Chota-Mira valley, I would be dismissed as an “outsider,” viewed curiously at best and suspiciously at worst, in the context of other social networks in the same geophysical locations. Even among family, the concession of “insiderness” frequently shifted depending on the context of conversation, especially when drawn along racial/spatial lines (i.e., degrees of “blackness” and proximity to the Chota-Mira valley). Needles to say, such distinctions just as easily restricted as facilitated mobility and access to local individuals, resources, and other sources of knowledge. Furthermore, perceptions of proximity implied corresponding expectations, turning my project into a truly intersubjective site of knowledge construction as family, collaborators, and friends freely vocalized their thoughts on the topic and direction of the dissertation as well as on the relative value of specific sources and on their interpretation. As such, I cannot and refuse to claim authority on this topic based solely upon my perceived proximity to or distance from the people and cultural traditions of which I write based on my heritage and academic training.

I say this in part to make clear my position on the matter of “native” scholars. My blood ties to the Chota-Mira valley do not excuse me from dealing critically with problematic research methods, contesting perspectives, and the interpretation of “ethnographic data.” This dissertation does not pretend to be a representation in the authoritative sense. It is, for all intents and purposes, an interpretation; one among equally valid others generated by Afro-Ecuadorian as well as non-black Ecuadorians and outside scholars alike. As an exercise toward the development of new ways of conceiving of, approaching, and talking about black identity and culture in the Americas, it is intended primarily for students and scholars of music and culture. If the content and interpretations may be of use to Afro-Ecuadorians and local scholars as a source of documentation or as a launching point for further discussion, than I am all the more grateful. I am also quite conscious of the fact that, as with all dissertations, this project is being written in fulfillment of an academic degree with specific expectations and requirements. Within these limitations, I hope to have produced something that yet challenges conventions within the field and that advances discussion on the topic, or at the very least raises questions for future scholars. Problematics of subjective positioning aside, the research methods employed for the purposes of this dissertation are predicated upon what is now considered a trueism in ethnomusicology and anthropology: that music, like other material and expressive forms of “culture,” is situated within specific social contexts within which meanings are produced, contested, and negotiated. Grasping the complexities of meaning production thus requires up- close and personal observation and experience (i.e., participant observation) in order to fully grasp the complexities of meaning production arising from that connection (see Geertz 1973). As a participant observer, I therefore lived between the community of Chota in the Chota-Mira valley, the neighboring urban center of Ibarra, and the capital city of Quito where I spent time partaking of social life with collaborators and family, attending festivals and events featuring representations, musical or otherwise, of Afro-Ecuadorian and afrochoteño identity, learning to play the bomba with local musicians, observed Bomba performances, conducted formal and informal interviews with local musicians, scholars, organization and community leaders, perused materials and resources at Afro-Ecuadorian sociocultural organizations, collected recorded (often pirated) Bomba cds and vcds, visited archives, and purchased relevant books at local academic publishers such as Abya-Yala. As many afrochoteños, such as my father, have family residing in

40 multiple locations, this project necessitated involvement at various sites, though the primary site for the majority of the field investigation was indeed the community of Chota located just off of the Pan American highway approximately 35 kilometers north of Ibarra via Tulcán, Colombia. Yet the participant observer model necessarily privileges certain voices and representations over others. While this is more of a logistical and pragmatic problem for scholars who frequently face constraints in time, finances, and contacts while conducting fieldwork, it is nonetheless a problem generally overcome by either explicit or implicit authorization of local sources of knowledge. This form of legitimization serves both parties. In ethnomusicology, for instance, apprenticeship to “master” musicians is a source of authorship that collaborators in the field are often well aware of and play into for various personal reasons, such as for the prestige accompanying such outside recognition, monetary or other material gain, or for matters of local boundary policing and gatekeeping. Ethnomusicologists likewise play into this construct because such positioning sanctions and thus authorizes academic representations (see Berliner 1978; Hood 1960; Kippen 2008, 125). This dynamic is unfortunately and not surprisingly true in historically marginalized and exploited communities. Recognizing these local sociopolitical dynamics, though certainly not a solution, goes a long way toward mediating contesting voices. Within the context of this dissertation, this means paying particular attention not so much to the “what” of representations of La Bomba and afrochoteño identity, but to the “why.” This follows ethnomusicologist Heidi Feldman’s (2006, 11) assertion, informed by her own research experience in Peru, that discourse about and other representations of Afro-Peruvian history and culture today reflect particular “memory projects” that speak not to an objective past, but to present sociopolitical circumstances. Afro-Ecuadorians likewise have a vested social and political interest in shaping representations of their identity. Local discourses, interview statements, and performances are therefore here examined critically in relation to the particular sociohistorical and political context from which they arise and to which they respond. Problematization of afrochoteño self representations are not intended, however, as value judgments with regards to the legitimacy of local perspectives. The purpose of such deconstructions, rather, is to more fully expose the underlying social and political dynamics informing the necessity of such representations.

This also means recognizing the limitations of formal research methods, such as recorded interviews, live and mediated performances, and instruction or training in some aspect of local music making. While these methods are indeed crucial to the formulation of any serious research project, they but provide a partial perspective on local meanings as these are often constructed in not so explicit ways. This realization is conveyed in the “participant” aspect of the participant observer model. For ethnographers, this means becoming involved in some aspect of social life, of the “doing” of culture, reflecting, again, the assumption that culture is something that is actively (re)produced through human activity rather than that which is simply given in nature. For ethnomusicologists, engagement in the life-world of musical subjects tends to involve participation in some aspect of local music making. Indeed, such is the case in this study, wherein I learned to play the bomba from a local musician in the community of Chota. Yet, more so than from the actual content of the formal music lessons, it was the informal conversations and moments of vulnerability that occurred between myself and such fellow collaborators that most informed the development of my understanding of La Bomba’s relationship to afrochoteño identity. As these moments constitute the intersubjective nature of knowledge production involved in ethnographic research and representation, I include those most relevant to the current discussion within in the body of the dissertation in the form of narrative and self-reflexive ethnographies and vignettes. While self-reflexivity itself is not new within the context of anthropology and ethnomusicology, it is worth reiterating its value as I devote an entire chapter to short narratives constructed of remembered conversations and reflective moments crucial to the development of my theoretical orientation and interpretation.18 Following the understanding that meaning production is an intersubjective and hermeneutic process involving those intimate interpersonal and introspective moments constituting ethnographic fieldwork and ethnography, I include these vignettes as a means of conveying the extent to which my personal encounters and reflections over the course of this project have informed my perception of, approach to, and representation of La Bomba and afrochoteño identity. Individually and collectively, they reveal the

18 For discussions of self-reflexivity in relation to transparency, representation, and the production of knowledge in ethnography (written and visual) and ethnographic fieldwork in anthropology and ethnomusicology, see Bakan (1999), Barz and Cooley (2008), Clifford and Marcus (1986), Behar (1993; 1996), Behar and Gordon (199), Hastrup (1995), Hastrup and Hervik (1994), Hymes (1974), Ruby (1982; 2000), Tedlock (1983), and Tedlock and Mannheim (1995), among others.

42 pervasiveness of power in discussions of La Bomba and representations of Afro-Ecuadorian and afrochoteño identity as well as problematize the notions of race, tradition, authenticity, fieldwork, and authority. In so doing, they raise the pertinent questions either explicitly or implicitly addressed in this dissertation as well as situate my interpretation as a product emergent from within rather than from without those dynamics of power structuring perceptions and representations of race in Ecuador. The juxtaposition of dates and locations not coterminous with my actual fieldwork experience likewise more properly reflects the true nature of the field as a mental construct extending well beyond the entrance into and exit from the geophysical site. Permeating all aspects of this research project, from my subjective positioning to the field experience and write-up itself, are dynamics of power that are difficult to ignore and seemingly impossible to escape. Though Afro-Ecuadorians are indeed agents in mediating the coloniality of power and the colonial difference, it cannot be denied that these dynamics, long after colonialism, are very much present in the ways in which afrochoteños conceive of and represent their identity, history and culture even while contesting institutional racism. It is in hopes of exposing these structures, writing against them, and reaching a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the significance of La Bomba as it relates to afrochoteño identity that I present this dissertation.

Organization

This dissertation is organized into seven chapters, including the introduction and conclusion. Chapters two through six follows the trajectory of my research and understanding of La Bomba and its relationship to afrochoteño identity, starting with an ethnography of contemporary representations of afrochoteño identity, and developing through a self-reflexive narrative representing the equally important intersubjective and interpretive process that is ethnography and ethnographic fieldwork, an overview of the history and development of the communities of the Chota-Mira valley, an examination of the sociohistorical development of La Bomba itself, and culminating in the resultant analysis of the formal structural aspects of La Bomba informed by the previous chapters/stages of research. Though the chapters are intended to be read in successive order, individuals interested in one or another aspect of afrochoteño history and La Bomba may find individual chapters sufficient for their specific purposes.

Chapter Two presents an ethnography examining La Bomba and afrochoteño identity in the present day as means of introducing readers to La Bomba and the current sociopolitical dynamics informing representations of afrochoteño identity today. As noted above, this chapter represents my initial point of entry as an ethnographer attending, documenting, and observing La Bomba and other musical and non-musical representations of afrochoteño identity in Quito, Ibarra, and the Chota-Mira valley observed during the course of my field-stay. Thus, events such as festivals, museum exhibits, print sources, interview statements, and informal conversations constitute the ethnographic “data” critically examined in this chapter. Following the notion that such representations constitute discourse, in the broadest sense, linked to sociopolitical agendas indexing greater underlying sociohistorical dynamics of power (e.g., Feld 2006), I situate these ethnographic moments in relation to the current sociopolitical dynamics informing race and race relations in Ecuador. This chapter thus links afrocentric projections of afrochoteño identity, a relatively new construct in the national racial imaginary, in relation to the current social and political struggles of the afrochoteño communities. La Bomba plays a significant role in this struggle as a prominent national signifier of afrochoteño identity. Deconstructing La Bomba in its current representation serves not to undermine this sociopolitical process nor to invalidate individual actors in their self-portrayals, but to better situate the significance of La Bomba in relation to that particular subaltern identity today known as afrochoteño. Chapter Three consists of short self-reflexive narratives constructed from memories of informal conversations, interpersonal experiences, observations, and correspondence drawn from the course of my field experience informing my understanding of La Bomba and the development of my theoretical and methodological orientation. The vignettes, though self sufficient with regards to the stories and meanings respectively imparted, are arranged in complementary pairs the synergistic relationship between which are intended to metaphorically represent the coplas (paired verses) once typical of Bomba lyrics (discussed in Chapter Six). As with the Bomba coplas, these pairs are juxtaposed in seemingly incongruous and non-narrative fashion. Yet within the context of this chapter they ideally reflect the arc of my understanding of La Bomba, afrochoteño identity, and the major issues dealt with in the course of this dissertation. Meaning, therefore, may be constructed not only within and between the paired vignettes, but also from the metanarrative emerging from the dialogue between the paired vignettes. These layers of signification reflect the unending creative intersubjective and hermeneutic process

44 involved in the production of knowledge that is ethnography and ethnographic research. For this reason, I situate these narratives not as interludes or as appended material to be read apart from the more familiar formal representation of scholarly knowledge, but as an integral aspect thereof. As memory (re)constructions, the vignettes, though based on actual occurrences and exchanges, are not intended to be faithful reproductions. Important in the context of this chapter is not what exactly happened or was said, but how I remember those moments and how my perception thereof informs my understanding of the subject matter and issues in question. For this reason, all conversations are presented in English regardless of the original language unless to convey a linguistically pertinent meaning otherwise lost in translation. Lastly, Chapter Three is intentionally left without additional analysis and contextualization as it is primarily intended as a methodological tool problematizing the major issues either explicitly addressed in the content of this dissertation or implied in its theoretical assumptions, approach, and form. Chapter Four provides an overview of the sociohistorical development of the afrochoteño communities from their origins in the seventeenth century to the end of the agrarian reforms as a means of contextualizing the greater dynamics of power informing the development of La Bomba and afrochoteño identity. This follows the premise, suggested by an afrochoteño collaborator, that one cannot understand La Bomba without first understanding something of the history and struggles of the afrochoteños. As such, this chapter synthesizes disparate sources dealing with various aspects of afrochoteño history, including extant academic literature, travelogues, other print sources such as textbooks and newspaper clippings, and afrochoteño testimonies (the collective memory of the afrochoteño community). A close reading of these documents reveals the extent to which the afrochoteño communities, and subsequently their cultural identity and traditions, are circumscribed and informed by the asymmetrical dynamics of power set into motion with colonialism and colonial slavery. With regards to La Bomba, this legacy of colonial slavery may best be observed in the social context in which La Bomba first emerged and continues to be used, namely socioreligious occasions. This has ramifications for an understanding of La Bomba’s role in the expression of the colonial difference and the mediation of the coloniality of power, discussed in greater detail in Chapter Four. As no such comprehensive narrative of afrochoteño identity exists to date, this chapter serves the dual purpose of bolstering the main thesis of this dissertation while constructing a useful social

45 history of the afrochoteño communities for students, scholars, and Afro-Ecuadorians interested in afrochoteño history. Chapter Five offers a concise social history of La Bomba from its origins in the colonial period to the present day. As an oral tradition, much of what can be known about the early history of La Bomba resides in the collective memory of the afrochoteño communities. It is possible, however, to triangulate key moments in the early development of La Bomba using oral testimonies in conjunction with academic literature on the history of Ecuadorian music and the three known sources depicting Bomba in the Chota-Mira valley prior to the mid-twentieth century: two travelogues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century respectively, and the first monograph length study of the afrochoteño communities conducted in the 1950s. The story that emerges suggests that La Bomba was significant first and foremost as a sociomusical process enabling the formation and expression of local familial and communal bonds: the building blocks of collective identity in the region. Furthermore, this early history reveals the extent to which La Bomba lends itself to the appropriation of “outside” music and dance genres. This is important considering La Bomba’s commoditization and continual transformation in the wake of globalization during the last half of the twentieth century. Culled from interviews, commercial recordings, ethnographic observations, and the extant academic literature on La Bomba and the afrochoteño communities, La Bomba’s recent development reveals the extent to which its seeming changes in its musical appropriations speak to the broader social significance of the genre as an expression of the colonial difference and mediator of the coloniality of power. Chapter Six presents an analysis of the formal structural elements of La Bomba, including its rhythmic, tonal, and textual aspects. Taking the bomba drum in its symbolic dimensions as my point of departure, I consider the ways in which the ideal of complementary pairs pervasive in the drum expresses itself at various other levels of the genre’s formal compositional characteristics. What emerges from this analysis is the realization that La Bomba, at all levels of its formal structural elements, is homologous in its replication of the idealized complementary pairs contained in the drum and its defining rhythms. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the significance of this trait as it relates to afrochoteño identity as an expression of the colonial difference. Considering the significance of La Bomba as a sociomusical process and the development of La Bomba and afrochoteño identity as a manifestation of the difference conditioned by the coloniality of power, I argue that rather than

46 an appropriation of indigenous Andean symbolism or a vestige of beliefs rooted in Africa, that this dualism embodies the tension filled and meaning producing dialectic that is the coloniality of power. Constituted and mediated in the performance and emergent sound of La Bomba, therefore, is that particular colonial difference today expressed as afrochoteño. Chapter Seven concludes with a synthesis of and commentary on the main points of the previous chapters as they relate to the primary thesis and concerns of this dissertation. It also briefly considers the implications of this study for the issue of black agency in the African Diaspora.

CHAPTER TWO

THE COLONIAL DIFFERENCE AND CONTEMPORARY REPRESENTATIONS OF LA BOMBA AND AFROCHOTEÑO IDENTITY

February 3, 2007

Standing on the bridge overlooking the river Chota-Mira at the Westernmost end of the community Chota, I survey the animated scene unfolding along the bank of the river at the other end of town. A team of young men place the final touches on a large-stage erected at the Southeast corner of a large, dirt soccer field. They’ve been working steadily since the early morning, slowly transforming the dusty and rock strewn pitch into a concert venue worthy of any professional touring musician. Sound and lighting technicians check lights and microphones from a mixing booth in the middle of the soccer field. As they set-up a tent over the mixing board, I wonder silently to myself whether or not it will be enough to protect the equipment from the water fights that are the hallmark of carnaval celebrations throughout Ecuador. Meanwhile, local families attend to their chosas, the conjoined wooden and straw-thatched booths lining the perimeter of the soccer field that will serve as food and beverage vending booths. An estimated 40 families from Chota and surrounding communities are representing the gastronomy of the Chota-Mira valley in this year’s celebration. Many have been preparing for weeks if not months, procuring ingredients and supplies from Ibarra and stewing large pots full of guandules (a type of pea), chicken, potatoes, corn, rice, and other foods commonly found at the dinner tables of local households. As if drawn by the delightful scents wafting in the wind, the first vehicles from outside the region pull off of the Pan American highway and into the community, making their way to the makeshift parking lot alongside the river. A bulldozer had extended and smoothed over the bank of the river days in advance, creating a levy with the remaining earth

and rocks. Curious as to the impact of this man made structure on the river-itself, I would later observe that the levy and parking lot would succumb to the force of the river and ultimately return to its original form. Even with the additional space, I found it difficult to imagine the estimated thousands that would attend the event and transform this otherwise tranquil community. Carnaval Coangue is perhaps the largest and most well known carnaval (pre-Lent festival) celebration in the province of Imbabura. Held annually since 2001 in the community of Chota, the event prominently showcases afrochoteño culture and identity through music, dance, food, and pageantry. The event is produced by the Fundación Piel Negra (Black Skin Foundation) in conjunction with the municipality of Imbabura and involves the collaboration of numerous families directly involved in the sale of food and beverages, some twenty different music and dance groups providing entertainment, sound engineers, local policeman and firefighters, and the residents of Chota who welcome into their community an estimated five- to ten-thousand visitors over the course of three days. Carnaval Coangue attracts afrochoteños living in other parts of Ecuador as well as curious mestizo and indigenous Ecuadorians from Ibarra and Quito and international tourists from Korea, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Italy, among other nations. With its diversity of people, music, and events, the festival in itself adequately captures the eclectic and often times conflicting elements that constitute afrochoteño identity and the reality of life in the Chota-Mira valley today. Among the live music acts scheduled for 2008, for example, are Bomba groups ranging widely in style from more traditional to Bomba-salsa fusions, local rap and reggaeton performers, salsa bands, the banda mocha of Salinas, a capoeira troupe from Quito featuring afrochoteño jogadores (players), a Colombian vallenato band, and a coastal afroesmeraldeño group. In addition, area youth Bomba dance troupes and an invited Colombian folkloric dance troupe are scheduled to demonstrate traditional Afro-Ecuadorian and Afro-Colombian dances. Interspersed are such events as a beauty pageant, aerobics, and a parade of traditional African clothing. Opening this year’s celebration is Milton Tadeo. Originally from the neighboring community of Carpuela, Milton Tadeo was among the first Bomba musicians to commercially record La Bomba and represent the region musically at the national and international level (see Schechter 1994). His career as a professional musician spanned nearly thirty years (from the

1980s to the time of his death in 2009), during which time he produced several now famous Bombas. Among them are “Carpuela Linda,” “El Puente de Juncal,” and “Zamba Zamba.” Of these, “Carpuela Linda” in particular has risen to a place of national prominence and is today widely recognized among black and non-black Ecuadorians alike as emblematic of La Bomba. The song, which references a local historical event—the flooding of the river Chota-Mira— speaks to the social conditions facing many families in Carpuela, namely the social and economic devastation caused by their proximity to the unpredictable and turbulent river. So popular has this song become that Milton, in response to the somewhat negative light in which his beloved community of Carpuela was portrayed in the song and the defeatist tone of the lyrics, wrote a second Bomba literally inverting the text. The famous line “Yo ya no quiero vivir en este Carpuela” (“I no longer want to live in this Carpuela”) became “Yo si quiero vivir en este Carpuela” (“I do want to live in this Carpuela”). As Milton explained in the liner notes to the Bomba compilation CD titled Por el camino de los abuelos (FECONIC 2001), “’Aqui mismo en mi tierra lucharemos, desde aqui demonstraremos que somos capaces de surgir’” (“Here in this my land we shall struggle, from here we shall show that we are capable of arising[overcoming]”). It is with this spirit that he and the community of the Chota-Mira valley proudly celebrate the first day of Carnaval Coangue 2008. Already approaching noon, the day’s events are off to a late start as cars and busses filled with visitors trickle in slowly from the highlands. Within a matter of hours the single road leading into and out of the community of Chota will be entirely congested. Mestizos arriving from Quito, Ibarra, and even parts of Colombia wander to the river and survey the chosas and the delicacies offered. Foreign tourists, with their backpacks and cameras, more boldly explore the community itself, walking up and down the main street and interacting with the children who delight in meeting outsiders and having their picture taken. Local afrochoteños linger in their doorways and near the chosas, conversing and sharing beer while observing the incoming crowd. Meanwhile, the first musical group, a local rapero (rapper) and turn-table duo who go by the name of Rap City, takes to the stage and performs to their faithful fans and curious outsiders gathering in front of the stage. The rapero dons a long black-sleeve tee shirt, red, baggy warm- up gym pants, and a nondescript red and white baseball cap. In true rapper fashion, he also sports a thickly braided gold necklace, several shiny rings, and a dazzling earing. Gesticulating with his free hand, he lets loose a torrent of rhymes while leaning in close to his DJ who bobs his

head and busily adjusts his headphones with one hand while tweaking the knobs on his turntable and preparing another record with the other. As people file into the field, they pause briefly to admire the scene and continue on their way, either uninterested or turned off by the poor sound quality rendering the lyrics indiscernible. The rapper seems unconcerned continuing his set while sound technicians frantically adjust levels on the mixing board. The musicians seem un-phased by the ensuing distraction in the crowd who between watching and listening, eating, and dancing, are otherwise preoccupied with staying dry. Grinning children with buckets of river-water and canisters of sticky pink foam-spray stalk potential unsuspecting victims. The children are bested only by a firefighter who lets loose a torrent of water into the gathering crowd from the hose of a fire-truck situated toward the far-end of the soccer field opposite the stage. The cool water is a welcome respite from the hot midday sun, and festival goers over the course of the festival take advantage of the proximity of the river to wet their feet and heads despite its brownish tinge. The sound engineer protectively guards his mixing board from the children hovering nearby seeking to catch him off-guard. He barks at them sternly attempting to warn them that he and his equipment were somehow immune to the unspoken rules of Carnaval water-play, that any and all are fair game. His concern was well warranted and his warning little heeded as I later learned. The children’s right-to-play eventually bested the vigilance of the sound technician by the second afternoon of the festivities. With water-damage sustained by the mixing board, the organizers of Carnaval Coangue had little choice but to cancel the remainder of the evening’s program. The Rap City duo concludes their set and the substantially larger crowd begins to dance as the DJ cues the set-change with a Bomba-mix CD. By the time Milton Tadeo takes the stage nearly forty-minutes later (and some two hours after originally scheduled), the audience has grown to full capacity, filling in the space enclosed by the stage and the chosas. At no other point in the festival will the soccer field-remain this saturated for the duration of a single performance. The six piece band takes their places and the audience settles in anticipation. Milton’s band consists of a bombero (bomba player), bongo player, a guiro player, a bass guitarist, an amplified acoustic guitar player, and a requinto player: a typical Bomba ensemble arrangement he and other initial Bomba groups in the late 1970s and 1980s helped to make popular and standardize through their many performances and recordings. In contrast to the informal attire of Rap City, Milton’s fellow band members appear professional in their pressed

white pants, black leather shoes, and button down red satin long-sleeve shirts. As if paying homage to the roots of the genre, the bombero alone and without introduction begins the familiar rhythmic pattern that is the hallmark of La Bomba. As the percussive tones ring out over the enclosed valley, amplified by the surrounding hills, the audience enthusiastically moves their feet and hips in sync with the binary beat. The rest of the ensemble joins in unison vamping on the intro as Milton, distinguished from the band by his button down black long sleeve satin shirt, slowly makes his way up the stairs and onto the stage greeting fans along the way. He strides confidently to the end of a long platform jutting from the center of the stage set-up especially for his performance. A roar erupts from the crowd as Milton begins the opening lines of “Carpuela Linda.” Off to the side of the stage toward the back, an elderly afrochoteña wearing the typical white embroidered head-scarf, light sweater, and multi-layered knee-length skirt dances in an elegant and stately fashion as a young man in jeans and a T-shirt circles her in the traditional manner.

* * *

La Bomba is a genre of music and dance unique to the Chota-Mira valley. The word Bomba refers to a confluence of related constituent elements: a specific double-headed drum, a rhythm, dance, and a social event. Its origins are thought to be with the enslaved African population brought to the region during the seventeenth century. As the vignette above shows, its development over the past three hundred some years has followed diverse paths in its interpretation. Afrochoteños today strongly identify with La Bomba as both a tradition reflective of local history and culture and as a contemporary art form speaking to their daily needs, desires, and aspirations. This chapter explores the relationship between La Bomba and afrochoteño identity today in situating representations thereof in relation to the current dynamics of race and racism in Ecuador and the sociopolitical struggles of the afrochoteño communities. The mobilization of ethnic identitary movements among Ecuador’s subaltern populations (indigenous and afro- descendant) since the 1990s has led to considerable changes in perceptions and representations of race and national identity. The notion of interculturalidad, in its challenge of the homogenizing and racist ideology of mestizaje (race mixture), and the related Afro-Ecuadorian

project and movement known as etnoeducación (ethnoeducation), in its cultivation of local ethnic identity, are responsible for the reconceptualization of local history and culture among Ecuador’s black communities. Current representations of La Bomba and afrochoteño identity must be understood in relation to these shifting sociopolitical dynamics as they emerge from and respond to this context. The following thus briefly outlines current dynamics of race and racism in Ecuador and considers how they inform contemporary representations of La Bomba and afrochoteño identity at the national and local level through an examination and discussion of two nationally touring museum exhibits (Afrodescendientes and El Color de la Diaspora), two exemplary Bomba groups from the Chota-Mira valley (Marabu and Sol Naciente), and local discourse about La Bomba and afrochoteño identity. These representations, in their simultaneous emphasis on the distinctive local and shared transnational Diasporic dimensions of afrochoteño history and culture, index the afrocentric discourse and dual Africa/African Diaspora rhetoric espoused by etnoeducación (ethnoeducation). This Afro-Ecuadorian led educative project and sociopolitical movement seeks to socially consolidate and politically strengthen Ecuador’s black population in its cultivation of black ethnic identity so as to engage in the national discourse on interculturalidad (interculturality) and thus participate in the newly envisioned pluricultural and plurinational state. In so doing, however, etnoeducación, in its construction of black ethnic identity at the intersection of Africa, the nation, and the Diaspora, is allowing for the creative appropriation of transnational Diasporic cultural elements otherwise incommensurate with the sociohistorical reality of the afrochoteño communities. Current manifestations of La Bomba, as exemplified by Marabu and Sol Naciente, reflect this duality in the preservation of the genre as a local tradition and cultural heritage rooted in Africa on the one hand, and, on the other, as popular culture expressive of and responsive to the particular afrochoteño experience of blackness in Ecuador and the African Diaspora. Though this bifurcation in the development of the genre has led to local debates concerning authenticity and cultural change, this phenomenon is best understood as two divergent yet interrelated and complementary expressions of the local/global duality inherent in the afrocentric rhetoric of etnoeducación. Such a perspective exposes claims to authenticity and contemporary representations of afrochoteño identity as power invested discourses employed in the service and reflective of specific sociopolitical agendas. Within such a context, questions of cultural change

are rendered moot as the notion of black ethnicity and its relation to music in the African Diaspora is problematized. Though local discourse about La Bomba and afrochoteño identity likewise reifies the roots and routes rhetoric of etnoeducación, it also reveals a means of approaching afrochoteño identity beyond representation in its equation of La Bomba with life and blackness. This suggests that La Bomba, rather than reflect ethnicity, embodies the particular afrochoteño experience of blackness in Ecuador and the African Diaspora. The concluding section thus argues that, given the sociopolitical dynamics informing the recent development and representation of afrochoteño identity, La Bomba constitutes the colonial difference and indexes the coloniality of power in its discursive and dynamic representation of afrochoteño identity today.

Interculturalidad and Etnoeducación

Following the removal of Abdala Bucaram from the executive office in 1998, president Fabian Alarcon convened a national constitutional assembly for the purpose of drafting a new constitution, one that would better reflect the nation in its diverse constituency, common humanity, and unity in social and political aspirations.1 The resultant document, spurred by growing unrest in the nation’s marginalized and disenfranchised indigenous and Afro- Ecuadorian populace, for the first time in Ecuadorian history recognized the existence and relative autonomy of the nation’s diverse ethnic constituency (Walmsley 2004, 22; Van Cott 2002, 58-67). No longer a nation defined in terms of a singular homogenous social, cultural, historical, economic, and political ideal (as expressed in the concept of mestizaje), Ecuador was now a pluricultural and plurinational state. This is to say that within its boundaries coexist a multiplicity of histories, social, political, and economic systems, epistemological orientations,

1 For further information about the 1998 revision of Ecuador’s constitution and the role of indigenous uprisings in enacting constitutional reform, see Becker (2011, 57-60), Pallares (2007, 152). See also Van Cott (2002, 58-67) for constitutional reform in the greater Andes region.

social and economic needs, and political agendas that converge, in conflictive as well as harmonious ways, to constitute the nation in its plurality (Walsh 2006, 26).2 The amendment to the constitution’s portrayal of national identity in its premise of unity in diversity is founded upon the indigenous movement’s platform of interculturalidad (interculturality), today a significant sociopolitical trope operative at all levels of government in Ecuador.3 As Catherine Walsh (Ibid., 24) notes, while the concept of interculturalidad itself is not unique to Ecuador, its particular use and sociopolitical trajectory as a result of the efficacy of the indigenous ethnic identitary movements makes it unique in relation to other manifestations and uses of the term in other parts of Latin America. Within Ecuador interculturalidad emerged with CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nations of Ecuador) during the 1990s as a means of unifying the diverse social and political interests and agendas of the various and competing socio-cultural organizations representing the disparate social and political needs of Ecuador’s numerous and distinct indigenous communities toward the creation of a plurinational state (Ibid., 25). As CONAIE makes explicit, the ultimate aim of the plurinational state, whose principles are founded on the ideals of interculturalidad, is to put an end to those social and economic woes inherited from the colonial period that have maintained the marginalization and exclusion of Ecuador’s indigenous and afro-descendant population (CONAIE 2003, 2: Walsh 2006, 27). As an ideology, interculturalidad thus posits a vision of society distinct from and counter to that characterized by mestizaje: an exclusionary and homogenizing model of citizenship premised on the erasure of cultural difference (Whitten and Quiroga 1998; Walmsley 2004). Just as in other parts of Latin America, mestizaje as a master narrative of national identity arose in Ecuador from nineteenth century political concerns with the post-colonial project of

2 See Pallares (2002, 184-217, 2007), Becker (2011, 12-17), for a discussion of the meaning, origins, development, and social, political, and economic implications of the concepts of pluriculturalidad and plurinacionalidad in the context of Ecuador.

3 See CONAIE (1997, 12) for a definition of interculturalidad as conceived by the indigenous organization. See also Puente (2005) on the implications of interculturalidad for the nation state, and Walsh (2006) for further discussion of interculturalidad and its relation to the indigenous movement and the coloniality of power. On indigenous movements in Ecuador, see Clark (2005), Clark and Becker (2007), Becker (2011), Field (1991), Pallares (2002, 2007), MacDonald (2002), Van Cott (2002), Viattori (2009), Yashar (2005), and Zamosc (2004). See also Walsh (2006, 41) for discussion of interculturalidad as it relates to multiculturalism.

nation building.4 The need to project an identity distinct from Europe and elevated from that of the “Indio” (Indian) led to the idealization of the mestizo as a being of superior qualities. A positive eugenic conception of race mixture thus resulted in a conflation of race with class similar, not coincidentally, from that which existed during the colonial period. Upward social and economic mobility, while not solely determined by, was nonetheless greatly influenced by race within this social structure. Conversely, ethnicities constructed opposite of the white- mestizo suffered stigmatization and the devaluation of their cultural traditions, belief systems, forms of knowledge, and ways of living. Following this logic, state modernization efforts during the latter part of the twentieth-century focused on the implementation of social and economic programs not reflective of and responsive to local values and needs, thus reifying the ideals of whitening (Chalá 2006; Jaramillo 1994, 53; Pabón 2007). So persuasive was the equation of whiteness with modernity that the indigenous and black populations were not officially recognized as citizens per se under the constitution until 1998 (Walmsley 2004, 19). To this day, the pejorative use of the terms indio and negro to connote that which is unproductive, uncultured, uneducated, uncouth, and unsafe stem from this association. The 1998 constitution thus marks an important social as well as political victory for the nation’s subaltern populations. Indigenas and Afro-Ecuadorians since the 1990s have gained considerable visibility, representation, and influence in the nation’s political arena. The previous twenty years alone have witnessed the popular overthrow of three governments (Abdala Bucaram in 1997, Jamil Mahuad in 2000, and Lucio Gutierrez in 2005), the election of a progressive leftist president, Raffeal Correa, who champions, at the very least at the level of rhetoric, the ideals of interculturalidad and plurinacionalidad, the drafting of a new constitution in 2007 that would eventually include even greater recognition of indigenous and afro- descendant autonomy, and the proliferation of indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian sociopolitical organizations at various levels of government (see Becker 2011). Though too early to tell whether or not the adoption of interculturalidad is fundamentally transforming the social and political structures that have long maintained the status-quo, it is certain that it has begun a

4 See Walmsely (2004) and Whitten and Quiroga (1998) for a discussion of mestizaje, its development and social and economic implications in Ecuador. See also Appelbaum, Macpherson and Rosemblatt (2003), Graham (1990), Radcliffe and Westwood (1996), and Wade (1997) for a discussion of state co-option and implementation of mestizaje as an ideology of national identity in Latin America in general.

process of validation and affirmation among the indigenous and Afro-descendant populations. For Afro-Ecuadorians in particular, this means a burgeoning awareness of ethnic identity and renewed interest in local history and cultural traditions. As noted above, the internalization of the racist principle of whitening implicit in the ideology of mestizaje led to the stigmatization of local cultural traditions and ways of life. Prior to the 1990s, as Schechter (1994) observed, a conception of black ethnic identity was nonexistent in the Chota-Mira valley. In the years following the 1960s agrarian reforms, afrochoteño youth eager to advance socially and economically emigrated from the region to the nation’s urban centers and shunned the traditions of their elders in favor of more “modern” forms of living. Telenovelas, national and international popular dance musics, and urban commodities replaced afrochoteño oral narrative traditions such as stories, riddles, games, and La Bomba, and material culture. Likewise, knowledge of local history and traditions, passed down orally, gave way to textbooks on the history and culture of Ecuador as told from the perspective of the white-mestizo (see Pabón 2007). Local identity was thus conceived primarily in terms of place rather than race, as in a pan-highland regional identity. Following the success of the indigenous movement in changing the social and political vision of the nation from a monocultural to a plurinational state, however, perceptions of local identity shifted from a negative to a positive association with blackness. Within the Afro-Ecuadorian communities, this transformation was enacted primarily through an educative project and sociopolitical movement known as etnoeducación.5 The architect of etnoeducación in Ecuador, Afro-Esmeraldan educator Juan García Salazar began a process of collecting, documenting, and imparting the history and cultural traditions of the Afro- Ecuadorian communities as early as the 1980s as a means of preserving and validating local knowledge. In the context of the social and political changes of the 1990s, etnoeducación assumed even greater significance as a resource in the sociopolitical struggles of the Afro- Ecuadorian communities. As García himself notes (n.d., 14) etnoeducación is a process of identity construction involving the cultivation and inculcation of local history and culture toward the successful participation of the Afro-Ecuadorian population in that social and political project conceptualized in the vision of an intercultural and plurinational state (Pabón 2007, 96; Walsh

5 See Pabón (2007, 95-107, 2009), García (n.d.), and Walsh (2006, 17) on etnoeducación.

2006, 39). Oral history projects, workshops on various aspects of Afro-Ecuadorian history and culture and on etnoeducación itself, educational materials such as textbooks, and the development of an educational curriculum founded on the ideals of etnoeducación and speaking to the needs of local communities thus helped revive interest in once neglected cultural traditions and foster a sense of regional and shared national black ethnic identity (Pabón 2007, 101; see FECONIC 2001, 2005). The impact of etnoeducación on perceptions of black ethnic identity is evident in representations of afrochoteño identity simultaneously celebrating its local as well as transnational dimensions. Etnoeducación’s emphasis on cultural roots and shared struggles situate afrochoteños within the greater transregional and transnational community of afro- descendants in the New World. As such, a truly transnational dialogue has emerged between Afro-Ecuadorians and other black Diasporic communities in Latin America and the United States as well as with Africa. The proliferation of local and national Afro-Ecuadorian and transnational Afro-American sociopolitical organizations as well as the various conferences and congresses through which they interact speak to the enactment of this community. These networks affirm and lend support to local Afro-Ecuadorian struggles and sociopolitical agendas. They also, as will be shown below, infuse local struggles with a transnational discourse of race and black resistance founded on an afrocentric perspective of black ethnic identity. Consciously aware of their position vis. a vis. the nation as both pertaining to and transcendent of its boundaries, afrochoteños today resource Africa and the Diaspora in representations of local identity as encouraged by etnoeducación in its sociopolitical agenda. The following briefly examines the ways in which the afrocentric discourse fostered by etnoeducación and fueled by transnational Diasporic links is manifested in portrayals of afrochoteño identity as specifically represented in two national museum exhibits and afrochoteño discourse about La Bomba and afrochoteño identity. The exhibits Afrodescendientes and El Color de la Diaspora, respectively co-sponsored by the Banco Central de Ecuador and the United States Embassy, and the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar and The University of Tennessee, are significant precisely because they are the first two nationally and internationally touring representations of Afro-Ecuadorian history and culture curated by Afro- Ecuadorians themselves. As will be shown, afrochoteños readily engage the afrocentric

58 discourse evident in these exhibits in local discussions about La Bomba and afrochoteño identity, though often in contradictory ways.

El Color de la Diaspora and Afrodescendientes

El Color de la Diaspora

El Mate nos explicaron luego los mayores, es para sacar con cuidado el agua que es Buena para beber, las piedras que están en el fondo son parte de la fuente, pero no se pueden beber. Así es esto de la cultura, tenemos que aprender a sacar con cuidado lo que es propio y dejar en el fondo lo que es ajeno. El calabazo—nos dijeron—es para guardar el agua y tenerla a la mano, porque “no se puede ir a la fuente cada vez que se tiene sed, el agua tiene que estar dentro de la casa para beber cuando se tiene sed.” (Quoted in Leon and Garcia 2006, 27)

[The elders have explained to us that the gourd is to take with care the water that is good to drink; the pebbles and stones that are at the bottom of the river are part of the source but they cannot be drank. Culture is like this we have to learn to take with care that which is ours and leave at the bottom that which belongs to others. The gourd—they have told us—is to save the water and have it at hand, because “you cannot go to the water source each time you are thirsty. The water has to be in the house to be able to drink when you are thirsty.”]

La Memoria Colectiva es como una gran fuente, que siempre tiene agua para beber, pero el que quiere beber de ella, tiene que traer su mata y su calabazo. (Ibid., 54)

[Collective Memory is like a great fountain that always has water to drink. He or she who wishes to drink from the fountain has to bring his or her own gourd.]

July 27, 2006 (Quito, Ecuador): Soft white lights illuminate striking black and white photographs tastefully arranged along the walls of a rectangular gallery. Rows of chairs, neatly arranged before a table, occupy the center of the room while a set of musical instruments, long conical drums known as conunos from the coastal province of Esmeraldas, huddle in a corner in anticipation of a musical performance. The predominantly mestizo patrons, presumably professors, intellectuals, and a few backpack wearing students of the Pontific Catholic University of Ecuador converse quietly as they peruse the exhibit. Though early in the evening, only a few Afro-Ecuadorians are present, including the curator and the musicians. It is the opening night of “El Color de la Diaspora” (the Color of the Diaspora) at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador in Quito. A collaborative project involving the

Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar and the University of Tennessee, the exhibit conveys through intimate photographs and personal quotes the diversity and vitality of the black communities of the Chota-Mira valley and province of Esmeraldas. Curated by Edison León and William Dewey and featuring photographs taken by León and Juan Garcia Salazar, “El Color de la Diaspora” is scheduled for showings at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador in Quito as well as at the University of Tennessee in the United States over the course of six months (July-December 2006). Pausing as I make my way around the gallery, I am drawn to a portrait of an elderly woman, her head covered with a scarf in the fashion typical of afrochoteñas reclines against a wall. I contemplate the stoic and resolute expression on her line worn face. Only her eyes, weary and withdrawn, betray ever so slightly her thoughts and emotions. Moving on, I spot a photograph of young man most likely from Esmeraldas with his eyes cast downward and a hand- carved wooden pipe characteristic of the region clenched between his teeth. A broad smile parts his lips. Yet another afrochoteño, a cigarette dangling from his lips, is captured feeding sugar cane into a mill under a thatched roof. His torn and ragged collared shirt and the mildly annoyed expression in his eyes indicate the intensity of the chore at hand. In contrast, a young boy playing along the banks of what appears to be a river pauses to look at the camera directly, his grinning smile lighting up his eyes with delight as he presents himself unabashedly to an unknown audience of curious on-lookers. The images continue, juxtaposing the elderly with the young, the past with the present, the stoic and stern with the playful and joyful, the coastal with the highland region. Interspersed throughout the gallery, select and poignant quotations from celebrated authors and Afro-Ecuadorians from both the Chota-Mira valley and Esmeraldas give pause for reflection and serve to contextualize the photographs and reinforce the concept informing the exhibit. Attributed only to the collective memory of the Afro-Ecuadorian communities, the quotations invoke the notions of individual and collective memory, oppression and struggle, unity and difference, and pride and resilience. “El cura me bautizó como Zenón,” reads one such quote “pero no me dijo quién soy, fue mi mamá la que cantando me dijo de dónde vengo y para donde voy” (“the priest baptized me Zenon, but he did not tell me who I am, that was my mother who in song told me from where I come and where I am going;” Leon and Garcia 2006, 19). Yet another expresses the following similar sentiment:

Mis mayores me dijeron que el ser que no conoce el razón de su diferencia y no aprende de dónde nace esa diferencia, no puede saber para dónde tiene que caminar a la hora de buscar la vertiente de su sangre y nadie puede vivir, sin beber de la vertiente de sus ancestros. (Ibid., 31)

[My elders told me that the being who does not know the reason of his or her difference and does not learn from where this difference is born, cannot know where to walk when the time comes to look for the stream from where his or her blood comes. No one can live without drinking from the stream of his or her ancestors.]

A common metaphor for vitality and cultural identity among Afro-Ecuadorians, water calls attention to nourishing roots as well as fluid and often turbulent pathways. It also makes reference to the vast body of water connecting the Afro-Ecuadorian communities of the Chota- Mira valley and Esmeraldas with one another, Africa, and the greater African Diaspora. Indeed, illuminating the differences between and interconnections among these afro-descendant communities is the primary purpose of this exhibit. As the accompanying publication to “El Color de la Diaspora” makes clear, “the exhibit is intended to build a more complete and heterogeneous view of the African Diaspora, making clear that the construction of the African Diaspora is not a finished totality, but rather is an emerging lived process” (Ibid., 5). At the base of this diversity, as the text clarifies, however, is the unified history and experience of slavery. As if to underscore the diversity as well as unity of African Diasporic and Afro- Ecuadorian cultural expressions, renowned afroesmeraldeño musician and marimba specialist Papá Roncón, accompanied by four young male percussionists, three elderly female vocalists, and a group of mixed young male and female dancers, pause the evening’s informal viewing for a performance of Esmeraldan arullos, and rhythms such as the bambuco typical of the coastal Afro-Ecuadorian marimba repertoire minus the marimba itself.6 Occupying the center of the room now cleared of the chairs and table, Papá Roncón unceremoniously begins to play as the other drummers and vocalists enter in accordingly. The patrons gather around, forming a semi- circle around the ensemble. More than a few begin to move their feet and hips to the driving rhythm of the guasá, a wooden shaker played with great force by the vocalists as they respond to

6 See Ritter (1998) and Whitten (1974, 124-137) on the coastal Esmeraldan marimba, instrumentation, performance practice, and repertoire.

the lead singer. Papá Roncón and the lead vocalist seem unaware and unaffected by their surroundings, performing as though to and for themselves and acknowledging the crowd’s applause only briefly with an occasional passing nod. Responding to the rhythm of the conunos (conical drums), guasá, and driving bombo (large bass drum rested horizontally and played with two drum sticks: one on the drum head, the other on a wooden plank attached to the side of the drum), the dancers move energetically, showcasing the playful dance between the male and female typical of the coastal marimba dance repertoire (see Whitten 1974, 129). More cognizant of the audience, the dancers improvise fanciful movements and dance with even greater fervor as the onlookers enthusiastically cheer. By the end of the hour, the dancers are drenched in sweat, out of breath, and smiling broadly. Papá Roncón says little to anyone else as he and his fellow musicians quickly pack their musical instruments. He must be off to another performance, they tell me. In a corner of the room I see Edison León speaking with my father, a musician and Afro- Ecuadorian originally from the Chota-Mira valley now residing in the United States. Knowing we would be present at the exhibit’s opening, Leon had asked my father to perform for the remainder of the event. I grab the conga lent to us by a close family friend and adjust a chair beside my father who tunes his guitar. A few patrons stop to listen and take photographs as we begin to play a mixture of songs and rhythms from Afro-Ecuadorian Bomba to Afro-Colombian cumbia, Afro-Cuban son, and Afro-Bolivian saya. I smile encouragingly as a mestizo couple courageously begins to dance. My father, inspired by the event, sings a Bomba recalled from his youth. Afterward, Leon approaches, and surprised comments on the obscurity of that particular Bomba. He thanks us graciously at the end of the performance and we quickly join the rest of the patrons as they began to take their conversations outside the gallery doors. As a conscious representation of Afro-Ecuadorian identity to the Ecuadorian mestizo and international intellectual communities, “El Color de la Diaspora” projects an image of blackness that at once conveys its distinct regional and yet unified trans-regional and trans-national character. This portrayal is consistent with the stated goals and objectives of etnoeducación. That this is the case is not surprising considering the involvement of Juan García Salazar, the founder of etnoeducación, and the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino (Afro-Andean Documentary Foundation) whose purpose it is to “build and maintain a political affiliation with the collective visual and oral memories” of Ecuador’s black communities (Ibid., 12). As will be shown in the

following, this political agenda is made even more manifest in yet another nationally and internatonally touring museum exhibit of Afro-Ecuadorian history and culture presented in 2007 and 2008.

Afrodescendientes

Ibarra, Ecuador 2008: A poster and an events board outside the entrance to the Casa de Cultura in Ibarra advertise the recently arrived exhibit along with associated movie showings and lecture- discussions. I glance at the scheduled films, among them: “Tarjeta Roja,” an Ecuadorian documentary about racism in soccer, and “Malcolm X.” Entering the enclosed courtyard, I immediately catch sight of a raised wooden and thatched roof structure, representative of the homes once typical of Esmeraldas. Hanging from the roof on one corner of the inside of the home is a wooden-keyed xylophone. Two conical drums along with a large double-headed barrel drum rest on the floor beneath the marimba. On the other side of the singular room hangs a hammock. I rummage through my backpack in search of my camera when a security guard calls out to me. I sign in as he warns me about their picture and video policy. I nod reluctantly and pick up a program. Afrodescendientes is a nationally touring exhibit sponsored by the Central Bank of Ecuador and the United States Embassy. Curated by John Anton, an Afro-Ecuadorian scholar, it speaks to the exclusion of the Afro-Ecuadorian communities in national representations of the history and culture of Ecuador. In doing so, however, the exhibit also explicitly seeks to make social, cultural, and political links with the broader African Diaspora and with the African American community specifically. “In examining the relation between the afro-descendant communities of Ecuador and of the United States of America it is possible to find outstanding interrelations and common manifestations in the area of culture” asserts the brochure on the second paragraph of the inside flap. “But, beyond those,” it concludes “there exists long links in the political scene. One cannot ignore an Afro-American social movement shared in the struggle for the conquest of civil rights, which has constituted in the most strong and fraternal lived experience.” Those links, which encompass the cultural as an outgrowth and expression of this shared struggle, are revealed in the exposition of the exhibit’s three main halls. The first hall traces the history of the Afro-Ecuadorian communities. Timelines, graphs, posters, maps, archival documents, and artifacts document the origins of the Afro-Esmeraldan

and afrochoteño communities and the experience of slavery. Iron chains, cuffs, and whips are displayed under clear glass cases, providing added depth to the illustrations of slave mistreatment hanging on the walls. Countering the images of passivity, despair, and helplessness are documented instances of slave rebellion and flight along with the names of local resistance figures. The exhibit proceeds through manumission up to the agrarian reforms of the 1960s. Here, the exhibit makes parallels with the abolishment of slavery in the United States and the civil rights movement. Pictures and biographies of prominent Afro-Ecuadorian leaders and educators advocating for social justice and for pride in local black culture are depicted alongside African American leaders such Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Jesse Jackson. The hall ends with a picture of the starting line-up of the national soccer team posing on the pitch just prior to their 2006 FIFA World Cup tournament debut in Germany: nine of the eleven players are Afro-Ecuadorian. The second hall contains displays showcasing and explaining various aspects of Afro- Ecuadorian culture. A wall of clay masks represents the artisanship of the afrochoteño community of Mascarillas. Though this is a nouveaux tradition inspired by African mask making techniques and instigated by the influence of a European artist residing in the region, Mascarillas is today well-known throughout Ecuador for these masks, which can be found in markets and shops catering to tourists in the nation’s urban centers. Hanging neatly on the opposite wall are articles of jewelry and clothing typical of the coastal region: necklaces and earings of pearly white tagua (a seed), a hair-tie and tobacco pouch most likely also made of tagua, and a belt and pair of hats made from the fibers of a local tree. In one corner stands a type of alter adorned with flowers. Three religious iconic figurines, two women most likely representing Mary (one of which holds a child) and a monk cradling a child rest at its base. Nearby, a plaque describes the procession of Saint Martin de Porres along the river Santiago in the northern part of Esmeraldas. Yet another display diagrams the cosmology of the Afro- Ecuadorian communities. The depiction of an intermediary world between the natural and supernatural world, described in Roman Catholic terms as heaven, hell, and purgatory, makes evident the confluence of European and African belief systems in the development of Afro- Ecuadorian culture. Unfortunately, the display fails to mention that this particular view, or cosmo-vision, pertains solely to the communities of the coastal region and not the highlands.

The third and final hall contains interactive displays juxtaposing Afro-Ecuadorian and African American music and dance. A marimba and an accompanying set of conunos and a bombo rest against a wall alongside a flowing white and green dress. In a nearby corner, a bottle partially filled with water hangs above a circular black platform. A small sign against the wall reads “el baile de la botella” (“the bottle dance”) in reference to a style of dance associated with La Bomba. Listening stations with headphones are spread throughout the hall, each looping examples of La Bomba, la banda mocha, marimba, jazz, and hip-hop. Displays with descriptions of the genres depicted line the walls while a video-screen plays a short documentary on the banda mocha. An entire wall devoted to jazz highlights the development of the genre, paying tribute to the life and career of Louis Armstrong. Yet another display contains information about the Harlem renaissance. I look through the third hall once more, certain that I had missed something: could it be that such an exhibit, which purports to represent the diversity of Ecuador’s afro-descendant communities, not contain an actual bomba? I walk toward the exit in disbelief, catching a glimpse once more of the words written above the station labeled hip-hop: “Today, various Afro- Ecuadorian musical groups dedicate themselves to the interpretation of Caribbean influenced rhythms, like son, salsa, and guaguancó, or to genres of north American origin like hip-hop.”

* * *

As with “El Color de la Diaspora,” the exhibit “Afrodescendientes” references the Afrocentric and Diasporic dimensions of the current rhetoric of etnoeducación and the greater socio-poltical discourse on Afro-Ecuadorian identity in its representation of a heterogenous Afro-Ecuadorian cultural identity yet unified transnationally with other black communities in the Americas through common roots and struggles. This conception of Afro-Ecuadorian identity as distinctly Ecuadorian while simalteanously Afro-American, as in both local and global, is evident also in current manifestations of La Bomba in their representation of afrochoteño identity as will be shown below. As noted previously, etnoeducación may be credited with the revival of once neglected cultural traditions such as La Bomba. This has led to the conscious maintenance of La Bomba as a tradition celebrated for its links to Africa and afrochoteño cultural heritage as well as to its transformation as a popular music genre responsive to the lived experiences of afrochoteños today. Indeed, renewed interest in the genre on the part of afrochoteño youth is

generating musical innovations reflective of a conscious awareness of an identity that is both a part of and yet transcendent of the nation. While sparking debate among afrochoteños concerning the issue of authenticity and cultural change, the current bifurcation between traditional and what some have termed modern bomba (La Bomba moderna) is ultimately the manifestation of the duality local/global (Afro-Ecuadorian/African Diaspora) referenced in the rhetoric of etnoeducación. The following presents a brief examination of two Bomba groups, Marabu and Sol Naciente, currently popular in the Chota-Mira valley exemplary of this duality.

La Bomba Tradicional (Traditional) and La Bomba Moderna (Modern): Marabu and Sol Naciente

Marabu and Bomba Tradicional (Traditional Bomba)

April, 2008, Ibarra: Nearly three four and six bands into the Bomba marathon-like concert event fittingly advertized as “El bombazo,” the venue, the coliseo (coliseum) located in Ibarra’s north side, is only just beginning to fill with people in anticipation of the headlining band, Marabu. The lead vocalist and band leader Plutarco Viveros walks casually around the open gymnasium, occasionally pausing to greet and converse with members of the audience as his band-mates and sound crew begin to set-up their equipment on stage. Plutarco slowly makes his way to the stage, laughing and shaking hands as he does. His elegant button down silk red shirt, white pleated pants, and shiny black shoes match those of his five band members: guitarist and vocalist Patricio Viveros, bass guitarist Lester Viveros, bomba player and vocalist Gustavo Viveros, bongo player Augusto Espinoza, and guiro player Estaban Borja. Exchanging only a quick glance at his bandmates as he picks up his requinto, Plutarco briefly adjusts the tuning before launching directly into a lively Bomba set in a compound duple-meter. With great force, Gustavo accents the slap-tones played near the rim of the drum, producing a hemiola pattern heard against the bass and propelling the song in a forward driving motion. The energetic and attention grabbing introduction brings the audience to their feet and they quickly fill the space in front of the stage as they dance and holler in approval. They join in song as Patricio begins to sing:

Vivencias Lived Experiences

Con el permiso de los patrones With the permission of our masters celebremos el santo de nuestra devoción Let us celebrate the saint of our devotion

Y les ofrecemos nuestra cultura And we offer you our culture porque se siente que es nuestra identidad Because we feel it is our identity mujeres negras danzando en procesión Black women dancing in procession sacando a flote lo que es la tradición Bringing out what is our tradition

Y con vestuarios queremos demostrarle And with outfits we want to show que fueron vivencias de nuestros ancestrales That these were the lived experiences of our ancestors

* * *

I greet Plutarco graciously at the door of my apartment in Ibarra. As the band leader of one of the more renowned and respected Bomba groups in Ecuador, Plutarco maintains an active performing and touring schedule that has made arranging an interview a challenge. He begins to apologize for the difficulty as I thank him for his time and usher him into the living room and offer him a seat. Over six feet tall with an athletic build, the former professional soccer player commands an authoritative presence offset only by his warm smile and congenial and humble persona. I ask him about his involvement with Bomba and about the origins and history of the group Marabu. La Bomba has its heritage, he tells me, in the memory of the slaves. It was they who recalled this tradition and why it was done. He explains that though not permitted to make music other than on specific days designated for festivities, the slaves were allowed to hold their own celebration apart from that of the slave-master. This, he notes, is where La Bomba first started. He adds that his grandfather, a former slave who lived to be over 100 years of age, told him long ago that La Bomba is a rich part of afrochoteño cultural heritage with which all afrochoteños should be familiar. It was this sentiment that inspired the formation and mission of the group today known as Marabu. The original intent of the group, comments Plutarco, was not to make money, but to bring people together and impart awareness among afrochoteños of La Bomba as a distinct part of their cultural heritage. He explains that during the 1980s, many of his fellow peers gravitated towards foreign commercial popular music and dance rhythms such as the music of Michael Jackson and

67 breakdancing. At the same time, contends Plutarco, existing recording Bomba groups became more commercialized as concerns with money began to supersede those of maintaining and sharing La Bomba as a cultural tradition. Thus, in 1980 at the age of sixteen, Plutarco, along with Gustavo Viveros and Marcelo Acosta, formed a group called La bomba nueva generación in their hometown of Mascarillas in the Chota-Mira valley. Throughout much of the 1980s while Plutarco lived in Quito where he played soccer professionally with La Liga, the group would perform cultural programs at local hostels and museums such as the Oasis and the Honka Monka for tourists during the weekends. As the group grew in popularity, they were presented the opportunity to play at local, provincial, and regional festivals and competitions that eventually provided them with their first recording opportunity. It was in the context of one such regional festival that the concept for Marabu was born. As Plutarco recalls, the idea and name for the group Marabu emerged in 1990 during a collaborative project involving indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian musicians and music. Weary of the motives of the indigenous and mestizo producers, the group initially declined only to change their minds after a successful performance at a celebration of Inti Raimi among neighboring highland indigenous communities. It was at that moment that one of the producers of the project, then director of the ministry of indigenous affairs, encouraged Plutarco and the other band members to change their name to something more “African.” Consulting with local friend and afrochoteño scholar José Chalá, they scoured the dictionary, eventually agreeing on the name Marabu. As Plutarco explains, Marabu is the name of a large and today endangered bird native to Africa. Though hesitant to adopt the name at first knowing that the bird in question is a scavenger, the group decided that it suited their purposes nonetheless in making direct reference to the continent of Africa. It was thus with the intention of foregrounding and sharing the origins of La Bomba and afrochoteño culture that Marabu was conceived. Since 1990, Marabu has continued to grow in popularity and has succeeded in its mission of maintaining, sharing and imparting the significance of La Bomba as a cultural tradition with African roots with audiences not only in the Chota-Mira valley itself, but at the national and international level as well. Plutarco proudly notes that on every one of the five albums recorded thus far there are at least a few tracks that speak to La Bomba as afrochoteño cultural heritage, such as “Bomba Caliente” from their first album, “Bomba Bomba” from their second album, “A Golpe de Bomba” from their third album, “Vivencias” from their fourth album, and “Coangue”

from their most recent album. As cultural ambassadors, the group was honored with an invitation to tour and perform in South Korea during the summer of 2005. So enthusiastic was their reception by the people of South Korea that their invitation was extended for yet another three months. Plutarco recounts this experience with a mixture of awe and bewilderment as though surprised by their success and the positive public response. When he pauses to reflect on the differences between Marabu and the various other Bomba groups active in the Chota-Mira valley today, however, Plutarco reaffirms his belief that Marabu’s success lies precisely in its focus on their original mission of preserving and sharing La Bomba as a tradition unique to the afro-descendants of the Chota-Mira valley. “¿Y esto, que tiene de bomba?” (“And this, what does it have of Bomba?”) he states rhetorically in reference to a newly acquired Bomba mix compact disc featuring many of the youth Bomba groups in the region. Many of these groups, he notes, started as cover bands emulating the repertoire and style of older generation Bomba groups like Marabu. Some of these groups even took on the name of the original bands imitated, distinguishing themselves only with the prefix mini, as in mini-GDR and mini Marabu. Though Plutarco admits that he is pleased that afrochoteño youth are learning the music and continuing with an interest in La Bomba, he is afraid that they are blurring the distinction between traditional Bomba and that which other groups like Sol Naciente profess to be Bomba. Shaking his head, he states again even more firmly as if to leave no uncertainty, “eso no es Bomba” (“that is not Bomba”).

Sol Naciente and La Bomba Moderna (Modern Bomba)

April, 2008, community of Chota, Chota-Mira valley: Another young women takes the stage and proudly walks around the raised platform, posing every few moments and moving her hips to the Bomba playing in the background much to the delight of the cheering audience. Barefoot and hair covered with a scarf, she wears a pleated knee-length skirt and a beige blouse. The MC, ushering the next model onto the stage, moves the program along while encouraging the boisterous audience: “Muy bien, ahí tenemos una niña mas. Son vestimentas autenticas de la comunidad, del ayer, como vestían las abuelitas! Que sigan!” (“very good, we have yet another young lady. They are authentic clothing of the community of yesterday, as our grandmother’s once dressed! May they continue!”). The parade of models continues for another twenty-five minutes featuring girls and boys to young women and men donning both traditional and

69 contemporary clothing of the Chota-Mira valley: bare-feet give way to high-heels, modest skirts and blouses to tight jeans and elegant dresses, button-down white collared shirts and indigenous style hats to soccer jerseys, sunglasses, and sideways worn baseball caps as the event wares on. By the end of the fashion show, the Coliseo in the community of Chota is filled with people of all ages and from various neighboring communities and even Ibarra and Quito. They stand huddled in groups or as couples, some purchasing and sharing beer in the customary communal fashion, while others wait outside smoking or sharing the potent local homemade sugar cane liquor known as aguardiente. The evening’s festive program and mood stands in stark contrast to the otherwise somber events of Semana Santa (Holy Week) consuming the community of Chota that week, and it is evident from the restless shuffling of feet that the audience in attendance is ready to dance. They make their way toward the center of the hall in anticipation as Sol Naciente, the only band scheduled to perform that evening, finishes their sound check. The eight-piece band crammed onto the rectangular stage features a drum set, electric keyboard, electric bass, timbales, congas, bongos, guitar, and metal scrapers. With a brief introduction, they set the audience to dancing with a fast paced song in simple duple-meter reminiscent of a Bomba in its rhythmic foundation but with the melodic and harmonic characteristics and lyrical content of a contemporary romantic pop ballad. Furthermore, the addition of the timbales, conga, bongos, guiro and clave provide a generic tropical/salsa tinged flavor that the audience immediately responds to in the adjustment of their dance movements. Sol Naciente moves from the Bomba-salsa-ballad fusion to another song featuring the keyboard mimicking in voice and style the sound and rhythms of the coastal marimba. This song quickly transitions in tempo to a fast-paced musical fusion similar to the previous song. The audience dances without pausing just as the band moves from one song to the next for the duration of the evening. Sol Naciente has a loyal following in the region and has grown in popularity especially among youth as a result of their innovative compositions. Originating in the community of Chota, the band in its entirety consists of Vladimir Borja on bomba, Alejandro Carcelen on bongo, Fidel Chalá on congas, Jorge Calderon on the drum set and timbales, Luis Angel Acosta and Elmer Acosta on auxiliary hand percussion (i.e., guiro), Andres on guitar, Vladimir Minda on bass guitar, Jason Chalá on keyboard and voice, and Calixto Calderon on voice. Though they

do consider themselves purveyors of La Bomba and indeed often share the same stage with such groups as Marabu, they are aware that their unique approach sets their music apart from what may be considered more traditional Bomba. For this reason, they tend to informally distinguish their music as La Bomba moderna (modern Bomba). Daniel Minda Lara, a percussionist specializing in bomba and congas, explains the perspective of Sol Naciente with regards to La Bomba and tradition in non-essentializing terms. He notes that while they did indeed start by imitating the sounds of more conventional Bomba groups such as Mario Diego Congo (from Oro Negro), they have consciously sought to keep up with the changing trends over time:

Se mantiene la tradición, no? pero igual se hace algo diferente, marcar la diferencia, eso es lo que hiso Sol Naciente: marcar la diferencia, no solo mantener en un solo género . . . Obviamente si estamos haciendo con los instrumentos tradicionales, pero ahora están implementados algunos instrumentos como son el timbale, congas, los gemelos que llamamos los bongos, hacemos con batería, . . . por hoy lo estamos hacienda igual con el piano, el teclado, antes, igual se hacía con el bajo, veras, la bomba tradicional se lo hacia así, guitarra, requinto nada más. El bajo se lo hacía a base de un puro que lo tocan en la banda mocha. Entonces hoy [se lo hace] a la moda, se puede decir. Pero uno no está metido en la moda, no, si no que las cosas que uno debe, lo mejor, no. Entonces lo hacemos con esos instrumentos que han salido y que son muy importantísimos para la música que hacemos nosotros.

Sol Naciente esta en un género que no lo hace nadie. Es un género que es propio, que es muy diferente al resto de grupos. Nunca hay que olvidarse de la tradición, de la cultura, [Pero] estamos enfocados en no hacer lo solo La Bomba tradicional, si no que hacer lo para que cada lugar a donde nosotros vayamos, esa gente se siente a gusto de la música que a ellos le guste. Entonces hacemos bomba, obviamente, merengue, salsa, hacemos hasta bachata, como obviamente la bachata se está dando, lo hacemos baladas, y así un poquito de músicas que hay, no solamente estar en ese género de la música bomba.

[[Sol Naciente] maintains the tradition, right? But at the same time they do something different, mark the difference, that what Sol Naciente does: mark the difference, not just stay in one single genre . . . Obviously we are [making music] with traditional instruments, but now we are implementing some instruments like the timbale, congas, the twins as we call the bongos, we play with drum set . . . today we are doing it also with piano, the keyboard. Even before [Bomba] was played with a bass instrument: traditional Bomba was done with guitar, requinto and nothing else. The bass was done using a gourd which is played in the banda mocha. So today, [we play] according to what is in style, so to speak. But one is not into what is stylish, but rather those things that one should be [concerned with], the best, right? So we do it [make music] with those instruments that have come out and that are extremely important for the music that we make.

Sol Naciente is in a genre that no one else does. It is our own genre, which is very different from the rest of the groups. One must never forget about tradition, about culture. [But] we are focused on not doing solely traditional Bomba, but rather to make [Bomba/music] so that each place that we go [to play], those people feel the pleasure of that music which they like. So we make Bomba, obviously, merengue, salsa, we even make bachata, as it is obviously very popular today, we make ballads, and in this way a little of the musics that there are, not just stay within the genre of Bomba.]

As Daniel suggests above, Sol Naciente adapts to the interests, tastes, and desires of their audience in an effort to maintain La Bomba not as a static tradition, but as a popular music genre responsive to contemporary trends and needs. Sol Naciente is thus not concerned with the preservation of tradition and the issue of cultural change, but is instead preoccupied with engaging La Bomba as an integral aspect of life as lived in the Chota-Mira valley and Ecuador today. This resonates with the dynamic notion of tradition and culture referenced in the black diasporic routes rhetoric of etnoeducación as evident in “El Color de la Diaspora.” The emphasis on black heterogeneity in its national and regional dimensions despite common origins provides the foundation for a conception of culture, tradition, and identity as fluid, dynamic, and discursive: as responsive to time and place. Thus Sol Naciente reconciles their artistic liberties with La Bomba with recourse to black diasporic creativity in its celebrated tendency toward appropriation, juxtaposition, mixture, and fusion. Furthermore, the evident appropriation of formal and stylistic musical elements of other black diasporic musics such as salsa, son, merengue, bachata, cumbia, and afro-esmeraldan marimba, for example, speaks to the growing awareness among afrochoteño youth of their place not only within the nation, but globally as part of a greater transnational community conceptualized in terms of Diaspora. What appears, then, to be two disparate and contradictory practices of La Bomba, one traditional and the other modern, is no more than a manifestation of the dual national and transnational notion of Afro-Ecuadorian identity referenced and reified in the rhetoric of etnoeducación. The African Diaspora, as the museum exhibits previously discussed show, simultaneously connotes unity and difference. While common origins and struggles define the Diaspora, the diversity of cultural expressions which comprise it arises from the divergent sociohistorical trajectories necessitating creative adaptation on the part of local communities. That Marabu emphasizes cultural origins and regional diversity while Sol Naciente celebrates

black cultural creativity and the shared cultural unity of the African Diaspora reflects more differences in perspective rather than degrees of authenticity. It also shows the extent to which current artistic choices in the representation of afrochoteño identity are informed by the rhetoric and discourse of etnoeduación and interculturalidad.

Discourse about La Bomba and Afrochoteño Identity

Cristóbol Barahona pulls out three drums of varying width and diameter from a small shed and sets them on their side on the dirt before me. “Recién hechos” (“recently made”), he explains as he taps one of the hides with his fingers. He nods approvingly at the resultant resonant tone as he sits in a chair and proceeds to place a medium sized drum on his knee. The instrument consists of two hides stretched taught over a cylindrical body made from a hollowed tree-trunk. Securing the drum heads and providing the necessary tension is a green nylon cord threading the supple wooden loops fitting the hides onto the body of the drum. Placing it between his knees, he begins to play the duple-meter rhythmic pattern characteristics of La Bomba. He then suddenly stops to hold aloft the drum and admire the craftsmanship. “Este es la bomba” (“this is the bomba”), he tells me. Residing in the community of Juncal, Barahona is a skilled bomba maker whose instruments are regularly commissioned by commercial Bomba musicians such as Milton Tadeo as well as foreign musicians, tourists, and scholars. He explains that the bomba is an instrument unique to the Chota-Mira valley, and that its roots lie with their enslaved ancestors who brought the memory of this musical instrument and tradition with them from Africa. Traditionally made of all natural materials found in the area, the drum requires the hides of a male and female goat, the trunk of a balso tree, a vine known as pigua, the fibers of a cabuya plant, and a cord made of deerskin. The hides are rubbed with ash and buried for the duration of approximately two weeks after which time the hair is removed by hand and the hides cleaned with water. The hides are then fit onto the drum using two loops made of the pigua vines. The cabuya fibers provide thread for tying the vines together and sewing the hides onto the inner or lower loop. A cord, ideally deer-skin, is then threaded between the outer or upper loops of the two hides along the circumference of the drum and back around the drum tying together the V shaped threads so as to provide the necessary tension. With a hint of pride and melancholy, Barahona claims to be the

sole bearer of this traditional craft. Well aware of the changing trends among younger Bomba musicians who now choose to use congas, bongos, and timbales in place of the bomba, he states that when he passes, so too will this specialized knowledge imparted to him by his ancestors: “Cuando me muero, se muere esto conmigo” (“when I die, this will die with me”). Despite Barahona’s dour pronouncement concerning the potential fate of the bomba, afrochoteños are more hopeful about the place and current state of the genre as indicated by the conscious positioning of groups like Marabu and Sol Naciente relative the notion of tradition. Indeed, as the foundation for La Bomba, the drum is regarded as a source of pride among afrochoteños. Regardless of its physical presence, the bomba is lauded as a symbol of African roots and afrochoteño cultural heritage as well as an expression of contemporary afrochoteño identity. As previously noted, this reflects in part the local/global relationship inherent in the rhetoric of etnoeducación. Local testimonies concerning La Bomba and its meaning, however, reveal an intimate relationship between La Bomba and afrochoteño identity that goes beyond the ideological and sociopolitical agendas of etnoeducación and interculturalidad. It is here that a deeper understanding of the genre and its significance with regards to afrochoteño identity may be approximated. Discussions of La Bomba necessarily start with a consideration of the drum and its symbolic significance. In its construction, the bomba is thought to convey the cosmovisión (cosmology or world-view) of the afrochoteño communities. As Plutarco Viveros explains, the use of both male and female goat hides in particular are thought to be of great symbolic value in this regard:

[La bomba] tenía que ser exclusivamente de cuero de chivo y chiva porque allí se expresa el matrimonio, la creación; se expresa la cosmovisión mismo de lo que viene siendo la cultura afrochoteña.

[[La bomba] had to be exclusively of a male and female goat hide because therein is expressed matrimony, the creation; is expressed the very cosmovisión that comes to be afrochoteño culture.]

Though unable to fully articulate this world-view, Plutarco reaffirms the significance of the bomba as an integral aspect of afrochoteño identity and culture in his reference to this frequently expressed interpretation of the drum (see Bueno 1991, 175; Chalá 2006, 158). In its representation of the union between man and woman, the bomba embodies the ideals of

complementary duality commonly shared among indigenous Andean communities.7 It is a notion that connotes both harmony and conflict, and that at once recognizes the relative independent equality and mutual dependence of these opposing forces for the sustenance and reproduction of life in all its manifestations. Implicit in this understanding is the realization that the whole expressed in the union between the pairs, as a synergistic relationship, is greater than its individual constituent aspects. Thus though individually potent forces, a man and woman together make possible life both in the biological and social sense (i.e., produce a functional or economically re-productive household). This is what Plutarco means when, borrowing language from the Church, he speaks of matrimony as creation. For this reason afrochoteños, musicians or otherwise, adamantly reiterate the necessity of using both male and female goat hides. As Plutarco’s comments reveal, the bomba contains and expresses an integral aspect of afrochoteño culture and identity. This sentiment is likewise conveyed in statements concerning individual meaning in relation to La Bomba. For example, Karla Aguas, a young woman from the community of Chota, explains the significance of the dance as such:

La Bomba es una música que nosotros bailamos para sentir lo de los ancestros, de los antepasados, porque eso viene a consecuencia, van criando y van bailando La Bomba y es para sentir, porque son bombas que uno no se baila por bailar, La Bomba es para sentirle lo que, la letra, lo que dice.

[La Bomba is a music that we dance to feel that of our ancestors, of our forefathers, because that comes as a consequence, they [afrochoteño children] grow and dance La Bomba and it is so to feel, because they are Bombas that one does not dance for the sake of dancing, La Bomba is to feel that which, the lyrics, what they say.]

As Karla notes above, La Bomba conveys a profound connection with the roots and cultural heritage of the afrochoteño communities that goes far beyond the entertainment value of the song and dance genre. Nelly Calderon, also from the community of Chota, corroborates this sentiment and goes so far as to extend it to its racial dimension:

La Bomba para mi es vida, porque un negro que no baila Bomba o no se identifica con eso no es negro, eso sí, lo único. Nosotros aprendemos a bailar La Bomba desde chiquititos. Con eso incluso aprendemos hasta a hablar y a cantar pues.

7 See Baumann (1996) on duality and music in the Andes. See also Wissler (2009) and Turino (1989) for duality and music in Peru. 75

[La Bomba for me is life, because a black person who does not dance Bomba or who does not identify with that [Bomba] is not black, that much [is] for certain. We learn to dance La Bomba at a very young age. Well, with that we also learn to even talk and sing.]

The statements above situate La Bomba and its significance in relation to the physical body, its racial essence, and even speech. They suggest that the essence of afrochoteño culture and identity is imprinted onto the body through song and dance. Inferred from their comments is the notion that this specialized knowledge, manifested physically and verbally, is what distinguishes afrochoteños from other individuals, black or otherwise. For Nelly in particular, the distinctive blackness of local identity is itself predicated upon the difference inherited and inculcated through La Bomba. The ability to speak in this context connotes not only learned speech patterns (i.e., local sayings and expressions) but also, and more significantly, a particular locus of enunciation. According to Nelly’s logic, if one cannot “speak” La Bomba, than one is not an afrochoteño. Conversely, to sing and dance La Bomba is to sing and dance the essence of what constitutes afrochoteño identity and culture, a trueism reflected in Plutarco’s conception of the drum in its symbolic meaning. The significance of La Bomba as an embodiment of afrochoteño identity and culture is made most evident in its conception as a social event. Local scholar Gualberto Espinoza, from the community of Santa Ana, refers to La Bomba first and foremost as a communal gathering integral to the formation and continuation of afrochoteño identity:

La Bomba como género musical específicamente negro aquí pues es algo que, o era, algo que se sentía, se llevaba en el alma. Era algo que nos permitía establecer esas relaciones de familiaridad, con la comunidad, con la familia. Porque era en los encuentras familiares donde La Bomba emergía, afloraba. Y no la bomba solamente como un instrumento, si no como todo un corpus, como todo un conjunto, como todo un universo patrimonial. porque se entiende la bomba primero como un instrumento, que da también el nombre al baile, da el nombre al música, da el nombre al momento: estamos hacienda bomba . . . Otros dicen “a la cochita amorosa,” hacer relación a la bomba que es un lugar, un momento, de encuentro comunitario. “Estamos en La Bomba.” Y si eso lo llevamos al género musical, pues se hace todavía más interesante, porque ya no es solamente un compartir ideas y intercambiar experiencias, si no también es negociar el alma en conjunto, en comunidad.

was in the family gatherings where La Bomba emerged, flourished, and not La Bomba only as an instrument, but also as a whole corpus, as a whole ensemble, as a whole hereditary universe. Because La Bomba is understood first as an instrument, which also gives name to the dance, gives name to the music, gives name to the moment: we are making Bomba . . . Others say “to the loving thing” making reference to La Bomba, that is a place, a moment, a communal gathering. “We are in La Bomba.” And if we take this [idea] to the musical genre, well it becomes even more interesting, because it is no longer only a sharing of ideas and interchanging of experiences, if not also it is to negotiate the soul in communion, in community.]

Gualberto’s interpretation foregrounds La Bomba’s role in the intersubjective negotiation of afrochoteño identity. Inferred from his comments is the notion that La Bomba, as a social event enabling the formation, expression, and mediation of familial and communal bonds, is not simply cultural inheritance—a pre-given tradition passed down from some distant point of origin—but the very means by which afrochoteño identity and culture persists.8 This understanding places emphasis on social action and process rather than on form and content, which provides a more dynamic perspective of La Bomba as an act of renewal and transformation; concepts alluded to in the symbolic value of the drum itself as creation embodied. Indeed, as Gualberto as well as other afrochoteños note, it is the drum that gives name and meaning to the music, dance, and event itself in its intimate association with afrochoteño identity. The equation of La Bomba with local cultural heritage and black ethnic identity noted in the above statements is consistent with the project of etnoeducación in its emphasis on African roots and local black cultural creativity. The discourse of collective memory evident in the exhibit “El Color de la Diaspora” is here invoked with recourse to ancestros, antepasados, and abuelos (ancestors, forefathers, and grandfathers). In this way, La Bomba is reaffirmed and validated as a tradition unique to the region and its people. This realization, in turn, fuels the debate over authenticity and reinforces the notion expressed by Plutarco Viveros and Barahona, among others, that La Bomba must be recuperated and preserved as distinct from more modern and foreign cultural elements. To do otherwise, as Barahona suggests, would be to allow the distinctive knowledge contained and expressed in this tradition (the essence of afrochoteño cultural identity) pass into oblivion. Indeed, this belief that La Bomba is intrinsic to an afrochoteño conception of self further reifies race as culture and biology as suggested by Karla and Nelly’s perception that to sing and dance La Bomba is to be afrochoteño.

8 This perspective resonates with current ethnomusicological understandings of and approaches to tradition (e.g., Bakan 2011, 27; Monson 2007, 10). 77

Yet in their metaphors of embodiment and creation, the above statements also go beyond the rhetoric of etnoeducación and thus provide a window into the potential significance of La Bomba beyond its sociopolitical value as a symbol of regional black ethnicity. Nelly’s reflection on La Bomba as life resonates with the ideas of creation, reproduction, renewal, and transformation evoked and alluded to in the bomba’s symbolism, Karla’s notion of dance as the present embodiment of the past, and Gualberto’s interpretation of La Bomba as an intersubjective social process of identity construction. As previously noted, these comments concerning La Bomba and its relationship to afrochoteño identity collectively foreground the processual aspects of the genre and bring attention to its dynamic and discursive dimensions. As such, they suggest a more fruitful path for discerning a more critically informed understanding of La Bomba as it relates to afrochoteño identity beyond representation.

Conclusion

The strategic resourcing of ethnicity and tradition among Ecuador’s subaltern populations in the contestation of mestizaje and its implicit exclusionary ideology of whitening since the 1990s has led to the envisioning and emergence of new collective identities at once a part of and transcendent of the nation. The sociopolitical agenda of etnoeducación and the recent shift in emphasis from region and nation to ethnicity and Africa/Diaspora in afrochoteño self- representations is indicative of this trend. In fostering transregional and transnational Diasporic linkages in the strengthening of local claims to social, economic, and political equality, the rhetoric of etnoeducación inadvertently allows for the creative appropriation of cultural elements from the circum-Diaspora otherwise incommensurate with the sociohistorical realities of the afrochoteño communities. La Bomba’s current celebration and bifurcation as tradition and African cultural heritage on the one hand and popular culture on the other reveals the extent to which this is the case. That cultural authenticity and cultural change are today issues of concern among afrochoteños such as Viveros and Espinoza speak to the social and political currency of ethnicity and its representation in Ecuador today. Contained in and expressed through that emergent hybridity represented as afrochoteño and Afro-Ecuadorian is thus not ethnicity as cultural origins and heritage, but as a power invested construct strategically co-opted and posited in opposition to whiteness and the process of ethnic erasure (mestizaje).

In this regard, current representation of afrochoteño identity in terms of black ethnicity may be understood as the most recent manifestation of the colonial difference. As such, they index and mediate the coloniality of power in their discursive engagement with the dialectic structuring the colonial difference. The conscious co-option and manipulation of blackness by Afro-Ecuadorians in the struggle for social, economic, and political equality, as evident in the objectives of etnoeducación, reflects the relative agency of such subaltern populations in the contestation of the coloniality of power. It also shows the degree to which the coloniality of power structures and informs the limits and possibilities of identity construction in the African Diaspora. As Walsh (2006, 55) notes, interculturalidad and etnoeducación constitute not counter-hegemonic discourses, but enunciations from the border or limits of the colonial difference. It is this aspect of the colonial difference, of being simultaneously of and along the margins of the coloniality of power, as Walsh (Ibid.) and Mignolo (2000, 18) respectively note, that endows them with their potential to disrupt, mediate, and potentially transform the terms of the coloniality of power. As argued in Chapter One and shown in this chapter, a recognition of identity in the African Diaspora as an enduring yet discursive and dynamic power invested construct arising from the coloniality of power allows for a more critical understanding of representations of blackness. La Bomba, as an expression of the colonial difference, necessarily embodies and makes manifest the tensions inherent in the coloniality of power informing the shifting perceptions and representations of afrochoteño identity. This is most apparent in the current bifurcation of La Bomba as well as in Sol Naciente’s reconciliation of the seeming contradictions inherent in their music. It is also alluded to in afrochoteño discourse about La Bomba in its intimate equation between La Bomba and life. As a metaphor, “La Bomba es vida” (La Bomba is life) captures and conveys the understanding that, as an expression of the colonial difference, La Bomba embodies the particular afrochoteño experience of the coloniality of power. To approach contemporary representations of La Bomba and afrochoteño identity is thus to examine the shifting manifestations of the colonial difference arising from the contestation of the coloniality of power.

CHAPTER THREE

VIGNETTES IN THE STYLE OF COPLAS

Quito, Ecuador 2006

Quito is buzzing with excitement. The Ecuadorian national soccer team is about to play their final game in the first round of the FIFA World Cup. That the opponent is a veteran world cup champion and the host of this year’s tournament seems of little concern to Ecuadorian soccer fans. Indeed, Quiteños are unusually optimistic about this particular match considering the recent performance of their beloved team. Regardless of the outcome, Ecuador has already won the honor of advancing to the next single elimination stage with two impressive wins. Their fast- paced, aggressive, and fearless playing style seems to have caught the attention of the international press and that of the usual soccer powerhouses as well. Rumors of coveted contracts with premier European leagues for individual Ecuadorian soccer players are beginning to spread. Quito will shut down for the duration of the soccer match and for much of the day thereafter depending on the outcome. I take the opportunity to watch the game in the comfort of the home of good family friends. Putting on my yellow, blue, and red soccer jersey, I join the growing crowd of guests who likewise don the infamous tri-color. The players take the field for the national anthem and the people settle in to get a good view of the projected image. As the camera pans across the faces of the soccer players, an elderly woman shakes her head and quips, “They will think this a nation of blacks!” “So what if they do, so long as they win,” responds another individual.

Tallahassee, Florida 2006

I begin my section on music in Latin America with a discussion of Brazil. Having just finished a two week virtual musical tour of Africa, starting in South Africa and moving up through Uganda and Tanzania to Mali and Ghana, I thought it only natural to follow the transatlantic slave trade routes to the New World and its musical traditions. The students in my World Music course take copious notes as I talk about the music and social significance of candomblé, capoeira, and samba. I end the class with a discussion of Olodum, samba-reggae, and Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints album, which features Olodum. They listen attentively and say nothing as they walk out at the end of class. A student hesitates as she walks toward the door and then turns around to walk toward me. I glance up with an inquisitive stare as I shut down and unplug my computer from the projector. “I’m sorry professor Lara,” she says to me, “but I’m confused about today’s lecture.” “Yes?” I reply. “I thought we were talking about Latin America,” she says. “Well, we are. Brazil,” I answer, looking at her sideways with some confusion. “Oh, its just that, well . . . ,” she trails off now visibly embarrassed. “Ohh,” I say as I begin to understand. I purse my lips as I think about how best to handle the situation, turn back on my computer, and show her a map of the slave-trade routes.

* * *

Guallabamba, Ecuador 2006

Family gatherings inevitably involve dancing, whether to recorded or live music. Today is no different. My father is leaving for Minnesota in a few days and I will return to Florida in a matter of weeks. A farewell party is the only way to convene and see those we otherwise would not have the chance to see during our brief visits. To do otherwise would most certainly cause resentment. Only twenty minutes north of Quito, my grandmother’s finca (small farm) in Guayllabamba provides a refreshing location for the occasion. The fresh-country air contrasts with the smog of the city and everyone seems content after what appears to have a long week.

Music, laughter, and conversation mingle in the open-air as the food is set aside and the crates of Pilsener are brought out. “Vivencias” by Marabu plays from a CD player placed outside the door of the house. I dance with one of my cousins in the open air, smiling and making conversation. The sun is starting to set and the air is getting rapidly cooler. My father calls to me as I excuse myself and grab a light jacket. He is sharing a drink with a cousin of his and wants me to join in on the conversation. My dad’s cousin wants to know about my summer research. I tell him I have been working out of Peguche, an indigenous community just north of Otavalo, and that I am learning Quichua in preparation for dissertation field-work in the area. He looks at me with a mixture of surprise and curiosity. After listening politely, he says, “That’s all fine and good, but why not do something with black music?” Taken aback, I stammer as I assure him that I eventually plan to do so, just not for the dissertation. “This country,” he continues somberly “is made up of several ethnic groups, each equally important. I’m not saying that we blacks deserve any more attention than others, but why is it that when scholars come to do their research, when politicians institute policy, and foreign organizations invest in local projects that it is always about the indigenous communities? What about us?” I avert my eyes feeling somewhat guilty and ashamed. Grabbing my hand firmly and looking me directly in the eyes he says, “We are black. You are black. This is who we are. Don’t forget your roots.”

Quito, Ecuador

“So, what will you discuss in your interviews?” asks my father’s cousin, Isabel one afternoon while sharing a cup of coffee with her mother, my grandmother, and myself. “Well, it will be about La Bomba, obviously, but I’m really hoping to use Bomba as a way to examine pertinent social issues such as race, racism, and social relations generally in Ecuador,” I respond as they politely nod. Recognizing that the issue of race may be difficult to broach during the course of my research, I seize on the opportunity to open a discussion among my own family whose reception and honesty may be more welcome and candid than among others. I quickly test the waters by

82 asking what, if any, discrimination they have personally suffered as Afro-Ecuadorians. Hesitating before answering, my grandmother chimes in, “Look, we don’t really think of ourselves in those terms, as ‘Afro-Ecuadorians.’” Catching my puzzled expressions she continues, “We are who we are and don’t really make distinctions or relate to others differently on the basis of skin color. Like hair color, it’s something that can’t be changed, something that is simply a part of who we are. But it doesn’t come to define us. The term ‘Afro-Ecuadorian’ is used by intellectuals and political leaders, but it has nothing to do with how we see or understand ourselves on a daily basis.”

* * *

Carapungo, Ecuador 2006

“I don’t associate with whites, only blacks” says my cousin with pride as we ride past a few friends of his standing near the edge of the park at the entrance to Carapungo. Sitting behind him on his moped, I simply nod. I let slide the irony that Mauricio himself is by far the fairest of our family and his friends, passing more for a white-mestizo than for a mulatto. I’m careful not to anger him, however. This is the first time I’ve seen Mauricio in fifteen years. The rumor was that he was spending time in jail for drug-related charges the last time I had passed through Ecuador. Despite the lapse of time, he receives me warmly, and is eager to introduce me to his friends and to his neighborhood. Carapungo is among the communities constituting Quito’s northward urban sprawl. Much of my father’s family live here, having settled in the area along with several other predominantly Afro-Ecuadorian immigrants from the Chota-Mira valley during the 1970s and 1980s. It is among the most densely populated black communities in Quito and, perhaps for this reason, is known among Quiteños for being a rough neighborhood. So much so that cab drivers often refuse or charge extra for going into Carapungo after sundown. For me, Carapungo is and always has been simply where my family lives. “We need to stop by the house,” says Mauricio. His daughter, a beautiful three year-old girl with dark brown eyes and braided hair, throws up her hands and loosens a big smile as we enter the doorway. She’s sitting on the lap of Mauricio’s grandmother Magdalena who attempts to get up as we walk in.

“Don’t worry, mother,” he says as he picks up his daughter. Magdalena, the eldest of my grandmother’s sisters, is a woman of great strength who has spent much of her life raising the children of the family, from her own daughter to her grandchildren and now great-grandchildren. The handkerchief covering her hair, sweater and knee length dress betray her rural origins. Motioning to his grandmother he says to me fiercely, “She raised me, you know. She is my real mother.” Pride, bitterness and resentment resonate through his words and tone of voice. His grandmother looks at him with sadness. “You’re mother has sacrificed everything for you, don’t speak like that about your mother.” “You are my mother,” he repeats with tenderness this time and motions for us to go. Mauricio’s story is all too familiar in Ecuador and among Afro-Ecuadorians in particular. Since I can recall, his mother, Sara has worked abroad as a live in cook and maid for wealthy families in Miami and now Spain so as to provide for her two children and now grandchildren. Despite the transition from the sucre to the U.S. dollar following the 2001 economic collapse in Ecuador, U.S. and European salaries still go a long way to providing a boost in local household incomes. As we hop back onto the moped, I can’t help but think about my own grandmother and the sacrifices that she made for her own family. In fact, it was Magdalena who took care of my father and his siblings in Cuajara as children when my grandmother went to work as a live-in cook and servant for wealthy families in Quito. I also think about my aunt and uncle who today similarly send checks back to their own respective families from Spain. I think about Mauricio’s hardened but resolute and proud demeanor. It is a characteristic trait readily discernible in the faces and postures of many in Carapungo, and one long reflected in the weary visage of the elderly who first arrived to the community from their rural homelands. “All my friends are black,” repeats Mauricio acknowledging three young black men sharing a Pilsener (a local beer) outside an alley-way shop as we speed off toward the main road.

Quito, Ecuador 2007

My sister Nicolette and I cram into the backseat of a two door car along with my cousin. Another cousin pulls up the front passenger seat to give us more room as her friend takes the wheels. They are excited, having convinced us to go out dancing with them despite my sister’s

84 initial protests. This is only the second time she’s been to Ecuador, and having been in Quito only a few days, she is having trouble adjusting to the altitude and food. Realizing there was no way to get out of this adventure without causing offense, we decide to go and call it an early night if nothing else. My cousins are excellent salsa dancers and are eager to show us the town. “So where to?” asks the driver. “Seseribó?” I suggest. Seseribó is an up-scale and trendy salsa club in Quito on the outskirts of the infamous mariscal district that caters predominantly to upper-middle class mestizos, extravagant dancers, and tourists. My cousin screws her face in disapproval, “I like Mayo 68 better,” she says. I know Mayo 68. It is a tiny hole-in-the wall dance club directly in the heart of the mariscal. Though the space is smaller, they do charge less and it is more down to earth than Seseribó in the sense that it attracts a younger, local, and racially more diverse crowd. “Sure, why not,” I reply sensing her discomfort with Seseribó. Along the way our cousins fill in their friend on my family background. He seems puzzled by the family connection. “How are you related again?” he asks. My father, an Afro-Ecuadorian born in Cuajara in the Chota-Mira valley, raised in Quito, and now living in the United States, is the cousin of their mother, Isabel, they explain. He smiles, “You’re black!” “No, they’re mulatto, right?” responds my cousin as though defending me from an insult. Technically she is right. My mother is Caucasian of European descent. I turn to Nicolette, but she’s starring out the window, apparently lost in the misery of her stomach illness.

* * *

Minneapolis, Minnesota 2007

I leave for Ecuador in a matter of days to begin my dissertation field-work. I’m anxious and uncertain as to how everything will turn out. Will I find what I’m looking for? Will I be able to put together a good dissertation? I don’t know exactly what to expect and I’m trying to keep an open mind. I know from previous experience in Ecuador that approaching fieldwork with rigid, preconceived ideas can be counterproductive. Flexibility is crucial and the only thing I can truly

85 expect is constant change. Still, navigating such tumultuous waters with only a vague idea of where I want to end up is a bit unnerving. In need of support and assurance, I call a longtime friend. I tell her about my anxieties about the trip and about the dissertation in general. “What about your family in Ecuador?” she asks, “this must be a very personal topic for you to address.” I tell her about my experience with my father’s cousin in 2006 who at that time expressed to me a certain truth that led me to change my dissertation topic. “But are you black?” She asks. Taken aback, I respond, “Well, technically I’m mulatto.” “Huh,” she says with genuine curiosity, “Ok. But do you consider yourself black?” I hesitate before responding, “I don’t know . . . I don’t really think about myself in those terms.”

Tallahassee, Florida 2007

I collect myself as I observe the students file into the stadium-style lecture hall. For a brief moment I hesitate about the day’s planned lecture. Overall, I am having a good experience with this particular class. Popular music in the United States is a course that naturally lends itself to interesting topics and discussions and it is not difficult to understand why it would attract so many students. Fortunately for me and my teaching assistant, only about 120 students are registered for an otherwise 200 person capacity classroom. Though some teachers might discourage discussion in such a large class, I try as much as possible to engage the students by soliciting their thoughts on the course and lecture material. Today, however, I am a little worried. The issue of race and racism is always a difficult subject to address no matter the class size, and it crosses my mind that the discussion could potentially devolve if not facilitated correctly. My students are good kids, but I sense they lack a certain basic knowledge about history. It comes across through certain innocent but naïve questions and comments and through the blank or uninterested stares that I get when discussing black face minstrelsy, the history of Rock n’ Roll, figures like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, and the social significance of Motown and Stax Records, hip-hop, and gangsta’ rap. In my conversations with students on these issues

86 over the years, I am left wondering whether or not it’s me or the students who lack perspective. Has race really become a non-issue for this younger generation only some 50 years removed from the civil rights era? My observations, personal experiences, and my knowledge of history tell me firmly no. It is an issue these students need to not only hear about but a conversation in which they need to be directly involved. With resolve, I take a deep breath and approach the center of the room as I glance at my watch. The class settles. “What if I were to tell you I am black?” I ask addressing the class as a whole. From the corner of the room an African American student stifles a laugh while another says under her breath “uh-uh,” shaking her head as if to say ‘you could never pass as being black.’ I smile, not at all surprised by the reaction.

* * *

Quito, Ecuador 2007

Trying to stay dry in the December rain, I cover my head with my jacket as I hop off the still rolling bus and follow my cousin Mercedes who quickly makes her way to the sidewalk. She glances back with a slight grin and quickens her pace as she heads up the steep hill. “It’s just around the corner,” she tells me as I hurriedly catch up. We pass few people as we make a turn onto an even steeper uphill road. I’ve never been to this part of Quito and though my curiosity would normally compel me to look around and ask questions the dismal day and circumstances of our visit discourage me from doing so. La Bota, as this neighborhood is known, is similar to Carapungo in terms of its demographics and reputation for being a somewhat rough area. Much to my grandmother’s disapproval, Mercedes is dating a young man who lives here. I’ve met Jazz, as they call him, only once before. His family is originally from the community of Chota in the Chota-Mira valley and he returns to visit often though he himself lives in La Bota along with a roommate. “Here we are,” says Mercedes as we approach a door of one of the many grey, square cinder-block structures lining the slope of the street. Mercedes assures me she’ll be quick as she knocks on the door. I give her a reassuring look. Though Mercedes needs no help from me, being an intelligent and street savvy young lady in her early twenties, I accompany her nonetheless as a favor to our grandmother. Jazz glances out the window and then opens the door motioning us to come in. The main living room is bare save a few chairs. A stereo somewhere out of site is playing a familiar song by Dr. Dre. Jazz doesn’t offer us a seat as he disappears to

87 the back room telling us he’ll be right back. Mercedes looks at me apologetically and distracts herself with the puppy pit-bull lounging in the corner of the room. “I gotta say, today was a good day,” I begin to sing along with the familiar refrain as a glance around. A poster of Bob Marley and another of a famous U.S. basketball player are the only decorations in the room. The smell of tobacco and marijuana linger faintly in the air. I make my way to Mercedes and the puppy as Jazz walks back into the room donning a pair of baggy black jeans and a red baseball cap with the logo of a U.S. basketball team. I can’t help but wonder whether or not it’s an original.

Community of Chota, Chota-Mira Valley, Ecuador 2008

I excuse myself as I walk ahead through the door of the house and into the main living area. A little girl rests on a couch on the opposite wall and an even younger toddler walks into the room carrying a miniature guitar. I smile and mimic a strumming motion as he looks at me with curiousity. I turn my attention back to the girl as the mother of the children, a neighbor and friend of Nelly’s in the community of Chota, walks into the house carrying a glass of water, a cigarette, matches, and an egg. Knowing I would be interested in observing, she had invited me to watch her diagnose and treat her daughter using the traditional healing methods used in Chota and in the neighboring indigenous communities. The young girl, who is otherwise very lively, is visibly ill though she makes no protest about her condition. Her mother seems to think she has mal de aire (bad or evil air), which is similar to mal de ojo (evil eye). The malady is the result of negative, evil, or bad energy (definition dependent on with whom you speak) which can be cured by the use of an egg and smoke, which absorb and dispel the negative energy and purify the body. The girl takes no notice as the mother begins to pass the egg quickly over the body of the girl, rubbing vigorously at times. Holding the egg gingerly as though hazardous, she breaks the egg into the glass. As she does so, she explains that the way in which the egg settles in the water will tell her whether or not her daughter was afflicted with the malady. Nodding with satisfaction, she confirms the diagnosis as I continue to stare at the egg floating at the bottom of the glass. She then lights the cigarette and takes a few shorts puffs before inhaling a mouthful of smoke and blowing it steadily over her daughter’s head, torso, legs, back, and arms. Sending her daughter off to bed, the woman, pleased with the treatment, smiles.

Before leaving, I ask her about modern medicine and whether or not she would consider taking her daughter to Ibarra. She explains that while she has and does go on occasion to the hospitals and clinics in Ibarra, she prefers not to for two main reasons: the cost of travel and medical treatment as well as discrimination. “Besides,” she adds, “why would we go all the way to Ibarra to take care of mal de aire?!”

* * *

2008, Chalguayaco, Ecuador

I talk excitedly about my thoughts on the origins of La Bomba and the issue of African retentions as I walk alongside my friend and companion Billy. “To say that La Bomba is an African drum isn’t really tenable considering we can’t really prove that it was physically transferred to this place from Africa. Still, there is no question that African slaves brought with them the memory of such instruments and traditions, and, more importantly, of their social significance.” “Enslaved Africans,” says Billy sternly. “Hm?” I ask with some confusion. “You said African slaves when what you mean to and should is enslaved Africans.” “Oh, right,” I say as though a minor oversight. “You see, the African people were forcibly put in a position of servitude; they were not given to that condition by their being African.” He explains. “This is a major problem that we must consciously address and fight against in the valley: the notion that we are somehow in a position or condition of inferiority and are therefore destined to be docile and servile as a result of our mis-represented history as slaves.” I nod, immediately recalling the impetus for much of the research and literature produced by scholars such as Melville Herskovits in the United States. “Unfortunately many afrochoteños have adopted this persona of humility and servitude, this sense of inferiority which stems directly from this interpretation. So we are trying to fix this by reclaiming our history and reeducating our youth about who they are and where they come from.” Feeling somewhat foolish for having made such a gross misjudgment in word choice, I apologize and thank him for his correction. We continue our walk in silence as we approach the

89 community of Chalguayaco. We are on our way to an interview with one of the orange-leaf players of the banda mocha. I consider Billy’s words in relation to the mixed humility and distrust many afrochoteños tend to exhibit toward outsiders such as myself. Indeed, the Chota- Mira valley is known for being wary of outsiders. But among its communities, Chalguayco and its inhabitants are especially famous for the fierceness of their guardedness. Such attitudes are understandable considering the history of the region as well as of the inability of local, state, and international governmental and non-governmental organizations to yet realize significant social and economic changes for the communities of the region. I am therefore elated and grateful to Billy for making this interview happen. An afrochoteño from the community of Chota, Billy works in the ministry of culture and sport through the municapility of Ibarra. As such, it is his business to know about and work with many of the people with whom I’m interested in interviewing. His resourcefulness is matched by his congeniality and easy-going demeanor which likewise serves him well in his line of work. On this particular day Billy is serving more than just a friend and guide, but as a fieldwork companion as well. He’s interested in my dissertation research as well as in putting together a recording project of the banda mocha through the ministry of culture and sports. He later tells me that there was no possible way they would have given the interview had I gone by myself.

Monmouth, Illinois 2010

I lightly knock on the door to the small upstairs room serving as my at-home office. “Headache?” I ask my younger sister who is sitting on the floor beside the bookshelf. “Yeah, I just don’t feel all that well,” she responds somewhat distracted. Carmen is sitting on the floor beside my bookshelf engrossed in a little yellow book. I tilt my head sideways trying to catch a glimpse of the title as I set the cup of water and Ibuprofen on the desk. It’s a Lingala-Spanish dictionary by Jean Kapenda I’m using as part of my dissertation research. Though the first part of the book is in fact a dictionary, the last half contains a brief history of the Congo-Angola region, the Chota-Mira valley, and, most significantly, a list of names commonly found among the Afro-Ecuadorian population in Esmeraldas and the Chota- Mira valley with their probable origins. This book, written by linguist Jean Kapenda is much cited by contemporary afrochoteño scholars like José Chalá seeking to validate afrochoteño identity and culture in reaffirming its African origins and heritage. According to Kapenda (2001,

121-122), names such as Anangonó, Congo, and Chalá common in the Chota-Mira valley, for instance, are thought to originate among the Mongo, Bakongo, Luba, Lunda, Kuba, and other tribes located along the Congo-river basin. It also contains a list of common surnames of Indigenous and European origin. These names index the history of colonial slavery and serve as a reminder of the painful origins and history of the afrochoteño communities. “Interesting book, isn’t it?” She looks up and nods distantly. I explain the premise of the book and then direct toward the list of surnames appended at the end, scrolling through the columns. “Look, there it is,” I tell her pointing, “Lara.” “You know how dad always jokes that we can change our last names, that Lara really isn’t our real last name?” She nods and looks up somewhat confused. “Well, he’s right. It’s not really our last name. It’s a name inherited from the European owners and masters of our enslaved ancestors. It’s a slave name.” She says nothing as she turns back to the book and stares at the name. “Carmen?” I say after a moment having expected some sort of response. She nods as she looks up slowly, her eyes red and wet with tears.

* * *

Ibarra, Ecuador 2008

Shortly after Carnaval Coangue I have a chance run in with Milton Tadeo while walking past the municipality in Ibarra. Though we’ve never formally met, he stops politely and greets me as though a casual acquaintance as I approach him. Star-struck, I express my appreciation for his work and career as the preeminent bombero of the Chota-Mira valley. He listens attentively, his quite demeanor and short stature contrasting sharply with his commanding presence and exuberant persona on-stage. I tell briefly about my dissertation research and share with him my desire to conduct an interview and perhaps even take a few bomba lessons from him. “Sure, sure,” he says, “we’ll be in touch.” A few days later my cell phone rings while on the bus from Chota to Ibarra. It’s Milton Tadeo. “About those lessons,” he tells me, “I need an advance on the payment.” “Oh, well we still haven’t settled on the amount,” I begin somewhat warily.

“Don’t worry about that, I just need sixty dollars. Could you meet me at the hospital in Ibarra?” Confused and alarmed I ask him if everything is alright. “Yes, I’m ok, I just need some money for my son who is sick in the hospital.” Something about the tone of his voice makes me suspicious. Could it be that this nationally and internationally recognized Bomba legend with perhaps the most successful recording and touring career of any other bombero in history to date really needs monetary help from a stranger he barely knows and only recently met?

Columbus, Ohio 2009

News-paper article clipping attached to an email correspondence received Jan. 31, 2009:

Gobierno entregará una casa a los hijos del fallecido compositor Milton Tadeo

El gobierno entregará una casa a los hijos del compositor imbabureño Milton Tadeo que falleció el pasado jueves victimo de un cáncer terminal de próstata, anunció el Presidente de la República, Rafael Correa, durante su enlace radial 106 desde El Quinche.

El Jefe de Estado manifestó su pesar por esta pérdida para la cultura ecuatoriana y se solidarizó con los hijos y esposa del autor de Carpuela y el tradicional ritmo de “La Bomba” en el valle Del Chota.

El mandatario dispuso que una delegación del gobierno integrada por los gobernadores de Imbabura y Carchi así como el Ministro de Cultura, asista al sepelio de Milton Tadeo que se realiza hoy.

Según el gobernante a pesar de que su administración está haciendo todos los esfuerzos por cambiar el país, reconoció que aún falta más celeridad para actuar de ahí que recordó la tradicional frase “ todo en vida", dando a entender que no se pudo hacer nada cuando Tadeo aún estaba vivo.

El gobernante aseguró que ahora que Milton Tadeo ya no está más, el gobierno no abandonará a su familia y que se está trabajando para entregar una casa a sus hijos como un homenaje al compositor afroecuatoriano.

A pesar de que su deseo era ser sepultado en Piquiucho, en donde vivía con su esposa, sus hijos decidieron que sus restos descansaran en la población de Carpuela, donde vivió los primeros años de su vida y se inspiró para componer varias de sus canciones.

[Government to grant a house to the children of the deceased composer Milton Tadeo

The government will grant a house to the children of Imbaburan composer Milton Tadeo who passed away this past Friday a victim of terminal prostate cancer, announced the president of the Republic Rafael Correa, during his weekly radio talk radio 106 from El Quinche.

The Chief of State expressed his sorrow for this loss for Ecuadorian culture and he reached out to the children and wife of the author of Carpuela and the traditional rhythm of “La Bomba” in the Chota Valley.

The mandate disclosed that a delegation of the government made up of political leaders of Imbabura and Carchi such as the Minister of Culture assist in the burial of Milton Tadeo, which takes place today.

According to the governor despite the fact that his administration is doing all that they can to change the country, he recognized that there yet lacks more speed in acting recalling the traditional phrase “all in life”, meaning that nothing could be done while Tadeo was still alive.

The governor assured that now that Milton Tadeo is no longer here, the government will not abandon his family and that they are working to grant a house to his children as an homage to the Afro-Ecuadorian composer.

Despite that his desire was to be buried in Piquicho, where he lived with his wife, his children decided that his remains should rest in the community of Carpuela, where he lived the first years of his life and was inspired to compose many of his songs.]

* * *

Chota, Ecuador 2008

It is the second day of Carnaval Coangue. I seek shelter from the children and their buckets of river-water, finding a welcome place to rest in the kitchen of a dear friend, Nelly. Among the first to welcome me into the community when I first arrived, Nelly and her family have been a tremendous source of inspiration and information throughout the course of my research. From her house, located up the hill between the main street of Chota and the Pan American highway, I can see the festival goers playing in the river below and dancing in the soccer field and clearly hear as well as feel the music reverberating from the loudspeakers. Nelly’s home and kitchen in particular, which is adjacent to her home, has provided much warmth, respite and comfort for me and many other visitors and Choteños over the course of the year. A middle-aged single mother of four now young-adults, she works during the week as a cook in a restaurant in Ibarra only to return home to feed any and all who walk through her door. I myself have spent many

93 memorable hours in this kitchen conversing with Nelly and other guests over coffee and entertaining the children who scamper in and out of the kitchen with songs and games played on the conuno (a conical drum from Esmeraldas) propped in the corner. Being the weekend of Carnaval Coangue, Nelly’s house is more busy than usual. Such celebrations in the Chota-Mira valley typically provide occasions for family reunions as children, grandchildren, cousins, and siblings return from Quito, Ibarra, and elsewhere to their place of origin. On this particular occasion, I am greeted by one of Nelly’s sons, Andres, who had arrived that morning from Quito with his father, a well known and respected anthropologist originally from the community of Chota. At twenty years of age, Andres takes after his father in his intellect and curiosity and over the past few months, I’ve enjoyed engaging him on issues such as race and racism in Ecuador. On this day, however, he decides to test my knowledge of La Bomba. Pulling up a chair across from me, Andres casually asks how my research is progressing. As I begin to answer, he folds his arms, looks at me intently and interrupts, saying in a curious though challenging tone: “So, what is La Bomba? What have you learned so far?” Taken aback, I stammer and begin to repeat a standard descriptive definition: “Well, La Bomba refers to a traditional drum, rhythm, and dance of African heritage that developed among the Afro-Ecuadorian communities of the Chota-Mira valley sometime during the colonial period.” “Yes, . . . ,” he says leaning in more intently, “but what is it?” he repeats. Uncertain what he means, I go on to fill in a few additional descriptive details: “The drum is made of material taken directly from nature, including the trunk of a tree and pair of goat hides said to be male and female; the drum was often accompanied by a person playing an orange leaf: the lyrics traditionally dealt with local topics and concerns; the dance involves a male dancing in a circular pattern around a female who wears a wine or liquor bottle atop her head . . . ,” I trail off as a smile widens on his face. He shakes his head, laughs and says, “You [foreigners/outsiders/scholars] will never understand.” “Understand what?” I retorted defensively, “did I not answer your question?”

“Yes and no,” he tells me. “La Bomba is that in part, but it is so much more for us, the people of this region: La Bomba is life,” he says, “and that is what you will never understand.” Curious and eager to return the challenge, I ask him to explain what he means by that expression, La Bomba es vida (Bomba is life). Smugly, however, he once again folds his arms and refuses to share. By now a little upset, I argue that withholding such pertinent knowledge or insight is counterproductive in combating academic misrepresentations. Andres merely shrugs, looks as if about to say something, then pauses. After a moment, he looks me in the eye and with a resolute tone he responds, “My thoughts on La Bomba I am saving for my own book.”

Community of Chalguayco, Chota-Mira valley, Ecuador 2008

Billy turns off of the highway onto a rough gravel road just before the community of Juncal and heads up the hill toward Chalguayaco. Though each community in the region shares a similar history and culture, each one has a distinct characteristic for which it is locally recognized. The community of Chota, for instance, is identified with commerce and education, while Carpuela is associated with music, and Mascarillas with artisanship. Chalguayco, on the other hand, is known for belligerence, or more specifically the proud and fiercely guarded character of its people. We are on our way to interview Segundo Isidro Yepez Mendez, an agriculturalist and musician in the community’s banda mocha, an ensemble unique to the region reminiscent of a community band and featuring instruments made of natural materials. Segundo, well known for his ability to play the orange-leaf, has granted us an interview thanks largely to Billy’s resourcefulness as an administrator and representative of the region in the municapility of Ibarra. Billy glances anxiously about as we pull into the town square and park. He motions to a familiar child walking past and asks him where we can find Segundo. “Over there,” says the child pointing down a street off to the corner of the square, “but he is not there now, he is tending crops at the garden.” “Run and go get him, will you? Tell him we are here for that business I told him about the other day.” The child gives him a resentful look as he turns around and slowly makes his way down the road in the opposite direction.

“Go, run!” yells Billy. Turning to me, Billy comments, “We are lucky that Segundo agreed to do this interview. The people of this town don’t care much for strangers. They want to have anything to do with them. If you had not known me, he would have never agreed to give you an interview.” This was not the first time I had heard Billy express such a sentiment. I nod recognizing that such wariness reflects the precarious relationship afrochoteños in general have had with “others” over the years, especially those otherwise well intentioned individuals and organizations who are perceived to take much from the local communities while give little back in return. We make our way over to his home and stand in the porch, waiting silently. Soon, the boy returns with a tall, lean middle aged man with closely shaved and graying hair wearing jeans and a sleeveless green shirt. He walks deliberately as the boy skips ahead to Billy who steps out from the porch to greet them. I stand back a little ways observing as Billy and Segundo talk quietly. Segundo nods as he listens and glances in my direction with a wary but not unkind glance. I walk over them as Billy introduces me. Segundo’s firm handshake and rough palms betray his vocation while his voice, raspy and with cough, and bloodshot eyes suggests his vices. We exchange pleasantries, and then I explain to him about my research project and how I hope he might be able to help me. After listening politely with his arms crossed, he tells me that he values and supports the project and the questions I am asking, and that he will give me the interview, but under the condition that I pay him. Glancing at Billy who was looking at me with caution, I ask warily what sort of payment would be acceptable under the circumstances. A carton of cigarettes, he responded to my dismay. Flustered, I turned to Billy for help as he quickly jumped into the conversation and deftly bargained the terms of our meeting down to a pack of cigarettes which Billy later purchased at a local stand. Recognizing my ethical dilemma, Billy afterward shared with me his disapproval of Segundo’s request for cigarettes. “The people here feel entitled” he explains, “and they do have a right to demand some sort of compensation or recognition, but not of that form. That is abusive as well as destructive to the community. It gives others the wrong idea about us and it also tells you something about the state of mind of the people here who do not know the true value and worth of their own culture, that they would gladly give up their treasures and pride for cigarettes and liquor. That is

96 what the Spanish did to us and the indigenas. It is a mentality of those enslaved and colonized. We need to teach our children and community better, to respect ourselves.” I listen quietly and nod in agreement, still feeling uneasy somewhere deep in the pit of my stomach for having partaken in an exchange intimately linking me historically to countless other such exploitative arrangements between outsiders and locals of the region. It would be the last formal interview I conduct during the course of my fieldwork.

* * *

Chota, 2008

I sit on the ledge of the second floor terrace of Zoila Espinoza’s home, tapping my fingers absently on the head of the bomba resting on my knee as I wait. The first stars appear in the evening sky and I allow my mind wander to the sound of the rushing river below. I begin to question whether or not I made the right decision in passing up an opportunity to take bomba lessons with Milton Tadeo. The general unspoken consensus among fellow ethnomusicologists holds that one must apprentice with a “master” musician of a given genre or instrument to fully understand the dynamics involved in the process of learning and transmitting a musical tradition and the explicit or implicit body of knowledge it contains. While studying with such a renowned professional as Milton Tadeo would no doubt lend me a certain amount of prestige and credibility among afrochoteños and ethnomusicologists alike, I cannot help but wonder to what extent such informal modes of sanctioning marginalize and silence contesting voices and perspectives. This question troubles me deeply as I further reflect on the rifts and factions between and within the various afrochoteño communities and organizations evident in disagreements and competition over projects, resources, funding, and representation. Afrochoteños in Carchi complain that they are often neglected by FECONIC which they perceive to favor projects benefiting the communities in Imbabura. Afrochoteño leaders and intellectuals vie for the ability to represent their communities, history, and culture in the political and academic arenas. Likewise bomberos contend for recognition as the sole guardians of La Bomba’s authenticity. Interviews amongst them inevitably digresses to disparaging comparative statements intended to at once discredit opposing perspectives and validate the speaker’s authority. Indeed, even the very term “afrochoteño” is a point of contention for many in the communities of the valleys of

Salinas and Carchi located on the Carchi half of the Chota-Mira valley. As a few notable critics claim, the exclusionary label, which references only the Imbabura portion of the broader region referenced by the regional label Chota-Mira valley, speaks to the specific agendas of a few individuals with a great deal of social and political capital and persuasion at the moment. Such a charged environment necessarily makes undertaking ethnographic fieldwork and reconstructing the history of an oral tradition so intimately linked to local (racial) identity a political and power- invested project. As I come to terms with my decision, I’m quickly brought back to the present by a voice below. “Greetings!” shouts up a young man as he approaches the house. “Hey!” I call back as I look at my watch, mildly surprised by his punctuality. Danny makes his way up the steps along the side of the house as I approach him and shake his hand. Dressed casually in blue jeans, a light brown t-shirt, and a light jacket, he explains that he rushed home from work in Ibarra to stop by his home just up the hill to change clothes before meeting me for my bomba lesson. He didn’t want to be late because immediately afterward he must rush down the hill to practice with the band. Danny is the conga player for the latest Bomba group to come out of Chota, Sol Naciente. The group, which consists of five young local individuals in their twenties, has gained a significant following since their formation in 2005 not only within Chota, but throughout the region and even in Esmeraldas. Their success owes much to their innovative instrumentation and fusion of Bomba with eclectic and popular dance styles from salsa to the rhythms of the coastal marimba repertoire. The group is also distinguished by their use of a keyboard, and a drum-set in addition to congas, bongos, a metal scraper, and occasionally an indigenous bombo. Conspicuously absent from the groups instrumentation is the bomba itself. In its place, Danny outlines and elaborates the basic bomba pattern on the congas. Though Sol Naciente is often criticized by older and more established Bomba musicians for straying too far from the defining characteristics of the genre, Danny maintains that Sol Naciente is merely adapting and responding to the current circumstances and changes evident in their surroundings and daily-life. Indeed, this much seems to resonate with their growing fan base who, though largely youth, also consists of many adults, all of whom equally enjoy listening and dancing to the music of more traditional Bomba groups like Marabu.

“What we do,” notes Daniel referring to Sol Naciente in previous conversation on the topic, “is adapt our music to the rhythms that most speak to our audience.” When asked whether or not what they perform may be considered Bomba, he adds that though aware of the importance of tradition, Sol Naciente distinguishes itself from other groups in terms of their constant desire to innovate rather than remain static. When pressed, however, he admits that though distinct in terms of sound, the music of Sol Naciente is as much Bomba in spirit as the Bombas of Milton Tadeo or Mario Diego Congo. I thank Danny in advance for the lessons as I pass him the bomba. He shakes his head as if to say not to worry and examines the double-headed drum. He nods in admiration as his eyes and fingers pass over the frame. He feels the surface of the drum, gives it a few taps with his palms, and tests the tension of the nylon ropes. “Cristóbol Barahona made this bomba, right?” he states more so than asks. “You can tell by the quality. This is a very good bomba,” he acknowledges as if to reassure me. Indeed, Barahona’s workmanship preceeds him, and many consider him to be the last true bomba maker in the region. Whether or not this is actually the case is arguable, yet there is little question that afrochoteño bomberos frequently commission bombas from Barahona. “I was hoping that you could show me how to properly tune the bomba and that I might videotape the process, if it’s alright with you,” I tell him. “Certainly,” he says shrugging. Danny places the bomba on the floor, loosens the knot at the end of single braided nylon cord threading the loops holding the drum hides in place and commences to tighten the slack in the rope throughout the drum using solely his physical strength. Once finished, he places the drum between his knees and strikes the drum-head. The sound is notably higher in pitch and tighter in sound. Without a word he commences to play the basic bomba pattern, alternating between the two variations known as sol and tierra (sun and earth). I watch attentively and within a matter of moments I begin to mimic the pattern on my knees. He nods in approval and stops to explain the patterns. He tells me there are two basic patterns, traditionally known as sol and tierra, though he himself refers to them as sol and do, most likely in reference to the two distinct pitches produced by the particular technique of the pattern and their solfege relationship of tonic and dominant. He breaks down the patterns for me before handing me the bomba and then cues me by counting

off what sounds like a two-three clave. Taken aback, I miss my entrance and look at him inquisitively, uncertain as to how the clave-like pattern relates to the bomba. “This is how we start our songs in Sol Naciente” he explains, taking the drum and reciting the cueing rhythm before jumping straight into the otherwise unrelated bomba pattern. Shrugging, I follow his lead and quickly adjust between the feel of the clave, which spans a group of eight beats felt in four, and that of the bomba which spans a group of four beats felt in two. Only later, in acclimating my listening between the two genres, did I realize that the basic bomba rhythm corresponds with the bongo pattern in salsa. Considering the musical tastes of many contemporary afrochoteño youth, it became apparent as to why Sol Naciente would choose to begin their songs in such a way. The lesson continues for yet another twenty minutes as I struggle with the variation of tierra, which requires a sliding motion in the weak hand leading into the downbeat. This technique serves to simultaneously bend the pitch of the open-slap tone and dampen that of the subsequent one. He tells me that tierra should be used to vary and compliment the sol pattern, alternating between the two in equal phrase lengths. He demonstrates by playing first sixteen bars of each, than eight, four, and lastly two before concluding with a stock pattern ending on beat one. When I ask him about the significance of these patterns and their use, he shrugs and responds that it is mainly to add variety and that it is an aesthetic. Danny’s pragmatic interpretation neither supports nor contradicts my previous understanding of these patterns as somehow being related to the cosmology of the afrochoteño communities. I say nothing, simply nodding in response as I try to make sense of the seeming contradictions noted to date. Before leaving, Danny gives me a preview of other rhythms he intends to teach me. Among them are various other patterns associated with and clearly identified as other genres, such as a San Juan, Pasacalle, and Colombian Cumbia. He then proceeds to give me examples of specific well-known Bombas which incorporate these patterns. “But are those Bombas?” I ask him afterward now even more puzzled than before. “Of course!”

Ibarra, Ecuador 2008

“Do you mind if I video-tape this?” I ask Gualberto as he reaches for the bomba next to his chair. Taking his shrug of indifference as tacit approval, I connect the video camera to the tripod and

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adjust the microphone of my hand-held voice recorder. All the while I thank him profusely for agreeing to make the trip to Ibarra for this interview. I’ve been anticipating this meeting ever since I met Gualberto Espinoza in Quito, January of 2008. An afrochoteño from Santa Ana, Gualberto is a bombero, a student of anthropology, and the founder and director of a local afrochoteño publication known as El Griot. In his youth, he performed Bomba alongside his father and uncle who were among the first to commercially record Bombas in the early 1980s as Los Hermanos Espinoza. Upon meeting him for the first time, I was immediately struck by his passion for and knowledge of La Bomba as well as his earnest interest and deep concern for his cultural heritage and his fellow afrochoteños. “Everyone likes to say that they were the first to bring Bomba to light,” he comments during the interview, “but in fact Los hermanos Espinosa were.” Loading a flash drive into my notebook computer, he shows me with pride the pictures of his father’s records. There are two discs with one song on each side: “Adela” and “Maria Chunchuna” appear on one record dated 1984 and “Capital de la Bomba” and “Santa Ana” on the other dated 1985. Opening a .wav file he plays “Maria Chunchuna,” a well-known traditional Bomba now widely attributed to the Hermanos Espinosa, the text of which is cited in the Costales’ 1950s study of the huasipungo system in the Chota-Mira valley. “But this sounds like a san juanito,” I tell him somewhat surprised. “Well, yes. You see, La Bomba has always been in dialogue with musical genres of other ethnic groups. For this reason we cannot say or identify within a specific time period a ‘purity’ of La Bomba. Such a task results to be very complicated and adventurous.” I nod vigorously in agreement. “Then what of the meaning of La Bomba and its relation to afrochoteño identity?” I prompt. “First, La Bomba is more than just an instrument, rhythm, and dance. It also refers to a space, a moment, of communal gathering. La Bomba is, or at least was, something that was felt and carried in the soul. It allowed us to establish those relationships of familiarity, with the community and with the family. So, yes, La Bomba is, first, an instrument that then gives name to the dance, the genre, and to the moment: ‘we are doing Bomba; we are in La Bomba.’” I take in his commentary, briefly reflecting on my own observations before handing him the bomba. Gualberto admires the quality of Cristóbol Barahona’s artisanship as I finish setting up the video camera.

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I ask him to explain how the bomba is constructed and to discuss its symbolic significance for the camera before demonstrating a few basic rhythmic patterns. He explains in detail the type of materials used as I busily take notes in my journal. “The body of the bomba is typically made of the trunk of a seibo tree. Pigua, a type of vine, is used to fasten the hides onto the drum while these here were typically made from cabuya,” he says, pointing at the nylon cord threading the drum hides and the metal wire holding together the pigua loops and the trunk which notably has been shortened in diameter. “Now, the drum heads should ideally be made out of a pair of male and female goat hides. They say this represents the union between man and woman,” continues Gualberto. “Yes, I meant to ask you about that. I’ve encountered this perspective in my research, but I’m also hearing some conflicting accounts from some who claim that there is no such meaning. There are also those who contend that this symbolism is reflected in the rhythmic patterns, and yet others who tell me the bomba represents not only the union between man and woman in its construction, but the elements of the natural world. In any case, nobody I’ve spoken with who believes La Bomba is linked to the cosmology of the afrochoteño communities can tell me exactly how, or even what this cosmology entails! How am I to make sense of this?” Gualberto gives me a knowing smile. “They are all right.” He says with a slight chuckle. Noting my look of surprise, he continues, “La Bomba is a conglomeration of things. From this simple instrument, one could construct many representations, many imaginaries, and so all that they say with respect to “cielo,” “tierra,” and so forth, is true: it is in accordance with the sentiments of each group of people that assume La Bomba as a fundamental element within their culture, their livelihood. You see, it is important that every group of people, every person, individual, overall if they are a bombero, make their own interpretation of the elements that La Bomba has.”

* * *

Community of Chota, Chota-Mira valley, Ecuador 2008

Chota is awash with sound. If not a radio or stereo system blaring Bomba, salsa, or reggaeton from multiple doorways, than it’s the sound of roosters at dawn, dogs barking, children playing in the street, buses and trucks roaring past on the Pan American highway, women washing clothes and conversing outside, young men and women playing soccer in the dusty field, the

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roaring sound of the river Chota-Mira, the chiming of the church bell, and the all too frequent laments sung during funerary wakes and processions. Taking a cue from the general soundscape of the community, I turn up the volume on my newly acquired portable speakers plugged into the head-set jack of my computer and playback a field recording made the previous day:

Porque dejas a tu hijo Why do you leave your son Crucificado, crucificado Crucified, crucified

En el alma me pesa My soul weighs De haber pecado, de haber pecado For having sinned, for having sinned

A Calvario a llegado He has arrived in Calgary Muy agitado, muy agitado Very agitated, very agitated

Shortly after, I run into Zoila standing outside the terrace of the upstairs bedroom I rent from her. The puzzled and agitated look on her face prompts me to ask if anything is wrong. She hesitates before asking me if I recently heard las viejas (the elderly ladies) singing. “Has anyone died?!” she asks me alarmed. Confused, it takes me a moment to realize she is referring to the field-recording of the salve I played over the speakers in my room. Laughing, I explained to her that it was a recording I had made during the Holy week procession. She seemed little convinced by my explanation, however, and she walked back downstairs.

Community of Chota, Chota-Mira valley, Ecuador 2008

Not yet noon, the sun shines intensely in the cloudless sky as I walk to the small yellow church overlooking the river Chota in the community of Chota. Already people are gathering around the steps waiting to catch a glimpse of the procession that is scheduled to start from the top of the hill in moments. I make ready my camera and digital audio recorder just as a small crowd of variously costumed individuals make their way slowly toward us from the distance. Faint singing carries with the wind and I strain to make out the melody. As the procession nears I make out a group of young men wearing costumes of silver armor with feathered helmets and swords reminiscent of those of Roman soldiers. They flank another young man naked from the waist up and hunched-over carrying a wooden cross. Following them are five or six elder

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women singing in heterophony a liturgical text set to a somewhat melancholy and repetitive melody. As the party approaches, they stop at a station to recite and recreate the passage pertaining to that segment of the passion. The sweat dripping from the torso of the cross- carrying individual and the look of exhaustion on his face betrays the difficulty of the task assigned him on this hot morning. The weight of the large wooden cross drawn over his shoulder is too much for him and he kneels at the station with the help of some of those near him. I begin to wonder whether or not the crown of thorns on his head and the red dots dripping from his forehead onto the pavement are real. As the reading, enactment, and prayer are concluded, the women, without warning or direction, begin again the local liturgical songs known as salves:

Porque dejas a tu hijo Why do you leave your son Crucificado, crucificado Crucified, crucified

En el alma me pesa My soul weighs De haber pecado, de haber pecado For having sinned, for having sinned

A Calvario a llegado He has arrived in Calgary Muy agitado, muy agitado Very agitated, very agitated