“Champeta music: Between regional popularity and national rejection, Colombia 1970- 2000” Viola F. Müller Economic and Social History Leiden University Leiden The Netherlands Email:
[email protected] Post-print of ‘Viola F. Müller (2018) Champeta music: between regional popularity and national rejection, Colombia 1970-2000, Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue canadienne des études latino-américaines et caraïbes, 43:1, 79-101,’ available online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/08263663.2018.1426228. Abstract Champeta is the music from the Colombian Caribbean coast and extremely popular in an Afro-descendant community of any age, increasingly fancied by non-black people as well. Despite being highly celebrated on the coast, in the capital Bogotá and other big cities of the country’s interior, champeta is still marginalized and not recognized as a music suitable for the rest of Colombian society. This article reviews the history of champeta music from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, with a particular focus on the diverging developments in Cartagena and Barranquilla, respectively. It analyzes factors that may explain the local and regional popularity as well as the national rejection of champeta, and concludes that the elements which made champeta regionally successful are precisely those elements which hindered its acceptance on a national level, namely, the focus on blackness and the African Diaspora, distinct class-based tastes, a loud claim to space by the lower classes, and the high regional stratification of the Colombian society. Keywords: Colombia – Champeta – African Diaspora – Caribbean – music – class – race 1 Introduction In 2002, Manuel Reyes, producer of champeta music, received a short letter from the President of Colombia in which he congratulated Reyes for the success of the band Champeta All Stars.