Strategic Positions of Las Hijas del Sol: Equatorial Guinea in World Music

Strategic Positions of Las Hijas del Sol: Equatorial Guinea in World Music Dosinda Garcia-Alvite is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Denison University. Her research interests focus on issues of migration, historical memory, and gender issues in literature, film and music of contemporary Spain. Her dissertation, which she is revising for publication, analyzes music and literature of artists from Equatorial Guinea exihd in Spain. Very little attention has been paid to Equatorial Guinea's cultural works both in African and in Hispanic studies. Even less space has been dedicated to the country's women's lives and music. In this essay I aim to fill part of that void by examining the works of the group called Las Hijas del Sol, since according to a website from a cultural critic in Equatorial Guinea "this group can put the country on the global map."1 Indeed, this duo formed by an aunt and her niece, Paloma and Piruchi, achieved world recognition with their first recording Sibèba in 1995. From then on, their subsequent works Kottó (1997), Kchaba (1999), Pasaporte mundial (2001) and Colores del amor (2003), all produced in Spain, have kept the group at the top of the World Music Charts Europe.2 The importance of studying these works in the field of contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies derives from the fact that, although belatedly in comparison to England or France, Spain has recently become an openly multicultural society, not only through the official recognition of the different historical nationalities of the Basque Country, Catalonia, and Galicia, but also through the presence of increasing numbers of immigrants. The specific case of the Equatoguinean community living in Spain dates, in fact, back to the 1960s, a period in which a select group of youths from the former colony of Spain (at the time officially considered a province) came to study at Spanish universities with the aim of becoming the leaders of the country that would obtain its independence on October 12, 1968. Unfortunately, their first president, Macias Nguema, soon became one of the worst dictators in Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 8, 2004 150 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Africa, and the number of exiles and political refugees fleeing to Spain increased.3 Nevertheless , the plight of the Equatoguineans is litde known, because in 1969 the Francoist government forbade the publication of any news coming from the former colony. This information was declared materia reservada in an effort to hide the failure of the decolonization process in Equatorial Guinea.4 As a consequence, the cultural production of the Equatoguineans is little known today, but I would argue that it deserves our attention . As the critic Homi Bhabha points out, the immigrants that travel from former colonies to the metropolis offer a new view of the nation: The Western métropole must confronr its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar migranrs and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity . (6) My analysis of the music of Las Hijas del Sol will foreground the different activities and movements that show how contemporary Spanish cultural production is closely linked to politics, and how it is manifested at three levels: ethnicity, nationality, and global links. Through reflection on how these three issues are manifested in the works of Las Hijas del Sol, we will not only learn how Equatoguineans contribute to Spain's multiculturalism, but moreover, how they mirror Spanish society. Ethnicity is often used in the conception of social groups although its meaning and content are constantly negotiated depending on the context. Ethnic groups are based upon relationships that are constantly constructed rarher than on linguistically and culturally homogeneous entities. The social anthropologist, Thomas Ericksen , has written: Ethnicity emerges and is made relevant through social situations and encounters, and rhrough people's way of coping widi the demands and challenges of life. (1) Further, says Ericksen, ethnicity refers to those "aspects of relationships between groups which consider themselves, and are regarded by others, as being culturally distinctive " (4). The relational basis of ethnicity, with attention to the boundaries of language , culture and political organization, become recurrent issues in the records of Las Hijas...