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2. A Sensual Mulatta Called the Plena
- Wesleyan University Press
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c h a p t e r t w o A Sensual Mulatta Called the Plena If the feminized and racialized danza was the national music of Puerto Rico by the turn of the century, the Afro–Puerto Rican plena, along with the bomba, was historically and discursively marginalized, erased, and dismissed as música de negros (music of Blacks). This opposition, which negates the racial hybridity of the Puerto Rican people as well as the basic processes from which its transcultural manifestations emerge, continues to inform musicology. Moreover, it builds the historical framework for current manifestations of racial binaries in the young, urban musical culture of Puerto Rico, as the rockero-cocolo paradigm during the 1980s illustrates (cf. Part Two, “The Plural Sites of Salsa”). Like the danza, the plena is, after all, a hybrid musical form that integrates both European and African elements in its form and lyrics. Their respective differentialized genesis, racially and class-located, have led music historians and essayists to present the danza in opposition to the plena, systematically denoting the former as “our national music” while relegating the latter to the fringes of culture as “folklore.” Like the danza, the plena also becomes an object of feminization in Tomás Blanco’s essay, “Elogio de la plena,”1 which I pose here as a central subtext to Rosario Ferré’s “When Women Love Men.” The origins of the plena, a form of song and dance practiced by the black and mulatto proletariat, have been located by most musicologists in the coastal towns and areas of southern and southeastern Puerto Rico, that is, in the sugar-growing plantation areas where the African population resided.2 While its chronological origins are still undefined, most scholars date its emergence from around the turn of the century. Among some hypotheses, it has been proposed that the term plena came from the tradition of singing and dancing outside during the evenings, particularly in nights of full moon (luna llena or luna plena). Thus, the adjective for luna plena became synonymous with the dance and the music.3 Many scholars have also indicated the English-derived partial origins of the A Sensual Mulatta Called the Plena / 27 plena, as they recount the presence of a couple, immigrants from St. Kitts, who used to play the guitar and tambourine on the streets of Ponce to make a living. The husband used to tell the wife, “Play, Anna!” or “Play now!” which was heard and rewritten into Spanish as Ple-na.4 As Juan Flores has observed, the English source of the Puerto Rican plena has not always been documented by music historians, yet it reveals the “multiple intersections and blending of cultures as working people scatter and relocate ,” as well as the “regional Caribbean context for the emergence of twentieth century song forms in all nations of the area: son, calypso, merengue, and many other examples of the ‘national popular’ music of their respective countries were all inspired by the presence of musical elements introduced from other islands.”5 Juan Flores contributes to the growing scholarship on the origins of the plena by calling attention to the legacy of the semilegendary Joselino “Bumbún” Oppenheimer (1884–1929), from the area of La Joya del Castillo, a proletarian barrio in Ponce, where Flores locates the historical beginnings of this music. He recounts the “humble beginnings” of this music in the work of Bumbún, whose job plowing the land was accompanied by singing and improvising plenas. The call-and-response structure characteristic of this musical form was practiced and developed by Bumb ún, who sang the solo while his cuarteros (plowboys) responded with the refrains. Joselino Oppenheimer, also known as “King of la Plena,” left his trade as plowman and began the first plena band, dedicating himself to the music full-time. According to Flores, he was also a popular panderetero (tambourine player), famous for his virtuosity in improvising as well as for his body performance with the pandereta: “In the midst of a vibrant improvisation he would rest it suddenly on his shoulder, bounce it off his head, or roll it along the floor, all the while twisting and jerking his body in a wild frenzy.”6 The historical recovery of a figure such as Joselino Bumbún Oppenheimer and the identification of the English couple in Ponce—John Clark and Catherine George, the latter known as Doña Catín—are significant contributions to the historical reconstruction of the plena...