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Chapter 6: Blackness, Music, and (National/Diasporic) Identity in the Colombian Caribbean
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� � � � � � � � � � Blackness,Music,and(National/Diasporic) IdentityintheColombianCaribbean Ligia S. Aldana � � � � � � � � � � Recuerdas en donde naciste. Te acuerdas. Y la madre que te parió. Eso que tu corazón dice. Lo que eres tu propio yo. Sientes muy dentro de ti Algo que te grita ¡Vuelve! Esa es la propia raíz Que no se corta y que crece. Mama África te llama Te llama mama África Majaná, majaná Onde jué ugtere tá majaná. Luis “El Rasta” Towers—“Mama África” —Ligia S. Aldana, “Mama Africa” Palenge Tiela Ngande, kumo ele ten uno solo numá —Luis Gerardo Martínez Miranda Embedded in the Black Atlantic continuum, the Colombian Caribbean has historically posed a challenge to the central government in the process of attaining full control of the national space.1 Costeño worldview, the ideology attached to the 1. See Posada Carbó’s The Colombian Caribbean: A Regional History, 1870–1950; Palacios and Safford’s Colombia: País fragmentado, sociedad dividida. Su historia; and Fals-Borda’s Historia doble de la costa, for a general history of the region and its relationship with the rest of the country. For an alternative history 39 40 Ligia S. Aldana population of the Atlantic coast, stands in stark contrast to the vision of the country that Colombians from the interior of the national space have shared. This split brings into focus a national identity in constant tension with the diasporic reality of la costa, an area marked by the legacies of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery. Cartagena, the space that anchors the region and was one of the most important ports during the first phase of the transport of Africans to the New World for their enslavement in the seventeenth century, is a repository of a painful history that defines the ethnicity and cultural/diasporic identity of a significant segment of its population.2 Consequently, and in spite of the multicultural turn propitiated by the new Constitution of 1993,3 many of the Northern coast’s cultural practices are dissonant expressions that resist all intentions put forth by the Colombian , local, political, and social elites to control what may bear the national label. Ethnicity and the memory of slavery, and the cultural codes and practices borne out of these two elements, point to experiences of displacement and marginalization, characterizing a diasporic condition that finds resonance with the rest of the Caribbean and continental Africa. Anchored in these fundamental principles, champeta music serves as a perfect example of the product of a collective experience grounded in a diasporic African continuum that stands at the margins of a fragmented national realm. Amid the rising of Shakira and her transformation into a blonde, and the popularity of Juanes and Carlos Vives, the sound of champeta provokes a rupture in a carefully crafted national musical continuum that has projected internationally by Sony Latin America and that has become representative of what is widely accepted as Colombian. Within this scheme of things, champeta has been successful in articulating an active Afro political subject who claims his or her right to full citizenship through other means of empowerment. Champeta is a Colombian Caribbean musical expression that combines the rhythms of Congolese souscous, Ghanian High Life, Nigerian Afro beat, salsa, of the region and the country, addressing the exclusion of blacks and mulattoes in the process of nation formation, in spite of their active participation in the wars of independence, see Múnera’s El fracaso de la nación: Región, clase y raza en el Caribe colombiano (1717–1821), and Fronteras imaginadas: la construcción de las razas y de la geografía en el siglo XIX colombiano. 2. For further information on Cartagena’s role in the trans-Atlantic trade of enslaved Africans, see Vila Vilar’s Hispanoamérica y el comercio de esclavos; Friedemann’s La saga del negro: Presencia africana en Colombia; Escalante’s El Palenque de San Basilio: una comunidad de descendientes de negros cimarrones, Friedemann and Patiño Rosselli’s Lengua y sociedad en el Palenque de San Basilio; and Richard Price’s Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. These are only some of the numerous studies on the subject. I also recommend Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 for an exploration of the phenomenon of New World slavery and its relationship to the project of Modernity. 3. See Constitución Nacional de la República de Colombia. Senado de...