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The Americas 58.1 (2001) 146-149



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Music, Race, and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia. By Peter Wade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. xi, 323. Notes. Illustrations. References Cited. Index. $40.00 cloth; $20.00 paper.

Peter Wade, a senior lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Manchester, has long been interested in the meaning of blackness in Colombia. (His first book, published in 1994, was entitled Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics [End Page 146] of Racial Identity in Colombia.) In the present work, he explores how music with black and working-class roots from the Caribbean coast of Colombia became, in the decades after 1940, popular in the nation as a whole. This is a process, he believes, that is both remarkable and revealing. It is remarkable because, traditionally, most Colombians, and particularly elites in the nation's heartland, the highlands of the interior, defined themselves as racially and culturally superior to their coastal compatriots. It is revealing because the music one claims as one's own is part of one's identity, both as an individual and as a member of communities, be they regional, national, or international.

The research for the book was quite ambitious. In addition to interviewing scores of musicians and consumers of music in three of Colombia's largest cities (Bogotá, Medellín, and Barranquilla) who experienced the rise of costeño music to national prominence, Wade also sought to go beyond his training as an ethnographer by doing documentary research and linking his analysis to the history and historiography of the nation as a whole. Much of the research was carried out by Colombian assistants under his supervision; the project was funded by a grant from the Leverhume Trust.

In informational terms, the book is a major advance, especially for English readers. It gives a thorough account of the origins and evolution of the major styles that converge to form música tropical in Colombia, particularly porro, cumbia, and vallenato. It provides a history of the early recording industry in Colombia, which began in the 1920s and 1930s in the modernizing Caribbean port of Barranquilla, then moved on to the dynamic industrial city of Medellín and the capital, Bogotá. Readers are introduced to many of Colombia's leading practitioners of costeño music during the middle decades of the twentieth-century and glimpse aspects of their careers at home and abroad.

Some of the most interesting material in the book comes from the testimony of people who listened and danced to music during the 1940s, when recordings and record players made it possible for many middle-class families to play costeño and other music in the home. The following comes from an interview with a secondary-school teacher as she recalls aspects of her youth in Bogotá: "When we arrived in Bogotá [in the early 1940s] we acquired a radiola [combination radio and record player]. For the dances, we'd put on pasillos and paso dobles . . . a few rumbas and some dances from the [Atlantic] littoral like mambo, porro, cumbia--that was just beginning . . . . Ah! and the boleros, I haven't mentioned them . . . . Bolero was for love, for despair, for sadness, for happiness, for longing: bolero was all that . . . . We loved Mexican music intensely . . . . Who didn't dream, who didn't cry, who did not become romantic to the highest degree with all those songs. . . . We also assimilated Cuban music a lot: conga, danzones, all that. It was really beautiful, it was a very beautiful time of life" (p. 112). Intimate information of this sort, like the cultural concerns of the book as a whole, is a welcome complement to a Colombian historiography heavily skewed toward political, economic, and social themes and preoccupied with issues of violence, underdevelopment, and social exploitation. [End Page 147]

Wade's analysis of this information is very much in the postmodern, discursive fashion, a fact that explains some of the book's strongest features. His penchant for "multivocality" and for "deconstructing" his evidence leads to a healthy skepticism about the origin...

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