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Chocolate, Coconut, and Honey: Race, Music, and the Politics of Hybridity in the Ecuadorian Black Pacific

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 34; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03007766.2010.537848

1740-1712

Jonathan Ritter,

Caribbean history, culture, and politics

Abstract Against the backdrop of a tremendous surge in ethnic identity politics and social movement organizing over the last two decades in Ecuador, this article explores two complementary musical trends that have emerged in reference to the country's Afro-Ecuadorian population. The first showcases the traditional music and dance of the marimba as a symbol of Afro-Ecuadorian identity. The second features numerous popular music fusions of the marimba repertoire with genres including rock, salsa, reggaetón, and more, with broad appeal to audiences throughout the country and beyond. The new popularity of the marimba clearly marks a moment of arrival for Ecuador's black community, one coinciding with and contributing to its increased visibility on the national political stage. This paper makes a critical appraisal of this moment of arrival, noting its justly celebrated successes in advancing black self-determination and popular culture in the country, while also sounding a cautionary note about this celebratory narrative's ability to mask the continued discrepancies of power that lurk within the promotion of hybridized "folklore" and a multicultural national identity. Acknowledgments This essay is based on more than a decade of periodic fieldwork in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, funded most recently by a 2005-06 UC Regents Faculty Fellowship. I wish to thank Petita Palma, Alberto Castillo, and their extended family for their continued hospitality in Esmeraldas. An early draft of this paper was presented at the conference "Beyond Visibility: Re-Thinking the African Diaspora in Latin America" at UC Berkeley, in March of 2007, and a late draft presented for the "Mapping Black American Aurality" Working Group at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics Encuentro in Bogotá, Colombia, 21–31 August 2009. I thank the organizers and participants of both events for the opportunity to present this work and for their feedback, particularly Michael Birenbaum Quintero and Susana Friedmann. I am also grateful to Javier León and Heidi Feldman for their commentary. Any errors in fact or omission are, naturally, my own. Notes [1] In part due to the entirely pirated music retail business in Esmeraldas and Quito, in which original recordings with their liner notes are virtually impossible to locate, the full identity of the musician who created "Marimba Perreo" remains unknown to me. Though it was included on various mix CDs I found for sale in Esmeraldas and in Quito, and everyone I knew seemed to know the song, none could recall the artist who recorded it. After returning from Ecuador, I encountered the music video for "Marimba Perreo" on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = ybz9HzAaPl4, accessed 1 May 2010), in which it is identified as the work of "Joel 'la clave'," with no last name provided. The video shows Joel (presumably) dancing with bikini-clad women on the beaches and resorts of Esmeraldas, as they gyrate in the perreo (aka "doggie") style alluded to in the title. [2] The Afro-Ecuadorian bomba, a song and dance genre accompanied by various guitars and the eponymous hand drum (see Schechter Schechter, John. 1994. "Los Hermanos Congo y Milton Tadeo Ten Years Later: Evolution of an African-Ecuadorian Tradition of the Valle Del Chota, Highland Ecuador". In Music and Black Ethnicity: The Caribbean and South America, Edited by: Béhague, Gerard. 285–305. Miami, FL: North South Center Press, U of Miami. Print [Google Scholar]), should not be confused with the Afro-Puerto Rican genre of the same name. To the best of this author's knowledge, there is no known relation between the two, although the coincidence of names and their respective position within nationalist folklore discourses in each country is certainly suggestive. It should be noted that Afro-Ecuadorian bomba musicians are also creating popular music fusions today that raise similar questions to those explored here in reference to the marimba tradition. [3] For instance, in 1998 Whitten and co-author Diego Quiroga (89) reported positively on the fusion efforts of Carmen González, which will be discussed later in this essay. [4] "[C]ómo se revolcarán mis ancestros en sus tumbas al escuchar las músicas locas que se están produciendo desde que la marimba empezó a ponerse de moda…reggaetón marimba, perreo marimba." From an interview published in Ecuador: Terra Incognita 40 (Mar.–Apr. 2006); available at: http://www.terraecuador.net/revista%2040/marimba%202.htm (accessed 1 Mar. 2007). [5] Of course, Canclini's argument can be pushed back beyond 1492 to acknowledge the syncretic and hybrid nature of each of Latin America's "root" populations, including heterogeneous African and Amerindian cultures, but also African and Arab influences on the Spanish culture brought to the Americas. [6] During this same historical period, between the 16th and 18th centuries, Jesuit plantations in the Chota River Valley in highland Ecuador also imported African slaves, who developed an equally hybrid but distinct Afro-Ecuadorian culture in that region (see note 2 above), closely related to the surrounding Quichua indigenous population (Schechter). Contacts between these two black populations, in Esmeraldas and the Chota Valley, were infrequent until the 20th century, and both maintain to this day separate musical traditions; for clarity, I will focus in this paper primarily on Esmeraldas. [7] One of the most astonishing examples of this is the omission of any reference to black musical traditions in Ecuadorian musicologist Segundo Luis Moreno Andrade's Moreno Andrade, Segundo Luis. 1972. Historia de la Música en el Ecuador, Quito: Casa de Cultura Ecuatoriana. Print [Google Scholar] seminal and purportedly "encyclopedic" work Historia de la música en el Ecuador, which includes no discussion of black music in Esmeraldas and even dismisses indigenous music from the region as being overly corrupted by the Afro-Ecuadorian presence. See also Rahier; Wamsley. [8] The comparisons with Colombia and Peru are striking, but also incomplete and partial. In Colombia, for instance, the national and international appeal of black musics like cumbia and vallenato from the Caribbean coast have overshadowed the black musical traditions of the Pacific coast, which share both a cultural history and a similar state of marginalization to those in Esmeraldas. Similarly, while the Afro-Peruvian revival has championed certain genres and performers in Peru and abroad since the 1950s, more rural practices within Afro-Peruvian communities south of Lima remain distinctly local. [9] Abdala Bucarám was removed from office in 1997, Jamil Mahuad in 2000, and Lucio Gutierrez in 2005. [10] See, for example, García-Barrio's discussion of blackness within Ecuadorian literature. In his overview of the black social movement in Ecuador, Sánchez locates the roots of the current Afroecuadorian social movement in the late 1970s, when an "ethnic perspective" was first articulated (16–17). [11] For a useful overview of NSM theory and its relevance to studies of music in the African diaspora, see Gerstin Gerstin, Julian. 2003. "Musical Revivals and Social Movements in Contemporary Martinique: Ideology, Identity, Ambivalence". In The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective, Edited by: Monson, Ingrid. 295–328. New York: Routledge. Print [Google Scholar]. [12] Personal communication from Afro-Ecuadorian anthropologist Pablo Minda (25 Sept. 2006). This situation parallels the recent history of indigenous participation in beauty pageants elsewhere in Ecuador (see Rogers Rogers, Marc. 1999. Spectacular Bodies: Folklorization and the Politics of Identity in Ecuadorian Beauty Pageants. Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 3.2: 54–85. Print [Google Scholar]). [13] Pablo Minda, personal communication (25 Sept. 2006). [14] For more on the early development of the marimba tradition, see the extensive bibliography by Norman Whitten, Jr., particularly Whitten and Fuentes; Whitten Whitten, Norman. Jr. 1974. Black Frontiersmen: A South American Case, Cambridge, MA: Schenkman. Print [Google Scholar], Black Frontiersmen; Whitten and Quiroga; as well as works by the author. [15] Interview with Alberto Castillo (1 June 2000). [16] In its traditional format, the marimba is played by two musicians, one performing a repetitive, ostinato-like bass figure called the bordón, and the second playing a more improvisatory part on the instrument's upper octaves, called the tiple. Contemporary marimba groups often have more than two players, and more than one marimba, but the parts they play still largely adhere to these roles. [17] Quote from the Carmen González biography on the World Music Central website, available at: http://www.worldmusiccentral.org/artists/artist_page.php?id = 705 (accessed 1 May 2010). [18] "Su objetivo es investigar, rescatar y desarrollar los ritmos tradicionales del Ecuador para que los jóvenes, principalmente, se reencuentren con su identidad cultural." Quote from the website "Cantantes Ecuatorianos" (http://cantantesecuatorianos.es.tl/la-grupa.htm, accessed 1 May 2010), though the exact quote is repeated verbatim on a number of other sites and in press coverage, leading me to believe it was originally part of a press release put out by the band. [19] "La fusión de letras musicales rescatadas de la herencia musical del Ecuador con ritmos alegres que se acoplan a las tendencias y gustos de la actualidad, junto on el profesionalismo y la entrega total de 'La Grupa,' fueron los elementos que permitieron una conexión fácil con el público que acompañó la presentación con aplausos, bailes, y gritos de aclamación….'La Grupa' ofreció a los asistentes una imagen juvenil, positiva y alegre del pueblo ecuatoriano y de su música." From a press release put out by the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, available at: http://www.mmrree.gov.ec/mre/documentos/novedades/boletines/ano2006/julio/bol602.htm (accessed 1 May 2010). [20] For more on Papá Roncón and his role in contemporary Afro-Ecuadorian folklore, see Ritter, "Agua Larga".