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Re‐constituting Chocó: the feast of San Pacho and the Afro question in Colombia

2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1356932042000246995

1469-9575

Daniel Güiza Mosquera,

History and Politics in Latin America

Abstract Because the habitus is an infinite capacity for generating products – thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions – whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it provides is as remote from creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditioning. (Bourdieu, Citation 1990 : 55) Notes ‘El Chocó’, Reportajes, 1993: 46–47. This and subsequent translations into English are mine, unless otherwise noted. ‘Ellos habían nacido en la fatalidad y aceptaban su destino. Pero yo, desintegrado por el miedo y la cólera, era arrojado en los brazos de una aventura andrajosa, arrastrado por aquel viento de negritud’ (p. 47). Well known in Colombian literary circles for his leading role in the Nadaista movement, Arango also reported on his travels, publishing a variety of journalistic vignettes in several Colombian magazines and published today in Reportajes. ‘El Chocó’ (1965) reflects in some ways the desperation and defeatism that his nihilism had bred, but also reveals and denounces deep colonial prejudices that inform perceptions and laws in regard to Afro‐descendants in Colombia. The Nadaista movement was first characterized by irreverence to, and cultural subversion of, social, religious and aesthetic conventions and values. Among its long‐term aspirations were to question and attack nineteenth‐century evolutionist notions and to denounce institutional and moral hypocrisies, especially as they became apparent throughout the twentieth century in the two most revered organisms of Colombian life: the Government and the Church. ‘Sentí horror de estos intelectuales de la selva, pagué mis copas y furtivamente me deslicé en la oscuridad’ (p. 49). Entre cubanos: psicología tropical (1913) 1987: 69. Bhabha's other word for ambivalence, ‘vacillation’ (1994: 147) is just as encompassing a term, because it suggests conscious and subconscious manifestations and uses that navigate the behavioural realms of social norms and games. Let us remember that colonial enterprises are, for the most part, both the search for, and result of, notions of resolution and fixity, both of which are informed by ideas of cultural and racial purity and constancy, among others. See Naipaul's early chronicles throughout the Caribbean, The Middle Passage: the Caribbean Revisited, first published in 1962 (1990). As the epigraph from Bourdieu indicates, habitus is a product of history in a cognitive and experiential sense whose structures result in individual and collective practices, behaviour and beliefs, inscribed in bodies (human, institutional). Once internalized, this system generates and organizes social practices and representations, becoming relatively autonomous – as ‘embodied history’, that is, as accumulated (cultural) capital with the ability to provide continuity and reactivation of those same practices (1990: 53–58). I am not here concerned with how habitus itself originates, a question better suited for other fora, but with its social and economic implications within a given community and, particularly, in regard to constructions of identity. While observing a musical performance of drums and dance in Martinique, Naipaul confessed his displeasure at such a ‘mincing mimicry’: ‘This music and motions of privilege, forgotten elsewhere, still lived here in a ghostly, beggared elegance: to this mincing mimicry the violence and improvisation and awesome skill of African dancing had been reduced’ (p. 218). The subjects of his observations could be neither truly white nor African, exemplifying a double mimicry whose definition originated in absence. Naipaul's look at emerging postcolonial nations in the Caribbean archipelago, also evident in his subsequent work, met resistance from writers like Kamau Brathwhite, Edouard Glissant and Derek Walcott, among others, who preferred to explore issues of African diasporic continuities and discontinuities. Critiques of Naipaul's inability to make representation a revisionist issue that dismantles rather than reinforces established views of postcolonial inferiority have highlighted the need to address ‘empire’ as the site where much of the problem resides, as Edward Said has argued, that is, an issue of ‘political choice’ for intellectuals (postcolonial or not) (1989: 215, 224). Homi Bhabha's analysis of mimicry is pertinent here as well. If I may borrow his language, ‘In the ambivalent world of the “not quite/not white”, on the margins of metropolitan desire, the founding objects of the Western world bec[a]me the erratic, eccentric, accidental objets trouvés of the colonial discourse – the part‐objects of presence’ (1994: 92). Colonial, postcolonial, subaltern, cultural studies, among others. It appears that the US Congress has today also an interest in this as well, as it seeks through a rewriting of Title VI funding in education to regulate the activist role played by postcolonial and area studies (Michael Bednar, personal communication). Although not prescribing the erasure of heterogeneous memories as a requisite for a new, common memory, the cultural theorist Jesús Martín Barbero's prescription of an all‐inclusive narrative that can produce a ‘common memory’ from which a people can build a ‘common imaginary’ has some echoes in this nineteenth‐century view. Citing Daniel Pecaut, Barbero concluded that ‘what the country lacks, rather than a foundational myth, is a national narrative (“un relato nacional”), that is, a narrative that makes it possible for Colombians of all classes, races, ethnic groups and regions to locate their daily experiences in a same, shared plot of trials and achievements.… Colombia needs a narrative that can produce a common memory from which a future imaginary can be built that mobilizes all constructive energies in the country.…’ Barbero's prescription does identify that the absence of this narrative is connected with the structural violence of the state (by excluding others from its foundational identity). As Jaime Arocha and others have argued, however, and as more massacres and displacements of black peoples indicate, the text legalizing territorial autonomies is not an effective deterrent against bullets and bombs (2000: 200); and it does not invest the state with better tools to protect the economic and sociocultural viability of its citizens. Senado de la República, Información legislative (available online at http://www.secretariasenado.gov.co). Jaime Arocha and Nina Friedemann are both academics who participated in the process of constitutional reform, and for whom the issue was not merely an academic one (Wade, Citation2003: 2). See Wade, Citation2003: 5–6 for a discussion of mestizaje in relation to the development of Colombian music and Afro‐Colombian influences (such as porros and cumbias). Admittedly, any theory of the Caribbean (however defined geographically) must account for a conglomerate of cultural histories that include also non‐African ethnic groups, South Asians, Chinese, etc., many of whom may also connect to a postcolonial past. Here, I focus only on the Caribbean that seeks definitions in the African diaspora. Therefore, the terms ‘Caribbean’ and ‘postcolonial’ are used interchangeably when referring to Chocó, as a region that shares both histories. See Ana Pizarro's recent discussion of Caribbean intellectuals and of the need to expand the notions of Caribbean geo‐cultural insularity as an archipelago or basin connecting with the main land (Atlantic coast). Pizarro proposes a third Caribbean dimension, a widely encompassing dimension that sees the Caribbean in constant displacement and ‘fugitive identities’ (‘identidades tránsfugas con procesos de dislocación de sujetos, saberes y lenguajes’) (2002: 28–9). Although not expressly postmodernist, this resonates with Benitez Rojo's postscript to the second edition of La isla que se repite (1998), where he conceived of a fractal and paradoxical Caribbean without frontiers, spreading like a Deleuzian machine beyond cultural confines (p. 314). His emphasis on the ‘Plantation’ and on polyrhythmic paradoxes as determinant structures of Caribbean contemporary identity, however, may leave diaspora cultures that have been connected with Caribbean history through trade and consumption behind, and whose cultural and economic becoming had little to do with plantation cultures, such as Chocó. There is a need to re‐evaluate the notion of Caribbean in order to address more complex and wider realities of displacement, which may result as much from colonial legacies as from the acceleration of social, economic and political transformations for variety of reasons: national and regional constitutional changes, political violence, globalization, teleological and identitarian narratives of vindication, the reification of politically viable local coalitions, etc. The decision in 1816 of the Congress of Tucumán to publicize a declaration of independence of United Provinces of South America written in Aymara and Guaraní, and the Araucano proclamation made by Bernardo O'Higgins in 1820, in which the Araucanos were textually integrated into a multiethnic national community, are both instances of imagined pluriethnic charters born in the midst of ardent transitional moments in Latin America (Kaempfer, Citation2001). Bolivar himself, we must recall, although mistrustful of power disseminated among various factions, propounded a multiethnic vision, a compound of American peoples made up of European, Indian and African blood as the healthiest embodiment of the Republic (‘Discurso de Angostura’ [1819] 1979: 109, 110). Kaempfer concludes that the independentist idea of a unified national identity – derived from a multiethnic constituency – inherits an inclusive drive, a drive that was ‘interpreted as integrative and reordering of a new reality and a new history’ (ibid.). The Colombian 1991 Constitution represented a drive toward integration of formerly excluded others and of regional autonomy that included the participation of indigenous communities, a drive that resonates with other Latin American nations that seek today to preserve constitutional and territorial coherence in the context of internal violent implosions, territorial and cultural displacements, and globalization and neoliberalism pressures. As I write this article, Bolivia is on the verge of a historical event that may signify such a change and that could strengthen a politics of resistance with the ability to counter nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century discourses of national identity. Carlos Mesa, the interim president after the forced resignation of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, declared in his inaugural speech on 18 October 2003 that ‘we must be able to understand the nation starting with [a partir de] its ethnic groups … under a transparent, credible and strong leadership’. At least on paper, the constitutional move toward a pluriethnic, multicultural Latin American nation seems all but inevitable, a move that is as much about self‐preservation as it is about national (cultural and natural) resources, their control and representation. I concur with Horacio Legrás, in that if there is any claim subalternity can produce it is that of the historical failure of universalization itself, encoded in ideologies of inclusion that, from criollismo and mestizaje to theories of hybridity, etc., conjure up ‘the historical failure of the Latin American nation‐state’ and its inability to grant a tangible and sustainable ‘condition of citizenship to all its inhabitants’ (1997: 91–92). I use the term diaspora as the territorial embodiment of a ‘contrapuntal modernity’, in the words of James Clifford, a modernity that serves ‘as a signifier not simply of transnationality and movement but of political struggles to define the local, as distinctive community, in historical contexts of displacement’ (1997: 252, 256). The most glaring example in Colombia of such a project of ‘difference in unity’ after the pluriethnic constitution of 1991 is a documentary video created and distributed in 2001 by the most important national newspaper El Tiempo entitled ‘Colombia Viva’ (Living Colombia). The video presents a sanitized conglomerate of regions as the felicitous convergence of ancestral cultures (cf. Emberas, Wayuus) and modern urban centres, projecting a country of cohabiting cultural styles within the national imaginary. The view of two asymmetrical historical realities is prevalent, with blacks and indigenous people's histories presented as having stopped in time (‘la historia parece haberse detenido en estos parajes’); whereas in urban centres history is in constant motion, ever evolving. This montage resonates partially with governmental programmes of inclusion and support such as the Directorship of Black, Ethnic and Cultural Communities (Dirección General de Comunidades Negras, Minorías Étnicas y Culturales) created in 1994 within the Ministry of Interior and amplified in 1999. Its proposition has been to ‘become the legitimate institutional interlocutor between (and among) Black Communities and other ethnic and cultural minorities, with the goal of improving their social conditions and guaranteeing their rights as ethnic groups’. Since its creation this organization has defined itself as seeking to empower local organizations and to oversee, and dialogue with, local and regional cultural and political coalitions (abailable at http://www.anticorrupcion.gov.co/mininterior/comunidades_negras.htm). Reported in major national and international media outlets, the violent disruption of Bojayá in early May of 2002 involving guerrillas, paramilitaries and government forces (the latter presumably by omission), killing about 119 villagers, including at least 40 children, is not unprecedented in Colombia. Like the constellation of massacres and displacements redrawing the national territory since the mid‐twentieth century, this one merely centred attention on the multivalence of displacement and death revisiting the Afro‐Colombian region. For a short while, it brought the eyes of the media, and the nation, back to Chocó. Since then, a variety of journals and books have dedicated space to analysing the conflict and the situation of blacks. Conferences and various other fora have been organized to discuss alternatives of protection, and regional coalitions have mounted further protests to address the intensification of displacements within the region. We are reminded of Arango's letter to his brother in 1966. A year later, after a fire almost consumed Quibdó and destroyed its commercial district (owned mostly by whites and Syrian‐Lebanese merchants), Arango wrote to his brother Benjamin, who was delving in politics in Quibdó, reminding Benjamin how this tragedy would put Chocó back on the public map, only to see it disappear soon after from the national consciousness: ‘I know that when Quibdó disappears from the newspapers’ front page, from television screens, and the tragedy becomes just a piece of news to suit the sentimentalist gullet of the public, then Chocó will again fade from the map, reduced, condemned to a negritude without future. Along with its eternal rains, a relentless mantle of indifference and stupor will fall upon its feral and desolate territory' (Arango, Citation1993: 188). Although including studies of former feasts, this analysis is based on the feast's 2002 and 2003 versions. Photo reproduced here with permission from Utopías (May 2002: 26). Chirimía music is traditionally composed of bass drum, fife, side drum, cymbals, clarinet, bugle, which marks the tempo. Other instruments such as trombones are also used. Rogerio Velásquez describes it as street music of multitudes, used in Choco's political events, processions, ex‐votive prayers and masses (Velásquez: 1960). Using a sexualized language, a Chocoan calling her/himself ‘Mandinga’ writes in SanPacho.com that rebulús are to be felt, not contemplated: ‘[they] are the doubling of the black man under the spell of bunde [type of chirimía] marking frenetically the supernatural act of gods possessing the black man through drums and brass instruments’. Women appear included as agents and objects of the feast's sexualized economy. Some women, like Eida Caycedo and Zully Murillo, have become popular composers and produced a plethora of chirimía songs. Presumably Raimunda Cuesta, a matron from one of the neighbourhoods, becomes at the end of the nineteenth century one of the feast's first leaders to help take away from the church the organization of the feast (Ayala de Santos, 2002: 43–44). Other women like Ana Gilma Ayala and Lola Rengifo, revered in the community for their activism, have been presidents of the organizing committees several times throughout the event's history. Julio Ramos's La promesa (1993), a video‐documentary that deals with the cult of St Lazarus in Cuba, inscribes this devotion in a space within which competing forces between belief (popular religion) and power (ecclesiastical mandates) constitute contested spaces and agencies that result in a particular economics of penance. No cult survives without exhibiting reciprocity, ex‐votive articulations of debt and repayment, and San Pacho is no exception. It is possible that San Pacho also echoes figments of an African pantheon. I suspect that the question of Africanity in this devotion cannot be resolved in terms of verifiable transatlantic genealogies; however, several studies have amply demonstrated the persistence of African, especially Bantú, traditions in the region. See Jaime Arocha's Ombligados de Ananse: Hilos ancestrales y modernos en el Pacífico colombiano (1999), and father John Herbert Valencia's Antropología de la familia chocoana (1998). Agudelo concluded that after the 1991–93 constitutional autonomies, processes of ‘ennegrecimiento’ (blackening) have come to compete with and at times eclipse strategies of ‘blanqueamiento’ (whitening), as ‘particular forms of sociability among the afro‐descendent population acquire a currency as vehicles of interlocution with the state and with society at large with the goal of obtaining recognition and socio‐political benefits’ (1999: 32). The Chocoan anthropologist Rogerio Velásquez's Citation1960 short study of the feast remains to date the only history of its origins and development, cited subsequently by all scholars who have written on San Pacho. See Nina Friedemann's Fiestas, celebraciones y ritos de Colombia (Friedemann and Horner, Citation1995) and ‘Todo el mal se me quitó con San Pacho y Changó’ (Friedemann, Citation1994), William Villa Rivera's ‘San Francisco de Asís o la poética de la calle’ (1989), and Germán Ferro Medina's ‘Contexto religioso y musical de la Costa Pacífica: resistencia, tradición mestiza y afirmación de identidad’ (1996) for later studies or narratives about San Pacho. See also Ana Gilma Ayala Santos's Reseña histórica de la fiesta de San Francisco de Asís (2002), an informal history of the feast published locally that is used in schools in Press of Virginia, 1989), and La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna (Ediciones del Norte, 1989, republished in 1996 and translated into English as The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective) have resulted in further the region and draws a continuity between the Italian friar and its Chocoan double. It includes components of oral local history absent in more formal studies, including a history of its organizers and committees, popular songs related to San Pacho, gossip, neighbourhood descriptions and emblems, demographic changes, etc. Emphasizing the need to protect the local culture, she concludes that Chocoans ‘must take advantage of the feast not only for entertainment but also as a tool for the construction of culture, the exaltation of values and the pursuit of better lives’ (2002: 98). See also http://www.sanpacho.com and http://www.etniasdecolombia.org/grupos_afrocolombianos.asp, websites subsidized by grants and local sponsorships that provide a virtual space for the discussion of cultural and sociopolitical issues and histories emerging from the region. Although terms such as pageant, carnival, procession and parade appear interchangeably used in this and other studies, it is my belief that none describes accurately the multivalence of the event. It echoes as much medieval public drama and tablados as it does carnivals such as those occurring in Brazil and Trinidad and Tobago. For its choreographies, the feast borrows from popular Catholic traditions, national and international iconographies, and local and national politics. Rivas Lara, Citation1993: 13. Valencia was killed by the government in 1907 and was the last man presumably to die in front of a firing squad, an event narrated later by Rogerio Velásquez in ‘Las memorias del odio’ (republished in 1992 by Colcultura). Manuel Zapata Olivella recovers Velásquez's document and transforms it in his novel EI fusilamiento del diablo (1986). Bogatá: Plaza & Janes. Córdoba is in some ways exemplary of the best and worst manifestation of black political leadership. He rose to become an important politician, whose name still dominates politics in the region but whose legacy mirrors the accomplishments, clientelism and corruption of the central government. In a letter to his brother, Arango joked about this ‘idol of the liberal negritudes’ and of how it was important to honour his name in front of Chocoans in order to ingratiate oneself with them (1993, II: 286). A black politician (suit and tie), not visible in this picture, holds the other handle of the sugar mill. This is not the first time the feast has taken recourse to a sugar mill as a symbolic device of oppression to represent a system of exploitation that implicates local and national politics. The massacre of Bojayá is referenced in the painted background. Lola Rengifo, former president of the organizing committee of the feast. Personal communication. Photo reproduced here by permission of Bayron Enrique Mena Palacios, creator of ‘SanPacho.com’, an Internet source of regional cultural and political information from Chocó launched in 2002. Like all characters in the different tableaux, this one was moved mechanically by people hidden beneath or behind the figures using a combination of pulleys. Each float also uses the help of people with long sticks to push away electric wires and other obstacles during the float's movement. Photo reproduced here by permission of Bayron Mena, author of a Chocoan culture website SanPacho.com. See more recently Gerald Aching's Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean (University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Glissant and Benítez Rojo's postcolonial and postmodern theories on Caribbean cultures, both published during the same decade, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (1981, as Le discourse antillais) (University explorations of mestizaje as a neither/nor site of cultural refashioning where identity is in constant migration, refusing to accommodate to the demands of metropolitan universalization. Glissant's (and others') preoccupations with the ecological implications of cultural and territorial resurgence and autonomies in Martinique resonate with Chocoan post‐1991 politics of locality. Such analyses of locality resonate more recently with Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's insistence on addressing the production of locality as ‘the social machines that create and recreate the identities and differences that are understood as the local’ not at all dissociated from the capitalist imperial machine (2001: 44–45). One of the terms in currency today in some Colombian academic circles is ‘huellas de africanidad’ (imprints of Africanity). This formulation emphasizes the idea that, although there is no direct memory of an African origin in Colombian blacks, there are remnants that endure across generations playing an important role in the configuration of cultural identities (Wade, Citation2003: 2). This view is echoed in Friedemann as well (1994: 199). As the introduction states as well, the book is born of a lived history that also has an origin in oral traditions. Ayala's recognition that we must believe those who have done research as much as those who know the history first hand is of much interest. After thanking those who studied Chocoan traditions such as the ethnologist‐anthropologist Rogerio Velásquez and the writer Teresa Martinez de Varela, evident members of the lettered city, she concludes that we must also thank those who with ‘original words’ narrated what they lived, saw and remembered, leaving the door open for revisions, additions and changes that may, in the natural course of things, occur (Ayala de Santos Citation2002: 13–14). Hansel Camacho's salsa song ‘Homenaje a San Pacho’ has become a local anthem; other songs related to cultural and ethnic identities and emblematic of an ongoing reflection about what it means to be black in Chocó, Colombia have also acquired territorial currency, such as Grupo Niche's ‘Etnia’ and Grupo Saboreo's ‘Pacífico 2000’. I find Friedemann's term ‘propuesta singular’ (propuesta, as in proposal or proposition, Friedemann and Horner, Citation1995: 116) to refer to San Pacho provocative and illuminating in this respect, since the event uses carnival elements, but it is not just a carnival. In the chapter ‘The Two Answers of the Colonized’ Albert Memmi describes precisely this predicament: ‘Being a creature of oppression, [the colonized] is bound to be a creature of want…. The colonized's refusal resembles a surface phenomenon, but it actually derives from the very nature of the colonial situation' (1991: 119). The most visible event gathering the musical traditions of the Pacific coast, within which chirimía is prominent, is the Festival de Petronio Álvarez, which takes place every year in Cali, Colombia. Friedemann (Friedemann and Horner, Citation1995: 122). In this case a culture whose perspectives are often male. Although produced throughout Chocó, chirimía is also a source of musical innovation for national projects proposed by internationally recognized salsa groups such as Grupo Niche and Guayacán Orquesta, both of which maintain a close connection to Chocoan chirimía traditions, produce and subsidize new music, and advance a dynamics of identity construction that has benefited from the 1991–93 constitutional changes, as more projects financed by federal monies are used to advance local artistic production. Younger groups such as Son Bacosó and Saboreo have diversified their styles by using Hip‐Hop influences while still maintaining a close connection to Chocoan politics and local issues. Saboreo's ‘Pacífico 2000’ was an incisive indictment of globalization and national forces that undermined local autonomies, while at the same time emphasizing a sustainable politics of locality as a mechanism of survival. See Peter Wade's Music, Race, & Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia (2000) for an extensive study of the relationship between race, music and national identity.