Garifuna

While the origins of the Garifuna, a culturally hybrid, multilingual people of mixed Amerindian and African ancestry who never submitted to slavery, are not entirely clear, their Arawak-speaking Amerindian ancestors almost certainly came from tropical forests in South America. Debate persists as to whether Caribs and Arawaks constitute two separate ethnic groups, as some ethnohistorians believe New World Europeans simply grouped native peoples by whether they were hostile or friendly. Nevertheless, if Arawaks and Caribs were distinct cultures, it is highly likely that the ancestors of the Garifuna were a mixture of both. 

The few native peoples to elude English or Spanish enslavement on Caribbean plantations occasionally raided European plantations, often carrying off African slaves. Other African bondsmen ran away to the sanctuaries of the free Amerindian islanders. In 1635 Spanish ships carrying kidnapped West Africans shipwrecked near the Eastern Caribbean island of St. Vincent, which, along with the island of Dominica, was an early center of Carib resistance to European rule. Survivors took refuge among the indigenous Carib people, who welcomed the newly liberated slaves into their communities. Over the decades, the West African transplants and local Amerindians intermarried and formed a hybrid culture, and in time became a distinct people known as Garifuna. Culturally the Garifuna retain their Arawak language and Amerindian patterns of subsistence, political organization, and kinship, while their African ancestry has deeply informed their oral tradition, dance, drum styles, and agriculture.

Owing to their ancestry from runaway African slaves, the Garifuna were viewed by some Europeans as an impediment to the institution of slavery and the further development of Caribbean colonization. Sporadic violence between Garifuna and English settlers in the Caribbean intensified toward the close of the eighteenth century, finally culminating in an extensive British military campaign against the Garifuna on St. Vincent in 1795. Outgunned and facing starvation, the Garifuna surrendered in late 1796 and early 1797, and were first exiled by the British to the island of Baliceaux, where roughly half of the Garifuna died as a result of unsanitary conditions and disease. In March 1797 the remaining Garifuna were transported from Baliceaux to the island of Roatán, in the Bay Islands off the Caribbean coast of Honduras. Shortly following, the Spanish seized control of the island and brought the Garifuna to the Honduran port of Trujillo, where they established thriving farms and quickly settled the shoreline from Nicaragua to Belize. 

The Garifuna retained clear West African elements in their music, which combines powerful vocals with a dense percussive base. The intensely percussive, communal antiphonic (call-and-response) qualities of Garifuna singing and drumming are rooted in the sacred context of ancestral invocations and spirit possession and reveal a kinship with other musical expressions of the African diaspora, especially Cuban santería, Haitian vodoun and Brazilian candomblé. Garifuna song texts serve as a repository of the history and traditional knowledge of the Garifuna, including fishing, agricultural experience, i.e. cassava-growing, and the construction of canoes and baked mud houses. Traditional Garifuna songs contain a significant amount of satire, and are accompanied by various drums and dances, which encourage communal participation. In acknowledgment of the modern threats to survival of the Garifuna culture by the lack of economic prospects, urbanization, migration, discriminatory land measures, and the school system's failure to acknowledge the language and culture, UNESCO declared Garifuna language, dance and music to be a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001. 

Garifuna music builds on an ensemble of two or perhaps three hollow log garaon drums: the improvising primera, which is a tenor drum considered to be the heartbeat of Garifuna music ensembles, the counter-rhythmic segunda drum that acts to shadow the primera, and the tercera that maintains a steady bass-line.

Originally music and dance developed by the Garifuna people for funeral rites, traditional punta  instrumentation includes hand drums, maracas, a tortoise shell and the caracol (conch shell), and includes call-and-response singing. More recently, punta has become modernized into a popular style played by electronic instruments.  

Another popular form of Garifuna music is paranda, which adds the guitar to the garaon drum ensemble. Spanish for "carousal," the salacious paranda male-female couple dance recalls the sensual motions of the Cuban rumba guaguanco. 











Bibliography

Andrews, G.R., 2004. Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000, Oxford University Press, USA. 

Gates Jr., H.L. & Appiah, K.A., 1999. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Basic Civitas Books; 1st edition.  

Louisiana’s Division of the Arts, 2009. Garifuna Music and Dance. Available at: http://www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Articles_Essays/garifuna2.html [Accessed November 25, 2011]. 

Steel drums of Trinidad

Yorubans represented a large portion of the slave population in Trinidad, which explains how the Shango religion that emerged as a syncretic blend of Catholic and Yoruban spiritual beliefs was to one day have strong influence on the culture of the island. Much like other New World religions spawned from the Yoruban pantheon, such as Santería and Candomblé, the Shangó religion involves drumming with call and response singing, trance and possession.

Carnival had arrived in Trinidad with the French planters via Martinique, and the slaves, who were forbidden from participating in Carnival, formed their own, parallel celebration called Canboulay, which was originally a harvest festival in which drums, singing, dancing and chanting were an integral part. After Emancipation of the slaves in 1838, Canbouley developed into an outlet and a festival for former indentured laborers and freed slaves who were banned from participating in Carnival. The term "canboulay" derived from the burning sugar canes, or "cannes brulees," carried by the revelers. When the British attempted in 1881 to ban the practice of carrying sticks and lighted torches during Canbouley, a clash ensued, resulting in the Canbouley Riots. The Riots led to a complete ban on Calinda (stick fighting) and African percussion music. These practices were subsequently replaced by tunable bamboo sticks beaten together in what is known as tamboo bamboo music, which was itself banned in turn.

The British ban on percussion instruments and religious observances in the late 19th century was to lead to the surreptitious innovations that gave birth to steelpan music. Oil drums littering the island following the closing of the U.S. military base in the late 1940s were refashioned into one of the most unique new instruments of the 20th century. Pioneered by Spree Simon, the steel drum (or steel pan) was eventually incorporated into Carnival, reinstating a participatory strong percussive presence and helping to forge a national identity. By the 1960s, steel pans became commonplace in Trinidad and throughout the Caribbean, and were incorporated into Carnival in the Panorama, an annual music competition of the steelbands of Trinidad and Tobago. 

Wifredo Lam and Fernando Ortiz

Afrocubanismo spawned a number of artists, such as the painter Wifredo Lam, composer Amadeo Roldán and the poet Nicolás Guillén, who often drew inspiration from black working-class street culture and sought to establish and promote the value of popular black musical, artistic and literary forms as vital elements of national identity.

Afro-Chinese Cuban artist Wifredo Lam employed Cubist painting techniques inspired by Afro-Carribean religions. His surrealist compositions present his mythic, erotic and syncretic influences in supernatural and abstract forms, and his artwork sought to liberate Afro-Cubans from cultural subjugation during a time in which Cuba was in danger of corrupting its African heritage. The Jungle, which is considered Lam's masterpiece, intends to relate a Santería-inspired spiritual state; here, Lam simultaneously expresses the spirit of Afro-Cuban culture while attending to the way their traditions were debased for the sake of tourism.

Wifredo Lam, The Jungle (1943)

Notwithstanding his intellectual formation within a white and Hispanophile cultural elite, the Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz left an intellectual legacy of astonishing breadth and erudition that asserted Cuba's cultural debts to Africa. Motivated by what he saw as a complete lack of sociological research on blacks in Cuba, Ortiz set out to methodically chronicle and catalog all of Cuba's African-derived forms to undo years of heretofore Negrophobic musicology by scholars who denied any African influences in Cuban music. He pioneered the use of the term Afro-Cuban in his 1906 book, Los negros brujos, and developed the concept of transculturation, considered his most influential contribution, which is distinguishable from assimilation in that it acknowledges ongoing struggle and creative resistance that mutually transforms two or more cultures.

From Whitening to Afrocubanismo

     Driven by the prospects of emancipation and an opportunity to play a prominent role in nation building, Afro-Cubans enthusiastically joined the struggle for independence against Spain. But any hopes for racial democracy were curbed shortly following with the U.S. military presence in Cuba from 1898 to 1902 and again from 1906 to 1908 that emboldened the conservative ruling class, who pursued policies that actively sought a "whitening" of the nation (blanqueamiento) by subsidizing immigration from Europe, mostly Spain, and extricating blacks and mulattos from every aspect of national life. Cuban elites of the early twentieth century viewed Afro-Cuban cultural forms as the antithesis of European civilization and progress they sought to impose on their unruly societies. To be sure, the specter of an Afro-Cuban uprising styled after the Haitian Revolution—a common fear among the ruling establishment in many colonial societies—also animated this policy of whitening. More than 600,000 Spaniards are estimated to have immigrated to Cuba between 1902 and 1931, and while 'whitening' lost all intellectual respectability in the wake of the death of scientific racism in the 1940s, it did serve to shift the demographics of Cuba, as the island nation was one of the more Spanish of the Latin American republics. But most damaging effects of whitening to the social and economic fabric of the young nation was the further marginalization of blacks and mulattos, which contributed to an internalized oppression.  

     In response to the perceived “black problem” of the early twentieth century and its attendant racism, leaders who formed the Committee of Veterans of Color in the early years of the republic broke with the Liberal Party in 1908 to found the first black political party in the New World, the Partido Independiente de Color (Independent Party of Color), and fight for self-determination and racial equality. The party platform demanded equal participation in government, an end to racial discrimination in access to education and government jobs by Afro-Cubans, and an end to the ban on "non-white" immigration. Party members viewed the myth of racial democracy as working against blacks and mulattos by silencing and deracializing Cubans. After a racist government propaganda campaign that stoked fears of a race war, the legality of the Partido Independiente de Color was under attack with passage of the Morúa Law in 1909 that banned political parties based on race or class, and a demonstration against this prohibition in 1912 provoked a harsh repression by government forces. The leaders of the movement, Evaristo Estenoz and Pedro Ivonet, together with a number of other veterans of the War of Independence, were killed in what is known as the Race War of 1912. All told, more than 3000 blacks and mulattos were massacred in Oriente, and black people across the young nation were detained, harassed, and terrorized.

     While the Race War of 1912 represented a nadir in Cuban race relations, it was followed by the progressive emergence of an Afro-Cuban middle class that criticized Cuban racism, advocated self-improvement in the black community, encouraged African diasporic solidarity, and called for political and cultural agency. As a product of this period of cultural renewal, the  afrocubanismo, or negrismo (négritude), movement took shape to celebrate Afro-Cuban cultural expressions while seeking to reconstruct a national identity that reflected Cuba's rich African heritage. The movement would spawn a diversity of art and literature, from the magical realism of Alejo Carpentier and the radical Afrocentric poetry of Nicolás Guillén.

      Out of the maelstrom of late-nineteenth century Cuba, the son emerged as a musical form in Oriente province, and its straightforward African elements meant that playing it in the early twentieth century was a punishable offense. However, by 1925 President Antonio Machado authorized a son band to play at his birthday, symbolically moving the music from the social spaces of working class neighborhoods into the mainstream and thus, the commercial entertainment industries. For the first time, Cuba’s establishment started embracing the nation's mixed heritage—a concept called Cubanidad. 

The trajectory of artistic production by marginalized social groups from an initial status as a primitive expression to an eventual nationalized art form accepted by middle-classes and elites is one played out across the African Diaspora. This evolution in status reveals much about the history of national discourses and racial relationships in Cuba. Less than a grand step toward a racial democracy, the gradual incorporation of Afro-Cuban marginal expressions to the cultural 'main stream,' and the stylistic transformations that occurred in the process, in many ways reflected an appropriation of Afro-Cuban music that served and responded to nationalist interests. Indeed, often Cuban intellectuals and the social elite only accepted Afro-Cuban music after it had first become popularized abroad, as Europeans and Americans explored primitivism and other movements of supposedly African-influenced cultural expressions. An emergent tourism industry in Cuba led club and hotel owners to give visitors an experience that tourists would consider 'authentically' Cuban, which had the effect of ending segregation in a number of venues to allow black and mulatto performers and prompted the lifting of government restrictions on the public performance of various Afro-Cuban forms. The Cuban son exemplifies this complex developmental arc: first repressed, later popular abroad and at home, and finally acclaimed and embraced as an authentic national form.    

Bibliography

Andrews, G.R., 2004. Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000, Oxford University Press, USA.

Gates Jr., H.L. & Appiah, K.A., 1999. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Basic Civitas Books; 1st edition.

Gates Jr., H.L., 2011. Black in Latin America, PBS.

Moore, R.D., 1997. Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1940, University of Pittsburgh Press.

Sublette, N., 2007. Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, Chicago Review Press.

Velez, M., 2000. Drumming For The Gods (Studies In Latin America & Car), Temple University Press.

Afro-Latin Music in the United States

The early twentieth century American presence in Cuba facilitated a cultural exchange between Afro-Cuban artists and some of America’s leading representatives of the Harlem Renaissance—a cross-fertilization that significantly influenced afrocubanismo. Langston Hughes' 1929 visit to Havana allowed for a meeting between him and Nicolás Guillén, who greatly admired Hughes for his success in transcribing the essence of black popular musical forms such as blues and jazz into American literature. Likewise, Guillén used son as vehicle for his most original poetic expression.

Source: American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music

The first Cuban musical ambassador to the U.S. of note was Mario Bauzá, a trumpet player who joined Chick Webb's jazz orchestra in 1933 and quickly infused Latin sensibilities into the jazz idiom. Latin Jazz emerged as a distinct genre in the New York clubs of the 1940s, where orchestras like Machito & His Afro-Cubans—the first band name to acknowledge African roots —performed to increasing popularity. Bauzá, who was Machito's brother-in-law, served as the band's musical director and helped construct the new music on an Afro-Cuban rhythmic foundation, but added jazz orchestrations derived from swing and improvisation on top. The addition of a young timbale player named Tito Puente added another exciting dimension to the emerging sound. Jazz luminaries like Dizzy Gillespie was a great admirer of the new Latin music and added the now-legendary Cuban conguero Chano Pozo to his band. Soon enough, congas began to appear in other jazz bands, infusing their songs with the clave rhythms that form the core of Afro-Cuban music. 

     Cuba's mambo was pioneered by bassist Israel "Cachao" Lopez and fused rumba rhythms with big-band jazz; exemplar recordings include Dámaso Pérez Prado's Mambo Jumbo (1948). 

      The Palladium Ballroom was a New York club at 53rd & Broadway renowned as an epicenter for Latin music and dance in the U.S., and for the list of legendary artists who performed there, which includes Machito, Arsenio Rodríguez, Tito Puente, Tito Rodríguez, Celia Cruz, La Sonora Matancera, Beny Moré, and many more.

     In the 1940s, Arsenio Rodríguez, a virtuoso of the tres (Cuban guitar with three groups of double strings), set the standard for the Cuban conjunto (group) by adding congas, piano and trumpets to the traditional guitar-based sextet, thus pioneering a type of son with novel instrumentation.

Haitians in Cuba

     In early 18th century Cuba the Spanish Catholic Church created mutual aid societies, known as cabildos, which, in spite of the imposed Catholicism, served simultaneously as institutions of entertainment and venues of their ancestral African religious practices, adapting them to their new environment and to their circumstances as a marginalized, repressed and enslaved group [Velez, p 139]. The cabildos served a diversity of economic, political, and cultural functions. In stark contrast to the experience of African slaves in the United States, Africans in the cabildos of Cuba were afforded an opportunity to congregate with Africans of the same nation or territorial origin and speak in their native languages, which allowed for the retention and reconstruction of musical traditions and the perpetuation of rituals, ancestral expressions of dance and song related to religious belief, and the use of instruments so essential to the performance of those rituals. Lucumi (Yoruba) cabildos, Congo (name given to person of cultural practices of Bantu origin) cabildos and Arara (Fon) cabildos thrived, and were officially recognized during the colonial era and in the first years of the republic. Most offered mutual-aid benefits when members became disabled or sick, and virtually all provided death benefits, helping to defray the expense of funerals for members families [Andrews, p. 69].       

     As the the influence of the church over Cuban society waned in the 1800s (Knight, 1970), and the importation of Africans to Cuba approached all-time highs, the African culture of the cabildos was fortified further to give rise to Afro-Cuban religions: Santeria, Abakuá, and Palo Monte, each of which was formed in the cabildos of their respective peoples: Santeria in the Yoruba (Lucumi) cabildos, Abakua in the Carabali (Calabar coast) cabildos, and Palo Monte in the Congo cabildos. 

     Haitian immigration to Cuba began in 1791 and has continued at various times up to the present day. The early wave of refugees from Saint-Domingue established communities in the Oriente province of Cuba, which then was quite remote. Africans from Haiti were a transculturated mix of Dahomeyan, Congolese, and other groups, who usually spoke creolized French and observed the voodoo religion. 

     Given Haiti's reputation as a dangerous center for subversion, these new arrivals to Cuba avoided describing themselves as haitiano and soon the word francés was universally applied to all the refuges and their distinct array of music and social organizations. These black franceses formed cabildos, where they performed their dances known as tumbas, which derives from the French word for drums, "tambours"; in time these societies became known as tumba francesa, some of which survive to this day. Adorned in clothes modeled on the ballroom costumes of eighteenth-century France, they play almost purely African-derived music on Dahomeyan-style drums, together with dances that imitate the formal dances of the French society of the colonial era, while incorporating African elements. 

     The tumba was hardly limited to the cabildos and was heard on the coffee plantations, in the city slums, and in the palenques, the remote mountain communities of the cimmarones, or runaways. Palenques existed from the beginning of slavery in Cuba and could be found all over the island, but few regions provided more favorable terrain for hiding out than the mountains of Oriente. Soon after the arrival of the Haitian refugees at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a number of franceses joined or formed palenque communities where they practiced voodoo and performed the tumba.   

     Notably, the franceses employed a syncopated rhythmic cell known as the cinquillo (meaning quintuplet), which would prove to be not only the foundation of Haitian meringue and Domincan merengue, but of the Cuban danzón and the bolero. The influence of eighteenth-century France and the practice of voodoo allowed the franceses to provide more depth to Cuban music as distinct regional styles thrived and migrated.

Haiti Roots of the Creole Choir of Cuba

Haitian Roots of the Creole Choir of Cuba

Bibliography

Andrews, G.R., 2004. Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000, Oxford University Press, USA. 
Creole Choir Boasts Roots In Haiti, Fame In Cuba. October 24, 2011. National Public Radio. Available at: http://www.npr.org/2011/10/24/141652174/creole-choir-boasts-roots-in-haiti-fame-in-cuba. 
Knight, F.W., 1970. Slave Society in Cuba During the Nineteenth Century, University of Wisconsin Press.  

Sublette, N., 2007. Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, Chicago Review Press. Velez, M., 2000. Drumming For The Gods (Studies In Latin America & Car), Temple University Press.  Velez, M., 2000. Drumming For The Gods (Studies In Latin America & Car), Temple University Press.  

Afro-Mexicans in Mexican History and Culture

The nationalistic call to assimilate into La Raza Cósmica (The Cosmic Race) obscures a rich cultural and historical legacy of Afro-Mexicans in a homogenizing quest toward a dominant mestizo culture. The Mexican slave trade reached its peak between 1580 and 1640, when nearly two out of every three African slaves bound for Spanish holdings in the Americas disembarked in Mexico (Gates, Jr., 2011). The scale of the importation of Africans is evident in demographic figures that show Spanish outnumbered by blacks until 1810 (Vaughn, 2001). The experiences of slavery and the rigid caste-system, coupled with a prevalent ideology of whitening among the lower class, have all worked to suppress a significant component of the Mexican people.

Notwithstanding the historical forces against any sense of racial pride, the contributions of Afro-Mexicans have been recently reappraised by scholars, who focus on two regions in Mexico that have significant black populations today, the state of Veracruz on the Gulf coast, and the Costa Chica, an almost 250-mile long region on the Pacific coast in the state of Oaxaca. On the plains of the Costa Chica, livestock provided economic sustenance, and blacks of the colonial period worked principally as ranchers, while in Veracruz, slaves were taken to work in mines, sugarcane fields and wealthy homes. 

African retentions are clearly present in the danza de los diablos, a stomping, syncopated dance performed in the Costa Chica on Todos Santos (All Saints' Day):

By early 17th century, at least 10% of the Africans in New Spain had run away to form palenque (maroon societies).

The most well known of these was founded by Gaspar Yanga, who led a slave rebellion near Veracruz in 1570 and organized a self-sustaining maroon colony that eventually won its freedom to establish what is regarded as the first town founded by free blacks in the Americas. 


The music of Veracruz reveals a strong African influence, especially in the elements of the local fandango celebrations that use the traditional music style of the son jarocho, a harp music that is improvisational, repetitive, and percussive. The son jarocho features a call-and-response song structure and uses a number of instruments, the most African of which is a thumb piano known as the marimbol. The most widely known son jarocho is "La Bamba," although its African roots are not widely recognized.

Bibliography

Gates Jr., H.L., 2011. Black in Latin America, PBS.

Vasconcelos, J., 1997. The Cosmic Race / La raza cosmica, The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Vaughn, B., 2001. Mexico in the Context of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Diálogo, 5, p.14-19.

Sugar's Labor Requirements

     The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) positioned Cuba to replace Haiti as the premier sugar producing country in the Western Hemisphere. The immense labor demands of sugar cultivation entrenched slavery and the slave trade in Cuba; consider that within two decades of the Haitian Revolution, slaves constituted 40% of Cuba's population, and, owing to the harsh demands of sugar cultivation, slave deaths outstripped births (Perez, Jr., 2010). The affordability and availability of slaves, together with a complete disregard for their living conditions, made their importation, rather than population gains via natural growth as in the United States, economically favorable. The earlier ban on slave imports in the United Stated in 1808, in addition to the fact that slavery was not abolished in Cuba until 1886 (the last country in the Caribbean to do so) accounts for the almost two-fold more Africans in Cuba.

Volume and direction of the trans-Atlantic slave trade from all African to all American regions (Eltis, 2010)

     When slave imports to the U.S. were banned in 1808, the black cultures of the United States and Cuba began to chart different courses, especially as more and more Africans arrived in Cuba to address the vast demand for labor.
     Curiously, Afro-Cuban culture was one of the least Islamized of the New World. An interesting dichotomy existed: whereas whites of the United States in this time period came from European countries with virtually no Islamic influence, many of the Africans imported to the U.S. came from Islamized regions of Africa. In Cuba it was just the opposite: its white population had a (somewhat amnesiac) Islamic background, but most the Afro-Cubans hailed from regions of the African continent that had not been Islamized.

     These regional differences were apparent in the musical traditions of Cuba and the United States, as the music and culture of the United States reflected a Sudanic influence. The model for the legions of folk musicians and songsters who created and sustained blues in their infancy may have been the Senegambian gewels (griots), “entertainers who play for dances, do acrobatics, tell stories, pose riddles for members of the audience to solve,” and, like many African-American songsters and instrumentalists, “pride themselves on being able to provide the appropriate music for any situation” (Coolen, p. 9). The griots were skilled musicians and folklorists who served to maintain the history, traditions, and mores of their respective kinship groups through songs and stories. In terms of instrumentation, antecedents of the fiddle and banjo, so ubiquitous in American slave culture, were used widely among Senegambian musicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The African-American songsters who synthesized the blues from preceding forms of black folk music were in line with the griot tradition, preserving the historical and cultural heritage of their people while signaling a desire for social discourse and action. Their songs were the collective representation of the realities of a postbellum generation of African-Americans still reckoning with the legacy of slavery, engaged in a struggle for survival and freedom.

     The music in Cuba, however, reflected altogether different origins, as a rhythmic key, or clave, is a centerpiece of a number of Afro-Cuban musical forms, and Cuban music, for all its delights, does not employ the loping swing rhythms so characteristic of African-American music.

Bibliography

Coolen, M.T.1, 1991. Senegambian Influences on Afro-American Musical Culture. Black Music Research Journal, 11(1), p.1-18.

Eltis, D. & Richardson, D., 2010. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Yale University Press.

Pérez Jr., L.A., 2010. Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution 4th ed., Oxford University Press, USA.

Sublette, N., 2007. Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, Chicago Review Press.

New and Old World Intersections of Music, Religion, and Culture

The trickster deity in West Africa, Esu, was reformulated in parts of the New World as Legba (also known as Elegguá, Eshu, Elegbara), who in the Yoruba pantheon stands at spiritual crossroads and has power over fortune and misfortune:

At a crossroads in the history of the Yoruba gods, when each wished to find out who, under God, was supreme, all deities made their way to heaven, each bearing a rich sacrificial offering on his or her head. All save one. Eshu- Elegbara, wisely offering the deity of divination with a sacrifice, had been told by him what to bring to heaven—a single crimson parrot feather (ekodide), positioned upright upon his forehead, to signify that he was not to carry burdens on his head. Responding to the fiery flashing of the parrot feather, the very seal of supernatural force and ashe (life force), God granted Eshu the force to make all things happen and multiply (Thompson, p. 18)

In a number of Caribbean communities, Esu is known as Elegguá, especially among the Lucumí, a Yoruban people of Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Elegguá's colors are red and black, and according to Sublette, he's always the first and last to be saluted in a ceremony (p. 215). Elegguá inspires musical ceremonies in the Santeria tradition, as seen here:

It was with this power over fortune and misfortune that Legba appeared in African-American culture at the crossroads, serving as an intermediary between the spirit world and humanity. Perhaps the most famous American example comes from the great bluesman, Robert Johnson:

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees 

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees 

Asked the Lord above “Have mercy, now save poor Bob, if you please”

Standin’ at the crossroad, tried to flag a ride 

Ooo eeee, I tried to flag a ride 

Didn’t nobody seem to know me, babe, everybody pass me by

Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, risin’ sun goin’ down 

Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, eee, eee, risin’ sun goin’ down 

I believe to my soul, now, poor Bob is sinkin’ down

     

The crossroads legend of the American South appears to be consistent with the Yoruba myth. It is unsurprising that in the historical context of the early twentieth century, when African cultural memory was less remote, this legend captured the imaginations of Robert Johnson, Peetie Wheetstraw, and other bluesmen who would, in turn, adopt it as part of their musical persona. Robert Johnson obsessed over “the forces against him,” expressing his fixation and sense of resignation in “Hellhound On My Trail,” “Me and The Devil Blues,” and “Crossroads Blues,” (Barlow, p. 49; Palmer, p. 127). In Robert Johnson’s blues, the Devil is “the ultimate trickster,” according to Barlow (p. 49). Tommy Johnson also met the trickster Devil at a crossroads under a full moon, and made a Faustian “covenant with [the Devil],” for which he was granted skill and fame (Barlow, p. 41; Palmer, p. 113). Peetie Wheatstraw claimed to be “the High Sheriff of Hell” and “the Devils son-in-law.” Notably, as the Devil, Esu/Legba in its New World incarnation was more a trickster than the Christian concept of Satan, and served a role as overseer and inspirer of the art of interpretation, as “ultimate master of potentiality” with “the force to make all things happen and multiply” (Floyd, p. 74; Thompson, p. 18-19).

Bibliography

Barlow, W., 1989. Looking Up At Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture, Temple University Press.

Floyd Jr., S.A., 1996. The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States, Oxford University Press, USA.

Palmer, R., 1982. Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta, Penguin

Sublette, N., 2007. Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, Chicago Review Press. 

Thompson, R.F., 1984. Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy, Vintage.

Notes on Mintz: Slavery, Forced Labor and the Plantation System

Nearly all Caribbean slaves were allocated for needs of large-scale agriculture, especially for production of subtropical commodities: sugar, coffee, and spices. Slavery was totally bound up in the spread of European military and colonial power. For the slave, the past provided symbolic and material resources to draw upon, and this creative process had a two-way character, which was especially manifest in music. According to Ralph Ellison: “American culture was, even before the official founding of the nation, pluralistic; and it was the African’s origin in cultures in which art was highly functional which gave him an edge in shaping the music and dance of the nation.” “When speaking of African-American cultures, we speak of disturbed pasts; the glory of African-Americana inheres in the durable fiber of humanity.” (Mintz)

A wide range of racial dialogues can be found across the 50 islands of the Antilles. Perception of race differences by the majority, as seen in the United States, has not functioned the same way in the Caribbean, where problems of race have been embedded in wider questions about colonial exploitation.

Three crudest yet most important ways in which Caribbean politics differ from North America: 1) colonialism of region 2) smallness of its societies 3) predominance of nonwhites

The smallness of these societies and the distance between them have always mitigated against an integrated economic or political development, even in the face of commonly felt needs.

Their frontiers is the islands were carefully closed to free men whenever possible, to prevent ‘uncontrolled development.’ Spain saw no effective challenge to its dominance in the Caribbean until 1625. The fallout of this first unchecked Spanish phase of colonialism was an almost complete destruction of the native population and the establishment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The metropolises on the Caribbean islands were not only ports of trade, but centers of a particular form of agro-industrial enterprise.  

Mintz notes several important facts of Caribbean slavery:

1)    Caribbean slavery shared much with other parts of the colonial New World, but much less with other forms of slavery. Primary function was to be manual laborers engaged in production in excess of consumption, various market commodities.

2)    Slavery was an answer to a felt need for labor. There was abundant land and a severe labor scarcity

3)    There were many periods where slavery and other forms of labor coercion were scarcely distinguishable

4)    Caribbean history is mostly African but also yellow, red, brown and white history

5)    Servile resistance took many forms

Bibliography

Eltis, D. & Richardson, D., 2010. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Yale University Press.

Mintz, S.W., 1988. Caribbean Transformations, Columbia University Press.

African Retentions in Latin Music

A number of African retentions are apparent throughout the vast range of Afro-Latin music, including the antiphonic (call-and-response) song pattern, polyrhythms, improvisation, and syncopation. All of these elements are present in this exemplar recording of 'Mas Que Nada' by Carlos (Patato) Valdez and Eugenio (Totico) Arango from their 1967 classic album, Patato y Totico, which deeply inspired a burgeoning rhumba subculture in late-60s/early-70s New York 

 

Central to the analysis of this blog are the influence of African music, Afro-Latin performers and composers, and the Afro-Latin experience as they relate to the evolution of new forms of sonic expression from the colonial period to the modern day. Here, the historical roots of Afro-Latin music, and how these various musical forms (e.g. Samba and Son) moved from the social spaces of working class neighborhoods into commercial entertainment industries, will be explored. In addition, attention is given to the ways these genres helped create a sense of community through language, performance practices, history, struggle and heritage. While some Afro-Latin musical forms have been appropriated to serve national interests, the immense contributions of Afro-descendants in the history of Latin America have by and large been overlooked, forgotten and ignored. This blog is a modest effort to address this historical marginalization and the social and cultural omissions perpetrated against Afro-Latinos by Eurocentric influences inherited from colonization.