The City of Musical Memory. Lise A. Waxer
the Andes and are also found in southern Colombia. In the southwest Pacific Coast region, the currulao represents a more direct connection with African diasporic roots, employing marimba, single-headed drums, and shakers modeled on West and Central African instruments and a dense polyrhythmic texture in 12/8 meter similar to those of many sub-Saharan African styles. Like that of the Atlantic Costeño people, the music and culture of Afro-Colombians from the Pacific is also seen as sensuous and playful.
Other musical traditions frame Colombian regional diversity. The grassy plains of the southeast, which are geographically and culturally linked to the Venezuelan grasslands, form the heartland of the courtship dance known as joropo, which is associated with the cowboy culture of the region. Performed on harp, bandola, cuatro, and maracas, joropo is a dynamic, polyrhythmic mestizo style that fuses Andalusian, African, and indigenous elements. In rural and semiurban areas of Antioquia province, the guitar-based carrilera is associated with the urbanizing peasant or worker class, where economic suffering is configured into mournful songs of romantic loss in a manner similar to the one Deborah Pacini Hernández describes for bachata in the Dominican Republic (1995). Throughout Colombia, a number of indigenous traditions are also practiced within small native communities located along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and in the Sierra Nevada, the highlands of Cauca and Nariño provinces, and the southeast Amazon region. In the highland region bordering Ecuador, mestizo and indigenous peoples perform a style of Andean music distinct from Colombian música andina and similar to Ecuadorian and Peruvian genres. Another Afro-Colombian tradition relevant to this study is the body of religious songs specific to the rural towns and settlements of the Cauca Valley that flank Cali’s southern limits. This repertoire, adapted from Catholic songs and hymns, is performed by small brass-and-wind bands and played during the Fiesta del Niño Dios in January, and also for funeral rituals.11
Urban popular styles also coalesce around regional and even local identities in Colombia, although, as Wade notes, the intensified pull between processes of hybridity and homogeneity make it impossible to correlate these to specific social groups in any absolute terms (2000: 23–25). Several urban sounds in Colombia have transnational origins, reflecting the ways that Colombian cities have been entry points for international influences. In general terms, vallenato, salsa, and rock are the most widespread urban styles in Colombia. Vallenato, a Costeño style, has been predominant mainly on the Atlantic coast, but in the early 1980s it followed música tropical’s footsteps into the interior, becoming prominent in Bogotá and Medellín. Only in the late 1990s did vallenato finally puncture salsa’s foothold in Cali to gain audiences there. Salsa’s spread in Colombia has been concentrated primarily along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Apart from Cali—a city with close economic ties to the Pacific coast—salsa’s most significant urban nuclei have been Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Buenaventura, all coastal port towns through which Cuban and Puerto Rican sounds first entered the country. Contemporary rock en español—Spanish or Latin American rock—first flowered in Bogotá and Medellín, the cities with the strongest economic and cultural ties to the international rock scene. Reflecting recent trends throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, however, rock en español has swept the country, its youthful audience defined more along lines of age than of region. Indeed, the Barranquilla native Shakira (an MTV darling) and Bogotá’s Andrea Echevarría (of Los Aterciopelados) have become icons of current Colombian youth culture and its most visible symbols abroad (see Cepeda 2001).
Also important, although less widespread, has been the localization of Argentine tango in Medellín and Manizales, where it functions similarly to salsa and música antillana in Cali as an emblem of cosmopolitan identity. Likewise, among Afro-Colombian inhabitants of Cartagena and Barranquilla the adoption of soukous, Afro-pop, mbqanga, soca, zouk, and other African and Afro-Caribbean genres into the style known locally as champeta or terapia has become an emblem of black cosmopolitanism on Colombia’s Atlantic coast since the 1980s. Significantly, champeta emerged after Afro-Costeño forms were appropriated (as música tropical) into national mestizo culture, providing a new vehicle for expressing a distinct Afro-Colombian subjectivity and experience (Pacini Hernández 1993; Waxer 1997).
Other transnational styles have entered Colombian urban life, reflecting popular currents in other parts of Latin America. Balada, or Spanish romantic pop music, was popularized primarily as a result of control by Latin American music industries (Manuel 1991). Balada’s influence in Colombia peaked during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the nueva ola, or new wave, of romantic crooners such as Julio Iglesias, Leo Dan, Sandro, and Rafael washed up on Colombian shores. Dominican merengue, which swept several Latin American and Caribbean countries during the 1980s, made inroads into Colombia, but only in the Atlantic coast cities of Barranquilla and (to a lesser extent) Cartagena. When I arrived in Cali in 1994, merengue still faced a virtual blockade on local airwaves and in clubs that was not broken until later in the decade. Interestingly, the Dominican bachata, which has become very important for U.S. Latino audiences (especially in the northeast), was still unknown in Colombia by the year 2000, pointing to uneven processes of distribution and marketing within the Latin American music industry.
To return to the question I pose at the outset of this section: what stake have Caleños had in maintaining that no local tradition existed before the adoption of música antillana and salsa? Certainly, the diversity of musical styles that compete for attention on the national cultural landscape offers one explanation. Given that regional difference in Colombia is strongly marked by musical and cultural distinctions, the shaping of Caleño identity has been stimulated by the need to develop a distinct musical emblem for the city. Why, however, were local genres not remembered or performed? Many of the musical styles played in Cali during the early years of this century were dominated by national tastes adopted from the interior of the country. Although Cali has been marked by economic and political isolation from the Colombian interior since colonial times, local cultural tastes tended to follow national norms. This can be attributed in part to control of the city by elites who felt a need to maintain the appearance of being “cultivated” along national standards, even if other ties to the interior were weak. Through the 1940s and 1950s, however, burgeoning industrial and urban expansion fostered the rise of a new middle and upper-middle class with less allegiance to national standards and cultural images from the interior. This growth was reinforced by new social and cultural forces that entered the city and further ruptured allegiances to earlier musical practices. Certain key influences affected Cali’s musical landscape through the mid-twentieth century, and a number of factors led to the displacement of earlier local genres by a transnational one—música antillana.
Música Antillana: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan
Latin American Dance Music
In Colombia, Cuban and Puerto Rican genres from the 1920s–50s are usually referred to as música antillana—music from the Spanish Caribbean islands. I have also heard the term música caribeña (Caribbean music) used, but this is less frequent, perhaps because Colombia already has a rich vein of traditions from its own Caribbean coast. Indeed, música antillana and música caribeña are terms that are commonly used throughout Latin America, but their meanings have different nuances from country to country. In Puerto Rico, for example, these terms refer generally to any Caribbean popular dance style, especially those from Hispanic Caribbean nations, regardless of epoch.12 This can include old Cuban son and guaracha from the 1930s, Puerto Rican bomba and plena, contemporary salsa, and commercial Dominican merengue. While theoretically connected to musical genres from throughout the Caribbean, however, in Colombia “música antillana” usually refers to the Cuban and Puerto Rican popular musical styles diffused to the rest of Latin America from the 1920s through the 1950s. This probably relates to the fact that Cuban and Puerto Rican artists were better known in Colombia than were music and musicians from the Dominican Republic or other Caribbean nations. Indeed, the isolationist policies of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo curbed the widespread dissemination of merengue, the principal genre of that island, and it was only after the large wave of Dominican migration to New York in the 1970s and 1980s that merengue began to enjoy the same level of international popularity that Cuban music had attained during the first half of the century (Austerlitz 1997: 73–74). The predominance of Cuban and Puerto Rican artists on