Cartagena and the sound of cumbia
A brief photo-essay about some of the dance companies that take over old Cartagena, what we call “la ciudad amurallada”, and fill it with moves of cumbia and mapalé.
What seems to draw all the tourists from wherever they are in the old town is probably the combined sound of the drums and the flutes. It can be heard from at least one block away.
They typically take over La Plaza de Bolivar (the square in Cartagena that bears El Libertador’s last name) and the show starts sometime after lunch. The whole thing must be comprised of at least two dance companies and three different groups of musicians.
There is no lack of charisma. We are talking afros and full on costumes and all the colours, wherever you look. They dance, but they also make sure to yell the name of the dance company, as loud as possible. You will rather frequently see a hat circulating from hand to hand as a reminder that hey, the show ain’t for free after all, they do need your generous contributions.
Like most things about Cartagena, this is yet another Caribbean fantasy happening live before your eyes. One can understand why a guy or a gal coming from afar would immediately fall in love around here. There’s curves and muscles and the added sensuality of the music and the way they move. The ladies come in all the shades of black and they have the kind of smile that you normally only see in dancers.
I am yet to meet anyone who is impervious to this music. I remember it finding its course all the way to our flat on the fifth floor, in Barranquilla, sneaking through any little crack on the wall and taking over slowly until it was impossible not to move or at least hum. Some are oblivious to its origin: Argentinians have somehow appropriated it in the form of “Cumbia Villera,” which is a very sad imitation that seems to exist for the sole purpose of making the point that the original is so irresistible precisely because it is an affair of mestizos, of half breeds.
The Argentinean version and all of the copycats that are produced far away from the Caribbean have the most horrendously monotonous beat of maracas that the human species has conceived. It’s basically a very obvious chucu-chucu made so that white people are able to follow the beat.
In contrast, the one I grew up with sumptuosly combines the European brass, the language of Cervantes, the Spanish flowing skirts, the African rhythms and drums, the Black movement of the hips, the hypnotising gaita flutes of the Native American Kogis and Zenús. It is an unfathomably catchy and complex blend of European, African and Native American musical artefacts. It is one amazing way in which the three cultures found each other by the sea of the New World.
It is probably the African beat—the Black physicality so foundational to it—that takes over your hips (or at least your feet) and makes you want to move. I dare you try not to. It must be the magical gaita that sounds like the water and the wind that makes it so mysteriously appealing.
This music is in many ways the Afrobeat that preceded Fela Kuti and Burna Boy, it is like me and for me: a music for for the people whose blood contains the struggles of the coloniser, the colonised, and the enslaved. It is blissful and beautiful and it was proudly born by the Colombian Caribbean. I regret that it took me so long to be this damn proud of it.
