The Acoustic Body: Rumba Guarapachanguera and Abakuá Sociality in the 1990s

Latin American Music Review, Volume 30, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2009© 2009 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

ABSTRACT: Since the late 1960s, summer rumbas in New York City’s Central Park have been a center for Puerto Rican music elaboration. However, since the mid-1990s, the arrival of Cuban rumberos has reshaped the practice. In this essay I analyze this transformation and suggest that Central Park rumba has the capacity to generate multiple sociopolitical, historical, and spiritual presences through sound and gesture. Centering on the interaction between the Cuban Marielitos and the balseros, I show how their encounter in Central Park rumba produces a transnational space of cross-generational negotiation through spiritual and secular perfor-mances. I argue that while the rumba guarapachanguera became a style performed primarily by the rumberos from Cuba’s Special Period, Abakuá spiritual bonding functioned across the Mariel and balsero generations because of the deep history embodied in their performance of the Abakuá Íremes. I theorize how the performance of rumba constitutes an aural community that, once in the Diaspora, articulates what I call the “acoustic body,” a body that echoes an internalized spiritual sound via gesture.

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keywords: Abakuá, balseros, Central Park, Mariel, rumba

RESUMEN: Desde mediados de los 1960s, la rumba del Parque Central en Nueva York ha sido centro de elaboración músical para la comunidad Puertorriqueña. A partir de mediados de los 1990s, la llegada de rumberos de Cuba reconstituyó esta prática. Este articulo analíza esta transformación y muestra como la rumba en el Parque Central tiene la capacidad de generar la presencia de multiples hechos históricos y prácticas espirituales por medio del sonído y el gesto. Se analizá la interacción entre Marielitos y balseros y como su encuentro produce un espacio transnacional donde se negocian diferencias greneracionales por medio de acciones seculares y espirtuales. Se propóne que mientras la rumba guarapachanguera funciona princi-palmente dentro de la generación del Periódo Especial, los lazos espirituales entre los Abakuá unieron estas dos generaciones dada la historia que se manifi esta en el baile del Íreme. En este contexto, la rumba se teoriza como comunidad auditiva que, una vez en la Diaspora, demues-tra lo que se defíne aquí como “cuerpo acustico,” un cuerpo que articula un sonído espiritual por medio del gesto.

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palabras clave: Abakuá, balseros, Central Park, Mariel, rumba

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The Acoustic Body:1 Rumba Guarapachanguera and Abakuá Sociality in Central Park

BERTA JOTTAR

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Introduction

In a competition of smells, from the popular perfumes Nautica and Kouros to the smell of freshly dyed white shoes, people arrive at Central Park (CP) rumba with style, down and slow. There’s a lot of waving and kissing, and hand crossings of various sorts and signifi cations. People are ready; their clothes carefully ironed, planchaos, as Hugo tells me on the phone: “Desde ayer planchando la ropa de verano. Ahora tengo que plancharla para el do-mingo.” (I have been ironing my summer clothes since yesterday. Now I have to iron them for next Sunday.) Hugo is an entrepreneur and a rumbero (rumba dancer), one of the 35,000 balseros (rafters) who came to New York in 1995. Soon after his arrival in New York City, Hugo joined the informal economy around CP rumbas. He brings botellitas of rum, anisettes, and his Polaroid camera: “Traguitos for $1, Polaroids for $5.” Yet, his business is not too profi table; too many of us receive his friendship gifts.

Since the late 1960s, summer rumbas in New York City’s CP have been a center for Puerto Rican music elaboration and a social cornucopia for Afro-Latinos/as as well as Spanish-speaking Caribbean immigrants and ex-iles (see Jottar 2005; Knaver 2005). In this essay I detail the development and performance of CP rumba in the mid-1990s and suggest that rumba has the capacity to generate multiple sociopolitical and historical presences through sound and gesture. Through an analysis of the articulation and interaction of two waves of Cuban migrants—the Marielitos who arrived in the United States in 1980, and the balseros who came to New York in 1994—I show how their encounter in CP Rumba produces a transnational space of cross-generational negotiation through secular and spiritual per-formance. I argue that while the rumba guarapachanguera became a style performed primarily by the younger generation of amateur and profes-sional rumberos from Cuba’s Special Period, Abakuá sociality and spiri-tual bonding functioned across the Mariel and balsero generations due to the deep history embodied in their performance of the spiritual fi gures of Abakuá Íremes. Finally, I theorize how the performance of rumba consti-tutes an aural community that produces alternative secular and spiritual spaces in the Diaspora.

In order to understand rumba’s transnational articulations, fi rst I pre-sent Havana’s local genealogy of the rumba guarapachanguera style in the late 1970s, its coming together via family and community ties, its rhyth-mic innovations, and the invention of musical instruments to illustrate the emergence of what I argue is an aural community. I then look at how the guarapachanguero’s insertion into transnational networks of tourists and rumba enthusiasts during the early 1990s Special Period resulted in both the proliferation of a subaltern economy among Havana rumberos/as, and the commercialization of rumba in Cuba and abroad. This history provides


Rumba Guarapachanguera and Abakuá Sociality in Central Park ! 3

the context for understanding how these new infl uences then reshaped CP rumba and the aural community surrounding it in the mid-1990s.

Rumba is an Afro-Cuban performance culture and social event where drum base music, dance, and singing function together as the organizing principle. Rumba performance is constituted through three forms and sub-styles: The yambú (a couples dance no longer practiced popularly, but done within show contexts); the guaguancó, an urban phenomenon characterized by its cadence for dancing couples; and the vacunao, a gesture symbolic of sexual possession performed by the male dancer toward the female while dancing. The guaguancó has many popular regional music styles, the most famous being the guaguancós from Matanzas and Havana (see also Daniel 1995). During the late 1970s, however, rumberos (rumba performers) from Havana created another guaguancó style, the guarapachanguero or guara-pachangueo, the central topic of this essay.2 The guarapachangueo evolved into a movement as it introduced a di! erent rumba rhythm and new in-struments (Diaz & Jottar 2004). Finally, the rumba columbia is a country-side form which also became common in Havana and other urban regions. The columbia is performed mostly by solo male dancers, and it is based on competition and dexterity.

Since the late 1960s, CP rumba in New York has been cultivated and practiced primarily by Puerto Ricans along with a few African Americans and Jewish amateur musicians. They all learned the music primarily by lis-tening and imitating the sound of rumba recordings circulating within the community. The performance of this rumba resulted in a more hybrid, Pan Caribbean, free-form jam session, what I call “rumba a la boricua” (Jottar 2008). Until the Giuliani administration (1994–2001), these summer rum-bas took place every Sunday for more than 30 years without any legal re-strictions, permits, or commercial sponsorship (see also Taylor 2003; Kirk 1998). By the mid-1990s, the expanding rumba jam sessions in CP became also a center of social life for Afro-Latinas/-os and many migrants from around the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and most centrally, for the pur-poses of this paper, Afro-Cubans. It is in the mid-1990s when two di! erent waves of Cuban migrants, the Marielitos and the balseros (rafters), con-verged to produce the most lively rumba scene in the country and possibly the world, e! ectively reconfi guring the existing genre’s style and sound.

The Marielitos reached Florida’s shores in 1980. They were about 125,000 Cuban refugees who left the island after the Peruvian embassy cri-sis when the Peruvian government gave political asylum to a group of men who “shot and killed a Cuban guard while trying to enter.” As a response, Fidel announced publicly that anyone who was interested in leaving the country could do so through the Peruvian Embassy (Torres 1999). Subse-quently, Fidel opened the Mariel port and announced over Cuban radio to the families in the United States that they could pick up their relatives.


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Fourteen years later, the balsero crisis of 1994 took place during the Cuban Special Period of Peace, an era of economic depression, energy shortage, and infl ation provoked by Perestroika and the eventual collapse of the So-viet Block. The Period’s social unrest culminated in the so-called Malecon-zaso, a state-sponsored public event in the Malecón that turned into a mas-sive riot and confrontation with the brigada antimotines and other police and military forces. The next day Fidel announced the opening of the island coasts allowing more than 30,000 rafters to leave.3

Both of these distinct migration waves from Cuba included a majority of Afro-descendants and working-class men. But there were di! erences in how they were perceived by much of the U.S. public. In contrast to previous waves of Cuban “golden exiles,” the Marielitos were often per-ceived and portrayed as criminals (see Portes and Stepick 1993; Garcia 2004) while the balseros were received as refugees from a communist regime and represented as “tropical signs” of Cuba’s desperate condition (León 1997). However, neither of them was as anti-Castro as the previous waves that constituted the Cuban exile community in South Florida. While both groups challenged the racial, social, and ideological homogeneity of the Cuban “ethnic” group in the United States,4 their arrival to New York City had a profound musical and religious impact, particularly within CP rumba.

While the Marielitos restructured CP Puerto Rican rumba into a more traditional format that followed the rules of the clave (two wood sticks used to play a three-two rhythm that serves as rumba’s spinal cord), the balseros introduced the latest rumba trends from Cuba, most notably the guaguancó “guarapachanguero.” They also arrived at CP with a di! erent religious public behavior, particularly those belonging to the Abakuá cul-ture.5 In addition, thanks to a relaxation of the U.S. embargo for cultural exchange, frequent U.S. tours of professional folkloric ensembles such as Los Muñequitos de Matanzas and Afrocuba de Matanzas fueled the com-munities of rumba afi cionados. Touring musicians visited the U.S. rumba circles, fostering exchange between rumba enthusiasts and developing a transnational rumba community encompassing di! erent migration experi-ences and generational6 a" liations.

In addition to their regular social interaction, CP rumberos also related to one another via the codifi ed performance of distinct, historically informed gestures and sounds that form the basis of what I term rumba’s “aural community.” I argue that CP rumba’s aural community is an amalgam of material and spiritual presences, including the material presence of diverse waves of refugees as well as that of their ancestors. Furthermore, rumba’s aural community is the result of the coexistence of diverse rhythms and musical meters. For the purpose of this argument, I center my discussion



on the Abakuá’s rhythmic contribution to the guaguancó as well as other less evident time signatures: The performance of silence and gesture as acoustic interactions.

My analysis of the aural community of CP rumba builds on previous works on the conceptualization of community through the expressive em-bodiment of sound by scholars like Robert Farris Thompson (1980), Ruth Stone (1982), and Steven Feld (1990). Both Farris Thompson and Stone were concerned with the role of expressive culture in the making of com-munity. To that end, they analyzed the signifi cance of the multiple meters or polymeters that are often found in West African music. In his study of the Kaluli people, Steven Feld analyzes the social life of sound and its role in mediating community sentiments by arguing that sound functions as an “aesthetically coded sentiment” (1990, 223). He observes that particular bird sounds function as metaphors and sonic refl ections of the living as well as of the dead, arguing that once these sounds are embodied as song, voice, and weeping, they become powerful expressive forms of communication.

These theories about the relation between sound and sentiment are im-portant for understanding how the body interiorizes sound, and the role of this acoustic interiority in the production of multiple presences and presents. The performance of rumba illustrates the negotiation of multiple time signatures and presences and, I argue, produces an alternative episte-mological and ontological framework that I call the “acoustic body,” a social body acting within a percussive culture that builds a spiritual bond through musical/performance traditions preserved historically in the African Dias-pora. This act includes the performance of silence as musical space, and gesture as acoustic interaction.

Thus, the acoustic body encourages a critical performance of history through the embodiment and gesture of sound. Through the interaction of Marielitos and balseros, and on the basis of two interrelated yet innova-tive elements: the secular practice of the rumba guarapachanguera, and the inclusion of Abakuá spiritual elements, participants create an aural com-munity.7 Therefore, the rumba guarapachanguera and Abakuá sociality are central to Afro-Cubans’ building of an acoustic community in Havana and in New York City, and both shape the continued transformation of CP rumba.

Little has been written about the rumba guarapachanguera style and in-vention (Diaz and Jottar, 2004), a new rhythm that has essentially, with no doubt, revolutionized rumba’s performance in Cuba and internationally. Starting in Cuba, I explore the style’s family and community origins and its instrumental and rhythmic innovations so that the reader may better un-derstand the building process of this acoustic community, and its impact on the CP Rumba community.


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Guarapachangueo: The Building of an Acoustic Community

The guaguancó guarapachanguero emerged as a grassroots music impro-visation during the late 1970s. However, it forcefully established itself via the national and international proliferation of rumba troupes during the “Special Period of Peace,” and eventually the arrival of balseros to CP. The guarapachangueo is a rhythm invented in the La Korea section of the San Miguel Padrón neighborhood on the outskirts of Havana. Helio Orovio has characterized the guaguancó guarapachanguero (or guarapa-changueo) as:

A faster, more dynamic, more polyrhythmic rumba. The way rumba had been played on the salidor or tumbador drums, and on the three-two drum, was obliterated; that ended and now it’s a very polyrhythmic thing that even contains rhythmic elements from jazz, rock and reggae. There’s a lot of rap in the singing style and the dance style mixes break-dance steps with karate . . . It’s incredible, an incredible fusion. And so that’s the guaguancó guarapachanguero, the rumba guarapachanguera that undoubtedly overlaps with the timba.8

Marielito Manuel Martínez Olivera “El Llanero” (a guaguancósero him-self) baptized the guarapachanguero by naming it before his departure from Cuba in 1980; but the rhythm was actually invented by his neighbors and cousins, the López brothers, better known as “Los Chinitos,” a rumba family known for their traditional Mother’s Day rumbas in La Korea. Elder brother Pedro explains:

In those days when beer cost sixty cents in La Korea, my brother made shoes. After fi nishing the shoes, we would buy fi ve or six beers. Our fi rst cousin Miranor Zulueta López started to play on a fan blade and played “pa pa pá”. And Little Pedro got in on that; he quickly fi gured it out tu tu túm leaving that space in the beat. I also caught on fast and that’s how the timba began . . . That’s when I started with them. But Luis and my brother were the principal musicians.9

Here Pedro describes an important feature of this new rhythm—its inter-play of beats and rests, or what the rumberos call “silences.” The role of the clave’s rhythm and the musical silence resulting from the specifi c percus-sive beats are critical components of this acoustic interaction. The rhythm performed with the guarapachangueo’s cajón (wood box drum) or tumba-dor (base conga drum) is composed of a rest and 3–4 beats which I refer to as tu cu túm or tu cu tu cúm.10

The rumbero’s internalization of this musical silence is signifi cant in the performance of an acoustic body and community. Both in Cuba and



later in the United States, however, the silence generated with the guara-pachanguero’s basic phrase became the center of heated discussions and disagreements.

In fact, the Chinitos’ after-work rumbas are part of a larger historical practice that connects rumba with free time and improvisation. Tradition-ally, rumba is considered one of the leisure practices of the Afro-Cuban poor, particularly within Havana’s port culture, where stevedores played and danced rumba during their lunch breaks and on Sundays. Thus, it is not a coincidence that the guarapachangueo’s new rhythm was a spontane-ous invention during the Chinitos’ after-work rumbas. Furthermore, be-cause rumba is an expressive culture that has historically been prohibited, policed, and managed, rumba has been played on most surfaces, including suitcases, drawers, or any wooden box. For instance, during colonial times in Cuba—known as Tiempo España (the time of the Spanish)—rumberos improvised their rumbas using two wooden boxes, or cajones, of di! erent dimensions. The larger box was made out of the thick wood of catfi sh boxes, and the smaller one was from the fi ne wood of candle boxes (Castellanos and Castellanos 1994). These diverse boxes have also served as camoufl age against police and state repression during colonial and postcolonial times.

Moreover, the Chinitos’ guarapachanguero reestablished the then for-gotten traditional maleta (suitcase) drum, a sonorous rectangular wood box and the quinto cajón (a wood cube for solo improvisation). With the guara-pachanguero however, the maleta is the only instrument whose design did not change, as the Chinitos transformed the traditional quinto cajón into a conic or pyramidal wood box.11 Because the Chinitos felt it was hard to simultaneously play a membranophone12 tumbadora and the base wood box (maleta), they also designed the raspadura,13 a larger pyramidal three-two box that rests on the fl oor between the legs. The variety of raspadura drum boxes were inventions that substantially altered the sound of rumba because, as Amado stated, “sometimes, with a simple, slight strike, the rumba’s whole structural concept changes.” Hence, the Chinitos’ guara-pachanguero resulted from the juxtaposition of traditional instruments with the invention of new ones, a key indication of the improvisational na-ture of rumba, which would continue in CP. While some of the Marielitos participated in the guarapachanguero’s movement prior to their departure, it was not until the 1990s that the balseros brought the guarapachanguero’s rhythm to CP Rumba.

The Chinitos’ combination of old and new drums, and the invention of an entirely di! erent rhythm are the result of the rumberos’ sense of improvisation, one based on their profound knowledge of clave, timing, polyrhythmic relations, and an understanding of the necessary conversa-tion among drummers, singers, and dancers. Thus, improvisation or in-ventar (to invent) is a great example of the rumbero idiosyncrasy: Anything


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rumberos think becomes a rumba lyric, and just like the Chinitos began playing their guarapachanguero on a fan blade, any surface has the po-tential to become an instrument. As El Goyo asserts, “the rumbero/a in-corporates everything into his/her system of values.” However, rumba in general, and the creation of the guarapachanguero in particular, illustrates how the rumbero/a’s value system is implicitly aural—any sound is under-stood through clave’s two-three rhythmic phrase; and when there is rumba music there are rumba dancers who also must follow the clave’s rhythm. Damián Aragón, one of the young prodigies within the guarapachangueo movement, once told me, “I feel like a prisoner of the clave, between the tumbador and the singer.”14

Indeed, the guarapachanguero is an acoustic elaboration that showcases rumba’s experimentation and improvisation based on a profound sense of a traditional polyrhythmic knowledge. However, even master drummers hesitated when confronted with this new rhythm. One of the Chinito broth-ers remembers when “Changuito” (José Luis Quintana, a former percus-sionist of Irakere and Van Van) had a “mano a mano” (hand-to-hand battle or competition) with them. It was a Saturday after a formal performance with Juan de Dios’ company Raíces Profundas at the space of the National Folkloric Ensemble in Havana. Once they started the rumba, Changuito was shocked:

Of course it was a new rhythm. He had to adapt to that rhythm, hear it fi rst: “Listen, no, no, you’ve got to study this . . . [there is] an empti-ness. You have to wait for my answer and I have to wait for your answer; you can’t do those [same old] tricks.” And then came the variation even within that pattern. The base is “tu cu túm, pakin pakin.” That’s the base, but now you can do lots of things over it, and that’s why this style has spread.

El Goyo, Helio Orovio, and others observed that the guarapachangueo has fomented a percussive individualization of rumba, thus resulting in the proliferation of guarapachangueo styles. In other words, each person, and therefore each group, performs the guarapachangueo di! erently. Nobody sounds alike and they all use di! erent combinations of drums. As Orovio suggests, this results in “a more polyrhythmic rumba.” Nevertheless, I ar-gue that the Chinitos’ innovative tu cu túm rhythm did not prove as infl u-ential as did its resulting rhythmic concept of the “empty space,” the musi-cal rest resulting from the guarapachangueo’s abstraction of the three-two drum rhythm.

The guarapachangueo, somewhat like jazz, pushes the musician’s im-provisational skills and sensitivity, as it demands keen attention from the audience and participants. The guarapachangueo’s abstract, minimalist base, and fragmented rumba phrases sound like hip-hop sampling that



resonates from a wood box rather than a boom box. It is the deconstruc-tion of rumba, literally, a cubist rumba. Yet it is rumba because it follows its Cuban clave, and because it constitutes a grassroots acoustic community of performers with a clear but heterogeneous understanding of socially coded sounds and gestures. During the Special Period, rumba functioned within resisting subaltern economies while it also experienced musical publicity via the circulation of Cuban and U.S. rumba recordings and professional rumba groups. These fortifi ed a transnational rumba community made up of rumberos/as and admirers of the form—CP rumba in New York City be-ing an example.15

The Commercialization and Internationalization of Rumba Guarapachanguera

In the 1990s, the proliferation of the rumba guarapachanguera coincided with the evolving tourist economy during the Special Period. As tourism became a primary economic source during this time, the government in-stitutionalized rumba, in addition to other Afro-Cuban forms. Thus, the guarapachangueo fl ourished during Havana’s Special Period as Afro-Cuban folklore became an asset to the new revolutionary tourist economy. The sanctioned commercialization of rumba in Cuba and its subsequent interna-tional circulation served as the bridge between Havana, New York, and New Jersey’s rumberos. Hernández-Reguant (2005) has discussed the Revolu-tion’s assimilation of Afro-Cuban folklore via the discursive combination of postcolonial theory and Marxist historical materialism. She argues that para-doxically, Cuban national rhetoric situates Afro-Cuban culture as central to Cuba’s mestizo national culture and identity while displacing the discussion of racial inequality with its emphasis on class struggle. However, Hernández-Reguant makes the case that Afro-Cuban culture is caught and marginalized within a revolutionary project (and institutions) that continue to promote a hierarchy between “high” European culture and popular culture. She adds, however, that the “gap” between high art and folklore was partially bridged during the 1990s because of “the commercialization of folklore.”16

Indeed, the commercialization of rumba during the Special Period ex-emplifi es not only the bridging of this gap, but the development of an al-ternative subaltern economy among the practitioners of Afro-Cuban folk-lore.17 Prior to the Special Period, as Giovanni del Pino, Director of Yoruba Andabo remembered,

There were not many formal groups or son bands,18 or groups of any sort. There was none of that here . . . Here the nightlife has come alive with the rise in tourism; as tourism has increased it has created a new structure. But before tourism, there was practically nothing. The groups had no place to play.


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The steady infl ux of tourists facilitated an informal economy that benefi ted rumberos—they sold recordings and instruments, and o! ered private les-sons to foreigners in Cuban convertible pesos (CUCs) rather than Cuban pesos. Thus, rumberos/as embraced the Special Period’s tourist economy and participated in what became a subaltern economy, as state-sponsored rumba venues proliferated around the city.19

The internationalization of rumba occurred through the numerous U.S. tours of professional rumba ensembles and through rumberos who left Cuba permanently, with some settling in New York City. The proliferation of rumba functioned in spite of the U.S. economic embargo and it was dur-ing the worst crisis of the Special Period, in 1992, when the Muñequitos de Matanzas made their historic nine-week U.S. tour, the longest by Cuban musicians to date.20 The circulation of rumba during the Special Period also allowed well-established rumberos and rumberas to leave Cuba.

The internationalization of rumba was also reinforced by the balseros who left during the Special Period, particularly those who integrated into New York City’s ongoing amateur rumbas. As a result, New York City’s rumba was constantly fed by the creativity and innovations of rumberos from all over. During the summer of 1995, balseros discovered CP, where the openness and fl uidity of the landscape provided a better context to informally socialize and share distinct migration experiences with the Marielitos in the rumba scene, many of whom belonged to the Abakuá brotherhood. Thus both com-munities’ aural interactions took shape in, and shaped, the CP rumba circle itself, echoing their acoustic community in Cuba. The performative silences of the guarapachanguero opened new contexts of subaltern economic and cultural resistance against rumba’s institutionalized marginalization and the U.S. economic embargo, all through the building of local and transnational acoustic communities that survived at the historical tempo of the clave, echo-ing their acoustic community in Cuba. Thus, during the Special Period, the guarapachanguero’s performative silences generated new context.

Two Exoduses-One Rumba

Somos los cubanos que venimos invadiendo,Somos los cubanos que venimos a decirte a tique la timba es brava,la timba no es como ayer(We are the Cuban invasion!We are the Cubans who have arrived to tell youthat our timba (sound) is fi erce,our timba is not like yesterday’s.) (Daniel Ponce, New York Now! 1983)

Daniel Ponce, himself both a Marielito and a professional rumbero, com-posed and recorded “Invasión 80”(New York Now! 1983). Playing with the



stereotype of the Mariel migration as an “invasion,” this recording revealed the larger history of migration and labor of which the Marielitos and rumba were a part. “Invasión 80” was a very di! erent rumba from the conga lines that people had heard and experienced in previous recordings and perfor-mances by Mr. “Conga-man” Desi Arnaz. “Invasión 80” was intended to challenge the Hollywood-disseminated Ricky Ricardo stereotype of Cuban Americans as white and middle class. Ponce’s rumba also lent visibility to rumberos who had participated in the emergence of Latin jazz, like percus-sionist Chano Pozo, who collaborated with Dizzy Gillespie between 1946 and 1948, the year in which he was assassinated. Finally, Ponce’s “Inva-sión 80” also recalled another invasion, which took place in 1917 during the sugar harvest season in the rural areas of Matanzas province. According to numerous recollections, famous rumberos from all over the country trav-eled the island in search of seasonal farm work, and after their arduous la-bor, they competed among themselves, elaborating complicated dance steps that demonstrated their ability as Columbia (a form of rumba) dancers. In his album, Ponce paid tribute to these transregional and seasonal workers’ contests, reminding listeners that the circulation of workers now continued beyond Cuba’s borders with his own cohort of Mariel rumberos.

The Marielitos introduced structural changes to the existing New York City rumba sound. The boatlift brought important rumberos to New York City, but only a few integrated into CP rumba like the rumbero Manuel Martinez Olivera, “El Llanero Solitario” (The Lone Ranger), who special-ized in the guaguancó style of rumba. El Llanero introduced techniques not yet well developed in the Puerto Rican/Nuyorican rumba scene; spe-cifi cally, the formal use of the voice in relation to the clave’s rhythmic cell, and the quinto solo drum which improvises in relationship to the singer and the dancers. He also introduced the Lucumí language, used in Cuba in religious ceremonies, into the circle. In sum, the musical impact of El Llanero, along with other Marielito rumberos in CP, was instrumental in the conversion of the existing Puerto Rican-led rumba jam sessions (which some argued was a mix of rumba with bomba rhythms) into a traditional rumba form (Jottar 2005). The impact in CP was not only musical, but also religious, and extended to New York’s Pan-Caribbean community. A signifi -cant number of the Marielitos were members of the Abakuá secret society, as well as devoted practitioners of Palo Mayómbe and the Regla de Ocha (known as Santería).21

During the summer of 1995, Marielitos like Ponce were joined by balse-ros, and both generations converged in CP. The young balsero José Alberto arrived in CP with the guarapachangueo, challenging notions of a “proper” rumba sound. During the rumba, he would ask a drummer for the tumba-dora (base drum) in the traditional fashion of asking for a “fi lo” or break, gesturing with his index fi nger pointing up. At fi rst many either did not


12 ! BERTA JOTTAR

understand the gesture or did not want to share the drum. Once he suc-ceeded in obtaining the drum, he would perform the rather untraditional tu cu túm rhythm over the central base area of the tumbadora. But like his ear-lier gesture to call for the drum, his abstract rhythm—the way he extracted the guaguancó’s traditional tumbador rhythm into the guarapachanguero style—was not understood by the others. Those few rumberos who un-derstood clave (and most likely his index fi nger gesture), like Ponce, tried to fi gure out José Alberto’s sound. Yet those who had learned rumba by memory or had not mastered the clave usually asked him to pass the drum rather quickly, creating tension in the rumba circle. While the gesture of calling for the drum continues in Cuba, this lack of musical conversation among rumberos of di! erent generations was not unique to CP.

As in Cuba, the guarapachangueo tested the rumberos/as’ ability to lis-ten to this musical rest or silence, the guarapachangueo’s trick, the utter-ance of the empty space that speaks only to those rumberos who have in-ternalized the clave. However, Marielito rumberos were also missing the value of silence. It is possible that even Manuel “El Llanero” did not neces-sarily recognize it in CP, as it had changed so much since its early days in Havana’s La Korea. After all, Manuel, like Daniel Ponce, had not experi-enced its evolution. With the exception of Orlando “Puntilla” Ríos, who was the fi rst to play the quinto improvisational drum with the Chinitos’ guara-pachangueo before his 1980 departure, these rumberos had not returned to their native land.

While rumba’s acoustic community embodied a history of resistance common to rumberos/as inside and outside of Cuba, and across age groups and migratory cohorts, there was a certain opposition among the older group in the diaspora to incorporating stylistic innovations introduced by a younger infl ux—as if rumba’s authenticity was at stake. Yet, “El Llanero” no longer despicably complained, “that was a guarapachanguero, that was not rumba,” in New York as he had in La Korea. He became more tolerant of in-novation, and simply observed the drummers’ interactions with attention. He would observe how Cuban and other Latino amateur rumberos would tell José Alberto to stand up and “open” the rumba, because he performed a rumba “cerrada,” a closed rumba, with the guarapachangueo. In other words, he performed the music at its next level, beyond sociability and re-laxation, to musical conversation and competition.22

By 2006, the guarapachangueo became a style performed primarily by the younger generation of Cuban and Puerto Rican musicians faithful to the clave’s rule. It did not spread to CP rumba’s older generation because many rumberos literally could not hear it. But if the guarapachanguero initially was a contentious and contested feature of the CP rumba acous-tic community in the 1990s, the new visibility of Abakuá codes seemed to



emerge in consensus. The Marielitos and the balseros constructed a com-mon Abakuá space in the diaspora through the choreography of sound, gestures, and spiritual performance.

Abakuá: Building a Transnational Acoustic Community

Allá en el Cielo es ÉkueY aquí en la tierra soy yo23

(Ekue is up in the heavensAnd I am down here on the earth)

During the Special Period, the circulation of balseros in CP rumba un-derscored the Abakuá’s cross-generational character and the role of religion in its aural articulation. By the late 1990s, CP rumba was heavily infl u-enced by Abakuá spirituality, and that strengthened the social and religious bonds between the two migratory cohorts, the Marielitos and the balseros. No reliable statistics exist, but among both migratory waves, the presence of Abakuá was believed to be important, probably because of the associa-tion of masculinity, blackness, and working-class status with Abakuá and the migrants. In addition, many Cuban rumberos are admittedly members of the various all-male Abakuá lodges or Juegos.24 In New York City, how-ever, Abakuá membership was by and large unspoken until the balseros came to CP. They were outspoken about their a" liation and, for some, it was central to their identity. In CP, Abakuá membership became the core of a sacred aural community historically informed by a socio-political and religious performance culture.

The Abakuá brotherhoods, also known as lodges, cofradias, juegos, parti-dos, and potencias, are mutual-aid associations with both social and religious functions (see also Cabrera 1970; Quiñones 1994, Matibag 1996). Their re-ligious practice, like that of the Yoruba and Bantus, is in direct relationship to nature, but “their connection to the cabildos de nación (nation group) is what provided them with their social character.”25 In the early 19th century, the Abakuá were known to control the port zones of Havana, Matanzas, and Cárdenas, organizing the white and black stevedores against exploitation. It was in this context that rumba thrived, to the point that for many rumberos the link is inseparable; “where there is rumba there is Abakuá; where there is no Abakuá there is no rumba.”26 In fact, according to El Goyo, the struc-ture and instrumentation of Abakuá music is evident in the development of Havana’s guaguancó. “Of the surviving [musical] manifestations that came to Cuba, like the Yoruba, Arará, Bantú, and other traditions, [the Abakuá] is the only one that tells a story through its opening section lyrics, that has a format similar to prose. Like the guaguaneó, the Abakuá melody is also invented together with the prose section. It’s a long song that tells a story,”


14 ! BERTA JOTTAR

like the guaguancó. Additionally, the Abakuá brotherhood, unlike other tra-ditions, expressed their contributions to the nation through rumba. For instance, the famous guaguancó composition “Protesta Carabalí” (“Calabar Protest”), written by the Abakuá Reinaldo Brito,27 narrates the Abakuá alli-ance to anticolonial resistance movements:

Me voy a profundizaren la historia de Cubapara que la aprenda a respetar. . . la de Majagua en el ’68la independencia en el ’95,con el triunfo en el ’59,tres etapas una sola misión.Pero así debemos sertodos los pueblos sufridos:honestos, rebeldes, guerrilleros.

(I’m going to be profound about Cuba’s historySo that you learn to respect it. . . Majagua in ’68,Independence in ’95,The Triumph in ’59,Three eras, one mission.But that’s how all of us su! erers should be:Honest, rebel, warrior people.)

Hence, for centuries, sound, music, and dance have been constitutive of Abakuá’s transmission and articulation of memory and knowledge. Yoruba Andabo, the rumba ensemble that popularized this rumba and the guara-pachangueo style, performs it in Spanish and Carabalí. For instance, when the soloist sings “[E]s la campana de Majagua la que sonó” (“It is Majagua’s bell that rang out”), the chorus responds “Por Cuba changanaka kue Abakuá” (“For Cuba we fi ght”).28 At this point, when staged, Yoruba Andabo intro-duces the Íremes who dance and ring their nkanika29 bells—a set of three to six square, metal or wood bells that hang from their belt. According to Balbuena-Gutierrez (1996), the shaking of the bells in general is meant to convey the presence of the Abakuá spirits. In this performance context, this gesture recalls a history of Abakuá anticolonial rebellion. In Protesta Carabalí, sound also has the obvious connotation of resistance and independence be-cause “these nkanika [bells and sound] substitute the Majagua bells of inde-pendence [because] when there is a problem in my country, the Íremes come down.”30 Finally, the bilingual nature of the song demonstrates the living practice of this ritual language in a popular, everyday articulation. The per-formance’s bilingualism also illustrates the performance of memory through



embodiment and presence. In this context, bodily bilingualism refers to the simultaneity of diverse historical, cultural, and political knowledge articu-lated through gesture;31 the body then becomes the site where historical and contemporary knowledge are negotiated and contested through movement. I will elaborate this point later in my discussion of the performance of the same nkanika gesture by balseros in CP rumba.

The most profound way in which the Abakuá socioreligious institu-tion constitutes an acoustic community through the historically informed linkage of sound and sentiment is through the internalization of Ékue’s sound. During their initiation (juramento), the Abakuá hear what is known as “the cry of Ékue,” produced by a secret friction drum that channels the magic voice of the fi sh Tánze known as Boko, which is considered the voice of God. This sound binds the hermetic society, but the sacred Ékue drum is always kept hidden, and it is metonymic of the secret character of the entire Abakuá society. The invisibility of the sacred Ékue drum is therefore expressive of the Abakuá’s epistemology of the sacred, one based on the internalization of the sacred as sound (Boko, Ékue’s sacred voice) rather than as visual representation. I argue that for the Abakuás, Ékue’s sound is ontological; it is God’s voice. More important, it is the internalization of Ékue’s sound that constitutes this religious aural community; a commu-nity that immortalizes woman vis-à-vis her voice—the sound of Ékue. On the other hand, the Abakuá’s history of secrecy also has social as well as racial dimensions.32 Abakuá religious practices have been persecuted and, as a result, functioned underground on and o! even after the 1959 revolu-tion when all religious Afro-Cuban activities organized by private individu-als were controlled via the requirement of city permits. In fact, all Abakuá ceremonies (plantes) were forbidden from 1967 to 1977.33 Ironically, while this o" cial paperwork controlled these gatherings, this institutionaliza-tion also produced a legal context for these activities to exist even when socially sanctioned.

Thus, the expression of Abakuá solidarity through sound and gesture, brought Marielitos and balseros closer together in CP. The younger bal-seros, having experienced a relative openness of their religious practice in early 1990s’ Cuba, were more relaxed than those who had left Cuba at a time when revealing such leanings carried adverse social consequences. As Marielitos and balseros continued to socialize in CP, those who were Abakuá would greet each other with the typical Abakuá cross-hand salute, naming the temples to which they belonged, and a few of them engaged in a bilingual Spanish-Calabar conversation. In CP, Abakuá lost its stigma, be-coming instead a source of pride, far from the home that had traditionally marginalized it. For Marielitos, however, this unrestricted visibility initially had to be negotiated, given their history of criminalization as Marielitos in the United States and abroad.


16 ! BERTA JOTTAR

Marielitos and balseros reconfi gured CP rumba into a public space of Abakuá sociality, and in so doing they channeled the most basic practices and tenets of Abakuá membership and spirituality via sound and gesture. One such instance took place on June 13, 1999, the day of the Puerto Ri-can Day Parade. Ever since former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani imple-mented his Zero Tolerance policy, the police close the rumba area and evict the rumberos/as during the Parade. In 1999, the rumberos/as relocated to the center of 72nd Street, a street that crosses from the east to the west side of Manhattan. In this rumba, the balsero Hugo Torres34 broke into the rumba’s montuno (the dialogic call-and-response section), repeating three times in Calabar, “Eh, eru miña, eru miña, eru miñan efueko!” In response, the rumberos replied in unison: “Eru miña, eru miña, eru miñan efueko!” As the quinto drummer played an Abakuá rhythm, Hugo began inserting an Íreme gesture into his rumba steps indicating gratitude to this drum-mer. Indeed, Hugo was responding to the quinto drummer, whose func-tion and sound substituted for the Bonko Enchemiya Abakuá drum used in Cuba. The rumba continued until another ekobio inserted a second Abakuá montuno phrase in Calabar. This call-and-response interaction lasted for at least 20 minutes, and the entire time rumberos “sang” in Calabar while others entered the circle with Íreme gestures.

Viewing the videotape of this rumba, one Abakuá pointed out that this was not a religious performance, this dance was just like those performed as entertainment on the patios outside the Abakuá temples in Cuba. Thus, in the absence of a sacred physical place (Temple) in-situs, CP became an Abakuá transnational patio where Abakuás used sound and the Íreme’s gestures to communicate with one another. Thus, Marielitos and balseros produced an Abakuá space fostering an acoustic community where the boundaries of the secret and the public, home and homeland were blurred. Thus, CP rumba during the Puerto Rican Day Parade involved multiple circles of cohesion, one between Puerto Ricans and Cubans, and another between these two generations of Cubans who were already bonded by the internalization of the sacred sound of Ékue’s voice (Boko).

The Acoustic Body

By the late 1990s, CP had become a transnational Abakuá patio hosting the social and religious bonding between Marielitos and balseros, but the production of this Abakuá space was also articulated via the dancing body. In general, Abakuá presence manifests with the presence of the living, as well as that of the dead. The Íremes symbolize the spirits of the dead, in-voking the presence of, and communication with, the ancestors; they are “imagen y semejanza del Antepasado [the image and likeness of the Ances-tor]” (Cabrera 199 1970). Íremes move in unrecognizable ways, never like



a human35, and their gestures are performative (not representational) be-cause they invoke and provoke the presence and the communication with the past, with the ancestors. Thus, the Íreme speaks to a shared ontological status; it is the ancestor via performance. On Cuban patios, the Íremes’ movements are directed by special religious authorities. The Moruá directs them in the Calabar language, and the Moni-Bonkó, the drummer who plays the Bonko Echemiya drum, provides the rhythmic motivation. In CP, however, these two characters are not o" cially present.

Thus, CP rumba is a circle that implicates multiple presents and pres-ences. For instance, in a less crowded rumba, once the rumba montuno (choral section that answers dialogically the leading singer’s improvisa-tions) shifted into an Abakuá chorus, Hugo opened his arms, forcing those present to make space for the Íreme’s magnifi cent gesture. Without wear-ing the traditional Íreme masquerade (saco), Hugo as Íreme pulls out two handkerchiefs, one depicting the U.S. fl ag, and the other the Cuban fl ag. These fl ags substitute the Íreme’s attributes known as the Itón (a wood stick that he carries in his right hand) and the Ifán (a broomlike object made of straw) that he uses with his left hand for purifi cation purposes. According to Abakuá Román Díaz:

The Íreme, being a spirit, expresses himself through his dance, his movements. Through his movements he can give a reverent salute or he can assume a combative stance, either in a defensive mode or o! ensive at certain moments. With his left hand he does good, and his right hand is where he holds his defense.

The Íreme uses his entire body to communicate, but the left hand is the one that leads most of the conversation while the right hand could lead to war, according to El Goyo.

Hence, with Hugo’s juxtaposition of the Cuban and U.S. fl ags replacing the Íreme’s attributes of cleansing and approval, or threat, disapproval, and war, one cannot ignore the 46 years of economic embargo, terrorist attacks on Cuba, and constant verbal assaults between the two countries’ govern-ment o" cials and expatriates. Are these two cleansing fl ags, or two fl ags representing nations at war on Hugo’s body? He is an Abakuá, a balsero, an economic migrant from the Special Period, and a political refugee un-der U.S. policies of anticommunist spectacle. Marginalized in Cuba and in the United States as a black man and as rumbero, he is an artist whose choreography embodies multiple historico-political presences. Hugo’s sub-stitutions confront these territories and their referents: the presence of the Cuban nation as a colonial and postcolonial origin, the Carabalí people as cultural antecedent, and the United States as past, present, and future condition.


18 ! BERTA JOTTAR

However, the encounter of these territories and their historical and co-lonial relations, the resulting diaspora, forced migration, and the cultural and political resistance between them passes into spiritual and metaphysi-cal terrain. Hugo’s body, the Íreme of his gestures, articulates what Barbara Browning has already analyzed in her outstanding study of samba as “a ges-ture of making signifi cance” (Browning 1995, 14). Hugo’s gestures become a historical cartography through his use of these fl ags, as they function as metonyms of Abakuá’s contemporary secular and sacred nations. Hugo’s fl ags recalled the spirits of both nations into one Abakuá postnational terri-tory, an Abakuá acoustic community that surpasses the political and mate-rial borders of the Cuban nation. Indeed, Abakuás have always functioned in spite of national discourses that have historically criminalized them in Cuba (Ortiz 1973). Thus, the Abakuás in CP participate critically in the con-stitution of what José Muñoz (2003) theorizes as the a! ective geography of greater Cuba.

In CP rumba, the presence of the Abakuá spirits through the Íremes is not merely a transnational interaction between Cuba and the United States. These “transnational spirits” acquire an additional political signifi -cance. The most common Íreme gesture that Hugo embodies (known as “nkanika”) is the same one discussed above performed by the Íremes in “Protesta Carabalí.” Hugo shakes his waist while standing still in what is known as “second position” in contemporary dance. The Íreme/Hugo makes this movement to sound the nkanika bells, “to make oneself pres-ent in the action” (Balbuena-Gutierrez 1996, 77). In the context of CP, Hugo is obviously not wearing the nkanika, yet his gesture is “heard.” His movement is acoustic because those who understand the Íreme’s choreog-raphy “hear” his nkanika. The ekobios reply to the nkanika’s meaning and signifi cance. Thus, Hugo becomes an acoustic body based on the sacred acoustic function of sound via gesture within rumba’s secular context. This acoustic body echoes a silent but nevertheless felt and internalized sound. Again, here we witness the power of silence and the performativ-ity of sound—an aural community performed in a silent, yet amplifi ed, acoustic gesture.

The Íreme’s silent, yet acoustic gesture articulates a larger aural epis-temology based on the religious sound of Ékue no longer possible in this Diasporic community but yet interiorized nevertheless. It is not only the memory of the initiated that “hears” Hugo’s gesture, but rather a larger cultural context, an acoustic community that experiences the liminality of this gesture: a simultaneous articulation of past and present via the socio-cultural and spiritual signifi cance of sound and gesture. CP rumba hence opens an Abakuá space of multiple presences that contemporizes the living and the dead, the Marielitos and the balseros, and the ancestors of them all. Gesture replaces national and ethnic territories with spiritual ones, criti-cally re-embodying the historical specifi city of colonialism, migration, labor



relations, and resistance. Gestures and choreography constitute presences as well as absences, identity and secrecy, the sacred and the secular, the liv-ing and the dead, home and homeland. There are many “presences” in the Abakuá association, and they all coexist in CP.

Closing Remarks

CP rumba absorbed the rumberos from 1980, and the 1990s, thus remain-ing one of the most important public, grassroots music events of New York’s Afro-Latin Diaspora. Rumba in general is a performance that maps, through sound and gesture, silence and secrecy, the di! erent trajectories and historically specifi c forced movements of people; those resulting from colonialism such as the Carabalí ethnicity who formed the Abakuá secret society in Cuba, and those political and economic migrations like the Mariel (during the height of the Revolution) and the balseros (during the Special Period). Thus, rumba’s performance of multiple presents is deeply related to labor and migration. Historically, rumba has been a cultural perfor-mance via a continuous improvisation of the present, creating either aural and discursive counterpublic spheres, or alternative subaltern economies during Cuba’s incorporation of Afro-Cuban folklore into the new tourist economy of the 1990s. CP rumba is the performance of a transnational and intragenerational acoustic community reigned by the rules of clave. It is a liminal space where the Abakuá acoustic body, the material yet spiritual sonorous body, is possible.

CP Rumba juxtaposes these secular and spiritual registers by way of in-ternally negotiating the silent sounds and aural gestures of various spiritual practices that arrive in the maleta (suitcase) of a larger Diaspora. The study of rumba teaches us that the popular saying “ver para creer” (“I’ll believe it when I see it”) is never enough. The study of sound and movement, mu-sic and dance, as ontological practices illustrates how embodiment (rather than textuality and representation) can demonstrate alternative systems of knowledge, agency, and resistance. The understanding of rumba demon-strates the building of community and counterpublic spheres that function beyond and in spite of the privileged fi eld of visual interaction. “The drum is omnipresent.”36

Acknowledgments

I thank the Maestro Gregorio Hernández, El Goyo, for our intellectual de-bates during the two months I stayed in his house recording and editing the DVD “De las Raíces a la Síntesis” (same time I was doing the refi nement and completion of this essay). I am also thankful to Ileana Pérez Velázquez for doing the musical notation of the Aragon brothers who performed the guarapachanguero rhythm for me, and Ivor Miller for helping me translate


20 ! BERTA JOTTAR

many of the Calabar concepts and words for this essay. Also, muchísimas gracias a Martin Duncan, Maria Elena Cepeda, Kelli Moore, and Jennifer French for helping with this text in its Spanglish version! Also to Ariana Hernández-Reguant and the editors of Latin American Music Review for their dedicated editorial corrections of this text. Furthermore, my deep-est appreciation to Carmen Whalen, whose editorial corrections and com-mentaries made this text possible. Finally, I dedicate this essay to Barbara Browning, whose work has always been inspirational. All conversations were conducted by the author unless otherwise noted.

Notes

1. I am borrowing and elaborating on the idea of an “acoustic body” from Jesús “Pupi” Insua, who mentioned this term during our collaborative video performance-lecture: “Abakuá” at the Spectacles of Religiosity Conference, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, New York (2003). 2. In the early 1980s, Pancho Quinto introduced his bata-rumba, another style mostly performed in stage contexts. The giribilla is yet another rumba style, though it is no longer performed. 3. Personal conversation with José Alberto Peña and Rolando Valera. 4. For instance, in 1970, only 3.5 percent of the entire U.S. Cuban population were called “negro,” or black, and 2 percent were of mixed race. Most had arrived with technical skills highly valued in the United States, identifi ed themselves as Cu-ban rather than “black,” and most of them lived in New Jersey and New York (Volsky 1969, 45). Thus, Marielitos represented a negative image for Cubans already in the United States, whose exilic identifi cation meant precisely that they were anti-Castro and had not emigrated for economic reasons: “There were obvious di! erences of values, of appearance, of ambition between the old and the new refugees” (Portes and Stepick 34). 5. The Abakuá religion is based on Cuban “secret” societies or lodges descended from the Leopard Society located at the intersection between southern Nigeria, the Calabar, and Cameroon (Balbuena-Gutiérrez 1996, ix). Their origins are in the Efi k and Ekpe ethnic groups enslaved in Cuba during the Spanish colonial period. 6. While both the Marielitos and the balseros are fi rst- generation immigrants in the United States, by generation I mean here the age gap between Marielitos (who are usually older) and balseros. In addition, most Marielitos are an in-between generation that grew up between the Batista and Castro regimes; many balseros, on the other hand, belong to the fi rst generation that grew up under the revolutionary ideology. 7. What makes this acoustic community particular is that, di! erent from other rumba practitioners, including those non-Cubans who belong to other Afro-Cuban religious practices such as the Regla de Ocha or Palo Mayombe, the Abakuá can only be initiated in Cuba and the members must be Cuban. 8. Cuban Television, Sunday’s “El Amanecer” show, 2002. 9. Interview with Pedro López by Gregorio Hernández, “El Goyo.” 10. In the guarapachanguero, what I signal as a tu cu túm is the basic rhythmic base of the tumbador or cajón. These 3 beats create the rest, or silence in between the



rest of the rumba’s rhythmic phrase. However, many rumberos/as have internalized this tu cu túm and no longer perform it. Nevertheless, the silence remains within the tumbador’s rhythmic phrase and rumberos/as use it to improvise over it. 11. This idea came from their friend Ifrain Cofa, who noticed that the quinto box was uncomfortable: “I don’t like how they play that [quinto] because it falls down.” Therefore, he designed a cajón cónico which shape prevented the quinto cajón from sliding down from between the drummers’ legs. 12. Membranophone drums contain animal skin or membrane. 13. All of these pyramidal instruments are called “raspaduras” because their shape was like a sugar cane sweet of pyramidal shape named raspadura. 14. For an elaborate discussion on the role of clave in the Caribbean, see Wash-burne (1997) and Quintero-Rivera (2003). 15. For the purpose of this paper I do not analyze the participation of non-Cuban rumberos/as, particularly Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who also constitute an important and vibrant segment of CP rumba’s secular and religious acoustic community. 16. Hernández-Reguant, 2005. For an implicit discussion about the revolution-ary institutionalization of Afro-Cuban folklore as part of its larger egalitarian pro-cess and project see Daniel (1995). For a critique of this process see Hagedorn (2001). 17. Following Gramsci and Guha’s School of Subaltern Studies, I am using the term “subaltern” as situational outbreaks of fragmented, multiple, and simultane-ous pockets of resistance. While this subaltern economy functions within the com-mercialization of Afro-Cuban religion and folklore discussed by Hagedorn (2001); Ghertner (2003); and Velez (2000), I am interested in how these subaltern econ-omies produce nevertheless a space of resistance against the marginalization of Afro-Cuban folklore as practitioners function simultaneously within and outside the revolutionary institutions and economy. 18. Son is one of the most popular Cuban music genres for couples dancing and working-class story telling. The tres guitar is one of its signature instruments and Ignacio Piñeiro, Arsenio Rodríguez, and Benny Moré were some of the most infl u-ential interpreters (Orovio 1992). 19. For several years there have been steady rumba peñas in public spaces like El Callejón de Hamel and La Tropical, as well as at night clubs such as Las Vegas, El Karachi, El Nacional, El Kukalambé, El Solar de la California, La Tropical, and Aso-ciación Yoruba de Cuba. Since 2000, there are rumba peñas in the city four out of seven days a week. However, as Daniel asserts, the majority of the audience at these venues is Afro-Cuban, with a tourist minority who tend to be studying Afro-Cuban folklore (Daniel 1991). 20. It is important to mention that during the peak of the balsero crisis in 1994, the Clinton administration tightened the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba by halting the sending of remittances from the United States to Cuba and forbidding exiles to visit their relatives on the island. For further discussion of U.S. immigra-tion and asylum policies, see García (2004) and Johnson (2004). 21. This is not to say that the Cubans erased the previous practice. Instead,both groups, Cubans and Puerto Ricans, collaborated in many performances and record-ings. For further discussion, see Díaz and Jottar (2004).


22 ! BERTA JOTTAR

22. Personal conversation with Rolando Valera, a balsero regular of the rumba scene. 23. This is the meaning resulting from a combination of gestures performed by an Íreme, a masked dancer who embodies the spirits of the society’s founders. 24. Juegos are also known as potencias, partidos, or tierras. In fact, the guara-pachangueo inventors (Los Chinitos), the initial transmitters of the guara-pachanguero in Havana (el Chori, Pancho Quinto), and eventually those who car-ried it to New York (Román Díaz, Pedro Pablo Martínez, José Alberto Peña, and Hugo Torres) are all Abakuá. 25. Cabildos de nación were mutual-aid associations composed by African ethnic groups. During the mid-19th century, they were the only legal African institutions permitted to perform street processions during the most important holidays of that era such as their anniversaries, Christmas celebrations, and the Día de Reyes (Three Kings Day), or the Feast of the Epiphany. Personal conversation with Toto Quiñones. 26. Personal conversation with El Goyo. 27. “Carabali” is also the Abakuá language. This song was part of Yoruba Andabo’s acclaimed recording El Calejón de los Rumbero (1991), a CD that became a central ref-erence to CP rumberos. 28. Pedro Fariña is former singer and lyricist of Yoruba Andabo. Personal conver-sation with Pedro Fariña. 29. Nkanika also means to make oneself present in action (Balbuena-Gutiérrez 1996). I thank Ivor Miller for helping me translate many of the Calabar words for this essay. 30. Personal conversation with Pedro Fariña. 31. My understanding of bodily bilingualism di! ers from Karen Backstein’s defi -nition, where she positions bodily bilingualism as practiced by performers foreign to “ethnic dances.” (Backstein 2001) 32. Abakuás have been represented as child eaters and fearful criminals, among other things. For more on perceptions of Afro-Cuban religious and secular prac-tices as instinctually criminal, see Ortiz’s criminal ethnologies “Los Negros Brujos” (1973). 33. Personal conversation with El Goyo. 34. Hugo Torres is one of the most charismatic and skillful rumba and Abakuá dancers. Since his arrival to CP rumba, Hugo became a central fi gure because of his picaresque wit and quick mind for incorporating current events—whether local, national, or international—into his rumbas’ lyrics. 35. According to El Goyo, Íremes have those shapes because in Africa, the dead cannot be represented because no one knows what the dead look like. 36. Personal conversation with El Goyo.

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The Acoustic Body: Rumba Guarapachanguera and Abakuá Sociality in the 1990s

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