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García Márquez, macondismo, and the soundscapes of

vallenato

ANA MARÍA OCHOA

Popular Music / Volume 24 / Issue 02 / May 2005, pp 207 - 222

DOI: 10.1017/S0261143005000437, Published online: 15 June 2005

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0261143005000437

How to cite this article:

ANA MARÍA OCHOA (2005). García Márquez, macondismo, and the soundscapes of vallenato.
Popular Music, 24, pp 207-222 doi:10.1017/S0261143005000437

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 Popular Music (2005) Volume 24/2. Copyright © 2005 Cambridge University Press, pp. 207–222
doi:10.1017/S0261143005000437 Printed in the United Kingdom

García Márquez, macondismo,

and the soundscapes of vallenato
A NA MA RÍ A O CHO A

Abstract
This article is about the role of García Márquez and particularly macondismo as an ideology in
establishing the canonic validity of vallenato as a folk genre from the Colombian Caribbean. García
Marquez’ chronicles of the early 1950s are seen as foundational texts on the aesthetics and value
of vallenato; texts which influence subsequent writings on the topic. One of the main topics
explored is how these texts acquire canonic validity through the success of One Hundred Years
of Solitude. It is then that macondismo – the Latin Americanist celebration of magical
realism – becomes an interpretive metaphor for Colombia and vallenato music becomes the
sonorous emblem of this metaphor. This occurs through García Marquez’ writings, his multiple
interventions in Colombian vallenato festivals, and the way vallenato is subsequently taken by a
journalistic elite of the country as representing a macondian sonorous paradigm. The article
explores how these different elements coalesce in constructing a genealogy of aurality for vallenato,
setting the parameters of its interpretive significance through multiple processes of folklorisation
of the genre.

Introduction
Gabriel García Márquez has often affirmed the importance of popular music in his
literary work.1 His newspaper chronicles as well as his recent memoirs testify to a
passionate relationship with popular music, especially from the Spanish-speaking
Caribbean (García Márquez 1983, 2002). Both he and his critics identify popular
music, particularly Colombian vallenato, as one of the sources that fed into his
narrative style and a clue to understanding his poetics (Cobo Borda 1997). But as I
read through his chronicles and memoirs, and the numerous accounts of his presence
at vallenato festivals, the opposite question came to mind: What has been the role of
García Márquez, and particularly of the rise of magical realism as an ideology, in the
construction of the aesthetic and cultural values associated with vallenato music?
Vallenato music became a nationally recognised folk genre from the 1940s to the 1970s
through a variety of historical processes that led to its canonic validation. But simul-
taneously, it arose as a popular music genre recorded by the music industry and
played on the radio at least since the 1940s. Historically, vallenato’s rise in popularity
coincides with the rise to prominence of magical realism as the lens through which to
read Latin American and particularly Colombian creativity in the traffic of global
interpretive frameworks. Macondismo – the Latin Americanist celebration of magical
realism – was used not only to validate this reading at a regional level but, in the case
of Colombia, as an index of national differentiation and validation. Macondismo is an
ideology that is celebratory of magical realism’s trait of seeing Latin America as
undecipherable, beyond the code, and as a place whose very disjunctures are, in and
207

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 208 Ana María Ochoa

of themselves, identifying characteristics.2 The construction of generic canonicity in

the traditionalisation of vallenato was defined by the traffic between the literary and
the aural (with the latter signifying the popular) that characterises macondismo as an
ideology as well as magical realism’s claim to aesthetic particularity. Here, the
‘rhetoric of innocence’ (Moreiras 2001, p. 193), whereby the notion of the magical
inscribes the periphery into the impossibility of decipherment, conflates with the
folklorisation of music. Vallenato is seen as the mimetic reality of the celebratory
condition of magical realism and via the geopolitics of folklorism’s persistent
romantic nationalism it is indexically linked to Macondo, the town in which the action
of One Hundred Years of Solitude takes place. Thus, folkloristics as an ideology of
aurality extends the narration of macondismo from the lettered city into the realms of
popular music.

Circumstance, discourse, soundscape

During a recent conversation, I asked the director of an independent music company
in Colombia to tell me about the history of vallenato as a music genre. His response
was that ‘vallenato is a circumstance’ – quite a response for a person whose life
profession has been to package this ‘circumstance’ into commodities, that is, translat-
ing musical processes into products. But this response denotes a keen awareness that
the rise of genres in folk and popular music is a process that entails the cultural
construction of an identifiable, bounded sonorous item through the creation of
‘a poetics of entextualization, circulation, and preservation as constitutive of oral
tradition’ (Bauman and Briggs 2003, p. 15). Through the construction of the aesthetic
rules of genres as well as through discourses on musical propriety, a time-space frame
for the popular and folk musician within modernity is established. In Latin America
the entextualisation of music genres into folklore often occurred concomitantly to
their conversion into commodities.3 Recent histories of the rise of popular music in the
region such as those by Robin Moore (1997) with respect to Cuban music, Peter Wade
(2000) with respect to Colombian music from the Caribbean, and Carlos Sandroni
(2001) with respect to samba in Brazil, document some of the tensions of this
simultaneity. Here the project of a modernity marked by spectacularisation enabled
by the creation of media industries in the first half of the twentieth century, in which
the enhanced transportability of music played a crucial role (Erlmann 1999), largely
coincides with a process of vernacularisation of folk genres, in which oral and
provincial sonorities are given a specific place in the search for a national musical
idiom.
Moreover, the rise of the aural processes that led to the structuration of
Latin American soundscapes of popular music developed in parallel with the
Latin American literary boom, which represented the ‘culminating moment in
the professionalization of the Latin American writer’ (Avelar 1999, p. 28), and with
the international transcendence of Latin American literature as one of the region’s
most validated cosmopolitanisms. The transnational publishing industry and the
music industry fed into each other not only by constructing simultaneous inter-
related textualities regarding the significance of music, but as apparatuses of circula-
tion and spectacularisation that play a crucial role in establishing the significance of
sound and the genealogy of aurality in Latin America. This genealogy is simul-
taneously transversed by the processes that led to the entextualisation of the folkloric,
the codification of the oral/aural in the literary realm (journalism, the novel), and the

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 García Márquez 209

processes of generic construction that are involved in the marketing strategies of the
entertainment industry itself. The significance of aurality and the constitution of the
cartographies of sound into multiple soundscapes occur through the articulations and
disjunctions between these different forms of entextualisaiton and circulation of
sound.
It is with this cartography in mind that I would like to trace the role of
García Márquez in constructing the aesthetics of vallenato. García Márquez figures
prominently here, not only in his role as author, but also in his role as mediator
between multiple spheres of entextualisation of music. After the international success
of his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, however, what determines his influence on
the interpretation of vallenato as a music genre is not necessarily his personal role in
validating this music, but macondismo as an ideology through which to inscribe local
soundscapes (and García Márquez’ writings) into cosmopolitan imaginations.
Today, the term vallenato is used to designate a group of music genres – paseo,
son, puya and merengue – bound together by what have come to be considered as
shared musical characteristics. The paseo and the merengue are the most popular
today. Paseo and son are binary forms with a relatively slow tempo, while the puya
and merengue are ternary forms characterised by a simultaneity of binary and ternary
sub-divisions and are performed at a much faster, virtuosic tempo (Londoño 1985).
The instrumental base that came to be considered as standard to all forms of folk
vallenato at the end of the first half of the twentieth century is the caja, a small single
membrane drum, the guacharaca, a gourd scraper, and the button accordion. Today,
sometimes a bass is also included in this instrumental canon. The paseo and the son,
because of their tempo, are more apt for poetic display and textual elaboration, while
the puya and merengue tend to be characterised by virtuosic, improvisatory duels
between the accordionist and the singer.
In its history it is usually stated that vallenato used to be performed by travelling
minstrels, male singers who transmitted the news about the region in which they lived
and travelled, although this role of vallenato as journalistic chronicle has been quite
controversial – an issue we shall return to later. Vallenato has been played at least
since the 1940s in feasts called parrandas and in events called piquerias, duels of poetic
and instrumental virtuosity between accordionists and singers. Up to the 1970s the
singers were usually, although with notable exceptions, the composers of vallenato as
well as the accordion players. But with the institutionalisation of vallenato in the
music industry and in festivals, the roles of singer and accordion player were divided
between two musicians. Vallenato has also become a recognised dance genre.
Historically, vallenato is seen as originating primarily from the northern region
of the Colombian Caribbean (Londoño 1985). The question of origins itself, however,
has became an issue of dispute as vallenato entered the political, lettered and
mediatised spheres of modernity, and its origin was increasingly localised in the city
of Valledupar. Today vallenato is undoubtedly the most widespread Colombian
popular music genre in the country and abroad and exists in a multiplicity of events,
contexts, and instrumental formats: from small, peasant festivals of vallenato played
on guitar, for example, to the Festival of the Vallenato Legend which is the largest folk
music festival in the country, and to different types of musical hybrids that developed
from the 1960s to the 1990s and have become internationally significant in countries
such as Spain, Mexico, and the United States.
During the second half of the twentieth century, vallenato was transformed from
a music considered to be a vulgar, peasant music of vagabonds and minstrels into the

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 210 Ana María Ochoa

validated canons of folklore and the more ambivalent canons of the music industry.
The history of the canonisation of vallenato is marked by the tension created by the
simultaneity of its rise as both a folk form and a popular music genre. One of the most
fascinating elements of this process of canonisation is García Márquez’ role in what
Bauman and Briggs (2003, p. 5) have labelled ‘the epistemological work of
purification’ – that is, the processes through which specific genres are rendered
representative of tradition and authenticity.

Entextualising vallenato
The Colombian recording industry and radio broadcasting initially emerged in the
mid-1930s in the Caribbean cities of Barranquilla and Cartagena (Wade 2000). At least
since the early or mid-1940s, vallenatos were recorded and produced by these national
companies, although the cumbia was the Caribbean genre that gained ascendancy
and primacy throughout the country and internationally until the 1970s. The 1930s
was a crucial decade for modernisation in Latin American countries, marked by
educational and land reform and the rise of the culture industries. In Colombia, a
country with a highly fragmented geography, a history of recurrent civil wars and a
profoundly centralised government that was distant from the reality of the country’s
regions, the enhancement of the transportability of music via the culture industries
became a crucial source for the construction of a regional and, in some cases, national
imagination. At the very least, it played a role in breaking down the excessive
isolationism of a highly regionalised country.
On the other hand, during the 1950s and 1960s, vallenato came to be mobilised as
a valid folk regional music by a political and artistic elite within the Caribbean. During
these decades, the localism of the Caribbean Coast became increasingly tied to a
notion of cosmopolitanism that made its regional imagination different from that of
the rest of the country (Posada Carbó 1998; Wade 2000). This was partially accom-
plished through the rise of the media industry and the rise to prominence, both
nationally and internationally, of Colombian Caribbean music (Wade 2000).4 But in
vallenato, the mediation of literary circles, especially what came to be known as the
group of Barranquilla, which included Gabriel García Márquez, became as important
as the music industry itself.
From 1948 to 1954, García Márquez, then a relatively unknown author, worked
for several Barranquilla and Cartagena newspapers as a writer of crónicas (newspaper
chronicles) – a genre half-way between the literary and the journalistic, in which
writers make commentaries, describe events and debate ideas. García Márquez’
crónicas of the early 1950s, many of them humorous, inaugurate his career as a
journalist and, according to Jacques Gilard, very probably introduce vallenato and its
musicians into the realm of the newspaper. With reference to a chronicle on the
accordion in the Caribbean Coast of Colombia written by García Márquez and
published on 22 May 1948, Gilard states:

From the point of view of accordion folk music García Márquez’ text probably has historical
value . . . it is highly probable that if the note of May 22, 1948 is not exactly the first one to deal
with the topic, it is at the very least, one of the first ones in talking about the accordion from the
Caribbean Coast of Colombia in the Colombian press. García Márquez thus had a pioneering
role in its diffusion, even though it is impossible to affirm that this role belonged to him
exclusively. (Gilard 1997, p. 29)5

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 García Márquez 211

I want to propose, however, that the historical value of this and other chronicles lies
not only in their pioneering dimension but in the crucial role they play in the
vernacularisation of vallenato. These chronicles are partially built from material
gathered by García Márquez during his travels in the region of Valledupar as an
encyclopedia and book salesman between 1951 and 1953 and, in the case of vallenato
music, they probably owe quite a bit to his friendship with folklorist and novelist
Manuel Zapata Olivella and vallenato composer Rafael Escalona, with whom he often
travelled throughout the region during this period. In these texts García Márquez
begins to consolidate a written discourse that becomes crucial for the creation of a folk
ethos for vallenato. I am not suggesting here that he alone constructs that ethos but
rather that he authorises it by putting it into writing, and by the status his writings
acquire once he becomes an internationally successful figure. García Márquez’
vallenato chronicles, as well as his constant references to accordion music in One
Hundred Years of Solitude, effectively become bibliographic sources that are repeatedly
cited as authoritative texts in the books on vallenato published from the 1970s until
today.
García Márquez’ chronicles were written during the 1950s, that is, during a time
of profound violence. La Violencia was unleashed on 9 April 1948 when populist
leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was killed and many cities of Colombia, including Bogotá,
were looted and burned. García Márquez, then a law student in Bogotá, had to return
to Cartagena and Barranquilla where he began working as a chronicle writer for
regional newspapers. As Jacques Gilard has written:
The entrance of García Márquez into journalism was due to that historical cataclysm that was
the 9th of April of 1948 for Colombia. The years that followed, the years where he practised his
job as a journalist in Cartagena and Barranquilla, were the worst of La Violencia . . . It is a
particularly dark period of national history during which García Márquez dedicates himself to
the writing of humoristic texts. (Gilard 1997, pp. 31–2)
Although the Caribbean was much less touched by violence during this period than
the rest of the country, the publication of overtly political texts was out of the question.
Vallenato then, makes its entry into written discourse via the chronicle, a hybrid
genre, half literary, half journalistic, during a time when writing about regional
culture in a humorous, poetic way, is a recourse towards the visibilisation of the
region in a country marked by the signs of invisibility and closure that characterise
particularly violent periods. This sets up an opposition between violence and culture
in the form of writing about the music itself, at least in these chronicles. As Jameson
(1992, p. 138) has stated, ‘the possibility of magic realism as a formal mode is
constitutively dependent on a type of historical raw material in which disjunction is
historically present’. That disjunction is, on the one hand, that of the coexistence of the
precapitalist and capitalist modes of technology, as mentioned by Jameson. In fact,
macondismo as an ideology in which the popular is celebrated, eventually becomes a
powerful national metaphor in Colombia partially because it provides a mechanism
for bridging the gaps between the cosmopolitan and the local in a country where the
value of the local and the popular had been totally excluded from the lettered city by
the late nineteenth century elite (Von der Walde 1999). But disjunction is also
generated through the silencing produced by violence. The aesthetic qualities
ascribed to vallenato as folklore have to be seen against this backdrop in which the
local emerges through the humorous, but is silenced in its conflictive aspect. The
journalistic writing in the chronicles contrasts highly with García Márquez’ fictional
writing of this period illustrated by the novel The Evil Hour, a novel that carries the full

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 212 Ana María Ochoa

weight of the realism of violence. In other words, fictional writing admits the
visibilisation of violence, while journalistic writing begins to encode those humorous
and localistic dimensions that will tie the magical in magical realism to its identifi-
cation as a sphere of re-enchantment of the world in which the irrational dimensions
of magic often appear as characteristic of local culture itself. As pointed out by Julio
Ramos (1989), since the nineteenth century in Latin America, journalism became the
sphere where the professional writer made his or her entry into the literary world. But
it is also the realm where the author begins to encode the manifestations of the
popular – journalism preparing the way for the veracity of representation that is the
legitimating base of folkloristics as an ideology of aurality.
But the act of writing itself, even though a crucial step in the construction of
folkloristic paradigms, is not enough to construct an authoritative stance. The folk
ethos of vallenato receives canonic validity through two events. The first is the
creation of the Festival of the Vallenato Legend in 1968 by a local elite of the city of
Valledupar, which included composer Rafael Escalona, a good friend of García
Márquez, who significantly was one of a few lettered and land-owning vallenato
composers of that generation and also one of the few who was not an accordion
player. The festival was also created under the auspices of regional politicians of the
liberal party, especially Alfonso López Michelsen, who became president of Colombia
in 1974, and who promoted the creation of the new state of Cesar with Valledupar as
its capital in 1967, largely through the mobilisation of clientelist politics, and Consuelo
Araujo Noguera, a woman who belonged to the local elite of Valledupar and was the
director of the festival until her death in 2001. The vallenato festival was supposed to
give visibility to this newly created state in a region ignored by the highly centralised
government of Bogotá and by the more cosmopolitan cities of the South-Central
Caribbean – Cartagena and Barranquilla. The festival of the Vallenato Legend had
become the largest festival of folk music in the country by the mid 1980s, thereby
institutionalising a structure that sanctions the appropriate folklore forms of vallenato
and that validates the genre.
Moreover, the creation of the Vallenato Festival took place during the same year
as the first publication of García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, which
became an instant success and launched the Colombian Caribbean and the country
into the annals of the Latin American literary boom of magical realism. The impact of
the international success of the novel in Colombia cannot be overstated. Colombia is a
country with a repeated history of civil wars, and in the 1960s it was just coming out
of ‘La Violencia’, a period of Colombian history in which violence came to stand as an
identificatory marker and acquired a foundational status for the nation. National
studies of violence began to acquire discursive primacy in fields such as history with
the emergence of the violentologists, a group of historians dedicated to the study of
violence in the country. In a country lacking a foundational myth, violence came to
occupy foundational status after the period of La Violencia (Palacios 2001). It is
against this background of intensification of a sensation of failure and fragmentation
of the nation following the period of La Violencia that magical realism emerges as an
alternative identificatory paradigm. As stated by Erna von der Walde,

The international success of One Hundred Years of Solitude will convert [García Márquez] into a
national writer and macondismo will be elevated to the status of a foundational myth of the
nation and a narration of identity. While many American nations construct their myths in the
nineteenth century, Colombia finally acquires its own, in the 1970s. (Von der Walde 1999,
p. 232)

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 García Márquez 213

Macondo, the town where One Hundred Years of Solitude takes place, comes to be used
as a synonym for Colombia. The idea of Colombia as a country where the inexplicable
and the excessive are identificatory characteristics, takes root. Violence and
Macondismo stand as mirror images of identity – a mirror in which the reflection of
the one by the other silences the catastrophic dimension of the contradictions as their
mutual excesses constitute each other.
A variety of processes intervene in the consolidation of vallenato into a
recognised folk and popular music genre with its own modes of circulation via the
music industry and folk music festivals, processes of appropriation by regional
political elites for political ends and inscription into legitimated discursive strategies.
It is in the texture generated by the articulation of these multiple processes that the
entextualisation of vallenato into a recognisable and validated music genre actually
takes place. In other words, I am not taking for granted a previous existence of the
genre as a recognisable, bounded, identifiable one. Accordion music circulated in a
variety of formats and events throughout the coast in the early twentieth century
and today cumbia, for example, is also played with accordion in many regions of
the Colombian Caribbean (Bermúdez 1996). However, I do not see vallenato as
an ‘invented tradition’ either (Hobsbawm 1983). One of the most problematic
dimensions in the notion of invented tradition is the differentiation between custom
and tradition in Hobsbawm’s Introduction to The Invention of Tradition. Here he states:

‘Tradition’ in this sense must be distinguished clearly from ‘custom’ which dominates so-called
‘traditional’ societies. The object and characteristic of ‘traditions’, including invented ones, is
invariance. The past, real or invented, to which they refer imposes fixed (normally formalized)
practices, such as repetition. ‘Custom’ in traditional societies has the double function of motor
and flywheel. It does not preclude innovation and change up to a point, though evidently the
requirement that it must appear compatible or even identical with precedent imposes substan-
tial limitations on it . . . ‘Custom’ cannot afford to be invariant, because even in ‘traditional’
societies life is not so. Customary or common law still shows this combination of flexibility in
substance and formal adherence to precedent. The differentiation between ‘tradition’ and
‘custom’ in our sense is indeed well illustrated here. ‘Custom’ is what judges do; ‘tradition’ (in
this instance invented tradition) is the wig, robe and other formal paraphernalia and ritualized
practices surrounding their substantial action. The decline of ‘custom’ inevitably changes the
‘tradition’ with which it is habitually intertwined. (Hobsbawm 1983, pp. 2–3; quotation marks
in the original)
This differentiation between custom and tradition obviates the fact that the epistemo-
logical work of purification actually involved assigning a cultural, social and political
value to custom within the space-time of modernity itself, especially since the very
idea of custom became one of the bases for assigning political value and hence
a particular time-space to tradition and ‘so-called traditional peoples’ within
modernity itself. The idea of repetition as favouring the uncreative and static (as
defining custom) and originality (as defining change, creativity and modernity)
became the epistemological basis for assigning value to tradition within modernity. It
was also one of the ideological grounds for constructing the aesthetic differentiation in
value to repetition in the arts as monotonous or uncreative versus transformation and
change as original and creative. This has been one of the historically crucial ideologi-
cal distinctions of value distinguishing folkloristic and popular from avant garde and
‘high art’ aesthetics. Rather than distinguishing between custom and tradition, it is
more important to look at the types of complex relations through which the past is
constructed, and at the creative means through which different peoples make cultural
and political sense of the relationship between past, present and future. What I wish to

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 214 Ana María Ochoa

point out is the way that a genealogy of aurality is constituted through ideological and
interventionist processes that recontextualise music genres into the purview of folk-
lore and thus define the place of folk music within modernity. This defines not only
folklore itself but actually locates and identifies custom as folklore within the time-
space of modernity. Here the ideological constitution of aurality as a sphere of
authority is as much a strategy of modernisation as the ideological constitution of
authority in the printed word.
What interests me about the density created by the multiple events, texts
and historical circumstances that define the place of folk and popular musics in
modernity, is how the elaboration of strategies of legitimation get inscribed on to
the surface of the folk music genres themselves and how these strategies establish
cartographies of expression and being through traditional and popular musics. As
such, popular culture is not a precondition that gets inscribed into magical realism via
the lettered city, as has been implied in theories of transculturation, neither is magical
realism the moment when the voice of the popular finally gains entry into the rigid
discursiveness of a modernity that imagined itself only via the canons of Europe.
Rather, the problematic authority of musical discourse and the effects of its unequal
modernisation – via the newspaper, the music industry, the creation of festivals,
the writing of folklore books or political mobilisation – are inscribed into the
musical forms themselves and popular culture is constituted through all of these
processes.

The Musical Aesthetics of the Written Word: journalism, fiction,

folkloristics
Vallenato is one of the folk music genres of Colombia, and it has been the subject of
more books than any other Colombian folk or popular music genre. Most of these
folklore books were written after the 1970s, that is, after the canonisation of vallenato
as a folk form. As was stated before, these texts reference García Márquez’ chronicles
and fictional writing as bibliographic sources in the construction of vallenato as a folk
genre and in the constitution of a canon of folkloristic writing on vallenato, what
Adolfo González (2003) calls ‘official vallenatology’ (vallenatología oficial). But the
circularity between fiction and folklore lies not only in the intertextual relations
between the different types of writing, but also in the way García Márquez inscribes
vallenato into his own writing. Beyond a coincidence of timing between the
inauguration of the Festival and the publication of his novel, García Márquez himself
has written that One Hundred Years of Solitude is nothing more than a 300–page
vallenato (Cobo Borda 1997) and that vallenato gave him a narrative model, as it were:
In Aracataca where I had the passion of being told stories, I saw as a very small child, the first
accordion player that came from the province singing the news of his region. I remember
having seen him for the first time because he was an old man that was sitting in an event that
was like a fair in Aracataca and he had the accordion on the floor beside him. I did not know
what that was until he took out the accordion and there I saw the accordion for the first time. The
man began to tell a story and that for me was a revelation: how one could tell stories through
song (contar historias cantadas), how one could learn about other worlds and other people
through a song. Years later I discovered literature and I discovered that the procedure is the
same. (García Márquez quoted by Cobo Borda 1997, p. 156)
The circularity between fiction and folklore becomes the epistemological ground
on which the interpretation of vallenato as folklore is based. Folklore’s history of

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 García Márquez 215

legitimacy partially rests on a valorisation of the mimetic quality of textuality as an act

of recording. The folklorist’s task is seen as that of faithfully transcribing onto paper
(and later onto different recording machines) what he or she heard, interpreted as
epistemological solidity. Written description becomes the mimetic copy of the act of
listening. But, in the case of García Márquez, the mimetic capacity of aurality is
translated into narration. Here the chronicle is the training ground for narration,
which is later re-inscribed into the magical realist novel. The magical realist novel, in
turn, is interpreted as a claim to an alternative modernity, as that sphere of fiction that
best describes a disjunctured reality. Thus the magical realist novel – and not only
the chronicles with their journalistic claim to veracity – can count as legitimated
bibliographic sources that are intertextually linked, through their descriptions of
vallenato, to the folklorists’ books on vallenato and, later, to the music industry itself.
This mimetic circularity is the interpretive ground on which the aesthetics of vallenato
as the music most closely tied to magical realism is epistemologically rendered. What
then are these aesthetic qualities and how does the aural get codified in these multiple
forms of textuality? To begin with, how does vallenato appear in the chronicles of the
1950s?
According to García Márquez, the accordion is a nostalgic, bitterly human
instrument, that has ‘so much of sad animal’. It is ‘bohemian, vagabond, proletarian’
(García Márquez 1997 [1948], p. 61):
The accordion has always been, as is our gaita, a proletarian instrument . . . The legitimate
accordion is the one that has acquired nationality among us, in the Magdalena valley. It has
become incorporated into the elements of national folklore beside the gaitas, millos and
tamboras costeñas . . . Here we see it in the hands of troubadours (juglares) that go from one
riverside to another taking its warm poetic message . . . As usual, it does not lack enemies . . .
Listen to the accordion my reader friend and you will see what painful nostalgia will wrinkle
your feelings (se le arruga el sentimiento). (ibid.)
The pathos of the instrument, rather than the virtuosity of the performer, is what is
emphasised here. Turned into a folk instrument, the accordion begins to leave its
disreputed nomadic vagabondage (and its foreign origin) and begins to be linked to
a nostalgic mythology of the local. The vulgarity of vagabondage, which is often cited
in One Hundred Years of Solitude and in García Márquez’ memoirs (2002) as linked to
accordion music, is redefined by the recourse to sound as nostalgia.
Moreover, the accordion becomes the signifying sonority of a sung genre whose
lyrical and narrative characteristics come to represent one of its highest aesthetic
values. As stated before, accordion music in the Colombian Caribbean is not
necessarily restricted to the role of accompaniment of narrative poetic genres. But
with the visualisation of vallenato, the use of the accordion in genres such as cumbia
became practically invisible (or inaudible) in the country. In the above-mentioned
chronicle of 1948, although García Márquez does not use the term vallenato yet, he
does link the sound of the accordion to a particular form of lyricism.
This linkage between the accordion and a certain type of literary poetics
becomes more and more indexical of vallenato in other chronicles of the period.
To García Márquez, ‘the lyrics of vallenato songs – from Valledupar, Magdalena,
Colombia, South America – have more poetic commotions (estremecimientos líricos)
than the poems that have been published in the latest literary supplements’ (1997
[May 1951], p. 457). Of these, the most outstanding lyricist is Rafael Escalona, his
lettered land-owning friend. To García Márquez, Escalona ‘is the intellectual of our
popular airs, the one who imposed on himself a maturing process until reaching that

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 216 Ana María Ochoa

state of grace in which his music breathes the air of pure poetry’ (1997 [March 1950],
p. 158). Escalona, moreover, is the lettered composer who by virtue of his intellectual
lettered training, brings the lyricism of vallenato to a new level, all this without
becoming ‘separate’ from the people:
On another occasion we will talk about Escalona and of the advantages he has obtained over his
colleagues due to the significant circumstance of having been to high school in the Liceo
Celedón of Santa Marta. Escalona is today the intellectual of vallenato and his colleagues
dressed in alpargatas and hat (alpargatas y sombrero alón) – such as Compae Chinuco – are
satisfied that it is thus. (ibid., pp. 149–50)
Vallenato’s folklorisation is based on its admission into respectability via the lettered
word in which the intricacies of verbal art are judged by the lyricism characteristic
of the printed word, and in which the sonorous becomes an item in support of
this lyricism. The presence of aurality in the lettered city thus occurs through the
mediation of an intellectual figure who values the aesthetics of aurality through
literary standards: a classical scheme of vernacularisation labelled literalisation, ‘in
which the oral, traditional forms of vernacular expression are accommodated to
‘literature’, worthy of being cultivated, read and preserved’ (Bauman and Briggs
2003, p. 15). Although here we do not have the act of transcription of texts into
written discourse (the task of the folklorist), we do have a validation of aesthetic
parameters of aurality through narration. The transition from vulgar nomadic music
to respectable folkloric music is filtered through the validating screens of the lettered
city.
The emergence of the ideology of autonomy in classical music in the eighteenth
century partially rests on its separability from the word as a legitimating sphere of
value in music (Goehr 1992). By contrast, during this period, the folk song, in the
hands of figures such as Johann Gottfried Herder or Hugh Blair, appears increasingly
tied to issues of nationalism and authenticity (Bauman and Briggs 2003). Here, the
legitimating value of authenticity is the word and other musical and sonorous
dimensions are frequently subservient to the value of the literary text. The lack of
musicological description often ascribed to popular music studies (McClary 1994) is
therefore not only a characteristic of contemporary studies of mass-mediated musics.
The linkage of sonorous value to verbal text is an aesthetic dimension that effectively
separates the realm of the vernacular as a sphere of musical legitimation from classical
music, at least until recordings make musical transcription the epistemological sign of
ethnomusicology, generating a split between folkloristics and ethnomusicology in
processes of recontextualisation and ideological validation of musical texts of local
and distant Others.
In García Márquez’ chronicles, vallenato lyrics are also linked to real life and to
nature. They are made ‘of the very substance of memory’ and ‘they make part of a
philosophy of the Atlantic Coast that of solving problems by putting them into music’
(García Márquez 1997 [March 1950], p. 149). They are also autobiographical:
Whoever has been close to the troubadours of the Magdalena valley . . . can bet with me in the
affirmation that there is not one letter/lyrics (no hay una sola letra) in vallenato that does not
correspond to an episode of real life, to an experience of the author. A troubadour from the
Cesar river does not sing just for the sake of singing whenever he wants to, but rather when he
feels the need of doing it after having been stimulated by a real event. Just like the real poet. Just
like the best troubadours from the best medieval heritage. (ibid.)
Thus the chronicle, in a way, is a mimesis of vallenato’s narrative scheme itself – an
elision between biography, event and the irrational imagination of the local. It is a

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 García Márquez 217

mimesis that acquires structural maturity by the time of One Hundred Years of Solitude
as the aesthetic principle that guides magical realism – one understands then why
García Márquez himself has stated that it is nothing more than a three-hundred-page
vallenato.
This mimetic circularity exists at multiple levels – not only in narrativity as an
aesthetic quality – but also in the role of legend as a foundational figure in what has
been called the Festival of the Vallenato Legend. According to García Márquez, he
himself was indirectly and inadvertently a crucial figure in the creation of the
vallenato festival. He states in a chronicle of 1983 that one day in 1966, after having
been away from Colombia for seven years, he asked Escalona to bring together for him
the best vallenato musicians in the region so he could listen to what had been
composed during those years (García Márquez 1996 [1983]). Escalona organised a
vallenato pachanga (feast) in Aracataca of which García Márquez states:
That pachanga (feast) in Aracataca was not the first Festival of the Vallenato Legend – as is now
suggested by some – and those of us who promoted it cannot consider ourselves as its founders.
But we had the good luck that it inspired amongst the people of Valledupar the good idea of
creating the Festival of the Vallenato Legend. (ibid., p. 426)
Maybe not a founding father, but certainly in this chronicle he gives authority to a
legendary event which he helped inadvertently bring about. The gesture of blurring
the boundaries between memory and legend as a recourse to mythologisation and to
fiction as history is a discursive technique in the construction of the auratic telos of
magical realism itself. His publicised presence in the festival’s legendary originating
event undoubtedly affirms the ethos of magical realism within vallenato. This is
further legitimated in the name given to the festival.
The foundational legend of the festival is Francisco El Hombre. According to
that legend Francisco Moscote, alias El Hombre, encounters the devil one night while
travelling on his mule and they engage in a poetic duel with accordions. Francisco el
Hombre wins when he sings the credo backwards (Quiroz Otero 1982). The legend
appears as one of the episodes in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Quiroz Otero, in
his book Vallenato Hombre y Canto, even gives García Márquez authorial status in the
creation of the legend:
The version of the devil that engages in a duel and loses also had its scenario in the valleys of the
Departments of Cesar and Magdalena where it was found by García Márquez. The story of
Francisco el Hombre is his work (obra suya) which, taken from tradition, returns to the people
converted into a legend with a personal name. (ibid., p. 166)
We then have a double inscription of vallenato into legend which establishes a
circularity between fiction, a foundational event that actually took place (the pachanga
that led to the festival) and folkloristic description. Here mimesis plays the role of
enabling the circularity between a popular legend, fiction (the novel), the actual
codification of the legend into writing (folkloristics), and its re-inscription into the
real via the folkloric ideology of legitimation whereby what is codified by folklore –
via textual description or via the canon set up by the festival – is read as ‘coming
from the people’. Magical realism’s claim of the magical as a characteristic of Latin
America’s particularity is actually inscribed into folkloristic entextualisation in
such a way that the legendary origins of the genre and the festival are built into the
folkloric description of vallenato itself, thus placing the foundational tropes of the
genre beyond the realms of history, placed as it were, beyond the codes of decipher-
ability.

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 218 Ana María Ochoa

Autobiography and schizophonic mimesis

As stated above, the autobiographical dimension of vallenato is one that is high-
lighted by García Márquez in his chronicles. This characteristic becomes a key feature
in another topic that is crucial to the vallenato chronicle and that later becomes
emblematic in the folklore texts on the genre: that of ascribing authorship to specific
songs because they reflect the life of the composer, an issue that is important because
vallenato is at that moment being authored into the copyright system via the music
industry. In a raging polemic over the supposed theft of Escalona’s authorship in a
commercial recording of vallenato, García Márquez writes:

It so happened that one of Escalona’s compositions – The Testament – was recorded without
his permission. And even worse: somebody, who is not Escalona, figures as author of this
composition . . . When a song’s paternity (paternidad) is disputed to Escalona, one abuses much
more than simply authorial rights. It is an interference in his private life. (García Márquez 1997
[March 1951], p. 437)
With the entry of vallenato into the music industry, García Márquez himself begins to
differentiate between appropriate interpretations of vallenato. He highlights the fact
that many of the interpretations of vallenato on commercial recordings are done not by
the troubadours themselves, but by singers who popularise this music through inter-
pretations that do not do it justice: ‘One of the unfortunate issues that vallenato music
has encountered is that of having been popularized in recordings made by bad singers
(malos intérpretes)’ (1997 [May 1952], p. 531). This is quite a delicate issue because in
the case of Ecalona, he himself is one of the figures that inaugurates the division
between composer, performer and interpreter. As I stated at the beginning of this
article, the construction of this folk paradigm occurred simultaneously with the rise of
vallenato as a commercial popular music genre that was defined as vulgar by those
who preferred to validate vallenato as folk. The issue at stake is not only commercial-
ism versus traditionalism within the recording industry itself, but also a discomfort
with the fact that at the moment when the characteristics of a privileged form of local
minstrelsy are being defined as located in the Magdalena valley and particularly in
Valledupar, and are supposedly being taken to a new level of literacy by lettered
figures such as Escalona, the schizophonic dimensions of the professionalisation of the
folk music through the industry set in, challenging the literary paradigm of aurality.
Schizophonia is a term initially coined by Canadian composer Murray Schafer to
signify ‘the split between an original sound and its electroacoustical transmission’
(quoted by Feld 1995, p. 97). Steve Feld has used it in exploring the complexities
involved in the increasing transportability and global traffic of sounds, particularly
with regards to world music (Feld 1995, 1996, 2000). The issue of separating the music
from its place of origin is crucial in mediating the presence of Costeños in Bogotá and
of taking the music from the Caribbean Coast to the Andean capital – that is, it is
crucial in establishing the cultural validity of Caribbean sonority in the nation, an
issue that also appears in the chronicles when folklorist Manuel Zapata Olivella
travels to Bogotá with musicians from the Caribbean region (García Márquez, May
1952, June 1952). Yet it brings with it the contradictions produced by schizophonia:
the difficulty of assigning authorship (significantly an issue that appears only with
regard to Escalona in the chronicles), copyright and ‘adequate’ interpretations of
vallenato.
The impossibility of containing the genre within appropriate boundaries of
interpretation reifies the mythology of origins and constructs the idea that change

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 García Márquez 219

involves distancing oneself from an original aesthetic that appears as immemorial.

The impossibility of memory as myth in the dispersal of the genre into the industry is
one of the issues that creates anxiety. As has been stated by Peter Wade, ‘current
literature [on La Costa’s musical history] deals as much with a mythology of musical
origins as with their historiography’ (Wade 2000, p. 54). He highlights two processes
that play a crucial role in this blurring of the boundaries between myth and history –
that of localisation of the origin of genres – ascribing a town of birth to the genre – as
well as a tendency to privilege continuity, links with the past and stasis over transfor-
mation. These two strategies of legitimation of folk music are, of course, not unique to
folkloristics in the Colombian region of La Costa but features that are repeatedly
invoked as foundational characteristics of the very notion of folk music itself. But the
resistance to change in this case is also related to the necessity of keeping a certain
version of undecipherability as recourse to the magical. The historisation of generic
change in vallenato would break not only the aesthetic process on which the ideology
of folkloristics rests but the interpretive scheme of macondismo itself. Valuing change
implies recognising that the division between composer and performer becomes an
ambivalent sign of vallenato’s entry into the lettered city (in which the values of
poetry can be sustained). It also implies the impossibility of policing the boundaries of
vallenato’s canon of musical propriety in the record industry – where the dividing
line between folklorisation into a respectable canon and what is interpreted as vul-
garisation into the masses via commercialisation is tenuous, ambivalent and difficult
to sustain.
All of these aesthetic values become crucial points of controversy in the folklore
texts on vallenato from the 1970s to the present, in other journalistic production and in
the new wave of redefinition of vallenato in the 1990s through its increased trans-
nationalisation in multiple productions by the record industry. As stated by Gilard
(1997), the mere publication of García Márquez’ chronicles in the press of the 1950s
would have been insignificant if it were not for the success of One Hundred Years of
Solitude. Macondismo as a nationalist ideology, in which the local is celebrated with
humoristic optimism, permeates vallenato not necessarily because of the act of having
written the chronicles but rather because of the canonicity the chronicles acquire après
la lettre. This has in turn endowed vallenato itself with a certain auratic quality, one
that will be perpetrated by other chronicle writers that are part of the journalistic elite
of the 1980s and 1990s and long-time friends of García Márquez. Enrique Santos
Calderón, the owner of the newspaper El Tiempo, the largest newspaper in the
country, Juan Gossaín and Daniel Samper are not only nationally and internationally
recognised Colombian journalists (and in the case of the last two, also novelists) but
are also considered some of the foremost authorities on vallenato in the country. As is
made clear in a chronicle written in 1983 by Enrique Santos Calderón, the correct
interpretation of vallenato is only available to a select few:
One has to know vallenato and especially know how to enjoy it in order to appreciate all its
creative depth, the human warmth and the cultural force of a festival that concentrates the best
of the most authentic and lively of our musical genres, and in order to capture its hallucinatory
surrealist dimensions that are only available to those that understand that fortunately Andean
rationalisms (racionalismos paramunos) and the pedantry of salsa have no place here . . .
(Santos Calderón, June 1983, p. 58)
The mimesis that operates the elision of the dividing line between fiction, journalism,
folkloristics and song is here used as a means of interpretive privilege. In vallenato
this identification with macondismo (here rendered as surrealism) means that the

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 220 Ana María Ochoa

discourse surrounding vallenato itself is ‘beyond codification’: it is the truth about

vallenato; that truth, simultaneously embedded in the mythical and the fictional. In
Colombia, and especially in the Caribbean region in the 1970s, with the mythical
status granted to macondismo due to the international success of One Hundred Years
of Solitude, this elision has acquired ontological status – that is, it has not only been a
generic formal strategy of either vallenato or the chronicle. It has assumed the status
of the real. Macondismo as Latin Americanism will become that difference that is
essentialised as that which is nostalgic, incomprehensible, beyond rationality. Placing
folk vallenato beyond the codes of interpretation, in opposition not only to the
rationalism of the Andean region – a defining feature of Colombian macondismo
itself – but also to the popularity of salsa and to despised forms of commercial
vallenato, is placing it in an enclosed cultural realm accessible only to the few.6
According to Moreiras, citing Moretti, ‘the primary technical innovation (in
magical realism) would be the conflation of the rhetoric of innocence (which uses the
periphery’s magic for an enterprise of disavowal) and the ideology of progress of
modernisation’ (Moreiras 2001, p. 193). This conflation of innocence and the ideology
of progress characterises not only magical realism but also the romantic nationalism
that pervades folkloristics – the folk as those that are outside the rationality of the
lettered city and thus constitute its validity by becoming the opposites. The technical
innovations of magical realism actually are the same ones that validate codification of
folkloristic aurality. Moreover, the operation here links magical realism to folkloristics
in a complicated politics of submission of language and aurality to the standards
of the European cosmopolitanism that paradoxically ends up reificating the very
operation of exclusion, through language, on which the installation of Great Divide
narratives rest. As stated by Erna von der Walde, ‘in its own way, macondismo grants
a stamp of approval on the Euro North American gaze and legitimizes the geopolitical
divisions between First and Third World’ (Von der Walde 1999, p. 227).
However, in the field of folk and popular music, the simultaneity of the
emergence of the folkloristic via its codification into the lettered word, its entry into
the industry and its spectacularisation via its massification will make it impossible to
clearly establish the boundary lines between the auratic of the folkloric/popular via
its entry into the lettered world and via its entry into the industry. In fact, the cyclical
turns of multiple forms of mimesis between folkloristic writing, legend, vallenato,
crónica and One Hundred Years of Solitude acquires one more turn in the 1990s when
a series of productions feed into this mimetical structure. The paradoxes of the
encryption of vallenato into the industry and the lettered word will be highlighted
during this period. A record production such as One Hundred Years of Vallenato, which
contains ten CDs featuring the most important vallenatos as selected by journalist
Daniel Samper and with an extensive booklet co-authored by journalists Daniel
Samper and Pilar Tafur, references vallenato as a genre that occurs in the land of One
Hundred Years of Solitude (Samper Pizano and Tafur 1997). The vallenato popular
singer, Carlos Vives, references García Márquez permanently in his aesthetics (Ochoa
1999; Sturman 2003).
Every operation of mimesis is simultaneously an operation of visibilisation and
elision. In part, macondismo smooths out the contradictions between tradition
and modernity, between appropriation and authorial rights, between culture and
violence, between visibilisation and exclusion in vallenato, by attempting to exclude
from its folk purview the simultaneous rise of vallenato as a massive popular music
genre in the 1960s and 70s. However, the cartographies of schizophonia depend on

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 García Márquez 221

multiple forms of circulation of texts and their relation between each other (Feld
1996). Concomitant to the validation of vallenato as a realm interpreted through
macondismo, we have the different spheres of circulation of vallenato that extend
beyond this purview. Genealogies of aurality are located precisely in the disjunctures
produced by these tensions. The relation between macondismo and vallenato pro-
vides us with one of the routes through which the aural cartography of vallenato got
established.

Endnotes
1. I would like to give special thanks to Idelber
Avelar, Eleuterio Santiago-Díaz and Timothy
Taylor for comments on this paper. I would also
like to acknowledge the valuable comments
made by the anonymous reader who evaluated
the article for Popular Music.
2. For a detailed account of macondismo as an
ideology see Brunner, José Joaquı́n.
3. In Latin America the term popular (lo popular)
can refer to what in English would be termed
separately as the fields of folklore and popular
culture. What counts as ‘folk music’ and/or as
‘popular music’ often involves highly conflic-
tive debates about the boundary lines between
each, due to the difficulties of establishing a
complete or at least a clear separation between
tradition and modernity and the concomitant
anxieties that the resultant permeability entails:
between the cosmopolitan and the local,
between the lettered city and rural orality,
between the people as masses or the people
as folk, between different forms of utopian
imaginations ascribed to diverse modes of
mobilisation of the popular.
4. Also, through the international success of artis-
tic figures coming from the Caribbean – writers,
painters and musicians – La Costa (the Coast, as
it is known in Colombia) has increasingly come
to signify Colombia’s artistic cosmopolitanism.
5. All translations from texts originally in Spanish
are by the author.
6. The elitism of vallenato has been denounced by
several writers (Quiroz Otero 1982; Rito Llerena
1985; Gilard 1993).

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