Professional Documents
Culture Documents
tropical of his title refers to the popular industry label for a broad category of
music of Caribbean character, including salsa, pachanga, merengue, balada,
calypso and cumbia, all of which have exerted mutual influences upon each
other and enjoy support across Latin America, the U.S. and Europe. The
title also indicates the rather new position Colombian music has come to
assume in defining this broad category, both at home and abroad. Today,
industry marketers are as likely to refer to the Colombian cumbia as any
other genre in defining mitsica tropical. Not surprising, Colombian musicians
and listeners have more nuanced ways of perceiving and referring to musica
tropical and these distinctions are at the heart of Wade's study.
Peter Wade is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Uni-
versity of Manchester. His previous work on race and ethnicity includes
the books Blackness and Race Mixture (1993) and Race and Ethnicity in Latin
America (1997). In many ways this new book extends arguments raised in
his earlier books, but the much richer discussion of music in this new
book will surely attract wider interest. Wade's principal question in Music,
Race, and Nation is how music from the Caribbean coastal regions of
Colombia, known as musica costeiia, came to be central to that country's
popular music repertoire and even came to represent the nation. As he
explains in the course of the book, social views would have made such an
occurrence unthinkable prior to the mid-twentieth century. The relatively
new identification with the Caribbean is also surprising if one considers
geographic and ethnic criteria.
Colombia covers a geographic area roughly equal to the size of France.
It is Latin America's fourth largest country and, in its position at the
northeast corner of the continent, is the only one with coasts on both the
Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Its geographic diversity results in a correspond-
ing cultural diversity. The nation is frequently divided into four zones: 1)
the Pacific zone along the west coast, which shares a border with Panama;
2) the Andean zone defined by three central mountain ranges; 3) the
Caribbean zone along the northern coast; and 4) the largest region, known
as the llanera, featuring the vast plains that border Venezuela and Brazil.
Some scholars, such as Abadia Mora1es (1995), include a fifth zone, known
as the island region, which includes the two Caribbean islands that belong
to Colombia: San Andres and Providencia. The capital city of Santa Fe de
Bogota is in the Andean zone and hence the country has long been domi-
nated by cultural policy emerging from this region.
The ethnic population of the country is at least as diverse as the geogra-
phy. A general breakdown, using categories common in Colombian dis-
course, estimates that 47% of the country's population is mestizo (people
of mixed ancestry, blending indigenous and European lineages); 24% is
mulato (of mixed Mrican and other ancestries); 20% is white; 6% is black;
REVIEWS 171
regarding the history of three categories of music: porro, cumbia, and valle-
nato. Wade's task is a complicated one. While it is convenient to think of
these categories as genres of music, such a classification is somewhat mis-
leading as each term embraces a set of representative song types and
dance genres. The array of contemporary cumbia practices, for example,
reflects its mediation in Mexican films, tropical dance bands, and general
international circulation, as well as local folkloric custom. According to
Abadfa Morales, "classic cumbia is never sung" (1995:68), a noteworthy
point since even in contemporary commercial variants dance remains
most critical. Sung cumbias did surface in certain regions, such as
Cartegena, and include mapale, a song form featuring call and response
between a soloist and chorus, as well as bullerengue, salome, malla, and porro,
i.e., genres in their own right. Similarly, vallenato songs are performed in
various rhythms such as son, paseo, merengue, and puya whose accompany-
ing dance steps range from slow and song-like to wildly fast, respectively.
While Wade argues that Abadia Morales is too eager to draw connections
between folkloric and commercially defined practice, many of these dis-
tinctions persist in contemporary Colombian practice and are recognized
by listeners as well as performers.
Wade's basic categories (porro, cumbia and vallenato) also evoke favored
instrumental combinations as well as song styles and dance rhythms. Here
again, simple definitions are impossible. A vallenato ensemble featuring
the signature instrumental combination of accordion (acorde6n), scraper
(guacharaca) and box drum (caja) might perform a cumbia or mapale while
a typical porro ensemble featuring brass and wind instruments might playa
cumbia or even a currulao associated more with the Pacific Coast. In short,
it is better to think of cumbia, porro, and vallenato as the signature designa-
tions for stylistic traditions. Wade focuses less on the distinctions within
the traditions and more on aspects they share.
Wade finds that in all three traditions folklorists and historians 2 have
projected the origins of the style further back in time than can be con-
firmed by material evidence; in fact such evidence often contradicts popu-
lar assumptions. Another tendency is to ascribe the origins of the genres
to one specific region, such as vallenato to the town of Valledupar, and
define early performances as a process of re-casting folk practice by incor-
porating modern European instruments. Local historians have also typi-
cally portrayed the genres emerging from these coastal traditions as
triumphs of mestizaje, or racial mixture, representing the idealized cultural
blending of tri-partite roots: indigenous, European, and African. Wade
rejects the simplifications embedded in such popular narratives and offers
explanations that reveal the bids for power that lie behind their
construction. He notes, for example, that the conventional narratives of
174 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY
styles, program formats and recording policy. However, later in the book
his references to costerio music as a general category become more promi-
nent. Wade is likely aware of his own myth building; indeed, he discusses
briefly his role in the "tangled webs of knowledge production" in the final
chapter of the book (232). Thus a reader should be prepared to do some
de-tangling.
Second, while Wade's research has facilitated analyses of popular genres
that reveal fascinating processes of social negotiation, his revisionist stance
is also complicated. Although he never defines his work in terms of advo-
cacy, the reader would be hard-pressed not to sense that Wade applauds
(at least on some levels) Colombia's relatively recent embrace of Mro-
Colombian culture. At the same time, by unveiling the rationalization, and
continued racism, that underlie the integration of coastal customs into the
central Colombia consciousness, Wade risks undermining the integrity of
the people whose story he is telling, particularly when his conclusions
stress the ultimate flexibility of interpretation. This is a danger that Wade
is well aware of and that he addresses more directly in Race and Ethnicity in
Latin America (1997:116-17).
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 outline the history of costerio music, again focusing
on the three genres of porro, cumbia, and vallenato. Exactly how these styles
changed over time, how their practices overlapped, and how people
viewed such developments form the heart of Wade's investigation. He
identifies three major periods of activity. In chapter 4, he reviews the
1920s and '30s during which costerio traditions develop as commercial
music popular in Colombia. Chapter 5 surveys the 1940s and 50s when the
coastal style made inroads into the Colombian heartland, though not with-
out inciting intense reactions. One example is the Colombian composer
and musicologist Daniel Zamudio, who claimed that all music with Mrican
roots was "insidious" and that costerio music was "like the rumba," a threat
to a "truly genuine" Colombian national identity (126). Wade also exam-
ines the views of central Colombians who were attracted to costerio music,
in part because they perceived it as happy, sensuous, and representing a
warmth they felt missing in the elite social circles in the central cities. In
chapter 6 Wade discusses the 1950s and 60s, the period during which
Colombian popular music, increasingly dominated by costerio forms,
gained new international footing, primarily as dance music. Cumbia, in
particular, represented Colombia's answer to the popular rumba, tango,
and mambo sweeping U.S., Latin American, and European markets.
This last period was spurred by the growth of Colombia's domestic
recording industry. Conventional readings of this development tend to
consider costerio musicians as the exploited victims of a recording industry
that appropriated and commercialized their authentic music. Wade resists
176 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY
these readings as overly simplified and points out that costerio musicians
shared in, and even directed the commercialization of vallenato, cumbia
and porro.
Wade further insists that the increasing commercial success of this
music rests to a large degree on its associations with happiness and sexual
openness and he discusses this issue for different time periods and geo-
graphical regions, but not with equal attention to each. Clearly Colombian
attitudes regarding the sensuous nature of the music contributed to both
acceptance and rejection of costerio music, but the overall discussion of this
issue is too general. Although a brief paragraph in the final chapter (235)
summarizes shifts in social mores and changing attitudes towards sexuality
in society, more detailed discussion of such shifts is needed as well as clari-
fication of how sexuality relates to changing visions of national identity.
Wade's most convincing analysis of sexual associations appears in chap-
ter 7, "Costenos and Costeno Music in the Interior." Here he focuses on
listener reception, drawing on a collection of sixty-one interviews of resi-
dents in the central cities of Bogota and Medellin, and, for comparison,
from Baranquilla on the Atlantic coast. Compiled with the aid of four assis-
tants, these accounts supplemented printed documentation and Wade's
first-hand observations and provided the basis for a comparative analysis of
individual attitudes towards costerio music. For residents of central Colom-
bia, music of the coast has long been associated with overt sexuality, a care-
free and happy manner, and sensuous dancing and courtship. This view
contributed both to popular acceptance and elite resistance. Respondents'
comments regarding dance lead Wade to theorize that dance provided an
opportunity for coastal Colombians to express their sensuality and for cen-
tral Colombians to embrace, even embody, both a desired sensuality and
their corresponding interpretations of racial difference.
However, despite the growing acceptance of coastal music in elite social
circles, costerio people continued to be viewed with suspicion. Wade writes,
"elements of costerio identity could be appropriated, even while costerios
themselves-or perhaps more precisely the image of them as a category-
might be kept at arms length" (210). Later in this section he reflects on
the methodological difficulty of discussing costerios as a group as well as the
difficulty of understanding a repertory of commercial music as belonging
to a specific group (although at times he has done both in this book). It is
a cautionary statement worth noticing, because it reminds readers of how
the very constructive practice Wade is examining necessarily pervades his
own theoretical explanation.
In "Multiculturalism and Nostalgia in the 1990s," chapter 8, Wade
directs the reader's attention to some of the most recent artists to
re-interpret Colombian popular music, particularly the music of the 1950s
REVIEWS 177
and 60s, for a new global market. Among the musicians that Wade profiles
here is the singer Carlos Vives, who became a contemporary superstar
when he chose to reinterpret classic vallenato for new audiences using
the technology and sound resources commonly associated with rock
performance. Wade observes that Vives's project, despite being more self-
conscious, is not entirely new for Colombian musicians. It involves
balancing personal aspirations for commercial success with a genuine
respect for local tradition-a process Wade outlines earlier in the book.
He notes that similar balancing acts back in the 1940s, such as by singer
Lucho Bermudez, to name just one example, account for the very exis-
tence of porro and related genres as commercial popular music. Indeed
the repertory that came to be regarded as "golden" in the subsequent
decades resulted from the negotiations between regional recording artists
and the international recording and communications industry.
The concluding chapter briefly addresses the problems of postmodern
interpretation of culture. Throughout Music, Race and Nation Wade high-
lights how popular music is constantly subject to multiple interpretations.
He concludes that the role of the ethnographer today is to "challenge
categories which are taken for granted in a given social context" (232,
emphasis in the original). He then offers several answers to his original
question regarding why costeiio music with its associations of blackness and
tropicality, came to be regarded as Colombian national music. First he
suggests that the coast was the first region to profit from industrialization,
and thus it and its music came to represent modernity in the eyes of many
Colombians. A second reason is that music of this region represented a
multicultural perspective that could be, and has been, interpreted in
many different ways, as the above discussion of race and sensuality indi-
cates. Wade mentions that the diversity of the region was further
enhanced by affiliations with other Caribbean cultural products, especially
Cuban dance music that has long dominated the Latin American enter-
tainment industry. Wade also notes the additional impact of the inter-
national attention garnered by Colombian author and Nobel prize-winner
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose writings about his country celebrate its ties
to Caribbean culture.
It is at this point that a reader might wish that Wade had taken pains to
elaborate or at least draw clearer connections between these points and
the data presented earlier in the book. His early analysis of the communi-
cations and recording industry emerging along the coast did not empha-
size any status the region itself accrued as being modern. Wade's ultimate
conclusion regarding the flexibility of interpretation is also somewhat dis-
appointing. His final chapter would be more useful to scholars hoping to
build upon his theories if he had summarized how this flexibility operates,
178 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY
Notes
l. See Bermudez (1985, 1996), Friedmann (1993), Gradante (1998), List
(1973, 1980, 1983, 1991), Manuel (1988), Marre and Charlton (1985), Pacini
Hermindez (1995), and Waxer (1998,2001).
2. Wade examines a large body of literature concerning each of the genres of
popular music featured in his book. While some, like the traditional studies by
List, Abadia Morales, and Perdomo Escobar (1963), represent work by highly
respected scholars, other sources include transcriptions of oral lore such as the
widely cited work by Fals Borda (1979-88). Scholars who challenge these well-
established readings include Gilard (1987) and Bermudez, and Wade draws on
their work as well.
3. Indeed, it maybe that Wade is best known among social scientists and schol-
ars in Latin American studies for his theory of mestizaje as a whitening process.
References
Abadfa Morales, Guillermo. 1973. La musica folkl6rica de Colombia. Bogota:
Direcci6n de Divulgacion Cultural, Universidad Nacional.
- - - . 1995. ABC del Folklore Colombiano. Santafe de Bogota: Panamericana
Editorial.
Averill, Gage. 1997. A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power
in Haiti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bermudez, Egberto. 1985. Syncretism, Identity and Creativity in Afro-Colombian
Musical Traditions. In Music and Black Ethnicity: The Caribbean and South America,
edited by Gerard Behague, 225-38. New Brunswick, N J.: Transaction.
REVIEWS 179
References
Bemba, S. 1984. Cinquante ans de musique du Congo-Zaı̈re, 1920–1970: de Paul Kamba à Tabu-Ley (Paris:
Présence africaine)
Lonoh, M. 1969. Essai de commentaire de la musique congolaise moderne (Kinshasa: Ministère de la Culture
et des Arts)
Tchebwa, M. 1996. Terre de la chanson (Louvain-la-Neuve: Duclot)
Music, Race and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia. By Peter Wade. University
of Chicago Press, 2000. 286 pp.
This study comes out of Peter Wade’s long-standing interest in how processes of
racial identification are bound up with nationalism and national identity, an interest
evidenced in his previous works: Black Culture and Social Inequality in Colombia
(1989), Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia (1993)
and Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (1997). In this latest book, the key question
addressed is how the music of the marginalised coastal region of Colombia, La
Costa, has come to be the most commercially successful music at the national level
and the best known internationally. Fans of internationally recognised salsa bands,
such as Fruko y sus Tesos, Grupo Galé, Orquesta Guayacán, Latin Brothers and, in
particular, Grupo Niche, with its success on US Latin dance floors, might well dis-
pute the international predominance imputed to música tropical. In this connection,
it is worth noting that since Wade focuses almost exclusively on the genres of porro,
cumbia and vallenato, he does not refer at any length to one of the biggest Costeño
(‘coastal’) stars, Joe Arroyo. Arroyo’s unique ‘tropical’ sound or ‘Joe-son’ is notori-
ously difficult to define in terms of genre, as it syncretically combines a wide variety
of Caribbean and Latin American musical styles, appealing to discourses of black-
ness, region and nation in songs such as ‘Rebelión’ (‘Uprising’), ‘En Barranquilla
me quedo’ (‘I’m sticking around in Barranquilla’) and ‘Costumbres de mi tierra’
(‘Customs of my homeland’).
It is these discourses which form the central focus of this study. Wade examines
how cultural practices and politics are racialised, gendered, sexualised and spa-
tialised through a historical and anthropological analysis of the development of
Costeño music over the course of the twentieth century. His research methodology
combines archival work with the examination of oral histories to get a feel for how
people relate to or think about music and identity. Wade and local research assistants
carried out interviews in Bogota, Medellı́n and Barranquilla according to pre-
specified criteria of class, age and gender. Unfortunately, these criteria are not made
explicit for the reader, although there is a comprehensive, annotated list of inter-
viewees given as Appendix A to the text. There are also a limited number of inter-
views from Cartagena, which is a key area for the study of newer, explicitly ‘black’
forms such as champeta. A rather surprising omission in the study is the lack of in-
depth analysis of the city of Cali, given that it has the largest urban black population
in Colombia and is an important centre of music production (see article by Lise Waxer
in this issue of Popular Music). In his preface, Wade admits that he had originally
envisaged doing research in Cali but was unable to do so due to time constaints.
The text has a clear historical and anthropological focus. Brief musicological
analyses of the genres being studied are somewhat awkwardly integrated into the
main body of the text, which does, however, address issues of lyrical content, instru-
mentation, performance and vocal style. The styles of porro, cumbia and vallenato are
defined according to musicological characteristics in Appendix B by Alex Miles on
the basis of a minimal number of recordings. Genres, which, as Wade acknowledges
elsewhere, are difficult to pin down, are reduced to sets of limited structural charac-
teristics that cannot account for the wide variations within genres and the crossing
of boundaries in increasingly inter-generic sounds. Indeed, a highly polemical dis-
cussion around generic definition was sparked off by Marco Vinicio Oyaga’s paper
on porro and its variants, porro tapao, porro palitiao and porro chocoano, at the Third
Latin American Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular
Music held in Bogota in August 2000 (see report in this issue).
In his introduction, Wade provides an extremely useful overview of theoreti-
cal approaches to the interconnections between national identity, race, gender, sexu-
ality and music. He draws on post-colonial studies, writings on popular music and
popular culture in general, current theorising of race and gender, and Latin Amer-
ican cultural studies to critically examine key concepts such as homogeneity and
heterogeneity, syncretism and hybridisation, transformation and appropriation,
authenticity and commercial degeneration, hegemony, and the national and the
transnational in the context of music capitalism. He also addresses an area too often
overlooked in studies of popular music, which is the relationship between music,
dance and body in constituting a sexualised cultural topography of the nation. He
goes on to outline how Costeño identity has been constructed in relation to national
identity through an analysis of the ideological fields of racial identification, tradition
and modernity, realism and magical realism, political power and powerlessness,
before examining the origin myths of porro, cumbia and vallenato. Wade calls into
question both lay and academic accounts of Colombian music that are grounded in
notions of tradition and authenticity, and that posit a simple homological link
between music and the identity of particular social groups. He constantly fore-
grounds the difficulties attached to the production of knowledge, in a highly self-
reflexive analysis that constantly deconstructs ontological and epistemological cat-
egories whilst acknowledging the continuities that necessarily characterise
historiographical accounts located in particular social contexts.
Wade explores the trajectory of música tropical from its marginalised status in
the late nineteenth century through its appropriation in the mid-twentieth century
as a national symbol, in the context of rapid modernisation, the growth of the mass
media and development of modern music technologies. Its revival at the close of
the twentieth century is linked to renewed concerns about regional identity, but
also to the new context of a postmodern, multicultural nationalism officially
enshrined in the 1991 consitution. Wade’s central argument is that throughout these
processes a tension can be traced between ambivalent discourses of tradition and
modernity, sameness and difference. The appropriation of Costeño music as a
symbol of national identity has not led to the homogenisation of difference or eras-
ure of blackness.
Why has this music, with its connotations of tropicality and blackness, come
to play such a key role in a nation in which dominant representations of national
identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were rooted in the white
heritage of the highland, interior regions? Wade’s conclusion is twofold. On the one
hand, the early modernisation of Colombia’s coastal cities provides the structural
conditions for projects of cultural modernity constructed around the ambivalent
traditional elements of openness and sexual freedom (linked to notions of
blackness). The recourse to traditional community values, particularly a tropicality
associated with peacefulness, may also in part reflect a desire to distance the nation
from the overpowering images of violence that have come to characterise Colombia
since the irruption of widespread partisan violence, known as La Violencia, in 1948.
On the other hand, the multivocality of Costeño music makes it especially pro-
ductive in the constitution of a variety of identities in different contexts which cut
across boundaries of class, race, gender and regional alliance.
Overall, this is an insightful study of the complex interactions between ideol-
ogies of race, class, gender, sexuality, region and nation, in the context of the ten-
sions between discourses of tradition and modernity, homogeneity and heterogen-
eity, in the construction of both regional and national identities in Colombia
through the study of Costeño music. The notes are very full, as is the extensive
bibliography which is extremely useful for researchers in the field. This is a serious
academic work highly recommended for those with an interest in Latin American
music, racial and cultural studies.
Vanessa Knights
University of Newcastle
master nationalistic narrative is one of mestizaje or race historical or social context may be attracted to a music
mixture. style that provides a feeling of happiness and/or libera-
Another central argument of the book is that not only tion is worthy further exploration.
in La Costa but also in the nation as a whole, Costeño Scholars who specialize in the study of music and
music cannot be “linked in a simple homological fashion dance would like to have seen more detailed references
to a particular group or social group and that simple con- to the performative aspects of the different forms of Cos-
tinuities underlie its history” (p. 233). For example, in teño music and dance discussed in the book. A CD ac-
chapter 4 Wade demonstrates how Costeño music was companying the book and a closer look at the bodily
rearticulated in the city of Barranquilla by many different
techniques involved in the practice of porro, cumbria,
people and with many different ends as both authenti-
and vallenato would have helped. Despite these minor
cally regional and modern. Finally, a further argument
shortcomings, Wade’s book is a valuable contribution
that unfortunately is not fully developed or documented
is that La Costa’s image of peacefulness and happiness and a must-read for those who study nation building,
has been fruitful in the context of the different forms of identity construction, and performance politics in Latin
violence that have plagued Colombia since 1948, facil- America and elsewhere. The author demonstrates that
itating the transformation of Costeño music and dance nationalistic projects actively re-create rather than erase
into national symbols. This is obviously not an easy trail diversity and that popular music results from complex
to follow, and Wade did not make it one of his initial interactions and is not a simple product of one particular
goals. Nevertheless, the idea that people in a particular social sector or the result of political manipulation.
The Americas, Volume 58, Number 1, July 2001, pp. 146-149 (Review)
Access provided by UND Chester Fritz Library (19 Nov 2018 02:32 GMT)
146 BOOK REVIEWS
and other elite sustains Frank Safford’s interpretation of this process. Uribe-Uran
amplifies, however, the divisive character of Santander’s insistence that university
reform include the teachings of Jeremy Bentham, which resulted in a conservative
backlash influential in the presidential election of 1836 and the vice presidential
election two years later. His analysis of the role of lawyers and different factions in
the Guerra de los Supremos is masterful.
Just as lawyers had established themselves as dominant figures in the new gov-
ernment, their increased numbers came to exceed the numbers of available bureau-
cratic posts. Charges of empleomanía (the demand for state jobs) came to under-
mine the status of bureaucratic service beginning in the 1830s. Partially in response
to the declining access to government posts, and partially due to increased political
divisions, the author sees an increased importance of class in the era of liberal
reform. He notes that class affinity united lawyers with provincial and aristocratic
elite in the late 1840s and early 1850s in opposition to perceived threats from arti-
sans and renegade lawyers, an alliance that helped repress the Melo revolt of 1854.
Curiously, José María Obando, whom Uribe-Uran had highlighted as a divisive
figure in the 1830s and in the Guerra de los Supremos, fades from the analysis
shortly after the war. As a result, the emergence of the Draconiano political faction,
its relation to the military in the liberal agenda, and its relationship with artisans is
slighted in his analysis of the 1850s. This omission complicates the author’s class
analysis of the 1850s.
Among its many virtues, this book is a gold mine of genealogical and familial
information. Uribe-Uran has painstakingly traced the histories of scores of lawyers,
often illustrating analytical points by concise description of representative figures.
Three appendixes document the background and career trajectories of colonial era
lawyers, and “aristocratic” and “provincial” lawyers in the first generation of inde-
pendence. Other appendixes list lawyers active in the Independence and early
national periods.
Uribe-Uran’s style of writing is crisp and easy to follow. Given the density of
information contained in Honorable Lives, it is a surprisingly readable volume.
Scholars of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will find this to be a valu-
able contribution to social, legal, and political history.
Music, Race, and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia. By Peter Wade. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. xi, 323. Notes. Illustrations. References
Cited. Index. $40.00 cloth; $20.00 paper.
of Racial Identity in Colombia.) In the present work, he explores how music with
black and working-class roots from the Caribbean coast of Colombia became, in the
decades after 1940, popular in the nation as a whole. This is a process, he believes,
that is both remarkable and revealing. It is remarkable because, traditionally, most
Colombians, and particularly elites in the nation’s heartland, the highlands of the
interior, defined themselves as racially and culturally superior to their coastal com-
patriots. It is revealing because the music one claims as one’s own is part of one’s
identity, both as an individual and as a member of communities, be they regional,
national, or international.
The research for the book was quite ambitious. In addition to interviewing scores
of musicians and consumers of music in three of Colombia’s largest cities (Bogotá,
Medellín, and Barranquilla) who experienced the rise of costeño music to national
prominence, Wade also sought to go beyond his training as an ethnographer by
doing documentary research and linking his analysis to the history and historiogra-
phy of the nation as a whole. Much of the research was carried out by Colombian
assistants under his supervision; the project was funded by a grant from the Lever-
hume Trust.
In informational terms, the book is a major advance, especially for English read-
ers. It gives a thorough account of the origins and evolution of the major styles that
converge to form música tropical in Colombia, particularly porro, cumbia, and val-
lenato. It provides a history of the early recording industry in Colombia, which
began in the 1920s and 1930s in the modernizing Caribbean port of Barranquilla,
then moved on to the dynamic industrial city of Medellín and the capital, Bogotá.
Readers are introduced to many of Colombia’s leading practitioners of costeño
music during the middle decades of the twentieth-century and glimpse aspects of
their careers at home and abroad.
Some of the most interesting material in the book comes from the testimony of
people who listened and danced to music during the 1940s, when recordings and
record players made it possible for many middle-class families to play costeño and
other music in the home. The following comes from an interview with a secondary-
school teacher as she recalls aspects of her youth in Bogotá: “When we arrived in
Bogotá [in the early 1940s] we acquired a radiola [combination radio and record
player]. For the dances, we’d put on pasillos and paso dobles . . . a few rumbas and
some dances from the [Atlantic] littoral like mambo, porro, cumbia—that was just
beginning . . . . Ah! and the boleros, I haven’t mentioned them . . . . Bolero was for
love, for despair, for sadness, for happiness, for longing: bolero was all that . . . . We
loved Mexican music intensely . . . . Who didn’t dream, who didn’t cry, who did not
become romantic to the highest degree with all those songs. . . . We also assimilated
Cuban music a lot: conga, danzones, all that. It was really beautiful, it was a very
beautiful time of life” (p. 112). Intimate information of this sort, like the cultural
concerns of the book as a whole, is a welcome complement to a Colombian histori-
ography heavily skewed toward political, economic, and social themes and preoc-
cupied with issues of violence, underdevelopment, and social exploitation.
148 BOOK REVIEWS
These same qualities help account for a certain indeterminacy in the book as a
whole. Wade alludes to this problem near the end of his study when he expresses his
frustration at the “difficulty of tying things down” (p. 231). He is referring there to
conflicting testimony about simple historical facts, but he goes on to note that ques-
tions of fact “merge almost seamlessly” with larger interpretive issues. And if all
accounts are “discourses,” produced by people who have particular personal, class,
regional, gender, and ethnic interests and perspectives, are they not all, as Wade puts
it, “ontologically and epistemologically equal”? How is the critical scholar to avoid
deconstruction that entails “endless regression.” How to avoid a “relapse into rela-
tivism” (p. 232)?
Struggle as he does to overcome these pitfalls, Wade is only partially successful.
Part of the reason, one suspects, is his failure to fully deconstruct himself. The
reader never learns why he is personally interested in the problem of blackness in
Colombia, or, for that matter, whether he thinks of himself as black or white or
what? Given the subject at hand, these are issues on which full disclosure might be
expected of any scholar, whatever one’s position on the assumptions undergirding
postmodern cultural criticism. Moreover, apparently because of his commitment to
“multivocality,” we never really learn what Wade himself thinks of Colombian
costeño music. The most he tells us on that score is that, at the start of the project,
he “liked” salsa (not, of course, originally a Colombian musical form), and that he
had also “grown to enjoy” vallenato accordion music, “mostly by dint of dancing
and drinking for long hours with vallenato playing at high volume” (p. vii). Is this
faint praise?
Wade is at his best when he argues that enjoyment and acceptance of música
tropical—in part because of the music’s ambiguous and complex associations with
modernity—can be understood as a remaking of the self, and of the identity of the
nation, into a fuller, freer, more inclusive entity. And Wade is to be commended for
his efforts to set his argument in the broad context of Colombian history. Neverthe-
less, his effort to link national acceptance of costeño music to the political violence
that enveloped the country in the late 1940s and continues in different form today is
based more on assertion than on evidence. It may be that it is not coincidental that
costeño music, widely associated with happiness and joy (alegría) and with the rel-
atively peaceful coastal region of Colombia, gained ground nationally just as the
nation was sliding into a politics of death and violence (pp. 148-9). But a causal
relationship between the two phenomena is simply not supported by the kind of evi-
dence presented in the book.
BOOK REVIEWS 149
Wade apparently rejects the idea that there could be something innate in costeño
music that enabled it to appeal to a broad constituency in Colombia and abroad once
the means of hearing it outside its native region became available. Comparison with
the trajectories of other music of the African Diaspora, in particular the rise to
national and world prominence of jazz music from the southern United States, might
help clarify the appeal of all this music. Such comparison, absent from this study, is
much more possible because of it.
Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe.
By Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2000. Pp. ix, 351. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $49.95 cloth.
Access provided by UND Chester Fritz Library (19 Nov 2018 02:35 GMT)
112 : Reviews
WADE, PETER. Music, Race and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia. Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000, 323 pp. Appendix:
List of interviewees, musical examples (descriptions and transcriptions of
selected commercially available recordings), notes, references, index.
print capitalism (1983) are a welcome area of inquiry, and once again, one
cannot really blame the author for the lack of ethnographic material avail-
able under some circumstances. Yet one has to ask why the polarization
between musicians’ actions and their interpretation in ideological realms
was not accounted for as directly as some of the other reductive polarities
that the author identifies in his introduction. This is of particular concern
in relation to the notion of blackness, which is never explicitly defined and
addressed by the author. Rather, one needs to extrapolate its meaning from
the author’s discussion and definition of race during the introduction. Un-
fortunately, as fluid as Wade’s definition of race might be, the aforemen-
tioned research challenges of this study are such that blackness is most
often discussed in relation to how it is perceived from the realm of ideol-
ogy and rhetoric and far less through the lens of the musicians’ personal
experience.
This issue of blackness could perhaps be better understood via a deeper
local historical contextualization of the notion. Unfortunately, this
contextualization does not go farther than the nineteenth century, some-
thing that may have contributed to the oversimplification of the concept of
blackness. While Wade’s definition of race is a rather useful one, little is
ever made of the fact that most of its elaboration is based on the assump-
tion that there was more or less a consensus of how race was viewed in
Europe during the colonial period. As Young (1996) has pointed out ex-
plicitly and as the author has implied more indirectly in some of his earlier
work (Wade 1993), racial ideologies based on phenotypes and biological
difference were developed during the eighteenth century as part of French
and British Enlightenment rhetoric as a means to make sense of Europe-
ans’ position in relation to non-Europeans’. Clearly, this recognition par-
tially inspired Wade’s definition of race and has also influenced the
theoretical elaboration of writers such as Bhabha, Gilroy, and Hall, who
Wade greatly draws upon in his introduction to this book. However, there
is little research available to suggest that Spanish colonial powers shared
the same view with their British and French counterparts throughout colo-
nial history. The fact that the Spanish system of colonial rule (at least in
mainland Latin America, for example, Peru or Mexico) was based more
on the subordination of slaves through assimilation into the dominant cul-
ture (see, for example, Bowser 1974) rather than segregation implies a dif-
ferent attitude towards slavery. This does not deny the very clear existence
of racist attitudes, but rather suggests that such attitudes were verbalized in
economic, cultural, and moral terms rather than biological ones.
This is a particularly important possibility to keep in mind when deal-
ing with a situation where the continued verbalization of marginality in
terms of “decencia” comes first and race later. The suggestion here is that
perhaps race, and by extension blackness, in a case like Colombia, is a
complex web of iterations that sometimes are verbalized in terms of class,
Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict
1983 Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso.
Bhabha, Homi
1994 The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Bowser, Frederick P.
1974 The African Slave in Colonial Peru: 1524–1650. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Young, Robert J. C.
1995 Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London:
Routledge.
Sostengo que la música costeña está ligada a través de una relación (sic)
de homología simple con una clase o grupo social en particular, y que
esta continuidad subraya toda su historia. Se trata de un vínculo
sugerido en algunas teorías académicas sobre clase y cultura, y que
está implicado en algunos relatos sobre música colombiana cuando
insisten en las continuidades tradicionales de los aires costeños, sus
raíces locales y sus orígenes plebeyos, todo lo cual es apropiado por las
clases medias, la industria fonográfica y las élites nacionales (p. 302).
Music, Race, and Nation. Música Tropical coincidió con nuevas directrices es-
in Colombia. The University of Chicago tatales, muy agresivas en este caso,
Press. Chicago.
que afincadas en un gamonalismo
Revista Colombiana
de Antropología 339
Volumen 38, enero-diciembre 2002
She explores the emotional dimen- zonian Peru. She advocates a shift Using case studies, Russell links
sions of women's lives and details how from a female to a couple-centered ap- macro- and microlevel perspectives on
spousal affection, notions of responsi- proach and links fertility with the cul- teen pregnancy in Teesside, U.K., and
bility, and the developmental cycle of turally constructed expression of emo- vividly details examples of personal
the family ultimately shape reproduc- tions between a couple and toward decisions regarding sexuality that are
tive strategies. children. This case effectively illus- often obscured in statistics. This chap-
Using ethnographic data from Bo- trates that in contrast to demographic ter provides a particularly astute explo-
livia, Hawkins and Price critique transition theory, integration into na- ration of teenage sexual behavior and
demographic and health policies that tional society may imply abandon- its public construction as a moral and
fail to account for how sexual and re- ment of fertility regulation rather than social problem. Harris and Smyth con-
productive health are constituted increasing agency in women's fertility clude the policy discussion with a
within particular cultural and eco- decisions. strong statement on refugee health is-
nomic contexts. Attention to everyday In her chapter on coping with infer- sues that identifies structural con-
practices of migrant women, including tility in Nigeria, Cornwall offers both a straints preventing the effective imple-
the role of emotion in shaping women's perspective on children's "agency" in mentation of policies. They suggest
decisions, leads the authors to con- creating ties with foster mothers and that reproductive health cannot be
clude that a "neoliberal" and biomedi- poignant reflections on the meaning of separated from conditions of poverty,
cal construction of the autonomous in- infertility in a strongly pronatalist soci- gender-based power relations, and
dividual fails to explain women's ety. She suggests casting reproduction "health" more broadly construed.
reproductive health strategies. Effective less as "a patterned set of choices than They join numerous anthropologists in
health policies will require broader ap- as a contingent process over time" (p. arguing that it is imperative to engage
proaches that address women's overall 155). Her case histories document how local populations in developing cultur-
lack of empowerment. relations of mothering are produced ally relevant reproductive-health inter-
Both Montgomery and Day address and renegotiated, enabling some infer- ventions.
aspects of reproductive health among tile women to assume the social role This edited volume is notable for its
sex workers and explore health risks, and identity of "mother." coherence and the consistent atten-
sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), Similarly, Martin explores the mean- tion to the themes of the three sec-
and the meaning of motherhood for ing of children to parents in Hong tions. One regrettable feature is the
their informants. Montgomery pro- Kong and contends that although chil- lack of reference to much of the an-
vides unusual ethnographic detail on dren are valued for their potential eco- thropological literature on reproduc-
child prostitutes in Thailand, pointing nomic and ritual contributions, the tion and child health published in the
to the lack of local-level research on Chinese family is parent-centered. In United States, which would have bol-
fertility and reproductive health, as spite of changes in family structure stered the volume editor's introduc-
well as on the fundamental causes of and a decline in fertility, filial piety re- tory argument for the centrality of re-
child prostitution. Day identifies the mains idealized, and Western psycho- production to anthropological theory.
tension between the public and private logical traditions of intensive parent- The book is most likely to interest
lives of London sex workers, for whom ing appear to have had little impact. scholars in medical anthropology,
the desire for motherhood is juxta- As the opening chapter in the sec- gender issues, and international health
posed with frequent pregnancy termi- tion devoted to policy issues, Boyden's policy. It would be appropriate for ad-
nations and associatedrisksof infertility. review of scientific conceptualizations vanced medical anthropology courses
Hampshire applies demographic and of childhood and youth is less ethno- as well as specialized classes on interna-
anthropological approaches to analyze graphic than theoretical. She offers tional health, reproduction, or sexuality.
fertility decisions and outcomes among historical and cross-disciplinary per-
Fulani in northern Burkina Faso. Her spectives on human development and Music, Race and Nation: Musica
research cautions against making critiques models of childhood that fail Tropical in Colombia. Peter Wade. Chi-
overly simplistic inferences from cor- to account for individual agency, thus cago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
relations between migration and fertil- diverting attention from "the social vii + 323 pp., appendixes, notes, refer-
ity decline. She suggests that social and moral competencies" of children ence, index.
changes anticipated with "modern- and adolescents (p. 179). Price and
ization," such as increased autonomy Hawkins's subsequent chapter empha- BRENDA F. BERRIAN
for women leading to reduced fertility, sizes the need for increased attention University of Pittsburgh
are less significant in the Fulani case to sexual and reproductive health
than an unwanted increase in sterility, needs of youth. They review existing In Music, Race and Nation: Musica
probably linked to STDs. policies and programs in poor coun- Tropical in Colombia, Peter Wade pro-
Belaunde similarly critiques demo- tries, recommend approaches to sex vides a detailed study of the rise of
graphic assumptions regarding natural and reproductive health programs that musica tropical, or Costerio music, in
and controlled fertility in her study of are multidimensional and locally rele- connection with racial and national
menstruation, birth, and couples' rela- vant, and document precisely which identities and cultural hybridity along
tionships among the Airo-Pai of Ama- projects "work." the coastal area of Colombia in South
476
Book Reviews • American Ethnologist
America. La Costa (the coast)—the area by the middle-classes" (p. 105) be- challenge by stating that certain musi-
that includes the cities of Barranquilla, cause the music had "qualities which cal styles needed to be nationalized in
Cartagena, and Santa Marta—is char- expressed the tensions between mod- order to be widely accepted. For exam-
acterized by ambiguity. According to ernity and tradition, between black- ple, in his December 30, 1950, chapter
Wade, it is "black, but also indigenous ness and whiteness, between the re- for Semana newspaper, Julio Torres,
and white; it is poor and 'backward'.... gion as distinctive and as part of the the leader of a vallenato group from
but [it] has also been a principal port of nation in progress, and between sexual the interior, said, "To despise the im-
entry for 'modernity' into the country" desire and moral propriety" (p. 105). portance of popular music... is a criti-
(p. 39). The area has also been politi- Wade attributes the real impact of cal absurdity. To exalt so-called classi-
cally vocal and the central source of Co- Costeno music to Lucho Bermudez cal music as suitable for the people and
lombia's commercially and interna- and his Orquesta del Caribe, who cultured minorities, is another socio-
tionally successful Costeno music. played live porros for the first time in a logical error. Art music does not have
Three organizations played important new nightclub in downtown Bogota. to forcibly exclude popular music, nor
roles in acquainting the country with To be accepted by the elite, Bermudez vice versa" (p. 133).
the latest sounds and developing popu- switched the band's composition from The elites were culturally oriented
lar music as an urban form: two record mainly black musicians to musicians toward Europe and toward their re-
companies—Discos Fuentes, founded who were whiter in appearance. As gional cities of Bogota and Medellin.
in 1934 in Cartagena, and Discos Tropi- Costeno music infiltrated Bermudez's Some viewed Costeno music, with its
cal, founded in 1945 in Barranquilla— orchestra and other popular orches- underlying implications of blackness,
and Colombia's first radio station, La tras, special radio programs began to as backward. On the other hand, the
Vozde Barranquilla, opened in 1929. be dedicated to promoting the music. emerging middle class and lower class
To situate Costeno music, Wade Yet the racial identity of the Costeno recognized the celebratory aspects of
traces its origin to three 19th-century musicians varied, as exemplified by Costeno music that reveled in the eco-
musical forms: porro (working-class Bermudez, a light mestizo; Jose Barros, nomic growth, industrialization, and
music derived from flutes and drums a moreno (brown) singer and com- modernization of Colombia during the
of Amerindian origin and appropriated poser; and Antonio Penaloza, a slightly 1930s and 1940s. Yet Costeno music
by the bourgeoisie); fandango (a col- darker moreno, or black. As a result, cannot be understood solely through a
lective dance music with drums and blackness in the popular Costeno simplified binary opposition between
hand-clapping from Spain); and valle- bands "was usually not very evident, the elites and the middle and lower
nato (accordion music). Traveling but its shadow or possibility was al- classes. Wade maintains that the power
wind bands helped spread the three ways there, especially in the rhythm of Costeno music resides in its ambiva-
musical forms in the coastal and inte- section" (p. 125). lence and the multiple possibilities it
rior cities and provincial towns. Costeno music successfully pene- presents for ideological rearticulation,
Although Wade finds it difficult to tie trated the consciousness of audiences in the tension between homogeneity
a musician's class background to a in the interior of Colombia and won and heterogeneity in national identity,
specific musical form, he nevertheless entry into elite urban entertainment and in the tension between the na-
acknowledges musicians such as circles. Yet, Bermudez and other musi- tional and the transnational.
Lucho Bermudez, Antonio Maria cians sometimes dealt with hostile re- The golden era of Costeno music
Penaloza, and Luis Sosa, whose band actions. In 1936, at thefirstCongress of was the 1950s and the 1960s. During
members had strong connections with Music in Ibague, Daniel Zamudio, a that time, the term cumbia displaced
the elite, middle, and lower class, re- composer and musicologist, issued a porro. Although cumbia, with its trans-
spectively. The three musicians and racial diatribe lumping Costeno music national construct of appropriations,
their orchestras played a diversity of with Cuban music as foreign, black, became the musical marker of Colom-
styles at a variety of venues, always and threatening to national conscious- bian nationality, it had to compete
slipping Costeno music in with new ar- ness. Other writers bemoaned the im- with salsa, rock, pachanga, merengue,
rangements. The theme of possible pact of Mexican, Cuban, and North and the bolero. With the consolidation
covert sexual relations between white American jazz on Costeno music, of the national record industry,
men and black women began to appear equating foreignness with blackness. Costeno records were released inter-
in the lyrics in the mid-20th century. In Thus, Costeno music was identified as nationally under the designation cum-
fact, Camacho y Cano, a white Costeno black, foreign, vulgar, modern, and bia in the mid-1960s in such countries
male, recorded such a song, "Por la sexual. To counteract such racist and as Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Argentina.
Bajo," in New York, which sub- often derogatory commentaries, some Yet the question of why the music was
sequently made its way along with Costeno intellectuals, including the labeled cumbia instead of porro re-
other risque songs into clubs in Co- writers Manuel Zapata Olivella and quires more research.
lombia patronized by the elite. Other Gabriel Garcfa Marque/, argued that This book is a fascinating account of
lyrical themes were partying, drinking, improved communications and inter- how Wade managed to unravel the
and love. The process of creating new nal and external migrations had cre- complex history of Costeno music and
types of Costeno music "was certainly ated a crisis in ideas about Colombian its connotations of tropicality and
mediated very heavily by the elite and identity. Costeno musicians rose to the blackness.
477