In what sense can we talk about a “cultural politics of music and dance” in contemporary

Colombia? Explain with reference to “race”, region and the nation.

Introduction
Talking about a cultural politics prompts a focus on the way in which ‘the cultural’ can be
viewed as a site where political struggles over meaning take place, (West, 2014). A type of
politics which stresses that culture has a key place in society within which groups can assert
expressions of identity and address issues of belonging, inclusion and exclusion, (Korf,
2020). Gilroy (1994: 33) stresses the political effectiveness of expressive cultures such as
music and dance, whereby through their struggles, these artistic forms have the potential
the produce and sustain an ‘interpretive community’ outside of mainstream political
consciousness. At the same time, to propose a cultural politics of music and dance must also
recognise the innate contestation regarding what these creative expressions represent;
these meanings can vary drastically depending on who is doing the imagining and in what
way, (Wade, 1998).

To bring these debates into a more contemporary Colombia, this essay critically examines
picó sound-system culture and the musical genre of champeta as important sites of music
and dance. Originating in the 1960s within the Caribbean coastal cities of Cartagena and
Barranquilla from the afro-Colombian community, picó describes a local culture of loud
sound-systems and parties which still flourishes today. The name comes from the
Colombian interpretation of the English word ‘pickup’ used to describe the trucks needed to
transport the large audio equipment, (Hernandez, 2020). Synonymous with these sound-
systems, champeta refers to a genre of afro-Colombian music which fuses drum machines
and sexual lyrics with west-African influenced rhythms and guitar plucking; this music is also
known for the intimate and explicit couples-dancing that it attracts, (Hernández, 2003).
Despite being first and foremost about a spontaneous expression of enjoyment, the essay
looks to draw out the tensions and complexities of these cultural forms in relation to race,
region and the nation by applying local, national and international scales to analyse them.
Locally, an analysis of picó raises questions surrounding territory and the claiming of spaces
between what Schwarz (2015) coins sonic boundaries. Leaning on work by Wade (1997,
2002), this essay turns toward previous temporalities in the Colombian imaginary to better
explain why champeta music, framed a national level, also becomes problematic. Finally,
through an ‘international’ lens of analysis, a globalised world of music can be seen living in
the marginalized places where picós have traditional played music. Calling upon cultural
critics Paul Gilroy (1993) and Stuart Hall (2015), local struggles of identity by afro-
Colombians, through their music, can be located within a wider hub of black diasporic
culture, something which becomes a problem to the idea of nationhood.

Historical and theoretical contribution

Colombia is a country which has a deep, long-standing sense of regionality for which race
(and class) can be seen as a divider, (Urea-Giraldo, 2012). The Andean centre envelopes
major cities of Bogota and Medellin which are the richest in Colombia containing a
predominantly mestizo population. The Pacific region on the west coast continues to be the
most deprived home to the vast majority of the total afro-Colombian population. The
Caribbean coast, despite its better national and international connections is still one of the
nation’s poorest regions. Although less than the Pacific coast, la costa is home to a large
afro-Colombian and mulatto population; the costeños living in the main cities of Cartagena
and Barranquilla are majority black, (Ng’Weno, 2007).

In part, music and dance have historically played a role as signifiers of this regional and
racial difference being used to construct a community in a certain way by certain people.
Following on from the colonial period of racial subjugation during which white Spaniards
ruled over their indigenous and black counterparts permitted by their own logic of scientific
racism, the newly independent nation of Colombia continued this socioracial hierarchy
which favoured whiteness under the guise of a new national discourse of ‘mestizaje’,
(Wade, 2005). Within what Anderson (2016) describes as the ‘imagined community’ of the
nation, ‘darker-skinned’ Colombians were valued less than the highly regarded ‘mestizo’
Colombian with their ‘whiter’ features still championed; ‘whiter’ Colombian elites could still
feel part of a nation that they had ruled over without having to give up any of their
privileges, (Chavez & Zambrano, 2006). Cultural forms such as music and dance are messy,
they do not fit neatly within community borders and thus became a threat to the dominant
power structures of Colombia leading to what Wade (1998) calls processes of
‘tropicalization’. Traditional black (pacifico and costeño) and indigenous music that had
started to gain popularity could both embraced by the state as a badge of diversity for a
homogenous Colombian nation while at the same time allowing for the state to discriminate
against these same communities that produced the music, continually relegating them to
same precarious margins of the nation, (Calle, 2012).

Local
Native to Cartagena and Barranquilla, it was within the more economically deprived
neighbourhoods of the city where picó was able to cement itself. For the darker-skinned
residents who tended to reside in these barrios, which grew considerably during the periods
of chronic urban decline hitting much of Colombian cities during the 1970s, (Daniel, 2019),
they could not afford (and were not welcome at) the discotecas of the time; thus picó was
the only way they could ‘let loose’, a way to enjoy and express themselves. Throughout the
rest of the 20th century and up to the present day, this form of partying has continued it’s
popularity within these communities, becoming a great source of pride for these people.
Picó owners (picoteros) obsess over the aesthetics of the sound-system, not just the quality
of the sound but over colourful graphics painted onto the wooden soundboxes, as well as
the records they select to play. West-African rhythms like soukous and highlife were very
popular with the mainly afro-Colombian dancefloor demographic, these have now been
combined with electronic drums to create the popular champeta music which now
dominates, (Gautier, 2013). For these areas like ‘Nelson Mandela’, located on the margins of
the city of Cartagena, a place with one of the poorest accesses to health, education and
security in the region, it is unsurprising that picó still plays a central role today especially
amongst young people, (Hashmi, 2023). Picó culture acts a means to (re)represent these
communities on their own terms away from more formal means of representation which
have historically failed them. Even the popularity of champeta music as a distinct genre can
be seen as example of this; a term which was originally used a racial slur by mestizos
towards novel afro-inspired music, then transformed by predominantly ‘black’ producers to
(re)label this fresh sound they were making, (Aldana, 2013).

Examining music within cultural politics not only becomes important to represent identities
but also as a way to actively construct them, (Wade, 1998). The sound-system can be
unpacked as a way to (re)construct and (re)claim ‘the local’ through its music and sound
more broadly. In some ways, this is a form of resistance ‘from below’ to reclaim an
‘Afrocolombianness’ which continues to be neglected and subjugated by the state ‘from
above’. Despite major legislative change in the 1991 constitution to recognise afro-
Colombian land rights and move away from a homogenous racial view of the nation to one
that was pluri-ethnic, the lived reality is contested with a more cynical approach proposing
that the diversity permitted is still subject to the same framework of oppression, (Wade,
1995). Simultaneously, we can also see the construction of these marginalised identities
through the reclaiming of (sonic) space at a local level, (Schwartz, 2015). People become
distinguished by their specific sonic practices; places where picó is popular and people
dance and listen to champeta are marked these forms of music and dance. This is
problematic as meaning ascribed to these sites of identity construction becomes contested
within the wider city and region. The sonic frontiers between different soundscapes that
coexist in Cartagena can be used to delimitate the city, also utilised from the outside to
define what is inside, (Hudson, 2006). Through the music, binaries are created between
good and bad areas, violent and non-violent areas, and pretty and ugly areas. Despite
increasing popularity of the genre, champeta continues to be associated with the violence
that is prone to areas like Nelson Mandela, viewed by other parts of the city as being worth
less than other genres which also constructs an image of the ‘doers’ of these sonic practices
as devalued and somewhat inferior, (Schwartz, 2015).

National
Colombia is a country which prides itself as a nation of music and dance, with much of its so-
called ‘nationalised’ music having its roots in traditional afro-cultural forms, such as cumbia,
(Katz-Rosene, 2017). To a certain extent, salsa and even reggaeton, which are not native to
the country, now have a national affinity as Colombian-own interpretations of these genres
have gained such a large popularity; the city of Cali promotes itself as la capital de la salsa
as well as world-renowned reggaeton artists now reside in Medellin, (Cepeda, 2010). These
genres too have their origins within the afro-Colombian community, once vehicles of
expression for ‘blackness’, they have now been ‘tropicalized’ within a Colombian national
imaginary. The song La Rebelion by legendary afro-Colombian salsa singer Joe Arroyo being
a great example of this; a dancefloor classic at any fiesta mestiza while at the same time
being a song which denounces the horrors of slavery on the Caribbean coast.
This has not been the case for champeta ‘classics’. Despite the inclusion of the genre in the
2020 half-time Superbowl show by Colombian global mega star Shakira, viewed by much of
the world, champeta still lacks the affection that other genres get at the national level. The
so-called ‘nationalisation’ does not refer to a giant rubber stamp coming ‘from above’ to
render a certain cultural form ‘national’, instead Wade (2005) talks about single
spontaneous actions of people on any given day based off premonitions and common-sense
notions in the national imaginary. From this understanding, champeta can be seen as too
localised within predominantly ‘black’ neighbourhoods to be granted this affiliation to the
‘nation’, as it conjures up certain temporalities; historic sentiments embedded within the
national community. Champeta is immediately associated with the way people use their
bodies, a sensual and sexualised dancing style which caused a small moral panic during the
1990s when the genre first started to grow, (Aldana, 2013). The music and picó culture, as
previously mentioned, were born during economic crisis, within already deprived
neighbourhoods which were historically marginalized and demonized by the state. These
residents were pitted against the rest of population as the perpetrators of the state’s own
problems, stoking fear of a perceived internal enemy. Only by hanging champeta on this
wall of context, a backdrop of competing temporalities which show the thoughts and
feelings undercutting this music, can the complexities and ambiguities be drawn out relating
to what (and therefore who) is considered as belonging to the ‘nation’ of Colombia. Unlike
reggaeton which features a similar dancing style known as perrear, (Marshall, 2008),
champeta becomes trapped within its sonic frontier, ghettoised as a notion of the dodgy
pueblo. Shakira can positively use the genre as a hashtag on her Superbowl Instagram post
to spread awareness of the contribution of this genre to the success of Colombian music,
(Serrano, 2020), the Waka Waka 2010 World Cup Song clearly represents this link between
Afro-pop and Colombian champeta. However, this does little to free this music from being
held where the ‘nation’ has historically relegated it to, a place where champeta is
intertwined with the violent, the vulgar and the vagrant.

International
Zooming out to analyse this region of Colombia through an ‘international’ lens, it feels as if
picó and champeta have been left behind to make way for a postcard image which connects
the main cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla to a circuit of Western tourism through their
picturesque colonial architecture and golden beaches. However, this negates the fact that
another network lurks beneath the surface, living within the spaces that seem to be cut off
from these formal global channels. Since the decline of salsa negra during the 1970s as it
became somewhat ‘whitewashed’ to create salsa romantica, (Waxler, 2000), many
picoteros were lost as to what to play, searching for new sounds which could make their
crowds dance. They started to experiment with many west-African and pan-Caribbean
sounds ending up in their record bags due to both port cities’ transatlantic connections,
(Hernandez, 2020). This resulted in a subsequent surge of these records playing at picó
dances as partygoers resonated with these highly danceable rhythms despite not being able
to understand the English or French lyrics. Picoteros coined the umbrella term musica
africana to describe these tunes as they were aware that the performers behind them were
black but unaware of their scattered global distribution, from Jamaica to Gambia. Over time
the records became anthems of picós at the time, legend-like in the memories of their new
dancers and DJs and eventually influencing champeta, a new electronic sound which was to
take over the dances incorporating lots of afro-diasporic musical elements.

Following a framework of Paul Gilroy’s (1993) ‘Black Atlantic’, we can explain this
phenomenon of picó as being part of a wider cultural system of ‘black’ musical exchange;
this music becomes the sound of Gilroy’s construction which is transmitted through the
records that the picoteros spin. The playing of musica africana does not seek to emanate an
essentialised vision of ‘Africa’ in the minds of the DJs and dancers; much like varied
geographical distribution of the actual records, it aims creates points of connection and
meaning between different cultural forms across the diaspora, (Hall, 2015). In a way, it’s a
claim to a bigger transnational identity above the nation, one which is based more on the
shared culture and experiences of displacement and oppression that the diaspora has faced,
(Crook, 1993). Through this wider framing, cultural expression through picó and champeta
are no longer penned in by oppressive sonic boundaries as marginalized spaces like Nelson
Mandela become connected to a much broader form of ‘blackness’. This poses a question to
the cohesion of the ‘nation’, one which has traditionally sought to side-line these
populations within a national discourse of mestizaje. However, ‘Black Atlantic’ also
complicates the idea of belonging for afro-Colombians themselves and not just the ‘nation’,
as their local and national sense of self is uprooted by this transatlantic pull. Navigating this
becomes an innate part of their identity, a diasporic experience defined “by the recognition
of a necessary diversity”, (Hall, 2015: 235).

Conclusion
Despite using different scales to analyse picó and champeta, these should not be seen as
disparate from each other. The local, national and international are all interlaced forming a
complex web of different identities that inhabit these cultural sites of music and dance. They
can be unwound from each other momentarily to view tensions at each level however they
must ultimately be viewed as constituting a singular mess. In this way, one cannot
acknowledge that picó has constructed new forms of local collectiveness in pockets of
Cartagena and Barranquilla without also considering where the cultural inspirations for the
types of music played are taken from, and how that relates to a wider cultural system of
black culture and diasporic identity. Only by realizing the ways in which champeta is framed
in the national imaginary, as a racialised music which plays on people’s previous stigmas,
one can unpack how the music becomes cornered back into its ‘black’ box at a local level
and how a wider vision of the ‘Black Atlantic’ becomes such a problem to the ‘nation’
because of this. More importantly, the reason why talking about a cultural politics of music
and dance becomes so credible is because it involves expressions of identity from the
everyday actions of ordinary people which are done in the moment. DJs and dancers, with
little thought, show different parts of their identity at different times constituting distinct
pieces of an overall broader ‘mosaic’ of identity, (Wade, 2005). The ambiguity and
contestation of meaning that haunt these cultural forms become irrelevant during these
impulsive acts as enjoyment and expression is the main focus.
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