Peter Wade.

Music, Race, and Nation: Musica Tropical

in Colombia. University of Chicago Press, 2000. xi,
323 pp.
Reviewed by Janet L. Sturman

Music, Race, and Nation: Musica Tropical in Colombia is an especially wel-

come addition to the distinguished Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology
series edited by Philip Bohlman and Bruno Nettl. First, it boosts the rela-
tively small body of published scholarship in English on Colombian
music,1 and second, it promotes new theoretical directions for research by
focusing on commercially popular music and the constructive role it plays
in Colombian social politics.
Wade departs from the venerable practice in Latin American music
studies of seeking to identify musical and textual evidence of Iberian
heritage, a topic addressed by both George List (1973) and Susana
Friedmann (1993). When he raises the issue at all, it is not to elucidate the
essential character of the music, but instead to evaluate why the identifica-
tion of Hispanic ancestry has been esteemed. Wade is more interested in
the social negotiations and musical reconceptualizations undertaken by
Colombians as they reconcile new patterns of musical reception that
threaten long-standing attitudes regarding social status.
Scholars other than Wade have explored Afro-Colombian musical prac-
tice. George List must be counted as one of the pioneers in this area, but
much of his work concerned folkloric practice. Wade, in contrast, directs
his attention to commercially disseminated popular music. He also
devotes more attention to music of Colombia's Atlantic coast, and he is
more interested in the social construction of musical practice than in the
construction of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic patterns that dominates
many of List's analyses. Matters of musical reception, appropriation, and
re-identification, as well as the connection between these behaviors and
social politics, concern Wade as much as sound itself. His statement that
"The way people think about identity and music is tied to the way they
think about place" (2) makes it clear that Music, Race, and Nation focuses
on the social interpretation of sound.
Like the American scholar Lise Waxer (1998, 2001), who has explored
links between local Colombian popular music and the now globally popu-
lar salsa, Wade is especially interested in how the development of a com-
mercial music industry in Colombia and abroad affected musical practice
in central Colombian cities as well as in outlying regions. The musica

Current Musicology, no. 69 (Spring 2000)

© 2001 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York 169
170 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY

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

and 3% is of indigenous ancestry (Abadfa Morales 1995:18). The same

adjectives used to describe population groups are frequently applied to
musical genres and activities, as Wade points out in his introduction.
From the earliest stirrings of independence, elite Colombians worked
to create a centralized vision of national culture. Their efforts favored the
Andean region and positioned the coastal regions, as well as the people
and culture that flourished there, as marginal and provincial. This view
was aided by prevailing attitudes regarding race and national identity.
Blending of ancestries-Mrican, Hispanic, and other European, with
indigenous-occurred throughout Colombia, but the influence of Mrican
ancestry has always been strongest along the coasts. The voices guiding the
central government supported a racially-defined conception of national
identity that highlighted the dominant role of Colombians of white,
European ancestry. Thus, although the Colombian elite recognized the
distinctive character of regional ethnic (and musical) variety, they gener-
ally valued local traditions for what they might contribute to a centralized
composite; such traditions were to be absorbed rather than valued for
their independent integrity.
Correspondingly, indigenous, mixed, and in particular, black residents
and traditions were viewed as lower in status. Wade therefore begins his
study by asking how music with undeniably black roots came to represent
the entire nation. In chapter 1, he introduces a host of related issues he
has considered in answering such a question and presents an extensive
literature review. He discusses the tensions between homogeneity and
heterogeneity, transformation and appropriation, and nationalism and
transnationalism, and how these issues figure into the discourse on
Colombian identity. He also presents a general discussion of theories link-
ing gender, sexuality and racial identity. Ideas concerning sexuality and
the body in music and dance, as well as those concerning music and capi-
talism, play an important role in Colombia's rather surprising embrace of
music once viewed as provincial and coarse. Perhaps most important is
Wade's theory that the history of Colombian popular music reveals a more
nuanced understanding of the constructional potential of social identifica-
tion via popular music. He reminds us that Colombian nationalist elites
do more than absorb and modify diverse regional culture; they "resignify a
diversity that they also partly contruct" (7). He contrasts this view with
positions explored by other scholars of Caribbean popular music, like
Pacini Hernandez (1995) and Averill (1997), which emphasize the opposi-
tional potential of music.
In chapter 2, "La Costa and Musica Costeiia in the Colombian Nation,"
Wade develops his examination of how attitudes toward the music and cul-
ture of the Caribbean coast connect to Colombian attitudes regarding
172 CURRENT MUSICOLOGY

national identity. Drawing on resources that include published literature,

school texts, and cultural policy, he explains the positions of the Ministry
of Communications, which oversees radio broadcasting; the Ministry of
Education, which provides radio programs for state broadcast; and the
Ministry of Culture, which directs programs at museums and other state
institutions. In particular, he observes how the issue of cultural diversity is
treated by these national agencies, noting a persistent tendency to treat
diversity as a regional matter, i.e., something characteristic of specific
areas of the country, but not a national trait. Wade reminds his readers of
the constructive vision at work in such representations since cultural diver-
sity is actually much more pervasive than official policy implies: plenty of
Afro-Colombians reside in the central city of Bogota and not just along
the coasts.
Of particular value is Wade's investigation of the growth of the record-
ing industry in Colombia. Far from merely describing stages of develop-
ment, he uncovers and highlights the importance of the ongoing dialogue
between domestic and international markets. The construction of a
Colombian national identity, and music representing it, was not simply a
national project. Beginning with the first commercial recordings of
Colombian music such negotiations had an internatiorial character and
involved non-Colombian voices. Thus, while prominent Colombian jour-
nalists, authors, and politicians were waxing eloquently about how the
Andean bambuco (a dance song adapted for urban consumption in middle-
class salons) best represented the country's national character, the genre
was not included in the first recordings of Colombian music made by the
Columbia Grammophone Company and Victor Talking Machine Company
in 1910 and 1917 respectively. The recordings did, however, include
Colombian versions of the waltz and polka, dance genres popular not just
in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America, but around the world. Wade
concludes, "apparently at this stage bambucos did not interest record com-
panies which were catering to an international audience" (49). Bambucos
and other forms of central Colombian music popular in the middle-class
salons of the era were eventually recorded and Wade discusses the rise of
this and other central Andean genres with the central bourgeois public.
However, his overriding point is that although music from the Colombian
interior regularly dominated national discourse, the international record-
ing market consistently prompted wider visions of national music,
especially favoring links between Colombian music and Caribbean styles
which were growing increasingly popular with international, especially
American, listeners.
Chapter 3 of Music, Race and Nation, "Origin Myths: The Historiography
of CostellO Music," is dedicated to the popular narratives that circulate
 REVIEWS 173

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

mestizaje regularly embody an ideology of erasing cultural difference

through blending (or, in many cases, whitening).3 While these narra-
tives frequently appear to celebrate diversity, they also have the little-
recognized effect of reinforcing cultural hierarchies by continually
articulating difference. Thus the narratives that define costerio traditions as
authentic (meaning rooted in folkloric practice and reflecting an ideal-
ized cultural blend) tended to simultaneously define these traditions and
their supporters as backward and less cultivated (66).
Wade's general skepticism regarding accepted narratives derives in part
from his study of Gilard (1987) and Bermudez (1985, 1996), but the
revised version he offers in his book is groundbreaking, if nothing else for
the breath of his explanations. He has worked assiduously to discover the
perspectives that have shaped conventional explanations regarding music
history and practice. As noted earlier, he shows the role of the recording
industry in the development of various costerio styles, in contrast to the
myths that posit a purely rural gestation.
That said, two concerns come to mind. First, despite his unveiling of
existing origin myths, one might argue that Wade has constructed a myth
of his own. His tendency to lump together different musical practices into
one general category called costerio music is a construction that many will
see as an oversimplification, albeit one that is frequently favored by the
record industry.
Wade's acceptance of this generic categorization is somewhat sur-
prising when one considers that historically the styles of music that he
examines have embodied "blackness" (to use Wade's term) in rather dif-
ferent ways. The currulaos of the Pacific Coast, and even the many types of
cumbia associated more with the Atlantic coast, embody far more overt
African traits than does the vallenato tradition. While Wade may be
emphasizing the similarities across styles because it has become fashion-
able to do so in the contemporary entertainment industry, it is not my
experience that Colombians hear these styles as one undifferentiated
group, as the repeated use of the term might imply.
At various points in the book Wade does distinguish between different
styles and practices in Colombian music, notably in chapter 2 where he
provides a historical overview of various styles. He also invites readers to
explore specific musical differences between a modern porro, cumbia, and
vallenato (in paseo rhythm) in appendix B where he has included a repre-
sentative transcription of each. The transcriptions, prepared by Alex
Miles, are prefaced by a description of instrumentation and conventional
practice for each ideal type. Wade's own discussion of musical characteris-
tics does not refer to these transcriptions, but he does detail individual
performers' approaches to instrumentation, rhythmic choices, singing
 REVIEWS 175

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

especially since his earlier discussions suggest more definitive conclusions

than he presents at the end. As Wade has shown, the dissemination, and
reception of costen a music permit it to be interpreted as representing one
ideological pole or another; the same music might simultaneously repre-
sent both modernity and tradition, regional and international affiliation,
political purpose and sensuous entertainment, and/or racial distinction
and racial transcendence.
Despite these minor criticisms, Music, Race and Nation is a very fine
book. It provides an enormous wealth of data on Colombian popular
music and raises a provocative set of theories regarding how race, sexual-
ity, commerce, and technological development intersect as Colombians,
individually and collectively, draw on music to define their identity in
local, national, and international contexts. The identification of these
contexts, and their nuanced components, is a valuable contribution to
both popular music scholarship and social science. Although Wade's
observations concern Colombian experience, they are relevant to anyone
interested in popular music studies and will be of special interest to schol-
ars of Latin American music and culture.

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
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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.
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- - - . 1996. La musica campesina y popular en Colombia: 1880-1930. Gaceta

32-33: 113-20.
Fals Borda, Orlando. 1979-88. Historia doble de la costa. Vols. 1-4. Bogota: Carlos
Valencia Editores.
Friedmann, Susana. 1993. In Search for a Common Past: Romancero and Festive
Song in the Colombian Pacific Lowlands-A case study. Revista de musicologia
16: 2055-63.
Gilard,Jacques. 1987. Vallenato: (Cual tradicion narrativa? Huellas 18: 41-46.
Gradante, William J. 1998. Colombia. In The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music.
Vol. 2, South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, edited by Dale
A. Olsen and Daniel Sheehy, 376-99. New York and London: Garland.
List, George. 1973. A Comparison of Certain Aspects of Colombian and Spanish
Folksong. Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council 5: 72-84.
- - - . 1980. Mrican Influences in the Rhythmic and Metric Organization of
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Revista de musica Latinoamericana 1: 6-17.
- - - . 1983. Music and Poetry in a Colombian Village: A Tri-cultural Heritage.
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- - - . 1991. Two Flutes and Rattle: The E'/olution of an Ensemble. The Musical
Quarterly 75: 50-58.
Manuel, Peter. 1988. Popular Musics of the Non-western World: An Introductory Survey.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marre,Jeremy and Hannah Charlton. 1985. Beats of the Heart. London: Pluto.
Pacini Hernandez, Deborah. 1995. Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular
Music. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Perdomo Escobar, Jose Ignacio. 1963. La historia de la musica en Colombia. 3d ed.
Bogota: Editorial ABC.
Wade, Peter. 1988. Music, Blackness, and National Identity: Three Moments in
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- - - . 1993. Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- - - . 1997. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. London and Chicago: Pluto Press.
Waxer, Lise. 1998. Cali Pachanguero: A Social History of Salsa in a Colombian City.
Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Chicago.
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 290 Reviews

place Stewart outside current post-colonial disclosure, such as ‘[Patrice Lumumba’s]

slender frame stretched a full head above most Congolese as if his bloodline flowed
in part from the elegantly tall Tutsi people of eastern Africa’ (p. 75) and ‘Africans
in the two Congos embraced [Latin music] like a kidnapped offspring suddenly
released from captivity’ (p. 18).
Though about music, Rumba on the River does not talk about the music itself.
I am accustomed to authors’ reluctance to engage music and dance directly when
they are not trained in those fields, and Stewart, too, is shy, leaving issues of per-
formance, for instance, to the more ambitious scholar. On a few occasions, Stewart
describes how a particular song sounds, but with neither transcriptions nor
accompanying CD, it will be difficult for the reader unfamiliar with Congolese
music to get a full idea of what s/he is reading about.
Rumba on the River includes a full discography of the works mentioned in the
text. The bibliography, a collection of diverse primary and secondary sources, is a
valuable resource. The index is accurate and useful. The book is physically attract-
ive, with dozens of photographs, exquisite reproduction of disc labels and album
covers, and a few maps. It is a hefty book in the unusual and agreeable format of
4″× 6″.
Rumba on the River is a valuable document for readers of Popular Music, for it
shows in detail what has gone on behind the scenes in the creation and propagation
of Africa’s most widely appreciated music. Furthermore, it provides an opportunity
for comparative thinking on why and how some genres of highly syncretic musics
succeed.

Jesse Samba Wheeler

University of Brasilia, Brazil

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,

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 Reviews 291

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

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 292 Reviews

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

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Books
“Everyone Has a Bit of the
Other”1: Music and Identity in
Colombia
zoila s. mendoza
Native American Studies Department, University of
California, Davis, Davis, Calif. 95616, U.S.A.
(zsmendoza@ucdavis.edu). 30 v 01
Music, Race, and Nation: Música Tropical in
Colombia. By Peter Wade. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000. 323 pp.
Music and dance constitute rather than just reflect social
reality. This is a statement that a growing literature
within the social sciences and the humanities has been
able to substantiate, showing that performative practices
are powerful forms of social action in their own right.
Since the late 1980s, more and more studies of perform-
ance have proposed new interdisciplinary approaches
that account fore the complex ways in which politics
and aesthetics come together and constitute history. In
Music, Race, and Nation, Peter Wade takes a further step
in this line of investigation, presenting a theoretically
grounded and thoroughly documented book that is des-
tined to become a landmark in the study of the construc-
tion of national, regional, and racial identities forged by
means of popular music and dance.
By showing how during the middle decades of the 20th
century music from the Caribbean coast (La Costa) be-
came the national music of Colombia (and the best-
known internationally), Wade sheds light on the fasci-
nating process whereby certain styles associated with
marginalized social and racial groups are resignified as
symbols of regional and national identity—a process
fraught with ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions.
In fact, Wade argues convincingly that the capacity of
Costeño music for mediating these tensions is what ac-
counts for its acceptance as the national music. Through-
out the book he highlights how Costeño musical styles
have mediated the tensions between tradition and mo-
dernity, region and nation, whiteness and blackness, civ-
ilization and primitiveness, the national and the global,
and homogeneity and heterogeneity. The study runs into
the 1990, when Costeño music dating from the 1950s
and ’60s was resurrected in a postmodern, multicultural
nationalism.
One of the central arguments of the book, developed
Permission to reprint items in this section may be obtained only
from their authors.
1. From “Etnia,” a song by Grupo Niche, quoted by Wade (p. 211).
This content downloaded from 193.050.140.116 on July 25, 2016 06:21:14 AM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
at a more theoretical level in chapter 1 but present
throughout the text, is that a nationalistic project does
not “just try to deny, suppress, or even simply channel
an unruly diversity; it actively reconstructs it” (p. 7).
Arguing against the all-too-common picture of a ho-
mogenizing national elite versus a “heterogeneous,” “re-
sistant” subaltern culture, Wade shows that nationalistic
efforts in Colombia resignified rather than erased the
difference or diversity embodied in Costeño music and
dance. His understanding of nationalism is strengthened
by his inquiry into the way in which globalization can
activate and underwrite it.
After a rich (although at times thick) theoretical in-
troductory chapter and a second one in which Wade ex-
plains how La Costa and its culture fit within the nation,
the following chapters run smoothly through the decades
of the 20th century, showing that Costeño music has
been multivocal and open to many readings. The book
vividly portrays the ambiguity of La Costa as a place
which is black but also indigenous white, poor and back-
ward but also the main point of entry for “modernity,”
and politically vocal but economically weak. The author
also argues that those who live inside and outside of La
Costa see “Costeño cultural practice as less inhibited,
more open, . . . more fun, more ‘sexy’ . . . less Europe-
anized” (p. 44). Supported by these two latter analytical
elements, Wade demonstrates that for the people of the
interior, especially women, Costeño music and dance
incarnated a “liberated sexuality.” While the image of
this liberated sexuality overlapped with the view of peo-
ple from La Costa as primitive, it also was viewed as
“modern.”
This idea that “tropical” music and “Latin” music in
general can be read as modern and liberating and used
as a tool against “traditional” hierarchies and inequali-
ties clarifies many cultural processes elsewhere in Latin
America. For example, in Peru, whether in the guise of
Altiplano folklore in the southern Andes or Technocum-
bia in the nation’s capital, “tropical” or “Latin” music’s
implications of modernity and sexually liberating prac-
tice have resonated strongly among Andean young
women and migrants of highland descent.
Wade examines the most popular Costeño styles,
porro, cumbria, and vallenato, showing how their origins
have been viewed and how one replaced the other in
popularity (roughly between the ’50s and the ’80s) with
the increasing commercialization of Costeño music in
the context of the transnational market. In reference to
the writing on the origins of these three forms, he shows
how “the music is seen as a symbol of fusion, of the
overcoming of difference, but the representation of that
symbol involves the continual reiteration of difference”
(p. 66). The differences among the indigenous, the black,
and the white are repeatedly re-created even though the
PROOF 1
PROOF 2 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y
master nationalistic narrative is one of mestizaje or race
mixture.
Another central argument of the book is that not only
in La Costa but also in the nation as a whole, Costeño
music cannot be “linked in a simple homological fashion
to a particular group or social group and that simple con-
tinuities underlie its history” (p. 233). For example, in
chapter 4 Wade demonstrates how Costeño music was
rearticulated in the city of Barranquilla by many different
people and with many different ends as both authenti-
cally regional and modern. Finally, a further argument
that unfortunately is not fully developed or documented
is that La Costa’s image of peacefulness and happiness
has been fruitful in the context of the different forms of
violence that have plagued Colombia since 1948, facil-
itating the transformation of Costeño music and dance
into national symbols. This is obviously not an easy trail
to follow, and Wade did not make it one of his initial
goals. Nevertheless, the idea that people in a particular
This content downloaded from 193.050.140.116 on July 25, 2016 06:21:14 AM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
historical or social context may be attracted to a music
style that provides a feeling of happiness and/or libera-
tion is worthy further exploration.
Scholars who specialize in the study of music and
dance would like to have seen more detailed references
to the performative aspects of the different forms of Cos-
teño music and dance discussed in the book. A CD ac-
companying the book and a closer look at the bodily
techniques involved in the practice of porro, cumbria,
and vallenato would have helped. Despite these minor
shortcomings, Wade’s book is a valuable contribution
and a must-read for those who study nation building,
identity construction, and performance politics in Latin
America and elsewhere. The author demonstrates that
nationalistic projects actively re-create rather than erase
diversity and that popular music results from complex
interactions and is not a simple product of one particular
social sector or the result of political manipulation.
 Music, Race, and Nation: Musica Tropical in Colombia
(review)
Charles W. Bergquist

The Americas, Volume 58, Number 1, July 2001, pp. 146-149 (Review)

Published by Cambridge University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tam.2001.0066

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32755

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.

Juniata College DAVID SOWELL

Huntingdon, Pennsylvania

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.

Peter Wade, a senior lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Man-

chester, has long been interested in the meaning of blackness in Colombia. (His first
book, published in 1994, was entitled Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics
 BOOK REVIEWS 147

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

Wade’s analysis of this information is very much in the postmodern, discursive

fashion, a fact that explains some of the book’s strongest features. His penchant for
“multivocality” and for “deconstructing” his evidence leads to a healthy skepticism
about the origin myths surrounding certain coastal musical styles. It enables him to
undercut simplistic conspiracy theories regarding the hegemonic designs of capital-
ists who commercialize and profit from popular music. It causes him to question
dualities like “traditional” versus “modern” and “authentic” versus “commercial.”

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.

University of Washington CHARLES BERGQUIST

Seattle, Washington

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.

This sweeping study of the impact of American silver on European socioeco-

nomic development and overseas expansion is an outgrowth of the authors’ pio-
neering synthetic work, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays in Eco-
nomic Dependence in Perspective (1970). The Steins asserted in this earlier book
that by 1492 Spain and Portugal were already dependencies of northern Europe’s
more developed economic powers. Their current book provides empirical data to
explain this process. According to the Steins, Spain’s access to American silver but-
tressed Habsburg aspirations to hegemony in Europe, while the weaknesses of the
peninsular economy allowed pragmatic French, Dutch, and particularly English
merchants to gain access to enormous amounts of this wealth by contraband trading
and by providing capital to Andalusian merchants trading legally through Seville
and later Cadiz. Efforts by imperial reformers to curb Spain’s enemies in the
Caribbean, regain control over the American trade, and modernize the country ulti-
mately failed by the mid-eighteenth century. Despite producing a fascinating and
seductive tale—American silver produced both the rise of Northern European cap-
italism and Spanish decline—the authors would have greatly strengthened their
argument by integrating the findings of more recent literature on this subject and by
utilizing some rich documentary sources in Seville.

From the outset of Spanish overseas expansion, weaknesses in the peninsular

economy forced the merchants’ guild (consulado) in Seville (and later Cadiz) to
ship foreign manufactured goods to the Indies in exchange for American silver.
Between the Treaties of Westphalia in 1645 (ending the Thirty Years War) and the
Treaty of Utrecht in 1714 (at the close of the War of Spanish Succession) however,
powerful French, Dutch, and English merchant houses gained a series of commer-
cial concessions from Spain that allowed them to dominate the silver trade. In addi-
tion, Madrid was ultimately forced to recognize her enemies’ rights to Caribbean
bases—Curaçao (Dutch), Jamaica (English), and later Saint Dominique (French)—
which served as centers for contraband commerce to the Spanish Indies. These
unequal treaties and a corrupt royal bureaucracy effectively allowed Spain to main-
 Music, Race and Nation: Musica Tropical in Colombia (review)
Javier F. Leon

Latin American Music Review, Volume 22, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2001,

pp. 112-116 (Review)

Published by University of Texas Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lat.2001.0007

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/19454

Access provided by UND Chester Fritz Library (19 Nov 2018 02:35 GMT)
 112 : Reviews

As a composer, he cultivated in a remarkably creative and subtle idiom a

musical genre that became known as “afro-samba.” Dreyfus’s biography,
organized in ten chapters, chronicles in many details and perceptive inter-
pretations the various phases of the life of the composer. She also analyzes
Powell’s professional relationships with such great artists as Vinicius de
Moraes, Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto, and others. The best quali-
ties of this new biography can be summarized as follows: (1) it provides
many details made possible only through an actual prolonged contact with
the composer and those surrounding him professionally and privately; (2)
it relates Powell’s residencies in Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Germany at
various times, and his multitude of tours around the world, to his musical
motivations, productions, and huge success especially in Europe; (3) it
sketches most impressive intuitive images of the artist’s reserved and at
times problematic and contradictory personality. Although the author is
not a musicologist, she provides very accurate descriptions of the composer’s
innovations and impact in the post-bossa-nova MPB (“Música Popular
Brasileira”). What Dreyfus could not have anticipated was the untimely
death of Baden Powell, in Rio de Janeiro on 26 September 2000, at the age
of 63.

Gerard Béhague, The University of Texas at Austin

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.

Anthropologist Peter Wade’s new book on the development of música tropical

seeks to reach a better understanding of how the concept of blackness, as
elaborated through the music of Colombia’s northern Atlantic coast, be-
came an integral part of contemporary notions of a multicultural, tri-ethnic
nation. Wade draws from a vast array of anthropological, historical,
ethnomusicological, and popular music sources in order to elaborate an
argument that focuses on the progressive integration of music genres from
a formerly marginalized area of the country, often looked down upon for
being predominantly “black,” into the national and international spheres
as the most popular and commercially successful Colombian musics. From
the onset, the author is concerned with the over-simplification of several
theoretical concepts that he will use throughout the book. Following
Bhabha’s writings on nationalism (1994), he identifies homogeneity and
heterogeneity as two interrelated aspects that should not be conceptual-
ized as polar opposites but as part of an irreconcilable ambivalence imbed-
ded in nationalist discourses. Similarly, he is concerned with the rigid

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 Reviews : 113

oppositions of tradition versus modernity, foreign versus national, racial

origins versus hybrid identities, gender identity versus sexual stereotype,
and so on, rather than viewing these concepts as fluid, interrelated, and
open to a variety of interpretations within the context of the nation as
mapped out by the space generated by the tension between homogenizing
and heterogeneous processes. His definition of race, “the changing catego-
ries and concepts created primarily by Europeans as a result of their con-
tact with, and the subordination of, non-European peoples through
colonialism and imperialism” (14), is particularly important to mention as
it attempts to reintroduce the concept of a process where racial identity
can be changed and transformed depending on the context of a given situ-
ation. Finally, he advocates the conceptualization of music as being ca-
pable of creating social identity rather than just being a reflection of it so
that processes of commercialization and massification can be seen as com-
plex mediators between music and social position.
Aside from the introduction and concluding chapters, Music, Race and
Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia is made up of seven chapters, arranged
in a roughly chronological fashion and which deal with the development
of música tropical at the local, national, and international level. Chapters 2
and 3 give some background on the musical genres of La Costa that Wade
identifies as emerging during the 1930s. The former focuses on La Costa as
elaborated, since the nineteenth century, by print capitalism, intellectual
elites, cultural policy, economic development, racial identifications, the
tension between tradition and modernity, affective associations to the area,
and political power relations. The latter, seeks to identify and partially
deconstruct the myths of multicultural origins by giving a brief and infor-
mative discussion on how various scholars and musicians speak about the
genesis of genres like the porro, cumbia, and vallenato.
The remaining five chapters focus specifically on musical developments
in terms of significant geographical and temporal frames. Chapter 4 deals
with the development of música tropical in La Costa between the 1930s and
1950s. Chapter 5 expands the discussion to the reception of these coastal
genres in the interior areas of the country during the 1940s and 1950s.
Chapter 6 partially shifts the focus away from live music performance to-
wards the role of the record industry and the mass media in the further
popularization and commercialization of música tropical, locally, nation-
ally, and internationally between the 1950s and the 1980s. Chapter 7 rep-
licates many of the interests of chapter 5 during the more recent time period
by focusing on the reception, rejection, and eventual adaptation of the
now mass-mediated música tropical at the national level. Finally, chapter 9
attempts to tie all of this together in the 1990s as a national nostalgia for an
old, “traditional” costeño music, and its elaboration through the mass media
and recording industry contribute to the development of a sense of
multiculturalism that is both a new reconstitution of the Colombian nation

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 114 : Reviews

as well as the continued reproduction of a number of social, political, and

class hierarchies, ideologies and processes.
Throughout these chapters, Wade includes rich discussions regarding
key significant figures and performers in the world of música tropical, their
perception by various groups of elites, by members of local and national
intelligentsia, and the relationships of all of these to various institutions
and processes involved in the dissemination, popularization, and commer-
cialization of these musics at various levels. For the most part, the level of
historical detail is astounding and makes this book a valuable reference
source for anyone interested in costeño popular music in the twentieth cen-
tury. Wade’s attempts at portraying the degree of variety and complexity
at work in the musical and ideological realms are also greatly appreciated.
Such an approach is a long way from the more common ethnomusicological
and popular music representations of developments like this as
oversimplified and unified processes that start with the trickling down of
foreign raw material from the elite to the masses and the subsequent trans-
formation and upwelling of new, more “authentic” and locally grounded
forms of musical expression. It also begins to question the validity of the
tacit assumption that many researchers have made regarding popular mu-
sic expressions in Latin America as having the tendency to “evolve” from
relatively simple and class-bound (usually working-class) forms of musical
expression towards a more fluid, complex, fragmented, and ambiguous
state, often attributed to the onset of modernity. By bringing into question
the genesis myths of multiculturalism, Wade successfully shows the conti-
nuity between the two as well as conveys a sense of the complexity and
ambiguity that already existed at the assumed point of origin. Neverthe-
less, a few reservations need to be pointed out, especially in relation to
some of the author’s theoretical grounding.
The research problems that Wade encounters, and which he comments
upon both in his introduction and conclusions, are welcome. Anyone who
has ever done historical research on popular musics, particularly in situa-
tions in which there is little or no background scholarly work, can sympa-
thize with the major challenges of being able to determine “what actually
happened.” Some details and specifics will never be revealed, some ac-
counts may be contradictory. Informants may place too much emphasis
on certain aspects of music, making more because of their own experi-
ences rather than because of more general social perceptions of the time.
Furthermore, being able to ground and discuss macro processes from the
perspective of local experience (e.g., the musicians) can be rather difficult
when dealing with time periods and places to which the researcher has
fairly limited access. All the same, there is a tendency in this work to overly
bifurcate discussion between the actions of musicians and how these ac-
tions were interpreted by leading rhetorics and ideologies. Wade’s interest
in examining musical and mass media counterparts to Anderson’s ideas of

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 Reviews : 115

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,

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 116 : Reviews

sometimes in terms of biological difference, and sometimes in such a way

that one is used to mask the other. Having said this, there may be a need to
reevaluate the concept of blackness in a less static way. Doing this perhaps
will contribute to doing away with (from a personal perspective) two rather
uncomfortable features of Wade’s narrative. One is his unreflexive dis-
missal of certain statements made by Colombian elites as simply racist,
rather than examining the socio-cultural basis and significance of such a
statement and how it may cut across various social hierarchies. The other
is the author’s own lack of awareness about how extrapolating the position
of a particular performer within a social, economic, and cultural hierarchy
by simply looking at how “black” he or she appears on a photograph could,
as easily, be dismissed as racist. Hopefully, these will be considerations
that are taken into account in future projects. This however, should not
take away from the fact that Music, Race and Nation is a thorough and well
researched work that contributes greatly to the study of Colombian popu-
lar music.
Javier F. León
The University of Texas at Austin

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.

08-LAMR 22/1-Reviews 116 5/23/01, 8:33 AM

 Revista Colombiana de Antropología
ISSN: 0486-6525
rca.icanh@gmail.com
Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e
Historia
Colombia

PÁRAMO, CARLOS GUILLERMO

Reseña de "MÚSICA, RAZA Y NACIÓN. MÚSICA TROPICAL EN COLOMBI" de PETER WADE
Revista Colombiana de Antropología, vol. 38, enero-diciembre, 2002, pp. 333-339
Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia
Bogotá, Colombia

Disponible en: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=105015289014

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 Revista Colombiana
de Antropología 333
Volumen 38, enero-diciembre 2002

MÚSICA, RAZA Y NACIÓN. MÚSICA TROPICAL EN COLOMBIA

PETER WADE
Traducción de Adolfo Gónzalez Henríquez
Vicepresidencia de la República de Colombia-Departamento
Nacional de Planeación-Programa Plan Caribe
409 páginas, incluye fotografías, un mapa
y un apéndice con tres ejemplos musicales
Bogotá. 2002

LO DIRÉ SIN AMBAGES: SE TRATA DE UN LIBRO HERMOSO. ME PARECE IMPOR-

tante empezar con este juicio, en esencia estético, ya que no es
demasiado usual encontrar hoy en día textos de musicología o
–lamento decirlo– de cualquier ciencia humana, que puedan ser
calificados de entrada como hermosos, independientemente de
sus virtudes o desafíos. Más aún, y ya que hablamos de música,
textos como este recuerdan al investigador social lo importante
que es comunicar una emoción clara a sus lectores; una emo-
ción que no derive del abuso de la hipérbole sino de la elegancia
de la exposición, de la ponderación de los argumentos, del afán
de ser entendido por encima del neologismo gratuito. Antes de
entrar en materia, permítaseme remarcar que el presente libro se
distancia kilómetros de las acrobacias discursivas de muchos ex-
ponentes de lo que hoy conocemos como estudios culturales,
categoría usualmente gaseosa y que últimamente parece revelar
su esterilidad nata, ya que el uso y el abuso del concepto de hibri-
dación terminó produciendo, verbigracia, híbridos infértiles. Para
que no quepan dudas, éste es un libro fértil.
Tal como lo describe su título, Música, raza y nación hace un
seguimiento histórico y etnográfico a la creación y recepción de la
música tropical en Colombia: género que rebasó hace ya medio
siglo la sola idea de música costeña para convertirse en una forma,
acaso la forma prevalente, de música nacional. A lo largo de ocho
capítulos y una conclusión que es mucho más que ornamental, el
antropólogo británico Peter Wade desentraña el desarrollo de los
ritmos caribeños desde sus orígenes e hitos –mitos– fundacionales
en la costa atlántica colombiana y su hinterland, hasta su asenta-
miento pertinaz en el interior geográfico y cultural del país. Ese
mismo interior, lo sabemos, procuró elevar de manera paralela y
334 Reseñas / Carlos Guillermo Páramo
Peter Wade: Música, raza y nación. Música tropical en Colombia

abiertamente antagónica al bambuco como proyecto nacional.

Wade no ahonda en la relación entre los cultores del bambuco y
el discurso racista, ejemplificado en Luis López de Mesa o Lau-
reano Gómez –lo cual es de lamentarse, ya que tienden a emerger
los mismos nombres–, pero sí nos ilustra con varios ejemplos de
las sonadas invectivas que, hasta fines del decenio de 1950, profi-
rieron muchos intelectuales del altiplano en contra de la invasión
de los aires de la costa. El autor demuestra cómo la idea de músi-
ca costeña, mientras devino en música tropical, fue asociada por
antonomasia a la raza negra –indolente, perniciosa y lúbrica, en
el concepto de varios sociólogos centenaristas– y cómo, aun lue-
go de su transmutación genérica, persisten en el interior nociones
ambivalentes frente a lo negro y lo costeño, las cuales sólo han
sido atemperadas por la injerencia de la música bailable.
Sin embargo, lo más interesante de la exposición –ceñida a
una cronología lineal, que se desenvuelve capítulo a capítulo–
es el desarrollo de dos tesis fundamentales. La primera, que la
exclusión racial y regional determinada por las oposiciones cos-
ta frente a interior y negro frente a blanco-mestizo halla su con-
trapeso histórico en un discurso oficial de la inclusión, deliberado
y constante, que encuentra expresión oportuna en la idea de la
diversidad cultural y social como fortaleza nacional. Wade es
claro en señalar que este discurso de la inclusión radica esen-
cialmente en la retórica estatal –usualmente deshilvanada y su-
perficial–, pero advierte que su permanencia a lo largo de la
historia republicana dispuso unas condiciones sui géneris para
la exitosa tropicalización musical del país, que no fueron en su
momento las de otras naciones latinoamericanas. De esta mane-
ra, por necesidad, se vuelve compleja la tensión entre homoge-
neidad y heterogeneidad que, amparado en Homi Bahbha,
ejemplifica el autor en la introducción:

Por ejemplo, en Colombia el discurso oficial sobre la nación, o

cualquier otro discurso público sobre el tema, contiene referencias
tanto a la supuesta homogeneidad lograda mediante siglos de
mestizaje físico y cultural como a la impresionante diversidad
etnográfica de un “país de regiones”. De hecho este deslizamiento
ambivalente, lejos de accidental es una de las paradojas centrales
del nacionalismo: el intento de presentar la nación como un todo
único y homogéneo está en conflicto directo con el mantenimiento
de jerarquías de clase y cultura (y sus corolarios frecuentes, raza y
religión), impulsado por quienes se encuentran en la cima de estas
 Revista Colombiana
de Antropología 335
Volumen 38, enero-diciembre 2002

jerarquías (...). Para teorizar esto es necesario trascender oposiciones

simplistas entre las clases dominantes homogeneizantes y pueblo
heterogéneo; (...) la historia de la música colombiana apoya esta
visión (p. 7).

La segunda tesis es la que entiende a la música tropical –para

otros efectos, cualquier música en el mosaico nacional después
del advenimiento del gramófono– como una que, incluso en su
acepción primigenia de música costeña, existió, en cuanto gé-
nero, gracias a un complejo proceso de negociación cultural,
que de lejos superó el ámbito de lo folk –esto es, la relación
primaria entre la música excluida o subalterna y una comunidad
marginada o pre-industrial, como sucede en algunas interpreta-
ciones literarias de la sociedad rural costeña–.

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).

Wade ausculta el surgimiento de la música tropical en los con-

dicionamientos históricos y sociales que determinaron relacio-
nes recíprocas entre el mundo exterior y la costa atlántica, por
una parte, y de esta última con el interior. Elementos decisivos en
el avance de estos ritmos fueron la diseminación del gramófono
y la radio, y, tanto o más, la construcción de una idea de costa,
mediada por las representaciones ideográficas que la música cos-
teña difundía y que todavía difunde: la idea de un litoral tradicio-
nal y pacífico, en épocas de la violencia partidista en el altiplano;
la idea de una alegría intrínseca, que no es otra cosa que un epi-
fenómeno –arbitrario si se quiere– de la música misma. Son estos
mismos elementos los que llevaron, más temprano que tarde, a
su apropiación por parte de las empresas fonográficas antioque-
ñas, a la producción del vulgar sonido paisa y de lo que pudiéra-
mos denominar un vallenato universal, desprovisto de cualquier
acento local. Simultáneamente, las fusiones con la salsa, el me-
rengue y el chucu-chucu le otorgaron nacionalidad múltiple a la
cumbia, a punta de vender playa, brisa y mar por encima de los
336 Reseñas / Carlos Guillermo Páramo
Peter Wade: Música, raza y nación. Música tropical en Colombia

conflictos de tierra, las amañadas regalías petroleras y al surgi-

miento del ELN. Se puede concluir, pues, que tanto costa como
música costeña, o tropical, fueron –y son–, en el sentido hobs-
bawmiano, tradiciones inventadas de la era de la reproducción
masiva, similares a otras tantas de principios del siglo veinte e
igualmente asociadas a contextos sociales estereotipados, como
el tango con el malevaje, la ranchera mexicana con el charro o
el bambuco con el campesinado andino.
De las dos tesis expuestas, es posible sustraer, o cuando me-
nos intuir, una tercera tesis implícita: que la nación colombiana
no se ha caracterizado tanto por la vapuleada antinomia del cen-
tro político frente a la periferia discriminada, como por un federa-
lismo político y cultural de facto. La historia de la música tropical
puede verse, en ese sentido, como la historia de un proyecto al-
terno de nación, el cual gozó desde sus inicios de suficiente auto-
nomía como para ganar una buena parte del territorio físico y
emocional de Colombia, antes de su inserción en los sistemas
masivos de producción y consumo. En cambio, la historia de la
frustración del proyecto musical andino está aún por escribirse.
Lo anterior, empero, no impide al autor rendir justicia a las
fuentes escritas, dispersas aquí y allá, que versan sobre las mú-
sicas de la costa y del interior. Muchas de estas fuentes, aunque
ciertamente pecan de lo que Middleton ha llamado la distorsión
folclorística, son reservorios casi únicos de información de pri-
mera mano, que no pueden ser descalificados so pretexto de su
precaria armazón conceptual. Wade ha logrado establecer un
orden coherente entre las miles de anécdotas que salpican los
cronicones musicales de Jorge Áñez, Hernán Restrepo Duque,
Gonzalo España y Consuelo Araujonoguera, los cuales, aunque
deliciosos, obligan por ausencia editorial, o por una inexplica-
ble maña retórica, a expurgar el libro de pasta a pasta en busca
de una referencia cualquiera.
Gracias a la limpidez de la narración, Música, raza y nación
cumple, adicionalmente, el papel de reference guide a la música
costeña, a sus protagonistas y sus aspectos más importantes.
Que esto lo logre un texto de etnomusicología –o, en cualquier
caso, de antropología– habla especialmente bien de la obra, pero
también pone de relieve la ausencia crasa en nuestro medio de
monografías y estudios comprensivos de la historia fonográfica
y, en general, de la música popular en Colombia. Sobra decir
que tal necesidad no es sólo la de musicólogos y melómanos,
 Revista Colombiana
de Antropología 337
Volumen 38, enero-diciembre 2002

sino la de cualquier estudio disciplinal que relacione el surgi-

miento de los medios de comunicación con nuestros diversos
proyectos nacionales. Hasta la fecha, aparte de las memorias
poco sistemáticas de Hernán Restrepo Duque o de Alfonso de la
Espriella, es muy poco lo que sabemos de la fonografía colom-
biana en géneros como, por ejemplo, el tango o el bolero. Des-
tacan los trabajos de Ellie Anne Duque en el ámbito de la música
andina republicana y centenarista, ya que son tal vez los únicos
que, impecablemente rigurosos y de largo aliento, han tomado
en serio el fenómeno fonográfico. De resto es poco o nada lo
que tenemos –salvo, claro, este libro–, y nadie ha aventurado
hasta la fecha un enfoque comprensivo sobre las músicas popu-
lares en Colombia.
El texto de Wade es de gran utilidad para el investigador de la
música andina, así sea sólo para delinear en la costa atlántica y
sus inmediaciones un proceso virtualmente paralelo al que ade-
lantaron las elites del altiplano. Insisto en que es una lástima
que el autor no haya profundizado en los pormenores del deba-
te sobre el bambuco durante la primera mitad del siglo pasado,
al menos en lo referente a los presuntos orígenes africanos del
género, de acuerdo con Jorge Isaacs y sus posteriores adeptos y
detractores. Incidentalmente, extraña que María no se mencio-
ne ni una vez en el texto, así su locación haya correspondido en
rigor a la cuenca del Pacífico. Estimo que la novela del vallecau-
cano resume en gran medida muchos de los elementos que ha-
brán de incidir estéticamente, a la vuelta de siglo, no tanto en el
romanticismo tardío del pasillo o el bambuco como en las rei-
vindicaciones tímidamente raciales de los primeros aires coste-
ños con visos de cosmopolitismo. De igual manera, dada la
ausencia parcial del bambuco como referente, no comparto ase-
veraciones como la enunciada en la página 226, que dice que en
Colombia “(...) el Estado jamás ha tomado cartas en los asuntos
de la música popular (...)”, o la que está en la página 38:

(...) en Colombia, por ejemplo, el Estado no elaboró una

reglamentación específica para la industria fonográfica y en cuanto
a los contenidos de programación radial se refiere, fue poco
intervencionista. De hecho, no existió una política cultural como tal
hasta 1970. Lo que efectivamente se dio fue (...): músicos de los orígenes
más diversos y empresarios con un marcado interés comercial dándole
respuestas inmediatas a un mercado de diversidad creciente con gustos
rápidamente cambiantes. He aquí un contraste evidente con lo que
338 Reseñas / Carlos Guillermo Páramo
Peter Wade: Música, raza y nación. Música tropical en Colombia

ocurre en países con regímenes más autoritarios: la República

Dominicana bajo Trujillo (...) o Haití bajo Duvalier (...).

Ciertamente, si algo nos distingue en el panorama político lati-

noamericano de la primera mitad del siglo veinte –algo que, creo,
incidió decisivamente en el aborto del bambuco como música na-
cional– fue la ausencia de regímenes populistas y, si se quiere, de
otros estímulos a la cohesión identitaria como, por ejemplo, gue-
rras internacionales –exceptuando las distantes escaramuzas con
Perú–. Esto, sin embargo, no significa que los gobiernos de turno
no hayan trazado directrices más o menos vehementes sobre el
papel cultural de los medios, públicos y privados. La investigación
de Renán Silva sobre “La política cultural de la república liberal y
la Radiodifusora Nacional de Colombia” –de la cual se publicó un
avance en 2000, en el número 41 de Análisis Político– ha abierto
una nueva trocha en los estudios sobre los proyectos nacionales,
que de ser allanada juiciosamente habrá de proporcionarnos en
poco tiempo resultados mucho más claros sobre la injerencia del
estado en los medios –incluida la industria fonográfica–; resulta-
dos que, sospecho, matizarán bastante aseveraciones como las ci-
tadas. Más aún, me hallo convencido de que el bambuco fue
enarbolado, precisamente, por las elites liberales y conservadoras
de los años 1930 a 1950, dentro de un programa cultural ultra-nacio-
nalista, palingenésico y orientado fundamentalmente hacia la de-
recha revolucionaria o, en otras palabras, de visos claramente
pseudofascistas. No es de extrañarnos, pues, que en esa época en-
contremos la fundación de decenas de emisoras, unas a nombre de
la curia durante los gobiernos conservadores, otras a nombre de las
logias masónicas durante los liberales, que orientaron su progra-
mación a regenerar el bambuco, de cara a la degeneración que im-
plicaba la música costeña. Como se ve, siguiendo este circunloquio
también es posible regresar a la raza y la nación en la música tropi-
cal, de una manera que, a mi juicio, hubiera arrojado luces muy
reveladoras sobre nuestra historia social.
Mi otra objeción no es al texto sino al tiempo que le tocó.
Este libro de Peter Wade desde ya puede ser leído desde una
perspectiva histórica, con tan sólo
1. La primera edición, en inglés, es de 2000: dos años de publicado . Su aparición
1

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

cultural a rajatabla, quisieron desde entonces imponer respecti-

vamente al vallenato o a la champeta como símbolos nacionales
por sustracción de materia. Tal y como se halla la edición de
2000 –y, obviamente, la traducción al español–, hoy en día ha-
ría falta un nuevo capítulo que versara de manera más concreta
sobre las relaciones intrínsecas entre la música tropical y la po-
lítica, que no la politiquería.
Pero las anotaciones anteriores no tienen como fin socavar la
inmensa riqueza del texto. Por último, la honestidad del investi-
gador me parece epistemológicamente proverbial, sobre todo
en épocas en que algunas vertientes del posmodernismo radical
han terminado banalizando cualquier forma de discurso antro-
pológico, desde el mismo discurso antropológico. Admirable y
conmovedor es este aparte de las conclusiones, y es modélico
en su orientación:

(...); y el papel de la academia (que no siempre se logra, dada su

dificultad) es cuestionar tanto las categorías utilizadas en el análisis
como las utilizadas por aquellos cuyas historias y vidas están siendo
estudiadas. Esto lleva inevitablemente a una regresión sin fin, a la
crítica sin sentido de la deconstrucción posestructuralista que
siempre descubre la agenda escondida en cualquier análisis, sólo
para que a su vez ese descubrimiento se sujete a más deconstrucción.
Ante el peligro de una recaída en el relativismo se recurre a algo que
está en el corazón de la antropología, una receta práctica para una
crítica constructiva: cuestionar categorías asumidas gratuitamente
en un contexto social determinado. Entonces la crítica ni es final ni
universal sino que siempre está en relación con ese contexto, un
contexto fluido, por supuesto, en parte como resultado de esa misma
crítica (...) (p. 299).

Se trata, entonces, de un libro hermoso. Y como urgen estu-

dios similares sobre otros géneros de nuestras músicas naciona-
les, es fundamental que este libro cuente con una difusión más
amplia a la que se ha dado a esta traducción que, desafortuna-
damente, tiene una circulación restringida, pues los editores
decidieron no distribuirlo por medio de las librerías, lo que limi-
ta su adquisición al círculo de los elegidos por ellos.

CARLOS GUILLERMO PÁRAMO

Antropólogo, Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
American Ethnologist • Volume 30
She explores the emotional dimen-
sions of women's lives and details how
spousal affection, notions of responsi-
bility, and the developmental cycle of
the family ultimately shape reproduc-
tive strategies.
Using ethnographic data from Bo-
livia, Hawkins and Price critique
demographic and health policies that
fail to account for how sexual and re-
productive health are constituted
within particular cultural and eco-
nomic contexts. Attention to everyday
practices of migrant women, including
the role of emotion in shaping women's
decisions, leads the authors to con-
clude that a "neoliberal" and biomedi-
cal construction of the autonomous in-
dividual fails to explain women's
reproductive health strategies. Effective
health policies will require broader ap-
proaches that address women's overall
lack of empowerment.
Both Montgomery and Day address
aspects of reproductive health among
sex workers and explore health risks,
sexually transmitted diseases (STDs),
and the meaning of motherhood for
their informants. Montgomery pro-
vides unusual ethnographic detail on
child prostitutes in Thailand, pointing
to the lack of local-level research on
fertility and reproductive health, as
well as on the fundamental causes of
child prostitution. Day identifies the
tension between the public and private
lives of London sex workers, for whom
the desire for motherhood is juxta-
posed with frequent pregnancy termi-
nations and associatedrisksof infertility.
Hampshire applies demographic and
anthropological approaches to analyze
fertility decisions and outcomes among
Fulani in northern Burkina Faso. Her
research cautions against making
overly simplistic inferences from cor-
relations between migration and fertil-
ity decline. She suggests that social
changes anticipated with "modern-
ization," such as increased autonomy
for women leading to reduced fertility,
are less significant in the Fulani case
than an unwanted increase in sterility,
probably linked to STDs.
Belaunde similarly critiques demo-
graphic assumptions regarding natural
and controlled fertility in her study of
menstruation, birth, and couples' rela-
tionships among the Airo-Pai of Ama-
476
Number 3 August 2003
zonian Peru. She advocates a shift
from a female to a couple-centered ap-
proach and links fertility with the cul-
turally constructed expression of emo-
tions between a couple and toward
children. This case effectively illus-
trates that in contrast to demographic
transition theory, integration into na-
tional society may imply abandon-
ment of fertility regulation rather than
increasing agency in women's fertility
decisions.
In her chapter on coping with infer-
tility in Nigeria, Cornwall offers both a
perspective on children's "agency" in
creating ties with foster mothers and
poignant reflections on the meaning of
infertility in a strongly pronatalist soci-
ety. She suggests casting reproduction
less as "a patterned set of choices than
as a contingent process over time" (p.
155). Her case histories document how
relations of mothering are produced
and renegotiated, enabling some infer-
tile women to assume the social role
and identity of "mother."
Similarly, Martin explores the mean-
ing of children to parents in Hong
Kong and contends that although chil-
dren are valued for their potential eco-
nomic and ritual contributions, the
Chinese family is parent-centered. In
spite of changes in family structure
and a decline in fertility, filial piety re-
mains idealized, and Western psycho-
logical traditions of intensive parent-
ing appear to have had little impact.
As the opening chapter in the sec-
tion devoted to policy issues, Boyden's
review of scientific conceptualizations
of childhood and youth is less ethno-
graphic than theoretical. She offers
historical and cross-disciplinary per-
spectives on human development and
critiques models of childhood that fail
to account for individual agency, thus
diverting attention from "the social
and moral competencies" of children
and adolescents (p. 179). Price and
Hawkins's subsequent chapter empha-
sizes the need for increased attention
to sexual and reproductive health
needs of youth. They review existing
policies and programs in poor coun-
tries, recommend approaches to sex
and reproductive health programs that
are multidimensional and locally rele-
vant, and document precisely which
projects "work."
Using case studies, Russell links
macro- and microlevel perspectives on
teen pregnancy in Teesside, U.K., and
vividly details examples of personal
decisions regarding sexuality that are
often obscured in statistics. This chap-
ter provides a particularly astute explo-
ration of teenage sexual behavior and
its public construction as a moral and
social problem. Harris and Smyth con-
clude the policy discussion with a
strong statement on refugee health is-
sues that identifies structural con-
straints preventing the effective imple-
mentation of policies. They suggest
that reproductive health cannot be
separated from conditions of poverty,
gender-based power relations, and
"health" more broadly construed.
They join numerous anthropologists in
arguing that it is imperative to engage
local populations in developing cultur-
ally relevant reproductive-health inter-
ventions.
This edited volume is notable for its
coherence and the consistent atten-
tion to the themes of the three sec-
tions. One regrettable feature is the
lack of reference to much of the an-
thropological literature on reproduc-
tion and child health published in the
United States, which would have bol-
stered the volume editor's introduc-
tory argument for the centrality of re-
production to anthropological theory.
The book is most likely to interest
scholars in medical anthropology,
gender issues, and international health
policy. It would be appropriate for ad-
vanced medical anthropology courses
as well as specialized classes on interna-
tional health, reproduction, or sexuality.
Music, Race and Nation: Musica
Tropical in Colombia. Peter Wade. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
vii + 323 pp., appendixes, notes, refer-
ence, index.
BRENDA F. BERRIAN
University of Pittsburgh
In Music, Race and Nation: Musica
Tropical in Colombia, Peter Wade pro-
vides a detailed study of the rise of
musica tropical, or Costerio music, in
connection with racial and national
identities and cultural hybridity along
the coastal area of Colombia in South

America. La Costa (the coast)—the area
that includes the cities of Barranquilla,
Cartagena, and Santa Marta—is char-
acterized by ambiguity. According to
Wade, it is "black, but also indigenous
and white; it is poor and 'backward'....
but [it] has also been a principal port of
entry for 'modernity' into the country"
(p. 39). The area has also been politi-
cally vocal and the central source of Co-
lombia's commercially and interna-
tionally successful Costeno music.
Three organizations played important
roles in acquainting the country with
the latest sounds and developing popu-
lar music as an urban form: two record
companies—Discos Fuentes, founded
in 1934 in Cartagena, and Discos Tropi-
cal, founded in 1945 in Barranquilla—
and Colombia's first radio station, La
Vozde Barranquilla, opened in 1929.
To situate Costeno music, Wade
traces its origin to three 19th-century
musical forms: porro (working-class
music derived from flutes and drums
of Amerindian origin and appropriated
by the bourgeoisie); fandango (a col-
lective dance music with drums and
hand-clapping from Spain); and valle-
nato (accordion music). Traveling
wind bands helped spread the three
musical forms in the coastal and inte-
rior cities and provincial towns.
Although Wade finds it difficult to tie
a musician's class background to a
specific musical form, he nevertheless
acknowledges musicians such as
Lucho Bermudez, Antonio Maria
Penaloza, and Luis Sosa, whose band
members had strong connections with
the elite, middle, and lower class, re-
spectively. The three musicians and
their orchestras played a diversity of
styles at a variety of venues, always
slipping Costeno music in with new ar-
rangements. The theme of possible
covert sexual relations between white
men and black women began to appear
in the lyrics in the mid-20th century. In
fact, Camacho y Cano, a white Costeno
male, recorded such a song, "Por la
Bajo," in New York, which sub-
sequently made its way along with
other risque songs into clubs in Co-
lombia patronized by the elite. Other
lyrical themes were partying, drinking,
and love. The process of creating new
types of Costeno music "was certainly
mediated very heavily by the elite and
Book Reviews • American Ethnologist
by the middle-classes" (p. 105) be-
cause the music had "qualities which
expressed the tensions between mod-
ernity and tradition, between black-
ness and whiteness, between the re-
gion as distinctive and as part of the
nation in progress, and between sexual
desire and moral propriety" (p. 105).
Wade attributes the real impact of
Costeno music to Lucho Bermudez
and his Orquesta del Caribe, who
played live porros for the first time in a
new nightclub in downtown Bogota.
To be accepted by the elite, Bermudez
switched the band's composition from
mainly black musicians to musicians
who were whiter in appearance. As
Costeno music infiltrated Bermudez's
orchestra and other popular orches-
tras, special radio programs began to
be dedicated to promoting the music.
Yet the racial identity of the Costeno
musicians varied, as exemplified by
Bermudez, a light mestizo; Jose Barros,
a moreno (brown) singer and com-
poser; and Antonio Penaloza, a slightly
darker moreno, or black. As a result,
blackness in the popular Costeno
bands "was usually not very evident,
but its shadow or possibility was al-
ways there, especially in the rhythm
section" (p. 125).
Costeno music successfully pene-
trated the consciousness of audiences
in the interior of Colombia and won
entry into elite urban entertainment
circles. Yet, Bermudez and other musi-
cians sometimes dealt with hostile re-
actions. In 1936, at thefirstCongress of
Music in Ibague, Daniel Zamudio, a
composer and musicologist, issued a
racial diatribe lumping Costeno music
with Cuban music as foreign, black,
and threatening to national conscious-
ness. Other writers bemoaned the im-
pact of Mexican, Cuban, and North
American jazz on Costeno music,
equating foreignness with blackness.
Thus, Costeno music was identified as
black, foreign, vulgar, modern, and
sexual. To counteract such racist and
often derogatory commentaries, some
Costeno intellectuals, including the
writers Manuel Zapata Olivella and
Gabriel Garcfa Marque/, argued that
improved communications and inter-
nal and external migrations had cre-
ated a crisis in ideas about Colombian
identity. Costeno musicians rose to the
challenge by stating that certain musi-
cal styles needed to be nationalized in
order to be widely accepted. For exam-
ple, in his December 30, 1950, chapter
for Semana newspaper, Julio Torres,
the leader of a vallenato group from
the interior, said, "To despise the im-
portance of popular music... is a criti-
cal absurdity. To exalt so-called classi-
cal music as suitable for the people and
cultured minorities, is another socio-
logical error. Art music does not have
to forcibly exclude popular music, nor
vice versa" (p. 133).
The elites were culturally oriented
toward Europe and toward their re-
gional cities of Bogota and Medellin.
Some viewed Costeno music, with its
underlying implications of blackness,
as backward. On the other hand, the
emerging middle class and lower class
recognized the celebratory aspects of
Costeno music that reveled in the eco-
nomic growth, industrialization, and
modernization of Colombia during the
1930s and 1940s. Yet Costeno music
cannot be understood solely through a
simplified binary opposition between
the elites and the middle and lower
classes. Wade maintains that the power
of Costeno music resides in its ambiva-
lence and the multiple possibilities it
presents for ideological rearticulation,
in the tension between homogeneity
and heterogeneity in national identity,
and in the tension between the na-
tional and the transnational.
The golden era of Costeno music
was the 1950s and the 1960s. During
that time, the term cumbia displaced
porro. Although cumbia, with its trans-
national construct of appropriations,
became the musical marker of Colom-
bian nationality, it had to compete
with salsa, rock, pachanga, merengue,
and the bolero. With the consolidation
of the national record industry,
Costeno records were released inter-
nationally under the designation cum-
bia in the mid-1960s in such countries
as Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Argentina.
Yet the question of why the music was
labeled cumbia instead of porro re-
quires more research.
This book is a fascinating account of
how Wade managed to unravel the
complex history of Costeno music and
its connotations of tropicality and
blackness.
477