by Kip Lornell
These cultural ties are particularly well illustrated by the links between Cuba and the Miami/Dade County metro area and are long-standing, of course, having been established by the late nineteenth century. A steady stream of Cuban immigrants has enriched the Cuban American population in Miami/Dade County over the past one hundred years but the volume increased dramatically when Castro took over control of the country in 1958. In the four years following the Communist overthrow of Batista, nearly 300,000 Cubans (many of them well established and white with a fairly high level of education) arrived in the United States and most of them flocked to southeastern Florida. A second, similarly sized—though more heterogeneous—surge occurred between 1965 and 1973, as flights arrived weekly from Havana. The third major influx happened in 1980 as the “Mariel boatlift” brought approximately 125,000 Cubans. This was the most diverse group yet and helped to ensure that a cross-section of the Cuban population was part of the local Cuban American community. Of the approximately 1.2 million Cubans and Cuban Americans residing in the United States, over 80 percent live in southeast Florida. In Miami the ties to Cuba are so strong that the city is often called the “Second Havana.”
Naturally, the Cuban American community brought their cultural matrix with them and so many of the immigrants are recent enough that there is much interest in cultural retentions. Many of these exiles have sought to resurrect their old ways from Cuba, from their playful nicknames for Miami (“Little Havana” and a section of the city known as “the heart of Little Havana”) to a specific business strip locally called Calle Ocho (Eighth Street). And it is not only nomenclature that looks back to Cuba for its roots. The hand-manufacturing of cigars was (and to a lesser degree still is) of importance, particularly along the southwest coast in Tampa. Roasted pigs, white rice, black beans, boiled yuca, and fresh figs are staples in the diets of many old-line Cuban Americans. Of course, Spanish is the language that is heard on the streets at least as much as English—another indicator of not only national and cultural associations but also of ethnic (Spanish) identity.
Although the majority of Cuban Americans are at least nominally Catholic, Santeria—a blending of Yoruba and Catholic religious practices—is growing in importance. Santeria is administered by a complicated hierarchy of priests who regularly consult the saints and teach the tenants of the religion, which contends that our world exists on two levels—the earthly one and the spiritual one occupied by the saints (orishas). Music is one of the most important elements of Santeria.
Religious gatherings (known as bembes) honor specific orishas, and this is where the elements of traditional music and dance enter the scene on a regular basis. Percussion is at the heart of these celebrations, and they are paired in three distinctive ensembles. Guiro ensembles consist of dried gourds, a hoe blade that is struck by a metal object, a conga drum, and a vocalist singing in Yoruba. Three congas, the hoe blade, and a singer form a bembe group, while the bata ensemble includes a trio of drummers playing larger double-headed instruments and a singer. The bata groups are considered the most sacred because their drums are consecrated and they “speak” directly to the saints.
In its use of percussion and complex rhythms, Santeria illustrates the type of syncretism that is so representative of folk and popular Cuban American music. With its strong and contemporary links to Cuba and its more distant but undeniable ties to West Africa, most Cuban American folk music is rooted in small percussion ensembles. Such ensembles are also found in jazz and first rose to prominence in the late 1940s when be-bop musician Dizzy Gillespie began incorporating them into his music, thus entering the canons of jazz history textbooks as the pioneer of “Afro-Cuban jazz.”
Since the late 1960s, salsa—which often utilizes a small horn section—has become the most widespread form of popular music among Cuban Americans. Salsa is based on son, the most popular (and folk-based) form of music that developed in Cuba in the early twentieth century. Much of the folk-based African Cuban music in south Florida also utilizes the antiphonal format that is found in salsa, son, and Santeria. In this respect a black American Pentecostal church service bears some resemblance to a Santeria ceremony.
Santeria is becoming more widespread and accepted as a religious practice in south Florida. It also includes other elements of the local folk culture. For example, special clothing patterned after Afro-Cuban and West African styles—known as ropa de santo—is worn for specific ceremonies. Religious goods stores, known as a botanica, sell a variety of homemade and mass-manufactured artifacts such as herbs, necklaces, candles, ropa de santo, and oils that are used in these ceremonies.
Not all Cuban American folk-based music is tied with this sacred tradition or with jazz. Some styles are increasingly tied to more popular trends, such as son and guaracha, and are always in the process of reinterpreting and reinventing their musical past into new forms. These reinventions not only pay homage to their roots but also express a look toward their future in the United States—a future that encompasses many of the current popular music forms, including hip-hop, techno-pop, and rock. Since the late 1970s, this melding of folk and pop, American and Cuban, old and new, has been known locally as the “Miami Sound,” which gained national prominence in the middle 1980s when the Miami Sound Machine won a Grammy. In 2000 NARAS (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences) recognized the increasing importance of Hispanic American popular music by creating the Latin Grammy Awards.
Because so many Cuban American residents of south Florida have arrived since the early 1960s or were born in or around Miami/Dade County, there is a strong trend toward blending the older Cuban and Cuban American folk-based music with the contemporary music they hear all around them. Salsa, which grew up in New York City’s Latin clubs before catching on with much of our country’s Spanish-speaking population, is a good example of this syncretization. While the process of musical assimilation is to be expected, it is not applauded by all Cuban Americans.
Homereo Gutierrez, for one, laments the loss of the roots, of Cuban folk music and all that it has contributed to Hispanic American music. Gutierrez, formerly president of Fundacion Artistica Cubano-American (Cuban American Artistic Foundation), reflects upon this trend in an interview conducted in the middle 1990s: “Well, it’s not the music specifically. It’s practically everything. There is no interest in maintaining our roots: musica campesina, Afro-Cuban music, and other genres . . .” Gutierrez clearly mourns the community’s failure to maintain cultural continuity—musical and otherwise—as more of his fellow country persons strive to become more “American” and less “Cuban,” particularly those born in the United States whose ties with Cuba become more tenuous with the passing years.
Nicaraguans are the second-largest, though most rapidly growing, segment of the local Hispanic population. Approximately 200,000 people of Nicaraguan descent now live in Miami/Dade. Their numbers swelled in the early 1980s when many people fled the 1979 Sandinista Revolution and during the middle 1980s difficult economic conditions compelled a slower but notable influx. The Nicaraguans themselves represent a multicultural mix of mestizo, who are Hispanic and who constitute the majority of Nicaraguans in the southeast corner of the state. About 10 percent of the population consists of creoles from the Atlantic Coast who are usually of Jamaican background, and the trilingual (Miskito, English, and Spanish) Miskitos from rural areas across the country.
Most Nicaraguans have arrived recently enough that their music reflects their Central American roots with little synthesis of styles that they have encountered in the United States. Most of the folk music consists of sons—plaintive vocals accompanied by solo guitarists, but the music played by marimba-based ensembles represents the most distinctive style. The marimba, called the marimba del arco, is of African ancestry. It is ubiquitous in Central America, but in Nicaragua the small, twenty-two-slat instrument is played with two or three mallets and accompanied by one or two guitar players. Many of the marimba players are of Indian background, though this is
changing. But as the Nicaraguan-derived population grows and establishes itself in Miami/Dade, more interaction is occurring between them, Cuban Americans, and other Spanish-speaking groups. As this process continues, new syncretic forms will no doubt emerge, nearly all of them in the popular realm, though they will always been informed by their folk roots.
NEW YORK CITY
Considering its place as a point of entry for so many immigrants—many of them from Spanish-speaking countries—it is logical that New York City, much like Miami, is host to many types of musical cultures. Unlike the Southwest, with its long history of Hispanic influence, many of these groups are relative newcomers to the greater New York area. Hispanics from throughout Central and South America have moved to New York City, of course, but only a handful, most notably Puerto Ricans, have developed new and syncretic forms since arriving in the United States.
Unlike the recent, explosive immigration into southeastern Florida, Puerto Ricans have been a part of New York’s vibrant music scene since the 1920s. Nearly 45 percent of the people of Puerto Rican descent do not reside on the island and most of them live in the continental United States. The majority of them have settled in or near New York City with an increasing number shifting to nearby rural areas in search of migrant farmwork. The number of Puerto Ricans immigrating to the mainland has increased since World War II, joining the growing Newyorican (a polyglot term for Spanish-speaking residents of New York City) population, many of whom have moved from Central America. In 2010 there were approximately 3 million citizens of Puerto Rican ancestry living on the mainland with another 3.8 million staying on the island.
The majority of Puerto Ricans living in New York City live—or have ties with—East Harlem, which is perhaps better known as Spanish Harlem. These migrants essentially built a new kind of barrio (neighborhood) modeled on their Puerto Rican roots. Spanish Harlem is still home to many social clubs, which are often based on older island ties, and some of them still meet in the informally erected clubhouses that dot the neighborhoods. Gamecock fighting is part of the cultural landscape, and the smell of seafood wafts out of restaurants throughout the barrios. There are also shops that sell the dry goods and clothes typical on the island.
Although they transplanted much of their material and oral culture, Puerto Ricans understand that they are not in San Juan any longer. Puerto Ricans come in many hues (black, white, and mulatto) and, in New York City especially, rapid assimilation has been one of the goals to which they have aspired because of the racial and ethnic prejudice they face. Just as the school authorities in Louisiana for many decades banned speaking French in the classrooms of their southwestern parishes, Puerto Rican (and other Newyoricans) were not permitted to speak Spanish in school. They soon discovered that speaking Spanish in the barrio was fine, but if they wanted to move in the world at large, they would have to learn English, too. This is one of the important steps in the transition from being Puerto Rican to “AmeRican.”
Puerto Rican musicians performing at the 1989 Festival of American Folklife. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.
Music serves as an integral and significant part of the Puerto Rican experience in the United States and it has been that way for over five decades. In the 1930s Puerto Ricans enriched New York’s already vibrant music scene with performances of jibaro (campesino) and plenos, throughout the barrios. Jibaro refers to music that flourished in the rugged, hilly sections of the Puerto Rican mountains and features guitar, cuatro, maracas, guiro, and voice. The texts of jibaros are emphasized over instrumental virtuosity, and when Puerto Ricans migrated to the United States they transported this tradition with them and wrote new texts about their (often harsh) immigrant experiences. New York plenas, on the other hand, are based on the Puerto Rican street music. This genre is lyrically similar to Trinidadian calypso (which emphasizes social and political commentary) and is accompanied by handheld frame drums, guitars, and sometimes the harmonica and accordion. Both jibaro and plenas have become Americanized not only in their shift of lyrics but also in their increasing use of electric instruments.
New York City emerged as the cultural nexus for Newyoricans (and Puerto Ricans in particular) by the beginning of the Cold War and music was one of the obvious expressions that helped to define the Puerto Rican community. Its large population is one of the reasons why New York City became a center for Puerto Rican music, but the mass media is the other—especially the recording studios, adventurous record companies, and radio outlets. In most respects, New York City had eclipsed Puerto Rico itself as the core of Puerto Rican music in the United States. New York City is also home to Juan Gutiérrez, a Puerto Rican plena musician who was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts/National Heritage Fellowship Award in 1996.
Despite the distancing from the island, the musical ties between New York City and San Juan remain strong. Many of the song lyrics are nostalgic, particularly when singers look back to the south and east, over the Atlantic Ocean. But as early as the 1920s AmeRicans were reflecting upon their difficult experiences as recent immigrants, often of a different color than those who occupy most of the positions of power, who for the first time were coping not only with prejudice but also with bitterly cold weather and a huge multinational city. In 1927 Rafael Hernandez wrote one of the most poignant examples of this genre:
I came to New York hoping to get ahead,
but if it was bad back home, here it’s worse.
Sometimes it’s hot, and other times freezing cold,
sometimes I look like a bundle sliding around on the snow.
I don’t like this, I’m going back to my hut.
FINAL THOUGHTS
United by a common language, the music and musical cultures described in this chapter demonstrate the wealth of Hispanic American folk and folk-based music. This chapter further underscores the geographical diversity of the Spanish-speaking citizens of the United States, who come from countries as different as Cuba and Mexico. Some Hispanic Americans, particularly in the Southwest, have lived here for several hundred years, while others—Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro—have arrived over the past fifty-odd years. Their living arrangements are equally varied and include Mexican Americans who live (often in great poverty) along the southern borderlands as well as Dominicans residing in barrios in New York City, and Haitians who have found refuge in Dade County, Florida. Their musical cultures have occasionally fused with popular styles (to create salsa, for example) or with Pima Indians in Arizona who play walia, but as our Hispanic American population grows there will no doubt be greater cultural interaction and new musical forms will emerge. Like the rest of American musicians, they will look to their roots for inspiration.
KEY FIGURES AND TERMS
button accordion
chicken scratch
conjunto
corridos
Dizzy Gillespie
jibaro
mariachi
matachines
Lydia Mendoza
mestizo
plenos
Tex-Mex
Silvestre Vargas
waila
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Paulino Bernal. Conjunto Bernal—16 Early Hits. Arhoolie CD 9010. Sixteen selections recorded between 1954 and 1960 by this forward-sounding conjunto musician/accordion artist from Corpus Christi, Texas.
Nati Cano’s Mariachi Los Camperos. Llegaron Los Camperos. Smithsonian Folkways SFW40517. Solid recordings (well documented, too) by one of the strongest and longest running mariachi groups based in Los Angeles.
Rumel Fuentes. Corridos of the Chicano Movement. Arhoolie CD 507. Heartfelt and personal songs written and performed in the early 1970s by this singer/activist based in Eagle Pass, Texas.
Las Hermanas Segovia. Punaladas De Amor. Arhoolie CD 9028. The Segovia Sisters sing norteno music with a pop twist on these recordings, originally issued by Ideal and Falcon between 1950 and 1956
.
Los Alegres De Teran. Original Recordings 1952–1954. Arhoolie CD 9048. These are fifteen seminal recordings by the group led by Eugenio Abrego and Tomas Ortiz, widely acknowledged as the founders of Musica Nortena.
Los Pleneros de la 21. Para Todos Ustedes. Smithsonian Folkways SFW40519. Formed in the early 1980s, this New York City-based group explores the intersections of traditional Puerto Rican music with music from the United States.
Lydia Mendoza. Mal Hombre. Arhoolie/Folklyric CD 7002. This compact disc surveys Mendoza’s lengthy career, focusing on her recordings from before World War II.
Various. Ballads and Corridos, 1949–1975. Arhoolie CD 367. The social and political topics covered in this anthology include the assassination of President Kennedy, civil rights struggles, and horse races.
Various. Borderlands: From Conjunto to Chicken Scratch. Smithsonian Folkways 40418. The title nicely sums up this collection, which covers vernacular Hispanic music along the Rio Grande Valley from Texas to Arizona.
Various. Caliente=Hot: Puerto Rican and Cuban Musical Expression in New York. New World Records CD 244-2. This 1976 release gives an overview of several popular and folk-based styles of music. The cd includes an excellent booklet.
Various. Conjunto! Texas-Mexican Border Music, 3 vols. Rounder 6023/24/30. A well-annotated, three-volume sampler featuring some of the recent masters of the genre—Flaco Jimenez, Santiago Jimenez, etc.