The Peasant, the campesino love stories and the recitation of popular poetry is their domain, they are oral fragrance, they are the beads of an immense necklace, with the home remedies, cooking food with an elevated patience, slow food they uphold a cherished treasure, they are also courteous and respectful. You enter a small bar in Puerto Rico known as cafetín, you shake everyone’s hands, the lawyer, the singer, the school teacher, the mendicant, the disabled, you salute all beings present, I have noticed this protocol in the Moroccan cities of my dwelling amongst the people, as they were once in Andalucía, the refrain “mi casa es su casa” is an old Arabic proverb which passed to us via the Spanish language. The campo folk practice order and calm and are conservative, not in the North American political sense of the word but as a manifestation of the order of nature, upholding traditions as in the culture of the singing of the décima. Complex rhyming scheme within the simplicity of the campesino memory.
The Turks, the Indians, the Mesoamericans, the Caribbeans, Incas, Aztecas, Eastern Europeans, Tibetans, Chinese, Hungarians, Polish, Czechoslovakians, Guatemalans, Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Germans, Albanians, all seem to be locked up in a Bashō Renga Haiku upon a long winter road, cold as cold as hot ice infinity. The Earth. Snow Pampas, Cordilleras, Andes, Atlas Mountains, Siberia of ice cubes, frozen skeletal trees swaying in the icy mental mist. Or hot tropicality so delicious by the Caribbean Sea, pours more open sea salt atmosphere through the coast bouncy and effervescent más you float, levitate. Dance waves simulations of Yoruba fertility, Shango chasing Oshun or one of his other women of water waves. Yemayá. Wave line of cocks gyrating back and forward to the corresponding sea of pussy shells, mass recollection of planetary memory. I go with mountain girl any moment, away from city (urban) university.
Fresqueria or Eros is what makes us human. Imagine cats that just jump the female in constant violation. Education más bien. Character is the natural, practical sign of the oral classic refinement, sharp spice, los troubadours of everywhere, the storytelling memoirs epic process of tradition, folk loom is universal knowledge, of manners, of respect, humbleness. Flirting, rapping, flores are the necessary fore-poetry of life, play the spell of love. The classical art of tradición. The mountain kisses are nervous and send shock revelations spine down toward pisa pie, where you do not miss the foot nor the step, as moist tongues sing together. Jíbara dresses dancing Mapeyé. The world is the same dress yet false knowledge has come in to divide us. Attempts to iron smooth the wrinkled lines, the wild curvy spontaneous reality of the world’s geographic robe. Artificial forces attempt to iron out smooth with false knowledge to divide with myths of race. Despite the fast digital-age efforts to smooth the world’s curvy bumpy spontaneous reality. The beautiful differences prevail, as such the colors and shapes sancocho unite, not multi-cultures which implies separateness but FUSION culture united in weavings of impossible sameness, in disparity clapping hands while lifting the vast florid dress. Of the Worldrobe concert.
Future Mountain
The literate fuss makes such
Day long one once gone come
Or going what on earth.
The question is is or not.
And send and bring. Till.
Rope knots listen to the flute
You snakes.
The Polka steps in the tropics
Away from Bohemia/Central Europe
Jevas lift the orange dresses
Above the knees.
A mass Polka of Chicanos
In Watsonville
Whispers of Slovenia/
Hungarian rise
Civilization harbored in the eyes
Follow the hands
The swift of turn’s body motion,
Menudo soup
Croatia my foot.
The agriculture smiles at harvest
Fest of Strawberries dancing,
Manzana not the apple city
But Latin American plaza north way,
What eye have seen upon
Journey from Toledo to Toboso,
From Guatemala to Guatepeor
From Salva truch to Bernal Heights,
O give me those hands that folded,
Lifted dress previous to her squat,
San Franasa Nicoyala.
Horchata de Cacao dulce.
Chocolat chocante.
Dulcinea the sweet embarrassed
The lust behind the shame,
Covered in veil Sunday road
To Church—as well the Mosque
Friday the same path.
Mazurka Polaca is the preindustrial
Barley.
Jíbaros-Guajiros Guachos-peones
Rise early as in the game of chess
Peasants-peones first to move,
Water on face in darkness
Antes the coocurucu of the roosters,
Cool morning no matter the
Inferno afternoon drops into serenity,
Mist dwells montunos arboreal
Trees inhale neblina looks tobacco smoke.
Café negro within once lata de Campbell
Soup gone
Opened in perfect rim,
No cut lip
Cured with the black liquid.
The Tobacco workers march
To the chin-chall
White straw sombreros illuminating
Through birth of nascent light.
The Middle East cities
Europe a semblance-closer
Middle Ages
In tempo, street grid,
Place of worship
Artisans of task
The wide space between
Societies spread later.
Vegetables meat scarce,
Asia stirred vegetables
With salty sauce,
Bamboo shoots
Celery vines
Cabbage.
Get out the way of
China man carrying Cabbage,
Don’t chabbage with cabbage,
Leaves headed toward the wok,
Oil Sesame,
Peasant rural communism
Works like a before Marx ideogram,
Him talking about what we
Nature assembles grows like weed,
Plantación adentro camarada,
Who were the first towners,
That lined up footage toward
The city,
Disappear the desert
Left to the flavor on the outskirts,
Water
Egyptians Heliopolis
The books were the buildings of
Alexandria,
Mexico City floating islands
Population in the millions
Before the Spanish.
Peruvians enclosed in stone,
Sipping coca té eating
Red beans and Potatoes,
Jumping mountains with Llamas
Gone in red caps blue skirt women
Vanish sky top levels of Machu Picchu.
In all Europe work land
Belong to landlords
(How did they obtain the turf)
The swindlers up late,
The workers rise antes sun,
Use the land for your needs,
Sons of whores
If I sell it I sell you too
And your mama,
Send me your daughter
When she is sixteen,
If the chick has an egg
Bring it up with the songs
Next to the peons
The hand clapping
Add to the cousins.
The Hacienda announces
Harvest of Café Feast,
The muchedumbre spills
Onto open fields
With steps of dance
Like rain falling,
Alegre grins
White pants, las Marías
With red blouses
“. . . con su pollera colorah
Mírala cómo viene
Mírala cómo vah . . .�
�
Shine moon fire water
Pitorro, the feast starts
With one güiro scratch
Terminates when people faint,
Dance flirtation
Inspires procreation
Crowd the mountains
More mocoso creatures,
Soon they gotta funche eat,
Meat captured sheep, goats,
In the Sahara you eat the stars,
The stars are your books,
Read horizon light line,
Search through the heavy mantas
For your wife’s leg
Conjunto ruffle of chingalín
Accompanies
Camel snores.
Saw once rural Holland
Persona full of cream Gouda
Colossal Shoes of wood
Look like two boats,
Amaze at pack of crazy moderns
Speaking what lunacy,
The circus has arrived he thought
The earth
Scoping excited brash appearances
Out of place like books
In an illiterate world.
A mango in Alaska,
Cuckaroaches invade
A dance of chickens.
The lyrics
Of the Boleros.
The pages of the books.
In the age of pure
Classic gold.
Destiny mountain girl
Save me a dance
In all other be.
Wait the tree, the shadow.
Under.
Latin American Dance
People dance the harvest; people dance the moon, humanity dances cock songs in flower marriage, dances new birth. Dance spirits cometh and goeth. Sun fire steps with the flower fertile hydro furnace womb, creation. They dance circle round they dance parallel lines of malefemales. Back and forth in and out. Rain dance the natives keep the earth producing barley, corn, yucca, potatoes. Taino Areyto was música dance circle and song-chant of the tribal memory the whole village partakes. The Opias and Cemis possess into the night, Tobacco aroma links, inter-realms of green light entities. Fly feather. Folks dance the wedding, they dance the baptism. As a whole the Caribbean mixture dances, with Spanish Flamenco blood with African sway, no one stays sitting down. Cuba has been the origin of many of the Latin American dances, danzón, cha cha cha, mambo, bolero, la Pachanga, in the case of the Pachanga, which was the rhythm of the Cuban revolution, it came in simultaneously with the bearded revolutionaries, both entering Havana in 1959. Was it Fajardo, the Cuban flute player, who brought the rhythm to New York around this time? The Puerto Ricans in the clubs of the Bronx defined the dance steps to it. Johnny Pacheco the Dominican New Yorker helped to establish the Pachanga rhythm in the City of Latin Dance. The Pachanga was a mix of Son Montuno with Merengue. Some hear the Mambo swifts along with the Colombian cumbia. The Pachanga spread like a fire in a dry forest. On the Lower East Side Puerto Ricans in a pachanga party tumbled a building wall down, the old worn bricks blasted out with the rhythm obeying the law of gravity, a whole wall stack of bricks thus exposing a living room painted pink fell onto a vacant lot below. Poricans ate the stairs evacuating, as the next obvious thought was that the whole building was going to collapse.
Cuba is the Rumba of dance and voice-song, steps pure hips, total torso involved, gyrating mating coquet between male and female. Similar would be the Puerto Rican Bomba dance, a circle the drums, maracas, sonero-singer chorus-call and respond. In the Bomba the dancer directs the drummers, the primo or subidor the sharp tone drum beckons the feet. It is the most African manifestation on the island, roots back to the Congo, some of the other Caribbean islands have similar rhythm/dances. Arguments abound as to the origin of the Bomba; some point toward the area of Mayagüez on the west coast of the island; others claim Loíza Aldea in the northeastern coast. The Bomba drums once were made from empty barriles of rum or bacalao in the region of Ponce, they have a style of playing where they lay the drums down horizontal as if to feel the vibrations of the earth, capture the sonic-spell from the Caribbean waves nearby. Whichever region gave it birth it is an important Afro-Puerto Rican development based direct upon African rhythms. In its dance motions you can also detect the Spanish gypsy Flamenco. It has various styles or tempos, the “Sica,” the “Yuba,” the “Holandes,” all feature the dancer directing the beats of the drummers, especially the Primo of sharp tone timbre chasing the hips, shoulders and waist and hand movements of the dancers. The crowd joins in on the chorus and entering and departing from the Bomba dance circle at will. Other African descendent peoples of Latin America have similar dances. San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, has a similar dance tradition. It is also one of the first free communities of Africans in the Western hemisphere. They maintain a language of Congolese vocals mixed with Portuguese within a dialogue uniquely their own. The Puerto Rican Bomba has been taken by island immigrants to Manhattan to Chicago. Ponce city on the Caribbean coast is definitely the origin of the Plena, another dance-song rhythm. Plena lyrics are based on everyday events; in the 50s a radio station on the island did the news in Plena fashion.
The Cuban Rumba has three main styles the Yambü, the Guaguancó, the Columbia, all feature drumming, singsong sonero with chorus response. The Rumba is also of the Spanish Gypsies and was given African flavor in the Caribbean. All peoples dance, have agriculture and gather to celebrate its fruits. The Berbers, ginger color tribe of Africa, have a back and forward drama, row of men row of women, the women are big mamas but move ass buttocks with such delightful facility, they appear like the round belly clay sculptures of Miró activated in jelly movements. They play hand drums, that are similar to the panderetas of the Plena, a favorite Berber percussive drum, most likely that is the origin of the Plena panderos, must’ve slipped into Spain during the Morisco occupation and come to the Caribbean with the subsequent waves of peoples migrating. Other North African drums are shaped like hourglasses. They are miniature and make sharp sounds.
In Cuba the “Guateque” formed. Father de Las Casas saw it and described it as a dance similar to one performed by the workers of Andalucía. It also had a singer and a chorus. The word guateque grew in the popular sphere to mean dance, party, usually out of the city in the campos.
Dancing was my youth-teen ’hood in New York of the mid 60s. There was a dance almost every day somewhere in the city, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan. I was too young to have made it to the legendary Palladium Club, but I knew elders who used to go party-dance there and looking at their eyes I knew there was something electric, excitement special on that dance floor. Once visiting a friend, his older sister was getting dressed to go to the Palladium, while the phonograph all the time spun Machito tunes. She prepared herself. Her name was Sonia and a girlfriend of hers she called Letty (or something like that, Tetty, Seddy, Litty qué sé yo) came to the door. She was all ready in a beautiful light-blue dress, nylon stockings with that black line in the back, where the batata ran. She and Sonia were gorgeous. I was wishing I was older and knew better how to dance, I knew they would disappear into the lights of the metropolis, to a place of laughter and dance and the music of the magic, Palladium, it was known as the home of the Mambo, for the excellence and enthusiasm of its dancers; from there it spread to the whole country. The Palladium ambiance did what the Latino-Caribbean had done from jump; they integrated all the colors, peoples of all ethnicities would go there, it was all based on one thing: dance, rhythm a trait that runs through all human flesh. Already in 1949 New Yorkers were in there dancing, throwing scissor-chopping motions with elbows and legs. The rest of the country was suffering from segregation. Latinos became the overwhelming mofongo pulp in the club. Puerto Ricans from Spanish Harlem came down, it was a train hop take the 6 Lexington down to Grand Central take the west Broadway line up a stop and there you were. It cost 75 cents to get into the club; remember it was the late 40s, early 50s, the subway ride was a dime. The Palladium Club this época was drawing big celebri
ties such as Marlon Brando, who would jump on stage and touch-play caress the Congas. Oh yeah, Frank Sinatra went there to listen to his Latino counterpart in Tito Rodríguez when the bandleader sang boleros. Tito was also a swinging sonero of mambos and cha cha chas. The Palladium had a broad appeal amongst the hipsters, beatniks, jazz musicians, Italians, and Jews were regular dancers on the floor. The musicians Duke Ellington, Count Basie were spotted listening to the Mambo beats. The singers Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald perfect splendors spotted in the stylish and glamorous dance hall at 53rd and Broadway. Everyone dressed to kill in suits and ties, proper shoes well shined, with handkerchiefs in pockets or in the hands. Women with kan-kan flares, ruffles, gowns, fancy purses. Wayne Shorter arrived and was inspired to create a tune called “Palladium” with his group Weather Report. The Palladium was the New York world of elegance. It was the pearl of the New York elegante Puerto Rican-Latino world.
Pedro “Cuban Pete” Aguilar was a New York Puerto Rican whose family had taken the trip across the ocean way before the mass Puerto Rican exodus of the late 40s and early 50s. Perhaps they came on the famous Marine Tiger ship which made so many trips during the San Juan to New York migratory wave, Marintaya full of Jíbaros, chickens in boxes, guitars in arms, folks singing serenading the Atlantic waves, first stop near the Brooklyn Navy Yard thus Williamsburg the first Puerto Rican community in New York. Pedro “Cuban Pete” Aguilar tried his hand at boxing, till one day the Cuban singer Miguelito Valdés, who had been an amateur boxer himself as well in his native Cuba, where he was born from a Cuban father and a Mexican Yucatec mother, had seen the young man dancing and advised him to join a dance competition. Pedro did, and he won $1,000. Wow, in the early 50s if $1,000 dollars fell upon you, you had some pasta. The young man turned his attention and his discipline from the boxing ring onto the dance floor. It was at the Palladium where this human charge of electricity broke out and people paid attention. He scribbled with his legs, at times doing something approximate lindy hop, Charleston, mixing the Caribbean with nitty-gritty Savoy Ballroom steps, melting the tribes together, paying homage to the Clave beat of the Mambo, to Africa, mother culture of us all. He twisted and went into contortions, squatting and jumping, walking like a chicken, hopping like a kangaroo, he trembled, tumbled, and turned himself inside out, he danced within the clave, that is he followed the beat of the drum not the melody which is the secret of all true Latin dancers. Stay attentive to the discussion that the tumbadora (conga) is having with the bongos and the maracas. Merge into the groove known as the martillito (the hammer) and throw your bone structure into it. It was in the Palladium that Pedro met the New York Italian girl named Millie Donay and they danced a love calligraphy around each other, loops and spins that took them all the way to the altar. Together on the floor of the Palladium they sizzled, defined timing and coordination. A choreographic harmony in body language that very few people have been able to achieve since. The Mambo from Cuba, the dance machine of the Americas, hit New York. Forget about it! The Palladium was the home of the Mambo; I am eternally frustrated at time and space for my age was that of a minor when all this fire was burning in New York. The Palladium had opened its doors in 1947 and the final curtain dropped in 1966.
Beneath the Spanish Page 12