I was awarded the Tinker & Bridges Summer Field Research Grant to help fund summer fieldwork related to my dissertation research project, entitled “Localizing Hybridity: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Cuban Rumba Performance.” My dissertation examines a range of innovations that have emerged in the performance of the Afro-Cuban music and dance genre rumba during the last three decades. Rumba, which emerged in the mid-nineteenth century within black and racially mixed communities in western Cuba, is a hybrid musical practice that integrates Central- and West African-derived percussion instruments and rhythmic patterns with European melody and Spanish poetic forms. Recent innovations include the creation of fusions with a variety of Afro-diasporic musical practices, the incorporation of Afro-Cuban sacred music and dance into the repertoires of rumba groups, and the invention of a new percussion style. Rather than employing an indiscriminate approach to their fusions, I posit that musicians from different provinces in Cuba have drawn on specific, locally-defined traditions in their respective innovations. I propose that recent rumba fusions can be viewed as an example of the entangled relationship between regional identity formation and musical innovation.
The main theoretical focus of my dissertation is an exploration of how racialized regional identities are performed through the rumba innovations emerging respectively from Havana and Matanzas, the two western Cuban cities with the longest and most influential histories of rumba performance. While Havana and Matanzas share many of the same Afro-Cuban musical traditions, the two cities have been inserted into polarized racial and cultural discourses: whereas Havana is represented as the center of innovation and racial/cultural hybridity, Matanzas is known as “the cradle of Afro-Cuban culture” and constructed as the site of “authentic” blackness. My fieldwork with rumba groups in both Havana and Matanzas leads me to complicate these widely held assumptions about where tradition is “located” and where hybridity “takes place” in Cuba, as they paint incomplete portraits of the two cities’ respective folkloric scenes. Although these tropes of place result in a problematic essentialization of the cultural identities of the two cities, they enjoy widespread currency both in Cuba and abroad and cannot simply be dismissed. The government’s investment since the mid-1990s in cultural tourism centered around Afro-Cuban music and dance has significantly raised the stakes for folkloric musicians in terms of representing themselves as “authentic.” Competition between Havana and Matanzas for cultural tourism, mainly in the form of music and dance lessons, thus presents a concrete example of how racialized discourses of place and related claims of authenticity have material effects on the livelihoods of folkloric musicians.
I used the Tinker Grant to conduct a short research trip to Cuba in May 2008 in order to attend an academic conference and related musical events that center on my area of musical specialization. Havana’s main music conference is held in late May each year in conjunction with the International Cubadisco Fair, a recording industry-sponsored music fair and awards presentation, similar to the Grammys. The 2008 Cubadisco Fair and conference were dedicated to “Africa and its diaspora,” and the highlighted musical event leading up to the conference was la rumba más larga del mundo (the longest rumba in the world). This event entailed consecutive 24-hour rumba events in each of Cuba’s 14 provinces, moving from east to west with the finale in Havana. Attendance at these rumba events was crucial for my research, as it allowed me to compare rumba performance in six different Cuban provinces.
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Photo taken in Santiago de Cuba during "La Rumba Mas Larga del Mundo" (The Longest Rumba in the World), a 2-week event that took place in May 2008 in which 24-hour rumbas were performed in each of Cuba's 14 provinces, with no stopping between each province. The rumba events moved from east to west, beginning in Guantánamo and ending in Havana.
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One of the most interesting things about attending la rumba más larga del mundo was observing the different conceptions of the event and organizational/logistical decisions that characterized the 24-hour rumbas in each province. In some places, such as the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba, the groups that played during the event performed mostly rumba, with a few songs falling into the category of conga (Santiago’s carnival music), which has historical connections with rumba practice. The repertoire represented by rumba groups in the province of Ciudad de la Habana (Havana City) was also heavy on rumba performance. However, in other places, such as the central province of Camagüey, there were a wide variety of musical practices that were performed during an event that was advertised specifically as “rumba.” Afro-Cuban folkloric music and dance practices, which are mainly constituted by sacred genres (as opposed to rumba, which is a secular Afro-Cuban genre), were heavily represented in several provinces. In Camagüey, which has been an historically important site for Haitian migration since the nineteenth century, the performances of several folkloric groups focused on Afro-Haitian religious and secular music and dance instead of rumba. Similarly, Afrocuba de Matanzas, one of the island’s most respected folkloric groups, was sent to perform in other provinces in addition to their home province of Matanzas, and many of their performances were largely folkloric- instead of rumba-based. I can preliminarily conclude that the provinces that have the longest history of rumba performance, such as Havana and Matanzas, and the places where rumba has a shorter history but is currently widely practiced, such as Santiago, were better equipped to stick closely with rumba performance and did not need to “fill up” the 24 hours with other musical practices.
Because Afro-Cuban sacred genres have been closely linked to rumba performance both historically and currently – primarily because rumberos (rumba participants) are usually initiates in one or more Afro-Cuban religion – it is not surprising to see folkloric practices being performed at an event advertised as “rumba.” However, I also witnessed some performances that seemed to be only peripherally related to rumba music and dance. In Cienfuegos, for example, the second performance of their rumba event was constituted by a trio of modern dancers accompanied not by live music, but by a recorded piece of instrumental music that included only the faintest sonic signifier of rumba, the well-known rhythmic pattern for rumba guaguancó. Similarly, during Camagüey’s rumba event, I saw a salsa group play quite a long set.
The artistic liberties that were taken by some of the local organizers of this historic, nation-wide rumba event suggest that this musical practice has quite porous boundaries, and that people have different ideas about what styles of music can be included within the category of “rumba.” Some of my musician informants were upset with the programming in certain provinces, complaining that in practice the event was more like a festival of folkloric music, rather than, as advertised, the longest rumba in the world. Other attendees were not as bothered by the wide variety of performances subsumed under the banner of “rumba,” and were just happy to be able to attend a free musical event and see some of the best local folkloric groups perform. In any case, the differing conceptions regarding what constitutes rumba and what does not, suggest that this musical practice has been particularly adept at resisting rigid categorical definition and classification. I believe that rumba has long occupied an interstitial space between Afro-Cuban popular/secular and folkloric/religious music, and that this unique status has allowed not only for a wide variety of meanings to be attached to the genre – as demonstrated by this event – but also for fusions with both sacred and secular Afro-diasporic musical practices.
1. Guaguancó is the most popular of the three current styles of rumba performed today.
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