First of all, I’d like to take a moment to thank Dominique Cyrille, Gustav Michaux-Vignes, and the Mediathèque Caraïbe for their very kind invitation to participate in this conference. It is a great privilege to be here with you all today.

My talk today deals with the efforts of the the Colombian state to institutionalize Afro-Colombian cultural memory, particularly to measures targeted specifically to musical and cultural practices and aim to grant legitimacy, institutional backing, and the possibility of preservation and documentation in order to allow for their continuation in the current epoch of wide-spread cultural change. The most important institutional instantiation of this is a very new entity, the Rogelio Velásquez Documentation Center of Afrocolombian Cultural Expressions, which I will be referring to as “the Centro” in this talk. Funded and assisted by a variety of institutions in Colombia and the US – the Ministry of Culture, the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History, Georgetown University in Washington, USAID, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York – the Centro will be housed at and run by the Technological University of the Chocó, which is located in the capital of the majority black, largely isolated province of Chocó. I was contracted in 2006 by the Ministry of Culture to assemble an inventory of musical materials for the archives of the Centro and will serve as a consultant to the Centro in the future. The Centro has recently hired a director and, now that a space for it has been built in the university, will open its doors on *.

The Centro is only one instantiation of the growing mainstream presence and institutionalization of the long-marginalized cultural forms of Colombia’s black population, which forms some 16 - 25% of the national population of 44 million (making Colombia the country with the most black inhabitants in the hemisphere after the U.S. and Brazil). Colombia has historically never understood itself, nor been understood abroad, as being a black country; indeed the national project has long been framed as a process of biological whitening and cultural refinement, within which Afro-Colombian cultural forms have been understood as atavistic left-overs of the very savagery which the national whitening narrative aimed to trascend. Since the adoption of a multiculturalist national identity in Colombia’s 1991 Constitution, however, however, state recognition of the role of blacks in the formation of the Colombian nation has been an important component of the newly pluricultural nation.

As in many countries, Colombian multiculturalism is related to economic development, particularly the creation of cultural tourism, and has aimed to promote tolerance between ethnocultural groups. In Colombia, however, the bloody civil war has made this tolerance an even more urgent goal.The multiculturalist promotion of black culture is also a measure through which the state aims to enlist participation in the national project and the support of the war effort among the black inhabitants of the Pacific hinterlands, where a long and still-present history of economic and social marginality, and lack of infrastructure, communication or state presence have only been exacerbated in recent years by the arrival of violent armed actors in the area. Multiculturalism , then, can be seen as a means to integrate isolated Afro-Colombians, especially in the Pacific region, into the spaces of the nation (as national culture) and world capitalism (through cultural tourism). The other mechanism of integration, the one that is dominant at the moment, is Colombia’s civil war itself, an ethnocidal land grab in which the various armies massacre Afro-Colombians and displace them from their territory. In this, all too prevelent form of integration, Afro-Colombians enter the nation as impoverished refugees squatting in urban slums; enter the capitalist economy by reorienting their cultural practices around cash consumption (even as they are bereft of both wage labor and the farms they once subsisted on); their former territories enter the global market as the ancient forests are emptied of inhabitants and cleared for agroindustrial projects ranging from lumber to the production of the coca which funds the civil war. Ethnocide, then, is the other model for the integration of Afro-Colombians with which multiculturalism competes and coexists.

This is not to say that multiculturalism cannot be used cynically. Recently, it has even effected foreign policy. The current government, which is staunchly militaristic and right wing, has had a number of scandals call its commitment to human rights into question, especially by the new Democratic Party majority in the US Congress, on which Colombia depends – pending human rights review – for its military aid. The unprecedented appointment of a black woman to head a national Ministry – the Ministry of Culture, to be precise – was widely interpreted as an effort by the administration to demonstrate to the US Congress its commitment to the cultural and human rights of its most marginalized citizens.

It is in this context that the Centro has been established. I want to turn now to some of the immediate issues facing the Centro. An important consideration in projects of cultural memory is over what will and what will not fall within the purview of archiving institutions and projects. What is to be done, for example, with those cosmopolitan or local popular musics to which Afrocolombians have made significant contributions? Popular and especially global musics are in certain ways the bugbears of the idea of cultural patrimony – often seen as the dilution of the local genius and the exclusive province of the market. Nonetheless, the important Afro-Colombian contributions to a global genre like salsa are an important component of contemporary Afro-Colombian culture and a crucial example of the insertion of local sensibilities (expressed both musically and in place-specific lyrics) into cosmopolitan aspirations. For the purposes of cultural memory, the assumption that the market will take care of the preservation of these musics may be true in the case of globally-popular salsa groups, but artists with a more local base may find themselves shortchanged and their contributions marginalized. This is even more so in the case of local versions of those popular musics which circulate through the informal economy on pirated media. Alongside Afro-Colombian rap, ragga, and reggaetón in this category is champeta, a musical style in which, like zouk, an informal economy of gigantic sound systems led to the adoption and creolization of a number of Afro-Diasporic musics, especially Congolese soukous and South African mbaqanga, often entailing fusion with traditional genres and overt expressions of local and racial identity. (Let’s listen to a bit of champeta, “La mala hierba,” by Sergio Liñan.)

Popular musics distributed in the informal economy, like champeta, despite their importance as everyday narratives of Afro-Colombian engagements with globality, are not likely to find a permanent home in the formal market anytime soon. Given the traditionalist bias of most conceptions of cultural patrimony, their inclusion in the canon of Afro-Colombian culture, let alone their inclusion in institutional archives, is a battle that will need to be fought with particular determination.

Another issue for an institution like the Centro Afro is where to draw ethnic boundaries. Witness, for example, the case of the black Protestant, English patois-speaking inhabitants of Colombia’s San Andrés archipelago, who mostly do not see themselves as black, but rather imagine themselves in geographical terms, complicating the terms of the inclusion of the Afro-Creole traditional musics of San Andrés in an ethnically-delineated project like the Centro. The question can be extended more generally to Colombia’s mulato musical genres, a category which describes most popular musics of the Caribbean region, including musics like vallenato and cumbia, which are touchstones of the nation both in Colombia and abroad. My recommendations to the Centro on the subject have aimed to be pragmatic: where no professional archive exists (as for San Andrés), the Centro should archive original materials, with diffusion to the islands; in the case of the Caribbean music, much of which is housed at the National Musical Archive in Bogotá, the Centro should cross-list and have access to it while its storage continues to be in Bogotá. Both of these necessitate a well-developed system of access and diffusion, on which I will have more to say later on.

Having discussed non-folkloric and less African-derived forms, I should point out that there are complexities for the preservation of even those genres which are unproblematically understood as traditional Afro-Colombian musics. I would like to take a moment to play some of the various traditional Afro-Colombian musical genres. One of the best known is the cumbia, porro and gaita format from the Caribbean coast, which uses indigenous-derived flutes. (Gaiteros de San Jacinto “La mica prieta”). The town of San Basilio de Palenque is a maroon community whose inhabitants speak a creolized version of the KiKongo language. Palenquero funeral music is called lumbalú, and it reflects a uniquely Bantu cosmology. (Teresa Salgado, Alba Luz Águilar, José Simancas, “Lumbalú”). All of the musics I just played are from the Caribbean coast. Chirimía is a brass band music from Chocó province in the northern Pacific coast. (Ritmosón, “Borrega”). The music I study, known as currulao, is from the isolated southern Pacific coast, and is one of the few surving neo-African musics in the Americas using the marimba. (“Mirando,” Grupo Naidy). Finally, the remembrances of 17th century Spanish liturgical music and medieval Iberian ballads have been preserved by Afro-Colombians on the Pacific coast in women’s harmonized funeral singing – a form called alabado. (“Jesús Nazareno,” Bonilla family of Timbiquí).

These are the musics that would certainly be included in the archives of the Centro. However, several problems remain. Intellectual property is particularly nettlesome. Given the extensive overlap – partly as a result of violent urbanization –
between juridically-recognized “traditional black communities” and more mainstream forms of political and social organization, most Afro-Colombian communities quite neatly confirm anthropological preoccupations over the validity of the notion of bounded cultural communities. Absent a bounded community, intellectual property rights must be awarded on an individual rather than communal basis. Given the depressed economic situation of most Afro-Colombians and the common practice of both new composition and glossing older musical texts, this will almost certainly lead to jockeying by local actors to claim authorship of particular pieces and their variations, which are extremely difficult to corroborate. Also, many existing recordings do not document the names of the artists who were recorded, necessitating an enormously complex vetting process by the Centro in order for potential licensing issues to be resolved. One way that the Centro should deal with intellectual property issues is to investigate older recordings while providing an explicit policy on intellectual property for new recordings. According to the particular clearances which have been obtained, the Centro should provide varying levels of access to different materials in a gradated system which at its most open will permit downloading from the internet, possibly for a fee, and at its most closed will have original materials for consult only on the grounds of the Centro itself, if at all.

Another important question is that of representativity. Almost all of the traditional genres which I played have a number of different formats, styles, genres and repertoires which vary on a micro-regional scale. In currulao, upriver and downriver styles may differ radically. The number of drums and the patterns played on them, as well as the repertoire, change as one travels north or south along the coast. Despite these important variations, most recordings of currulao over the years have taken place in a small number of locations, which have then been elevated to canonical status as the home of the “real” currulao. But these recordings may not necessarily be representative of the numerous micro-traditions that actually characterize the diversity within each regional tradition. These differences in canonicity become even more pronounced when, as in Chocó, the folkloric genres of the capital city are given pride of place by local elites over the musical forms of the far-flung and quite remote hinterlands of that province. All of this goes to show that the fact that Afro-Colombian traditional music exists in a marginalized position viz-a-viz white and mestizo genres does not prevent cultural hierarchies and processes of marginalization from existing within the body of Afro-Colombian musics, which the Centro must certainly work to overcome.

A related issue is that of musical forms which are marginalized because they violate the boundaries of the “folkloric cartography” which has been an important organizing concept for studies of traditional musics in the country. In the northern Pacific sub-region of Chocó, for example, one can find not only the chirimía brass band music which is associated with that province but also the cumbia genres of the adjacent Atlantic coast and the tamborito of neighboring Panama. Chocó’s variations of these genres have never been seriously recorded or investigated but are necessary components to an understanding of the history of these musics, especially if, as has been suggested, the Panamanian tamborito actually originated on the Pacific coast of Chocó. In other cases, entirely distinct genres exist in regions in which other musical forms are hegemonically traditional. For example, there are pockets of black settlement within what has been designated the Andean region which have their own entirely distinct musical forms, such as the string and brass band musics of the area called Norte del Cauca, or the archaic chirimías of the southern, rather than northern, Pacific. These forms are extremely important historically because they represent intermediate phases in the adoption of the neo-African musics of the Pacific by mestizo instrumental formats (often from the military band tradition), and as such, are a window into the complex inter-ethnic histories of Colombian music. Nonetheless, the geographical accident that has placed the Afrocolombians of Norte del Cauca in the Andean region has marginalized their musical practice, which is almost entirely unknown, is rapidly disappearing, and has been subject to only one rather obscure recording. The provincial government has seen fit to teach traditional Afro-Colombian music in some of the local cultural institutes, but ironically, the music they teach is in fact the more canonical marimba music of the Pacific coast, rather than local traditional musics! It is essential that music in places like Norte del Cauca and other geographically marginal sites of Afro-Colombian musical tradition, including those which have yet to be recognized, also be incorporated into projects of cultural memory.

There is a crucial question which underlies projects of cultural memory like the Centro. The existence of a musical archive is not the same as a process of cultural memory. The Centro will be nothing more than a simple warehouse if it does not catalyse the incorporation of its contents into the real-world cultural practice of Afro-Colombian communities. There are two ways to approach this question. Firstly, what must be documented is not so much “music” as “musical practice.” The first category, music, imposes the very occidental logic of music as a bracketed and autonomous phenomenon which is already isolated from the sociocultural contexts by which meaning adheres to sound. Alongside recordings, then, the Centro must include accounts of musical practices ranging from the construction of traditional instruments to the religious or secular events in which the production of musical sonorities take place. Luckily, audiovisual media make the documentation and storage within these larger frames possible. However, given the paucity of previously existing documents of this type – or even of musical recordings in the case of many genres – the Centro will have to undertake not only the consolidation of previously existing materials, but the continued investigation and documentation in situ of Afro-Colombian music-making.

But even more important than the documentation of musical practice is the adoption of the musical archive into the processes of cultural memory of Afro-Colombian communities. The musical archives of the Centro are useful to those privileged few with access to the Technological University of the Chocó, and, if the proposed digitalization of the Centro’s materials is carried out, to those foreign researchers and Colombians, largely non-black, who have access to the Internet. But none of those things is the same as cultural memory. To catalyze processes of cultural memory among the Afro-Colombians to whom the cultural forms at the center of the Centro’s project belong, the Centro must project itself outward. This must happen in two distinct senses.
Firstly, access is key. Alongside the internet, which is a useful tool, if not a cure-all for isues of access, there are a number of ways for the Centro to make itself available to communities. Designing multimedia educational materials, collaborating with the processes of multicultural educational curriculum formation which are afoot in both national and the local contexts of rural riverbank towns, creating links with institutions that are integrated into Afro-Colombian communities and cultural practices (such as the Church and musical festivals), and making materials commercially available are some possibilities. But perhaps most important is the inclusion of local communities in the projects that the Centro undertakes – the Centro should not merely feed content to the communities, in the hope that it may be of use, but it rather make local communities and cultural figures protagonists within its programs. Continuing documentation and investigation, vetting intellectual property licenses for old recordings, and even the consolidation of documents in the hands of private collectors are all activities that are not only essential to the conformation of the Centro and its archives, but that, in their necessary collaboration with communities, can assimilate the projects of the Centro into communities’ projects of cultural memory, making the practice, investigation, and discussion of local cultural forms an important part of daily life. And it is only by becoming a part of the everyday practice of communities that cultural memory in its truest and most organic sense, can exist.

The Centro will have to overcome a number of potential barriers, which I will only mention for reasons of space: rivalries and turf wars among musicians, academics, institutions, and communities; political pressures; bureacracy; budgetary issues; corruption; folkloric canons; difficulties in travel and communication; and violent civil war. Nonetheless, with a committed staff and a clear set of policy guidelines, the Centro de Documentación de Expresiones Culturales “Rogelio Velásquez” has the potential to
move beyond the tokenistic lip service that characterizes the more cynical instances of multiculturalism, in which communities displaced from their land are given the dubious consolation prize of having their living musical practices brusqely inserted into the articialities of the staged music festival and the political economy of specialized musicians, in which music is labelled culture even as the cultural processes that gave it meaning are left behind in the lands they have been forced to abandon, and in which cultural sloganeering does not interrupt the ethnocidal processes through which the chains of cultural transmission are severed. Colombia’s civil war will not be resolved through cultural policy; nor will Afro-Colombians cease to find ways to make their lives meaningful. But the promise of the Centro is the promise of fomenting processes of cultural memory which allow Afro-Colombians to use the ways they have made meaning of their world in the past as a resource for making sense of themselves in the new context of their violent integration to the national and global contexts.