Embodied «Sounds»: Musical Culture, Popular Agency, and the Public Display of Political and Social Power in State Sponsored Festivities in 19th Century Puerto Rico

• In Event: Acordes de México y ell Caribe: Música, naciones y procesos sociales

Abstract

This essay deals with the musical culture in Puerto Rico, during its long 19th Century, displayed in Central and local government’s festivities and the popular manifestations of celebratory rejoice. A close readings of government’s documents, personal memories, and «costumbrista» literature [literary Costumbrism] from 1789 to 1896, on one hand, show the specificities of the public displays of political and social power exercised by the Island’s social and political elite and, on the other, the popular agency manifested during the same celebrations. We are able to assess the level of coexistence, within a same cultural context, of the everyday life of popular dances and musical culture and the capacity, and mechanisms of the social elite and the political institutions of, both, the co-option, and the appropriation of the popular culture. The Island’s musical genres, -i.e.: the creolized contradanzas, danzas, aguinaldos, seguirillas, caballos, old fandangos, new canciones criollas, and the Africans and neoafricans candungués, sicás, holandeses, danuéses, and others (danced with a variety of drums called bombas)- are presented in these documents as class and political power embodied sounds. The study of the public displays of the social and political elite’s exercise of power in state festivities, and the popular agency shown in them, has two objective; one, to broaden our present understanding of a period of time so rooted in Puerto Rico’s popular and intellectual imagination, and, second, to reconsider old beliefs about the Island’s musical culture: i.e.: the danza, the aguinaldos and seises con décimas, and bomba drums dances.

Author

• Noel Allende-Goitia, Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico