Cumbia, Tamborito and the Construction of 20th-Century Panamanian National Identity

• In Event: Music and Afro-Latin American Studies

Abstract

In Panama today, two musical genres of clear West African origin vie for the title of the country’s “national music.” One is the drumming and vocal genre tamborito which rose to prominence in the early 20th-century as Panama’s “official” national music where it emerged as white, Hispanic and representative of the nation’s links to its Spanish colonial past (Bellaviti 2018, Gonzalez 2015). The other is cumbia. In its earliest descriptions by Panamanian folklorists (Garay 1930), cumbia was viewed as a hybrid genre of unquestionable African ancestry and foreign (namely, Colombian) derivation. While performed throughout this small Central American country, cumbia was nonetheless regarded as less representative of a Panamanian nation long-imagined as fundamentally Hispanic in its racial and cultural makeup (Szok 2012, Zien 2017). It was not until the mid-century when dancing cumbia became a national pastime that this genre took on the quality of a national music in that it constituted “el baile del pueblo,” that is, the most widely embraced form of music in the isthmus. Drawing on archival research and ethnography in Panama, in this paper I examine how tamborito and cumbia, two musical genres of similar origins and formal characteristics, came to be viewed in very different terms by Panamanian folklorists during the first half of the 20th-century. In particular, I focus on the music-theoretical and ideological frameworks that folklorists used to justify their analytical choices and how these connected to a broader nation-building process in which ideas of blackness frequently elided with pronounced anti-U.S. imperialism.

Author

• Sean Bellaviti, Ryerson University