How, then, do we position salsa’s rise in Cali? Angel Quintero Rivera notes that a fundamental underpinning of salsa’s significance in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean has to do with an empowerment of subaltern populations. Salsa revindicates black and mixed-race culture and music by freely drawing upon several Afro-Caribbean traditions in defiance of dominant Eurocentric cultural canons (1998). In the counter-plantations made up of freed blacks and maroons, rural Indians and mestizos, and outcast Andalusian (Arab Spanish) peasants, the cultural dynamics that fed into salsa’s roots emerged beyond the jurisdiction of the state (Rowe and Schelling 1991:101). What does it mean, however, for black, mulato, and mestizo proletariats in Cali to have embraced these Caribbean sounds as their own? There is no tight fit between race and class position that could have predetermined the adoption of salsa by Cali’s dark-skinned working classes. Yet, an understanding of the complicated nexus of race, ethnicity, and class is absolutely crucial for analyzing this cultural process.
Colombia is a complex nation, marked as much by the diversity of its cultural and ethnic groups as by the sharp contrasts of its geographic regions. The country can be seen as a microcosm of South America’s so-called triethnic heritage,15 and the mixing of indigenous, African, and European peoples and cultures is invoked and manipulated in many ways to support competing versions of national and regional histories (Wade 2000). Colombian national identity, nonetheless, has been blanketed under the incorporative ideology of mestizaje (cultural or racial mixing), which reinforces concepts of social and cultural equality it the same time it obscures the ways in which indigenous and black peoples have been systematically marginalized. Political and economic elites in Colombia’s mountainous interior have promoted white and mestizo images of national culture while ignoring or downplaying the contributions of other groups. In Colombia people claim not to “see” race; although phenotypical features are recognized, they are not correlated directly to socioeconomic standing and poverty. The rub is, as Winthrop Wright points out for neighboring Venezuela, to a great extent people are poor because they are black or indigenous (1990). Ultimately, racial categories denote ethnicity, not immutable biological classifications. As such, however, they are complex identity markers, shot through with elements (themselves socially determined) related to biological phenotype and socioeconomic status. Difference is acknowledged as a legacy of Colombia’s triethnic heritage, but it is reconfigured as part of a colorful mosaic—difference is not supposed to really be different. Rather than being merely invisible, however, indigenous people and especially Afro-Colombians have long suffered from negative images that have served as points of reference for elite superiority (Wade 2000: 32). According to Peter Wade, mestizaje does not mean a literal blending of races into indistinction, for such homogenization would dismantle the very social hierarchies that lighter-skinned elites have a vested interest in maintaining. Rather, cultural difference is constantly present in concepts of mestizaje and is invoked in various ways to support competing discourses of cultural heterogeneity or unity depending on the agendas at stake (Wade 2000: 210–12).
As in other Latin American and Caribbean nations (see Whitten 1981; Whitten and Torres 1998), distinctions of socioeconomic class in Colombia are often also distinctions of ethnic difference, tied up with biological concepts of race that have been inherited from colonial times. Despite prevailing ideologies about a colorblind “racial democracy,” the legacy of slavery and genocide that shaped Colombia’s colonial history has resulted in a tight weave between race and class in defining structural positions in Colombian society, which determine access to economic and political power and resources (Wade 1993). Unlike the one-drop system of ethnic identification that prevails in the United States, “black” and “white” are not essentialized as polar opposites in Latin America. Rather, they are conceived of as a continuum where the makeup of one’s ancestry (i.e., the percentage of black or indigenous blood that one has) is combined with aspects of social style, wealth, and other class markers in determining one’s position up or down the social ladder.16 The fact that in many Latin American countries people with “Indian” or “black” physical characteristics consider themselves to be upper-middle class and hence “white” points to some of the problems in conceptualizing race in contemporary Latin America.
In Colombia the marginalization of blacks has been particularly strong.17 Wade asserts that in Colombia, racism—as a “set of ideas about the inferiority of blackness”—and fluid racial categories are “woven into specific sets of unequal social relations.” At the core of racist dynamics lie discursive formations that associate blackness with backwardness and impoverishment. Wade analyzes in detail the ways in which these notions of inferiority are manifested and internalized in different local and regional contexts. Notably, those few Afro-Colombians who have successfully climbed the social ladder have had to “whiten” themselves, leaving behind cultural markers of their blackness (such as speech patterns, cuisine, style of dress, choice of marriage partners, and musical tastes) in order to do so (1993: 342).18
Enslaved Africans first arrived in Colombia with the fortification of Cartagena de las Indias in 1533. They were brought to work in agricultural settlements on the Atlantic coast and to mine for gold in the country’s Pacific Coast region.19 Slave labor also supported the haciendas of the southwest Cauca Valley (around Cali), which provided food for mining activity in the Pacific and also for the colonial administrative center of Popayán. After Brazil, Colombia has one of the largest black populations in South America (Wade 1998: 312). Population figures for people of African descent in Colombia vary widely, depending on which sources you consult. The 1995 census officially designates 21 percent of the population as of African origin,20 but this does not include mestizos, who may also recognize a black relative or ancestor even if they do not identify as mulato. The substantial presence and contribution of black peoples to the country’s economic and cultural history, however, has been little recognized. Despite their significant numbers, Afro-Colombians were not officially acknowledged as a distinct ethnic group until the 1991 constitution, and only then as a result of intense lobbying by Afro-Colombian organizations. Indigenous communities, on the other hand, who officially constitute about 2 percent of the nation’s population, have consistently received more political and cultural recognition during the twentieth century.
Such discrimination has had direct consequences for black communities. Owing to Afro-Colombian concepts of communal land ownership, most of the Pacific coastal lands and rivers populated and worked on by Afro-Colombians for centuries were not registered under individual names and were hence officially categorized as baldios (vacant properties) until the ratification of black land rights in 1993. This made Afro-Colombian territories open for development and resource extraction without any due consideration for the area’s actual residents (Arocha 1992). Underscoring the lack of political rights, the Pacific has been among the nation’s most economically underdeveloped regions, and migrants from the Pacific coast to urban centers such as Cali, Medellín, and Bogotá tend to live in the poorest and most underserviced neighborhoods (Wade 1993).21
Economic and political marginalization of Afro-Colombians has paralleled their invisibility and disparagement in academic and popular discourses. In 1965 a colleague told the anthropologist Nina S. de Friedemann (one of Colombia’s leading scholars on black culture) that studying Afro-Colombians was not a legitimate endeavor, on the grounds that they were an insignificant cultural group in the national context (1984: 509). Despite increased interest since the 1980s in exploring and reconstructing Afro-Colombian history and culture,22 research on Afro-Colombian communities and cultural practices remains secondary to the study of indigenous groups. Images of blacks in Colombian popular discourse have been even more disheartening. For generations black people have been characterized as backward, lazy, infantile, stupid, and sexually promiscuous. Racist jokes and media images still abound in Colombia—until 1997 racist “humor” was a mainstay on a nationally televised Saturday evening variety show.23 While many Colombians like to believe that they do not live in a racist country, for Afro-Colombians the experience of racial discrimination is real.
Given their historical experience of marginalization from the nation’s cultural, political, and economic arenas, it is perhaps not surprising that black and mulato Caleños