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Bomba dance11/30/2022 Leading the drummer is one of the elements that attracts Mar to bomba. Although there are archetypical rhythmic patterns, prominently holandés, yuba and sica, the life of bomba is in the improvisational interplay between dancer and the primo barril - with the dancer taking the lead. “No one is going to judge you.”Ī bomba percussion ensemble generally comprises a few barriles, hand drums originally made from rum barrels, with differing pitches determining musical roles a cuá, or barrel drum played with sticks and a time-keeping maraca, often played by a singer. “Anyone can join the dance,” María says of the venue’s nightly bomba events. Wearing traditional long, ruffled skirts, the Cruz sisters dance in the streets of San Juan, the island’s historic port city in front of a cave near Loíza that is believed to have sheltered Black people who’d escaped their captors, and at one of Puerto Rico’s traditional chinchorros - a casual place to eat and drink - to the rhythms of the popular local act Tendencias. It brings viewers performances from San Juan, Santurce and Loíza, important sites of Afro-Puerto Rican culture. This episode of “If Cities Could Dance” highlights the artists and communities committed to bomba in its many forms, inviting new meanings and political significance in the 21st century. “Those Black slaves who danced in the past, that was their only method of self-expression.” Sisters Mar and María Cruz. “I’m representing my ancestors,” says María. There used to be lynchings here too.”Ī new movement to assert Black pride and to acknowledge the island’s complex history of racism is part of the resurgence of bomba, providing Mar and her sister María, along with many more Afro-Puerto Rican performers in both Puerto Rico and diaspora communities, a creative outlet to celebrate their oft-suppressed cultural heritage. They are finally willing to say, ‘That was a tragedy!’ But they are racist too. “People have always been racist towards us. “That death didn’t only affect the African American community but also the Afro-Puerto Rican community,” says Mar. Since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, groups like Colectivo Ilé have shared their grief through the dance. In Puerto Rico’s center of Black culture, Loíza, bomba is at the heart of protests. “When we have something to say to protest, we go out there and play bomba,” says Mar. Like other Afro-Caribbean cultural forms, bomba provided a source of political and spiritual expression for people who’d been forcibly uprooted from their homes, at times catalyzing rebellions. Slavery fueled sugar production and many other industries, and continued until 1873, when a law creating a gradual ban went into effect. The movement and sound of bomba originate in the practices of West Africans brought to the Caribbean island by European colonizers as slaves in the 17th century, and over time absorbed influences from the Spanish as well as the region’s indigenous Taíno people.
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