[Curiosities] Get ready: There are musical alerts

[Noticias ALEJANDRO]

Music in the Caribbean and in Latin America in general has resources for all tastes, which are usually handled and interpreted by those who have greater knowledge through experience of the codes that move in these still enigmatic territories.

The street is usually the site of teaching, reflection, and daily alertness. With those codes, sometimes very subtle and sometimes explicit. As an example of the explicit is the famous décima by Ignacio Piñeiro, the Cuban sonero who turned the chronicle into a weapon: Stop who's going/ the guerrilla!/ boys with machete in hand/ those are our brothers/ but of bad seed…/ lazy, misunderstood/ drunk and perverted/ who sell Cuba/ their land/ the homeland where they have grown up/.
Carlos Puebla would do the same: “The fun is over: the Commander arrived and ordered it to stop!

There is a very famous one by Pedro Ortíz Dávila, The legendary Davilita of Puerto Rico: “And it is angry to see how cruel/traitors and foreigners are with my people/Where we go, what we are looking for/what we want/Enough of slavery/it has been four centuries.” / That's it, it's good to be like the lamb/ Let's be like the anvil of Luquillo”

 

 

The alerts transmitted through music come from the same process of invasion of the Abya Yala territories. Both the native peoples and the enslaved people who arrived from Africa had in their chords and rituals the elements that fortified their resistance. Many of these elements endure and have been maintained in the form of tradition.

That sense of resistance, of irony and even of pretending not to understand to mislead the adversary who tries to subdue the one who resists has been maintained over time, acquiring sounds that emerged from the colonizing process itself, and from miscegenation.

The tango, the joropo, the ranchera song, the vallenato, the son montuno, the guaracha, the galerón, the tumbarito, the palo de mayo, the merengue, the candombe, in short, the immense musical diversity that we are maintains links with that resistance ancestral, and with the current one.

 

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