Cumbia Above the River - Luis López - SAIC Gradshow 2020

Cumbia Above The River The rebirth of a musical genre 2,000 miles away from its home Luis López Levi

Introduction The death of Celso Piña on August 21, 2019, hit the cumbia scene hard. The singersongwriter, composer, and accordionist died suddenly of a heart attack at 66 years old during a routine checkup at a hospital in his hometown of Monterrey, with no previous signs of any major illness (Ruiz). Musicians who had collaborated with him immediately mourned his death on social media and journalists started to wax poetic about Piña’s contributions to cumbia and to Latin American music in general.

In an article for Spanish newspaper El País, Elías Camhaji said Piña was “remembered for his humility, his creative spirit, and as a transgressive artist who broke into the pop charts with a style that had been relegated from the conventional scene and conceived outside of Mexico” (Camhaji). Andrew Casillas, in a piece for Rolling Stone, went as far as to compare Piña’s legacy to that of a Beatle, writing that “he was to the accordion what George Harrison was to the guitar; whereas the former Beatle helped incorporate the sitar and Eastern influences to rock and roll, Piña specialized in marrying Colombian vallenato rhythms with North American styles like norteño and hip-hop” (Casillas).

At the time of his death, Piña was a successful touring musician who had performed in France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Japan, as well as all over Mexico, South America, and the U.S. (he was, in fact, in the middle of a North American tour when he died and had played in Chicago and Denver less than a week before his death). He was also frequently sought out for collaborations with both well-established and burgeoning musicians.

Piña is best known for performing Colombian cumbia and vallenato since 1982, but it took nearly 20 years for him to finally get on the path to success that he eventually pursued. This happened with his 2001 album Barrio Bravo (which translates to Rough Neighborhood), and particularly with its opening cut, “Cumbia Sobre El Río” (Cumbia

Above The River). This track, which combines elements of traditional cumbia from Colombia along with other urban sounds, acts, as I will argue in this paper, as a flagship song and a musical manifesto for the genre of Monterrey-based Colombian cumbia.

In this paper I will explain the origins of cumbia as a music and dance form originating on the Colombian Caribbean coast, its eventual appearance and embrace by the population of the Northeastern Mexican city of Monterrey, and the particular conditions that allowed the musical innovation for which “Cumbia Sobre El Río” is now known. I will also argue how this song, as a key example of Monterrey-based Colombian cumbia, manages to preserve the essential Afro-indigenous roots of the genre more so than other manifestations of it, mostly due to the grassroots conception of this particular subgenre of cumbia, forged by a hyperlocal musical scene rather than by large recording and broadcasting companies.

As someone born and raised in Monterrey, and who also became enamored by Celso Piña’s particular form of cumbia, I also write this paper in his honor to contribute to sharing why his music is successful and worth remembering after his death.

Cumbia’s Colombian Roots Cumbia started in the late 19th century in the Caribbean coast of Colombia, in what is now the Magdalena Department. According to Colombian choreographer and folklorist Delia Zapata Olivella, cumbia is like most Latin American styles of folk music in that it combines European, African, and indigenous elements both in its instrumentation and in its dance, which represents the amorous conquest of a woman by a man (92). This music can be performed by one of two folk ensembles, each one centered on a different wind instrument that plays the main melodic line: the conjunto de caña de millo, and the conjunto de gaitas (Zapata Olivella, 93).

The caña de millo is a transverse simple-reed clarinet that, according to Africanist ethnomusicologist George List, is a modified version of similar wind instruments played in Burkina Faso and Northern Ghana (qtd. in D’Amico, 34). The melodic line is accompanied by two conical drums: the tambor alegre and the smaller llamador, both of which display structural similarities with drums such as the sangbei from Sierra Leone,

the Afro-Venezuelan chimbangueles, the Afro-Panamanian pujador and repicador, and the Afro-Brazilian atabaque. (D’Amico, 34).

The other wind instrument that mainly performs cumbia is the gaita, a long flute made of bamboo and beeswax of which there are two versions: macho (male) and hembra (female) (List, 53). These flutes, List says, are descendants of similar flutes called kuizis and carrizos, originated by the indigenous Kogi tribe in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, in Northern Colombia (53). These wind instruments are accompanied by three percussion instruments: the aforementioned tambor alegre and llamador of African origin, and the maraca, also from the Kogi tribe (List, 53).

While Zapata Olivella claims that both ensembles traditionally perform cumbia, anthropologist Federico Ochoa Escobar argues that the conjunto de caña de millo is the only one to truly perform cumbia while the conjunto de gaitas performs in a similar, yet slightly different rhythm called porro (170). This confusion, he states, stems from the fact that “many times the word ‘cumbia’ is used as a generic term for any similar rhythm performed by coastal music groups” (Ochoa Escobar, 170). Regardless, both ensembles are popularly known in Colombia as performers of cumbia.

In the 1930s, jazz bands in Colombia started to perform different styles of Latin American tropical music, among which was cumbia, albeit arranged to fit in a new context, according to anthropologist Peter Wade (46). Band leaders such as Lucho Bermúdez would perform these rearranged versions, most of which use traditional jazz instrumentation with a basic recreation of the beat (Wade 46). This form of the genre grew in popularity among a broader Colombian audience beyond the Caribbean coastal region (Wade, 46). However, because of its strong association to black culture, the genre, although frequently danced and enjoyed by lighter-skinned audiences, was met with criticism from the same population (Wade 47). Wade writes, “What was evoked in this music was tropicality, sun, see, partying, and alegría (fun, happiness); blackness was an unspoken referent, evoked by these meanings linked to these elements–meanings not, of course, confined to a Colombian context, but common in the Americas, by the

association of the music with the Caribbean coastal region itself, and by the “hot” rhythm the music was felt to have” (Wade, 50).

Wade also lists examples of how cumbia’s black essence was either erased or fantasized in the 1930s and 40s. In several 1947 issues of the weekly magazine Sábado, columnist José Gers described this music as “savage and deafening noises... [which] express neither feelings, nor sadness, nor longings, nor happiness (although they may express an orgiastic and bacchanalian happiness)” (qtd. In Wade, 47), adding that “the gentlemen of the orchestra screech with a tragic fury, as if they were seasoning a joyful picnic of some ‘mister’ [i.e., a white boss] in a jungle in Oceania” (qtd.

In Wade, 47).

Cumbia’s essential sound as it is best known today, however, would be defined by a European instrument: the accordion, which first appeared in Colombia’s Caribbean shores in 1869, according to customs documents from that time cited by economic historian Joaquín Viloria de la Hoz. The historian collects accounts from late 19th century chroniclers who describe accordion playing in cumbiambas, festive events or venues where cumbia was performed (Viloria de la Hoz). Although the gaitas and the caña de millo continue to be played in Colombia to this day, the accordion essentially took their musical place in cumbia, as most performers of the genre today play it in this instrument.

Because Viloria de la Hoz is a historian of economics and not an anthropologist or ethnomusicologist, he does not go into much detail on the musical consequences of incorporating the accordion into cumbia, focusing instead on details that help track the appearances of the first accordions in Colombia. I have not come across literature that specifically goes in depth into how the accordion shapes the musicality of cumbia. It is safe to conclude, however, that the accordion also offers increased practicality to a musical ensemble, who need only purchase the instrument instead of crafting wooden wind instruments. The accordion also enables a single player to perform a polyphonic melody and harmonic accompaniment, allowing one musician to recreate the same melodic lines as two separate wind players.

Although it has been a part of cumbia’s soundscape for more than a century, the accordion only became more associated with cumbia on a mainstream level all over Colombia in the 1970s as Alfonso López Michelsen, former Colombian president and governor of the Cesar Department, campaigned for genre of vallenato to become a national popular music for the masses (D’Amico, 42) Vallenato, which hails from the town of Valledupar in the Cesar Department in Northern Colombia, just south of the Caribbean coast, has a similar rhythmic and melodic structure to that of cumbia, and also has tricultural roots. The genre’s traditional instrumentation consists of an accordion and two percussion instruments: a caja (a kind of drum) and a guacharaca (a handheld, wooden tube scraped with a metallic fork) (Wade and Chadwick, 124). Ethnomusicologist Leonardo D’Amico writes, “Having garnered official validation thanks to a process of increased acceptance by the Andean middle classes and enjoying steady support by selected members of Bogotá’s ruling classes, vallenato was losing its plebeian connotations (being an expression of the lower social strata of northeastern coastal populations) and an image closely associated with drug trafficking and smuggling during the late 1970s, to become a type of music disseminated and appreciated by the entire country and all social classes” (D’Amico, 42-43) This prompted performers of vallenato to incorporate cumbia into their repertoire and vice versa, developing a trend in which many performers played both musical styles, and in which the genre of cumbia started to be most commonly performed with the traditional instruments of vallenato. The nationwide promotion of cumbia and vallenato continued in the early 1990s thanks to singer and telenovela actor Carlos Vives, who rose to fame after playing famous vallenato composer Rafael Escalona in a hit Colombian soap opera and eventually becoming a major musical star performing fusions of vallenato, cumbia and rock (D’Amico, 43). Vives’s records “attracted middleclass youth (who had previously disparaged vallenato) and they sold very well abroad” (Wade and Chadwick, 125).

Thus, the popularity of the accordion in cumbia, even though it had already been a part of the genre since the 19th century, seems to have been boosted by a top-down cultural imposition by the media and government. The instrument, however, managed to retain the sonic essence of cumbia’s Afro-indigenous root, mainly in its limited dynamic range and the repetitive nature of its melodies. Accordion-based cumbia, even if born out of a cultural imposition, in fact maintains a closer tie to the genre’s roots than the jazz-bandorchestrated versions of the 1940s that privileged more European elements, such as traditional harmonic progressions and polyphony that are not present in the root versions of cumbia. This will be key in the genre’s indirect preservation of its Afroindigenous roots as it finds a second home 2,000 miles away, in Mexico.

Colombian Cumbia travels to Mexico The earliest recordings of cumbia in Mexico arrived in Mexico City in the 1950s thanks to the country’s music industry, which imported and sold early cumbia songs recorded

by Colombian big bands who performed all sorts of different Caribbean genres, and distributed by American record companies like Columbia Records and RCA Victor (Olvera Gudiño, 38). According to sociologist José Juan Olvera Gudiño in his book Colombianos de Monterrey, the film industry also played a key role in popularizing cumbia nationwide, and particularly in Mexico City (38).

However, not long after cumbia’s breakthrough in the nation’s capital, Ernesto Uruchurtu, the city’s Regent at the time, decided to heavily restrict the production and distribution not only of cumbia, but of the whole tropical music scene of which cumbia was a part, ostensibly because it incited prostitution and vices, prompting a situation in which “now unemployed musicians who no longer had a place in the burgeoning television industry emigrated to cities on the Northern border” (Olvera Gudiño, 38). The decline of these specialized bands did not result in a decline of demand for this music that had suddenly become forbidden, Olvera Gudiño adds, so this phenomenon contributed to a simplification of cumbia as it started to be embraced by other artists, mostly amateurs, who would play the accordion parts on a keyboard and the percussion parts on a modern drum kit, thus eliminating many of the genre’s professional arrangements (39). This simplification, however, did not translate into more accessibility

for wider audiences, but rather in a gradual adaptation of musical tastes that resulted in a population who sought out simplified commercial cumbia rather than roots cumbia (Olvera Gudiño, 39).

While the professional musicians moved to several locations in search for new job opportunities, two factors help explain why Monterrey, the capital of the state of Nuevo León and the largest city in Northern Mexico, became an important hub for them. On the one hand, the city was (and continues to be) Mexico’s richest industrial boomtown, enjoying a high level of economic development and standard of living compared to the rest of the country. This then favored the existence of “a strong media presence with enough technology to build and develop cultural products–among them musical tastes– especially by the radio and phonographic industries” (Olvera Gudiño, 40).

The other factor is Monterrey’s proximity to the United States, at just 140 miles to the border with Laredo, Texas. For decades the city has enjoyed a healthy cultural trade with the nearby city of Houston, Texas, which also includes the exchange of artists on both sides of the border, with Northeastern Mexican artists like Bronco and Rigo Tovar enjoying success on the Texan side and Tejano artists like Selena and La Mafia becoming popular on the Mexican side (Olvera Gudiño, 41).

Also noteworthy is the fact that Monterrey already enjoyed a strong accordion tradition of its own in its popular rhythms of polka, redova, huapango, and chotis, whose performers started to experiment with Colombian cumbia in the mid-1960s, says Olvera Gudiño in his article “Cumbia in Mexico’s Northeastern Region” (91). Of particular importance, he adds, is the Colombian group Corraleros del Majagual, who in 1968 had a brief residence in the border town of Nuevo Laredo, acting as an artistic node and bringing several Colombian artists to perform there, notably the vallenato composer Aniceto Molina (Olvera Gudiño, 92).

This link between Monterrey and Houston, Olvera Gudiño argues, also indirectly explains the parallel appearance of another style of cumbia, that of Colombian cumbia in Monterrey. This happened not because of the exchange in performers of the genre, but because Houston’s Mexican-run record stores (Discolandia being the most famous

one) were key places to acquire recordings imported from Colombia that were otherwise nearly inaccessible in Mexico (54).

These Colombian recordings were of particular interest to sonideros, DJs who played music at parties in the Colonia Independencia neighborhood on Monterrey’s south side.

This neighborhood, just south of the city’s Santa Catarina River and overlooking downtown Monterrey from atop the Loma Larga hill, developed as a hub for national immigrants, mostly from the nearby state of San Luis Potosí who settled in the area between 1940 and 1965 during an immigration wave that quintupled Monterrey’s population (the neighborhood is popularly known as San Luisito because of this) (Sandoval Hernández and Escamilla). The neighborhood, which grew as an irregular settlement, has historically lacked proper power and sanitation and has been often perceived as a dangerous neighborhood, even though it is also a historically commercial area where people from different neighborhoods and socioeconomic conditions throughout Monterrey gathered for weekend or holiday shopping for affordable goods in a marketplace situation (Sandoval Hernández and Escamilla). It has mainly attracted a working class population, the majority of which is employed as domestic servants, construction workers, low-level factory personnel, or in the informal sector as flea market vendors (Ramos-Kittrell, 196).

In the 1980s, the children of these migrants, commonly known as colombias, while born in Monterrey, grew up, according to ethnomusicologist Jesús Ramos-Kittrell, with “a tension between the stigma attached to their socioeconomic condition and the dominant construction of Monterrey as a hotbed for economic progress” (195). This population did not fit into the city’s ideal success model of coming from an established family with deep roots in the city, attending a good private school, and practicing a titled profession such as business management, engineering, or medicine (Ramos-Kittrell, 196). These youths, Ramos-Kittrell argues, were not only marginalized by the city in which they were born, but also often lived in dysfunctional family situations, which led them to find solace in the Colombian cumbia music that the sonideros played at parties, often relating to their lyrical content which talked about social hardship and marginality (197). This sentiment is exacerbated by an act of reclaiming public urban space by playing cumbia

on boom boxes on the street corner and dancing to it, often while drinking beer or taking drugs (Ramos-Kittrell, 200).

This led the colombias of Colonia Independencia to fully embrace the musical elements of cumbia, but not from mainstream channels like the recording industry or the main radio and TV broadcasting companies. They instead appropriated it from these hyperlocal parties led by sonideros, who acquired their records either by directly importing them from Colombia or, more commonly, by purchasing them in the US and taking them back across the border. This situation then created two parallel cumbia scenes in Monterrey: the official one backed by studio executives and broadcasters, and the alternative one born in this neighborhood and only distributed by local DJs and small-scale AM radio stations (Ramos-Kittrell, 197). Paradoxically, the latter form of the genre would eventually prevail as the most successful of the two, all thanks to Celso Piña and his hit track “Cumbia Sobre el Río.”

Celso Amplifies Cumbia Born in 1953 in a neighborhood adjacent to Colonia Independencia, accordionist and singer-songwriter Celso Piña became interested in Colombian music precisely because of the sonidero scene, which exposed him to musicians like Alfredo Gutiérrez, Aníbal Velásquez, and Andrés Landero (De La Fuente). One of these sonideros was Gabriel Duéñez, a particularly avid collector who has amassed over 2,000 records of Colombian music (Sattley). He is also credited with the invention of the rebajada (lowered or reduced) style, in which a cumbia track is performed in a lower RPM setting than how it was originally intended, resulting in a slower, deeper sound that emphasizes the bass register (Sattley). In an interview for the Austin Chronicle, he claims to have discovered this sound by accident in 1965 after a tape recorder malfunction, then playing this version at a party where it was well received, prompting listeners to ask for rebajada versions of other songs and for other DJs to imitate this sound in their own practice (Sattley).

Duéñez’s musical influence extended beyond the Colonia Independencia into the rest of the Monterrey metropolitan area. One of the musicians he inspired was DJ and music

producer Antonio Hernández, also known by his stage name Toy Selectah. Hernández did not grow up in Colonia Independencia and had an upbringing more similar to that of what Ramos Kittrell would call ideal for Monterrey. Born in the upper-middle class neighborhood of Vista Hermosa and educated in private schools, he started to dip his toes in music production by DJing in local shopping mall record stores (Medellín).

In the late 1990s, Hernández traveled to L.A., where he absorbed the sonic aesthetics of hip-hop and dub alongside the tropical music enjoyed by Mexican-American communities in East L.A. (Ramos-Kittrell, 196). Upon returning to Monterrey, he started visiting the sonideros, particularly Gabriel Duéñez, and became enamored with his rebajada style, which then prompted a series of experiments combining cumbia, reggae, dub, and rap, a sonic mix that he would eventually denominate “Sonidero Nacional” (Ramos-Kittrell, 196). This experimentation eventually led to the song “Cumbia Sobre El Río” (Cumbia Above The River), produced by Hernández for Piña’s 2001 album Barrio Bravo (Rough Neighborhood).

Piña, who often performed with his brothers Rubén, Eduardo, and Enrique in the ensemble Ronda Bogotá, had up to this point been known both for covering songs by Colombian artists and for writing his own tunes exclusively in the traditional vallenato instrumentation, sometimes adding a bass guitar as a musical emulsifier to tie the accordion and the percussion instruments together. But “Cumbia Sobre El Río,” the album’s main single, took the accordionist’s style to a whole new sonic landscape. A nearly six-minute-long song with a constant 2-beat rhythm and a consistently deep bass guitar, the song put a dub aesthetic under Piña’s accordion and vocals, who also shared the microphone with the late Venezuelan rapper Blanquito Man of the band King Changó and fellow Monterrey-born emcee Pato Machete, of the now defunct hip-hop act Control Machete, for which Hernández was also DJ. A similar approach was given to other songs in the album, such as “Cumbia Poder,” which Piña recorded alongside the Monterrey-based rock group El Gran Silencio, who had started to experiment with the sounds of cumbia in their own work before this album.

It is worth analyzing both lyrical and sonic elements of the song in order to understand why it became a manifesto for Hernández’s “Sonidero Nacional” sound and for

Colombian cumbia from Monterrey in general. The very beginning of the song features a filtered recording, as if from an old cassette player or an AM radio, of Celso Piña playing slow notes on the accordion. This is playing under a recording of Piña himself in an interview, in which he says “this music, it isn’t played live, let’s see, play it live, well who’s gonna play it live? Well I’m gonna play it live, man!” This refers to the challenges Piña faced when he started performing this musical style, often struggling to find an audience for it beyond his community in and around Colonia Independencia (Olvera Gudiño, 80). Piña, Olvera Gudiño chronicles, refused to play other styles that weren’t Colombian cumbia or vallenato, even if that would have opened an easier path for him earlier as a professionally recording musician (81).

This sentiment is amplified a few seconds after the main beat drops. A clip of Piña in the same interview continues, followed by his voice testing a microphone and complaining about sound levels in a way that evokes a live music setting, especially over the reverbheavy beat that has at this point established itself sonically. After this cold open of sorts, a voice with a strong delay announces Piña, saying “In the new millennium, the Rebel of the Accordion continues to march triumphantly!” This is voiced in the style of the sonideros, who not only played music at parties, but also acted as emcees, speaking over the music and adding to the party environment (Bartra, 96). Piña’s refusal to change his musical style eventually earned him the nickname with which the sonidero voice introduces him: “Rebel of the Accordion” (Rebelde del Acordeón) (Olvera Gudiño, 81).

Rapper Pato Machete’s verse in “Cumbia Sobre El Río” also references the sonideros in the verse where he raps “Sonidero Nacional, humming the beat, born in the hood, freestyle vallenato.” He not only pays homage to the sonideros but also announces Hernández’s Sonidero Nacional project in this manifesto-like vocabulary, where he mentions the birthplace of the movement and its essential sound that mixes cumbia and vallenato with other genres.

The song also alludes to sonidero Gabriel Duénez’s rebajada style. The track features Venezuelan rapper Blanquito Man, whose verse includes the phrase “dancing on the mountain with my mate Celso Piña/ rebajada, fine cumbia.” The moment he pronounces

the word rebajada, a filter lowers his voice’s pitch, recreating the way the rebajada process works.

In the first proper verse in the song, Piña sings “look, how exciting it sounds/ the water carries the rhythm/ look at how she turns and soars/ while that guy over there just sways/ just sways.” This is a multilayered reference that starts with the most basic interpretation: a description of the song’s dance. The traditional dance of cumbia from Colombia performed with gaitas or caña de millo is, according to Zapata Olivella, a representation of an amorous conquest in which, she writes, “The woman carries in her raised right hand one or more lighted candles and with her left hand she holds her skirt and marks the rhythm. The candles serve two functions, to light the way and as a weapon by which the woman defends herself against the advances of her partner. He, in turn, must be ready to avoid the woman’s thrusts of the burning candles” (92-93).

However, the dance in the Monterrey version of Colombian cumbia does not resemble this original dance. Instead of dancing as couples, Monterrey youths often dance to this music on their own in a step popularly known as the “dance of the hawk” (El baile del gavilán). Ramos-Kittrell describes it as, “A movement where people lightly squat moving their feet back and forward in alternation while flopping their arms and elbows like wings. An alternate version of the dance involves a fist on the mouth while the other hand is open and fakes pushing against the fist from below, simulating the way some colombias dance while inhaling chemical substances from paper bags, such as glue or paint thinner” (199).

This form of the dance, Ramos-Kittrell argues, is not rooted in romantic or sexual seduction, but as a way to reappropriate the public space that has been historically neglected to colombias, to take over a corner of the city, blast music and sway to it without structure (200). This is why Piña’s lyrics emphasize a male and female figure

dancing in the same space, but each one moving to their own particular steps, rather than as a couple.

The same verse, however, also introduces the imagery of the river in the line “the river carries the rhythm,” as well as another couplet further into the song: “the river and the good cadence/ dreams over a melody,” and, of course, the title of the song. The allusion to the figure of a river, Ramos-Kittrell argues, is twofold. It refers both to the Rio Grande as the body of water on the eastern half of the U.S.-Mexico border and becomes a metaphor for international migration, and to the Santa Catarina River, a nearly empty riverbed that separates the Colonia Independencia, on the south, and downtown Monterrey, on the north, and a river that national migrants who live in Independencia must cross everyday to go to work (Ramos-Kittrell, 196-197). However, I offer a third layer to this reference: an allusion to Colombia’s Rio Magdalena, the birthplace of cumbia and a poetic statement that acknowledges that cumbia thrives in places with rivers, bodies of water that sway to its rhythm.

Preservation of Afro-indigenous Origin The population that originated Colombian cumbia in Monterrey has no direct African ancestry, yet this musical manifestation managed to bring back several of the traditional genre’s key Afro-Indigenous elements, mainly by bypassing the official channels of the recording and broadcasting industries as it was developed. Norteña cumbia was heavily influenced by the música tropical movement, which actively hindered cumbia’s Afroindigenous elements and privileged its European ones. The cumbia from Colonia Independencia, on the other hand, maintained the original Colombian styles, often performed by Afro-indigenous musicians, by preserving the same accordion-led instrumentation. However, this music mixed with other black-originated genres like hiphop and dub to create an end product that is evidently descended from, but ultimately entirely distinguishable from traditional cumbia from Colombia.

In his article “Cumbia in Mexico’s Northeastern Region,” José Juan Olvera Gudiño highlights Celso Piña as a key figure in performing a sound that is faithful to authentic Colombian cumbia, and this decision ultimately exacerbated the genre’s African and

indigenous origins in the way it was performed in Monterrey (96). From a sociological point of view, he argues, “The most important aspect of this period is that, by respecting the style of songs imported from Colombia, this musical preference restored Amerindian and African components in Mexico. In this way, cumbia and vallenato, diffused and homogenized in grupera expressions, recovered their melodic and rhythmic distinctions” (96).

Olvera Gudiño argues that Monterrey’s (and particularly Piña’s) own expression of Colombian cumbia managed to preserve the genre’s Afro-indigenous roots by following the Colombian tradition as closely as possible, unlike the grupera and norteña versions of the genre that continued the tradition of the Western orchestrations in mid-20th century recordings. However, I argue that Piña achieves this even in “Cumbia Sobre El Río,” despite its instrumentation deliberately breaking certain traditions of cumbia and vallenato in Colombia by incorporating sonic aspects of other traditionally black genres like hip-hop and dub. This is not only true because the musical styles mixed with cumbia are also typically performed by black populations, but because of the sense of repetition that they evoke.

In his article “On Repetition In Black Culture,” James A. Snead maintains that the repetitive nature of black music defies the Western school of thought based on progress and fixed goal-setting (652). Snead then defines an essential aspect of repetition by analyzing the phenomenon of the “cut,” one in which, he says, “The ‘cut’ overtly exists on the repetitive nature of the music, by abruptly skipping it back to another beginning which we have already held.

Moreover, the greater the insistence on the pure beauty and value of the repetition, the greater the awareness must also be that repetition takes place on a level not of musical development or progression, but on the purest tonal and timbric level” Snead (Snead, 652).

Snead uses African music and African-American genres such as jazz, blues, and funk as case studies for his research. However, I believe the same argument can be made

for an Afro-Colombian style like cumbia, not only in its root form, but also in its manifestation by the colombias of Monterrey. The “cut,” Snead argues, leads to a constant “re-staging of the past” (652), emphasizing a sense of stasis that ultimately allows everyone in a particular community to join in at any moment. “That the beat is there to pick up,” he writes, “does not mean that it must have been metronomic, but merely that it must have been at one point begun and that it must be at any point ‘social’” (652).

The “cut,” in the way Snead refers to it, is immediately noticeable in Celso Piña’s accordion playing. Piña’s style is repetitive in nature, often playing the same melodic line multiple times before moving to the next one. This is accentuated by the fact that “Cumbia Sobre El Río” is almost entirely in a simple harmonic pattern that alternates between the root and the dominant chord (i-V), creating a back and forth sensation.

Returning to Ramos-Kittrell’s description of the “dance of the hawk,” where the young colombias dance to the rhythm on their own, yet in community and in a public space (usually on a street corner) being there for each other and for other colombias who wish to join. The variation of the step where they dance with their fist covering their mouth, as if inhaling glue or paint thinner, is also a representation of their own hardships and a way of connecting to other youths who may be in a similar situation. This is all particularly emphasized in “Cumbia Sobre El Río” in its use of a bass-heavy beat that, once started, does not stop until the end of the song.

Crossing the River The song, like the rest of the album, instantly became a hit by offering a fresh take on the genre. The album was soon nominated for Best Tropical Album at the 2002 Latin Grammy Awards and started to be broadcast on radio stations throughout Mexico and beyond, capturing the attention of foreign journalists who traveled from Spain and Argentina to Monterrey to interview him (Sattley). Most importantly, writes music journalist Bruno Bartra, this record inspired a proliferation of electronic artists that are still quite active nowadays, such as Bomba Estéreo from Colombia, Damas Gratis from Argentina, and Mexican Institute of Sound from Mexico, to incorporate cumbia into their

musical palette (99). “What the Monterrey-based DJ [Hernández] did with his Sonidero Nacional and his work on Barrio Bravo,” Barta says, “was to demonstrate that cumbia could walk the roads of musical innovation as well as those of cultural and ideological alternatives” (Bartra, 98).

Piña’s career skyrocketed after this success, continuing to record music in the cumbiadub style and booking tours to the US, Europe, and Asia. If “Cumbia Sobre El Río” was the first step to call attention to Monterrey’s Colombian cumbia scene, what truly finished the job was a visit to Monterrey by Colombian writer and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, who attended an award ceremony at the city’s contemporary art museum in 2003. Knowing that García Márquez was a lover of cumbia and vallenato, Piña was invited to perform that night, prompting the Nobel laureate to dance, a move that was perceived as a form of validation not only from a notable Colombian, but by a well-respected figure in world literature (De La Fuente).

Conclusion Cumbia is a Colombian folk genre of music and dance with strong Afro-indigenous roots that started in the late 19th century. Through several cultural developments, mostly due to top-down impositions by the Colombian government, the country’s media and its largest recording companies, it morphed into different forms, among them the jazzband-like style that minimizes Afro-indigenous elements and prioritizes European orchestrations. Eventually, the most popular form of the genre became the accordioncentric cumbia that continues to be frequently performed and recorded to this day.

Cumbia then arrived in Mexico by way of that country’s music and film industries, which were centralized in Mexico City. A ban of the genre and of the big-band-like ensembles who performed it, by a local politician, forced the genre’s musicians to disperse into other cities in search of better job opportunities. The genre eventually made its way into the Northeastern industrial boomtown of Monterrey, where norteño-style groups started performing it in a similar style to the jazz bands in Colombia.

In parallel to all this, cumbia became a staple in southern Monterrey, specifically in the impoverished Colonia Independencia neighborhood, where the scene of DJs called

sonideros who developed a taste for authentic, accordion-based version of cumbia, and gradually created a scene around it. Many of the musical style’s followers of this music in Monterrey are not of Colombian descent, nor have they ever been to the country. Yet the sound became a neighborhood staple, particularly embraced by the colombias, children of internal immigrants who felt stigmatized for not fitting into Monterrey’s socioeconomic ideal.

Through an equipment malfunction, one of the neighborhood’s sonideros, Gabriel Duéñez, accidentally lowered the RPM of a Colombian song, creating a slower, deeper sound called rebajada that eventually became popular in parties. Musicians then started recreating the style of the rebajada not by slowing down their recordings, but by playing them like that to begin with.

Musician Celso Piña grew up in that scene and started performing authentic accordionbased cumbia and vallenato from Colombia in the 1980s, but his success as a musician came two decades later when he recorded the song “Cumbia Sobre El Río,” off his 2001 album Barrio Bravo, a track that became a musical manifesto of this Monterreyborn cumbia. The song was produced by Monterrey-born DJ Antonio Hernández, better known by his stage name “Toy Selectah.”

“Cumbia Sobre el Río” maintains two essential elements of traditional Colombian cumbia: the use of accordion and the simple, two-beat rhythm. But it developed in a substantially different soundscape, a result of adapting this traditionally rural musical genre into an urban context nearly 2,000 miles away from its homeland.

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