The Soundtrack of Society: Rhythm and Liberation in Aníbal Quijano
By Victor Hugo Pacheco Chávez
Aníbal Quijano is remembered by his family, friends, students and close colleagues, as a character who liked music and dancing. One of the most moving images we have of him is the one offered in “Aníbal Quijano: socialización del poder como cuestión central del socialismo” by Rodrigo Montoya Rojas: “When I listened to him singing this zamba and ancashina songs from his land in Quechua, I saw for the first time a politician who seemed like José María Arguedas and who was different from the rest. That dream in youth and maturity, of all his life, was socialism” (56).
The analogy made by Rojas between Quijano and Arguedas is powerful because the novelist and anthropologist was effectively characterized in his intellectual work by a commitment to recovering the tradition of Andean popular music. It is not a coincidence that in Cuestiones y horizontes when Quijano comments on Alberto Escobar´s book, Arguedas o la utopia de la lengua, in which Arguedas´ relationship with Andeans songs is analyzed, that he establishes an idiom around Jacques Attali’s phrase “music is the soundtrack of the society” and his translation of Andean popular music through a “linguistic soundtrack” (691).
The “soundtrack of society” implies a whole mode of knowledge and strategies in which music reveals the changes and continuities occurring within a community. These soundtracks, which were first observed in the Andean area, acquired great relevance when pointing out the way in which Caribbean music subverts and transform Latin-American culture as a whole. To Quijano, Caribbean music, and more broadly the sounds and songs produced by those with African heritage, marked two possible ways of facing the world. The tragic soundtrack, as seen with jazz music, placed emphasis on the sufferer. The joyful and festive soundtrack, as seen in son cubano, instead carried rhythms of celebration. As Quijano notes in “Fiesta y poder en el Caribe”:
They say Marx liked “negro spiritual” [1] and Hobsbawm (although behind Francis Newton: The Jazz Scene) was the first of the European intellectuals to proclaim the jazz was the only genuine music revolution of the twentieth century. None of them did it by accident: with all the difficulties of the Eurocentric thread of their perspectives, both of them bet all of their talent and strength in the struggle for the liberation of the exploited/dominated/discriminated of the world (3).
Jazz in addition to being a song that reflected the suffering of black people, was also a rebellious music, a music that did not fit with Eurocentric rationalism. It should not be forgotten that the jazz boom took place mainly in the first decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps Quijano was thinking, as several of his contemporaries did, about Louis Armstrong who represented the condensation of African heritage in the United States. [2] Through black music, audiences were confronted with exploitation, domination, and discrimination—or the soundtrack of struggle.
In addition, Quijano was also directly or indirectly influenced by Peruvian music, such as the huayno, the son, the chicha music, creole music, and the zamacueca. These rhythms were products of Peruvian cultural exchanges that mostly has been established under miscegenation logics, but their legacies also include the vindication of the afro, not only as a cultural issue but in a broad sense as a movement linked to the logics of blackness within the mid-twentieth century. Precisely, in this period, the political and aesthetic vindication of the African heritage in Peru can be seen in musicians such as Carlos “Caitro” Soto de la Colina, Abelardo y Vicente Vázquez, Rolando Campos or Félix Casaverde, among others. It should also be noted that the work of dance and theater from the Afro-Peruvian brother and sister, Nicomedes and Victoria Santa Cruz, were also instrumental in these musical movements. [3] Victoria Santa Cruz, in the seventies, vindicated the zamacueca, whose origin dates back to the African dances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the Peruvian coast, which were later creolized with Andean rhythms also known as creole music. In this sense, it is worth noting Quijano’s personal taste for the Ancashino huaynos, which we know from testimonies that he sang in Quechua, a language he spoke since his childhood, as well as his taste for Atahualpa Yupanqui’s songs, which can well be considered as Andean music since they retain the influence of the Peruvian huaynos or zamba, despite the transfer of these rhythms to northern Argentina.
[Juan Carlos Ñañake, “Tribute to the Musician” (2020)]
Thus, while it may seem curious that in the nineties Quijano points to chicha music as a place where the conflictive relations between culture, society, and power can be shown in “El tiempo de la agonía.” This music, which originated in the seventies, is typical of the barriadas:
Could it be very difficult to find someone who composes valsecitos criollos nowadays, but the chicha is the first musical product that comes from within this country in fifty years; with all its magmatic nature, indefinite, it puts together the melodic structure of the huayno, the rhythmic structure of the cumbia and sounds of what it is circulating on international television and radio, jazz, rock, whatever. And sometimes they are sour sounds, and if you forget a little about the rhetoric of their lyrics and stick more to the image and the sound circulating there, you figure out there is yeast of a communications structure that affect us all, from Puno to Piura. It is not casual that chicha has a very curious history. It comes through the coca route, through the Colombian route, through the Huallaga, enters the valley of Mantaro, in Lima, and there it modifies in certain way to become what it is now (296).
The Caribbean soundtrack, likewise, also impacted the Andean landscape by offering a distinct type of liberation, one that Quijano established as a revolution of cultural subversion. Thus, while this musical influence could be found in Puerto Rico, it was also an element that had ties in the Afro-Peruvian heritage of the area. Quijano writes in “Fiesta y poder en el Caribe” that:
Chuco Quintero has found, in the splendid book that gives origin to these notes, the formidable personal experience that made me recast among a crowd of thousands of “blacks” who marched and sang at Rafael Cortijo’s funeral in 1982. For the first time I could directly feel what had barely been a prolonged suspicion during almost three decades, since when at the Peruvian archives I asked of the colonial documents, how did the “black” slaves continue to live, tortured, humiliated, and offended, without truce and fee. This suspicion began listening to music named afroperuana in the 59s’ Peru. It took hold listening to the “black” music of the United States, at the same time I studied the relations between “whites” and “blacks” (1; 26-27).
The “soundtrack of society” finds its subversive element exactly where it cannot be reduced to silence. In fact, the value of the music is precisely that it is more difficult to submit to silence. That is why Attali in Ruidos: Ensayo sobre la economía política de la música establishes an equation that resonated deeply with Quijano: “With the noise was born disorder and its opposite: the world. With music, power and its opposite were born: subversion” (15). The heritage of Caribbean music in the Andes then allows for a subversion of rhythm, which represents the legacies of African culture in the region and contributes to the construction of a Latin-American utopia.
This consideration is mediated in Quijano by a vision that today we can call pluriversal—one where the identity of the region is constituted from diverse and heterogeneous cultural fields that make the American space larger than the indigenous nucleus. For this reason, Quijano, Gustavo Gutiérrez y Sinesio López in “Mariátegui contra la expropiación de la utopía” established the matrix of utopia in Latin America as a knot composed of three threads:
One is the reciprocity, the social solidarity, the collective work, which is probably more or less what we can formulate as the utopia that is born from the experience, an experience called Indian-prehispanic. The second one is the idea of individual freedom, of social freedom, the idea of the future as something to conquer and build, therefore, the idea of change, the idea of the democratic auto-production of society, and that is not Indian, that’s European, it’s an America’s heritage. But there is a third utopia that comes from Africa and comes with this assessment and this exercise of corporality, comes with the idea of rhythm, with the joyful party as resistance against oppression and suffering, comes with the direct democracy, comes with the idea of community. All of this is part of what Latin-American culture is (42).
This consideration of Latin American culture only could be made by Quijano when he assumed a closer relationship with Boricua soundtracks. [4] The structuring of this utopia is based on the fact that for Quijano the "black rhythm", which was born in the resistance against suffering in the Americas, is the sound of subversion throughout the world. [5] To be liberated from slavery then is not only a political or spiritual matter but rather it is also a process that requires the liberation of bodies.
For Quijano, black rhythm is based on a primordial materiality in struggle. In this regard, he points out in “Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social” that: "Corporeality is the decisive level of power relations" (380). This relationship between rhythm and dance liberates the body in different ways. Not only does it provide pleasure as such, but it is in the body itself where leisure becomes a moment of enjoyment and where the joy of work frees the body from exploitation and from punishment (the punitive societies that have existed up to now always find in the body, in the repression of the body, the expiation of guilt). There is also in the body a chance at political liberation, wherein modes of repression and annihilation are combatted (380). The subversiveness of the black rhythm is that it calls attention to antiblack racism and the need for resistance for anyone that listens to its song. The “soundtrack of society” then is always part of an aesthetics of resistance.
Notes
[1] The Spiritual or Negro spiritual is a musical genre created in the eighteenth century in the United States. It became popular among enslaved Africans and their descendants in the nineteenth century. Francis Wheen, one of Karl Marx's biographers, remembers that a familiar and common scene with Marx was to see him return home, after a picnic, ending his day reciting Shakespeare to his daughters and singing negro spirituals or German folk songs. See Francis Wheen. “Karl Marx: A Life.” C-SPAN Video Library, 2000.
[2] See Aníbal Quijano. “Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina.” Anuario Mariateguiano 9:9 (1997): 126.
[3] See Fernado Elías Llanos. “El renacer afroperuano de 1950: discursos sobre la música negra de la costa peruana.” ORFEU 3:2 (2018): 25-43.
[4] See Aníbal Quijano. “Fiesta y poder en el Caribe (Notas a propósito de Ángel Quintero: Salsa, sabor y control).” Diálogo (1999).
[5] See Aníbal Quijano. “El tiempo de la agonía.” Perú. Entre el desafío de la violencia y el sueño de lo posible. Ed. Roland Forgues. Lima, Perú: Minerva, 1993: 3.
References
Attali, Jacques. Ruidos: Ensayo sobre la economía política de la música. México: Siglo XXI, 1995.
Montoya Rojas, Rodrigo. “Aníbal Quijano: socialización del poder como cuestión central del socialismo.” Discurso del Sur 3 (2019): 55-75.
Quijano, Aníbal. “El tiempo de la agonía.” Perú. Entre el desafío de la violencia y el sueño de lo posible. Ed. Roland Forgues. Lima, Perú: Minerva, 1993.
Quijano, Aníbal. “Fiesta y poder en el Caribe (Notas a propósito de Ángel Quintero: Salsa, sabor y control).” Diálogo (1999).
Quijano, Aníbal. “Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social.” Journal of Word-Systems Research 6:2 (2000): 285-327.
Quijano, Aníbal. Cuestiones y horizontes. De la dependencia histórico-estructural a la comunidad/descolonialidad del poder. Antología. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Clacso, 2014.
Quijano, Aníbal, Gustavo Gutiérrez y Sinesio López. “Mariátegui contra la expropiación de la utopía.” Cuestión de Estado 2:8-9 (1994).
Victor Hugo Pacheco Chávez graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) with a Bachelor’s in History, where he also completed a Master’s Degree with honors in Latin American Studies. He is currently pursuing his Doctoral Degree in Latin American Studies at the same university. He also obtained first place in the Antologías del Pensamiento Social Latinoamericano y Caribeño de CLACSO contest in 2014 and was awarded the CPA Anna Julia Cooper Prize in 2017.