In Music, Race and Nation: Múúsica Tropical in Colombia, Peter Wade provides a detailed study of the rise of múúsica tropical, or Costeñño music, in connection with racial and national identities and cultural hybridity along the coastal area of Colombia in South America. La Costa (the coast)–the area that includes the cities of Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Santa Marta–is characterized by ambiguity. According to Wade, it is “black, but also indigenous and white; it is poor and ‘backward’..., but [it] has also been a principal port of entry for ‘modernity’ into the country” (p. 39). The area has also been politically vocal and the central source of Colombia’s commercially and internationally successful Costeñño music. Three organizations played important roles in acquainting the country with the latest sounds and developing popular music as an urban form: two record companies--Discos Fuentes, founded in 1934 in Cartagena, and Discos Tropical, founded in 1945 in Barranquilla--and Colombia’s first radio station, La Voz de Barranquilla, opened in 1929.

To situate Costeñño music, Wade traces its origin to three 19th-century musical forms : porro (working-class music derived from flutes and drums of Amerindian origin and appropriated by the bourgeoisie); fandango (a collective dance music with drums and hand-clapping from Spain); and vallenato (accordion music). Traveling wind bands helped spread the three musical forms in the coastal and interior cities and provincial towns.

Although Wade finds it difficult to tie a musician’s class background to a specific musical form, he nevertheless acknowledges musicians such as Lucho Bermúúdez, Antonio Maríía Peññaloza, and Luis Sosa, whose band members had strong connections with the elite, middle, and lower class, respectively. The three musicians and their orchestras played a diversity of styles at a variety of venues, always slipping Costeñño music in with new arrangements. The theme of possible covert sexual relations between white men and black women began to appear in the lyrics in the mid- 20th-century. In fact, Camacho y Cano, a white Costeñño male, recorded such a song, “Por la Bajo,” in New York, which subsequently made its way along with other risquéé songs into clubs in Colombia patronized by the elite. Other lyrical themes were partying, drinking, and love. The process of creating new types of Costeñño music “was certainly mediated very heavily by the elite and by the middle-classes” (p. 105) because the music had “qualities which expressed the tensions between modernity and tradition, between blackness and whiteness, between the region as distinctive and as part of the nation in progress, and between sexual desire and moral propriety” (p. 105).

Wade attributes the real impact of Costeñño music to Lucho Bermúúdez and his Orquesta del Caribe, who played live porros for the first time in a new nightclub in downtown Bogotáá. To be accepted by the elite, Bermúúdez switched the band’s composition from mainly black musicians to musicians who were whiter in appearance. As Costeñño music infiltrated Bermúúdez’s orchestra and other popular orchestras, special radio programs began to be dedicated to promoting the music. Yet the racial identity of the Costeñño musicians varied, as exemplified by Bermúúdez, a light mestizo; Joséé Barros, a moreno (brown) singer and composer; and Antonio Peññaloza, a slightly darker moreno, or black. As a result, blackness in the popular Costeñño bands “was usually not very evident, but its shadow or possibility was always there, especially in the rhythm section” (p. 125).

Costeñño music sucessfully penetrated the consciousness of audiences in the interior of Colombia and won entry into elite urban entertainment circles. Yet, Bermúúdez and other musicians sometimes dealt with hostile reactions. In 1936, at the first Congress of Music in Ibaguéé, Daniel Zamudio, a composer and musicologist, issued a racial diatribe lumping Costeñño music with Cuban music as foreign, black, and threatening to national consciousness. Other writers bemoaned the impact of Mexican, Cuban, and North American jazz on Costeñño music, equating foreignness with blackness. Thus, Costeñño music was identified as black, foreign, vulgar, modern, and sexual. To counteract such racist and often derogatory commentaries, some Costeñño intellectuals, including the writers Manuel Zapata Olivella and Gabriel Garcíía Máárquez, argued that improved communications and internal and external migrations had created a crisis in ideas about Colombian identity. Costeñño musicians rose to the challenge by stating that certain musical styles needed to be nationalized to be widely accepted. For example, in his December 30, 1950, essay for Semana newspaper, Julio Torres, the leader of a vallenato group from the interior, said, “To despise the importance of popular music... is a critical absurdity. To exalt so-called classical music as suitable for the people and cultured minorities, is another sociological error. Art music does not have to forcibly exclude popular music, nor vice versa” (p. 133).

The elites were culturally oriented toward Europe and toward their regional cities of Bogotáá and Medellíín. Some viewed Costeñño music, with its underlying implications of blackness, asto be backward. On the other hand, the emerging middle class and lower class recognized the celebratory aspects of Costeñño music that reveled in the economic growth, industrialization, and modernization of Colombia during the 1930s and 1940s. Yet Costeñño music cannot be understood solely through a simplified binary opposition between the elites and the middle and lower classes. Wade maintains that the power of Costeñño music resides in its ambivalence and the multiple possibilities it presents for ideological rearticulation, in the tension between homogeneity and heterogeneity in national identity, and in the tension between the national and the transnational.

The golden era of Costeñño music was the 1950s and the 1960s. During that time, the term cumbia displaced porro. Although cumbia, with its transnational construct of appropriations, became the musical marker of Colombian nationality, it had to compete with salsa, rock, pachanga, merengue, and the bolero. With the consolidation of the national record industry, Costeñño records were released internationally under the designation cumbia in the mid-1960s in such countries as Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. Yet the question of why the music was labeled cumbia instead of porro requires more research.

This book is a fascinating account of how Wade managed to unravel the complex history of Costeñño music and its connotations of tropicality and blackness.