Like blue cheese or LSD, the lowered cumbia was born by accident.
In the early nineties, Gabriel Dueñez was playing records at a party in his neighborhood when, after a few hours of DJing, suddenly the music started to slow down.
"At first we thought it was due to electricity," recalls Dueñez on the roof of his house, raising his head to the place where it all began: the top of Cerro de la Independencia, one of the oldest and most rugged neighborhoods in Monterrey.
Dueñez points a finger at a tree, the only green remnant that remains of the hill.
Everything around it is a tight mass of informal houses made of cement and sheet metal, built by hand by the neighbors themselves.
In those parties, known as sonideras, it was normal to pull cable until you found a house that had electrical current, and the speakers were placed in the trees or on the roofs so that the sound ran through the neighborhood like an avalanche down the slope.
At the Sonido Dueñez party, the music did not fail anyway because of an electrical problem, but because of erosion.
Like foods that spend too much time out of the refrigerator until their flavor and properties change, the engine spent so much use of the old record player transformed the cheerful Colombian cumbia into a serious and thick litany.
Musicians playing in front of the Celso Piña mural on Cerro de la Campana.
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In video, The history of the Colombian cumbia and its arrival in Monterrey, Mexico.
Photo |
Video: Gladys Serrano
"It sounded
guango
, very slow, but people kept dancing," recalls the sonidero.
Between the fact that the public did not complain and that at the time they could not fix it, that
guango
sound
continued to expand to become the flag of the cumbia del cerro, always surrounded by stigmas and myths: "The riquillos say that it is
marijuana
music
" .
"When you are very fart and it is good not to fall dancing."
"It is so that the lyrics can be heard better."
"It is so that the song lasts longer, to hide in the lowering and that that moment never ends."
That last explanation, that of staying to live in the cumbia, is the one that Ulises tells a prostitute in a bar in New York.
Ulises is the protagonist of
Ya no soy aquí
(2019), the last sensation of Mexican independent cinema, rescued last year by Netflix and promoted to the Oscar pre-nominations.
Traversed by the singular passion for Colombian music in the poorest neighborhoods of Monterrey, the film focuses on the adventures of a gang of teenagers, led by Ulises, who will be forced to leave their city on a particular heroic journey.
The plot is set at the end of the 2000s with the two hooks of the time: the peak of drug trafficking violence and the striking aesthetics of the gangs of that time, known as
Colombias
or
Cholombianos
.
Two episodes of a broader Mexican phenomenon.
A story that begins with the internal migration flows towards the industrialized north since the middle of the last century.
It continues with Mexico City as a record hub for Afro-Caribbean rhythms —from danzón to mambo— and the explosion of sonideros, those traveling discotheques, sister cousins
of Jamaica's
sound-system
.
It continues with the uprooting and migrant exclusion in one of the richest and whitest cities in Mexico.
And it also goes through the emergence of gangs as an identity refuge on both sides of the border and the hole of violence.
Little Colombia
Gabriel Dueñez (73 years old) and Daniel García (21), the Ulises from
I'm not here
anymore
, have just met in a meeting sponsored by this newspaper on a Wednesday at the end of February.
The veteran and the new idol of the cumbia regia have spent all morning putting Colombian records in the house of the sonidero.
Sounds
The Dugout
, a cumbia 1969, and Garcia opens his arms and dances going around in circles on his toes.
“I could stay here all day.
This is like a museum, ”says the actor before Dueñez's collection of more than 10,000 vinyls, squeezed into a tiny room, between a closet and boxes that reach the kitchen and bedroom.
Considered in its own country a music of peasants, blacks and poor people, the landing of the cumbia in Mexico followed the same coordinates.
Internal Mexican migrants from rural, mestizo and poor states embraced the Colombian cumbia upon their arrival in Monterrey, the country's industrial hub, to work in the large factories.
Faced with the tradition of ranchera and white music of the new city, the newcomers appropriated a music that had spread throughout Latin America, precisely with the Mexican gold cinema, until incorporating it as a form of identity in the face of homelessness in the new earth.
Dueñez and García share uprooting.
Cerro de la Independencia, where they now listen to classics from Cumbia such as Lisandro Meza or Andrés Landero, was known as San Luisito because the first neighbors to arrive in a flood were mostly migrants from San Luis Potosí.
From there are the grandparents of the actor García.
While the sonidero Dueñez arrived from Zacatecas at the age of 11, accompanying his family to work in a foundry.
The two inherited a taste for cumbia.
García grew up with the instruments of his father, also a musician.
When the
casting
team
selected him from a dozen teenagers from the suburbs, the future Ulises was playing percussion in a band called Fuerza Cumbiera.
Dueñez was also hit by the parents and neighbors of the neighborhood: “The race here in the neighborhood is well known.
Not for nothing do they call us the little Colombia ”.
After saving the last album, the two walk down the hill by the Pope's bridge, which connects the mountain with the city.
The bridge is a symbol of urban segregation.
On one side the tiny Colombia and the concrete houses of the migrants, on the other a mirror shopping center and the US consulate The bridge is also one of the locations of
I'm not here anymore
.
In one scene, Ulises's band comes down from the mountain to buy music:
"What's up, dudes?"
Welcome to the empire of Colombian music, carnal— the street vendor welcomes you.
The film's flea market is a recreation of the one that for decades stood on the bridge and on the banks of the river, supplying the city with Colombian music.
Many times pirated copies or compilations recorded by the sonideros themselves, who bought their original jewels in Mexico City or were sent to them by migrant relatives from Texas, another node of the recording industry that facilitated the transmission of Colombian rhythms.
Doña Juanita, Dueñez's wife, remembers that in the early 70s the bridge was still made of wood and moved with the wind.
"We were very horny and we did not dare to cross."
Back in the 90s, Doña Juanita accompanied her husband in the mornings loaded with boxes full of cassette tapes.
It was cumbia lowered that Dueñez himself had recorded with his team after learning the trick to slow them down: scraping the machine's engine by hand.
She stayed on the bridge to sell.
Her husband was crossing to the city to work in the foundry.
In 2010, Hurricane Alex definitely took away the street market.
"He left us nothing but pure stone," recalls Dueñez looking at the dry riverbed.
The mountain and the river.
The basic geography of Monterrey, which was born in a valley, is another link with Colombian devotion in the city.
On the covers of the records and in the lyrics of the traditional cumbias there are a constant references to the Magdalena river or the San Jacinto mountains, the landscape of the interior of the Colombian Caribbean.
In the benchmark essay,
La cumbia como sonora hue de Latin America
, the anthropologist Darío Blanco analyzes this accumulation of winks: “A cultural capital was generated around this music.
For the people of Monterrey, these images of Colombia, where mountains and rivers constantly emerge, lead them to associate it with their own geographical space and landscape of the city ”.
Colombias
against cowboys
Monterrey is considered by historians as one of the oldest industrial societies in America.
In the 19th century, Porfirio Diaz facilitated the arrival of Italians, Germans and Irish, many of them merchants or small businessmen, to the north of Mexico to counteract US expansionism, forming a business elite of European heritage that continues to this day.
Also considered an economic thermometer for Mexico, the deindustrialization and liberalization processes of the late 1980s hit Monterrey hard.
The municipality of San Pedro Garza has the highest per capita income in the country, while just an hour's drive away there are rural communities with half the population living in poverty and serious deficiencies in basic water and electricity services.
Before becoming an industrial emporium, Monterrey was a cattle society, dedicated to herding.
Hence, the figure of the rancher was born, an aesthetic paradigm of the city, and by extension of the entire northern territory.
Boots, hat, truck as a substitute for the horse and ranch music.
Faced with the cowboy canon, the identity construction of lower-class youth on both sides of the border was radicalized.
In the eighties, youth gangs were born, with the Californian cholos, children of Mexican migrants, as a milestone of border identity.
The chola aesthetic, derived from hip hop, will gradually transform into a
sui generis
derivative
in Monterrey: the
Colombians
.
What are the
Colombians
?
Anything other than jeans.
According to the anthropologist Blanco, “the popular young people of Monterrey become
Colombian
so as not to be cowboys, to distinguish themselves from what they embody and represent all the characteristics of strangeness and mistrust.
(...) The others for
Colombians
are those who look over you, those who do not let you enter their places, they discriminate against you, they call you a cholo, people who have money, power, a good car ”.
Or in the words of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: "There is no more classifying, more distinctive practice, a clearer sign of belonging to the bourgeoisie than music."
The rhythm of the shackles
To try to explain the arcana of cumbia, Toy Selectah gets up from his chair and takes a few steps through his study, shuffling his feet as if they were handcuffed with shackles.
"That is the rhythmic cadence of the cumbia, the sound of the slaves walking," he says in reference to the dragged sound of the guaché, that metallic cylinder with grooves that is scraped to achieve the circular and hypnotic effect that defines the genre.
Cumbia was born first as a dance and from its etymology it refers to African ritual dances.
Selectah, civil name Antonio Hernández, 45 years old, is one of the most international Mexican producers and one of the first to include
cumbia
samples
for his hip hop group of the nineties.
“The cumbia has a quantum fart.
Not for nothing, San Basilio de Palenque is the first town of free slaves in Latin America ”, he adds in relation to the feat of the maroons in the mountainous area of the interior of the Caribbean, the founding territory of cumbia.
He is not the first to relate the historical and symbolic charge of the genre.
Carlos Vives, the popular Colombian musician, defined cumbia as a kind of
Latin American
blues
"because of its powerful spirit that generates musical currents."
The cumbia is a Latin American migrant.
There is cumbia in Argentina, in Peru, in Chile, in Ecuador.
All adapted to their destination countries but always vibrating in worlds of exclusion and poverty.
A political resonance that captivated even Joe Strummer, founder of
The Clash
, obsessed since the nineties with Andrés Landero, also nicknamed the son of the people, the accordion king.
“The Virgin of Guadalupe could have an accordion.
A figure with an accordion is a figure of power ”, summarizes Selectah about the popular symbolism of the instrument in Latin America.
In addition to being a producer and dj, Selectah is also a musical explorer, a kind of David Byrne or, as he prefers to compare himself, a Mexican-style Rick Rubin, in reference to the heterodox producer who brought Run-DMC together with Aerosmith, always with a leg. in rock and another in rap, on the street and in the
mainstream
.
With the same philosophy, Selectah invoiced the greatest success of the cumbia regiomontana in 2001:
Cumbia sobre el río.
Nominated for a Latin Grammy, more than a million copies sold, and one of the star videos of MTV at a time when the Anglo-Saxon market had the doors open to what was known as
World Music.
The author of the song is Celso Piña, a janitor in a hospital before becoming
the rebel of the accordion.
A neighbor of Cerro de la Campana, revered even before having put Monterrey's cumbia on the global map thanks to that mixer of dub, hip-hop and other electronic bases.
Piña passed away two years ago and his house, one of many on the hill, has been converted into a museum.
On the door there is an altar and on the wall a letter from one of his cumbias: "Thank you for being here being able to be there."
Piña's success made visible a phenomenon with at least five decades of history that has made Monterrey the new mecca of traditional Colombian cumbia.
As the genre was losing its pulse in its country after the birth of salsa and the rise of vallenato, in the north of Mexico it grew without stopping.
Over time, cumbia has also shed the stigma with which it came to the city, competing face to face with northern music.
In Monterrey, the unheard of things often happen: a concert by Colombian groups like Binomio de Oro tends to have more audiences than a concert by Mexican myths like Los Tigres del Norte.
The journey to consecration as a genre for all audiences has been long and bloody.
The Colombian cumbia scene in Monterrey is a survivor of prejudice, discrimination and violence.
The first concerts of Celso Piña himself were often interrupted by the police or declared outright illegal on the grounds that it was music that incited vice and violence.
Not all the pioneers survived.
"I like to be seen as a ghost"
The King of Sabanero, civil name Carlos Rivera, 48 years old, has gathered his group of musicians in another informal little house in the mountains.
Dressed all in white and with a wide-brimmed hat typical of the Colombian savannah, he dances with two candles in his hands.
It is the traditional dance of the cumbia.
Rivera represents one of the most orthodox aspects of the genre, which was mutating towards the accordion from the original indigenous and African flutes.
The Sabanero King came to spend almost a year in San Jacinto playing with Andrés Landero's son, known as the King of the accordion, the King of the cumbia.
Landero is venerated as a saint in the hills of Monterrey.
Under a framed photograph of him, an epic Che Guevara portrait, Rivera says that despite never having participated in gangs, he has also felt the stigma of cowboys: “They see us as if we were thieves, that we are going to assault them.
But I feel much better than them.
I feel important.
I like to be seen as a ghost "
Fosy 501, civil name Raul, 45 years old, did take part in the youth gangs.
He is a veteran who started in the late eighties and still combines his dedication to graffiti on T-shirts and stickers with giving psychology workshops in prisons.
“The Colombian has always been linked to drugs and violence.
If you listened to cumbia, people assumed you were from a gang and used drugs, "he says in a social center in the old part of the city run by other CMBS veterans.
In the last 35 years, Jesús Rivas —founder of an association that supports youth in the suburbs— has witnessed the evolution of Monterrey's youth subcultures.
The eighties were for the
brother
style
, in the manner of the classic cholos of the west coast of the US Then came the tropical, floral shirt, narrow pants and curled hair like Rod Stewart.
At the beginning of the 2000s, the
Colombians
were born
, once again loose fitting clothes but in two pieces and matching, made by hand with prints of the Virgin of Guadalupe or Aztec patterns.
Scapular, shaved head at the back, bangs and long sideburns in front of
emo
inspiration
, another of the subcultures of the time.
What is not very clear is where the name
Cholombiano
comes from
.
"Nobody said, hey, I'm a
Cholombian,
" clarifies Fosy, who rather points to the exotic view of subculture by the world of fashion and cultural elites.
More codes: clothes
lying down
: large, baggy.
Throw plaque
: The symbols made with the hands that represent each gang.
Pomear
: get high on industrial glue.
The passage of the hawk
: wave your arms while dancing.
The Cumbia Wheel
: the milestone that marks the beginning of the dance, in a circle and in a group.
"They are," according to Blanco in his book, "the new rituals for strengthening social ties and maintaining an idea of a peasant-based community under a festive logic."
Living by pure miracle
These social ties were blown up with the drug trafficking violence of the late 2000s. “There was an undeclared curfew and young people could no longer be on the street because organized crime either ran or pulled them, seducing them with power and money, ”says Rivas, who remembers 15-year-olds armed and slapping police officers at traffic controls.
The motto was: "I'd rather live a week as a king than a lifetime as an ox."
Drug trafficking turned off the
Colombians
.
La Peke, civil name Mirna Castillo, 36 years old, lived that time wearing a scarf dress, a bun on her head and a
star
symbol
with her hands.
“Nobody dresses like that anymore, dances and parties are over.
Because of the drugs, everything became very heavy.
Suddenly they would pick up the boys and the mothers would put altars to them in the neighborhoods, ”she recalls in the radio booth where she now works as a Colombian music announcer.
Specialized radio stations, outside of commercial radio stations, played a crucial role in the dissemination of cumbia and vallenato, the successor as the Colombian national genre.
Servando Monsivais has been working since the eighties on
Radio 13, Más vallenata.
In addition to the music, the radios were important, and continue to be so, for the greetings.
"Greetings are normal on the radio, but here the race became accustomed as a way of communicating between gangs," explains Monsivais.
The phenomenon of greetings, which also appears in the film, is even recorded in a song:
For the whole race this greeting: the cholos, frogs lokos, verdugoz, pachecos de la fome 11, corner girls, japicheras, malvivientes, golden boys, fantastic from the loma linda, pokas lokas, zureños, los bollitos, boxers, pirates, pampers.
There are more than 100 different gangs.
An authentic underground mapping of the city in the early 2000s. Javier Solís, its author, remembers writing down the names when they asked him greetings also at concerts.
For anthropological studies on the subject, greetings may come to be considered more important than music, because they refer to the logic of ancient societies based on prestige, where being a recognized member was a fundamental value.
Drug trafficking also contaminated greetings and the musicians themselves.
"Suddenly they were no longer just gangs of young people, they were criminal groups that threatened each other live:" Tell such and such that the hell is going to take them, "Monsivais recalls.
In 2013, all members of the local group Kombo Kolombia were kidnapped during a party.
The bodies were found two days later with a coup de grace at the bottom of a well on the outskirts of the city.
"It is said," says the announcer, "that they were sponsored by one of the cartels and the rivals became jealous."
In the film, Ulises and his band meet at night in an abandoned building on top of the Cerro de la Campana.
In one scene they are explaining to their superiors, an older gang, a confrontation with another gang.
"Do you think it was the cons?" Asks Ulises.
The contras were rival groups fighting to the death for the territory of the city.
Those stories were known very closely by Sonido Fuerza Caribe, civil name Arturo Domínguez, 44 years old, security guard and sonidero.
His house is just below the abandoned building.
Many nights I heard screams when leaving there.
And the next day the corpses were found lying behind his house.
"We are living by a pure miracle," he says from the dirt road that goes up to the abandoned block.
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