Abstract
In the seventeenth century, African enslaved people were introduced into an Ecuadorian valley currently known as Chota-Mira. From Atlantic slavery period, the inhabitants of this valley have been performing the event of Bomba del Chota. Currently, the most widespread representations of Bomba del Chota focus on a female Afrodescendant dancer smiling and moving her hips. In this chapter, I focus on the historical connection between dancers’ interactions through their hips in some Afro-Ecuadorian Bomba del Chota events that I have named here as ‘Bomba Cimarrona’, and their collective memories. I suggest that the understanding of this connection is essential to counteract the widespread colonial Ecuadorian belief that Bomba is a spectacle that is limited to each dancer’s fixed and stereotypical hip movements. Through a qualitative research method based on bibliographical compilations, participatory observations and a “relación de escucha” (relationship of listening; Rivera Cusicanqui, El Potencial Epistemológico y Teórico de La Historia Oral: De La Lógica Instrumental a La Descolonización de La Historia. Temas Sociales, 2015, p. 286), I want to suggest that Afro-Ecuadorian dancers have strategically maintained, and thus collectively remembered some of these hip interactions within the events of Bomba Cimarrona. Through the performance of Bomba Cimarrona, a sense of transient but recurring decolonial freedom, that resists the control over their lives and bodies they have historically faced is continuously generated.
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Notes
- 1.
A relación de escucha is understood as a collective exercise of disalienation, this is, a long-term, sensitive, creative, honest and open recognition and acknowledgement of the perspectives, needs and objectives of both the researcher and the communities as the basis for producing specific research (Rivera Cusicanqui 1987, 2015, p. 286).
- 2.
The percentage of Afro-Ecuadorians includes the number of Ecuadorian citizens who self-identified either as Afro-Ecuadorians or as Afrodescendants, mulato or black people.
- 3.
- 4.
For more detailed information regarding the living conditions of Afro-Choteños during the Huasipungo, see De La Torre Espinosa (2002, p. 85).
- 5.
The notion of Afrodescendants as inferior beings is also analysed by Birenbaum Quintero (2006) in relation to the music and dances of Afro-Colombians.
- 6.
Here, I use “practices of freedom” as understood by Jessica Marie Johnson (2020) as any attempt to “disrupt the new demands that use and possession placed on their bodies” (p. 9) during the period of Atlantic slavery.
- 7.
Although I draw a clear distinction between the roles of Afro-Choteños and mestizo-Ecuadorians in Bomba as a spectacle, I am also conscious that in some occasions, the directors of Bomba spectacular performances are Afro-Choteños. I relate this to a process of internal colonialism, understood by Maldonado-Torres (2007, p. 257) as colonialism that is internalised in each colonised subject. But more importantly, I acknowledge the right that the Afro-Choteños have to organise and be part of Bomba spectacular performances as they can represent a financial income that would allow them to improve their living conditions, or because some of them think that the inclusion of Bomba as a spectacle is still better than the historical exclusion of their music and dance-based events, or just because they have the right of enjoying being seen and admired as they please.
- 8.
Here the notion of ‘national’ refers to the nation-building process that began with Ecuador and other Latin American countries’ independence in the nineteenth century and that continues until the present day. This process revolves around the maintenance of a colonial social order based on a desire to resemble an idealised version of European culture and to be as far as possible from an indigenous or African ancestry.
- 9.
Here, although I acknowledge the fact that dances performed as a spectacle can also include some collective memories, I suggest that generally, these are structured to emphasise on the kinetic movements much more.
- 10.
Although in my previous research, I stated that Bomba Cimarrona has nothing to do with sexual intercourse, it is now my contention that this affirmation cannot be totally proven. I argue that the constant need to justify the non-relation between Bomba Cimarrona and sexual intercourse that can be found in my previous work (López-Yánez 2013, pp. 57–58) is not only unnecessary but could also be morally biased. I consider it crucial to remember what Karavanta (2013) has already pointed out in relation to the intense affective experiences that enslaved people went through, and that are negated in most representations, regarding their attempt to sustain their relationships with their siblings, partners and communities in suffering, whilst sustaining their own existential depth and ontological matter (p. 45). As the Afro-Choteño Paulo Ayala Congo stated during our conversation, “a lot of sexual tensions do get released while dancing” (personal communication, 2018). Thus, even if some of the events of Bomba Cimarrona could be related to sexual encounters, it is the reduction of these events to sexual encounters and the attempt to be continually exposing Afro-Choteños’ sexual life that can become problematic and which has colonial roots.
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López-Yánez, M.G. (2021). Bomba Cimarrona: Hip Interactions in the Afro-Ecuadorian Bomba del Chota as a Decolonial Means to Remember. In: Parfitt, C. (eds) Cultural Memory and Popular Dance. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71083-5_7
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