Proyecto Cimarrón Reconnects To Roots

Addys Castillo beamed as she looked at the crowd assembled Saturday evening for the inaugural show of bomba group Proyecto Cimarrón. To her, it was fitting that the show be held where it was, at the Citywide Youth Coalition on Chapel Street, which Castillo referred to as the Black and Brown Power Center. ​“This space is a space for liberation,” she said. ​“A place for people to laugh, have joy, and plan revolution.”

Castillo’s statement and the music she and Proyecto Cimarrón performed were also about continuing in a long, deep musical tradition in which rhythm and resistance were intertwined. That tradition on Saturday brought together people from as far as New York City and Massachusetts to participate in bomba, a style of music originating among West African enslaved people in Puerto Rico that continues to this day. Locally, it was the music that accompanied the enormous, and enormously peaceful, Black Lives Matter rallies in the summer of 2020, among many other rallies and protests. In performing the music in overtly political contexts, the musicians were carrying their musical tradition forward. With Proyecto Cimarrón, they are looking to continue to do this, as society continues to reopen.

But bomba is also simply about singing, dancing, and drumming, making rhythm, raising voices, and moving feet, as the the members of the members of the group — singer and percussionist Castillo, drummer and poet Carlos Cruz, drummer Asher Delerme, percussionist Cuqui Matos, drummer Kica Matos, and dancers Naomy and Natasha Velez — amply demonstrated. The interlocking rhythms of the drums easily filled the space, drawing in people from the street corner below through the open windows. Castillo’s strong voice rang out. And the Velez sisters’ flowing movements, their steps and gestures in conversation with the drummers, underlined just how much the dance and the music went hand in hand.

The members of Proyecto Cimarrón met while playing as part of New Haven-based bomba band Movimiento Cultural and decided to form their own group last fall. 

“It really was organic,” Kica Matos said. ​“We all share a deep love for the bomba. After we left the group, we agreed that we were going to meet every week to drum and to be in community. Then a friend of Carlos’s heard us and said, ​‘I really like your project. You guys sound good!’ ”

As the members of the group kept meeting, Matos and Castillo also began taking classes with master bomba artist Norka Hernández Nadal. ​“She’s one of the most highly respected practitioners in the United States, and we just thought she was a really good teacher,” Matos said. ​“Addys started going to the Bronx to do classes with her, and she said ​‘why don’t you join me?’ So every Sunday morning, she picks me up, and we drive to the Bronx and take classes.” Nadal’s classes cover ​“a little bit of everything — drumming, dancing, singing. And then she’s also teaching us choreography.”

As Cruz explained, in times of slavery in Puerto Rico, a cimarrón referred to escaped slaves who were hiding in the mountains of the island above the plantations, living there in harried freedom and possibly plotting revolts. As the musicians got together to play, ​“we started calling each other cimarrones,” Matos said. ​“We were riffing with names. Carlos came up with Proyecto Cimarrón, and we said, ​‘that’s it.’ ”

The group started rehearsing in greater earnest. ​“We wanted true collaboration, so we make decisions by consensus. We wanted to elevate the roots of resistance in this music, the Afro-Puerto Rican roots, and we are wanting to make sure that we show up for rallies for social justice causes. So we are not just a group that performs. We want to show up in spaces that advance social justice causes.”

Bomba, Matos said, ​“has been around for over 400 years. The roots of bomba come from enslaved Africans, from West Africa. They used the drums to communicate when they didn’t speak the same language. They used the drums, and their voices, and their feet, as an instrument to plan rebellions, to celebrate, to express sorrow. The drums are something that you hear through the diaspora. For a lot of people who are descendants of enslaved Africans, there’s something about the drums that we love.”

The sound of resistance is an integral part of the music. Some of the rhythms are ​“rhythms of war,” Matos said, ​“a particular rhythm of rebellion.” There are songs about emancipation, songs about liberation leaders.

Nadal, who had come from the Bronx to see Proyecto Cimarrón perform, explained how that communication happened. During Puerto Rico’s era of Spanish colonization, the Spanish ​“would allow enslaved people to gather and celebrate in some sort of way,” she said. Nadal is from the west side of the island, ​“which is really different from a lot of the other places because the majority of the enslaved population were women. So that has a different connotation and a different context of who are the people at the forefront of a lot of different things,” she said. ​“So in bomba traditions, there are a lot of women drumming and dancing.”

“These are songs that are passed down from generation to generation, so they end up being commercialized in a way,” Nadal continued. ​“But originally, bomba was not only used to give news and alert people about revolts, but to tell people about somebody being born, somebody dying.” Some of this happened in Loíza — now known as an epicenter of African culture in Puerto Rico — where the colonialists let free and enslaved Black people congregate. ​“While the colonialists were celebrating whatever it was they were celebrating, the enslaved people were also celebrating.” But they were also communicating. Singers in the tradition were ​“masters of improvisation” and ​“metaphors meant everything because if you were trying to relay a message, you had to say it in the verse in a way that not everybody would catch.”

Nadal sees a direct line from those gatherings over the centuries and her classes in the Bronx. ​“The classes that I have on Sunday are an extension of what I’ve been doing with my family since my earliest recollections,” she said. ​“It’s like sankofa, with the bird with the egg looking back. It has the egg in its mouth and it’s moving forward, looking back at our ancestors, what has been left to us by our ancestors. And the egg is the future generation. We are that egg, right now. Because we are far from our land, we have to make sure we carry on our traditions and make sure we introduce it to those that are of Puerto Rican heritage but are born here, and reconnect them with their roots.”

What Matos and Nadal talked about was enacted in the bombazo — the part of the evening, after a brief break for refreshments, in which everyone was invited to participate. As Proyecto Cimarrón took their positions back on the stage, they were joined by Nadal and others to create an even larger sound, while the Velez sisters drew more people to the floor to dance. As the performers moved from song to song without breaking the rhythm, participation proved irresistible, whether it was to play the rhythms on shakers the band had provided, try the dance steps, or cheer on each new dancer as they took the floor. It was a deep reminder that part of the key to sustained political resistance — which bomba has amply demonstrated for over 400 years — is joy. The celebration is a small taste of the rewards that come with each victory, but also, in the way it brings people of all ages together to laugh, dance, play music, and share food, an end in itself, reason enough to keep showing up.