Tracing The Roots Of Bomba

San Juan, Puerto Rico — The orange E‑Z up canopy where a man with glasses was setting up microphones and a PA on Calle Elisa Cerra was inconspicuous at first.

At one end of the block, an intersection anchored by Esquina El Watusi and two other bars was serving drinks to a growing crowd hanging out on the street in the warm night air. At the other end of the block, on the sidewalk in front of a restaurant called Graziani, a few artists put out paintings and jewelry for sale under dim lights on the sidewalk. Esquina El Watusi was pumping out salsa. A DJ among the vendors was generating pop.

Within a half hour, however, four men with frame drums gathered in front of the microphones. They turned up the volume, hit their instruments hard, and sang, and plena was suddenly rocking the block. Esquina El Watusi turned its music off. The DJ sounded far away. And a crowd made a semi-circle to listen, sing along, and cheer.

My family and I were on vacation for a week in Puerto Rico. We were there to go to the beach, hike in rainforests, jump into pools at the bottoms of waterfalls, and eat our weight in fried pork and fresh seafood. But this reporter was also there to try to understand — just a little better — the bomba that has, in the past few years, become a bright thread running through New Haven’s musical life. 

I had learned from bomberos in New Haven that the genre, involving singing, drumming, and dancing, is both a musical form and an act of resistance and tradition bearing, with deep roots in Puerto Rico’s African community, stretching back centuries into the days of slavery. But I was curious how bomba fit into the larger context of Puerto Rico’s deep, wide culture. And I was curious to hear where it, and Puerto Rico’s more traditional music generally, stood in relation to the multiple forms of contemporary popular music that course through the Puerto Rican community.

We didn’t get our bearings in Puerto Rico quite fast enough to hear bomberos perform as they do almost weekly on Sunday evenings at El Imán, a restaurant in Loíza, a town that is an epicenter for Afro-Puerto Rican culture just outside of San Juan. And we were visiting months too early for the Fiesta de Santiago Apóstol, a multiple-day cultural celebration of music, parades, food, crafts, and dance that happens at the end of July. 

But in Loíza (where we stayed), even in a normal week there, we got the unmistakable sense of visiting a place with a deep and thriving tradition of music, dance, and art that is keeping its roots alive while remaining utterly relevant to Puerto Rico and the diaspora community in the United States, including New Haven.

Among the artists celebrated in Loíza is Raúl Ayala, a musician and mask maker who learned his craft from his father, Castor Ayala. His work reflects the history of masks in Loíza. ​“In his works this artisan carries on a tradition of centuries,” an accompanying note in his studio explained.

But Ayala has also been recognized as an innovator in this tradition, ​“exploring different forms,” from his design of the masks’ facial features to the colors he uses. His art has taken him to art festivals in Germany, Spain, and all over the United States. He makes his masks for collections and for home decoration, but ​“their most important use,” the note emphasizes, is ​“in the tradition of the Fiesta de Santiago Apóstol.” There, the horned masks represent spirits, some of them malevolent, appearing alongside knights, old men in rags, and ecstatic women in a series of parades. Even in Ayala’s modern hands, part of the aesthetic behind the masks — which are made from coconut shells — can be traced back to West Africa, just like the polyrhythms in the bomba that accompanies them.

The complex history of Puerto Rico’s music — from bomba and plena to son and salsa and beyond, expanding to hundreds of genres, and the web of interconnections among them — is laid out in the Museo de la Música Puertorriqueña, in Ponce, Puerto Rico’s second-largest city. The museum is full of information (in Spanish) on the universe of Puerto Rican musical genres. It emphasizes the ways that Puerto Rico has pulled from all the cultures around it, from the various islands in the Caribbean, to North and South America and Europe, for musical influences, while at the same time finding more than enough fertile ground for musical growth in its own soil. It houses a gorgeous collection of instruments, strings, percussion, and horns. Perhaps its most prized possession, however, is a series of woodcuts by Rafael Tufiño that contain the music and lyrics to plena songs, accompanied by powerful illustrations that suggest, in turn, the power of the music itself.

Bomba ​“is a really important part of us,” said Fermín Candelario, a museum staff member, who emphasized the way the music carries the heritage of both the African people who were enslaved on the island and the indigenous people who were almost completely annihilated in the Spanish conquest. ​“Both were enslaved in the same barracks,” he said. ​“Bomba is the result of the mix of religious and social music” of the ​“people who were taken into to the system of slavery.… I don’t want to call anyone slaves.”

He noted that the growing popularity of bomba in the United States — in New Haven, the Bronx, Massachusetts, and elsewhere — is mirrored in its resurgence in Puerto Rico. ​“Now we are having more bomba places, more people playing bomba, dancing bomba. And bomba schools. We are having more people teaching the different rhythms, the different dances.” He thought of that resurgence as part of a cycle. ​“For some reason we are in a part of that circle where people are trying to find their roots. We are more aware about our past.” But some aspects of that history still aren’t taught in schools. Bomba ​“is the only way” to learn it.

“My father was a philosopher, and he said that the only way to know where you are, and where you want to go, is to know where you came from. If you don’t know where you came from, you are fried. You need to know your past, your history.” he said. ​“I think that we are having so many people — of all ages — trying to find their roots in the music.” They’re going to cultural events all over the island, ​“learning about the greatness of Puerto Rican music in all its extensions.”

Maybe the strongest connection I found — and couldn’t have appreciated without visiting — was between the music and its environment: the steep green hills, the beaches of reefs and sand, and the strong, churning ocean.

Loíza, like all of Puerto Rico, was hit hard by Hurricane Maria in 2017, and there have been storms before and since. Traces of that destruction are still visible. In town, there are houses abandoned after their roofs were torn off. A structure that used to be a gas station is now a mass of twisted metal. At one end of the gloriously undeveloped beach near the apartment we rented, the ocean had taken a bite out of a stretch of coastline. One large structure on a point at the beach and a neighboring house had been cut in half, their insides exposed to the elements. Another street ended in shattered asphalt and rubble, a spot where a house once was. Further down the beach, above the usual tide line, a refrigerator lay rusting in the sun. Further down from that, a half-destroyed small white boat lay on its side, slowly coming apart in the wind.

But the beach was still a beach, a long stretch of soft, dappled sand. The trees holding down the dune were a lush dark green; one spot, a sign informed, was a refuge for sea turtles. The surf was strong and cool. In the mornings, people came down to stroll and run, to take a quick swim before the heat set in. A few men brought fishing rods and tackle, casting their hooks into the foam. A small crew brought their horses down to the water. They seemed to like playing in the waves as much as humans do.

Maria was a catastrophe, and one amplified by stymied relief efforts thanks in part to Puerto Rico’s status as a territory, and not a state, of the United States. But those who know Puerto Rico’s music, musicians and listeners, know that it’s not the first time it has happened. The traditional song ​“Temporal” from the woodcut above commemorates a 1928 hurricane that ranks as the fourth deadliest in U.S. history, as it killed about 2,500 people on the mainland. It struck Puerto Rico as a Category 5 hurricane — the only storm so far ever to do so — killing at least 312 people (perhaps as many as a thousand), destroying 24,728 homes and damaging 192,444 more. Half a million people were made homeless. It took years for the island to recover.

The song is still sung today. The coconut shells used for the masks for July’s festival could come from the beach. Those 100-year maelstroms may be coming one after the other, faster than they did before. The ways we’ve lived are being tested, and some will have to change. But there’s also strength in knowing that the words of that song, the notes of the melody, and the rhythms beneath it all, were made by people who weathered storms and remembered them. We can do it too, if we listen.