Dansal: Música, tradición e innovación entre las nuevas generaciones de la champeta en Cartagena

Abstract

This study is part of anthropological research on Afro-Caribbean music and its social, historical and cultural dynamics. In the city of Cartagena in Colombia, music, and especially the emergence of champeta music as a vehicle for intergenerational communication among Afro-descendant groups, has transformed how this community observes itself and how it is observed from the outside. This has given rise to new identities and the emergence of new musical genres such as Dansal. Dansal is one of these new musical genres that continue the intergenerational dialogue, but which bring with it new demands, logics, perspectives and dynamics for the construction of ideals and for the intercultural relations of these groups. This research is based on an extensive ethnography in the Colombian Caribbean and the observation of the physical and virtual networks of communication and diffusion used by the music producing communities and the young people from cartagenian slums during the period from 2010 to 2017, in order to observe Dansal as a new musical genre of Cartagena and the fusions between champeta and dancehall jamaiquino, as well as historical-cultural phenomenon resulting from the meetings between the groups of Afro-descendants of the neighborhoods in Cartagena and the migrants of the caribeeann islands like San Andrés And Providence. An encounter not only between their music but also between their contexts, histories, identities and perspectives of the future. Unlike the champeta music, which is constructed from its hyperlocality, its logic of resistance and the evident lack of resources, Dansal has entered to participate in the effervescent markets of the urban music in and outside Cartagena and due to Its great economic and social boom and to the advantage that the musical markets have obtained from its massification, has exposed young musicians to a reality of economic, political and social possibilities very different from their predecessors and that forces them to generate new mechanisms for dialogue and reaffirmation or reconstruction of their local values, their music and their role within the communities.