Afro-Cuban resistance musical practice and its ideological containment-anthropological practic

Abstract

This research note refers to the sociocultural and political behavior surrounding the development of Afro-Antillean rhythms and their contribution to the joy of the world. It emphasizes power, hegemony, resistance and subordination, which reveal musical attitudes and discourses, hidden and open, accepted and detested. In essence, they represent power relations. Afro-Cuban musicians, in their attempt to construct a vision of the world, were closely linked to the resistance to the power and hegemony of the dominant groups. However, a part of them was integrated into the cultural and political order of the élites. In other words, resistance and integration constitute a unity in Afro-Cuban musical life. This work focuses on the first half of the 20th century, a period in which the aforementioned rhythms emerged and became popular, and in which a variant of Cuban music is addressed, what the performers called mambo. It covers a geographic space of analysis between Cuba, Mexico and the United States.