What does the history of Costeño music mean to you as an anthropologist?
P.W: The history of Costeño music is a history about what happens to blackness in Colombia in a national frame. In the earliest 20th-century, there were some debates about whether bambuco has African roots or not. And the consensus of opinion is that it doesn’t, even though it obviously has a very syncopated rhythm. So basically, blackness is kept to one side. At that time, it is not completely erased, everybody knows that there is a black population in Colombia, but it is marginalized in this not seen as central to Colombian identity. Then in the 1940s and 1950s. Suddenly you get the shift, where this music that comes from the Caribbean coastal region of Colombia — which is associated with tropicality and blackness — suddenly becomes the national music. Lucho Bermudez becomes the ambassador of the music, internationally. But at the same time, the music that Lucho Bermudez is playing, the blackness is very controlled, it is very conditional. You know he has one or two black musicians
