‘The Bolero as a Marker of Caribbean Identity’
Dr Vanessa Knights, University of Newcastle
Canning House Public Lectures
21 November 2001
The bolero... ‘Canción de cuna y cama’ or lullaby and accompaniment to sensual romance in the
Caribbean according to Cuban journalist José Balza (1996), lifelong standard-bearer of the Caribbean
flag according to Puerto Rican writer Luis Rafael Sánchez (1989), collective palimpsest for the
affective identity of the Caribbean according to Venezuelan researcher Néstor Leal (1992).
Where does it come from and what is it? The Latin American bolero originates in Eastern Cuba in the
late 19th Century in the work of the traditional Cuban ‘trova’. This was a popular singer-songwriter
movement with its roots in both African and European culture, very much involved in the
construction of a new, Creole, Cuban national identity. Key to this project was the ‘canción cubana’,
(Cuban song genre) of which the bolero may be considered a sub-genre. The origins of the term
‘bolero’ are not entirely clear. It possibly refers to the guitar style (‘rasgado/rasgueado’) which the
Cuban musicologist Helio Orovio describes as playing ‘bolereadamente’. In relation to its Spanish
homonym the Spanish bolero (originating in the late 18th Century), it shares only its name. The two
are composed in different rhythms (3/4 in the Spanish case and 2/4 in the Cuban) and have different
structures (the Spanish having 3 equal sections, the Cuban 2 of 16 bars each with an instrumental
bridge or ‘pasacalle’ between them). They are also danced differently: the Spanish bolero is danced
separately with an emphasis on arm work and use of castanets whereas the Cuban is a ‘baile de
pareja’ (couple dance to be danced close together). For the composer Rosendo Ruiz (hijo) the bolero
was the first great Afro-Hispanic vocal synthesis. It combined European influences on the ‘canción’
including Italian bel canto and French romance with Spanish/Moorish guitars and Afro Cuban
percussive elements. Originally the bolero had a strict rhythmic base, the ‘cinquillo cubano’
comprised of a group of syncopated notes forming five beats of note value long-short-long-short-long
(hence the term ‘cinquillo’) usually followed by non-syncopated notes.1 This alternation, which can
be traced back to African drumming patterns, was originally played on the ‘clave’ (a pair of hard
wooden sticks struck together) and appeared in both the melody and guitar accompaniment. As the
bolero has developed the hegemony of this strict rhythmic patterning has been replaced by freer
rhythms which follow the prosody of the lyrics. There has also been a move away from simple guitar
accompaniment to the use of orchestras and big bands. PLAY SINDO GARAY, ‘TORMENTO
FIERO’ TO HEAR A CINQUILLO
The bolero is an example of syncretization, hybridity or transculturation in a popular environment.
On the whole ‘trovadores’ were black or mulatto, of humble origins and autodidacts i.e. they learnt
how to play through playing/couldn’t write music. The first registered example of a Cuban bolero
dates from 1883: ‘Tristezas’ (‘Sorrows’) by the ‘trovador’ José (Pepe) Sánchez, a mulatto tailor from
Santiago. PUT UP SCORE AS OHT. Whilst not the first composer of boleros, he is acknowledged
as having defined its stylistic characteristics. The Cuban musicologist, Helio Orovio, describes
Sánchez as an intuitive guitarist whose style, suitable for both singing and dancing, was to
characterize that of the bolero (1994:127). Love in its multiple variations, both affirmative and
negative, is the predominant lyrical theme of the bolero. However, it is not exclusively about
interpersonal relationships. Many of the ‘trova’ songs were implicitly or explicitly dedicated to the
‘patria’ (this patriotic vein is later taken up by Puerto Rican composers in particular to address the
phenomena of mass migration tot eh U.S. mainland). Sánchez’s position as a tailor to the aristocracy
permitted him to move between social sectors and his mine permit allowed him to enter and leave the
city freely. Like other members of the early ‘trova’ (such as Nicolás Camacho, Sindo Garay,
Emiliano Blez and Patricio Ballagas) he was an activist linked to leading members of the
independence movement against Spain such as Antonio and José Maceo, Guillermón Moncada and
Quintín Banderas who attended musical soirées in Santiago which combined culture and politics.
1
See Galán (1983:ch.10), León (1982:243-5), Orovio (1981:50-2 & 1995:126-8), Pérez
Sanjurjo (1986:323-3).
Over the course of the twentieth century the bolero has been transformed into a transnational
phenomenon. In his introduction to the second anthology of Boleros de oro Cuban composer and
researcher Rosendo Ruiz Quevedo has stated that it constitute more than a national patrimony. It is a
shared cultural patrimony of the Caribbean and Latin America (1988: 5). For the Venezuelan
researcher José García Marcano the bolero is a shared heritage and taste which all Spanish
Americans supposedly share (1994: vii). General studies of the genre by Cuban musicologist Helio
Orovio (1995) or the Colombians Hernán Restrepo Duque (1992) and Jaime Rico Salazar (2000)
have demonstrated the rich variety of the bolero throughout the Americas.
There are many factors to consider in accounting for the extraordinary mobility of the genre. Cuban
musicologist José Loyola Fernández focuses on its binary and polyrhythmic nature which have
facilitated fusions with a wide variety of vocal and instrumental forms (1997: 21-22). PLAY
‘LAGRIMAS NEGRAS’ BY TRIO MATAMOROS WHO POPULARIZED FUSION WITH
SON GENRE IN 1920S. The indeterminacy of bolero lyrics have also contributed to the fluidity of
the form, the looseness of reference of romantic lyrics make them especially widely accessible. With
notable exceptions (such as the Puerto Rican boleros of nostalgia for the homeland) bolero lyrics are
impersonal dialogues between an ‘I’ and an un-named ‘you’. These semiotic shifters change meaning
according to the identifications of the composer, audience and individual listener. The listener can
identify with the singing ‘I’ or the ‘you’ to whom the song is destined. In the latter case a double
identificatory logic operates by which the listener is on the one hand made to feel special or unique
whilst on the other implicitly belonging to a community of other ‘yous’ who share the same desires,
illusions and frustrations.
The cultural conditions of production and consumption also need to be taken into account when
considering why the bolero and not other genres spread so rapidly throughout the continent. It is no
coincidence that its success coincided with the emergence of the new mass media such as radio,
recording, cinema (particularly in Mexico) and later TV. In order to consolidate their market position
the large recording studios such as Edison, Víctor and Columbia needed cultural products which
crossed boundaries easily whilst being adaptable to local markets. The bolero had the advantage of
already being relatively well known through the tours of Cuban revues and circuses. Not only that, it
is not easily delimited in terms of social or cultural demographics, in other words it had the
advantage of appealing across races, social classes and genders. It would seem to provide a common
yet differentiated cultural space in which a multitude of communities and publics can locate
themselves in imaginary cultural narratives through material experience.
If the bolero is a pan-Latino phenomenon why focus on the Caribbean? The countries of the Hispanic
Caribbean are united by a number of sociohistorical factors and a particular cultural heritage. They
share the legacies of Hispanic colonialism and slavery, conflicts of race and class, nationalism, the
effects of North American imperialism and massive migration to the United States. Whilst it is true
that these factors are applicable to many countries in Latin America the Caribbean crucible is perhaps
distinguished by the high level of creolization within its sociocultural makeup. This concept of
creolization in its diverse forms has played a key role in the formation of pan-Caribbean discourses
of identity: the transculturation of Cuban Fernando Ortiz, the repeating island of Antonio Benítez
Rojo or the ‘creolité’ of the Martinicans Edouard Glissant, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau &
Raphaèl Confiant (Den Tandt 1997: 104). All of these theories share a common base: a hybrid and
multiple identity in which diverse racial and social elements are mixed. This is not a simple process
of synthesis but an ongoing dialogic process. Furthermore within the kaleidoscopic totality of this
regional culture diversity is maintained (Hofmann 1997: 78). One of the manifestations of this
diversity is the variety and vitality of musical genres produced within such a reduced geographic
space. Nonetheless as Cuban writer and musicologist Alejo Carpentier noted during Carifesta 79
within the infinite variety of musical genres there is still an ‘aire de familia’ or family resemblance
(Orovio 1994: 6). Time is too limited to explain this in detail but Peter Manuel, in his study of
Caribbean musics, details the common denominators in the evolution of the distinct national cultures.
He examines the processes of creolization, internal and external migration, and globalization which
have contributed both to musical syncretism and the international success of Caribbean music.
Within the Caribbean there is a growing consciousness of this external prominence and the dynamic
importance of popular music within national cultural patrimony.
The bolero clearly embodies the paradoxical tendency towards homogeneity and heterogeneity, in
other words it simultaneously exemplifies the contradictory double pull towards globalization and the
local. From its humble origins in the ‘trova’ of Santiago de Cuba the bolero rapidly seems to be
adopted as a representative form for Latin American culture. A number of critics focus on the bolero
within the more reduced area of the Caribbean and it is certain that from Cuba it first spread to the
neighbouring shores of Mexico, Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic in the late nineteenth century.
Furthermore these are the key countries for the development of the genre. If Cuba is the country of
origin of the bolero, Mexico is its adoptive homeland from which it was disseminated through the
mass media, particularly radio and cinema. Between 1902 & 1904 Raúl Monte took his variety show
featuring the trovadores Adolfo Colombo, Alberto Villalón and Miguel Zaballa to the Yucatán. As a
composer, Villalón had a great success with ‘La clave del triunfo del bolero’ which was recorded by
Colombo for the recording company Victor in 1907 and boleros were soon being composed in the
Yucatán although the first bolero registered as such in Mexico comes relatively late (1921, ‘Morenita
mía’ by Armando Villareal Lozano). Guty Cárdenas took the bolero to Mexico City in 1927 but due
to his untimely death in 1928 it was the composer Agustín Lara (inspired by Cárdenas’s song
‘Nunca’) who was to become a national and international bolero icon. OHT OF LARA/PANCHOS
He wrote innovative and polemical lyrics referring to a bohemian, marginalized demi-monde, his
style of singing was more akin to a ‘decir cantado (almost spoken with drawn out cadences), his
arrangements did away with the strict patterning of the cinquillo.’ However, the key to his
extraordinary success is perhaps partly found in his emergence during a key time of transformation of
mass culture. On 18 September 1930 the legendary radio station XEW which became known as ‘The
Voice of Latin America’ was inaugurated and it promoted the bolero heavily in a number of
programmes (most famously ‘La hora íntima de Agustín Lara’). Boleros by :Lara also featured in the
first talkie in Mexican cinema (Santa in 1931) and were a staple feature in the highly popular
Mexican melodramas (sometimes providing titles and plotlines). Through a process of
transculturation the Cuban bolero genre was appropriated by composers such as Lara to symbolize a
popular, urban, musical nationalism representative of a modern Mexico that was to find one of its
maximum expressions in the hybrid bolero ranchero genre. (This style, in which singers are
accompanied by mariachi instrumentation and orchestration, was popularized by the composers
Rubén Fuentes and Alberto Cervantes whose works were immortalized by singers such as Lola
Beltrán, María Elena Sandoval and Lucha Villa, and film stars such as Pedro Infante, Javier Solís and
Vicente Fernández.2) Indeed the identification with Mexico is such that many Mexicans (and other
Latin Americans) assume the bolero to be Mexican in origin. The new cultural industries and
electronic mass media thus adapted existing traditions to create an urban mass culture and
consolidate post-revolutionary Mexican identity (Monsiváis 1994 & 2000).
The bolero, in the voice of singers such as the Puerto Rican Daniel Santos OHT, has been
identified with a particular Latin American experience of modernity and uneven development in
liminal spaces in which the rural and the modern coexist. The focus on intimacy, emotion,
interpersonal relationships, family links, the bonds of friendship and neighbourhood solidarity forms
a counterpoint to alienating social structures and macrosocial processes. In the dynamic act of
listening, the pleasures of recognition and resignifying provide a way of negotiating change in
everyday life. The cathartic nature of the bolero is perhaps felt most keenly in the context of Puerto
Rican migration to the mainland in the 1930s and 1940s. Over half of the migrants settled in New
York, predominantly in East Harlem which became known as Spanish Harlem or simply the ‘barrio’.
The often violent, English-speaking environment of the New York tenements was particularly
alienating for the first generation of immigrants. They faced not only material problems but the
psychological trauma and stress of the diaspora experience. As Peter Manuel makes clear, ethnic
discrimination heightened the identity problem of Puerto Ricans already self-conscious of their
status as perpetual colonial subjects (1995, 67). For them, popular urban culture supplied a means of
2 See Dueñas Herrero (1990), Orovio (1995) and Rico Salazar (2000) for detailed histories of the bolero in Mexico.
mediating change or lived experience through the pleasures of recognition and resignification.
Taverns and clubs transplanted island culture to the ‘island in the city’ (Manuel 1995, 70). Like
many popular musical forms the bolero stresses repetition both within individual songs, at the level
of melody, harmony, rhythm and lyrics, and within the ‘canon’ of boleros recognized throughout the
Hispanic world, through the repetition of figurative tropes and musical structures. The use of
formulae which provoke a sense of familiarity for the community of listeners link past and present in
an instance of cultural resistance and affirmation in which they engage in the ‘pleasures of cultural
mnemonics’ (Aparicio 1998, 92). Boleros such as ‘Lamento borincano’ (1929) by Rafael Hernández,
‘Bajo un palmar’ (1939) by Pedro Flores and ‘En mi viejo San Juan’ by Noel Estrada (1942) follow
a narrative format which distinguishes them from the usual lyrical pattern of the bolero corpus which
tends to focus on a single emotion within the context of a ‘love’ relationship focalised through an
anonymous first person voice addressing an unidentified ‘tú’. The audience of recent immigrants in
New York were predominantly drawn to boleros which addressed memories of home and the senses
and feelings they invoked through emotional association. PLAY JAVIER SOLIS ‘EN MI VIEJO
SAN JUAN’ (NB MEXICAN RANCHERO)
I cannot stress strongly enough that local forms emerge in each country the bolero passes through
and the development of a completely different genre, the bachata, in the Dominican Republic from
bolero roots is a key example of this (not researched it yet but excellent book out there by Deborah
Pacini Hernández). IF TIME PLAY SOME JUAN LUIS GUERRA/OHT Transnationality does
not necessarily indicate deterritorialization or homogeneity. On the contrary the bolero is a syncretic,
hybrid, creole, transcultural, heterogeneous genre which is constantly in flux.
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