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Cubaneando en Barcelona. Música, migración y experiencia urbana Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 196 pp. |
Reviewed by Julia Roth
Universität Bielefeld
“Does a Cuban community exist in Barcelona?”1 Íñigo Sánchez Fuarros asks in the
preface to his study Cubaneando
en Barcelona. Based on
fieldwork he undertook for his doctoral thesis between 2003
and 2006, he examines the importance of music for the
production of social spaces by the Cuban diaspora in Barcelona
in three different locations frequented by Cubans in the
Catalonian capital. Sánchez Fuarros asks how music further
serves in maintaining a feeling of belonging in situations of
migrations, loss, and displacement. The introductory chapter
on the study’s methodological approach and a historical
contextualization of Cuban migration is followed by three
chapters, each of which focuses on one location frequented by
Cubans in Barcelona.
The
first chapter depicts three “generations” of Cuban migration
to Spain during the last six decades, whereby Sánchez Fuarros
does not differentiate between male and female migrants, nor
does he specify gender particularities: Firstly, exiles,
consisting predominantly of white middle-class Cubans who were
against Castro and came right after the revolution; secondly,
the “sons of the revolution”, who were also mainly white and
among whom were many artists and writers that came during the
1980s and were disillusioned by the promises of the
revolution; and, thirdly, migrants arriving from the mid-1990s
on, who constitute a much more heterogeneous social and racial
group that keeps close ties to the island thanks to new
technologies and loosened travel restrictions (30).
Respectively, the author underscores his understanding of
diaspora as an open concept including distinct experiences and
displacements all over the planet (31). To describe Cuban
identity along musical imaginaries, Sánchez Fuarros refers
greatly to Cuban authors (Antonio Benítez Rojo, Fernando
Ortíz, José Martí, Alejandro de la Fuente). Since such an
identity is a play between how one sees oneself, and how one
is seen by the new society, music has also played a decisive
role in cementing an exoticized colonial view of Cuba.
Elaborating on the most common stereotypical perceptions of
the island, Sánchez Fuarros claims that “both scenarios, the
sexual and the revolutionary, coincide in the fantasy of the
possibility of the primitive-savage associated with the
colonial gaze that the metropolis has historically projected
onto geographic territories and exploited humans” (49, my
translation). However, Sánchez Fuarros observes how
individuals can at the same time reenact related images. As he
shows by observing the practices of a Cuban dancer in a
Barcelona nightspot and with reference to Critical Race
scholars Stuart Hall and bell hooks, individual actors can
appropriate images such as the oversexualized “Cuban mulata”
and fill it with new meaning (104-08).
The
first case study in chapter two focuses on La Paladar del Son,
a Cuban restaurant with live music, which turns the place into
a “total stage” of interaction between musicians and dancers,
especially on Sundays and during special events such as
festivals. Aside from rather traditional music styles, the
place is decorated with photographs and objects which evoke a
nostalgic image of the island, thus creating a shared memory.
According to Sánchez Fuarros the decoration, the food, the
dynamics of space, and above all, the music, turn La Paladar
del Son into an intermediate space between private and public,
into a “home” which creates the illusion of a community every
week (59).
The
club Habana-Barcelona in the fashionable La Barceloneta
district does not cater to such stereotypical notions of Cuba,
as the second case study in chapter three demonstrates. The
club rather resembles a nightspot in contemporary Havana. A
Cuban DJ (taking turns with non-Cuban DJs) plays contemporary
Cuban dance music, and the public is more Latino and mixed
than in the Paladar. The nexus to the island is maintained
through the “sonic continuity” (101) of the music played
throughout the day. The chapter focuses on how the
incorporated actualization of a collective notion of cubanía
is expressed through the body-in-movement constructed through
a play with recognition and difference on the dance floor
producing a “space in movement”2 (101).
The
fourth chapter focuses on an event called “Domingo de la
Rumba”3, a space for Cuban folklore music
reminding of neighborhood and community gatherings in Cuba.
The “Domingo de la Rumba” started as a get-together of Cuban
musicians in a public park in Barcelona. Soon, the event was
moved to a community center to host reunions of amateur and
semi-professional musicians to celebrate the “spontaneous
rumba” (in contrast to the “prepared rumba” or “commercial
rumba” played on stages for an audience) in a participatory
and interactive manner. Traditionally, the rumba has been the
public expression of subaltern and dispossessed subjects in
Cuban society, especially of the Afro-Cuban population in the
poorest neighborhoods. While elaborating on the importance of
Afro-Cuban elements and the references to Afro-Cuban religions
during these encounters, the chapter also gives an insightful
excursus to racism in Cuba before and after the Revolution and
the problematic dimension of the concept of a presumed
“mestizaje” (150-5). As long as the “Domingo de la Rumba” was
taking place at the community center, it was free of charge
and food and drinks could be brought, thus attracting numerous
families with kids and not-so-well-off Cubans residing in
Barcelona. When the event was transferred to a restaurant and
the organizer had to charge an entrance fee, the Rumba Sundays
soon disappeared.
The
opening phrase, “this feels like Cuba!”4 uttered by one Cuban teenager to
another in a nightclub in Barcelona, seems to be paradigmatic
of Sánchez Fuarros’ findings: it points at the question of
whether a Cuban community exists in Barcelona as being rather
a rhetorical one. The study makes visible a community by
bringing to the forefront a perspective that enjoys little
attention in social studies to migrant communities. As the
three case studies demonstrate, the participation in different
forms of musical practices makes Cubans visible as a group and
strengthens their ties with the new society, serving as a
“resource” for action and agency such as the appropriation and
re-signification of certain urban spaces through musical
practices. The study follows a transdisciplinary approach
rooted in anthropology and recent ethno-musicological
practices and is further informed by urban studies,
postcolonial studies, gender studies, diaspora studies,
performance studies, and dance studies. References to the book
in a number of newer studies on music and (migration) indicate
the study’s relevance to a broad field of study. A resume or
outlook summing up possible theoretical contributions to
conceptualizations of diaspora and to further migration
studies would have been helpful. However, the study provides a
vivid example of how to conceptualize, compose and write an
excellent transdisciplinary anthropological study. The book is
elegantly written, inserting the quotes and fieldwork notes in
a smooth narrative manner that makes the text a pleasure to
read.