As natural as salsa in New York
Compases beneath my window call to mind a flamenco lament for the tropics.
Popular culture is such a monetized and controlled thing now (and perhaps always, just in different ways). We're used to thinking of things like music as being the result of careful advertising, or as propaganda, clichés designed to appeal to tourists, to some mythical "national" identity, or to some kind of brand loyalty. (Vodafone has an ad playing non-stop across all TV channels here which smoothly slides from a background track of Peggy Lee's song "You Give Me Fever" to handsome young men at their computers humming along to them singing enthusiastically, "Ya tengo fibra...FIBRA!" and dancing in their enthusiasm at having "fibra" aka FiOS internet access. It's a shame that the nickname for Fiber-optic in Spanish sounds like an abbreviation of fibromyalgia.)
So it's always a bit of a surprise to discover confirmations of things that you normally dismiss as mere tropes. (Rather like Bart Simpson staring at his dog and saying "you ate my homework? I didn't know you guys actually did that!") I had a bit of that surreal experience yesterday afternoon when I woke somewhat groggily from a siesta, and heard what I gradually realized was someone singing cante jondo underneath my open window. After a few wails of "Por cuuulpaaa de una mujjjjjeeeer" interspersed not with tacones or guitar solos but rather with what sounded like a slightly noisy high school hallway, involving a bunch of boys giving each other relationship advice (at the top of their lungs, because most boys yell as much as they talk) I bothered to get up and look out the window, where I saw a handful of what looked to be late teenagers, wearing sagging jeans, and respectively shirtless or in sleeveless tank tops, with the odd backwards baseball cap. (The shirtless one was also wearing a crucifix.) In between warbling like cats searching for mates and carrying on a discussion, they were attempting (not very successfully) to do some acrobatics involving balancing in a split on the bricks of the portico of the apartment across the street. They weren't able to do it, either because they lacked the strength and skill, or because their high-top sneakers were too slippery, so after a while they drifted away, still chatting and occasionally singing.
I would have sworn that flamenco was (like jazz) mostly a concert art form nowadays, confined to either a few hardcore (and mostly older) aficionados and strictly tourist-oriented completely synthetic places. At best, I would have said that any real integration of flamenco music into everyday life would only occur in Sevilla or Granada. But nope, high school students in Carabanchel hanging out after school in front of the little weight-lifting place next to me apparently punctuate their gossip sessions with cante jondo. Amazing. (Not, I might add, particularly an aesthetic I appreciated while I was trying to sleep, but the very lack of skill of the practitioners suggests how widespread it is.)
Perhaps because of that when I had trouble sleeping last night my worry about what for me will always be the first place I associated with Spanish, however much of a hispanophile I may have become, took the form of a snatch of flamenco from the group Radio Tarifa, repeated over and over:
Temporal, temporal, tu serás mi temporal.
It is beautiful here, and I am happy, but still sad for my poor little island, drowned in rain and mudslides, and battered by waves. No one builds in wood with techos de zinc in Puerto Rico anymore because concrete survives the storms better (and because the Ferré family decrees it so). Time to step up and make PR's public infrastructure match its houses. May they receive the FEMA aid they deserve, and rebuild the electric grid with solar panels and buried power lines and with roads with better pitch and drainage to prevent flooding so some good comes out of this destruction in the long term.
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