Songs of Freedom: The Evolution of Son Jarocho
original photo courtesy of Interminable
by Ximena Violante and Tahnee Jackson
The port city of Veracruz in Mexico was a major point of disembarkation for nearly 120,000 enslaved Africans in the early years of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, from 1517 to 1650. From Veracruz and other points along the southeastern coast of Mexico, Africans were trafficked to other Spanish settlements throughout the Caribbean, South America, and the colonies of what would become the United States. Along with the rise of the Middle Passage however, many others took the opportunity to leave the Old World for what they believed would be a new one — colonists and refugees alike — and eventually shifted the cultural landscape of the region over time.
Ximena Violante of Interminable describes how the blending of colonial and cultural forces gave rise to the unique musical style of son jarocho:
Son jarocho is a musical tradition from the Sotavento region of Mexico, which includes southern Veracruz as well as parts of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Tabasco. It emerged during colonial times, when Veracruz was a central port city. Colonialism and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade brought together people who were West Africans of Yoruba, Bantú, and Mandinga descent, indigenous Nahua, Popoluca, Mixe, Mazateco, Zapoteco, and Chinanteco peoples, Spanish Catholic settlers as well as refugees of Jewish and Arab descent.
Under the Spanish Inquisition, there was an attempt to silence spiritualities that fell outside the Catholic faith either through syncretism or outright prohibition. Through music, people found a way to hold on to and maintain their practices, and son jarocho became a mixture of many cultures resisting colonial assimilation. When drums were prohibited, people transferred the percussion to their feet and danced zapateado on wooden platforms they called tarimas. Another central instrument is the jarana, whose name has Arabic roots and is an adaptation of the baroque guitar, but carved out of a block of wood in the style of indigenous instruments, and which plays African and indigenous rhythms.
Today, this music is played around the world, including here in Philly with the Son Revoltura collective that Ximena helped start 8 years ago! Communities keep the tradition alive through the fandango, a celebration of this music similar to a jam session where many folks gather around and improvise off of well-known sones. Similar to how jazz standards have pre-established melodies and changes that allow for musicians to join in and add their own interpretation, sones allow for communication, creativity, and new possibilities to emerge each time they're played. And the vast similarities between jazz, blues, and son jarocho are not accidental – they are a direct result of being musical styles of the African diaspora, músicas campesinas (music made by farmworkers and laborers), and music that was central to surviving and resisting the colonial order.
Through original music, Interminable explores those common threads that exist between all of the musics that have influenced us - jazz, funk, rock, son jarocho, classical, blues, and hip-hop.
West African influence is deeply woven throughout the cultural fabric of wherever its diaspora has landed, from the dance patterns following the drums on Mexican tarimas and in Puerto Rico’s bomba y pleña to the syncretism of Catholicism with beliefs from the Yoruba, Bantu, Akan, and other African ethnic groups have evolved into faiths like Santería, Lucumí, and Candomblé.
Diasporic evidence shows itself in the food, like mashed plantains reminiscent of fufu or Senegal’s bissap becoming the beloved agua de jamaica found in taquerias worldwide, and as shown in musical culture of Central and South America and even in the Southern US – from the evolution of the quijada or donkey jawbone rattle setting the beat in Afro-Peruvian music, Mexico’s son jarocho, and in the “ol’ jawbone” of early Southern minstrel shows to the evolution of jazz, blues, rock, and hip-hop – Interminable’s expansive sound pays homage to a shared ancestral culture and the many pathways taken to arrive there.