Carlos Cruz, who is a member of the bomba collective Proyecto Cimarrón. Lucy Gellman Photos.
The words floated through the atrium of City Hall, carrying centuries of Afro-Caribbean history in their echo. Ayé me dijite negro/Y hoy te boy a contejtá, Carlos Cruz began, his arms raised towards the high ceiling. Mi mai se sienta en la sala/¿Y tu agüela, aonde ejtá? Behind him, a row of barriles de bomba sat unoccupied, waiting for hands to grace their taut drumskins. Yo tengo el pelo'e caíyo— He held up a heavy, rusted chain with a shackle hanging at one end. El tuyo ej seda namá.
Those words, part of Fortunato Vizcarrondo Y Rodón’s poem “¿Y Tu Abuela Donde Esta?,” came to New Haven City Hall Saturday, as Puerto Ricans United, Inc. (PRU) and the Department of Arts, Culture & Tourism commemorated the 1873 abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico. Held each year on or around March 22—the day that the Spanish Assembly officially ended slavery on the island—the event both recognized and honored the pain of enslavement and the long struggle for Puerto Rican freedom, which is still ongoing today.
This year—the first in City Hall—speakers focused on the breadth and evolution of the Afro-Boricua diaspora, including a rich, polyphonic and kaleidoscopically diverse culture that transcends race, language, and geographic borders. In previous years, commemorations have taken place at Fair Haven School on Grand Avenue and Casa Otonãl in the city’s Hill neighborhood. Over 100 attended, some milling around at a table covered in blue, white and red vejigante masks.
Top: PRU Board Vice-President Edwin Martinez with other board members. Bottom: Miriam Magalis Cruz, a Wilbur Cross High School grad and former Ms. Puerto Rico of Greater New Haven, has been studying bomba.
“You know, sort of our North Star when we were doing this was no matter the content of melanin in our skin, we really have to honor our African roots,” said PRU member Juancarlos Soto, who helped organize the event. “Our freedom started as a joint struggle between the Taíno people and enslaved Africans,” a fact that some Puerto Ricans do not always acknowledge when speaking about the past.
“If you know our history, Puerto Ricans come in all different colors,” added PRU Vice President Edwin Martinez, weaving between English and Spanish as he spoke. “It’s a rainbow, es una mezcla que we feel really proud of, y tenemos que … that where we’re going, the struggle, the perseverance, nuestra música, nuestra comida … it’s what makes us who we are.”
As it unfolded in the heart of city government, the commemoration took many forms, from heart-ringingly good bomba to an award to FLECHAS (Fiestas de Loiza en Connecticut en Honor al Apostol Santiago) co-founder Menen Osorio Fuentes and members of her family. Early in the ceremony, that began with bomba from Movimiento Cultural Afro-Continental (MCAC), which Kevin Diaz founded in 2016. The group provides cultural education through dance.
Walking attendees through several different rhythms (click here to hear each of them), Diaz explained that bomba is its own part of Afro-Puerto Rican history, with collective drumbeats that contain a range of emotions, centuries of storytelling and layers of resistance. Sicá, for instance, is inherently narrative, wrapping itself around the call and response at the heart of the form. Yuba follows a six-eight beat and comes directly out of slavery, traditionally danced by elders.
Cuembé, meanwhile, is “a rhythm to celebrate,” Diaz said, hammering out a steady, heartbeat-like sound beneath his hands as members of the group joined in. There is also the festive rhythm Holandé, most commonly mistaken for la Plena. He finished with Seis corridos, a rolling, propulsive rhythm that comes out of Loíza’s long and complex history as a port of entry.
“Bomba’s a community thing,” Diaz said, singing out the first few lines of “El Conde de Loíza” as he waited for the audience to respond. Kids seemed to perk up each time the drums spoke. To the drums, he continued, a dancer enters a conversation with his or her body, using footwork and hand gestures to talk to the instruments. “Even if you don’t get up to dance, you’re part of it.”
Lissette Valle (bottom), who has been with MCAC for several years, showed attendees how bomba is a conversation between the drummers and the dancer.
As drums and cuá rang out over the space, six pairs of hands carrying the sound, attendees could see and hear that in real time. Mama yo voy para la central, Diaz sang out, and a knot of singers came alive on the side of the atrium, swaying to the sound in flowing, white dresses and bright batik headwraps. Mama yo voy para la central!, they sang bank, the sound rich and resonant.
Estan gritando alla en la hacienda, los negros congo estan de fiesta, Diaz continued, easing into a call-and-response with the singers. Parting with her microphone, Lissette Valle moved forward, bowing before Diaz—the primo—before she began to move. Her hands flew out to her sides, the dress suddenly like wings, and Diaz changed up his response, the other drums keeping time beneath it. She stepped back, and drummers watched her carefully. She spun, and they waited to see what she would do next.
“It keeps changing, as generation after generation [learns],” Diaz said. “Our elders, in the past, used to dance this, and all the young people would sit by their side to learn.”
It is also a nod to traditions, some of them mired in a hard and agonizing past, that have been passed down for generations. In 1508, the long struggle for abolition began with the arrival of Spanish colonizer Juan Ponce de León, who established a European settlement known as Caparra in what is now Guaynabo, Puerto Rico.
By that time, European colonizers had already begun to chip away at different parts of the Caribbean, using methods that included starvation, interrupted planting seasons, resource extraction and forced labor to destroy the Indigenous Taíno and Arawak cultures that were already there.
Heriberto “Eddie” Cajigas: "Understand that we acknowledge the struggle.”
That included the treatment of people as property: Spanish colonizers coerced Taíno women into marriage, committed acts of rape and sexual violence, and forced Taíno men to work in their mines and on their properties. Meanwhile, colonizers also brought new infectious diseases, including waves of smallpox and measles that devastated the Taíno population. Within five years, diseases and deteriorating conditions had killed tens of thousands of people in the Caribbean.
It was just the beginning of a painful, centuries-long stain on Spanish history, several speakers noted. In 1513, colonizers—acting within the Spanish monarchy’s authority and with its blessing—began importing enslaved Africans to Puerto Rico, where Loíza was for many the first point of entry. It marked the official start of enslavement on the island.
Through the 1800s, that chapter continued to expand, with enslaved people working on the island’s coffee, tobacco and sugar plantations (because of the ubiquity and power of these colonial spaces, the economic disenfranchisement of Afro-Puerto Ricans continued long after 1873). For enslaved people, Spain made life an act of suffering, regulating every aspect of what they could do as the country profited off their backs. It was out of this pain that traditions like bomba, a musical call to arms, was born.
“I can tell you, in many conversations with folks, they don’t understand our culture or our history,” said PRU member Heriberto “Eddie” Cajigas, as he read from a timeline Soto had created before the event. “And so when we talk about slavery in Puerto Rico, it makes us actually connect a little bit better. Understand that we acknowledge the struggle.”
That began to change in the nineteenth century, as a call for abolition became louder both on the island and in Europe (in part, this also had to do with the fact that Britain ended slavery in 1807, although the pain of its colonial footprint persists today). In 1856, the island’s first census recorded a growing number of Afro-Boricuas, whose contributions helped the arts flourish on and beyond the island.
Their presence and ability to thrive was, in some ways, a precursor to the unrest that spurred the 1868 Grito de Lares, which helped expedite Spain’s 1870 Moret Law and formal abolition of slavery in 1873. As Soto noted in a timeline he installed Saturday, this did not always mean the immediate end to slavery: enslaved people were sometimes forced to work an additional three years before they were able to leave bondage. Even after abolition, colonial rule continued, as does the economic disenfranchisement and deprivation of Afro-Puerto Ricans today.
That history also became a reminder of everything that was and is at stake when a culture is under siege, in massive ways and small ones, too. Taking a makeshift stage, cultural ambassador and Proyecto Cimarrón member Carlos Cruz addressed the pain of history of slavery and colonialism, the scars of which still criss-cross the island today. Speaking in Spanish, he folded song and poetry into the program, turning to the words of Fortunato Vizcarrondo Y Rodón when he had exhausted his own.
Rodón, who lived from the late nineteenth century well into the twentieth, was a poet and composer whose poem “¿Y Tu Abuela Donde Esta?” is meant to capture a specific Afro-Boricua dialect that rejects the idea of a “proper” or colonized Spanish. As he read Saturday, Cruz made the piece his own, adding in a stark, surprising cackle in one stanza, a dropped word or two in the next. Like the members of MCAC, he dressed head to toe in bright white, his moccasins a shock of soft brown against the carpet.
Alanna Herbert, reading from "Mi Mama. Mi Pelo.”
Other speakers also captured that spirit, jumping between languages in a gesture that felt like straddling worlds. Reading Marissa Phillips’ “Mi Mama. Mi Pelo” (“My Mama, My Hair”), Miss Puerto Rico of Greater New Haven Alanna Destynee Herbert recalled her own journey to accepting her Afro-Puerto Rican hair, a crown of tight, brown curls on which a glittering, rhinestone-studded coronet often rests at PRU-sponsored events like Saturday’s.
Cajigas, who serves on the organization’s board with his wife, Magaly Cajigas, meanwhile remembered how quickly teachers would bypass his full name when he was just a kid. Out of frustration, he started using “Eddie” to mollify them. He still thinks about what it meant to cater to their needs, to tweak his Latino identity for the sake of their (often white) comfort.
“I changed my name to Eddie to assimilate with the dominant culture,” he said, reflecting on the profundity of Puerto Rican history. “And I think we all do, in many ways.”
But Heriberto isn’t just a name: Cajigas is named after his father, who made the journey from Aguada, Puerto Rico, to Meridan, and raised three there children with his wife, Leonor, before he passed away in 2017. As a kid, Cajigas remembered visiting his grandfather Ricardo in Aguada, where people did backbreaking work at the Central Coloso sugar cane refinery until it closed in 2003. Through a series of different hands, it had been open since the early nineteenth century.
“It makes me think about perseverance,” Cajigas said. “Right? Because the Puerto Rican people, it’s about perseverance, it’s about hard work, it’s about making sure that we can succeed through adversity. I’m hoping that folks are able to evoke our African ancestry today by listening to la Bomba, because for me, it evokes energy, it evokes opportunity, it evokes strength.”
Nowhere was that clearer than in the day’s recognition of Osorio Fuentes, a Boricua dynamo who was born in Loíza, arrived in New Haven in the 1960s. Less than 10 years later, she was advocating for the legal rights of Latino New Haveners—including but not limited to Puerto Ricans—at JUNTA for Progressive Action, and later for the City of New Haven under Mayo John DeStefano.
She became an integral member of Fair Haven’s devoted neighborhood base, including the Fair Haven Development Corporation, Ward 16 Democratic Party, and the still-active Fair Haven Community Management Team. She mentored neighborhood kids and helped harness federal funding for those who needed it the most. She championed Puerto Rican voices, quick to remind people of their African roots.
But she is most remembered and beloved and beloved as “a cultural architect,” as Soto put it. In 1977, Osorio Fuentes co-founded FLECHAS as a way to honor, amplify and celebrate Afro-Puerto Rican voices in New Haven. As the festival traveled from the Hill to New Haven’s Long Wharf, it gained a regular audience who grew to look forward to it each year. From bomba to vejigante mask making, “she saw cultural celebrations as a tool for empowerment,” Soto said.
“Today we’ve been talking about ancestors, and when we hear the word ancestors, we think about people that are generations removed,” he said. “We started the day talking about two grandparents away. But we have living ancestors. Ancestors who allow us to do the events that we are doing today, who started this movement.”
Accepting the award on behalf of the family (Osorio Fuentes, who is now in her 80s, was unable to attend), PRU President Joe Rodriguez praised her as “a source of inspiration” who is still finding ways to give back to the community. He remembered being just 16 years old, and volunteering at FLECHAS as a way to keep his own culture, and his family’s culture, vibrantly alive. Decades later, he credits the festival with laying the foundation of the work he does today.
“If it wasn’t for FLECHAS, the old Puerto Rican Day Parade, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing, this board wouldn’t be able to do what we’re doing,” he said. “We stand on the shoulders of giants.”