The tentative title to my research is “When the Spirits dance Bomba.” Provocative on purpose, my work is inspired by Dr. Marta Moreno Vega’s When the Spirits Dance Mambo. Published in 2004, the memoir highlights key experiences of the Afro-Puerto Rican diaspora living in New York City, through the perspective of Marta growing up nuyorrican in El Barrio. Dr. Vega reminds us of the very segregated structure she was subjected to. In Dr. Vega’s academic work, she reveals how Afro-Puerto Ricans shared space alongside Afro-Cubans, Afro-Caribbean and African-Americans trying to navigate the racial and ethnic color lines as demarcated by redlining, displacement and urban neglect. While sharing key social networks, Afro-Latinos like Marta Vega found alternative spaces of affirmation including in home altars, botánicas and the dance-floors of the Bronx, Harlem and the New York City Mambo scene.

Asserting her ancestral connection to African Diasporic spiritual expression, Dr. Vega demonstrates how Afro-Cuban Santeria (Lukumí/Regla de Ocha/Religión Yoruba) gained prominence with Puerto Ricans in the early to mid 20th century following migratory patterns in the wake up US colonial empire, and diaspora. For over a century, Cubans, Puerto Ricans and other groups found community and built life sustaining practices through shared religious/spiritual expression. Her assertion is that Puerto Ricans have religious and spiritual practices including honoring ancestors, and dieties of the west african origin including Yoruba Orisha. However, Dr. Vega’s book does not mention the Afro-Puerto Rican musical style, Bomba, and instead zeros in on the mid 20th century mambo craze to situate her memoir in time.

My research takes Dr. Vega’s memoir as a starting point to making sense of the New York Bomba scene, one that is best understood as a transformative diasporic space in which people find all sorts of meaning and power. Growing up, I was often given messages that bomba is not religious. And while bomba is a popular musical style developed and transformed by enslaved and free Black Puerto Ricans, and has been used to spark rebellion and slave resistance, indeed it is not a religion. However for my research, the distinction is a political distraction to conditions that lead practitioners to bomba in the first place. I argue that the folklorization of Bomba is an attempt to sanitize the music and offer state sanctioned narratives to police notions of Blackness and national ideology.

But what does bomba look like outside of the stage and beyond the state and grant funded programming?

One day I was invited to a spiritual misa of the Afro-Caribbean espiritista variety. Hosted by a Dominican-American Santera, with the blessings of an Afro-Puerto Rican elder, I arrived dressed in white in what I assumed would be an evening of spiritual connection via song, prayer, tobacco and dance. I have experienced afro-caribbean religious ritual and ceremony including initiations in this house, so my guard was down, and I was ready to receive blessings and messages through spiritual work. As I walked into the side entrance of the newly furnished basement of the this unassuming row-house located in the south Bronx, I took in the scene. Adorned with white cloth, the spiritual table was set up on a table. I noticed the cups of water, white flowers, cigars, prayer books, perfumes oils and herbs sitting in a bath of water in a palangana, typical for these spiritual parties. What stood out to me however were the two Barriles, drums used in the Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba style placed standing to the table.

I have never seen Barriles at a spiritual party and I was skeptical but also intrigued. The Puerto Rican elder Santera had explained that she had never seen bomba, much less in a spiritual misa, that these practices were deemed as separate from the spiritual world that has been maintained in the New York Espiritisa and Santeria community.

Once the Spiritual party had begun with the typical prayers, the portals were open and the drummers began to play a Cuembé rhythm. Immediately, the lines between the folklorized musical tradition and the spiritual practices were blurred. The Dominican-American seasoned espiritista had been mounted by a spirit and danced almost with expert precision to the drums.

Growing up I have had the pleasure of serving and dancing with all sorts of spiritual entities be they orisha in Lukumí drumming ceremonies, Lwa in Vodou and 21 divisions parties and misas espirituales. Sprits have a tendency to ask me to dance with and for them, ever since I was a kid, aided by my experience as an omo ibeji -a twin in the Lukumi tradition. In that Bronx basement, this rule held true.

“I don’t know this music but I know this music” the spirit had announced in a creolized Spanish and implored everyone in attendance to dance to take up space in the spiritual batey that had been curated for the party.

My immediate instinct was to consider how dancing bomba with spirit was an inevitable transformation in the trajectory of the music, by the people who take up the music. However, it made me question the state-sanctioned narratives about bomba and lead me to asking new questions about Black social and political life.

Often, academic scholarship on Black culture gets a categorical treatment of “cosas de los negros” or “Black themes” resulting in depoliticized and under-theorized understandings of Black social life in the wake of plantation and hacienda slavery and the effects of global US imperialism and diaspora. This rendered Black popular music, Black life, and black religious expression as categorically the same in early scholarship. This treatment of academic dissemination leads to early Bomba recordings to be categorically simmilar to research on the pathology and criminology of Black subjects under Latin American and US regimes.

If bomba is not a religion, it is important to make clear that many who turn to Bomba are religiously inclined and take up space as black diasporic spiritual bodies. To be clear, many who find community in Bomba are practitioners of various afro-Diasporic and religious traditions. Gilroy reminds us that Black Culture like music is a counter-cultural expression that brushes up against modernity tending to community needs, aesthetic and embodied expressions of freedom.