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Bomba Research Conference Reflections

Andrew Viñales

Reflection on the PROPA Bomba Research Conference

This is a reflection on my recent research trip to Puerto Rico for the 11th Bomba Research Conference, organized by PROPA—the Puerto Rican Organization for the Performing Arts. Although the conference is held biennially, this was its 11th iteration. It was a deeply enriching experience that helped shape my understanding of bomba comunitaria.

One of the key takeaways was the distinction between bomba comunitaria, bomba del pueblo, and folkloric bomba. This topic was discussed extensively at the conference, and it’s clear that more people are beginning to grasp the social, cultural, and political implications of bomba as a musical tradition.

A particularly impactful event was moderated by Melanie from PROPA, featuring Desseree Soto of La Casita de Chema in the Bronx and María Luisa Cortijo from Loíza, Puerto Rico. What struck me was the use of bomba in non-performance spaces—outside of the stage and beyond the folkloric, institutionalized versions. The framing of bomba in these contexts was deeply political, social, and cultural.

María Luisa runs a cultural center in Loíza called El Ancón de Loíza, a space inherited from her father and rooted in family tradition dating back to the early 1900s. This center served as a hub for community gathering, food, dominoes, and bomba. Located by the river, it was a literal and symbolic crossing point—connecting communities from Cangrejos, Piñones to Loíza via boat. It was a place of sustenance, joy, and cultural affirmation.

This history is vital to understanding bomba’s development. Loíza and other areas like Cangrejos were home to free Black communities and maroon spaces. These legacies of freedom and resistance are central to bomba’s origins and evolution.

The conversation between María Luisa and Desseree revealed striking parallels between El Ancón and La Casita de Chema. Both are examples of maroon practices—spaces of self-reliance, life-affirmation, and community building. Despite being separated by time and geography, they share a commitment to resisting colonial dispossession and affirming Black Puerto Rican life.

La Casita de Chema, born out of the Bronx’s era of urban neglect and dispossession in the 1970s, has become a federally and state-recognized historic landmark. This recognition provides a form of protection and legitimacy, though Desseree rightly notes that displacement remains a constant threat, especially under the conditions of anti-Blackness, gentrification and so-called development. 

In Puerto Rico, another location in Loíza en Las Carreteras known as el Prebistero Cepeda recently received historic landmark status. This recognition, while significant, also highlights the colonial dynamics at play—who gets to authorize history, and whose histories are preserved. The process of historicizing these spaces is both a refusal to be forgotten and a strategic engagement with state power.

Indexed as a communal act of refusal against the backdrop of anti-black erasure and violence from the colonial and imperial borders of Puerto Rico’s maroon communities, bomba does tell particular stories that may be different from the state’s narrative. For many Afro-Puerto Ricans, ancestral memory is linked with not only the embodied archive of music and dance and lyrics, but also in the very instrumentation. The practice of bomba today is a reenactment of cimaron life affirming ways that refuses the state’s racializing discourse, over centuries. This came to a heed in the conference during Marcos Peñaloza Pica talk where he reminds attendees that the appropriation of the maraca in bomba is a relatively recent addition to the bomba lexicon. According to the state however, While the state is concered with syncretizing bomba to fit a culturally nationalist anthropological approach to nation building, they transform bomba into a symbol of national puerto rican heritage. Suddenly Maracas in bomba racially indexes Indigenous “contribtution” to the history of bomba. While bomba is a Black music, the existence of may not always visibly center Blackness, due in part to state-led whitening (blanqueamiento) efforts. One example is the mestizaje trope, which falsely attributes bomba’s elements to a tri-racial myth—

La Maraca El Guiro Y las canciones de la bomba de Ataño en la Comunidad/ Marcos Peñaloza Pica

As I continue my research on bomba in New York City, I’m struck by how these practices are continuously remixed and reenacted—across decades and generations. These acts of refusal and affirmation create spaces where Black people can be seen, heard, and expressive.

I also had a personal moment of connection during the trip. María Luisa Cortijo, who grew up in Residencial Llorens Torres, mentioned her cousin from the housing projects—my aunt Coco, Luz Cortijo. This familial link reminded me that tDhese cultural practices are not just reenactments; they’re deeply personal and rooted in lived experience. Displacement doesn’t erase identity. These life-affirming practices endure, even across borders.

In sum, bomba is not just music—it’s a living tradition of resistance, memory, and community. Whether in Loíza or the Bronx, these spaces continue to affirm Black life and challenge colonial erasure.

When the Spirits Dance Bomba

Andrew Viñales

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.

Police and Bomba

Andrew Viñales

Today I am thinking about how recent attacks against queer Puerto Rican Bomba practicioners in New York City were abused by NYPD on night of June 8th, 2025, at an afterparty for Puerto Rican Day Parade activities.

When I first started writing about my experience with Bomba I was interested in how bomba serves as a spiritual and healing tool used to hold and provide space in the face of anti-black dehumanizing realities of enslavement and colonialism. For me that might be true. But what is also true is that the NYPD has no problem attacking people mid batey.

While it is said that Bomba was practiced on Sundays on the only day of the week our Enslaved Ancestors were able to be relatively free from the masters. Here they conspired against their dehumanization. I am immideatly taken back in time to consider how bomba this practice of freedom dreaming was policed then.

Similarly I am interested in the ways Bomba has been co-opted by the state to reproduce narratives that endanger practicioners in the present. Bomba serves as a tool of survival against anti-blackness but also reproduces narratives of Blackness that situates Afro-Puerto Ricans in particular space-time configurations. Put simply, the narratives that conveniently tie Black cultural production to the Nationalist myth of tri-racial harmony, serves to police the transformation of Bomba to meet the revolutionary needs of the present.

So, when a diasporic group of Queer radicals take up bomba to both uplift their current struggles against the constant threat of violence my ancestors don’t like it. It’s a reenactment of raids against Black space-making practices.