Issue #4 - Petkovsek - Donde meter la cabeza (A Place to Call One’s Own)
Donde meter la cabeza (A Place to Call One’s Own)
Peter Petkovsek
Abstract
Donde meter la cabeza is a community theatre performance, a salsa musical I helped co-create with the founders, teachers, and students of the Son de mi gente (The Sound of My People) foundation in the district of Aguablanca of the city of Cali, Colombia, as well as researchers from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Cali, in the fall of 2023. The musical relates the story of the community, based on the biographies of local community leaders. Applying the lens of Gregory Bateson’s systems theory to three excerpts of the piece, included for watching in relevant places in the article, I argue that throughout the show, music and dance, comprising mostly of salsa, serve as the functional memory of the mind-system. Salsa music and daning (re)frame the (hi)story of communal resilience and strength. They also provide a medium of emotional expression, thought, dreams, resistance, interfacing, linkage with a wider network of historical movements, and cohesion within the jostling and nesting mind-systems. Salsa music and dancing engender a feeling of community within the system that goes beyond mere belonging whilst keeping it going.
Article
Gregory Bateson understood systems of interrelated processes as ‘minds’, in which the mental process is “the activity involved in receiving and responding to information and in gaining and using knowledge”[i], even when that happens unconsciously. These processes “produce, for instance, healing in organs, growth in organisms, development in societies, or balance in large ecosystems”[ii]. The minds are ‘thinking’, then, through the exchange of information and the circular or feedback systems that the exchange creates. Systems or minds can vary “from the very small, perhaps bacterial, genetic, or cellular, to the very large: a coral reef and its inhabitants, a forest ecosystem, the mind of a nation, or the whole process of biological evolution”[iii]. Crucially, these minds aren’t solely existing side by side but constantly interacting with each other, and smaller minds are nested in larger ones all the way to an ultimate connected whole, the ‘sacred’.
A district such as Aguablanca (‘white water’) in the city of Cali, represents a vast and complex mind-system. It covers an area of former wetlands once surrounding the city, then mostly desiccated in the first half of the 20th century to create agricultural terrain. These remnants of marshes and fields of sugarcane and millet were slowly incorporated into the city through various unplanned urbanisations processes, beginning “with migrants from the Pacific Coast, /…/ [who] settled on land that was still flooded and mounded, lacking water, sewage and electricity services, in homes mostly made of mats and recyclable materials”[iv]. Migrants from the coast as well as neighbouring provinces were fleeing violence of the Colombian national conflict through the 1970s and 1980s, ‘illegally’ occupying millet-covered lands and transforming them into improvised urban neighbourhoods. Facing many hardships whilst resisting threats from landlords and the government, the communities eventually won the fights over land ownership. They self-organised to find solutions to building and constructing houses and basic infrastructure through mutual solidarity.
Socioeconomic challenges continued to plague the district in the ensuing years and resulted in more and more youth participating in street gangs or pandillas, initiating a period of violence and crime. The demarcations between territories were invisible borders, the unsanctioned crossing of which would result in lethal consequences and blood feuds. The already tenuous situation became even more dangerous with the arrival of organised crime, mostly related to narcotics trafficking. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the notorious Cali Cartel ruled the city, while the 2000s were marked by disputes between drug trafficking groups and national-level criminal, guerilla, and paramilitary organisations of the Colombian civil conflict entering the territory[v].
The district is still a victim of socioeconomic inequality within Cali, of often corrupt local police, and of discrimination based on racial prejudice. Aguablanca remains a symbol of violence, poverty, crime and danger for many middle-class and lighter-skinned Caleños living in the more affluent neighbourhoods of the central and southern city zones: “The stigmatization of the eastern neighbourhoods increases the vulnerability of the young people who live there, because given the few opportunities for social, cultural and labour insertion in the city, crime is presented as a quick way to get money.”[vi]. Cali is the city with Colombia’s largest urban Afro-Colombian population[vii], most of which is situated in the comunas (official city neighbourhoods) that make up Aguablanca. Racist dynamics with “discursive formations that associate blackness with backwardness and impoverishment”[viii] still abound. On the other hand, it is an incubator of strong artistic and cultural practices: “Music and dance became an arena for negotiating the effects of this daily struggle. In addition to providing a safe outlet to let off steam and temporarily forget one’s troubles, they also formed an important avenue for reaffirming the community bonds needed in other contexts for group survival and development”[ix]. Although all Caleños claim salsa as their own these days, it specifically “revindicates black and mixed-race culture and music by freely drawing upon several Afro-Caribbean traditions in defiance of dominant Eurocentric cultural canons”[x] and is therefore not only woven into the very social and historical fabric of Aguablanca, but also closely linked to ideas of community and of contesting hegemonical structures of power and influence.
Although salsa originated from Puerto Rican musicians in New York City in the 1960s, it quickly spread through Latin America in the second half of the 20th century and coincided with social movements such as the urban expansions of cities, including the one in Cali. “Significantly, salsa’s lyrics reflected the experiences of the Latino and Latin American black and mixed-race working class, and—in distinction to its Cuban antecedents—the songs mirrored the violence and discontent of the inner city”[xi]. Caleños also quickly developed a local emblematic style of salsa that is to this day recognised as a particularly fast version of the dance, contributing to the self-proclaimed title of the ‘salsa capital of the world’ and the image of the people of Cali as joyful dancing partygoers. However, the importance of salsa goes beyond entertainment or popular culture: “salsa and its roots emerged from racial and socioeconomic opposition to the dominant colonial and neocolonial order”[xii]. Although ultimately adopted by all social strata, it was primarily a form of expression of the working classes, the migrants fleeing violence and flocking to the city, as well as the rapidly growing urban population trying to make sense of the whirlwind of socioeconomic, political, environmental, and cultural transitions happening all around them. Salsa is in the blood and genes of the young (mostly Afro-Colombian) generations in Aguablanca as an expression of their history and culture, a way to exercise and develop their artistic talents, and an alternative to getting involved in street gangs or crime. Additionally, it represents a potential ticket to a higher living standard and a life outside of the district, through a potential professional career or tournament wins.
Returning to Bateson, one can delineate any number of minds of various sizes or subsystems in Aguablanca, starting with the individual people and their networks. The Son de mi gente foundation is nested within the system of a salsa community, involving salsa dancers, musicians, styles of music, history of its provenance, its social and environmental meaning etc. It is also laterally connected to the system of violence and crime, of the pandillas and their victims, the narco-trafficking organisations, national conflict, the agricultural efforts needed to produce the drugs etc. The system of violence presents a feedback loop (vicious circle), where ‘successive cycles of information amplify any deviation from the norm, resulting in increasing change”[xiii]. A higher amount of crime results in more conflict, poverty and suffering, resulting in less opportunity and therefore even more crime; a killing of one pandillero results in vengeance from the rival gang, continuing and escalating the conflict ad infinitum. From the individual people to the various units formed by familial, interest, professional, creative, opportunistic etc. ties, these systems are nested within the larger system of the drained wetlands turned fields of sugarcane and millet turned densely populated unplanned urban environment. This includes the interrelation with climate change, government policies, demographic shifts and changes. Everything together represents the highly complex system of the Aguablanca district itself.
These systems meet Bateson’s criteria for mental processes: sufficient complexity, interchange of information, a push-and-pull between entropic and negentropic (negatively entropic, organising) processes, division into subsystems and inclusion into larger systems, interaction that leads to learning and change. Crucially, Bateson sees the network of mind-systems as a network of relations: “mental function is immanent in the interaction of differentiated ‘parts’. ‘Wholes’ are constituted by such combined interaction”[xiv], or put differently, “minds exist and function only as the relating between material parts”[xv]. It is these points of relating or interfacing that are the truly important parts of the systems and their connections: “All mental life is rigged around, dependent upon, made of … these multiple interface meeting points where something different from something else meets that something else and something happens”[xvi].
There are therefore two important loci to search when trying to interpret chosen mind-systems through narrative and performative forms: the difference that is the originator of the flow of information within a system, and the interface where two or more systems rub against each other. In Donde meter la cabeza, the first scene shows a mother and daughter fleeing conflict and arriving on the marshland/agricultural fields on the outskirts of Cali. They understand that they’ve found a potential home through the difference represented by the neighbours and the community that welcomes them to the land. Just as Bateson’s finger cannot recognise a white chalk spot on the blackboard if placed directly on it, but it can sense it as change when dragged over it, the mother and daughter can start place-making in what will be later known as Aguablanca not because they found a ‘pretty’ location once seen on TV, but because of the loop of information/change folding back upon them through the interface with the existing community.
Watch the scene: Donde meter la cabeza excerpt 1.mp4
The search for a place of their own is accentuated by the daughter’s frequent question, ‘es aqui?’ – is it here?, to which the mother cannot answer ‘yes’ until the difference of the community, at that moment still undefined, is also established. Mother and daughter nest within a new system that offers the latter. As their new neighbours appear and echo the statement ‘es aqui!’ – It is here!, they burst into dance to the sounds of the salsa song Siempre Pa’lante [xvii], which translates to ‘always going forward’ or ‘always keep going’, a continuation of the popular phrase (also present in the lyrics of the song) echa pa’lante, ‘go and succeed’ – a message of resilience and resistance deeply embedded in many existing variants of the song. The fact that all the dancers in this song are women adds to the significance of gender relationships within the community of Aguablanca, where women are frequently the ones stitching together social fabric disrupted by ‘male’ activities. Before launching into dance, the chorus of dancers first presents images of the terrain, then morphs into the nascent community, performing a connection between land and people. The daughter joins in, haltingly at first, then quickly learning and integrating herself completely into the dancers. In the narrative version of historically difficult events, salsa music and dancing take on the function of the working memory of the system, triggering interaction between the various minds through difference. Thus they create “’transforms’ (i.e., coded versions) of events which preceded them”[xviii] and engender in these moments of interfacing, the feeling that, to paraphrase Lola Olufemi[xix] keeps the community there, keeps it from deciding to leave. In the narrative, salsa music and dancing empowers the community to resist the landlords and government forces trying to evict them. It also allows the people to claim ownership of the land through place-making dance. In Batesonian terms, the mind-system has progressed: “When organisms or systems advance in their ability to live successfully, they are achieving levels of learning that enable them to recognize (not necessarily consciously) the wider context of their previous learning”[xx].
In Act 2 of Opera Salsa, the mind-system of the social environment of Aguablanca comes into friction with the mind-system of crime and street gang fighting. This is a stress test of the community’s ability to resist a self-reinforcing feedback loop. If coming together was previously sufficient to fight with landlords, government, scammers, and potentially threatening natural elements, the new challenge is more difficult, as it comes from within. The higher level of threat opens an opportunity for more systemic learning. In the scene, the young protagonist Jhon (based on one of the founders of the Son de mi gente foundation) is stopped on the street, robbed, and shot by a pandillero who wants his sneakers. The situation follows established violent relationships, in which the delinquents dominate local civilians.
Watch the scene: Donde meter la cabeza excerpt 2.mp4
The pandillero who shoots Jhon also dances salsa; he is a representative of the system, an inner threat or shock test, and he is only doing this for survival within the same system. The community reacts not by rejecting the feeling that brought them together, but by reinforcing it and joining ranks once again, to dance[xxi] while Jhon gets dragged off stage. By coincidence, the shooting doesn’t end in death but in partial paralysis, giving Jhon an opportunity to subvert the relationship, choosing a path of peace building and nonviolent resilience rather than entering the vicious cycle of a positive feedback loop of revenge. Played by the real Jhon, he reflects on this community-changing decision, while the camera focuses on his feet – the feet that cannot dance salsa anymore but continue to bind the community together. He links the story of the community to the symbolic health of the Blue Lagoon (Charco Azul), the only remnant of the former wetlands in the district, once plagued by pollution and corpses of gang war victims, now a clean haven for local wildlife and the community.
Salsa therefore represents the conduit for community memory; within the system, this translates into a functional (moving) part between the many integrated Batesonian minds making up the Aguablanca district and its people – a common denominator of sorts that allows information to flow from one system to the next. This is why the choreographies (of salsa and other types of dances) incorporated into Donde meter la cabeza transcend their showcase presentation to a much more fundamental function of identity integration within the expanded community, including the people, the environment, and all the interacting systems. Salsa as the working memory or feeling within the system binds it together, and this binding is actualised through dancing. Analysing it through the systems theory lens, I argue that this type of performance leads to higher-level learning within the integrated systems, which ultimately contributes to the extension of the self and the idea of the unifying sacred. The direct manifestation of this for Son de mi gente is an imprint within the system of Aguablanca. Through salsa and dancing, the show affirms the history, culture, and identity of the characters and the real dancers performing them. It opens the space to create connections within the community as well as between the community and the land. It provides a medium of resistance against pressures from hegemonic structures as well as a medium of potential growth and change for the participants of the project. The final dance, in which the whole community keeps dancing on as a symbol of union and resilience, is performed to a song[xxii] whose lyrics express pride in the way Caleños dance salsa, ending with a communal shout of ‘Distrito de Aguablanca!’:
Watch the scene: Donde meter la cabeza excerpt 3.mp4 [xxiii]
Endnotes:
[i] Noel G. Charlton, Understanding Gregory Bateson: Mind, Beauty, and the Sacred Earth. (State University of New York Press, 2008), p. 31
[ii] Charlton 2008, ibid
[iii] Charlton 2008, p. 29
[iv] Aceneth Perafán Cabrera, ‘Ciénaga de Aguablanca (Cali, Colombia), Scene of Socioecosystemic Transformations in the 20th Century’, Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribena, 12(1) (2022), pp. 74–107, DOI (p. 99)
[v] Jorge Ordóñez-Valverde, ‘De la pandilla a la banda: Transformaciones de la violencia pandillera en barrios marginales en Cali’, Sociedad y Economía, 32 (2017), pp. 107–126.
[vi] Diana Vinasco-Martínez, ‘Pacificando el barrio: orden social, microtráfico y tercerización de la violencia en un barrio del distrito de Aguablanca (Cali, Colombia)’Cultura y Droga, 24(27) (2018), pp. 157–187. DOI (p. 179)
[vii] Peter Wade, Music, race and nation: música tropical en Colombia. (The University of Chicago press, 2000), p. xvi
[viii] Lise A. Waxer, The City of Musical Memory: Salsa, Record Grooves, and Popular Culture in Cali, Colombia. (Wesleyan University Press, 2002), p. 48
[ix] Waxer 2002, p. 121
[x] Waxer 2002, p. 47
[xi] Waxer 2002, p. 32
[xii] Waxer 2002, p. 43
[xiii] Charlton 2008, p. 23
[xiv] Gregory Bateson, Mind and nature: a necessary unity (E.P. Dutton, 1979), p. 93
[xv] Charlton 2008, p. 46 (my emphasis)
[xvi] Bateson, qtd. in Charlton 2008, p. 38
[xvii] The music used here is the song Pa Lante by Tito Puente. The songs used in the performance were done with purely educational and practice-research purpose and were not diffused with the intention of profit or in circuits that would break the copyright of the artists.
[xviii] Bateson 1979, p.92
[xix] Lola Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, (Hajar press, 2021), p. 8
[xx] Charlton 2008, p. 52
[xxi] To the music of Welcome to the Party by Har-You Percussion Group
[xxii] The song, Salsa Caleña, is by Cali Flow Latino
[xxiii] The credits of the performers and creatives are at the end of this video. The three analysed excerpts represent a bit less than half of the whole performance.