The Ibero-American Culture Week is not the one with the most members nor the best-funded one. It is not very old and, when it started, it was not even exclusive: footage from the late North American, Latin American and Nordic Culture Week 2013 exists as proof of it. To be fair, there is not much about the numbers of our Culture Week that make it particularly special.
Yet, it is. Every year, for one week, every room in our school gets filled with the joy and happiness of that uncharacterized essence of being Latino that we all can tell but no one can pinpoint. That beautiful thing that goes beyond the lyrics of Bad Bunny or the spice of tacos and, despite its apparent superficiality, truly means more than anything words can convey.
Thankfully, humankind has means of communication apart from words. Even if Latin America has many writers with the grandeur of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or the glamour of Julio Cortazar, the one language our region has mastered is that of music. From protest anthems to club classics, the indescribable essence of being Latino fills pentagrams with more ease than paragraphs.
Although our music could fill history textbooks one after another and one of our favorite skills is the art of yapping, the Ibero-American Culture Week is also about explaining what Latino means in a condensed, week-long format. As so, here is a written playlist with five Latino songs for five Latino days.
Monday – Nos Siguen Pegando Abajo, Charly García
Latin America is obsessed with life because it is constantly threatened with death. We are a region filled with art, but also were the escape vent for several Nazi leaders. Our lively music is a manifestation of happiness as much as it is a political statement, and if there is anyone who realized -and mastered- this it’s Charly García (Buenos Aires, 1951).
An absolute musical prodigy who had perfect pitch at age six, Garcia’s musical breakthrough came at age 21 with Canción para mi Muerte (Song for my Death), the first single of his band Sui Generis (1969-1975). Heavily influenced by tango and classical music, García could be considered the biggest rockstar our region has ever seen: a life of drugs, sex and rock’n’roll led him to jump from the balcony of a 9-story building in 2000 simply because “he felt like it”.
He survived. And this was not even the most life-threatening situation he put himself in: as part of the generation most affected by the Argentine dictatorship that put the country in a chokehold from 1976 to 1983, he had to exile himself in Brazil because of the heavy political undertone of his songs. Near the end of the dictatorship, when the Falkland/Malvinas war was at its peak, his song “No Bombardeen Buenos Aires” (Don’t Bomb Buenos Aires) became a hit that cost him another exile.
Now from New York, his album Clics Modernos (Modern Clix) was his definitive leap into history. Perhaps the most innovative album in the history of Latin American music, it introduced the concept of sampling into Spanish-speaking music as much as it defied the authoritarian shade that seems to wrap our countries so often.
Nos Siguen Pegando Abajo (They Keep Hitting Us Low) is all about being hit, but standing up and following. With its upbeat atmosphere and García’s raging vocals, there is nothing about this song that does not scream for life from a deeper concern for death. Whether under the Videla regime that destroyed Argentina or the Castro regime that still suffocates Cuba, we Latinos keep claiming for life.
Even if they keep hitting us low.
Tuesday – El Gran Varón, Willie Colón
My father can be considered an innocently homophobic character. As he puts it, “he does not have anything against LGBTQ+ people”, but he refuses to learn what LGBTQ+ means and would rather have me as a “true straight man”. On a calm Sunday afternoon, I was driving around my town with him and holding the grand post of changing the music when El Gran Varón played.
Despite him being a prime example of what can be described as a “rock dad”, he loves salsa. We all love salsa, whether or not we like to admit it. As this song played, we both happily sang along: as it came to an end, we proclaim the mandatory “temazo” that comes after any good track is played and I ask him how he feels about vibing to a song about a trans person that died during the HIV pandemic of the eighties.
-Wait, what? –he exclaimed. At his 58 years of age, he had never realized he spent most of his life dancing to El Gran Varón, a song published in 1989 narrating the story of Simón, a Panamanian boy whose dad called him “The Great Man” despite him transitioning after leaving his country in order to escape from homophobia.
Always critical, Willie Colón (New York, 1950) is an artist whose pieces are as danceable as they are masterful pieces of social commentary. Within the bigger picture of the salsa movement, the utmost Latino genre that was nonetheless born in the Bronx, his wittiness is not an exception: practically every single salsero has pieces like El Gran Varón, where censorship is avoided by camouflaging critique under trumpet beats.
After some discussion, my dad accepts it. For his whole life, this subtly homophobic character had been singing to a song about a trans woman dying away from his rejecting family. El Gran Varón is as much about dancing as it is about defending LGBTQ+ rights in an era where no one dared to. Latin America is as much about dancing as it is about standing up and fighting.
Wednesday – Aquarela do Brasil, Francisco Alves
Something often understated about Latin America is how huge it is. Most of the Latin Americans in our school have been in more European countries than in Latin American countries apart from their own: considering how inequitable the access to elite education institutions like UWC is in Latin America, it is no small thing. Not even middle to high-class people can afford to travel inside our continent because it is simply gigantic.
And one of the few songs that manage to catch this dimension is Aquarela do Brasil (Watercolor of Brazil), a classic samba looking to paint a full picture of Brazil through narrating the lives of characters typical of the country’s society. As sparkled with social consciousness as the previous two songs, a charming brunette (morena sestrosa) who looks beautifully careless is portrayed as Brazil to the same extent to which a recently freed Black mother is.
In its delightful calmness, Aquarela do Brasil shows a country of contrasts spread over a canvas of jungle and savannah. Legend has it that this song was written because its composer, Ary Barroso, could not leave his house due to a strong thunderstorm and, as so, he sat down and simply wrote one of the most important songs of Brazilian history.
Yet, importance does not always come for free. Ary Barroso (Ubá, 1903) is the creator of the Samba-exaltação movement, a musical wave started in 1939 aimed at the exaltation of the beauty of Brazil through a markedly jingoist perspective that sought to impulse listeners to ignore the horrors of the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship.
Vargas, the most influential Brazilian politician of the 20th century, is the root of many of the problems that today the country faces, ranging from the rise of the far right to the countless abuses committed by corporations. His two governing terms shaped Brazil as it is today and are now looked at as one of the worst moments in the country’s history.
Still, Aquarela do Brasil did not fail in its description of the country. Perhaps one of the main reasons why authoritarianism is so successful is precisely because it never fails to understand what it is ruling over.
Thursday – Dame un Break – Rawayana
Latinos are the tightest community ever once they fly out of the territory encompassed from the Rio Grande down to Patagonia: besides that, there is barely any sense of a Latino community save for the fact that we all listen to reggaetón –a musical genre born inside the United States. Yet, each country has a particular sense of belonging for certain regions, mostly ascribed to linguistic and geographical boundaries.
Brazil is mostly understood as an outlier because they speak Portuguese. Argentina and Uruguay get confused not only because of the sun in their flags, but also because they receive about the same amount of sun each year, which is basically nothing compared to the Caribbean solecito we have in Venezuela and Central America. When a country’s population is dispersed across more than one geographic region, differences occur: in Colombia, for example, you should not dare mix up a costeño and a paisa because they live on different sides of the Panama Canal.
As a Venezuelan, I always saw myself as especially Caribbean. Even though I grew up in a mountainous area, I had never been more than 100km away from the Caribbean sea until I came to Mostar and a year without going to the beach was something totally unheard of for me. Venezuela’s football is also as terrible as that of the Caribbean countries, but our baseball pitchers are the world’s best.
Rawayana (Caracas, 2007) is precisely about the inner conflict of the Venezuelan identity. Its name comes from the Hindu saga Ramayana, but most people think it sounds “indigenous” simply because the indigenous tribes that inhabit Venezuela are extremely removed from the population centers. Its members all speak fluent English and come from one of the country’s most prestigious schools, but every Venezuelan knows the lyrics to at least five of their songs. Because, in the end, we are all the same.
Dame un Break (Gimme a Break)’s Spanglish is all about that: we are all the same, so chill out. It is fair that Latin America is the world’s capital of beaches and stunning landscapes: we love to take little breaks. We might as well take them in front of a beautiful sea.
Well, Bolivia cannot. Chile took their seafront. And god, are they pissed about it: there is nothing worse for a Latino than not being able to go to the beach.
Friday – Voy a pasármelo bien – Hombres G
A matter of debate that arises every time one tries to list Latin American countries is whether Spain and Portugal count. The UWC Mostar community, de facto, has settled in favor of the Iberian peninsula being an honorary Latino non-American region: Voy a pasármelo bien (I am gonna have a good time) is a perfect piece of evidence that sustains the case.
Hombres G (Madrid, 1981) is a deeply Spaniard product. The members of the band met in the hallways of Spain’s national broadcasting company and their lyrics are filled with references to cultural phenomena absolutely non existent in Latin America “proper”: for instance, in Devuélveme a mi chica, their most popular song, a reference is made to a teenager owning a car -something impossible in most of our economies. However, geography is not determinant of being Latino or not.
And Voy a pasármelo bien could not exist in any other culture. A totally hedonistic song with a melody that could perfectly be signed by The Police, its main purpose is to narrate the drive one feels right before waking up on a day you know you will party. From jumping to have breakfast to rushfully calling each of your friends asking to go with you, there is hardly any way to describe how exciting it is to go to a Latino party better than Hombres G does in this song.
As a teenager in 2024, I cannot help but agree with their descriptions: yet, this is a 35 year old song. Since 1989, the entire way in which parties work has changed: the music is different, the drinks are stronger and the entertainment is, perhaps, more obscene. However, the drive is the same.
Latin American parties are all about a drive that stays the same from generation to generation. In each one of them, there is a certain seminal feeling that leads to unexplainable levels of energy: they start at 8:00 p.m. and finish at 6:00 a.m. the earliest, but one does not feel the need to sit down at any point in time.
And, yet, they are simply one of the aspects of our culture that are plagued with this vibrance and happiness only we have. That makes our Culture Week a memorable event for the entire school despite us living almost six thousand miles away. That helps us withstand the blows of authoritarian dictatorships and sharply criticize them.
Being Latino is something special. It is a feeling of contradiction, of constant worry and extreme happiness. A state of constant nervousness for whatever is happening around you that, nonetheless, makes you experience each moment with a different kind of amazement.
And I hope that, for a week, you can join us. Welcome to a week of awe, happiness, laughter and loudness.
Welcome to the Ibero-American Culture Week 2024.
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