Soulful Sancocho

Abstract

“Everything started in Colón, soul music came to Panama via Colón,” said bass player Carlos Brown remembering the late 1960s and early 1970s when he and his band Los Dinámicos Exciters were part of the vanguard of a new musical movement that revolutionized popular music in Panama, conquering national TV shows, radio stations, and dancehalls with a unique fusion of US soul music, Caribbean calypso, and the latest Afro-Latin styles from New York, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. While these musical groups which would become known as combos nacionales drew from diverse Afro-hemispheric sources, the predominant influence of soul icons from the US such as James Brown, The Temptations, and Aretha Franklin manifested itself not only in their music but also in their appropriation of US Black aesthetics which was closely related to a sentiment of solidarity and identification with the Civil Rights and Black Power movements among Black Panamanians. Paralleled in magnitude only by the emergence of Latin Soul in 1960s New York and Brazil’s Black Rio movement in the 1970s, the combos introduced African American-inspired “soul style” in a Latin American context that was built upon white mestizo nationalist imaginaries. As many of the combos’ protagonists were Panamanians of Afro-Caribbean descent they gave unprecedented visibility to a community that had been excluded and discriminated against since the arrival of their ancestors from Jamaica, Barbados, and other Anglo-Caribbean islands most of whom had been recruited as labor migrants for the US-lead construction of the Panama Canal between 1904 and 1914. While soul music has often been celebrated as the ultimate expression of the US Black experience, I suggest that a closer look at the popularization of soul music in a Latin American country such as Panama might help to question one-dimensional nationalist interpretations of the genre. While Black Power anthems like James Brown’s “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud” were clearly aimed at closing ranks among African Americans in the US, I argue that soul music in Panama often contributed to building bridges between Panama’s Black Anglophone West Indian minority and the Spanishspeaking native population. It is in this spirit of complicating homogenizing and essentialist narratives of blackness and the prescribed meanings of Black popular culture that I aim to bring the concepts of post-soul and afrolatinidades into a dialogue with each other. In the same vein, it is this essaýs intention to contribute to the bridging of persistent demarcations between African American, Caribbean, and AfroLatin American Studies and further ongoing efforts for the development of a hemispheric perspective on the African diaspora in the Americas as proposed by Ifeoma Nwankwo, Agustín Lao-Montes,