The “First Day of Afro-Latin, Afro-Caribbean and Diaspora Women”, held between July 15 and 25, 2022 in Havana, has come to enrich the sociocultural panorama of the Island, opening the way to the traditions and artistic expressions that have been characterized by occupying the funds of the spaces of visibility and promotion. media.
The conceptual design of the event presented clearly reparative aims in the interest of the rights of black women, beyond national borders. In this way, the materialization of these desires is the result of a struggle that precedes several decades in time, carried out by a group that still has numerous social claims for racial and gender equity.
Among the variety of presentations that took place at the meeting, I will pay particular attention to the proposal of songalvez, a duo made up of the sisters Alba Liria Shand and Wendy Oram Gálvez, who stood out for their uniqueness, capable of captivating an entire audience made up of hundreds of people inside the Chaplin Theater in the Cuban capital. These young women with academic training have transcended in an adverse context for the recognition of their talent. Also in the face of the challenges that success implies in a highly competitive and class-oriented environment, added to the fact of making way for the variables of gender and skin color in her professional career.
Its harmonic representation is influenced by the most authentic expressions of the national culture, enriched with the classic standards that govern the canons of artistic instruction; Despite his self-confessed charm for African music, American pop and rock Argentinian. So that in its sonority the fusion of a Caribbean rhythm mixed with various musical genres that have become part of the heritage of Cubans, such as timba, son, rumba, pilón, salsa, is perceived. , the guaguancó, among others.
songalvez distances itself from any purist vocation in search of a plural public and a wide reception in terms of criticism, slightly distanced from the most colloquial expressions of urban music, such as the lyrics marked by a hypersexualization of women, the simplicity in aesthetic production or idealization that borders on the fatuousness of romantic eroticism, by choosing to separate from the usual resources of implicit violence in the compositions, —so naturalized by the media and socio-digital networks—, which largely condition consumption in contemporary times. But, that does not make them despise the influence and importance that such manifestations have in their repertoire and group projection.
The freshness of its public acceptance is ascribed to the knowledge of expertise along with the successful combination of other rhythms and influences from Cuban popular roots, motivated by admiration for exponents such as Celia CruzBenny More, Chano Pozo, Jose Luis Cortes, Chucho Valdes, Adalberto AlvarezAlexander Abreu and Juan Formell.
A song to the emancipation of Afro-descendant women
During the pandemic confinement stage (2020-2022) there was a shift in what had been the musical proposal of songalvez. At that moment, Alba and Wendy decide to break with the projected springs and embark on the path of singing to Afro-feminine beauty from a decolonizing perspective. This variable came into their lives at a moment of identity re-signification that marked a change in their daily philosophy and visual exposure in the planes of existence.
This fact, usually accompanied by a process of reading and searching for new paradigms, came to reaffirm from art what in praxis had been the beginning of a new cycle of conceptual introspection, accompanied by a position of pride in the face of challenges. which implies success in a space so marked by the whitening of Afro-descendants for their legitimation in such circuits.
Thus, Alba and Wendy become representatives of a population sector that does not usually have representation in a market promoted on its platforms, —in the best of cases, the industry absorbs its referents turning them into temporary fashions with purely mercantilist purposes—; in the same way that the recognition of this reality by the exponents of greater media visibility is conspicuous by its absence.
In this sense, songalvez It is the continuation of a work that has antecedents such as: El Mola, Obsession, Sekou and Robert el Ninho, who have made high-quality products in their compositions and arrangements, whose lyrics allude to restorative justice in racial terms. In the case of the Gálvez sisters, their significance is even greater, by including the topics of black feminism in their banner, for the liberation of Afro-descendant women under a successful Caribbean fusion. In his creations there are doses of personal experience in the face of the challenges involved in being part of a historically subalternized group, whose variables of improvement are not only in the hands of its members, but it is the duty of society as a whole to achieve equitable goals in the multiple spheres of life.
However, their ambitions as a group transcend these elements of social approach to encompass other existential and sound complexities that result from their full domain, despite the fact that they remain in continuous improvement from the planes of poetry, literature and music, admirably. representation of Cuban identity that ratifies the inexhaustible cultural heritage that converges throughout the Island.
