Abstract
ABSTRACTChampeta is the music from the Colombian Caribbean coast and extremely popular in Afro-descendant communities of any age, increasingly fancied by non-black people as well. Despite being highly celebrated on the coast, in the capital of Bogotá and other big cities of the country’s interior, champeta is still marginalized and not recognized as a music suitable for the rest of Colombian society. This article reviews the history of champeta music from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, with a particular focus on the diverging developments in Cartagena and Barranquilla, respectively. It analyzes factors that may explain the local and regional popularity as well as the national rejection of champeta, and concludes that the elements which made champeta regionally successful are precisely those elements which hindered its acceptance on a national level: namely, the focus on blackness and the African Diaspora, distinct class-based tastes, a loud claim to space by the lower classes, and the high regional stratification of the Colombian society.
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