Puerto está que arde/Buenaventura is too hot

by angryindian | January 23, 2007 at 05:44 pm
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Buenaventura is a city of some 300,000 people, the most important port in the country (when the road to the interior isn't blacked by a mudslide, at least), located on the Pacific coast and home to mostly Afro-Colombians. The irony, of course, is that Buenaventura (or "Puerto," as many of its inhabitants jocularly call it) and the Pacific in general used to be one of the most laid-back parts of the country, and even if black migrants from the rural Pacific have been stifled in poverty. It also used to be a central cultural point, not only in local Afro-Colombian traditional culture, and for the Italian, Chinese, and Spanish immigrants who settled there, but for the entrance of salsa music in the mid-20th century with foreign black, which is how Cali became pachanguero. Contrast this bustling port with the funereal environment now, ehen people don't even want to leave their neighborhoods...

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