Déjala Correr: The Sonic Infrastructure of Sociality on Colombia's Caribbean Coast

Abstract

This dissertation centers on the city of Barranquilla, Colombia, located on the country's northern Caribbean Coast, and the musical technologies that are ubiquitous sites of entertainment, musical interest, and social gathering in the city’s popular class neighborhoods, known as picós. Picós are large, colorfully decorated sound systems that play primarily West and Central African and Afro-Caribbean popular musics. I examine the ways that picós are symbolically located within local perceptions of class and racial identity. Barranquilla is a city that has been mostly peripheral to state projects of nation-building and is located in a region that is paradoxically imagined to be mixed race but also black, modern but also rural, poor but also industrial. Between 1900 and 1950, it was the second largest city in Colombia and held the country’s most important port. Consequently, it was an industrial powerhouse, a site of technological innovation, and cultural cosmopolitanism. Current nostalgic narratives of the city’s gradual decay dominate journalistic, political, and elite accounts of the city. Because of the city’s industrial identity, the city’s deteriorating infrastructure is commonly pointed to as evidence of Barranquilla’s fall from power. In this dissertation, I will argue that the social networks, technologies, and discursive fields that comprise picós function as an alternative to the lack of infrastructure provided to the city’s socially and class-segregated popular class neighborhoods. This infrastructure hinges around the modes of sociality that picós provide, which resist state logics of racial and class categorization. In so doing, picoteros utilize musical technologies to make claims on the hostile and contested space of Barranquilla's built environment.