The festival that was going to be born dead. : Tensions between the political and the cultural in Morroa, Colombia

Abstract

This article addresses the tension between politics and culture with regard to traditional music in the Caribbean region of Colombia. To this end, the National Festival of Pito Atravesao Pablo Domínguez was analyzed, a festival which has been held annually, and consecutively, in the municipality of Morroa, since 1989. For the first 25 years, the Festival was organized by a group of well-respected Morroan families within the Township; however, from 2014 to 2019, the organization of the Festival was led by a non-governmental organization (NGO) with the support of the Municipal Mayor’s office. The proposed hypothesis, in this paper, is that the local political class has instrumentalized this Festival as an arena of power (unilateral decision-making, administration of
resources, politicization of cultural events), thus preventing it from acting as a showcase for the transmission of musical tradition on a local level.