Bomba Cimarrona: Hip Interactions in the Afro-Ecuadorian Bomba del Chota as a Decolonial Means to Remember

Abstract

In the seventeenth century, African enslaved people were introduced into an Ecuadorian valley currently known as Chota-Mira. From Atlantic slavery period, the inhabitants of this valley have been performing the event of Bomba del Chota. Currently, the most widespread representations of Bomba del Chota focus on a female Afrodescendant dancer smiling and moving her hips. In this chapter, I focus on the historical connection between dancers’ interactions through their hips in some Afro-Ecuadorian Bomba del Chota events that I have named here as ‘Bomba Cimarrona’, and their collective memories. I suggest that the understanding of this connection is essential to counteract the widespread colonial Ecuadorian belief that Bomba is a spectacle that is limited to each dancer’s fixed and stereotypical hip movements. Through a qualitative research method based on bibliographical compilations, participatory observations and a “relación de escucha” (relationship of listening; Rivera Cusicanqui, El Potencial Epistemológico y Teórico de La Historia Oral: De La Lógica Instrumental a La Descolonización de La Historia. Temas Sociales, 2015, p. 286), I want to suggest that Afro-Ecuadorian dancers have strategically maintained, and thus collectively remembered some of these hip interactions within the events of Bomba Cimarrona. Through the performance of Bomba Cimarrona, a sense of transient but recurring decolonial freedom, that resists the control over their lives and bodies they have historically faced is continuously generated.