AfroLatine Worship
Originally published in the AETH Blog
“The practice of using drums and panderetas (tambourines) with a fast rhythm is very common in both Pentecostal and African-based religious practices.” – Rev. Luis Barrios
I have been preaching for a while, almost thirty years to be honest. It’s not because I am so wise, no it was because I started preaching at a young age at the behest of my father. I never actually preached in Bogota, Colombia, where I was born, but do recall when I first preached here in the U.S. I was eleven-years old when I shared a surely very brief homily with members of a Pentecostal Church in the Bronx. I don’t remember much about it, I remember wearing a suit, I remember being nervous, I remember some kids making fun of me before and during my preaching. But what always stands out to me, the thing that I remember the most, well other than the other kids laughing at me, was the music in that church. The way the drummer made the congregation come alive, the way the pianist was playing, the manner in which the music really added an aspect that my sermon could not provide seemed impeccable to me.
As I kept learning and preaching in the Pentecostal Church I kept being impressed by musicians and singers. The ways their songs would invoke God and cause the congregation to move, the manners in which the people needed an outlet, just kept moving me to think of music in the church as not just a secondary act but in our Pentecostal churches it was the primary responsibility of the service.
As I started to learn more about theology, music and AfroLatinidad I started to realize that what makes our Pentecostal music unique and so embodied were its Black roots, its African roots. However, upon sharing this information with fellow ministers, friends, and pastors the response was always, “no, eso es mundano, lo nuestro de Dios.” But I wasn’t talking about the lyrics, I was just talking about the rhythms which were rooted in African and Afro-Caribbean musicality. Sadly, what this revealed to me was that due to Anti-Blackness that has been a part of our congregations, our culture, and our tradition, we do not want to recognize that the coritos we sing have roots in Afro-Descendant music, in Black culture.
Music that hails from Latin America or is made by Latino/as is so influenced in African rhythms that to deny this should be considered illogical. From Merengue to Cumbia to Tango, all our music, and even the names of the genres, are African Based. The music that we colloquially know as Salsa is composed of many rhythms which we know hail from African and Afro-Cuban roots. Most of our music has so much Africanity in it that it’s sound can’t be any more influenced by the African Diaspora.
These same rhythms were present in worship sets I would hear at all of the services and campañas in my church in Brooklyn and in many churches I would visit. Whether the church was predominantly Puerto Rican, Dominican, Colombian, or Central American, many of the rhythms of the coritos had many influences I have come to learn derive from the continent of Africa. And not only our music, but our entire worship experience, the embodiment of the music is what creates space for the Holy Spirit to take over our minds, bodies, and even tongues, is something that resembles other African based spiritualities. This isnt something we should shy away from, but rather something that we should see connects us to a long tradition of the way that God operates in people of African Descent. It is part of Pentecost and how it makes use of our language and culture.
As Rev. Samuel Cruz says in Masked Africanisms: Puerto Rican Pentecostalism “Calling for the presence of God via the medium of dance, combined with the sounds of instruments, particularly drums, became essential aspects of Pentecostal worship. Some have observed that when drums are missing, they are replaced with shouts, stomping of feet, tambourines, and organs… an attribute which is also very African.”
The issue is that we don’t like to highlight that our rhythms are rooted in Africa because of stereotypes. Black culture throughout the Americas has been vilified as being demonic or del diablo. Today our music has lost some of its uniqueness, we have traded our original beautiful music for generic music that does not hail from our origins and simply continues this process of Black erasure. We no longer hear coritos with powerful theological messages such as my favorite Puerto Rican corito:
Alabar a Dios cuando las cosas te salen bien, ¡qué bueno es!
Alabar a Dios cuando en la vida no hay problemas, ¡qué cosa buena!
Pero yo le alabo desde mi quebranto
Y Jesucristo se glorifica dentro de mi
We need to start to reclaim and recognize that our worship, Latino worship, Pentecostal worship and many worship styles used by all our Latino churches have roots in Black culture. It will go a long way to stopping Anti-Blackness in our churches and our culture and will make us appreciate our heritage that much more. It will make our worship more dynamic, more vivid and at the end of the day more incarnational.
The Apostle Paul reminds the Christians in Ephesus “…be filled with the Spirit, meditating on psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making music to God in your hearts.” (Eph. 5:18,19 TFET) The way that our Latino, our Afro-Latina/o siblings in Christ make music in their hearts, the way that we have made music in our hearts for many years has been rooted in Blackness, and we shouldn’t question that, we should embrace and celebrate it for it has been infused by the Spirit of God.
Guesnerth Josué Perea serves as Executive Director of the afrolatin@ forum, Co-Curator of the AfroLatine Theology Project, Co-Producer of the documentary "Faith in Blackness: An Exploration of AfroLatine Spirituality”, Co-Host of the podcast Majestad Prieta, and Associate Pastor at Metro Hope Church. His writings on AfroLatinidad have been part of various publications including Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora, the Revista de Estudios Colombianos, and most recently Engaging Religion, a digital journal by Indiana University. Josué was once named by the newspaper amNewYork as one of five Colombians "making a mark" in New York City.
