Afro-Colombian internal migration and participatory music: Ethnically and politically charged religious festivals in Bogota

This paper reports an analysis of the roles of music performance in traditional patron saint celebrations from Afro-Colombian communities originally from the Pacific region but who currently live in the capital city of Bogotá. Since the late 1980s, a group of Afro-Colombian cultural leaders have used local traditional expressive cultural practices to construct social cohesion and a sense of collectivity among Afro-Colombians in the city. Here, I argue that the performative, expressive, and affective aspects inherent in Afro-Colombian patron saint celebrations can enable the potential of this transplanted practice for constructing ethnic identity and civic participation, thus catering to the needs of migrants and forcibly displaced people. Looking specifically at the case of the Virgin of Atocha saint wake in Bogotá, I discuss how several musicking, semiotic, and communicative techniques can be identified as facilitating social cohesion and cooperative behavior among participants. In this regard, creating an atmosphere overflowing with carefully selected social, expressive, cultural, and religious stimuli, as well as the idea of active participation, enables deep affective experiences that have an impact on elastic processes of identity construction and resignification of space and territory.