Cumbia brooklynense

My friends from Brooklyn-based band Yotoco have given me a most joyful gift: they recorded a song, “Cumbia brooklynense,” based on my book, Loving Immigrants in America. Sebastián wrote the lyrics, and together with Nato, Gabo, Geo and Evan, arranged and recorded it as the title song of their newly-released album, Brooklynense. 

In the first four verses, Sebastián sings:

Saliendo del laberinto
con una cumbia brooklynense.
Todo el mundo motivado
para bailarla de frente.

These verses are an allusion to the chapter in my book entitled "Dancing Out of the Labyrinth: From Solitude to Communion." In it, I write of Latin dance parties as ways to create community among Latinx and other friendly, open, inclusive peoples in the United States.

But Sebastián's lyrics are poetic and fresh in their own right. Listen carefully. At the core of the song, there is an image of the intricate subway system in New York City as a labyrinth and the train as a steel Minotaur. In order to escape the labyrinth's isolating madness, dancers go to dance, face to face, a cumbia brooklynense.

I will be discussing these joyful topics on a philosophical conversation about "Revelry" this Saturday at The Happier Hour, a fun public philosophy event. It will be at 4 pm at Caveat, a cool bar in Manhattan's Lower East Side. You can find the event details here. If you are in New York City, I hope to see you there.

To me this is all a precious gift from beloved friends. I share below what I wrote about Yotoco in Loving Immigrants in America:

"It is Monday night in the early fall. After a long teaching day, I decided to unwind by listening to live music, so I have come again to Barbès in Brooklyn. Yotoco is playing their original and very danceable fusion of cumbia, merengue, bomba, funk, plena, and other rhythms. There is a percussionist on the timbales, another one on the congas, a bass player, a male singer on the accordion, and a female singer on the güiro and maracas. I have been dancing along with the small crowd, made up mostly of Anglo hipsters and a Haitian couple. A small Monday night crowd means a lot of dancing space available, so I have been moving with ease across the floor and mingling. Everyone is dancing together. The band has played some fun arrangements of traditional songs from Colombia and elsewhere, and some of their own compositions. Then they come to an original song that strikes my attention. The front man, a dark-bearded, curly-haired Colombian guy in his late twenties, plays the accordion as he sings:

Yo soy indocumentado 
y no puedo ir a estudiar. 
Aunque sepa más que nadie 
no entro a la universidad. 
Tengo que comer callado.

The lyrics make me think of some of my students at the college who are undocumented immigrants. Our public university justly does not reject their admission based on their immigration status, so they can study. But they do live with the same fears of joblessness, deportation, and family separation of all people in their situation. When they graduate, they will still be excluded from full political participation in society and even from the job market. I think of my friend W, a former student. His family migrated by land from Ecuador to la Yunai when he was a kid. He grew up and studied in Brooklyn. Now he is also in his late twenties, like Yotoco's singer, and has earned bachelor's and master's degrees in humanities from our university. The US government’s program that temporarily protects him from deportation may be discontinued. He has a sales job for which he is over-qualified. I wish I could remedy the injustice of his situation in a society that continues to exclude him. I cannot. But when I listen to Yotoco's song, I realize that the band is speaking up for him and that people are listening, even these Anglo hipsters that in the past I had disdained. After the set is over, I go to talk to Yotoco's singer. His name is Sebastián, from Medellín, Colombia. I ask him about “Indocumentado,” and I am surprised to learn that he is speaking from personal experience. He was once undocumented as he grew up and then went to college in Florida. But then our immigration system provided him with a way to become documented. Now he has come to New York to work as an engineer and play music. In my mind, he has been singing and speaking up on behalf of W to the crowd. And I think that, just as in this dance floor in Barbès, it is possible for sympathetic people to sing and listen and move in sync, for the growth of loving communion, in la Yunai."

 Listen to Cumbia Brooklynense