In preparation for Hispanic Heritage Month, the following text presents a segment from my research entitled, Freedom on Their Own Terms: Understanding and Reassessing Enslavement and Insurrections on the Island of Puerto Rico (Copyright © 2025, publication date subject to change). It will form part of my forthcoming book concerning Afro-Puerto Ricans and forms of resistance to enslavement during Spanish colonization on the island . The excerpt below provides a brief overview on the bomba music and dance genre in Puerto Rico in relation to its connection to resisting enslavement on the island. I have modified the text to conform to blog post formatting. Readers will find the corresponding musical incipits for the sample bomba drumming patterns at the bottom of the post after the footnotes. I used the Musescore 4 music notation software program to notate the bomba rhythmic patterns.
Disclaimer: The excerpt presented and forthcoming book demonstrate years of ongoing investigative historiographical and musicological research and do not incorporate AI-generated content of any kind.
Disclaimer: The excerpt presented and forthcoming book demonstrate years of ongoing investigative historiographical and musicological research and do not incorporate AI-generated content of any kind.
Communication and collaboration served as valuable approaches for enslaved Africans in Puerto Rico in the nineteenth century to work together and fight against captivity. Some documented enslavement insurrections indicate that participants also incorporated music and dance via the bomba through “call and response” vocality and percussion by playing barrel drums, the cuá (sticks), and maracas. This specific performative genre in Puerto Rico has existed for nearly four centuries in the 1600s since the Spanish colonized the island and is often historically connected as a form of resistance to African enslavement. Readers should comprehend the bomba as having more than one type of rhythmic pattern played by the Buleador (Low Drum) and the Primo providing improvisatory drumming. The bomba consists of sixteen known drumming patterns, with the “Bomba Sicá” functioning as the basic drumming pattern in bomba performance and other variants like the “Yubá,” “Holandés,” “Belén,” and “Cunyá” (see "Figures 1 through 7" for Buleador drumming patterns).[1]
Dance also figures prominently in the bomba. By establishing nonverbal communication between the primo drummer and lead dancer in a bomba performance (eg., physically looking at each other or the dancer gesturing to the drummer by waving clothes), the primo drummer must watch and closely follow the dance movements. The main sections in a bomba dance consist of the paseo (introduction), piquete (picket), and corrido (rapid dance movement that simulates running). The dancer in the bomba dictates when the primo drummer should play and improvise the musical portion. Readers should also not assume that the bomba remains exclusive to Loiza. Bomba also exists in other parts of the island like Santurce, San Juan, and Ponce.[2]
Information concerning initial documentation about the bomba and its origins tends to produce murky results due to colonialist interference. However, most sources concur that its inclusion within the Puerto Rican lexicon derives from the French rather than the Spanish and from a source that has little to do with either music or dance. Historians often credit André Pierre Ledru, a French naturalist, for applying the term while documenting his travel experiences in Puerto Rico in Viage a la Isla de Puerto-Rico from 1797. While the book mainly concerns the work that Ledru conducted in relation to describing the landscapes and plants that he encountered on the island, the historical document also functions as ethnographic material from the eighteenth century. Ledru provides social commentary regarding the Puerto Rican people, their history, and customs.[3]
Viage proves significant because Ledru additionally includes information about the Afro-Puerto Rican population. He denotes the visibility of the enslaved and freed people on the island in the eighteenth century through statistical census information by describing their visual attire, cuisine, and their participation in social events. His work also presents one of the first known uses and descriptions of the bomba music and dance in writing. Available editions of Viage, however, stem from Spanish translations and not from the original French text. The etic perceptions that André Pierre Ledru expresses about Afro-Puerto Ricans can also come off as ignorant due to his misguided description about “benevolent” enslavers on haciendas.[4]
Examples from the nineteenth century concerning enslavement revolts demonstrate Afro-Puerto Ricans applying the bomba through the “call and response” vocal techniques to secretly transmit coded messages regarding rebellion and liberation in Puerto Rico. Historians mention several key moments that happened in 1826—the same year that Miguel de la Torre issued the Reglamento de Esclavos de Puerto Rico—where enslaved Africans on the island used the bomba to resist bondage. The first event transpired as a joint effort from enslaved people from Toa Baja and Bayamón in July and involved a planned escape to Haiti led by a José Joaquin from Bayamón from the hacienda of Miguel Dávila. The second instance took place in Ponce, also in July, and featured the bomba as a tool to relay information about causing mayhem in the barrios of the city by intentionally burning the sugar cane fields.[5]
Archival materials from the 1820s and research concerning connections to the bomba and enslavement revolts reveals that myriad participants in these events arrived in Puerto Rico as enslaved bozales. They had been purchased by hacendados who initially immigrated to Puerto Rico from areas in Europe and North America. The bozales also strongly opposed their captivity and resisted through rebellions via the bomba in places like Ponce in southern Puerto Rico.[6] The Puerto Rican historiography indicates that the second documented conspiracy for revolt involving the bomba transpired from July 9 to 10, 1826 and had been perpetrated by an Antonio Congo. Congo and many other enslaved bozales planned to hold a bomba demonstration in protest on July 10th that year because it fell on a Sunday, when most enslaved Afro-Puerto Ricans could rest from all their work. The conspiracy took place at the hacienda of an enslaver named Fernando Overman and quickly spread to other nearby haciendas. Available details regarding the planned insurrection state that Congo and the perpetrators involved wished to seize weapons and kill the White people on the island.[7]
This information does provide significant details by illustrating that enslaved Africans used music and dance to protest their mistreatment. It also mentions names and provides the reasons why the enslaved Afro-Puerto Ricans revolted at that point in time. However, it leaves some important questions about the bomba and its application within these contexts unanswered. Knowing that the bomba applies many different percussive rhythmic patterns instead of a universal one, what types of bomba rhythms did the protestors play, or plan to play, on both occasions in July 1826? How long did they want each performance to last as part of the conspiracies? Which instruments did they use? Most importantly, what lyrics would the enslaved Afro-Puerto Ricans have sung or spoken that could have denoted the coded messages about their plans for attack, defense, and liberation?
Answers to these questions remain uncertain. Much of the information regarding the bomba in the nineteenth century in relation to enslavement revolts reveals several problems for historical research about Puerto Rico. The most noticeable one stems from the fact that lyrics in bomba music and dance incorporate improvised texts. These texts usually do not get transcribed and preserved for public use. Textual transcriptions of bomba lyrics from the revolts that occurred in Puerto Rico in 1826 have not surfaced.
Readers should not misinterpret the absent information about the bomba as absolute or as a rush to judgement. When compared to other regions in Latin America and the Caribbean, Puerto Rico has endured a fractured history regarding preservation, something that more contemporary research efforts have attempted to remedy by allowing access to digitized historical literature and archival materials.[8] The invisibility of the enslaved Afro-Puerto Rican identity within that history, however, serves to aggravate matters. That means that scholars and readers cannot access the bomba textual transcriptions as archived materials so that more people can understand what happened to that population in the nineteenth century. However, it is possible for musicologists in contemporary times to surmise what kinds of lyrics that the participants in enslavement revolts might have sung or said.
The following excerpt stems from an original collaborative composition called Esta es la Bomba Síca[9] (This is the Bomba Síca) from 2024. My goal in creating this piece stems from maintaining the accurate instrumentation for the bomba by scoring the work for barrel drums, cuá, maraca, and vocals (either male or female). The bomba lyrics, written by Freddy Sanchez and included in this book with permission, demonstrate the words that could have been clandestinely sung or spoken on a hacienda in Puerto Rico in the nineteenth century. The words in Esta es la Bomba Síca signify how the enslaved Afro-Puerto Ricans in the past would have used music and dance as codes to show what they truly thought about the hacendados:
Esta es la Bomba Síca
que bailaba mi bisabuela,
Esta es la Bomba Síca
que bailaba mi bisabuela,
al fín de la cosecha
bailaba lo que sentía,
al fín de la cosecha
bailaba lo que sentía.
(English Translation)
(This is the Bomba Síca
which my great-grandmother danced,
This is the Bomba Síca
which my great-grandmother danced,
at the end of the harvest
she would dance how she felt,
at the end of the harvest
she would dance how she felt.)[10]
Some historical research from the twenty-first century suggests one possible bomba subgenre that the enslaved Afro-Puerto Ricans could have applied as resistance when singing and dancing. The “Cocobalé” (sometimes also spelled as “Kokobalé) functioned as a bomba type that incorporated martial arts tactics. Participants would practice defensive “dancing” with machetes to bomba drumming patterns and singing in secret to both transmit the coded messages about rebellion and to prepare the enslaved populations on the haciendas for any impending attack against them by enslavers.[11]
Cocobalé bears striking similarities in its description to “Capoeira” from Brazil. That practice also initially applied martial arts “dancing” to train enslaved Africans to fight back against the plantation owners. Unlike Capoeira, which has received countless attention via historical documentation, Cocobalé presents problems due to scant resources about the topic. I have encountered discussions and demonstrations concerning Cocobalé in research from the 2000s and 2020s from both island and stateside Puerto Rican communities: mainly from the Segunda Quimbanda Folkloric Center, Miguel Machado, and the 2023 Cumbre Afro symposium.[12] At the same time, however, these resources allude to the necessity for further concrete research on the subject. I must presently agree with such conclusions and regard the available details with suspicion. Conducting current online searches for academic materials about Cocobalé often produces few valuable results.
[1] Vimari Colón-León, “Bomba: The Sound of Puerto Rico’s African Heritage,” National Association for Music Education (March 30, 2021), https://nafme.org/bomba-the-sound-of-puerto-ricos-african-heritage/ (accessed August 19, 2022).
[2] Vimari Colón-León, 2021.
[3] André Pierre Ledru and D. Julio L. de Vizcarrondo (Transl.), Viaje a La Isla de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR: Universidad de Puerto Rico (1957), 47, https://issuu.com/coleccionpuertorriquena/docs/ledru_andre_pierre-1957_1797-viaje_/1 (accessed May 1, 2024).
[4] André Pierre Ledru and D. Julio L. de Vizcarrondo (Transl.), 47.
[5] Guillermo A. Baralt, “Chapter V: From the Bomba Dance in Ponce to the New Reglamento de Esclavos de Puerto Rico of 1826,” in Slave Revolts in Puerto Rico: Conspiracies and Uprisings, 1795-1873, Translated by Christine Ayorinde (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers. 2015), 41-52.
[6] Guillermo A. Baralt, 41-52; Francisco Moscoso, Inventario comentado de resistencia de los esclavos y de la lucha abolicionista en Puerto Rico, siglos 16 al 19 (Lajas, PR: Editorial Akelarre, 2023), 38-39, file:///C:/Users/antho/Downloads/Inventario%20comentado%20resistencia%20esclavos%20CC%204%200.pdf (accessed October 30, 2024).
[7] Guillermo A. Baralt, 41-52; Francisco Moscoso, 38-39.
[8] Francisco Moscoso, 38-39.
[9] Due to poetic license and to preserve the rhythmic flow in the lyrics, the lyrics for Esta es la Bomba Síca feature an accent on the letter “i” instead of the letter “a.”
[10] Anthony Luis Sanchez and Freddy Sanchez, Esta es la Bomba Síca (Savannah, GA: ZEKE SPILLED INK MUSIC, 2024). Lyrics reprinted by permission. Readers should note that the bomba lyrics lose its rhyme scheme and rhythmic flow when translated into English.
[11] Miguel Machado, “Reclaiming the Past: The Afro Puerto Rican Art of Cocobalé,” Medium (March 31, 2021), https://vagabondmachado.medium.com/restoring-the-past-the-afro-boricua-art-of-kokobale-4fe99f215d1 (accessed May 17, 2023).
[12] Guiro y Maraca 5, No, 1 (2001), https://segundaquimbamba.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/volume-5-no-1.pdf (accessed November 6, 2024); Miguel Machado, “Reclaiming the Past: The Afro Puerto Rican Art of Cocobalé,” Medium (March 31, 2021), https://vagabondmachado.medium.com/restoring-the-past-the-afro-boricua-art-of-kokobale-4fe99f215d1 (accessed May 17, 2023).
Dance also figures prominently in the bomba. By establishing nonverbal communication between the primo drummer and lead dancer in a bomba performance (eg., physically looking at each other or the dancer gesturing to the drummer by waving clothes), the primo drummer must watch and closely follow the dance movements. The main sections in a bomba dance consist of the paseo (introduction), piquete (picket), and corrido (rapid dance movement that simulates running). The dancer in the bomba dictates when the primo drummer should play and improvise the musical portion. Readers should also not assume that the bomba remains exclusive to Loiza. Bomba also exists in other parts of the island like Santurce, San Juan, and Ponce.[2]
Information concerning initial documentation about the bomba and its origins tends to produce murky results due to colonialist interference. However, most sources concur that its inclusion within the Puerto Rican lexicon derives from the French rather than the Spanish and from a source that has little to do with either music or dance. Historians often credit André Pierre Ledru, a French naturalist, for applying the term while documenting his travel experiences in Puerto Rico in Viage a la Isla de Puerto-Rico from 1797. While the book mainly concerns the work that Ledru conducted in relation to describing the landscapes and plants that he encountered on the island, the historical document also functions as ethnographic material from the eighteenth century. Ledru provides social commentary regarding the Puerto Rican people, their history, and customs.[3]
Viage proves significant because Ledru additionally includes information about the Afro-Puerto Rican population. He denotes the visibility of the enslaved and freed people on the island in the eighteenth century through statistical census information by describing their visual attire, cuisine, and their participation in social events. His work also presents one of the first known uses and descriptions of the bomba music and dance in writing. Available editions of Viage, however, stem from Spanish translations and not from the original French text. The etic perceptions that André Pierre Ledru expresses about Afro-Puerto Ricans can also come off as ignorant due to his misguided description about “benevolent” enslavers on haciendas.[4]
Examples from the nineteenth century concerning enslavement revolts demonstrate Afro-Puerto Ricans applying the bomba through the “call and response” vocal techniques to secretly transmit coded messages regarding rebellion and liberation in Puerto Rico. Historians mention several key moments that happened in 1826—the same year that Miguel de la Torre issued the Reglamento de Esclavos de Puerto Rico—where enslaved Africans on the island used the bomba to resist bondage. The first event transpired as a joint effort from enslaved people from Toa Baja and Bayamón in July and involved a planned escape to Haiti led by a José Joaquin from Bayamón from the hacienda of Miguel Dávila. The second instance took place in Ponce, also in July, and featured the bomba as a tool to relay information about causing mayhem in the barrios of the city by intentionally burning the sugar cane fields.[5]
Archival materials from the 1820s and research concerning connections to the bomba and enslavement revolts reveals that myriad participants in these events arrived in Puerto Rico as enslaved bozales. They had been purchased by hacendados who initially immigrated to Puerto Rico from areas in Europe and North America. The bozales also strongly opposed their captivity and resisted through rebellions via the bomba in places like Ponce in southern Puerto Rico.[6] The Puerto Rican historiography indicates that the second documented conspiracy for revolt involving the bomba transpired from July 9 to 10, 1826 and had been perpetrated by an Antonio Congo. Congo and many other enslaved bozales planned to hold a bomba demonstration in protest on July 10th that year because it fell on a Sunday, when most enslaved Afro-Puerto Ricans could rest from all their work. The conspiracy took place at the hacienda of an enslaver named Fernando Overman and quickly spread to other nearby haciendas. Available details regarding the planned insurrection state that Congo and the perpetrators involved wished to seize weapons and kill the White people on the island.[7]
This information does provide significant details by illustrating that enslaved Africans used music and dance to protest their mistreatment. It also mentions names and provides the reasons why the enslaved Afro-Puerto Ricans revolted at that point in time. However, it leaves some important questions about the bomba and its application within these contexts unanswered. Knowing that the bomba applies many different percussive rhythmic patterns instead of a universal one, what types of bomba rhythms did the protestors play, or plan to play, on both occasions in July 1826? How long did they want each performance to last as part of the conspiracies? Which instruments did they use? Most importantly, what lyrics would the enslaved Afro-Puerto Ricans have sung or spoken that could have denoted the coded messages about their plans for attack, defense, and liberation?
Answers to these questions remain uncertain. Much of the information regarding the bomba in the nineteenth century in relation to enslavement revolts reveals several problems for historical research about Puerto Rico. The most noticeable one stems from the fact that lyrics in bomba music and dance incorporate improvised texts. These texts usually do not get transcribed and preserved for public use. Textual transcriptions of bomba lyrics from the revolts that occurred in Puerto Rico in 1826 have not surfaced.
Readers should not misinterpret the absent information about the bomba as absolute or as a rush to judgement. When compared to other regions in Latin America and the Caribbean, Puerto Rico has endured a fractured history regarding preservation, something that more contemporary research efforts have attempted to remedy by allowing access to digitized historical literature and archival materials.[8] The invisibility of the enslaved Afro-Puerto Rican identity within that history, however, serves to aggravate matters. That means that scholars and readers cannot access the bomba textual transcriptions as archived materials so that more people can understand what happened to that population in the nineteenth century. However, it is possible for musicologists in contemporary times to surmise what kinds of lyrics that the participants in enslavement revolts might have sung or said.
The following excerpt stems from an original collaborative composition called Esta es la Bomba Síca[9] (This is the Bomba Síca) from 2024. My goal in creating this piece stems from maintaining the accurate instrumentation for the bomba by scoring the work for barrel drums, cuá, maraca, and vocals (either male or female). The bomba lyrics, written by Freddy Sanchez and included in this book with permission, demonstrate the words that could have been clandestinely sung or spoken on a hacienda in Puerto Rico in the nineteenth century. The words in Esta es la Bomba Síca signify how the enslaved Afro-Puerto Ricans in the past would have used music and dance as codes to show what they truly thought about the hacendados:
Esta es la Bomba Síca
que bailaba mi bisabuela,
Esta es la Bomba Síca
que bailaba mi bisabuela,
al fín de la cosecha
bailaba lo que sentía,
al fín de la cosecha
bailaba lo que sentía.
(English Translation)
(This is the Bomba Síca
which my great-grandmother danced,
This is the Bomba Síca
which my great-grandmother danced,
at the end of the harvest
she would dance how she felt,
at the end of the harvest
she would dance how she felt.)[10]
Some historical research from the twenty-first century suggests one possible bomba subgenre that the enslaved Afro-Puerto Ricans could have applied as resistance when singing and dancing. The “Cocobalé” (sometimes also spelled as “Kokobalé) functioned as a bomba type that incorporated martial arts tactics. Participants would practice defensive “dancing” with machetes to bomba drumming patterns and singing in secret to both transmit the coded messages about rebellion and to prepare the enslaved populations on the haciendas for any impending attack against them by enslavers.[11]
Cocobalé bears striking similarities in its description to “Capoeira” from Brazil. That practice also initially applied martial arts “dancing” to train enslaved Africans to fight back against the plantation owners. Unlike Capoeira, which has received countless attention via historical documentation, Cocobalé presents problems due to scant resources about the topic. I have encountered discussions and demonstrations concerning Cocobalé in research from the 2000s and 2020s from both island and stateside Puerto Rican communities: mainly from the Segunda Quimbanda Folkloric Center, Miguel Machado, and the 2023 Cumbre Afro symposium.[12] At the same time, however, these resources allude to the necessity for further concrete research on the subject. I must presently agree with such conclusions and regard the available details with suspicion. Conducting current online searches for academic materials about Cocobalé often produces few valuable results.
[1] Vimari Colón-León, “Bomba: The Sound of Puerto Rico’s African Heritage,” National Association for Music Education (March 30, 2021), https://nafme.org/bomba-the-sound-of-puerto-ricos-african-heritage/ (accessed August 19, 2022).
[2] Vimari Colón-León, 2021.
[3] André Pierre Ledru and D. Julio L. de Vizcarrondo (Transl.), Viaje a La Isla de Puerto Rico, San Juan, PR: Universidad de Puerto Rico (1957), 47, https://issuu.com/coleccionpuertorriquena/docs/ledru_andre_pierre-1957_1797-viaje_/1 (accessed May 1, 2024).
[4] André Pierre Ledru and D. Julio L. de Vizcarrondo (Transl.), 47.
[5] Guillermo A. Baralt, “Chapter V: From the Bomba Dance in Ponce to the New Reglamento de Esclavos de Puerto Rico of 1826,” in Slave Revolts in Puerto Rico: Conspiracies and Uprisings, 1795-1873, Translated by Christine Ayorinde (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers. 2015), 41-52.
[6] Guillermo A. Baralt, 41-52; Francisco Moscoso, Inventario comentado de resistencia de los esclavos y de la lucha abolicionista en Puerto Rico, siglos 16 al 19 (Lajas, PR: Editorial Akelarre, 2023), 38-39, file:///C:/Users/antho/Downloads/Inventario%20comentado%20resistencia%20esclavos%20CC%204%200.pdf (accessed October 30, 2024).
[7] Guillermo A. Baralt, 41-52; Francisco Moscoso, 38-39.
[8] Francisco Moscoso, 38-39.
[9] Due to poetic license and to preserve the rhythmic flow in the lyrics, the lyrics for Esta es la Bomba Síca feature an accent on the letter “i” instead of the letter “a.”
[10] Anthony Luis Sanchez and Freddy Sanchez, Esta es la Bomba Síca (Savannah, GA: ZEKE SPILLED INK MUSIC, 2024). Lyrics reprinted by permission. Readers should note that the bomba lyrics lose its rhyme scheme and rhythmic flow when translated into English.
[11] Miguel Machado, “Reclaiming the Past: The Afro Puerto Rican Art of Cocobalé,” Medium (March 31, 2021), https://vagabondmachado.medium.com/restoring-the-past-the-afro-boricua-art-of-kokobale-4fe99f215d1 (accessed May 17, 2023).
[12] Guiro y Maraca 5, No, 1 (2001), https://segundaquimbamba.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/volume-5-no-1.pdf (accessed November 6, 2024); Miguel Machado, “Reclaiming the Past: The Afro Puerto Rican Art of Cocobalé,” Medium (March 31, 2021), https://vagabondmachado.medium.com/restoring-the-past-the-afro-boricua-art-of-kokobale-4fe99f215d1 (accessed May 17, 2023).
Selected Bomba Buleador Drumming Patterns
Figure 1: “Bomba Sicá” Rhythm
Figure 2: “Bomba Yubá” Rhythm
Figure 3: “Bomba Holandé” Rhythm
Figure 4: “Bomba Belén” Rhythm (Rarely Used)
Figure 5: “Bomba Cunyá” Rhythm
Figure 6: “Bomba Cuembé (Güembé)” Rhythm
Figure 7: “Bomba Seis Corrido” Rhythm
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