A crowd of enthusiastic residents in Ponce, Puerto Rico, celebrated Abolition Day—the public holiday that commemorates the date in 1873 when African slavery ended in Puerto Rico—on March 22. They gathered at the city’s Parque de la Abolición (Abolition Park) for the commemoration and to honor the Black Puerto Ricans whose forced labor enriched the island’s second largest city.
Built in 1874, Abolition Park is the only park in the Caribbean that celebrates Puerto Rico’s abolition of African slavery.
At the celebration, Guillermo Vilaró, who lives in Ponce, showed off a replica he made of the park’s famous statue, which depicts a formerly enslaved Black man kneeling in a posture of gratitude in front of an obelisk with broken chains lying all around him. Vilaró used wood and metal to create a miniature model of the sculpture.
Vilaró also presented his model of the Ponce Massacre Memorial Museum, which is down the street from Abolition Park and is where 17 members of the Pedro Albizu Campos-led Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico were shot and killed by police on March 21, 1937. The Nationalist Party promoted the political independence of Puerto Rico.
Ponce, the city where plena originated
A performance by members of the Escuela de Bomba y Plena Isabel Albizú Dávila was the main feature of the day. The school’s director, José Luis Archeval Rodríguez, gave the audience a short lesson about the basics of plena music and explained why he is working to promote it in Ponce, the city where it originated.
Plena is a style of Afro Puerto Rican folk music that features tambourines and drums. It grew in popularity throughout the island and then spread to the rest of the world thanks to the 1970s salsa boom and the recordings of artists like Ismael Rivera and Rafael Cortijo.
In their book, “Puerto Rico and its Plena: New Sources for Study,” Néstor Murray Irizarry and Emanuel J. Dufrasne González noted that many people view Ponce’s La Joya del Castillo neighborhood as the birthplace of the plena. It was where some 80 people lived in small houses made of wood and zinc. They each rented a plot of land for $1.00 or $2.00 per month and placed their houses in a circular form, with a space or batey in the center for dances, meetings, and daily chores like cooking.
Black people in southern Puerto Rico may have created the plena, but many of the music’s traditions have been unfortunately lost, Archeval said. There are some nice customs that he believes can be restored, like the part of the dance where not only the woman danced in front of the central drummer, but everyone did. Specifically, the woman did a basic step, making figurines along the floor, while the man was the one to address the drum.
The barril drums used in plena also used to be much larger, and were made in Ponce by drum craftsmen. As instruments, the drum was laid across the floor and the performer sat on top of it while playing it.
“Basically, these are Southern rhythms,” Archeval told those attending the Abolition Day event. “The specificity of this style is being lost because there is no one to sing it, there is no one singing it. [In our school], we are working to promote these things now.
“It is difficult to have songs in belén or in cunyá [two plena styles] when each song has its own patterns on the cuá [the wooden sticks used to play the smaller barril drum] and the maraca. That’s another job…those cuá patterns, maraca patterns, are also going to be lost…there are five rhythms here that are played throughout Puerto Rico: the sica, cuembe, yuba, holande, and seis corrido. Basically, these rhythms—like the belén—are being lost because they’re not being performed. Specifically, the cuá patterns and of the maraca—we are losing them precisely because of this: because they are not being performed anymore.”