WOMEN, DRUMS, AND REVOLUTION:Female legacy, memory, and empowerment of the body-territory through drums and carnival

Abstract

This article provides an ethnomusicological analysis of the influence of Afro-Bahian music on Chile's popular festive movement, presenting the sound, musical, cultural, and historical elements present in popular manifestations. This approach aims to bring my experience, discovery-transformation, and journey as a non-black, dissident, Latina, marginalized woman, percussionist, educator, and researcher educated in the streets of the musical-percussive universe in territories of resistance, in search of empowerment and openness of this knowledge in academic and non-academic spaces. I bring as references the literature of Black Ethnomusicology, which values the contribution of black social movements and the black struggle around the world, through the Afro blocos of Salvador, Afro-Chilean blocos, and active women's groups in Salvador and Chile. In the first part of the work, I present the history of the carnival in Chile, and in the second, the history of the carnival in Salvador. In the third part, I highlight similarities between the two cultural movements, their main elements, sounds, musicality, memories of resistance, and challenges present in each of them. Furthermore, I address the aspects in which Salvador's carnival is present in Chile's carnival through the elements previously mentioned, with a focus on the historical role of women in the preservation, innovation, performance, production, and promotion of carnivals in these two territories. Therefore, I affirm that these exchanges and experiences between these territories are frequent and of great relevance for understanding the body-territory relationship of women in music and black cultural resistance movements, and their performance and impact in the field of Black Ethnomusicology.