Over the years, I
often received mail and phone calls with compliments or questions from readers
of my book, Guitarmaking: Tradition and Technology, which has been in print
since 1985. One day in 1992, I took a call from a reader, John Sotomayor, who
was a staff photographer for the New York Times.
Sotomayor was
gathering information on makers of the Puerto Rican cuatro--the Island's
"national instrument" -- in the United States, for an article he had
proposed to his editor. He saw a cuatro template illustrated among others in
the template section of my guitar making book. He called to inquire about my
cuatro making.
Sotomayor was an
aspiring amateur instrument-maker himself. He practiced several other hobbies
besides: carving duck decoys, researching genealogy, antique stenciling.
Also, and for many years before becoming a professional photographer, he was a
professional "segunda guitarra" (second guitar) in several New York
bolero groups. He had recorded with trio Los Duques for the Ansonia label in
1957, and had become rather well known within the great city's Latino guitar
scene for his great skill as an accompanist. He also established the New Jersey
Classic Guitar Society.
His inquiry about
cuatros and cuatro-making reflected a passion to learn about all things Puerto
Rican. Indeed, it is a fever many Puerto Ricans succumb to after living for
decades in the United States. John Soto, the guitarist and New York Times
photojournalist was in the process of becoming once again Juan Sotomayor, the
cuatrista and cuatro researcher. It was an affliction that had also bitten me
several years earlier.
Like Juan, I too,
had come around to "becoming Puerto Rican" again. I was born in San
Juan forty-five years earlier, raised in Rio Piedras, the son of a father who
was native of Rincón, P.R.; and a mother born and raised in an Eastern European
Jewish family in Boston. After high school on the Island, I came to the United
States to go to college and ended up in New England constructing my eventual
career in guitar making. I visited my Puerto Rican family on the Island
periodically as I did my American family in Massachusetts. My white skin and
English language skills allowed me to blend seamlessly into American society, a
stealth-Puerto Rican with a latent, late-onset cultural schizophrenia.
The time finally
arrived, and I became restive. Like Juan, I found myself unable to repress a compelling
urge to search for my other lost half. The form it took in my case was a
burning curiosity about my own native land’s “guitar,” the small ten-string
cuatro. During a return to the Island I took the opportunity to visit
established makers such as Cristóbal Santiago in Carolina and Manuel Rodriguez
Feneque in Rincon. I learned the traditional enterizo method of instrument
making: the hollowing and carving of a thick-walled soundbox and neck from a
single, thick slab of hardwood.
The ancient enterizo
instrument-making technique stands in contrast to the (only somewhat less)
ancient way guitars and violins are made. Violins and guitars are assembled out
of dozens of small blocks, grafts, braces and thinly sawn, heat-bent wooden
plates into a light and delicate soundbox, into which a separate, carved neck
is joined. The two techniques were once appropriate to the particular social environments of each. On the one hand, the enterizo technique fit into exigencies of
folkloric rural craftsman—with their reliance on rudimentary tools and resources
on the one hand—and de piezas [built up from many parts] reflected the highly evolved and refined standards of the European
craft guilds on the other hand. The early jíbaros saw the Spaniards coming off their
galleons: the conquistadores and clerics with their airy, elegant vihuelas and
the lowly sailors with their diminutive seventeenth-century soprano guitars, called guitarillos. The mixed-breed jíbaro
natives returned to the hills to carve out their own versions of the
instruments they saw in the blanquito Spaniard’s hands, using the same
home-made knives and hatchets that they always used to fashion all their
kitchen and farm utensils. A family of native stringed instruments was born,
and a subsequent treasury of musical traditions sprang from them.
I took my scribbles
and diagrams back to my New England guitar shop and there I made several
cuatros—one which I sold to a New York Puerto Rican stand-up comic (whose name
I’ve since forgotten), who like the vaudevillian Henny Youngman and his violin,
strummed his cuatro between punch lines. Hence the appearance of a cuatro
template—originally traced from Don Cristobal Santiago’s—in my guitar-making book.
And hence that fateful phone call from John Sotomayor.
Juan was dismayed
at how little, after an assiduous search, he was able to find in the standard
bibliographic sources. One established music encyclopedia had even gotten the
cuatro’s tuning wrong! Even the Library of Congress came up empty of any
published materials on the national instrument of Puerto Rico. Juan found only
two short academic research papers in the University of Puerto Rico that dealt
with jíbaro stringed instruments.
Giving up his
bibliographic search, he then interviewed several established Puerto Rican
instrument makers and cuatristas in New York and New Jersey. Alas, they could
reveal little more about the tradition than the craft techniques they had
devised, essentially on their own. They ventured some of popular myths about
the origins of the tradition. Most assumed that the cuatro arrived from Spain
with four strings, that it caught on in the island, where someone then doubled
them to eight, and then someone (some said Heriberto Torres, the greatest
cuatrista of the first quarter of the twentieth century) added the fifth course
to make it into the ten stringed instrument it is today. But as far as what
their antecedents were, the great makers or players of the past; or how the
traditions had evolved, and from what or where they had evolved, or how the
instrument had found its way into the heart of the Puerto Rican soul…John came
up empty-handed. I could not help Sotomayor, either. Like the others, I too,
only knew the builder’s sequence and had nothing to add but my faded memories
of the slightly nasal, sizzling sound of the cuatro that characterized Christmas to me as a child in
Puerto Rico. We both pondered the empty glass before us. We then resolved to
ally ourselves in an effort to search deeper into the cuatro's history. The
Puerto Rican Cuatro Project was born.
When we got back
together, and when we revealed what scant news we had for each other, we
realized that the institutions usually charged with documenting culture had
just not been very interested in the jíbaro music tradition, let alone the
culture’s defining stringed instrument. Up to at least fifteen or twenty years
ago, the field of ethnomusicology was primarily interested in the aboriginal
and African music in the Americas and other countries. Somehow, the music of
the mixed-race rural jíbaro folk fell into the realm of “popular music” and
hence, was seemingly unworthy of serious attention. That has since changed, of
course, and the subject is now well established as a legitimate field of study.
But to this day, not a single researcher, or institution has devoted itself
solely to the study of the origins of jíbaro instrument-making traditions.
One of the great
centers of the study of popular music is at the University of Austin, with Gerard
Behague at the helm. Yet a survey of articles in its journal, Popular Music,
displays scant attention to the Puerto Rican jíbaros and their music. And so we
found it to be in Puerto Rico, where all the prominent musicologists who
weren’t studying European music appeared far more interested in the Afro-Puerto
Rican bomba and plena, for which a rich literature and much documentation had
evolved. But interest in a comprehensive search for the corpus of jíbaro
musical traditions has never materialized. What could be found on the origins
and music of the cuatro and its Island cousins was truly scant and fragmentary.
A remarkable state of affairs!
One exception was a
rather short-lived effort by the Puerto Rican government itself. In the
mid-nineteen fifties the first elected governor of the U.S.'s island colony
(and erstwhile bohemian poet) Luis Muñoz Marín charged anthropologist Ricardo
Alegría to gather together, among other things, the remnants of jibaro lore,
and to promote native arts and culture in an effort to “humanize” Operation
Bootstrap—Muñoz´ master plan to industrialize the island. In turn, Ricardo
Alegría charged Francisco López Cruz (guitar accompanist to the legendary
composer, Rafael Hernandez, in his Cuarteto Victoria), to gather all that he knew
and could find on jibaro music, and to write a definitive method for cuatro
players. Lopez Cruz, who had recently returned from Spain with a doctorate in
musicology, compiled knowledge of the different folk and “popular” genres of
Puerto Rican music into a seminal but slim volume, La Música Folklórica de
Puerto Rico, now long since out of print.
Alegría founded the
Institute of Puerto Rican Culture as a quasi-independent government agency to
promote the native arts and crafts. The formative years of the Instituto de
Cultura was characterized by great vigor and commitment under Alegría’s
command: under Alegría, the Instituto gathered together the works of the great
writers and poets, inventoried all the great monuments and cultural treasures
on the island. He sent Walter Murray Chiesa (currently being honored by the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC) to scour the remote hills to find
and catalog folk crafts, with the aid of his inventories established
competitions for instrument makers, players and traditional singers. Francisco
Lopez Cruz went on to champion the rescue of native instruments that had
virtually disappeared over the years, encouraging makers to start building
again the diminutive tiple and the large bordonúa. A cuatro and bordonúa orchestra
was formed under his name, which survives him to this day.
But the focus,
commitment and energy of the Instituto waned soon after the passing of Lopez
Cruz and the retirement of Alegria. The Instituto became an entrenched
bureaucracy and a political football. Indeed, under the previous Republican
administration, an effort was made to subsume the Instituto under the wing of
the Department of Tourism: the new function of the cultural patrimony was to
entertain the tourists. We were soon to discover that on the Island people
fight over culture. What the jíbaros accomplished, or didn’t accomplish—or
whether it had any value--has been the subject of intermittent quarreling over
the decades. Puerto Rico’s colonial history has rendered the subject of a unique
and seminal Puerto Rican culture--with music as its centerpiece--a
controversial matter with troubling political overtones.
Given the fragile
support that academia and government had historically given to what we saw as
seminal and defining cultural manifestations, and given that the musical and
musical craft traditions of Puerto Rico has barely survived--not in books and
documents--but in the evanescent memories of ever fewer and fewer Puerto
Ricans, we felt an urgent mission had been thrust upon us. Sotomayor had skills
in research and photography; I had proven skills in technical writing and
instrument making. Upon acquiring a third member, Wilfredo Echevarria--a
prize-winning independent video documentary producer and media expert, and then
a fourth, Myrna Perez, director of the Francisco Lopez Cruz Foundation,
orchestra conductor and musical educator, we dedicated ourselves to this task
of cultural preservation. Our informal motto became, "if you want
something done well, well, do it yourself!" We were amateurs, of course,
but amateurs in the original sense of the word: “lovers.” We were amateurs in
the tradition of the naturalists of days past, those amateur scientists who
wanted to make a lasting contribution to science.
But no good deed
goes unpunished. The Island’s culture warriors did not readily embrace our new,
research-based hypotheses of the development of our iconic stringed
instruments. When we partnered with the Casa Paoli in Ponce to sponsor a
cuatro-making competition (according to the form we had discovered the
instruments had taken in the nineteenth century), our event was threatened by
pickets and a local shock-jock on the radio, demanding to know, ¿Qué se cree
esa gente que viene desde allá para tratar de cambiarle el cántico al coquí? [Who
do those people from over there think they are, coming over here to change how
the coquí sings?] The coquí is the iconic chirping tree toad that Puerto Ricans treasure as a culture icon.
Our new hypothesis
differed from the common narrative. They didn’t want to, indeed, didn’t need to
examine our evidence. The accepted narrative was that the cuatro started with
four strings, later it was doubled to eight, and then someone (the names of
several apocryphal players emerged to take the credit) added two more to make
ten. We had new evidence that indeed, there were at times four string cuatros, eight
string cuatros and ten-string cuatros all coexisting in different parts of the
island. They all were shaped and strung differently. But they were all
different instruments, not a single instrument that changed incrementally.
The earliest form was created by the first jibaros with four strings made
of twisted rawhide--and later, gut--strings and with a peculiar keyhole shape.
This cuatro antiguo was modernized at the turn of the 20th century by a
change of shape and a change of its stringing to eight metal strings, an thus
become the cuatro de ocho cuerdas. Then, at mid-century, that branch all but
shriveled and disappeared.
By then a
completely novel form was already established, its stringing rooted in
19th-century (not ancient, as the antiguo) Spanish instrument-making. A
ten-string cuatro appeared first appeared on the Island's northern coast in the
late 19th century, inspired in its stringing and tuning by the contemporary
Spanish instruments of the time. It was a new instrument when it appeared, it
was not an evolution of the cuatro antiguo.
Puerto Rican radio
started on the northern coast of the island, and on the occasion of the
station's inauguration, Ladislao Martínez played the modern 10-string,
violin-shaped cuatro that had caught on in his region. Everybody who heard it,
loved it. It eclipsed the earlier form in its sound and versatility. That
factor, and Ladí's awesome mastery of the instrument, insured it's universal
acceptance and spelled the end for the ancient four string cuatro.
We responded to the
protesters accusing us of interloping in Ponce--ready to picket our
competition--by inviting them inside, and giving them an opportunity to speak
on our podium. I told the crowd that during our research we had learned that
“culture is not a thing, it’s a process.” Later, a protester walked up to me,
his pointing finger raised in anger, stressing that “yes, culture is a process.
¡Pero la cultura es ÚNICA!” [It is only one way.] That is, the beloved cuatro
is singular, unique: don't come here telling us it isn't.
Maybe this is why
over the years, so few academics did much cultural field research in Puerto
Rico. Culture was more than an emotional subject, it was a battlefield. The
accepted narrative was hallowed. As I was told after the event, “it’s no wonder
you guys did your project over there. It wouldn’t have been possible over
here.”
Today, however--and
fifteen years later--I'm glad to report that our persistence and the obvious
quality of our work turned many minds around. We have become widely accepted as
"authorities" on the subject and appreciation is shown for our
website all around the Island. Our Project is the subject of “homenajes” during
festivals and events. Our persistence and lack of agenda apparently won over
many quarrelsome hearts.
Puerto Ricans now
everywhere are displaying a thirst of ownership for these delicate cultural
manifestations--their own--and the cuatro is experiencing something of a Golden
Age today. Virtually every town now boasts of an amateur cuatro orchestra and a
yearly culture festival. Young cuatro-playing prodigies arise in seemingly
every region of the Island, and even in the barrios of the frigid Northeast.
Now politicians are currying favor with the masses by placing more resources
and talent at the helm of the Instituto. A major Island TV network included a
cuatro in its logo. Politicians in the U.S. show up looking for Hispanic voters
at annual cuatro festivals in Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles. Every one is
looking for a cuatro to learn to play En mi Viejo San Juan on: lawyers,
bureaucrats, college kids, and housewives alike. Smiling when you hear a cuatro
seems to be firmly coded into the Puerto Rican DNA, along with Taínos and
pasteles.
But it makes you
wonder, will this Golden Age fade as quickly as others did during the last
century? This periodic cycle of cultural resurgence and oblivion goes hand in
hand with our inbred talent for sporadically loving and then disdaining our
jíbaro roots. The old saying goes, “I’m a proud jíbaro...(but don’t you
dare call me a jíbaro)!
Our colonial-era
schizophrenia persists through the ages: “Aren’t we great? No, we’re not.
Aren’t we great? No we’re not.” But we've presented to the present-day jíbaros the enormous forgotten treasury of poetry, music and musical
craft that their forebears left for us. Time will tell what its eventual impact
will be, whether it will be preserved, or once again, left to fade and
languish.
