Hey that crazy cumbión! A night of guarachas at the Cervantino

“So far it goes, young man. They won’t let us pass anymore. There is the Cervantino thing and there is an event in Pastitos”. “No way, charge me, please. How much is it? Seventy? But if it is a procedure from the center”. The taxi driver explains what is charged, young man, from the center to here. He appreciates the young thing, so there’s no more reprimand. He take the seventy pesos from him. Do you have change for two hundred? Thank you, gentleman.

At night, the area of ​​Pastitos, to the west of Guanajuato, is the perfect setting for a tremendous dance. The lights of the houses that cover the entire Cerro del Gallo look like a pharaonic decoration. That is the magic of this patrimonial city, the orography always restless, undulating, covered by colored houses whose lights shelter the open-air stages set up for the Cervantino Festival.

Guanajuato’s surface is taken over by pedestrians and those stubborn in driving their car through the super busy streets. They are there, stopped in traffic… or they move around the corner, with long faces, in some cases, but in others they play their cumbias at full volume on their powerful sound system, distributing the pachanga, and the drunken ones who go walking, they stop to dance those well equalized cumbiones. It is the night of La Changa Sound and the city knows it.

Beers and dorillocos

The Plaza de las Ranas, next to the Pastitos, serves as a barrier for the control of the local police, who are counted in abundance throughout the place and who have fenced off the vacant lot as best they could to control access to the presentation of one of the most emblematic sonideros in Latin America.

More than half a century ago, Tepiteño Don Ramón Rojo, who since he was a child was nicknamed “la changa”, after a character from the radio soap opera “Chucho el roto”, grabbed his microphone, put on some cumbias and gradually became a legend. , first from the neighborhood and quickly from all the neighborhoods. Now, in addition to “la changa”, they recognize him as “the king of kings”.

But, back to security. The entrance filter to the space is intimidating. To enter you have to walk down a catwalk flanked by at least 20 policemen who scrutinize absolutely all bags and backpacks. They are confiscating dozens of beer cans and bottles of Fresca with tequila. A couple of cops help each other to remove the confiscations, some packages of practically new beer cans. Where will so much seized alcohol go?

Those who wait outside the Plaza de las Ranas observe with suspicion the severity of the operation. How is it going to be that you go to a La Changa dance and you can’t have some drinks? That’s what their astonished faces say as they bite into a hot dog or get chilled with some dorillocos from the stalls that were set up outside the event.

cumbiones parade

Third call, says the sound system, as they say in all high culture recitals, and the screaming is already inside. And what a way to stand up from the second one in front of the cumbianchero public and also before the dozens of onlookers, among them one or another Korean who sooner or later will end up following his lead.

It will be three hours of a parade of songs that will not leave any cautious exempt. Pure years of experience collecting cumbias from Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, wherever there is a good song to move the medicine cabinet. These sonidero guys are absolute music lovers. Cumbia was born in Colombia, but its nationality is Latin American.

From the outset, “La Cumbia Buena” (2017) sounds, by Grupo la Cumbia, from Puebla, Puebla, which perhaps ranks much better for being the Tik-Tok song with the effect that makes people dance involuntarily, the michis and the puppies.

The people who come walking towards the Pastitos through the El Cantador Garden quicken their pace. La Changa’s surprise is that he brings with him his sponsor from the Confirmation Sound, who is also raffled with some ladies’ songs. “You ask for them and I confirm them”, is his motto. Two-for-one night of luxury.

They dance it there in Chicago, they dance it in New York, they dance it there in Atlanta, Los Angeles, California. It is the “Cumbia gabacha” (2006), another one of the songs that sticks with the tube, composed by Don Alberto Pedraza, a native of San Juan de Aragón, and by the time it sounds the public is already on, some apply the three-step dance, the side steps and all the variations that have made neighborhood dances so famous, it is pure art with the feet.

bathroom and shop

People come down from the neighborhood of Cerro del Gallo. Above all, the young women who do bring their beers and their tequila preparations, and the occasional weed churro. You can tell because it smells everywhere in the crowd. Those who come down from the Old Railway Station, opposite the hill, have also been able to sneak in their favorite chíngueres. There are dozens of cops planted all over the place, but inside they do little to confiscate. Their work seems to be solely of control and protection.

“Hey, don’t you sell chelas?” asks a friend as he rushes through a promo of three hot dogs for 50 pesos. And the lord of the stall regretfully disagrees. But he informs that just around the corner there is a store where they are selling chelas.

In the store there is a charge for entering the bathroom and a line is organized for the sale of alcohol. Outside there is a group of five or six youngsters, really very young, between nine and eleven years old at the most, still with childish faces. They are making a rooster, they tell him. One of them says to the other: “backpacks for the notebooks”. And they light it up and smoke it, and “water with the cuicos”, says one, and they head to the dance alert for the proximity of a “cuico” who really goes in peace, with the urgent need to use the bathroom of the establishment.

“Hey, but aren’t they going to stop you with so much sucking at the entrance?”, a group of kids who buy three loggerheads and a six and put them in a backpack are asked. “No, you don’t have to get in there. You go back here, through a little alley, and you come out the other side and there isn’t even anyone checking”, is his response.

While this is happening, in the distance you can hear La Changa and Sonido Confirmación interspersing and raffling off songs like “Cumbia de los keyboards”, by the Peruvian group Los Condors; “Negrita”, by Los Kjarkas, from Bolivia, and “In my desk”, by Sensación Latina, from Ecuador. Pure serious thing, pure fine cumbia.

The sound that La Changa carries is impeccable. It gives another dimension to the songs, the old ones, the discounted ones, the new hits. This genre has no age. Its lows rumble on the hips. Even the press, mounted on a platform in front of the stage, begins to dance very amateurishly, but dance, the thing is to move your legs.

Greetings to Los Vatos Locos, to the Sagittarius neighborhood, in Ecatepec; greetings to the people of León and the neighborhoods of Guanajuato capital. Greetings go out everywhere. From Tepito to the world.

A policeman who guards the tumult, takes out his cell phone and, smiling from ear to ear, begins to record the masterful steps of the La Changa club that puts the atmosphere on stage.

It is the music infecting wills. It is an expression of belonging, identity and joy.

ricardo.quiroga@eleconomista.mx