Grassland Geopoetics: Son Jarocho and the Black Sense of Place of Plantations and Pastures

Astorga de Ita, Diego

Abstract

This essay considers how the grasslands of the Mexican region of El Sotavento entangle with the history of racial capitalism and with traditional Sotaventine music. Throughout this text, I argue that son Jarocho music and its poetics counterpoint racist colonial discourses making space for ways of being beyond racial capitalism. I review the history of Sotaventine grasslands, counterpointing their historical becomings with ethnographic materials and current poetic expressions. I especially focus on two sones: La Caña, written in the 1990s by Patricio Hidalgo Belli regarding sugarcane, and the 18th century Toro Zacamandú that speaks of cowboying. Using scholarly writings on the plantation and plantation histories from McKittrick and Glissant, King's work on fungibility, scholarship on Maroon landscapes and marronage, and an array of writers who explore poetics and geopoetics, we shall see how racial capitalism and the historical becomings of plantations and pastures are reflected and overturned in Sotaventine sounds.

Citation

Astorga de Ita, D. (2023). Grassland Geopoetics: Son Jarocho and the Black Sense of Place of Plantations and Pastures. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12999

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 20, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Nov 23, 2023
• Publication Date: Nov 23, 2023
• Deposit Date: Mar 20, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 20, 2024
• Journal: Antipode
• Print ISSN: 0066-4812
• Electronic ISSN: 1467-8330
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12999
• Keywords: racial capitalism; music geographies; cultural ecology; Sotavento; fungibility; Maroon landscapes
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2254483
• Additional Information: Received: 2022-05-16; Accepted: 2023-08-20; Published: 2023-11-23