Kokobalé and its Epistemological (Re)turn to “Lo Africano”

Kokobalé is characterized by the duel, so much so that the chorus of Rafael Cepeda’s song “Si tu no sabe cocobalé” calls out: “Si tu no sabe cocobalé, No le vayas a tirar” or “If you don’t know cocobalé, don’t mess with them.”⁹ As a combat dance, the feints, thrusts, and parries foundational to kokobalé can also be found in other dance and martial art forms throughout the circum-Atlantic world. When Xiorro began his embodied research of kokobalé, one of the first combat dances he turned to was Afro-Brazilian capoeira. Capoeira’s roots can be traced back to the southern region of Angola and the practice of n’golo, a combat dance where dancers perform inversions, kicks, dodges, and leg sweeps, accompanied by polyrhythmic music and song to communicate with ancestral spirits.¹⁰ When the embodied knowledge of combat dances like n’golo migrated through the Middle Passage and into the Americas, their purpose extended beyond the spiritual or social functions they once held, providing enslaved individuals with practical methods of self-defense. These Afro-diasporic combat dances also offered, as ethnographer T.J. Desch-Obi notes, “an alternative lifestyle that provided a sense of belonging,” with philosophies, honor codes, and identity markers that contributed toward a sense of individual well-being transcending the physical body.¹¹ Hence, the combat game’s psychophysical strategies for evasion, diversion, and deception granted the practitioner the ability to adapt in any situation, stay on one’s toes when conflict arises, and course through obstacles like an ocean.

While scholars and practitioners alike speculate about the origins of kokobalé in Puerto Rico, it is plausible that this practice was already present in the archipelago prior to its formal identification. Although an embodied knowledge of the stick-fighting games can be traced to West Africa and n’golo, one cannot discount the role that inter-island migration played in the formation of similar combat dances across the Caribbean. For instance, as a port city, Mayagüez served as a destination after the Haitian Revolution for merchants, landowners, as well as enslaved individuals forced to leave the country by their enslavers; migratory movements that are evidenced in the French and Kreyol lyrics found in many bomba songs.¹² With regard to kokobalé, Xiorro’s search for the etymology of this stick-fighting dance has led him to move from common expressions used in Puerto Rico to terms that connect the dance to Martinique, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Jamaica, and Curaçao.¹³ Hence, many slippages arise from the act of recovery, as Julian Gerstin remarks regarding his own research on kalenda, another stick-fighting game in Trinidad and Tobago, since categorizing every Afro-diasporic combat dance is nearly impossible, due to the “broad range of referents” of the surviving names and the likely loss of many others, instead opting to identify several core “choreographic styles.”¹⁴ Mapping these choreographic styles alongside the presence of the stick or machete throughout the region—tire machèt in Haiti, calinda in Trinidad and Tobago, bajan stick-licking in Barbados, danmyé in Martinique, juego de maní in Cuba, banot in the Canary Islands, among many others—facilitates an understanding of how, rather than a “national” quintessentially Puerto Rican combat dance, kokobalé forms part of an affective network of Afro-diasporic combat dances that unites the African diaspora despite the region’s fragmented histories. Unbounded from imposed geopolitical borders that separates Puerto Rico from the rest of the circum-Atlantic world, kokobalé moves beyond what Joseph Roach describes as the “the relentless search” for singular, legitimate origins, true definitions, or even a proto-Caribbean dance of origin, that more often than not, become voyages “not of discovery but of erasure.”¹⁵

Thinking with Martinican poet, philosopher, and literary critic Édouard Glissant and his meditations on the archipelago in his book Poetics of Relation (1997)—where he configures the archipelago as a rhizomatic assemblage of islands with no localized center and mobilizes the archetype for his notion of a diasporic “unity within multiplicity”¹⁶—the bodies of water that surround each landmass becomes a crucial element for the creation of an archipelagic Afro-diasporic network. Water, as a site of connection in Afro-diasporic religions and spirituality, disrupts narratives of stagnation and “insularism” where island cultures become isolated and detached from one another due to the ocean that surrounds them. Paradoxically, as Rebeca Hey-Colón articulates in her book Channeling Knowledges: Water and Afro-Diasporic Spirits in Latinx and Caribbean Worlds (2023), though water seems to separate each island, it also becomes the agent that brings about the circulation of Latin American and Caribbean knowledges and lifeworlds throughout the region. Thinking materially, or rather secularly, water becomes the means through which bodies traveled from one island to another, whether by forced migration or voluntary encounters. Expanding this analysis to the spiritual realm, water also “carr[ies] the dead, the lwa, the misterios, and the orishas,” among other “liquid knowledges,” that as per Hey-Colón, “have survived inordinate cycles of violence, and continue to provide strength and possibilities beyond the secularly knowable.”¹⁷ As Puerto Ricans grapple with both the afterlives of slavery and an enduring colonial present, the memory of cimarronaje passed on through these combat dances, as well as the combative will of axe- and machete-wielding orishas Oyá, Ogún, and Shangó¹⁸ reminds us that our fight is not yet over.

Before delving into the speculative histories of kokobalé in Puerto Rico, I would like to turn to Joseph Roach’s theorization of memory, surrogation, and performance in the circum-Atlantic world. Roach asserts that “memory is a process that depends crucially on forgetting, [oftentimes] working selectively, imaginatively, and perversely” to fill in “perceived vacancies [that] occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric.”¹⁹ The creation of the “New World” and modernity itself was accomplished through violence and genocide in the Americas. Hence, the very premise of “forgetting” the magnitude of these acts constituted an imperial choreography of conquest and settlement. Forgetting, as per Glissant in Caribbean Discourse (1989), also facilitated “an imposed non-history” in the Caribbean that depended upon the erasure of Afro-diasporic traditions, and with them, ancestral memory.²⁰ Yet, as Roach poignantly notes, “the unspeakable cannot be rendered forever inexpressible: the most persistent mode of forgetting is memory imperfectly deferred,” referring to that which persists within circum-Atlantic performance.²¹ Kokobalé offers an excellent case study of this notion of “incomplete forgetting,” as the histories surrounding this movement practice encourage a narrative of extinction, yet somehow it endures. As Xiorro professes:

In Puerto Rico the effects of colonization have been immeasurable. There has been a systematic attempt to erase from our history, and thus from our collective consciousness, all traces of struggle, resistance, and revolution. The false image of a submissive indigenous, Afro-descendant, and Creole population are examples of what we call colonized minds which try to suppress or deny any act of struggle and resistance like the Kokobalé.²²

However, as the machete continues to inspire new maroon choreographies, the figure of the “rebellious” enslaved African, the fugitive cimarrón, and the militant kokobalerx, adapts and transforms through time, becoming imaginary that nurtures Black, feminist, and decolonial thought in Puerto Rico.

“Si Tú No Sabes Kokobalé,” Observe its Speculative Histories

Xiorro theorizes that kokobalé, as it is practiced and performed today, emerged as a consequence of the Haitian Revolution.²³ In the book Esclavos Rebeldes (1981), historian Guillermo A. Baralt notes that bomba aided communications for these resistance efforts across Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean, as “[d]ancing and drumming created a sense of cohesion among the enslaved population” and also functioned “as a disguise to cover up subversive endeavors.”²⁴ Following the Haitian Revolution, enslaved communities across Puerto Rico, particularly in the region of Ponce, began conducting plans for an uprising. Despite their secrecy, the Ponce uprising of 1826 was trounced by internal informants and, as a result, twenty-four conspirators were sentenced to death. Thereafter, Governor Miguel de la Torre decreed new regulations to dictate, restrict, and surveil the lives of the enslaved population. One of these regulations was a ban on taking the machetes beyond the workstation to prevent the use of this tool as a weapon during a revolt. As Xiorro suggests, while it is difficult to identify the causality of kokobalé’s emergence in Puerto Rico, the Regulations of 1826 might have instigated a shift on how la practica de la esgrima²⁵ (the art of the machete) was practiced. Xiorro’s speculative histories emerge from identified “intimacies” between Puerto Rico and Haiti, offering alternate interpretations of the silences in our cultural archives to imagine “what could have been” after the revolution.²⁶ Though speculative, this history uncovers two aftershocks of the Haitian Revolution: one that may have manifested materially, as seen in the French and Kreyol lyrics of bomba songs and the choreographic stylings of kokobalé, and another within the Caribbean imaginary, through what Pedro Lebrón Ortiz denotes as a “decolonial turn in the ontology” of the Afro-Caribbean subject.²⁷ Kokobalé thus operates in this “decolonial turn” as a means of kinesthetically enacting simulacrums of liberation in the present, a rehearsal for what is yet to come for Puerto Rico and its inhabitants.

In accordance with Xiorro’s premise, the way in which kokobalé is practiced today indicates that the Regulations of 1826 might have instigated the conditions that led to the inclusion of these combat dances in the batey, bomba’s stage. Due to the machete ban, combat training needed to be held within the batey, shielded by the musical and danceable qualities of bomba akin to the ways in which the “more innocent” samba shielded the practice of capoeira.²⁸ The batey was one of the few aspects of plantation life that remained mostly unaffected by these regulations, as plantation owners allowed the enslaved communities their weekly celebration after Sunday mass to prevent another revolt. The shift to the batey might have led practitioners to wield sticks instead of the customary machete and even incorporate elements of bomba technique, such as the deference to the musicians before the “dance” or the duel. As a result, both bomba and kokobalé were cultivated in the communal space of the batey, and beyond within cimarrón communities, as a crucial modus operandi for survival. While bomba nurtured the internal life of enslaved individuals and functioned as an embodied means of communication, kokobalé provided practical skills to fight back against the oppressor. In conjunction, these dance forms made the space of the counter-plantation possible, defined by Quintero Rivera as a “cimarrón or runaway social formation [that] involved two related aspects: the (economic) opposition to slave work and the (political) opposition to State rule.”²⁹ The presence of kokobalé affirms a history of resistance and subversion that counteracts derogatory epithets disseminated about Puerto Rican people as being docile, lazy, weak, and subservient.³⁰

After the abolition of slavery in 1873, bomba was “surveilled by authorities, deemed disreputable and a threat to an ordered society, a scrutiny that became further reified in the 20th century as criollo elites tried to represent Puerto Ricans as or at least near-white subjects.”³¹ Similar to the Penal Code of 1890 that criminalized the practice of Afro-Brazilian capoeira, municipalities across Puerto Rico in the beginning of the 20th century forbade the use of “bomba” percussion instruments in public spaces and the dances that accompanied them. Newspapers such as La Democracia reported on the phenomenon, as municipalities heeded the example set by metropolitan cities like San Juan and Arecibo in 1906, imposing strict bans on “the wild bomba dances and the nightly serenades that greatly disturbed the neighborhood.”³² According to Xiorro, after the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico, kokobalé was still utilized as “a method of conflict resolution where people turned the Bomba batey into a ‘field of honor’.”³³ While not explicitly stated, kokobalé was also prohibited, as these municipal laws extended beyond the sound of the drum over to bomba’s somatic practices. In defiance of the prohibition, these traditions were transmitted through clandestine means, operating in an underground fashion; nonetheless, the criminalization of bomba adversely affected its reputation. Following the legalization of “bomba” instruments, stigma lingered and even prompted practitioners in Puerto Rico “to actively distance themselves and their families from these spaces.”³⁴ It is also important to note that kokobalé, like many other Afro-diasporic combat dances, was shrouded by a “wall of secrecy because of their relationship with closed societies.”³⁵ Hence, to begin piecing together a history of this combat dance is also to observe what is not there and granting it what Glissant describes as “the right to opacity,”³⁶ a refusal to becoming fully transparent, understood, categorized, or legible in the eyes of a majoritarian sphere.

Decades later, the introduction of bomba into folklore by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture (ICP), founded by Governor Luis Muñoz Marín in 1955, meant that it would form part of a commodified unidirectional linear exchange, where the audience members become consumers, paying for a spectacle, and departing without acknowledging the labor that lies behind the curtain. Within the communal practice of bomba, specifically the soberao, there is not a strict division between witnesses and performers, as it requires everyone’s participation to a certain degree, as dancers, musicians, or (call-and-)responsive bodies. Hence, since the cypher-like structure of the soberao was difficult to maintain when performed in the proscenium and other touristic stages, performances began to be choreographed, movements gendered, and costumes codified; changes made often at the expense of its femme-presenting performers. What was performed in hotels, films, television, and state-sponsored cultural events became the image of bomba that remained in Puerto Rico’s collective memory during the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. As the reconstruction of national identity by the ICP relegated all that was Afro-Boricua to an idealized past, audience members were, as Power-Sotomayor puts it, “separated from the performers not only spatially, but also temporally through the period costumes, effectively distancing bomba from the immediate lives of the Puerto Ricans viewing the performance.”³⁷ The ICP’s fabricated image of bomba, which for years remained in our collective memory, erased the lived realities of Afro-Boricua communities in favor of a sanitized spectacle that perpetuated a white(ned) national identity. Meanwhile, practices like the soberao and, by extension, kokobalé, led a “double life,” safeguarded within “insider” communities and circulated mostly beyond the folkloric stage.³⁸

In an interview with Rafael Cepeda’s son, Roberto Cepeda, he asserts that kokobalé was incorporated into their family’s bomba stage performances only a few times during the 1960s and 70s.³⁹ The narrative showcased in these folkloric displays was not one that was explicitly tied to cimarronaje. Instead, Cepeda recalls the portrayal of a love affair and a match between two rivals:

The first scene involves a man that obviously tries to steal the affection of another man’s female friend. This leads to a physical and verbal confrontation which sets the stage for the stick fighting. […] We would also have many people to re-create a crowded scene. Women would talk, encourage the men, shout and so on. All of these elements were present in the choreography.⁴⁰

Although these stick-fighting games also “acted as a form of conflict resolution” and were “tied into a larger social system of a reflexive honor code,” there appeared to be dissonance between the performers and their unknowing audience.⁴¹ The performers, reenacting scenes with varied significance in specific cultural contexts, were perceived as aggressive when it lacked a comedic narrative such as the one highlighted above. Xiorro recounts a conversation with Jose Cepeda where the performers were “in the middle of the stage about to perform kokobalé when the police interrupted them, thinking they were going to fight for real.”⁴² While these staged performances preserved kokobalé’s technique as an interplay between dancing piquetes and partnered sparring, the practice’s illegibility compounded by the enduring stigma of the combative Black body made it difficult to replicate in many spaces. For this reason, Xiorro believes that kokobalé suffered “double the oppression, first for being a tradition of African origin, and second for being an art of war that emphasized freedom.”⁴³ What Xiorro articulates here highlights a persistent fugitive and elusive element within the practice of kokobalé, one that endures both because of and in spite of ongoing surveillance and state violence directed at Afro-Boricua populations.

“El futuro es cimarrón”: (Re)imagining Kokobalé in Contemporary Performance

Kokobalé’s “return” to the public eye in recent years signals a radical re(action) to exacerbated colonial conditions in the aftermath of Hurricane María, a climate catastrophe that left the community-at-large without essential services such as electricity and water for months, displaced many families with the destruction of 70,000 homes, and accumulated a death toll of approximately 4,645 people.⁴⁴ The hurricane, however, did not create these conditions but rather amplified the structural precarity imposed on historically marginalized populations through colonial extraction, neoliberal austerity measures, and systemic neglect by both local and federal governments. Prompted by a spirit of autogestión (self-reliance), defined by Puerto Rican feminist scholar Karrieann Soto Vega as a “coalitional counter-praxis of survival,”⁴⁵ practitioners on the archipelago and the diaspora⁴⁶ have taken it upon themselves to train kokobalé and activate cimarrón futures in the here and now with every slash, dodge, and parry. Proyecto Kokobalé, founded by Carlos “Xiorro” Padilla Caraballo with the help of Marien Torres from Taller Tambuyé and his partner/collaborator Melissa Santos, is an organization informed by Xiorro’s twenty years of experience as a bomba practitioner and fifteen years as a martial artist. Initially introduced to kokobalé during his early days practicing bomba, curiosity led Xiorro to conduct extensive research on kokobalé, beginning with the Cepeda family’s oral histories, a “living library” of Afro-diasporic knowledge in Puerto Rico. Rather than adhering to the narratives of extinction that surrounded kokobalé, Xiorro conducted “practice as research” by traveling to other islands in the Caribbean to learn from and train with elders from other Afro-diasporic communities as entry points into kokobalé’s “forgotten” technique. In 2019, Xiorro began disseminating these maroon choreographies by teaching adults at Taller Tambuyé in Río Piedras. In 2021, Xiorro expanded his efforts to the children of La Perla—a historically disenfranchised community that remains highly visible in the Puerto Rican imaginary—by offering classes free of charge and forming a group he named Lxs Pequeñxs Cimarronxs. By transmitting these maroon choreographies, Xiorro le pasa el machete a la juventud (passes the machete over to the youth), entrusting them with the responsibility of carrying this knowledge forward. As Xiorro writes:

Beyond the physical and psycho-emotional benefits that modern Kokobalé can provide, new forms of oppression and slavery will always appear. Understanding the changing nature of this ‘old monster,’ it is urgent for us to investigate, rescue and promote Kokobalé so that future generations have tools to identify and combat it. This is why the space of freedom and conspiracy that the space of the batey within bomba provides us and the spirit of resistance, struggle and marronage that the Kokobalé provides us with in the search for new freedoms will always be relevant.⁴⁷

Proyecto Kokobalé does not stop at remembering a “cimarrón consciousness” as if it were a static artifact in a museum, but rather it is rehearsed, reactivated, and reimagined with every movement, every action, and every collaboration. Through combative movement, Xiorro not only teaches the history of cimarronaje in Puerto Rico, one that is often absent or inadequately addressed in formal education, but also fosters an embodied understanding of survival that becomes ever more relevant as more Puerto Ricans are displaced from their homes.

Rather than reinforcing a nation-building project, the recovery of kokobalé is fugitive, resisting containment within Puerto Rico’s geopolitical borders. Instead, it extends outward to the circum-Atlantic world, reimagining Puerto Rican identity beyond its captive relationship with the United States empire and positioning it in relation to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago, West Africa, among many others. Xiorro’s engagement with other Afro-diasporic artforms to better understand the practice of kokobalé gives rise to what Paul Emiljanowicz terms “polyrhythmic counterpoint,” a metaphor he uses to describe the “sim-poetic becoming” of Caribbean entanglement, wherein “borders, frontier worlds, identities, and moments of founding are intertwined, performative, co-constitutive, and called into interrogation.”⁴⁸ Expanding Emiljanowicz’s metaphor into the realm of dance, polycentrism introduces a non-hierarchical framework in which multiple points of origin for movement coexist, without a single, central locus of authority. “Counterpoint” becomes a generative addition as, in music, it refers to the harmonic interplay between two or more independent melodic lines, each preserving its own integrity. In dance, counterpoint operates similarly, as multiple choreographic fragments, each with distinct uses of space, time, and intent, unfold simultaneously to contribute to a cohesive choreography. “Polyrhythmic counterpoint,” akin to Glissant’s notion of “unity within multiplicity,” provides a framework for understanding kokobalé and other combat dances in the Caribbean, as regionally specific, but entangled, nonetheless. Just as the specific sociomaterial conditions in Puerto Rico push and pull the practice of kokobalé in different directions, it remains part of a choreographic unity with the Caribbean, one that moves against neoliberal forces and the afterlives of slavery.

Figure 1: Carlos “Xiorro” Padilla y Pablo “Micha” Parra practicing kokobalé accompanied by Tato Torres, Frangie Rivera, and Manuel Pérez Kenderish in “Proyecto Kokobalé y Taller Tambuyé” (2019).

https://youtu.be/WPXBXuU3znc?si=JhPsiBsUWrkP7pru

A video documenting Xiorro’s “practice as research” early in the restoration of the technique in 2020 presents a duel between himself and fellow practitioner Pablo “Micha” Parra that begins not with clashing weapons but with the sound of the buleador.⁴⁹ Both practitioners prepare for the duel by squatting next to the cuá sticks placed in a cross. After exchanging a gesture of respect in the form of a handshake, they begin throwing feints at their opponent, keeping the spectators on their toes, wondering who will grab the first cuá and commence the duel. Xiorro quickly grabs onto the first cuá, but before the stick-fighting occurs, he bows in deference to the musicians and begins his own piquete, an improvised solo. Xiorro makes his body speak, often performing quick patterned steps accentuated by the subidor’s drum roll, while Micha, his opponent, remains at the edge of the circle with his hands behind his back, two-stepping to the base rhythm of the buleador. Afterwards, Xiorro shares the floor of the batey with Micha and when his opponent finishes his solo, the stick-fighting begins. However, the line between the kokobalé duel and the bomba dance is blurred in this interaction, as Xiorro’s feint is punctuated by a winging motion of the knees and Micha keeps his feet together to perform a more stylized shuffle backwards when dodging Xiorro’s potential attack. The subidor continues interpreting and sonically translating the practitioners’ interjecting steps as well as each strike. The practitioners are competitive yet playful in their attacks and in the integration of bomba steps into their duel. They move in and out of the buleador’s repetitive rhythmic pattern, just as one would in the practice of the soberao, keeping a base rhythm while sparring and enacting improvised syncopation in moments of standoff, performing feints alongside unpredictable bomba steps to trick their opponent. I follow Power-Sotomayor’s lead in reading this aspect of the kokobalé performance, as she writes that, “due to the unpredictability of improvised syncopation, too much syncopation in bomba movements can make it difficult for the primo player to follow the dancer,” hence, when performing kokobalé, we see the dynamics from the soberao at play as well.⁵⁰ In addition, the practitioners’ tactics of evasion—their rhythmic rocking as they prepare to strike, their unceasing circular movement, and the lateral curving of their torsos deployed to confuse their opponent—exemplify how Xiorro’s restoration of kokobalé is enacted through the shared movement vocabularies of other Afro-diasporic combat dances, such as capoeira and its accompanying stick-fighting dance maculelé.

By 2021, kokobalé had gained greater visibility as bomba practitioners across the archipelago and its diaspora took up the stick and the machete, engaging in their own experimentations with this revived combat dance. While this resurgence can be partly attributed to Proyecto Kokobalé’s memory activism, the growing interest in these combative movements also reflects a sense of urgency when confronted with dire sociopolitical conditions. Amid an alarming rise in femicide rates—a 62% increase from 2019, with at least 60 women killed in 2020—bomba groups composed of femme-presenting and queer performers led the charge against the patriarchal norms embedded in Puerto Rican culture.⁵¹ For years, femme-presenting performers were largely relegated to the mic and the skirt, singing and dancing, while male-presenting performers dominated the drums. However, groups like Las Barrileras del 8M disrupted this tradition with their all-femme comparsa, directly challenging the rigid gender roles historically inscribed in bomba and utilizing the communal space of el batey as a platform for feminist resistance. Their artistic contribution to Puerto Rico’s #NiUnaMenos movement was an independent production and reinterpretation of “Canción sin miedo,” a song by composer Vivir Quintana that denounced gender-based violence and became an anthem for feminist protests worldwide. The viral video featured the voluntary participation of 97 women, queer, transgender, nonbinary individuals, and allies who answered Las Barrileras del 8M’s call to the batey.⁵² Though the Barrileras’ video is indeed worth watching and closely examining, I would like to turn our attention to another contribution to the #NiUnaMenos cause that similarly reclaimed another male-dominated practice within the batey, but did not receive as much attention.

The opening sequence of Estudio 353’s “La Cocobalera”⁵³ introduces viewers to a familiar scene of childhood gender policing in the streets of Mayagüez. A young girl in a white off-shoulder dress reminiscent of folkloric bomba or jíbara attire pushes a toy truck along a cement sidewalk, the scraping of its tires audible against the pavement. A “Se Vende” (For Sale) sign lingers in the background, a bleak reminder of the archipelago’s economic crisis and the ongoing displacement of local communities. The camera then zooms in on an arm severed from any identifiable body, evoking a sense of eerie anonymity. The disembodied arm snatches the girl’s toy truck, waves a finger at her in reprimand, and places a blonde Barbie doll dressed in a fitted blue gown into her hands. The pouting girl defiantly throws the doll to the ground, and as it lands next to the discarded truck, the camera lingers on the stark contrast between the two seemingly unrelated objects. Despite the straightforward portrayal of gender norms, the video’s most radical intervention lies instead in its reclamation of kokobalé. The limited archival and research materials on the combat dance only showcase male-presenting practitioners, much so that some accounts describe it as a practice exclusively for men, “La Cocobalera” strives to recover the figure of la mujer kokobalera, the machete-wielding woman.

Figure 2: Opening scene in Estudio 353’s music video “La Cocobalera” (2021).

https://youtu.be/U55YW-FLQL0?si=jGbvuRQORSb4AjVo.

As the still image of the discarded toys fades from view, the voice of Jamienette Pérez Mercado emerges:

Yo soy la bomba de Mayagüez

Saque la venda pa’ que sepa usted

Que de tambores y cocobalé

Hoy los barriles son de la mujer⁵⁴

As Pérez Mercado sings, “with drums and kokobalé / Today, the barrels belong to women” the music video shows her rallying masked women wielding sticks throughout Mayagüez, who join her in an all-femme bombazo. Now standing among the guerrilla-like women, Pérez Mercado delivers more verses, as the other women take turns in the barriles, keeping the rhythm of the buleador. The camera shifts to fast-paced shots of the adult women in the batey, some intermittently slapping one end of a stick against their open palm, a well-known gesture that signals a looming confrontation: you’re about to get a beating. Amidst this, we return to the young girl from the opening sequence, now locked in an intense duel with another girl, both rehearsing the kokobalé that the adult women invoke through song and gesture. “La Cocobalera” responds to a persistent gut feeling, the intuitive sense that women must have always practiced this art form, even if their presence was erased from the historical record. These archival silences may stem from stereotypes of combative women as “hysterical” or from the possibility that their participation in kokobalé occurred beyond the folkloric stage or even the performative space of the batey. Hence, the music video not only affirms the presence of la mujer kokobalera but also challenges the structures that have historically kept her off-screen, beyond the lens, and obscured in the record.

With national figures such as the machete-wielding jíbaro and the cimarrón portrayed almost exclusively as male, the imagined mujer kokobalera emerges as a necessary disruption, a figure who exists not within the canon of Puerto Rican nationalist iconography but in what Roach calls “counter-memories,” defined as “the disparities between history as it is discursively transmitted and memory as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear its consequences.”⁵⁵ For instance, Pérez Mercado’s lyrics summon the visual and affective presence of a cimarrona crowned with flowers and adorned with a spiked necklace, a maroon woman fleeing to the mountains not just for safety but in search of kokobalé:

En su cabeza corona eh flores

Lleva en su cuello collar de espinas

Cimarrona se fue a la huida al monte… pa’l cocobalé

Cocobalera ganga mondé

Grito de guerra de las paleras

Epiyeyé mi Congo, epiyeyé mi cocobalé⁵⁶

La mujer kokobalera is enacted by the women of Estudio 353 through what Roach terms “kinesthetic imagination,” where “the truth of simulation, fantasy, and daydreams,” when performed, becomes a generative force with “material consequences of the most tangible sort and of the widest scope.”⁵⁷ Here, the mountain becomes a site of refuge, and the war cry “cocobalera ganga mondé” invokes a lineage of warrior women, the paleras, who, perhaps not named in official archives, are felt, heard, and imagined anew. Extending this reading into the spiritual realm, the imagined mujer kokobalera also recalls Oyá, the orisha of wind and storm, described as a warrior woman whose “tongue is represented by a small pair of swords, by an ornamental sabre, or, in the Americas, by a heavy-duty machete.”⁵⁸ As an African and Pan-Caribbean deity, Oyá cannot be fully understood in isolation, as Jacob K. Olúpònà and Terry Rey assert in their introduction to Òrìșà Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yorùbá Religious Culture, the Yoruba religion serves as a “shared devotional center” and becomes a “taproot of African diasporic life.”⁵⁹ In this allusion to Oyá, these paleras tap into a spiritual juncture that transcends national borders, where the practice of kokobalé serves as a conduit for ancestral wisdom and forms part of a larger corpus of Afro-diasporic knowledge.

Inquiring further into la mujer kokobalera, the women of Estudio 353 do not dream in vain, as a warrior woman left her trace in Rafael Cepeda’s notebook. In my interview with Xiorro, he shared that while reviewing Cepeda’s notes for information on kokobalé, he came across the following verse: “Doña Juana baila Conquest, baila Cocobalé” (Doña Juana dances Conquest, dances Cocobalé).⁶⁰ Though fragmented, the figure of Doña Juana lingers as a spectral presence, “forgotten but not gone” from our collective memory.⁶¹ Her identity remains elusive, yet the performative force of her figure reverberates through a lineage of insurgent Puerto Rican women such as Lolita Lebron, Luisa Capetillo, and Julia de Burgos. Although she wielded not the machete but the pen, Julia de Burgos—whose image is invoked in the video through the carving in Pérez Mercado’s earrings—honored her Afro-Boricua heritage, expressed fierce anti-imperial sentiment, and championed Puerto Rican independence in her poetry, particularly evident in “Río Grande de Loíza” (1938), where she writes:

¡Río Grande de Loíza!… Río grande. Llanto grande.

El más grande de todos nuestros llantos isleños,

si no fuera más grande el que de mí se sale

por los ojos del alma para mi esclavo pueblo.⁶²

My research rabbit hole also led me to another combative Juana, a lesser-known yet crucial figure in Puerto Rican history. Known as the “Joan of Arc” of Comerío, Juana Colón was an Afro-Boricua woman whose leadership in labor strikes and the women’s suffrage movement had been overshadowed by accounts focused on los obreros ilustrados (working-class intellectuals).⁶³ Colón led a tobacco manufacturing union, founded the Socialist Party in Comerío, provided alternative medicinal care for her community, and, whether leading marches or confronting police with stones, her physical presence in every protest earned her another warrior title: La Machetera (Machete-Wielding Woman).⁶⁴ Therefore, Doña Juana, la mujer kokobalera, beckons us to read her trace in Cepeda’s notebook not as a historical footnote, but one that affirms the “gut feeling” that women have always played pivotal roles in the fight for liberation. The women of Estudio 353 find political potential in “kinesthetic imagination,” (re)performance, and recursion, as they conjure the spirit of la mujer kokobalera to bolster their combative stance against gender-based violence in Puerto Rico.

As an open-ended coda, I return to ife’s evocation of the “anachoreographic opening,” which summons bodies to move together with nothing but an invisible affect. Kokobalé’s (re)introduction into Puerto Rico’s collective memory in the coming years reflects a greater movement toward decolonial and relational thinking. Decolonial, in the sense that it is fueled by injustice, as Puerto Ricans “woke up” the Summer of 2019—putting bodies on the frontlines, dancing, chanting, and calling for the ousting of Governor Ricardo Rosselló. Decolonial, too, in the sense that it is driven by a spirit of autogestión and self-determination, attending to the wounds inflicted by Hurricane María, the femicides, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Relational, in the way it ignites our desire to understand the technique of kokobalé, urging us to learn from our Caribbean neighbors, their combat dances, and our shared, fraught histories with empire. Relational, too, in the way that, by conjuring our cimarrón ancestors, and perhaps the orishas as well, we nourish ourselves from the taproot of Afro-diasporic lifeworlds that bridge the African continent, the Caribbean, and the Americas. In (re)performing kokobalé, we affirm an epistemological turn toward Blackness in Puerto Rico, rejecting the colonial structures that have long positioned Afro-Boricua people and culture as peripheral. In (re)performing kokobalé, we reiterate the will of the 19th-century cimarrón who saw liberation in battle, in escape, and in Haiti. In (re)performing kokobalé, we enter into a polyrhythmic counterpoint with the circum-Atlantic world. We enter into a dance that, as ife suggests, is slow, minimalist, unruly, durational… an open dance that wills the body beyond fear.

By incorporating these dances of perseverance into our collective memory via small-scale organizing and individual collectives across the archipelago and the diaspora, we ensure the longevity of these histories, which, in turn, informs how we move in the present. In response to economic crises, natural disasters, failed infrastructures, and corrupt governments, kokobalé becomes a gesture of resistance, akin to how Power-Sotomayor describes the crucial function of bomba as it accomplishes more than “representing Puerto Ricanness and blackness, generating cultural pride, or participating in a trending cultural practice. Rather, it is a performed refusal to disappear or to align bodies to the state.”⁶⁵ Practitioners engage in maroon choreographies, asserting their refusal to surrender to colonial powers and reinforcing the inseparable link between cultural heritage and an enduring struggle for liberation. Though the kokobalerxs’ call to action is ongoing, I conclude this inquiry into kokobalé with the song “Palo y Machete,” an anthem of resistance, struggle, and marronage, sung to an upbeat melody which, according to Xiorro, “was done with all premeditation since in the Caribbean we fight while singing, playing drums, dancing and even ‘twerking’. We smile in the face of danger with joy and the certainty that we are doing the right thing.”⁶⁶

Palo y machete cimarrón

Palo y machete

Coge el machete cimarrón

Nos llama la revolución⁶⁷

Figure 3: Melissa Santos and Carlos “Xiorro” Padilla Caraballo in “Canción: Palo y Machete (en vivo – live)” (2022).

https://youtu.be/_ahLGHH7krA?si=2oG6SqrxvA50gN4k.

Author Biography

Isabel Padilla Carlo is a dance scholar pursuing a Ph.D. in Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of performance and critical dance studies, particularly examining how crisis—understood in Puerto Rico not only as economic, but also environmental, migratory, and identificatory—is metabolized, interrogated, and contested through the performing body. Her sites of inquiry span the archipelago and the diaspora, inhabit proscenium stages as well as street protests, and move from the personal to the political.