The Accidental Linguist

Today I have a song (click here) I would like for you all to hear, as well as an English translation of the lyrics. I first heard “En Barranquilla Me Quedo” (”In Barranquilla I’ll Stay”) when I was in Colombia, though I did not know anything about Joe Arroyo at the time.

A more famous Colombian musician is Shakira, known throughout the world for her bilingual singing and her hip-shaking music videos. She is also known in the Middle East for her Lebanese roots. She grew up in Barranquilla, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia about half an hour from the sea. I was there a few years back when she gave a home-coming concert– I missed the show, but I remember the traffic jams that spread through all the major roads in the city. Barranquilla is a large, flat, dusty city; almost all of it is laid on a regular grid with some eighty streets and eighty avenues (”calles” and “carreras”). The Arabs there live in one of the established well-to-do areas of town.

In the central part of town, packed with street vendors, you can hear Shakira’s music blaring from the CD stands, along with all the other popular tunes. In more open, residential parts of the city, the music plays at gas stations and at the corner store. So I did not feel very left out when I missed the big homecoming concert. Shakira is talented of course, and pretty– but before she flew into her hometown, and after she flew out a day and a half later, she was already a part of the daily rhythm there, and in crowded markets across Latin America.

The concert I do remember being at was one that took me by surprise in the street as I was walking back to my hotel one night. The place I was staying was almost in the very center of the city, a couple of blocks south of the main government and bank buildings, near the main market. It was not a good place to be walking at night, but I was crazy. During the day there were lots of fruit-selling stands just outside the door, and I would often buy a bag of mangos or mandarins to take back to my room. The hotel was on the second floor above a fabrics store. The hallway that led back to the rooms was open to the sky, and at the end of the hall was a balcony with a clothes-wringer. I remember that there were chickens pecking in the lobby. It was called the Hotel California– though in Colombia they pronounce “California” more like Governor Schwarzenegger would.

The weirdest thing I ever saw there in the middle of the night there was an escaped cow standing across the street on a corner, bathed in moonlight, discarded plastic bags rustling at its feet. It watched me as I walked by, probably to see if I would try to catch it. But the night of the concert, as I walked the eerie quiet of the streets filled gradually with the sounds of music. When I got to 44th Avenue, a major thoroughfare which bisects the city from east to west, I found it packed with the anniversary celebration of the city’s birth.

The street was packed with people, armed policemen all around the edges, and big stages in the middle of the street. Not two or three stages, but close to a dozen, each with a band playing a different kind of music traditional to the city. Vendors everywhere sold drinks and food and the middle of the street filled with couples dancing. I walked down the line of stages and listened to the different bands, and wherever I walked everyone was shouting and having a good time.

For a while I stood near the edge of the police line, with several other single men who were dancing by themselves. These were older, unmarried men; I did not know them, but I knew others who were living long-term at my hotel. They worked odd jobs, sold merchandise on the street, and made ends meet, alone. On Sundays they would not know what to do; sometimes they would hang around the lobby, watching the TV. One of them had bought an old boombox and spent his Sundays in his room, with his old time music turned up loud, playing the air-marracas and drumming his fingers on the table. But at the concert these men did not seem so old. They stood on the margins of the crowd at the concert, drinking beer and aguardiente, moved by the music of Joe Arroyo and all the other greats to step and spin in spotless coordination with their imagined, Shakira-esque partners.