Rhythm and representation: Meet Utah’s first Afro-Puerto Rican music group

The music starts when one of the members of Bomba Marilé mischievously shakes a maraca.

Then one of the group’s dancers, Liliana Rodriguez Muriel, starts moving to the infectious beat of the barrill de bomba, the traditional drum used in bomba — an Afro-Puerto Rican genre of music whose roots go back 500 years, said musician Miriam Padilla Vargas.

The five-person group — besides Rodriguez Muriel and Padilla Vargas, the members are Manuel Padro, Omar Gonzalez and Isaias Alavéz-Martínez — bills itself as the first bomba group in Utah. Launched in November 2017, the group is registered as a nonprofit organization, and performs at such events as the Living Tradition Festival and TedXSaltLakeCity.

“There are many different rhythms in bomba,” Gonzalez said. “Some of those rhythms are sharp and serious, some joyful, some sad, some of them feel like you want to go to war. … It’s a big conglomeration of different rhythms.”

The rhythms, Padilla Vargas said, “were initially brought over by Africans from the Congo [and] Angola, and mixed with some Indigenous [Puerto Rican] and some European aspects.”

According to a 2021 research paper by Vimari Colón-León for the National Association for Music Education, bomba — the term refers to both music and dance styles — has its roots in Puerto Rico’s history of slavery, emerging from “colonial plantations where West African enslaved people and their descendants worked.”

Padilla Vargas compares bomba to French Creole — which is a mix of languages, influenced by colonial history.

“The dancers are creating music by their movement,” Padilla Vargas said. “It’s one of the only few dances that we know where the drummer is, following what the dancer is doing and having a conversation with the dancer.”

For Padro, who grew up in Utah, the group is a way to connect to his Puerto Rican roots — something he said he only got to do as a kid when visiting relatives in Philadelphia or back in Puerto Rico.

“I just grew up with the idea that, ‘Yes, I was Puerto Rican, but no real way of connecting with people and developing that.’ Bomba Marilé was the opportunity to do that,” Padro said. “Growing up, we didn’t know any other Puerto Ricans. This was the first group of Puerto Rican friends I’ve had, and I met them when I was 38 years old.”

In fact, Padro said he learned about the Draper group when he contacted a bomba group in Texas, to see if he could take classes online. He said he remembered the first time he first visited Bomba Marilé's space, and saw a Puerto Rican flag.

“The only other time I’d seen a Puerto Rican flag in Utah was when it was hanging from my rearview mirror in my car,” he said. “I’d never seen one in somebody’s house, or see Vejigante masks [from Puerto Rican folklore], or like any of the stuff that I’d see when I go on vacation to Puerto Rico. … To see it here in Utah was just, like, ‘This can’t be real,’ you know?”

Race and politics

Bomba Marilé was started, Padilla Vargas said, “to create a connection to our roots and our ancestors. To have a place for Puerto Rican representation and voice.”

Bomba, Padilla Vargas said, was once illegal in Puerto Rico, “because it was Black music, and there was a lot of words of resistance and trying to escape and, like, hidden messages in the songs.”

And, because Bomba was seen as traditionally Black music, Padilla Vargas said there have been misconceptions within Puerto Rico. “A lot of things that are historically Black have been seen as evil or witchcraft, or things like that,” she said.

Padro said once, on a trip to Puerto Rico with family, he talked to a dancer at a bar after a show — who said her family didn’t come to see her perform, because they considered bomba “devil worship.” Another time, he said, his family was going to attend a bomba event (called a “bombazo”) at a park, and one relative said they would only go if there “was no voodoo stuff involved.”

The misconceptions about bomba, Padilla Vargas said, are part of a bigger problem within the Puerto Rican community: Colorism, bias against darker-skinned Puerto Ricans.

“Colorism is something that’s not spoken of often here in Utah, within our own communities,” Padilla Vargas said. “But in bomba, it’s something that I experienced all the time, because it was traditionally Black music. There was a lot of discrimination against it from lighter-skinned Puerto Ricans and so on. …

“Historically, if you were more upper-class, privileged, lighter-skinned Puerto Rican, you might be able to pay to go to school for music, and then you’re the ones who get the gigs,” Padilla Vargas said.

Bomba, on the other hand, “is oral tradition. it’s not like you need like an opera degree to do this, but it’s still just as valuable,” she said.

Bomba, she said, also has a connection to politics and protest. “Bomba has always been used for resistance and fighting for justice,” Padilla Vargas said.

When Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló, resigned in the face of protests in 2019, she said, “bomba was used during all of those demonstrations in the streets. It’s a way of, like, fighting for justice, even to this day, in everything. There are songs that talk about the killing of transgender women in Puerto Rico. We use bombas as a tool for justice, still.”

Creating community

In 2021, according to the Pew Research Center, an estimated 5.8 million people of Puerto Rican origin lived in the 50 United States. (Puerto Rico is not a state but a territory — technically, a commonwealth — though people born in Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens.)

According to the U.S. Census, there were 11,716 people of Puerto Rican origin living in Utah in 2020.

Rodriguez Muriel pointed out that there are “[thousands of] Puerto Ricans here in Utah, but just five” in Bomba Marilé. (Actually, four. Alavéz-Martínez noted that he is Mexican.)

The Utah Division of State History wrote in 2020 that Puerto Ricans came to Utah in the 1940s to work in mines; most were single men, though 10 families set up permanent homes in Utah.

More Puerto Ricans — including Rodriguez Muriel and Gonzalez — came to Utah after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017.

“We’ve been forced to move to a place that in Puerto Rico we don’t know,” Rodriguez Muriel said. “So [to] come here and continue doing what we do in Puerto Rico, was, like, ‘Oh, so I can continue having my tradition here?’”

“When we came here to Utah,” Padilla Vargas said, “we feel like people didn’t really know what it meant to be Puerto Rican — or our rich cultural, ethnic diversity and all of that. So we try to also do a lot of education. When we play bomba, we don’t just play, it’s not just music for us.”

That sense of strong community is evident in Bomba Marilé's practice space, in one of the member’s homes in Draper. There are different iterations of the traditional red-white-and-blue Puerto Rican flag — including one in black-and-white that’s a symbol of colonial resistance; one in the colors of the LGBTQ Pride flag; and a historic version with a lighter shade of blue.

“Bomba is about creating community,” Padilla Vargas said. “So we also oftentimes will do monthly bomba community gatherings where people are invited to sing with us and dance with us. It’s meant to be a living, active tradition that people practice like in their basement, a park, their garage.”

The group performs songs known in the genre, but they also write their own. Padilla Vargas has written one called “Esos Rizos,” which translates to “those curls” — a reference to the diversity of hair among Puerto Ricans. The chorus is: “Me encantan como esos rizos / conquetean con tu mirada.” (“I love how those curls flirt with your look.”)

As part of its nonprofit mission, the group also offers educational programming, hosting workshops on such topics as colorism, cultural identity and the significance of drumming. There’s even a workshop on bomba as a form of self-defense hidden in dance.

Bomba Marilé, Padro said, has been a “life-changer,” a chance to make connections with members of the Puerto Rican diaspora, and strengthen his cultural roots. It’s also, he said, spurred him to keep a promise to his grandfather, to teach his culture to his daughters.

“When we named my daughter, my wife wanted to give her a Spanish name, and I told her, ‘No,’” Padro said, “because, I said, ‘If you give her a Spanish name, she’s going to want to connect with Puerto Rico, and she’s not going to have that opportunity here in Utah, and it’s gonna be very hard for her.’”

After meeting the people at Bomba Marilé, Padro said, “I was, like, ‘Well, that was a bad decision.’” Padro and his wife, he said, now call her by her Spanish name.