Abstract

UMEZAKI, Kahori. “Saya is Ours”: The Sounding Steps Towards the Recognition of Afro-Bolivian People. Entrediversidades rev. cienc. soc. humanid. [online]. 2022, vol.9, n.1, pp.383-408.  Epub Mar 15, 2023. ISSN 2007-7610.  https://doi.org/10.31644/ed.v9.n1.2022.a16.

The saya of the Afro-Bolivians is indisputably considered today as one of the diverse components that enriche the Bolivian national music, but this was achieved at the end of a long road. Bolivian Afro-descendants, now recognized in the Bolivian Constitution as Afro-Bolivians, are descendants of African enslaved people in colonial times and who had long been invisibilized and marginalized in contemporary Bolivian society. However, the Afro-Bolivian cultural movement that emerged from young Afro-Bolivians in the late 1980s, caught the attention of musicians and the mass media with the beat of drums and their singing of saya. Through the Bolivian national music scenes, their activities changed the concept of “black culture” in Bolivia. This article elucidates the process by which the Afro-Bolivian saya was recognized by Bolivian society as a national element and suggests that this experience was precisely what urged on them to form the collective identity and led them to the next stage of social movements.

Keywords : African diaspora; Bolivia; music; social movement; recognition of minority rights.