Puerto Rican bomba
Fredericksburg, Va and San Juan, Puerto Rico
This one-time performance unites one of Puerto Rico’s finest bomba dancers with the Fredericksburg non-profit Semilla Cultural, led by Isha M Renta Lopez.
Enslaved West Africans on Puerto Rico’s sugar plantations created the foundation of bomba in the 1600s, and the art form continues to develop, transform, and connect the island to its African heritage today. Bomba is defined by its percussion, including barriles de bomba—drums originally made from rum barrels, maracas, and the cuás (a pair of wood sticks).
Tata Cepeda (born Margarita Sánchez Cepeda) is widely known and respected in Puerto Rico as “La Mariposa de la Bomba” (the Butterfly of Bomba) and today is considered one of the most important and influential “bomberas” of our time. She was raised by Doña Caridad Brenes Caballero and Don Rafael Cepeda Atíles in the Santurce barrio of San Juan. Her grandfather is considered a patriarch of the modern form of bomba and plena, and she began dancing when she was nine years old in the Familia Cepeda group. In 2001, Cepeda founded the Doña Caridad Brenes de Cepeda School of Bomba and Plena, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting music and dance as representative elements of the cultural richness of Puerto Rico. Cepeda named the school for her grandmother as an expression of her deep love and gratitude and in tribute to her legendary dancing.
Semilla Cultural is a non-profit organization based in Fredericksburg that works to develop and grow a community that embraces Puerto Rican culture and arts throughout Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia. This volunteer-run organization was founded in 2014 by Isha M Renta Lopez, who is apprenticing with Cepeda in bomba dance with support from the Virginia Folklife Program. Through teaching and performing bomba and plena, Semilla Cultural seeks to raise cultural awareness and historical understanding. This special performance at the Richmond Folk Festival is part of their apprenticeship, and while Cepeda is in Virginia, she is collaborating with Semilla Cultural on a variety of community events.