Grassland Geopoetics: Son Jarocho and the Black Sense of Place of Plantations and Pastures

Abstract

This essay considers how the grasslands of the Mexican region of El Sotavento entangle with the history of racial capitalism and with traditional Sotaventine music. Throughout this text, I argue that son Jarocho music and its poetics counterpoint racist colonial discourses making space for ways of being beyond racial capitalism. I review the history of Sotaventine grasslands, counterpointing their historical becomings with ethnographic materials and current poetic expressions. I especially focus on two sones: La Caña, written in the 1990s by Patricio Hidalgo Belli regarding sugarcane, and the 18th century Toro Zacamandú that speaks of cowboying. Using scholarly writings on the plantation and plantation histories from McKittrick and Glissant, King's work on fungibility, scholarship on Maroon landscapes and marronage, and an array of writers who explore poetics and geopoetics, we shall see how racial capitalism and the historical becomings of plantations and pastures are reflected and overturned in Sotaventine sounds.