✒️ |From Girlfriend to Icon [English Transcription]
Before the stories were told, we wrote them. In this opportunity, we wanna tell you the story of Esther Forero and her role in Colombian music.
[Verónica Presenter]: Hi, everybody, welcome to a new episode of Lo Único Mejor Que La Música. My name is Verónica Rodríguez and we want to tell you the story of a woman that redefined the nicknames that chased her throughout her artistic career.
[Lorena Tamayo]: During the 40s in Colombia, a new musical wave from the Caribbean region was born with renowned figures like Lucho Bermúdez, Edmundo Arias, and Pacho Galán. But this story wasn’t only built by men, there were also women that transformed the perception of music in our country, among them Matilde Díaz and the main star of this tale: Esther Forero.
Esther Forero was born in Barrio Abajo, a town in Barranquilla full of colored houses and narrow streets where she tells that she had a happy childhood along with her mother and where she developed an interest for singing and composing music when she saw the parades of Barranquilla Carnival go by each January.
A few years later, Esther Forero will be recognized as “Barranquilla’s girlfriend”, Esther today is visible only in carnivals due to those songs she wrote for her home city. The other days of the year, her musical story and significance is forgotten by most people. Esther, despite her nickname, was an artist that revolutionized the Colombian music industry since the 40s, where she was a trailblazer in recording, distributing, investigating, and composing music. A female musical pioneer, where her involvement has been cast an invisible cloak on due to stereotypes on what masculinity and feminism should be.
The radio was one of the means that made musical distribution in Colombia a hit. Barranquilla was the first place where radio began in Colombia, with the radio station, La Voz de Barranquilla (The Voice of Barranquilla), and where a 14-year-old Esther Forero approach the media and music industry. Although her mother Josefina says that her daughter started singing poems and couplets that she taught her since Esther was two years old.
Esther’s interest was the same since then and after working four years on the radio, she took advantage of a job that offered her to be a traveling saleswoman in a local pharmacy to take her music to various places of the Magdalena department. She was in Mompox, Magangué, El Banco, and other towns. Alongside her song and her mother Josefina, she traveled on a steamboat on the Magdalena river to go to the radio stations of every village to promote her music. During her visits to these settlements, she would go the main plazas to live and take in the music that would sound there. Everything she saw and listened to, she would ask for its origin and would write everything down in a notebook that she always carried. That is how Esther started investigating about musical folklore of each region and started recompiling songs to, later, enrich her music repertoire. Due to great interest in the spread and investigate, Esther was started to be called, “la caminadora” (The Walker).
[Mariana Uribe]: So, what did it mean to be a “walker” in the society of that era?
[Mariana Uribe]: Well, in those times being a woman and doing music wasn’t to concepts that were linked to each other nor female singers weren’t considered to be “good women” and when they composed music, there were characterized as tramps, women from the street or “walkers”. Women that would walk from here to there without a course, searching for “who knows what” like how they used to say.
“Walkers” just like how they would call Esther. But she used this narrative to her favor, calling herself “walker”, and in doing so, the negative connotation was being erased and with this, she would use this “insult” as an inspiration for a song to give a new meaning to this word.
Her effort was less emphasized than her male coparts in the musical genres of that time, her story was told from another view that casts a shadow on her work and duty in music.
Why wasn’t told in the same way? Or these stories aren’t told at all?
In the last century, the female participation in music and in other areas was reduced and conditioned to a private field. Therefore, women couldn’t dedicate themselves professionally to music. They were considered not suitable to receive musical education. If women composed or interpreted music, often the “masculine” musical culture would ridicule them for being “feminine” (a trait in which woman couldn’t escape the criticism) or for pretending to be “masculine” (a trait that was unacceptable for most men).
[Mariana Uribe] So what is masculine and feminine according to those stereotypes?
Those stereotypes are part of a narrative and associations that we often use which are called dichotomies. Concepts related with masculinity and feminism can’t be equal and there is no common ground. For example, what is feminine counts with certain characteristics, ones that condition the form of carrying out any task, among them music? Amidst these concepts are:
They are associated with men and emotionality with women. These stereotypes suggest that if you’re a woman, you can’t be rational and emotional at the same time. The emotional has specific conditions that classify women to certain tasks and exclude women like Esther.
Within music, during that era, women can only dedicate to music as a hobby, or only play certain instruments related to feminine traits, like piano or being chorus singers, or singers in social events.
The other example in music like Matilde Díaz who couldn’t exercise her career as a Bolerista despite her great talent due to that within the orchestra of her husband, Lucho Bermúdez, Caribbean rhythms were played. Many times, Matilde had to pose as a Mexican woman for her music to be seen in a professional manner.
[Lorena Tamayo]: Despite standing out with her music a definite position for women, there wasn’t a lot of conditions within the music industry for a woman to be allowed to have an autonomous voice. Therefore, both Esther and Matilde Díaz and other female musicians had masculine support who gave them certain creditability that they couldn’t obtain by themselves. Esther’s support was Rafael Hernández, whom she would meet during her trips to foreign lands and Matilde’s was her husband, Lucho Bermúdez.
Furthermore, their songs had to use choruses sang by men so their music can be “more successful” because feminine voices weren’t as commercial as masculine voices. At each enforcement, Esther would achieve to give different meanings and starting using male voices as a discursive tool when she had to compose, like it is evidenced in her song Disimúlame (Conceal Me) recorded in New York in the year 1953. In this song, Esther talks a little a bit about the way men wanted to control anything that women would do. The male voices in this song would play a part as a conversation will Esther responds to them in a fun manner because women have the right to feel curiosity and desire.
Meanwhile, the participation of women in society was reduced to a minimal role. Forero achieved to be one of the first Colombian women to record songs, and to make visible their compositions in daily problems of the women in that era.
Esther, as a 20-year-old, traveled on an international tour throughout the US and parts of the Caribbean, being also one of the exponents of Caribbean music overseas. During her stay in Puerto Rico, she met the bolerista Rafael Hernánedez who became her tutor and recommended New York as a place to record with the important music label Seeco International, where she recorded most of her greatest hits.
Overseas, Esther represented a woman than sang about social causes that can be evidenced in her song Bolero Santo Domingo, dedicated to the Dominican Republic, where not only she sang about the beaches in this country and her memories on them, also about oppressed journalists during the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. With this song, Esther wants to give the city back its essence, calling it Santo Doming and not “Ciudad Trujillo” (Trujillo City) like how the dictator wanted to call it. This rebellious act caused anger in which led Esther to escape from that city.
This tour lasted around 11 years which led her to consolidate herself as an artist and acquire a broader experience to become a compositor after returning to Colombia. Her return around the 70s, Esther was nicknamed “Barranquilla’s girlfriend” during an interview in a famous radio station in this city.
At the beginning, Esther wasn’t at ease with the nickname because being a girlfriend in that time period had a negative connotation and which could have led to a different acceptance of her music.
[Mariana Uribe] But what did it meant or mean to be “the girlfriend” in the Caribbean?
[Mariana Uribe]: This nickname limited Esther’s work to a local scene and only played on carnival season where her music and name are only remembered on. Therefore, her history is lost within her 500+ composed songs and the only tunes remembered are the ones dedicated to her city. La Luna de Barranquilla (The Moon of Barranquilla), La Guacherna, and Mi Vieja Barranquilla (My Old Barranquilla), Esther’s story were told halfway for a long time.
[Daniella Cura Audio]: Los avances que se han hecho en este campo es porque cada día hay más consciencia y eso es gracias a los avances y a los espacios que ha conquistado el feminismo a lo largo de un periodo de tiempo. Sin embargo si bien se han ganado espacios, queda mucho por hacer todavía.
[Audio of Daniella Cura]: The advances that have been done in this field is due to that every day there is more of social awareness, thanks to the developments and spaces that feminism has conquered throughout a period of time. However, if social spaces have been one, there is still more to do so far.
The investigation of music with a gender perspective in Colombia has just begun, there is still more to do, there must be a continuation of publishing, writing, and spreading music made and for women.
[Mariana Uribe]: Daniella Cura, a musical investigator is a clear example of that and in her book “La Caminadora” (“The Walker”), she talks about Esther Forero’s life from another view. It is important to understand the labor of musical investigation with a feminine approach and how this path can open more doors to female musicians and musical legacies in our country.
[Audio of Daniella Cura]: Giving a gender approach to musical investigations is something that is become more important and necessary. Us women must have representation spaces that historically have been rejected to us and this musical space isn’t the exception.
Another important reason is the history of women in musical performance has been explored a bit; therefore, how many repertoires, how many stories have been numbed to us. This a completely fertile, relatively new ground for investigation. The jazz drummer, Carry Lyn Carrington, asks herself how jazz would sand and how the jazz world would be like if it wasn’t pierced by the patriarchy, and this is something that extends to all musical genres in how music was taken by women by the patriarchy and casting a shadow to music done by women.
[Mariana Uribe]: Esther with her music redefines the role of the woman and turned around the dichotomies that categorized women for many years in what way we should act and say. She occupies an important place for those who took the task of taking Caribbean music to other latitudes. Although her story isn’t told in the same fashion as others, it is there to be read, listened, and interpreted.
[Verónica Rodrìguez]: We want to thank everyone for joining us in this story. We invite you to visit our blog in Medium where you can read all our written content and listen to all our episodes. This episode was recorded in Medellin, Colombia, and Caracas, Venezuela. Written, narrated, and produced by Lorena Tamayo, Mariana Uribe, y Verónica Rodríguez Edited by Mateo Mejía. Don’t forget to follow us on our social media, Facebook, Twitter e Instagram como Lo único Mejor Que la música, because we believe that the only thing better than music is talking about music.
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