Learning the Latin Beat... in China!

The children had been waiting for four hours. Their desks were hot like stoves and they sat very still, sweating in silence. Their parents waited patiently in the shadow. We arrived with the scorching noon sun of summer to teach them Latin music. More than 100 kids, their parents and grandparents surrounded us in a dusty school courtyard. 

Eight million Yi people live in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, in China’s southwest. We were near the border between the two, at the Xinxing School. This was the eighth of nine schools we visited that summer, volunteering for a non-profit organization called Unity Bridge. Unity aims to help schools like this, with a lot more children than resources or qualified teachers. Through music education, Unity offers music as a positive extra-curricular activity to kids in rural China, who often turn to violence and drugs , mainly because adult men from their families have moved to the cities and so they have little guidance. 

That day, three generations of Yi minority villagers, one of China’s 55 official minorities, danced Cuban son and clapped to the beat of cumbia and merengue with us. There were so many children that we didn’t fit in one of the two classrooms, so we had to teach the class in the patio. The school walls were a crust of brown. The parents’ faces were tanned and weathered, their hands tough like leather. Here, showers and laundry were scarce. There was a boy who was blind and another one with a broken arm held up by a string instead of a cast. Among them were old women wearing big black square hats smoking marijuana from their pipes.

Unity began with David Borenstein, a University of Florida graduate. In 2009, he moved to No. 10 village in Sichuan province on a Fulbright scholarship, to research how internal migration shapes life in rural China. The Fulbright program is a United States scholarship program founded in 1946 for educational international exchange for students, professors and professionals. For David, the town’s most distinctive feature was the complete lack of adult men, who left behind only women, the very old and the very young. And because positive male role models have moved to the cities, and women practically only learn about raising children and housework, there is no one to guide children in developing their talents and skills. 

There are no legitimate jobs, so they have to turn to the illegal ones. High school kids do crystal meth. The place slowly becomes a dumpster and nobody cares, everyone wants to leave as soon as possible. “Urban” seems to equal civilization and progress, so they feel they are backward and have no value, David says. They think the town won’t last much longer. And they’re probably right.

But the idea for Unity actually came from the people of No. 10 Village. Some days, David took his saxophone to school, or played his band’s album for them. A teacher then asked him if he would like to do a music program for the children. David liked the idea, started organizing the music camps and invited the rest of the group to participate. Without second thoughts, we enlisted for two months. 

To fundraise for our trip we formed a new version of “Los Piratas del Monte”, a band from Gainesville, Florida, in the United States. We play salsa, cumbia, merengue, son and bolero in Beijing; in Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital; in Kunming, Yunnan’s capital; and in other cities in that province.

Natalia Pérez sang with Sebastián López, who in turn played guitar and accordion. Johnny Frías, a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology, played the bongos; I played the guacharaca, a Colombian percussion instrument, and danced with Ernesto Alonso, who also played maracas. We knew each other from the University of Florida, in Gainesville. Chen Zhi Peng was also with us (his friends call him Xiao Peng), a documentary film maker from Mongolia who produced a documentary about our travels.  

One of the first camps we did was in Wenchuan, the epicenter of a 7.9-magnitude earthquake in May 2008 that affected that region, killing more than 70,000 people. 

At the school we taught that day, 11 children died and many are now orphans. About 100 meters from the school, a large mountain chain rose to the clouds. During the earthquake its rocks flew downhill, exposing the mountain’s insides, leaving wounds that only time and water cure.

But most of the time we were traveling, by train, bus or minivan—nauseous and sleepy, or screaming, singing and clapping to wake up our driver who was falling asleep next to 5,000-meter high abysses. This way, the tedium was broken by music and the Sichuanese landscape: Red earth, corn, rice and sorghum fields, and long and dark tunnels where the air is cooler and more breathable. Landslides at 3,000 meters high. On one side, always a river, where men fish and women bring their children. 

We had to cross a river like this in Jiuxiang, where we did a camp very early in the morning. Twenty minutes outside the town, a hanging bridge awaited us with its long and thin steel bars. Below, the river soared and roared like wildfire. Vertigo was not an excuse, and so we kept going. Then came mud streets and dirty dogs with their ribs sticking out, who welcomed us to their unassuming town. At the school they had speakers, but no one knew what they were for.

We visited schools like this, with money for music programs but no one who could teach them. Others like Xinxing, with little money but lots of motivation. In each one our impact was different, but it is still too early to know how deep the impact was. Time will show. For now, we can talk about the impact it made on us. 

Personally, I learned how to dance salsa, and to be humble about personal hygiene. Let’s hope that these children, as they danced with us, felt the call of a rhythm, foreign or familiar, and that singing with us awoke music that lay dormant in their lives.