STORY · DANCEHALL
Reggae en español: Panama to the world
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West Indian canal labourers, Panamanian raggamuffin deejays and a wave of Spanish- and Portuguese-language bands carried Jamaican reggae across Latin America.
Panama's reggae en español pioneers set Jamaican dancehall rhythms to Spanish decades before reggaeton, while parallel Spanish- and Portuguese-language reggae movements took root from Chile to Brazil.
A canal, a diaspora, a new language for the riddim
Long before reggae en español existed as a genre, tens of thousands of West Indian labourers, many of them Jamaican, migrated to Panama from the 1850s to build the Panama Railroad and, later, the Panama Canal. The Afro-Caribbean communities they left behind stayed musically connected to Jamaica for generations, giving Panama a head start when Jamaican dancehall began travelling abroad on record and radio in the 1970s.
By the late 1970s and 1980s, Panamanian deejays including Chicho Man, El General, Nando Boom and Renato were versioning Jamaican dancehall rhythms in Spanish — Nando Boom's cover of Shabba Ranks' "Dem Bow" would, years later, help name the dembow rhythm underpinning reggaeton. Their pioneering work is now the subject of Panama City's Museo del Reggae en Español, the first museum anywhere dedicated to the genre.
From that Panamanian root, Spanish-language reggae bands spread across the continent: Buenos Aires' Los Cafres recorded the first Spanish-language roots-reggae album registered worldwide, Santiago's Gondwana became a national hit-maker, and San Juan's Cultura Profética became the first Spanish-language act to record at Bob Marley's Tuff Gong studios.
A canal built by Caribbean hands left behind a rhythm that outlasted the empire that built it.
Brazil built a parallel, Portuguese-language reggae culture on its own terms: Rio's Cidade Negra became the first Latin American act to play Reggae Sunsplash in 1992, Bahia-born Edson Gomes carried an engaged roots-reggae style directly inspired by Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Alpha Blondy, and the northeastern port city of São Luís built its own sound-system culture, the radiola, around imported reggae records until the city earned its nickname as "Brazil's Jamaica."