A Sound is Born

Reggae en Español bursts onto the scene and picks at the scar tissue surrounding a lingering question: What does it mean to be Panamanian?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Previously on a flow Diablo Roy is the bus, the
regular Hannah mob bus, the taps. When I started doing
because Calito from about that was the style. LaMDA el

(00:23):
momento laonda. This is the ship right now. Remember in
those days, Latin Americas was full of military um generals
instead of presidents. The military was the bosses. One night

(00:44):
in nineteen eighty six, a police car pulls up for
Renato Old. He's not sure why, but he knows it
has to do with his new song, El Danny, which
is popping. It was in tapes in buses and it
got so popular that raiders should started playing it. The
song is about the feared Panamanian police unit known as
a Danny, which is loyal to the general's running the country,

(01:08):
including top boss Manuel Noriega. At the time, n Diego
was a paid informant for the CIA and was moonlighting
as a money launderer for the Medjean cartel. Or was
it the other way around. Anyway, The point is he
kept a tight grip on power in Panama. It was
a fucked up environment, man, It was crazy. You know,
people were afraid you could not talk about the government

(01:31):
because you was going to jail. Or they'll kick you
out of the country. The idea for the song came
to Renato after listening to a Jamaican dance hall about
police brutality. In Renato's version, a Danny officer is being
confronted by a criminal after committing a crime. He's like,
what the hell are you going to do about it?
So I said it was easy to say, look at Danny.

(01:51):
I said yeah, and then after that saying the song.
Playing the part of the police officer, Renato goes on
about what the police can get away with, like pushing

(02:13):
you against the wall, coughing you and hitting you over
the head with a club. At one point, Renato refers
to the police as albinos, making it clear he's talking
about white cops because in those days they used to
broke your door and go in your house. They used
to do a lot of wicked stuff. The song hit
a nerve under the rose buses and then on the radio,

(02:35):
so Rnado hit the studio to make the record. That's
most likely the first forge in Espaniolity. The sales were
so good that my first page for El Danny was
eight hundred dollars and eight hundred dollars in those times
was like having like five thousand dollars back in the
police car. Renato had no idea what to expect. All

(02:57):
he knew is that somebody from the military called his
boss to book him to DJ on a military base.
We want the guy that sings El Danny. And my
boss said, what yeah, yeah, we want the guy to sing,
said asap okay, but Hito has no car. Now, we're
gonna send a police car for him. And they sell

(03:18):
a police car for me. When he gets to the base,
military officers tell him Noriega is in the house and
he has a special request. One of the captains told me, hey,
Noriega wants us to sing. I say, but they contract
me to DJ, not to sing. And I said, well,
I don't know what you're gonna do, but you gotta sing.
I say, but you gotta sing, And I had to

(03:38):
do it. This is a flow, a journey to the
roots of Regedon. Hi. My name is Lee Luciano. I'm
a CBS News correspondent born and raised in Puerto Rico,
the cradle of Regon. You're listening to episode four. A
sound is born. Just a few months after releasing Il Danny,

(04:06):
Rnado was lounging around at home when an idea for
a new song suddenly came to him. He lived with
his two grandmothers and they love to watch novelas or
super sappy soap operas. Look it's a Latina thing. Well,
Nado's grandmothers were big fans of the novel The Brown
Eyed Girl. I hated those bunch of soap opera because

(04:27):
I want to see my sport and my grandma wants
to see this bunch of soap opera. That was angry
with my grandmother. And I wrote Chicas Cafe, and I
was making a song to do it against that, and
then what I end up doing is a romantic song
saying the names of all these soap opera, this novellas,
and it was a big hit. That's the song that

(04:47):
made made everything international. I was supposed to sing that
song with him, because he invited me to sing the song,
but I was too busy to be honest with that.
But he made the song and the song hit all
over This is reggae sam, so he was the first

(05:10):
one that I could say that make it out there
recording like a good novela. The song spread throughout Central
and South America, but unlike anovela, which usually stars wider
actors and reserves for black Latino's roles like maids or servants.
Looking at You Too, Hollywood. In Renato's music video the
Stars or Black Panamanians Riojajo and the Diaolos Rojos. The

(05:34):
overall message of his video is I prefer you to
the glitz of the telenovela. And for that time, it's
a big deal because it picked at the scar tissue
surrounding a lingering question what does it mean to be Panamanian?
A question that goes back to the very founding of
the country. I look at reggae Espanola is kind of

(05:55):
an example of what is popular culture saying about what
it means to be black and brown in a Latin
American country. This is Sonia Watson, a dean a Texas
Christian University and the author of a book about race
and reggae and in Panama. So I look at it
very much from a literary, cultural and historical point of view.

(06:18):
And so what I found was you have kind of
this nation building literature that really talks about what it
means to be black in a country that does not
want to recognize that blackness. So Panama, in the span
of one hundred years went from a Spanish colony to
a Colombian province to an independent nation and their origin story,

(06:40):
their identity was up in the air. So while Teddy
Roosevelt was busy building the canal, Panama was struggling with
buyer's remorse. On second thought, that Panama Canal deal did
not look so good. Panama, room this time, was really
trying to define itself as a Latin American nation independent
from the United States, and they were kind of fighting

(07:01):
this kind of US imperialism. So Espanidad spanishness became a
really big tenant in Panamanian culture, history books, literature. They
not only define themselves but redefine themselves based on Spanish
white culture or Spanish white Mestiso culture. That turned out

(07:25):
to be problematic for a number of reasons because there
was this huge black West Indian community that had come
to Panama to build the canal and railroads, about one
hundred and fifty thousand people in all. These workers radically
changed the demographics of Panama. In the eighteen seventies, the
entire population of Panama was just seventy thousand people, But

(07:45):
by nineteen eleven, three years before the canal was finished,
there were an estimated three hundred and thirty thousand people
in the country. Many of the Caribbean workers went back home.
The work was dangerous, the conditions were shitty, and the
pay wasn't worth the hassle, but a lot of them
stayed despite being considered outsiders by other Panamanians. Panamanians aligned

(08:09):
the population culturally, linguistically, and racially with the United States,
so they were kind of deemed this foreigner. And so
this directly relates to Regain Espanol because these Regaan Espanol
artists are descendants of these West Indian immigrants. During the
ensuing decades, laws were passed that discriminated against the black
English speaking community. One law prohibited non Spanish speaking black

(08:33):
people from even entering the country. Another law made Spanish
a requirement for citizenship. The police, as we know, we're
targeting West Indians and even resorting to cutting off the
dreadlocks of young black men, like in the case of Brangquito,
the third member of Renado and Reggae Sam's Ryo Bajo Crew.
The systemic racism also spread to the streets. One very

(08:56):
overt example is the use of chumbo in Panama. Um
and so the chum, the word chumbo as a pejorative
used against people of African descent and particularly West Indians
in Panama. It's like if they mad at you, they
would say, oh it's and it was bad and it

(09:18):
created fights, just like in America. Here's reggae. Sam. If
you talk to me today about reggae, everybody is oh, nice, beautiful.
It was not like that back then when it started.
But when I get to my first show, the guys
there were Spanish people, of course I speak Spanish fluent,

(09:41):
and they say, oh, man, you're gonna be next. I said, okay,
what you're gonna sing? I say reggae And one of
the Spanish guys say reggae. That's okays like what is that?
I say, oh no, that's music from Jamaica. And then
he said, oh so they other guy he cut in
front and saying no, no, no no, no no, says Musica

(10:04):
der Africa. He exists the end Hamaica. You know, this
is music that's from being coming from Africa and it
ends in Jamaica. For Ronaldo, having grown up a Zonian,
he was spared the experiences and racism that came with
an upbringing in dry Oahu. It wasn't until after his

(10:24):
two biggest hits that he understood the feeling when I
felt it. When now I'm a magician and now we're
singing reggae and everybody's talking that this music is for criminals.
I'm the guy that had problems when they used to
call me maleante on TV because we did this this music.

(10:47):
I don't know anything about delinquency. You know, I'm not
a delinquent. You know, I don't rob, I don't do nothing.
They didn't like the music because it was it was
a music for kids, you know. The younger people made
it their movement. Reggae. Sam and Renato would eventually form
two parts of the group Las Guas the Four Powers,
along with Gabby, who would release this gem. I'm sure

(11:10):
you've heard it. No, it's a classic King Sanera anthem.
I mean, at least it was for me. The success
of Elda Cafe and Elmenito was a catalyst for reggae
and Espanoli and Rio Bajo became the launching pad for

(11:33):
this whole new sound. If you ask me where Renato
was from, Rio Bajo, Where Gabby from Riobajo, Where Reggae
Sam from Riobajo. We're Nando Boom from Riobajo. I'm the
guy that started everything and it was a great hit.

(11:54):
And El Pueblo, you know, and the projects you know
all over was a great hit. And now we surpass
everything because now is the number one music in the
whole world. Telling the stories of Renato, Reggae Sam, and
Ryobajo are important in this story, not just to pay
respects to an era that's often ignored and whose influence

(12:16):
is overlooked, but also to look forward because what happens
next is the quintessential story of Yaton. Somebody's gonna move,
the beat is going to follow them, pick up new
sounds and emerge better and better than any time before.
We used to hang a lot, and he used to

(12:36):
work in this grocery store and he used to, you know,
like the guy the kids. Once you finished shopping, they
pack your stuff and put it in a bag. So
at night, especially on the weekends, we used to go
to this dance and I used to sing, and me
and him used to practice a lot of combination in
my mom's house because we live very close. And once

(12:57):
I go to sing and I'm on stage age and
I call him up on stage and he'd do his
thing and hez he tear it up like he would
take his shirt off and start. Why aren't the girls
m stock jumping on stage next time? On a Flow?
Now we are talking about who were the first one

(13:19):
to make reggae intern nationally huge and big. That is
at Gardo Armando Franco Lol, who we know as Frankito.
A Flow is a production of Exile Content Studio in
partnership with iHeartRadio's Michael Tura podcast Network. The show is

(13:41):
hosted by me Lilia Luciano and was created and produced
by Bittannis d Julius. Production and sound designed by Dizo.
Additional production by David Quinones. Original music by Truco Production
supervision by Alvaro Cespdis. Executive producers for Excel Content Studio
are The Villa He Saw It Lee and Alejandro Rewing,

(14:03):
executive producers for iHeartMedia or Connel Burne and just Sell Bounces.
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