Spend any amount of time pacing the streets of Monterrey, the bustling city in the north of Mexico where
Delia Beatriz, aka Debit, grew up, and you’ll be sure to catch traces of cumbia echoing from Bluetooth
speakers, DIY soundsystems or car stereos. An Afro-Latin dance form and “practica cultural” originating in
Colombia in the early 19th century, cumbia evolved rapidly in the early 1900s, as a localised sound played
on drums and flutes quickly modernised to integrate European instrumentation like the accordion. When it
reached Mexico in the 1940s, the sound shifted again, fusing with mariachi styles and integrating further
vallenato folk elements. Eventually, cumbia spread across the entirety of Latin America, splintering into a
spectrum of different musical styles such as chicha in Peru and cumbia villera in Argentina. And over in
Monterrey, cumbia inadvertently found its own idiosyncratic groove.
In the 1950s until the 1970s, waves of immigrants from across Mexico and Latin America headed to Monterrey
to find work, making a home in Colonia Independencia. And Colombian cumbia records, shipped in from
Mexico City, Houston and Miami, became the soundtrack of the neighborhood, relaying familiar stories to a
rural working class adjusting to their new industrial reality. The sound struck a chord with locals, and huge
street parties hosted by ramshackle soundsystems known as sonideros unified the diverse community. So
when cumbia rebajada materialized serendipitously in the 1990s, it emphasised and highlighted the memory
distortions at the heart of the immigrant experience. Local record collector, selector and sonidero Gabriel
Dueñez had been playing cumbia for hours one night when disaster struck: his turntable’s motor overheated
and slowed down turning the music into a warped groan, with half-speed voices echoing over wobbly
accordion drones and splashy drums. But the crowd kept dancing, and Sonido Dueñez realized he’d struck
gold - cumbia rebajada was born.
Over the next few years he dubbed a popular series of mixtapes, hawking them at the flea market on the
dried-up Santa Catarina riverbed beneath El Puente del papa, the bridge that links downtown Monterrey
with Independencia. And these woozy archives became the stuff of legend, poetically but subconsciously
shadowing DJ Screw’s series of epochal cassettes that appeared over the border in Houston. Beatriz uses
Sonido Dueñez’s first two tapes as the starting point for ‘Desaceleradas’, entering into a dialogue with time,
culture and geography as she recalls the sonic ecosystem that surrounded her decades ago, long before
she emigrated to the USA. If 2022’s acclaimed ‘The Long Count’ was an attempt to recover concealed pre
Columbian history in the face of colonisation, ‘Desaceleradas’ jumps forward, figuring out how memory and
shared celebration can resist a more contemporary form of cultural erasure. As AI systems scrape, blend and
decontextualise culture around us, leaving vapid slop, ‘Desaceleradas’ proposes a slower, more careful, and
ultimately more human kind of engagement. It’s an archive with a pulse[info sheet from distr.]