In the beginning of 2020, Raíces set out to bring bomba and plena to our community. With a crew of drummers and dancers, we were sharing songs and rhythms, preparing for a series of bombazos. We were going to bring the batey- the circle where bomba is played, danced, and sung- to our community. We were going to bring our community to the batey. 

But as with just about everything else, 2020 had other plans for us, for our community, and certainly for the batey. The community could not gather. The place where movement, rhythm, and song are exchanged became a place of danger. The circle was broken.

Bomba and plena are community traditions, meant to be played in a group, a group that could not gather. There were two gathering places though, that bomba and plena continued to ring out. One was online, through discussions and presentations over digital platforms, connecting bomberos and bomberas from the island and across the diaspora, and the other illustrated an important aspect of the roots of bomba, its history of resistance. At Black Lives Matter protests, Bombazos for Black Lives sprung up in Puerto Rico and throughout the Diaspora, including in our own state of New Jersey at Jersey City Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

We could not gather our own community as planned to teach, share, dance, play, and sing bomba. As our own artistic efforts turned towards the digital world, we wanted to stay true to the roots of resistance being demonstrated by our friends, colleagues, and fellow artists. So we offer our own artistic contribution, shared above, to our community and to the new “digital batey”, written to reflect the spirit of resistance and protest that is so crucial to these folkloric forms, both in Puerto Rico, and here in the diaspora.