This story aired in the October 30, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
Bomba. It's a word you feel: percussive, rhythmic, pulsating.
The art form grew out of the Afro Indigenous cultures of Puerto Rico. But it’s much more than dance music. Bomba echoes and resonates with the violent history of slavery and resistance in Puerto Rico.
Batey Tambo is a Bay Area bomba ensemble that’s continuing one of Puerto Rico’s oldest musical traditions with “bombazos” - community gatherings that hold spiritual power and foster cultural solidarity.
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Story Transcript:
REPORTER: I’m walking to a waterfront park in Alameda, and I hear them before I can see them, the ensemble called Batey Tambo. The sound is irresistible.
The crowd on the Seaplane Lagoon Promenade is festive. Some people are dancing, others just seem happy to be in good company on a day with a blazing blue sky and a cool bay breeze.
I arrive as the opening number is winding down
DENISE SOLIS: Thank you. I see a lot of familiar faces, a lot of new faces. How many of you, this is your first time seeing bomba?
REPORTER: A wave of raised hands goes up.
DENISE: Yes. Awesome.
REPORTER: That’s Denise Solis, the founding director of Batey Tambo. Denise is considered a maestra or expert in bomba.
DENISE: I started in 2002. 23 years. 23 years… She's great at drums, but not at math.
REPORTER: Denise is definitely an educator, though, and shares the cultural legacy of bomba with audiences at Batey Tambo's performances.
DENISE: So, the music and dance, it's improvised Afro-Indigenous Puerto Rican music. It's in the tradition of call and response.
REPORTER: Call and response is an essential element of bomba and what we just heard is a laina, a soloist singing a line or phrase and a chorus repeating it in response. This repetition emphasizes the message in the song. This is how a song typically begins, then:
DENISE: The dancer is improvising and having a conversation with the drummer. The drummer's following the dancer and it's a little bit of a challenge.
REPORTER: A little bit of a challenge? From where I'm sitting – this time at a performance at Soma Arts - the repique (the dancer/drummer conversation) looks like a throw down. In most genres of music, the drummer sets up the beat. In bomba, the dancer known as the bombera, or bailador controls the rhythm and the tempo.
DENISE: That was Maria Christina having a conversation with the drum.
REPORTER: For me, one thing signals the dancer’s stature: the bombazo skirt - a resplendent, brightly colored, voluminous, tiered ruffled skirt. Some have as many as 25 yards of fabric. Depending on your point of view, the bombazo skirt is either an expressive tool in the conversation between dancer and drummer or a weapon in the duel between them.
DENISE: So the drummers, they interpret the movements of the dancer, but you don't really know what they're coming at you with.
REPORTER: Because even though bomba has standard dance steps - piquetes - the dance is improvised. Dancers add complexity to the repique using their arms, hips, shoulders and heads to create rhythm and tempo. To make it even more challenging, they add the skirt into the mix to narrate their stories and project a spectrum of emotions - rage, sorrow, playfulness, euphoria, confidence, allure. But before the repique begins…
DENISE: There are some, what we call protocols.
REPORTER: One protocol is the paseo. A dancer confidently promenades around the batey - the dance circle - making figuras, stances that to me look like power poses, then:
DENISE SOLIS: You're gonna see the dancer salute the drum because for our tradition, this is the ancestor. The subidor or the primo or the premiere, this drum is the one that has the conversation with the dancer.
REPORTER: The ancestor is the smaller, higher pitched drum of the barilles de bomba - the two types of goat skin drums traditionally played in bomba. The second type, the larger, lower pitched drums:
DENISE: They're buleadores and they keep the rhythm going.
REPORTER: Two other percussive instruments add complimentary rhythmic layers. One is the cua, two wooden sticks played on a block of wood
DENISE: and they keep the rhythm on time.
REPORTER:The second instrument is the maraca.
DENISE: Usually played by the singer who establishes what rhythm we're gonna play based on the song you're gonna sing.
REPORTER: Bomba is an ensemble music tradition where the practitioners learn and rotate collective roles between dancing, drumming, and singing. Although bomba’s three part instrumentation of drums, cua and maracas is pretty basic, Batey Tambo’s ensemble of ten practitioners collectively create the layered, interlocking, simultaneous combination of 2/4, 4/4, 6/8, 12/8 polyrhythmic percussion that makes bomba exhilarating, irresistible! But as uplifting as bomba music is, the history of its origins is not so much, as I learned from Sarita Shah, a member of the Bay Area bomba community.
SARITA SHAH: I was born in Puerto Rico, and bomba is a community experience. We have to know the history of why we do bomba, and it's to honor and respect this movement of resistance of African enslaved people.
REPORTER: Bomba evolved amongst enslaved Africans kidnapped to work in Puerto Rico's colonial sugar plantations. They spoke different languages and bomba evolved as a common language - not just for creative and emotional expression but as subversive resistance. This element of bomba meant the practitioners…
SARITA: had to play bomba under candlelight, and were prohibited from doing bomba. So part of the passion comes from that movement of resistance, where those African enslaved people would use it to send messages of escape.
REPORTER:The word bomba is thought to have originated from the Akan language in West Africa. In many Akan dialects, bomba refers to the spiritual atmosphere of a gathering, and for Jamila Sanchez, a bombera with the ensemble, this sacred spirit is still alive in modern bombazos, or bomba gatherings.
JAMILLA SANCHEZ: I am Puerto Rican and African American and there are not many Puerto Ricans in the Bay Area, and it's been a beautiful way of being connected to my community. It feels like a privilege and an honor to be connected to so many amazing musicians and dancers and to be part of a really beautiful lineage from Puerto Rico with a lot of deep roots in resistance and African culture in the Island. It’s very inspiring. I feel seen, I feel held, I feel supported, and it’s been beautiful to find my roots while I'm in the diaspora in the Bay Area.
REPORTER: Batey, a word from the indigenous Taino culture of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, is the name for the open, sacred spaces the Taino built their settlements around. Batey Tambo takes its name from this sacred space. And as director Denise Solis says, they stay true to bomba's heritage of celebrating and uplifting community, of activism and of resistance.
DENISE: They try to erase our histories because it's black history, it's indigenous history, but we're still here and we're thriving and we need to continue telling our stories. This is the way that we keep history. It's oral tradition. We do it through music and dance because we love to have fun. You're going to try to oppress us, life could be going really wrong, but we're gonna have fun and we're gonna resist and we’re going to keep crossing that border around people that’s not created by us.
REPORTER: Bomba! What a way to keep culture, keep history, have fun and resist.