CULTURAL MESTIZAGE

Here in America, flavors, colors, beliefs, sounds and feelings came together. Little by little, a culture as mixed as Venezuela came up in Venezuela and throughout the Americas.

Europe sent us its painting and its sculpture, for churches and homes. But here, indigenous and brown hands painted images, carved saints in wood, built pulpit altarpieces in churches. To the religious festivities are added something of their indigenous culture and something of their African culture: typically Venezuelan festivities arose. Even dark virgins were in Hispanoamerica.

The indigenous America had been musical. They were people of maracas, guaruras, totutos, quenas, tamboriles, raspadores, to celebrate harvests and the arrival of the rains, to worship the gods and cure the sick, to summon the war and even to express pain before death they performed dances with accompaniment of musical instruments.

From the other side of the ocean came harps and guitars to brighten the home of the whites. Here they were born two mestizo children: the Creole harp and the four Creole. Along with the enslaved Negro, came the African drum that accompanies the strong dance, as if he wanted to denounce the freedom lost to the equal San Juan.

In America, rhythms, melodies and instruments were fused to give rise to popular music and dances, which are as mestizo as the Latin American population and ours as a basket and a hammock inherited from the indigenous past.