‘Break Your Hips!’ Spinning to the Rhythm of Venezuelan Tambores

When Venezuela beat the United States to win the world baseball classic in March, images of a fifth-inning homer went viral. So did videos of the pitcher Eduard Bazardo pounding a drum in the dugout while his teammates clapped and danced. It was a scene that some veteran sports journalists struggled to describe.

“The Japanese reporters came over to me and were like, ‘What are they doing?’” said Daniel Alvarez-Montes, director of the sports news site El ExtraBase. Alvarez-Montes gave the reporters a tutorial on tambores — the word means “drums” in English — a dance that originated among enslaved people on cacao and coffee plantations in Venezuela in the 1600s. In tambores, dancers jump in and out of a circle, gyrating their hips and spinning to the rhythm of the drum.

Tambores may not be as widely known as other Latin dances like merengue, salsa and bachata, but that is starting to change with the exodus of millions of Venezuelans to Europe, other South American countries and the United States. Members of the diaspora are reacquainting themselves with their cultural roots and serving as emissaries of their country’s music and dance.

In New York, on June 20, Lincoln Center will feature its fourth annual tambores performance as part of the Summer for the City program. Beginning with a drumming procession, it will culminate in call-and-response songs and dancing on Hearst Plaza.

Jeickov Vital, the creator of Tambores Bombayá, a musical group that performs and gives workshops across the country, will travel to New York from Savannah, Ga., for the event. He said he had seen Venezuelans become more invested in their cultural heritage during the second Trump administration. With the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua in the news and “all that happened” with Nicolás Maduro, the country’s former president, Vital said, he had found Venezuelans keen to project a positive image. “People wanted to get out the message that that isn’t all of us,” he said.

“It’s when you are ‘othered’ that you reach back to your native culture,” said Mariana Martin Capriles, a Venezuelan who lives in New York City and D.J.s as MPeach. On a recent trip back home, she said she was struck by the resurgence of tambores in clubs and even on city streets. “What you are seeing abroad, multiply it by 10,” she said. “It’s a way for people to feel proud about what was created in Venezuela, something that’s ours.”

At last year’s Lincoln Center event, Venezuelan Americans turned out in force, waving white flags and wearing straw hats with sashes along the brim. Drums are the essence of tambores; they vary in size, but are made of wood and covered with animal skin. Along with the percussionists, some of the men shook maracas and women waved red bandannas as they sang “Que Lindo Se Ve San Juan” (or “How Pretty San Juan Looks”).

They were celebrating el Festival San Juan Bautista, or the Festival of Saint John the Baptist, the holiday most closely associated with tambores. It coincides with the summer solstice and was probably one of the few days that enslaved workers had off. As part of the festival, a wooden statue of Saint John is taken to morning mass, then paraded through the streets.

After the procession at Lincoln Center, participants formed a circle, which dancers jumped in and out of. They twitched their hips and extended their arms, spinning the whole while. After a minute or so those in the center were tapped on the shoulder to make way for a new entrant. People usually danced as opposite-sex couples. They almost never touched, but the overriding impression was undeniably sensuous.

For most of Venezuelan history, San Juan was not celebrated nationally. Afro-Venezuelans tended to be isolated along the country’s coast, and when they moved to cities, it was often to work in service jobs. “They weren’t seen as having a culture worthy of being represented,” said Mesi Bakari-Walton, assistant professor of Spanish and African diaspora studies at Howard University.

In the 1980s that started to change. The groups Un Solo Pueblo and Tambor Urbano began popularizing Venezuelan folkloric songs for a broader audience. Choroní, a beach town in Venezuela, developed a robust tourism industry around tambores; holidays could be spent lounging on the beach by day and dancing to drums at night. And tambores became a favored send off at society weddings, which had often ended with mariachis.

My mother is Venezuelan, and I learned tambores by copying my cousins’ moves. My heart rate always skyrocketed when I jumped into the middle of the circle, and not just because the dance is fast paced. Tambores require dragging one leg while using the other to move in a circle, gyrating your core the whole while. “Break your hips!” people would tell me as I tried to keep pace.

Throughout my childhood in the 1980s, migration from Venezuela was exceedingly rare. The collapse of the country’s economy, however, sparked an enormous exodus. Since 2014, some eight million Venezuelans have left the country. There are now roughly 800,000 in the United States alone.

These immigrants sparked a resurgence of tambores. Willie Quintana arrived in New York in 2015 and two years later, with Daniel Prim, founded the musical group Tambor y Caña. When Venezuelans started coming to New York in greater numbers in 2022, some new arrivals found Quintana through social media. He said: “People would reach out to me on Instagram, saying, ‘I’m staying in this shelter in Brooklyn and I brought my drum with me. Can I play with you?’”

Performances have given Venezuelan Americans a place where they can experience a sense of belonging. Andreina Torres Angarita, who teaches urban studies at Barnard College, said that Venezuelans in New York do not have established neighborhoods to move to or to meet fellow immigrants, as was the case for Dominicans in Washington Heights or Colombians in Jackson Heights. “They are dispersed,” Angarita said. “Dance and music provide spaces where people can connect.”

In 2022, Quintana partnered with a group of New Yorkers of Venezuelan descent to stage a San Juan procession across the Williamsburg Bridge. Carlos Chirinos, an assistant professor of music at New York University and curator of Latin music at Lincoln Center, heard about it and invited Quintana to headline a San Juan event at Lincoln Center the next year. “Venezuelans, especially Black Venezuelans, feel seen in San Juan,” he said, which dovetails with the center’s commitment to showcase the culture of all New Yorkers.

News of a San Juan event at one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world fired up the diaspora. Vital flew to New York with his four sons to participate in the procession. Grace Salamanca, a tambores dancer in Miami who gives master classes across the East Coast, flew in to perform. Ronaldo Cardenas, a sheet metal worker in Tennessee, rented a car and drove 18 hours with two other Venezuelans. He has since created his own tambores group in Nashville. “I indebted myself buying the drums and costumes and T-shirts,” he said. “But it’s worth it.”

Tambores is also influencing music and dance in a more general sense. MPeach, a niece of the founders of Un Solo Pueblo, has been playing what she calls tambor electrónico for years. Dennis Gutierrez, a D.J. known as DNS, heard the tambores drum beat in New York clubs and started incorporating it into his set at Café Citron in Washington, D.C. “If you want to get people on the dance floor,” he said, “play ‘Ley o ley o ley,’” a common tambores refrain.

Lincoln Center will feature another Venezuelan musician, with a creative use of tambores, Orestes Gómez. He will perform at the David Rubenstein Atrium on June 26. His album “No Me Fui Porque Quise” (“I Didn’t Leave Because I Wanted To”) blends jazz, hip-hop and Afro-Caribbean rhythms in songs about the experience of the Venezuelan diaspora.

To some purists, this version of tambores isn’t what they have spent years perfecting. Chirinos, though, points out that tambores music has always been transmitted orally and has no doubt evolved from how it was performed hundreds of years ago.

“The way the tradition can survive isn’t just by having people disseminate it,” he said. “It’s by changing and reaching audiences who aren’t familiar with it.” Perhaps to the point where the next time a tambores clip goes viral, people won’t have to ask for a tutorial — they will have seen it, or even danced it.