The African Diaspora in South America: De Rompe y Raja

De Rompe y Raja was founded in 1995, as a cultural organization dedicated to preserving and promoting traditions and culture from the coastal region of Peru, where the music and motifs of European, African and Indigenous peoples intersect. Afro-Peruvian music, song, and dance are a single continuum of rhythms, developed during Peru’s colonial period, when Africans, brought to Peru as enslaved workers, merged their syncopations with the lively dance and music of Spanish colonialists and indigenous Peruvians. These forms have been celebrated, preserved, and reinvented by countless drumming hands and dancing feet.