Taller Bula: Puerto Rican Bomba and the Black Diaspora

Under the direction of Hector Luis Rivera, Taller Bula has performed bomba in the Southern California region since 2018 and has lectured at UC Irvine, UCLA, and UC Santa Barbara. Bomba is a percussive call and response musical and dance genre created by enslaved Africans on Puerto Rican sugar plantations. For kidnapped Africans, bomba served as an important means of communication in the absence of shared language (Abadía-Rexach 2019). To this day, collectives of bomba practitioners turn to the genre to explore Black Puerto Rican identity, history and culture.