Afro Venezuelan women take the stage at Festival Betances

Bridgit Brown

Standing amidst a throng of colorful people, Patricia Abdelnour signals to the first in a procession of eight black women all clad in scarlet dresses as they exit the stage at the 34th Annual Festival Betances, held in the South End last Saturday.

This year’s six-day festival honored the landmarks of Puerto Rico. Organized by the Latin American community-building agency Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción, the event is named after Dr. Ramón Emeterio Betances, a Puerto Rican surgeon, ophthalmologist, scientist, politician and writer. Betances also fought Spanish Colonialism and used his own money to buy black children to avoid having them become slaves.
The women walk with the same rhythmic flow as the music they just made on stage. As they approach Abdelnour, she poses a question:

“Have you heard what’s happening in Venezuela? What’s going on over there right now is not traditional at all. It’s called Chávez. Have you heard of it?” she asks.

The spry and enthusiastic Abdelnour is the cultural attaché for the Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Her job is to accompany and translate for Ellegua, an octet of Afro Venezuelan women on a North American tour sponsored by their country’s government.

“They wouldn’t be here otherwise. It is the Venezuelan government that is bringing a band of Afro Venezuelan women to America,” she says. “This is because in Venezuela there is a policy — ‘revolution’ — for some, and for some it’s called something else. There’s this process of including the people who have traditionally been excluded, and it just so happens that those people are the majority.”

Abdelnour says that 60 percent of the Venezuelan population is mixed, including President Hugo Chávez, who is of African and indigenous ancestry. She also says that Venezuela is going through a process by which the people are now proud of being black, brown, mixed, mulatto — of being Venezuelan.

“Before, everybody wanted to be blonde and to live in Miami,” says Abdelnour. “Now there is this renaissance and rescue of our identity as Venezuelans and that includes the natives, the blacks, the Spanish and so on. Chávez is also the first president not only to recognize the mixed heritage of the people, but to celebrate it.”

Ellegua has been performing for the past 12 years. Their name comes from the West African Yoruba god who holds the keys of destiny. Ellegua also has the power to open all good roads and close the bad ones.

Heeidy Rondon, who sang the lead on many of the songs performed by Ellegua, says one of the purposes of the group’s North American tour is to build up solidarity with their African-descended counterparts here.

“We want our black American brothers and sisters to recognize and feel proud to identify themselves for what they are and keep in mind that our motherland is Africa and not what they have brainwashed us into thinking, which is that it is Spain or England,” says Rondon, who said many black Americans have told the group they never knew that there were black people in Venezuela.

One starry-eyed onlooker at the event was Mel King, a man whose life and actions have made him a pillar of the Boston community at-large.

“I feel the kinship as a member of the human family,” said King. “These women are my sisters and I think it’s important that we understand that that is how we survived in a society that has been hostile to us.

“People of African heritage everywhere continue to struggle and thrive under all kinds of oppressive conditions, and what we have to do is keep our eyes on the prize.”