Los Pleneros de la 21 is a New York City-based drum and dance ensemble that has been active since 1983. They specialize in Afro-Puerto Rican bomba and plena music and related dance forms. In addition to performing, they run a community-based, not-for-profit educational company dedicated to preserving and celebrating Puerto Rican traditional culture and "fostering the legacy and history of Puerto Rican artistic traditions of African and Creole descent."
Group formation and early years
Los Pleneros 21 was founded by percussionist and educator Juan Gutiérrez, a native of Santurce, Puerto Rico. When Gutiérrez (b 1951) arrived in New York in 1976 to study percussion at the Manhattan School of Music, salsa was the dominant form of popular Latin Music. But he soon encountered a rich, community-based circuit of musicians in Harlem and the South Bronx who played older traditional styles of Cuban rumba and Puerto Rican jibaro, bomba, and plena music. In the early 1980s he met master plenero practitioner Marcial Reyes Arvelo, and together they formed a group in the summer of 1983. The name Los Pleneros de la Veintiuno came from a neighborhood in Santurce where many of the members were originally from. In addition to Gutiérrez and Arvelo, early members included singer/percussionists Pablo “Gallito” Ortiz, Sammy Tanco, Nelly Tanco, Francisco “Paquito” Rivera, José Rivera, Alberto “Tito” Cepeda, and Benjamin Flores; dancer Eugenia Ramos; and cuatro player Edgardo Miranda and keyboardist Carlos Suárez.
Los Pleneros 21's early performances were in New York’s Puerto Rican community, at social clubs, casitas (little houses) and celebrations such as the annual Las Fiestas de Cruz (Feast of the Holy Cross) and Fiesta Navideña (Christmas party). With the help of cultural workers René López and Marta Moreno Vega, and folklorists from the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, City Lore, and the Ethnic Folk Arts Center (Center for Traditional Music and Dance), the group began playing for larger audiences at venues including Aaron Davis Hall (City College), Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Central Park, the 92nd Street Y, and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. They eventually toured internationally as cultural ambassadors to Russia, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, and Australia.
Style and Repertoire
Los Pleneros de la 21 specialize in Afro-Puerto Rican styles of music that originated in coastal towns like Ponce and Mayagüez where large communities of enslaved Africans and their descendants worked in the sugarcane mills. Bomba is played on a set of skin-headed barrel drum and features competitive interaction between the dancer and lead subidor drummer. Plena fuses Spanish melodies and verse/chorus structures with African rhythms played on hand-held frame drums knows as panderetas. Although bomba and plena were originally community street music played solely on percussion instruments, commercial recordings by such figures as Manuel A. Jimenez ("El Canario)" (in the 1930s) and Rafael Antonio Cortijo (in the 1950s) brought piano, horns, and string bass into plena arrangements. By the time Los Pleneros recorded their first album in 1989, they were using the cuatro (a ten-stringed guitar) and melodica for chordal accompaniment and melodic breaks. Subsequently they would add piano, string bass, and occasionally horns. Smithsonian Folkways scholar Raquel Rivera has noted that while traditional street bomba and plena have remained at the core of their musical style, Los Pleneros del la 21 draws on more contemporary influences from of jazz, salsa, and rap.
In terms of repertoire, Los Pleneros 21 performs traditional bombas and plenas as well as songs composed by Marcial Reyes Arvelo, Angel Louis Torruellas, Raphael Cepeda, Juan Gutiérrez, and other group members. Some songs chronicle the ups and downs of everyday life and community happenings. Others offer social commentary, such as Juan Gutierrez’s “Don Pedro,” a tribute to the legendary Puerto Rican nationalist leader. Gutiérrez's “Somos Boricuas” proclaims that Puerto Rican migrants to New York City still maintain pride in their Puerto Rican (“Boricuas”) identity and heritage.