The jukebox moves the hearts of the Guayacos

By Moisés Pinchevsky, especially for La Revista

To surrender to sadness, a coin. To toast the heartbreak, another small coin. To share the sorrow with the dearest friends, as much as necessary… And cheers for all those ungrateful affections.

The most traditional night of the Guayaquileños of yesteryear is unmistakably linked to a device that called out songs in exchange for coins.

For much of the second half of the last century, that player functioned as a trigger for the music genre of the same name, derived from the Antillean bolero: the jukebox.

It bore the seal “cursed linked to our cruel, melancholic, excessive spirit, disappointed by evil and untruths,” says historian Wilman Ordóñez about that player who gave birth to a whole culture related to how the people of Buenos Aires melancholy understood.

“90 percent of the problems of proletarian man are related to betrayed love and lack of money,” indicates this researcher, author of the book The jukebox in Guayaquil (2023), who learned to deal with the pain of these wounds at a very young age.

At the age of 14, Wilman was already adept at placing one-sucre coins into the jukebox’s world slot. Those were moments when his tender heart fell platonically in love with a prostitute in heavy makeup who had taught him to dance tight boleros in a dark cantina on 18th Street. That love would be the only romance she was willing to give him.

There, under a sad light – and even sadder music – the inexperienced man and the specialist summarized the meeting of their souls in a solemn promise: he would get a job to give her a jukebox on her birthday.

But that promise was never fulfilled, nor was that love consummated, for one cursed night a dagger eliminated that lady in a conflict of love and deceit.

“I was just a kid,” he recalls, a lovelorn child who has since become lost in the sentimental reaches of rock music. And he never escaped.

Youth with cabarets and pimps

The rise of the jukebox in Latin America is due to the Canadian businessman David Cullen Rockola (1897-1993), who founded his company on the production of that device that arrived in Ecuador in the 1950s on the steamboats that brought the great inventions brought to the world. country, Americans, such as radio and television.

In Guayaquil, Wilman Ordóñez seems to have had the jukebox as a nursery rhyme, since he grew up in a house at 11th and Calicuchima streets, next to the Montse bar, “where singing cholos and homeless people, drunk on life and the port, came.” (maritime)”.

Outside the bar, he listened intently to every song “of fire and howling” that came from that painful, suffering and pitiful cantina, he says.

He was a melancholic child who in later years, through direct visits or through stories from his parents, the cabarets No te ahueves (Octava and San Martín), Verdes palmeras, La Puerta de Fierro (Portete and Guerrero Valenzuela), La zinc door ( Gómez Rendón and Gallegos Lara), Cabello (Calicuchima and Novena), Roberto (Octava and Letamendi), A Clockwork Orange (Octava and Maldonado, then on Gómez Rendón and 22nd), Triquimoqui, Crystal injured, Life rosa and El Tropicana, among others .

In the latter, the star Blanquita Garzón danced and Julio Jaramillo sang.

Wilman explains that those places were the territory of the so-called “pimps,” mestizo men devoted to bohemianism, dressed in white suits, wide-leg pants, patent leather with high heels or double-toned shoes and with gallons of glitter in their hair. , to create a “very special” image and identity. They were the bright ones of the Guayaquil evening!

“This is how I saw my uncles and my father, with orange trousers, green shirts, very perfumed… it was the fashion”, as part of a neighborhood worldview that within the canteens loyal friends, clean fists, shared loves and, for the cruel , all the booze the night could bring.

The voices of resentment

All this was accompanied by songs by international artists such as Carmencita Lara, Lucha Reyes, El Cholo Berrocal, Cecilio Alva, Los Kipus (all from Peru), Alci Acosta (Colombia), Daniel Santos (Puerto Rico), Los Tres Reyes, Los Panchos (Mexico), Los Visconti (Argentina) and Ecuadorian artists such as Fresia Saavedra, Máxima Mejía, Olimpo Cárdenas, Elvira Velasco, Pepe Jaramillo, Segundo Rosero, Roberto Calero and Aladino, among many other healers of broken souls.

Wilman Ordóñez lays out a much more extensive list The jukebox in Guayaquila product of his hobby of collecting more than 780 songbooks such as The mosquito, The Cantarín of Guayas, The Songbook, The Folksong Book, The Royal Songbook, The National Troubadour, The guitarist, De Guayas Guitarrillo, The Night Owl and other publications that appeared between the 1910s and 1970s.

That whole world is summarized in that 116-page text full of that ‘other’ Guayaquil and which he dedicates to his mother. “She was the first fan of those songs.”

But Wilman also gives this investigation to the distant memory of that prostitute with the sad look who, considering her his first love, taught him that the feeling needs very little to become unforgettable. Sometimes you just need a coin.

The narrator of popular culture

The book The jukebox in Guayaquil (2023, $20), by Wilman Ordóñez, was printed by the publishing house CR Ediciones (Rosario, Argentina), by the writer Patricio Raffo, who organized a merit competition that resulted in the printing of three books related to historical research on the popular culture. Wilman won that competition in Latin America, which allowed him to be the first to publish Beautiful girl: lying stories about the harbor bandits (2022, $15), featuring fifteen real stories featuring women from the Guayaquil Night. The third book will be Valentinascheduled for next year, featuring stories of broken love tied to romantic ballads from the ’70s and ’80s.

Moreover, Wilman Ordóñez has just presented the book Palo Santo heart ($45), which tells in 491 pages the “new social and cultural history of the dances, music, typical costumes and folkloric dances of Montuvia and Buenos Aires.” It summarizes thirty years of research and fieldwork.

Reports and orders: Wilman Ordóñez 099-453-5289. Also in the Cocoa Museum (Imbabura and Panama). (JO)