Cartagena de Indias

A story told in salsa

Joe Arroyo grew up in Cartagena’s Nariño neighbourhood and began singing as a child. Years later, in “Rebelión”, he returned to the city as the setting for a story from the era of slavery.

The song describes an enslaved African couple in colonial Cartagena. When the woman is beaten by the man who enslaves them, her husband resists. Arroyo turns that confrontation into a salsa narrative whose repeated warning becomes its refrain.

Arroyo and his orchestra La Verdad released “Rebelión” on Musa original in 1986. The singer’s career also became closely tied to Barranquilla, but this song returns to the streets of his birthplace and a history much older than the neighbourhood in which he grew up.