Buenaventura is one of those cities anchored in the Colombian Pacific that, due to its location and its people, has been characterized over time as a pantry of talents, virtues and, above all, resilience.
Founded by Juan de Ladrilleros in the year 1540, since then it has become the main port on the Pacific coast, it is also called the island of Cascajal, 60% of the imported products that are sold in Colombia cross through the Panama Canal and they are unloaded in Buenaventura allowing an industrial and commercial economic growth to the country that in some way should be reflected in the economic life of the porteños, however a large part of these Colombians live in poverty with a tendency to worsen.
Buenaventura has been a breeding ground for talented men and women who, through their work, have demonstrated their innovative capacity and above all their intelligence for music, folklore and all those expressions that are somehow part of the ancestry and culture of the Pacific.
Well then; Today we will allude to an Afro-descendant from Buenos Aires who was born two years after the sinking of the Titani and in the same year that the First World War began, I am referring to Patricio Romano Petronio Álvarez.
Petronio Alvarez
This talented black from his childhood dreamed of music, it was his main passion, however, the economic situation forced him to sell chambray bread and empanadas, typical of Valle del Cauca, which were part of the enterprise of his mother, Mrs. Juana. Francisca. Petronio was a talented child who at an early age showed exceptional virtues that caught the attention of many people, and one of them was evident when he went out to sell empanadas; For this, he used a tenth which read as follows: “chambray empanadas, for the old ones, here they are, whoever doesn’t buy them, leave them there” that couplet stuck and with it allowed the sales of the empanadas to skyrocket.
Over the years he grew and following in the footsteps of his father, he began working as an “aguatero” soon after he went to the railway workshops and in the end he fulfilled his dream of being a locomotive driver which was known as the palm. As he carried within him the sound of the currulao and all those musical expressions from the Pacific, in moments of rest while he was driving the heavy machine, he played the guitar to delight his fellow railroad members. In 1942 he met Veneranda Arboleda Rodríguez, eleven years later they were married, in the Church of San Nicolás de Cali.
Petronio Álvarez always traveled with the full capacity of his locomotive, while in one hand he carried a rustic case with the tools to fix any fault the train might have, in the other he carried the guitar to make traveling on the parallel lines more enjoyable. of the railway.
Being the commander of the train and in charge of setting the pace towards the horizon, the only public that had his interpretations was the wind, which for several years took his melodies without suspecting that they would be an essential part of the folklore of the Colombian Pacific region. and that also recorded the idiosyncrasy of an Afro population that insisted on preserving its identity.
From his mother, Juana Francisca Quintero Asprilla, he inherited the facility to create verses and the magic to invent them out of nothing, to improvise, and so that these spontaneous compositions were sound documents in which feelings and the hunch of a community in a situation were consigned. marginal. Compositions such as Vespertina, Bochinche en el cielo, Coja la pareja, Felisa, Cali, ciudad sultana, El Cauca, La cana de azúcar and, of course, Mi Buenaventura, his most popular song, made Petronio Álvarez a renowned chronicler in the Pacific, Colombia and the world.
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