Uribe Hermocillo
By Julio Cesar Uribe Hermocillo. . . . Taken from El Guarengue.
Chabela died this Thursday, March 16, 2023, in Quibdó, the city where he was born. His father was the distinguished musician Rafael Ayala -widely known as RAYALA- whom at least three generations of Quibdoseños remember for his skill and mastery in the interpretation of the violin and the bandola, which were not the only instruments he played, but he did the most exclusive of those he played. His mother was the distinguished teacher Edelmira Cañadas, whom at least three generations remember as the one who taught them to read and write, and who was part of the sublime group of Chocoan women who -during the time of the Chocó National Administration- received scholarships to study pedagogy in Bogotá and Popayán, and marked a milestone in the history of women’s education in the region, around the third decade of the 20th century.
Gilma Isabel Ayala Cañadas was the full name of Chabela. I met her when she was already a married lady and I was still in the middle of school. I knew about her relatives from my mother’s stories from Quibdo, who was also a friend of Rayala and Señor Edelmira. Likewise, like almost everyone in Quibdó, he knew where his family home was, there on Carrera 7, between Calles 28 and 29, in a residential block -adjacent to Colegio Carrasquilla- where there were patios with fruit trees and medicinal herbs; Currently occupied -like almost the entire city- by a hubbub of businesses and commercial premises: a dance hall, a liquor store, a canteen, an auto repair shop and a cafeteria. That house, with a raised terrace, with an entrance staircase with two steps in the middle, had high walls made of cement bricks, a gabled zinc roof and a ceiling made of madeflex, with two stained glass windows and iron guard, one on each side of the entrance door. From the street, as one passed, one could see the living room of the house, with its gleaming floor of mosaics or tiles of alternating colors and with a set of furniture around a coffee table, above which, from the ceiling, hung a crystal lamp There, or sometimes on the platform, there were frequent evenings with family friends, many of them musicians, mostly guitarists; who, with Chabela’s father on the violin or on the bandola, and some percussionist or maraquero, were ecstatic in wonderful home concerts, whose repertoire included Chocoana music, sones and boleros, as well as melodic pieces, some of them Colombian Andean music , in which Rayala swaddled in ecstasy as if he were in a ballroom serenade or in a concert on the proscenium of the César Conto Theater or in the ballroom of the Hotel Citará, in Quibdó, or at the Teatro Colón, in Bogotá.
A decade after finishing school, after four years of working in El Carmen de Atrato and my degree at UPB in Medellín; the Apostolic Vicariate of Quibdó hired me to design and start up its social communication department. With Bishop Jorge Iván Castaño Rubio and the Claretian missionaries, headed by Gonzalo de la Torre, the Vicariate was the first entity in Chocó that was clear that institutional communication was not about bland press releases to promote its image or that of who ran it.
So, in the course of that job, I saw Chabela again. This time as an employee of Radio Universidad del Chocó, which worked in a large cement house, with a front garden and patio, on 29th street between sixth and seventh races, in the sector known as El Playón, in the César Conto neighborhood of Quibdó. There, in a large room, which was the first office of those facilities, sitting in front of an electric typewriter, was Chabela when Professor Alfonso Mosquera introduced her to me; with whom I had gone to speak to specify the possibility of transmitting through this station a weekly program of the Vicariate, which I would produce and which -if they allowed me- would be recorded in their studios and would be broadcast on Sundays at 7 a.m. the morning. Professor Mosquera Córdoba, one of the best voices that has ever been on Chocoan radio, due to his freshness and warmth, diction and naturalness, agreed to my requests and generously offered me all his collaboration for the development of my work there. . Chabela offered me red wine and water, in addition to her collaboration in whatever was within her reach. From that day on, greeting Chabela before entering the recording studio became a pleasant and inevitable weekly habit.
Thus, in 1988, the production and broadcast of the radio program “Church: People and Commitment” began, in whose first stage I was accompanied by the university professor Luz Stella Useche from Del Valle as a female voice, until mid-1989. We recorded on Thursdays, in large reel tape, which would later be copied to a 60-minute cassette, so that I could deliver the recording, on Fridays, to the stations Ecos del Atrato and La Voz del Chocó, which also broadcast the program -on Sundays at 7 in the morning – as on Radio Universidad del Chocó. Harold Ortega Fernández and Aldemar Valencia Murillo were the sound technicians in charge of recording the program. Over time, Nicolás Arce Valencia and Carlos Arturo Buenaños Palacios also took charge of this work.
Beginning in the second semester of 1989, after almost one hundred editions of the program, Professor Useche, until then the female voice in the locution and recording of the same, could not continue in this collaboration, for personal reasons. Two or three recordings were made by myself, while we found a woman who would share the presentation of the program with me. It occurred to Professor Alfonso Mosquera Córdoba and Aldemar Valencia that the new female voice of “Church: People and Commitment” could be Chabela, with whom we spoke immediately and between the three of us we convinced her that she could do it. From then until the first semester of 1991, Chabela and I recorded together every week – at the beginning on Thursdays and during the last stage on Friday mornings – this radio program of the Apostolic Vicariate of Quibdó.
Chabela and I made together at least fifty recordings of that radio program, before and after which we drank red wine, chatted and smoked, in his office. To her, and this was the subject of our first conversations, she was surprised that in a church program denouncements and analyzes were made that, on more than one occasion, seemed risky to her. She frequently asked me, especially at the beginning of our recordings together, if the Bishop listened to the program and if he approved of its contents; just as the analyzes of biblical texts that we presented in the program and whose source was the Bible scholar and Claretian missionary Gonzalo de la Torre, whom Chabela also -like half of Quibdó- called Gonzalito, called his attention. And she asked me to talk to her in detail about the purposes of the organizational work that the Vicariate supported, especially the legal recognition of black communities as subjects of rights and, in particular, the collective ownership of the territory.
Week after week, we went through the path of a friendship made of small conversations of all kinds, from banal to deep, from trivial and alien to important and personal, during which Chabela was, all in one and at the same time, a loyal friend and guide. , wise and understanding counselor. Thank you Chavela! The memory of your friendship, the frankness of your smile and the depth of your look will be eternal in the memory of my soul.
The post Thank you, Chabela! appeared first on Chocó7días.com.