4/15/2023 0 Comments Bomba y plenaSo I depend on a lot of my family and friends to take care of my daughter,” Liz-Cepeda said. “I’m a school teacher, so I have to go to school every single day while my daughter is doing virtual classes. On top of her non-profit, she’s helping her 7-year-old daughter with digital learning. Liz-Cepeda also works as a media specialist at Boggy Creek Elementary School and has two children. We have created a community for them, it’s not just taking the classes.” “So our dance school has made a great impact in our community because we’ve been able to give that part of the traditions and the culture to those Puerto Ricans who are here in the diaspora, and they can reach out to us, they can sit with us. Now, through her virtual platforms and social media, she’s been able to increase her audience and reach people from across the globe. Liz-Cepeda opened her non-profit with the mission to give Puerto Ricans in Central Florida a piece of home through in-person classes and performances. “Because of the pandemic and because we were trying to reach out and expand ourselves, we were thinking, how can we also offer back to the community? What are we also giving back?” Liz-Cepeda said. They are on their third book now, moving to their fourth book soon which will be, ¡Negro, Negra!, a compilation of lectures about Afro-descendants of Puerto Rico. She began a virtual book study where people from the United States and Puerto Rico meet every Saturday over Zoom and discuss topics about Black Lives Matter, slavery and Puerto Rico’s history and how it affects us today. “We have to be creative and think about things where we could reach the people, where we can reach the community.” “The good part of Covid-19 and the pandemic is that because we were seeing ourselves regressing in a way that we were not reaching the amount of people that we wanted,” Liz-Cepeda said. So, she had to get creative to find new ways to reach a larger audience. No matter how much teaching or how much playing Liz-Cepeda would do, it just wasn’t enough. Class enrollment decreased due to the pandemic and students said the experience and feeling wasn’t what they felt in the studio. You depend on the Internet.”īoth Liz-Cepeda and her students felt the classes weren’t the same. But you depend on having to move the computer if you’re on virtual… you have to lower the screen, you have to move back. “You would like to be there and hug people and dance and show the moves. “There’s not that much interaction,” Liz-Cepeda said. When it came to virtual teaching, Liz-Cepeda turned her living room into her studio in just a few days, but it wasn’t the same. But we have to make it work,” Liz-Cepeda said. And then that gave me the emotional support where I was at a point where I can say, ‘I know we’re going through a pandemic, I know that this is something new for a lot of people. “Once I got the hang of it, I learned pretty quickly. When the pandemic first started in March, Liz-Cepeda said she struggled with the transition to virtual classes and that it took her about a week to learn new software like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Liz-Cepeda is the first person in Central Florida to open a school dedicated to Bomba and Plena, named after her mother “Tata” to honor her while she is alive. The nonprofit’s mission is to educate the Central Florida community on Puerto Rico’s culture and history, and teach dance and percussion classes. The two genres are different, but often combined because they are Puerto Rico’s oldest. Plena is another traditional genre of music developed in the late 20th century. Bomba is Puerto Rico’s oldest genre of music dating from the 16th century and was developed by enslaved Africans in the sugar cane plantations.
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