Collection: Bugiganga Tropical Collection

Tropical Diaspora® Records first vinyl project the idea to start the record label, this is the origin of this 7 inch record collection called Bugiganga Tropical. The word Bugiganga from Portuguese means trinkets; gewgaw; gimcrack; knick-knack in English. The same word i used to hear in the houses of rich people, my grandmother´s workplace as servant-maid, housekeeper, housemaid, "empregada doméstica" many euphemisms for Modern Slavery.

My grandmother who took me with her to "work", a black woman cleaning the mess of white people families in huge houses and apartments in the Posh neighborhoods of São Paulo. The bosses in those houses use to describe anything my grandmother wore or that belong to her as "bugiganga".

This experience gave me the idea for this record collection, also everything that for the colonizers are worthless things trinkets, gewgaw, gimcrack, knick-knack, are certainly the most important things to the colonized person, their only belongs with a huge value. This is the same with  the music or any work done by slaves or the objects and raw materials used in any production of colonial goods.

The plants in the cover-art should help the beholder to remember the ancestors of the Native and African people that are the foundation of the culture and identity of the Americas or Abya Yala (Guna language means land in its full maturity or land of vital blood). For example our first records Bugiganga Tropical Vol.1 with the coffee plant remember us the kind of work Africans did in many regions in South-America, the same regions from where the music and rhythms we have in our records came from.

We hope you will enjoy this records as we do!