Newspaper in Education celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month
By MARGARET BOYLE
Music brought him back to his other culture
As any individual who comes from a mixed culture family, Northampton guitarmaker William R. Cumpiano found it difficult to balance his two heritages.
“I was born in Puerto Rico but we kept our home very Americanized,” said Cumpiano whose father was born in Puerto Rico and whose mother was from Boston.
“I was an American inside my home and when I stepped outside my house I was Puerto Rican.”
Growing up in San Juan, Cumpiano’s parents would send him to Boston to spend time with his maternal grandparents. While he remembers this time in his youth with fond memories, Cumpiano felt a conflict of cultures within himself.
“The language was a problem for me,” remembers Cumpiano. “I’d become fluent in the language of the environment I was in and become rusty in the other language. Puerto Ricans are all to some degree just like myself – living in two cultures. Each person suffers somewhat for that.”
After graduating from high school in his homeland, Cumpiano moved on to study aeronautical engineering — a field his mother suggested because of his love of drawing airplanes.
One thing Cumpiano didn’t love was physics.
“I failed miserably,” he remembers. “Instead of coming back to Puerto Rico, I applied to an art school in New York City and was accepted.”
After graduating from Pratt Institute in 1968 with a degree in industrial design, Cumpiano became a furniture designer, slowly climbing the ladder of success.
However, it didn’t take long before Cumpiano wanted to try something new.
“I was really chafing at the office routine and not being at all content with what I had become,” said Cumpiano. “So I was yearning for something different, whatever it was.”
Cumpiano remembers being very fortunate to have been given the opportunity to learn guitar-making from master luthier, Michael Gurian, who was opening his own small factory in New Hampshire.
“I was right there at the right time,” said Cumpiano. “Essentially I was offered to get paid to learn how to make guitars. It was absolutely like hitting the lottery.”
Just a few years later, though, Cumpiano experienced the same feeling he once had.
“I didn’t want a boss; I wanted to be the captain of my own ship, not a part of the crew.”
Over the next 25 years, Cumpiano got his wish and moved around Western Massachusetts, opening his own guitar-making shops in North Adams, Amherst and Leeds until he settled on his current location on Easthampton Street in Northampton.
When Cumpiano began starting his own businesses, his “other half” started coming out.
“Up until this point, I was only living out my American side,” Cumpiano said. “My Puerto Rican side wanted me to acknowledge it. I decided I wanted to become Puerto Rican again and I wanted to find that other half that I had been missing all this time.”
Cumpiano remembers walking into an institution Casa Latina, located in the Florence section of Northampton and the only Latino-led and Latino-focused organization in Hampshire County.
He told them that he wanted to volunteer, get in touch with the community.
What he didn’t expect was to walk out of the organization as a new executive board member, a position that he held for eight years, along with being the chairman.
“At that time I really came back,” Cumpiano remembers. “I started speaking Spanish again — my rusty Spanish came back and I just enjoyed that part of me that was lost in me. It was a new experience but it was all familiar in a way.”
Now as a world-renowned luthier, Cumpiano is happy about where he is in life, molding both his American and Puerto Rican cultures through his craft.
“My connection with the guitar was primeval,” said Cumpiano. “It was what you heard; guitar music was everywhere. The guitar is very fundamental background theme music if you live in Latin American countries.”
The national instrument of Puerto Rico is the cuatro and it was something that Cumpiano became very interested in when he was going through the stage in his life of balancing his cultures.
“I made an effort to find out how they were made and how they were played and what function they had and there was nothing to be found,” said Cumpiano. “It was all an oral tradition. You really had to be born into it, you really couldn’t come after. There was just no access, no documentation. “
From there, Cumpiano dedicated himself to finding out everything he could about the instrument that meant so much to the heritage of Puerto Rico but wasn’t easily accessible.
“I really had to start from scratch,” remembers Cumpiano. “I had to go back to the island and immerse myself. I visited the players and became familiar with them. I came back to the United States and made my first cuatro.”
That’s when Cumpiano realized that information about the musical genres, cultures, song, dance and musical craft was only existing on life-support.
“Me and several other people whom I admired formed The Puerto Rican Cuatro Project to do all the documentation and research that had never been adequately or comprehensively done,” he said, “for not only the cuatro but for a whole other bouquet of stringed instruments that had vanished.”
Now almost 20 years later, the project has become the go-to organization for research.
“We have had a lot of support, a lot of people joined our effort,” Cumpiano said.
One of the organization’s most prized projects was studying the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York City, which has just amassed the largest collection of oral history interviews, according to Cumpiano.
Cumpiano keeps himself busy at his shop, which he shares with another master luthier, Harry Becker.
The duo met while in college and now share the space where Becker fixes damaged guitars and Cumpiano makes custom guitars as well as teaches classes. His students are as diverse as the guitars he makes and come from all over the world.
While guitar-making and teaching are only a few of Cumpiano’s talents, he has a strong dedication to advocating through his project.
“We actually have gone a long way to reconstructing all the lost culture,” said Cumpiano, “and our main objective is to give it back.”
For more information, visit Cumpiano’s website at http://cumpiano.com/ and his web page for The Puerto Rican Cuatro Project at http://www.cuatro-pr.org/
Springfield resident Margaret Boyle, a summer intern at The Republican, is a student at Smith College in Northampton