Cachi Cachi music

Cachi Cachi music, also spelled Kachi Kachi, Kachi-Kachi and Katchi-Katchi, is a term that was coined to refer to music played by Puerto Ricans in Hawaii, when they migrated to Hawaii. It is a "variation of dance music found in Hawaii". Sometimes cachi cachi "involves fast, improvised solos" on the guitar. The "influence on Hawai'i endures to this day in the musical form known as cachi cachi played on the quarto [sic] and derivative of the Puerto Rican jibaro style."Jibaro means peasant in Spanish.

The Puerto Ricans, who only spoke Spanish and no English, worked alongside immigrants from China, Japan, The Philippines, Korea and Portugal and when the Japanese heard their music, they said it sounded "scratchy". The relationships, between the Japanese and Puerto Ricans working on the plantations, didn't used to be good. They lived near one another and the Puerto Ricans felt disrespected when the Japanese walked around naked or almost naked for their baths. In response, the people of Hawaii said the Puerto Ricans didn't have good bathing habits. Sometimes fights would break out and a Puerto Rican may have cut a Japanese with a machete or knife to teach him respect. According to oral tradition- video recordings by Onetake2012 and research done by Ted Solis, an ethnomusicologist, Puerto Rican get-togethers often involved fights and the Japanese called it "cut cut". A news article from 1903 said the Japanese were afraid of the Puerto Ricans because they often carried concealed weapons and were quarrelsome. Cachi cachi music is what the people in Hawaii, who heard the Puerto Ricans playing their own music, called it. It needed a name and the people of Hawaii, specifically the Japanese plantation workers called it cachi cachi.

In Hawaii, the Puerto Ricans played their music with six-string guitar, güiro, and the Puerto Rican cuatro. Maracas and "palitos" sticks could be heard in the music around the 1930s. More modern versions of the music may include the accordion and electric and percussion instruments such as conga drums.

In 1989, the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, a nonprofit established for recording music by small communities from around the world, made available an album called Puerto Rican music in Hawai'i containing 16 tracks. The Library of Congress, included the recording in its 1990 list of "outstanding recordings" of US folk music for meeting specific criteria including that the music emphasizes "root traditions over popular adaptations of traditional materials."

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