Earlier this month, the Colombian band Aterciopelados performed live on the telecast of the Miss Colombia pageant. In some ways, their presence was unremarkable — Colombia’s most popular alterna-rock band gracing the stage of the country’s most popular televised event. But in others, it was scandalous. With lead singer Andrea Echeverri cloaked in a pair of flowing white pants and a baggy poncho that obscured her long and wiry body, the band sang their 1998 sleeper hit "El estuche" (roughly, "the package"), a song that launches a pointed assault on the conventions of female beauty that the pageant flaunts. "Look at the essence, not appearances," Echeverri sang only minutes after the bathing-suit walks and the ballgown struts. "The body is only a shell . . . what’s inside is what matters."

The Miss Colombia pageant took place in the coastal city of Cartagena, a two-hour plane ride from Bogotá, the more urbanized and landlocked city that has shaped the music of Aterciopelados since they formed there at the beginning of the ’90s. "El estuche" is included on Evolución: grandes éxitos (BMG US Latin), a dazzling developmental tour of their career that watches them go from playing bare-boned rock melodies to using those melodies to reinvent traditional Colombian music (bolero, porro, vallenato, jaropo) for mosh pits and electronica lounges. That’s how Aterciopelados have put rock and electro faces on the stories that all that Colombian music tells: the country’s centuries-old musical mestizaje, the collision of Spanish, African, and Indian that has existed since conquest hit Colombia’s Caribbean coast at the beginning of the 16th century.

That Aterciopelados are more, as Colombians put it, "claro" (so white, they’re clear) than "azul" (so dark, they’re blue) should come as no surprise — throughout the Americas, when mestizaje goes multinational, the hues of its Billboard-charting ambassadors usually tip the mestizo scale to the Euro-white side. Just look at Colombia’s other top global pop exports of the moment — Juanes, Cabas, Carlos Vives, Shakira. Their sounds are all rooted in African and Indian music from Colombia’s Caribbean, Pacific, and Atlantic coasts, but none of them looks black or Indian enough to make teen consumers in LA or Tokyo confront the racial margins of Latin America. It is one of the grand stories of exporting commercial music in the Americas: African and Indian music can be audibly present only when it is visually obscured, the dark shadows buried in a lightened mix that wouldn’t be possible without them.

The day before the Miss Colombia pageant, "The National Contest of Beauty," was taped in Cartagena’s main civic theater, another pageant was held miles away in the city’s bull ring, "El Reinado del Pueblo," the beauty contest of "the people." Whereas most of Miss Colombia’s participants are light-skinned, the women of this crowning are more pueblo, representatives of Colombia’s darker and poorer regions who get cheered on by hundreds of their neighbors as they spill out from stacked rows of bleachers.

The two beauty contests held in Cartagena — the city that for years was South America’s main port of entry for African slaves — reflect the two Colombias, "national Colombia" and "popular Colombia," the Colombia that gets seen and the Colombia that remains hidden (despite this country’s being the South American nation with the highest African-descended population after Brazil). Nina, a new Afro-Colombian pop singer from the Pacific coast, is a product of that hidden Colombia. Her homonymous debut for EMI comes straight out of the porro tradition of laying swinging brass ensembles over thumping tamboras and crackling snares.

But Nina does porro for the global moment. Flowing sung and spoken verses like a Colombian Missy Elliott, she plays with it, tweaks it, and makes it her own, leaving hip-hop and ragga footprints wherever she goes. When Nina turns out the folkloric standard "Kilele," she tells us, "It’s a dance from the Pacific, but it’s my style!" Sequenced beats flutter beneath rollicking clarinets and trumpets as she sings, over and over, "This is the land where I was born."

The Miss Colombia pageant took place the same week as Colombia’s independence-day festivals. Up and down the beaches of Cartagena, Colombians celebrated the liberation of their country from Spanish colonialism with carnivalesque parties that parodied the era of conquest, complete with men painting their faces black with burnt oil. There was music everywhere: towers of speakers blasting from front porches, transistor radios blaring from restaurant kitchens. And up and down the beach, there were huddles of people — most of them dark, some of them light — dancing around snare drums and clarinets, wet from the sea that centuries ago turned this old world into a new home.