I’m engaged in a collaborative initiative with a collective of Afro-Colombian women that considers the use of song as a tool for resilience and resistance in the face of inequality, discrimination, and violence. The goal of this project is to release print and multimedia resources documenting the stories, verses, songs, and philosophies of five women who are central to the organization’s operation.

Founded in the year 2000 in Cali, Colombia, the organization Fundación Escuela “Sé Quién Soy” is an independent collective that seeks to maintain and revive ancestral customs and forms of thinking from their home community. Its constituent members are from El Charco, a small town on the Tapaje River in the province of Nariño. The only way to arrive to El Charco is by boat, as there is no road or airstrip connecting it to neighboring communities. The Pacific region is an epicenter of Afro-Colombian culture and identity, and is notoriously underserved by infrastructure and other national services. In the absence of the nation-state, the Pacific coast has subsequently become hotly-contested among narcomilitary groups who recognize the strategic value of the region’s deep-water ports, dense rainforests, and porous borders with neighboring countries. In addition, successive modernizing agendas on the part of the Colombian state have both explicitly and implicitly stigmatized, belittled, or reduced the lifeways of rural Pacific communities by characterizing them as backward and superstitious. “Sé Quién Soy” is distinctive in how it considers traditional worldviews as progressive rather than reactive, and seeks to draw from (and share) ancestral knowledge to inform current struggles for access, equity, and the recognition of rights.

The combined factors of regional violence, lack of economic opportunity, and distance from basic educational services have spurred a massive outmigration from communities like El Charco to the city of Cali, Colombia’s third most populous metropolis and the largest urban economy in the western part of the country. “Sé Quien Soy” confronts the challenges of moving from the countryside to the city by providing mutual aid to fellow Pacific migrants and organizing educational workshops on the traditions, practices, and beliefs of the region. Members also utilize expressive cultural forms, especially song, to link ancestral ways of seeing and understanding the world to contemporary political and social issues, ranging from environmental protection to support for victims of sexual abuse.