Rap, a musical genre with an urban genetic mark since it originated in the early 1970s in the Bronx, New York, has found a powerful echo full of new messages in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. This artistic and protest expression, which first represented marginal culture and was performed by young African American and Caribbean people, now emerges from the voices of six young Indigenous members of the murui community.
Although rap in Indigenous languages has existed for a long time, what the Colombian youths Hector Morales (HM), Jose Vazquez (Totty), Daniel Vargas (Parrot), Giovany Morales (Yova), and two others known as Sonjack and AVJ Checo are doing in Leticia and its surroundings has been attractive. They perform at events and celebrations of Indigenous communities and also in the center of the capital of Amazonas.
Their group is conveniently called Son de la Selva, which was born during the covid-19 pandemic. The confinement in the place known as Patio de Ciencia Dulce (where between 130 and 150 families live with children, parents and grandparents), on the road between Leticia and Tarapaca, awakened the artistic qualities of the six young people.
There they no longer dress as their ancestors did, but they still maintain their ancestral traditions such as dances, gastronomy, handicrafts, and language, and continue the line of mambe (powder obtained from toasted coca leaves ground with yarumo ashes) and ambil (a paste or thick molasses of tobacco of Amazonian origin, considered a sacred and protective medicine by Indigenous peoples) within their maloca (large house of knowledge), and no less important, the management of their agriculture in the chagra.
Continuing to denounce the massacre of the rubber plantations
These were special conditions for enthusiasm for rap to also emerge, especially because the need to denounce serious events against Amazonian peoples persists, such as the massacre carried out by the infamous Casa Arana for the extraction of rubber. A lamentable episode in the history of the jungle that Jose Eustacio Rivera recounted in his immortal work “La Voragine.”
In a report by El Pais of Spain about this rap group, it recounts that the young men had heard since childhood that they, the murui, had not been born in that territory, that they were orphans and arrived there fleeing barbarity. “The massacre, the Amazonian Indigenous extermination due to rubber exploitation, dispersed them. So they wanted to rap about that time of pain and sadness. To make a song that would remember the tragedy of their ancestors, but also their recovery,” the outlet adds.
Precisely their most recent song, “MARE UAI” (“The good word”), refers to the rubber era for the murui people, one of the most affected by the massacre. But it is not the only one. They already have six songs completed and are working on four more, always with the guidance of the elders, who never stop sharing wise words that transcend and have value beyond the jungle. “Be careful with words that can hurt, awaken things that one may not understand,” they advised them.
“I like to listen to what they sing. I like it because they sing purely about the jungle, they name the natural ingredient, they mention mambe,” Tomasa Morales, one of the murui grandmothers of Patio de Ciencia Dulce, told the Spanish newspaper. “In their rapping I hear that they name everything in the [murui] language.” With that, it is clear that the members of Son de la Selva are appreciated and, most importantly, they are authorized.