I want to pause with the life and work of Totó la Momposina, whose music carried one of the great living archives of the Americas.

Totó la Momposina was the artistic name of Sonia Bazanta Vides, the legendary Colombian singer, dancer, and keeper of Caribbean musical traditions. Her name carries geography and belonging. “La Momposina” refers to Mompox, the river region of Colombia connected to the Magdalena River, where African, Indigenous, and Spanish histories met under the conditions of colonization, displacement, enslavement, survival, and cultural creation. To be “Momposina” is to be of that place, of that river world, of that history.

Totó’s work was extraordinary because she carried music as memory. She did not treat cumbia, bullerengue, porro, mapalé, chalupa, tambora, and the other rhythms of Colombia’s Caribbean coast as folklore separated from life. She carried them as living forms of continuity. Her voice held the drum, the river, the village, the ceremony, the dance, the market, the funeral, the celebration, and the long memory of people who survived rupture by keeping rhythm, relation, and meaning alive.

In that sense, her contribution was much larger than performance. She was a carrier of coherence. She helped the world hear the Caribbean coast of Colombia on its own terms. She brought forward Black and Indigenous descendant memory without reducing it to explanation. She gave the music its full dignity by allowing it to remain embodied, communal, rhythmic, and alive.

This is also where I hear her work through the frame of creative resistance. Creative resistance is the capacity of a people to make beauty, form, meaning, and continuity under conditions designed to fracture them. It is the refusal to let violence become the final author of a people’s story. It is what happens when song becomes archive, dance becomes governance of the body, rhythm becomes a way of remembering, and collective expression becomes a structure of survival.

Totó la Momposina carried that kind of creative resistance. Her music was joyful without being shallow. It was festive without being forgetful. It was beautiful because it held consequence. The drum did not escape history; it answered it. The voice did not move away from rupture; it carried what rupture could not destroy. Her art showed how people create continuity inside conditions that were meant to sever them from land, language, kinship, memory, and meaning.

There is something deeply Terrenal in what she carried. Totó la Momposina stood in a lineage formed through the entangled histories of Black and Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Her work reminds us that memory is sometimes held in books, and sometimes it is held in the body. Sometimes it is held in the archive, and sometimes it is held in the drum. Sometimes continuity survives because someone keeps singing.

I am sharing this playlist as an invitation to listen with that kind of attention.

May we listen for the river.

May we listen for the drum.

May we listen to the people who keep memory alive through song, rhythm, and connection.