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Concerned about the repercussions of his musical project on the community, Héctor Morales asked one of the grandmothers if what he and his friends were doing was right. That is, rapping in Murui, the language of the creator father and the ancestors. “If the birds themselves get creative and imitate the song of other birds,” the woman replied, “why should humans limit themselves from singing what they like?” Then the young man calmed down: Son de la Selva, the rap group they had formed with five other boys from the Murui community at kilometer 11 in Leticia, in the Colombian Amazon and on the triple border, was not nonsense. Nor was it an affront to the traditions of his people.
“That runs in our blood, by nature the Murui sing,” says Morales, 22, also known as HM, about one of the indigenous peoples living in the Peruvian and Colombian Amazon. Rap in indigenous languages has existed for a long time. But a group of six twenty-somethings who rap in an Amazonian indigenous language, in a community that is in one of the main border cities, is more or less an anomaly. Or at least it is on the Colombian side.
HM, Totty, Parrot, Yova, Sonjack and AVJ Checo perform at events and celebrations of indigenous communities and also in the center of Leticia. They say they don’t do it for money or fame, but for a less desired goal than personal branding and virality: the power of music to free people.
So far, they have six songs and four more are about to be completed. The most recent, MARE UAI or The Good Word, is about the rubber era for the Murui people, one of the most affected by the massacre. It is also about their survival and redemption. “Perverse system, murdered and mistreated our people / from the most innocent / Resin for lives / Narrate our history so as not to forget and to know how to heal,” says part of the lyrics.
It is their most “ambitious” song to date: it featured production by Vist Projects and the collaboration of Colombian MC (master of ceremonies) Mismo Perro. The music video shows them crossing the Amazon rainforest, harvesting coca leaves to prepare mambe and playing ancestral musical instruments such as the maguaré. “We don’t want to make rap, which is popular artistic revolution, but ‘rac’: cultural artistic revolution,” explains Morales. Although the path to achieve it is paved with impediments.
A rap that tells of ailments
The first was Giovany Morales, Yova. While studying in high school, he heard rap for the first time from the voice of Laberinto ELC, a group from Medellín. “I had heard many songs about going to the moon, to the stars, but he told of his suffering,” says Yova, standing outside his house, in the Murui community of kilometer 11, in the Patio de Ciencia Dulce.
Yova was the pioneer who introduced this musical genre to his brother Héctor Morales, to their cousin, José Vázquez or Totty, and to their other Murui friends. “Jackson, Héctor and Totty were little kids,” says the elder Morales, 29. “I told them: ‘Boys, tell your pain, your ailments.’ And the process began.”
A few meters away, Totty explains that he not only learned about rap from his cousin, but also because he was a “curious” and “very naughty” child. In his days as a wayward kid, when he was locked in internet cafes, he listened to “pure crazy music.” Until he found the Spanish rapper Porta. “Before the group [Son de la Selva] sang, I tattooed some phrases that allude to what we do,” says Vázquez, 25, showing one of his arms where “Rap, hip hop, dance” is written in black ink.
Son de la Selva was formed in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, when the residents of Leticia and Patio de Ciencia Dulce were withdrawn in their localities. The boys who grew up together met and decided to create something different from what they knew, a musical revolution for their community. But for that, they knew they had to ask the elders for advice.
Rapping and mambeando
From inside one of the cabins of the Patio de Ciencia Dulce, Daniel Vargas or Parrot, another member of Son de la Selva, says that he learned his way of making rap as the Murui learn about the important matters of life: mambeando.
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Mambe is the powder obtained from toasted coca leaves ground with yarumo ashes. It is an ancestral preparation in Murui culture used in rituals, as medicine and for reflection among companions.
A mambeadero —says Parrot, 25— is a place where mambe is exchanged and conversations are held. “The tradition is shared, the word of the creator father who left it to us in these elements, tobacco and coca.”
“We are indigenous singers who have our own chagra, our own mambe crop,” Héctor Morales or HM had said days earlier. “Being Murui, you must ask if they know how to make their own mambe, a Murui who respects himself makes his own medicine.” The members of Son de la Selva are rappers because they are Murui and they are Murui because they mambean.
Mambe, mambeo, mambeaderos inevitably lead to “the elders.” That is, the oldest, most knowledgeable and wisest people in the communities. HM, Yova, Totty, Parrot, Sonjack and AVJ Checo went to them to ask permission to rap in Murui. Lest they consider it too transgressive, even offensive. But the elders did not oppose the novelty.
“I like to listen to what they sing. I like it because they sing purely about the jungle, they name the natural ingredient, they name the mambe,” says Tomasa Morales, one of the Murui grandmothers of the Patio de Ciencia Dulce, and blood grandmother of Héctor and Giovany Morales. “In their rap, I hear them name everything in the language.”
The boys from Son de la Selva also went to the elders to hear about Murui history and to learn their language, knowledge that most of them had been denied by their families when they were children, for fear of discrimination and rejection. “The elders are already leaving, we must take advantage of them,” says Vargas about the urgency of preserving Murui tradition and memory. After all, the group of rappers is thinking of more than themselves, but also of the younger ones who are coming behind.
The good word about rubber
They had heard something. From a young age, they heard that they, the Murui, had not been born in that territory, that they were orphans and had arrived there fleeing barbarism. 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 remembered the tragedy of their ancestors, but also their recovery.
“The elders advised us: ‘be careful with words that can hurt, awaken things that one may not understand’,” says Totty. “These are hidden things that have already hurt a lot, and if someone is going to open it, it’s because they know how to close it.”
In the midst of these plans, they met the people from the visual narrative foundation Vist Projects. Together —and with MC Mismo Perro— they undertook several months of research, composition, and production for MARE UAI. The theme, explains Héctor Morales, is divided into six parts: tranquility, first pact, prejudice, resilience, resistance and healing. Each composed and performed by a member of Son de la Selva.
The beat is heard intervened by maguaré drumming, bird songs and that kind of soft tinkling characteristic of the Amazon forest. Towards the end, AVJ Checo sings: “In the leaves lives our healing / of life / each leaf represents knowledge for being / planting new seeds so they grow in thought.” These are the words that Son de la Selva has chosen to close the dark times and to open a destiny where light appears.