The sound of the ‘other’ voices of the Caribbean

How does the Caribbean sound, how does the south of a Caribbean city sound, how is it told? The Vokaribe team, a community radio station born in the heart of Barranquilla’s Southwest locality, knows that if expressions are so diverse, so too must the voices be. That is why their radio productions are led by neighbors, women, migrants, LGBTIQ+ people, indigenous people, youth collectives, human rights defenders, and artists. Verbena dancers, rockers, salsa dancers. The voices that are often underrepresented and folklorized. All of them.

That free, alternative, and citizen-led sound journey, as they call it, began in 1991 in the Las Malvinas neighborhood, named after the Malvinas War between Argentina and the United Kingdom in 1982, something that inspired the residents of the area to fight for the neighborhood’s lands, which at that time was a land invasion. But let’s go back to the nineties and the beginnings of Vokaribe. It was a time of democratic opening. Colombia was undergoing constitutional reform and peace agreements with the former Popular Liberation Army, EPL. At that time, Walter Hernández was starting to do radio at the university, he had a notebook where he wrote down the music lists of the stations he listened to and was part of a rap group; Patricia Rendón was president of the student council of Pestalozzi school, a member of the Seventh Ballot student movement, and was preparing to study journalism; Milton Patiño was visiting citizen radio stations during his exile in Spain to learn about their experiences and put their teachings into practice, along with Ewar Torres and Ramón Turizo, after closing the chapter as members of the EPL.

The Vokaribe team of programmers in the radio studios, located in the Popular Library of the La Paz neighborhood. Photo: Vokaribe image bank

Everyone was united by the same desire. They wanted to explore alternative and popular communication through a community radio station, something that was not talked about in academia or in the city. They were certain that they had to make the communities’ processes of construction and transformation visible, amplify their discourses and symbolisms, and promote their participation and decision-making. They were inspired by the work of several community radio stations that were their references: Onda Verde, in Spain; La Tribu, in Argentina, and La Cometa and Suba al Aire, in Colombia. They also knew that they had the right to be heard. So they created the Vokaribe Community Radio Broadcasting Association in 1995.

Today they are 28 years old. Vokaribe broadcasts its signal through 89.6 F.M and its website vokaribe.net, as well as other digital platforms. Its sound reaches more than 90 neighborhoods in the southwestern and metropolitan localities, which exceed 700,000 inhabitants. There are six people who make up the coordination team, 14 representatives of the organizations that are part of the programming board, and 15 co-producers of the programs. An entire network focused on making “that plural and diverse universe” sound.

Alfredo González, host of several programs, during a broadcast of the Vokaribe news on bike-radio.
Photo: Vokaribe image bank

Listening to the station is being transported to its studios located on the second floor of the Popular Library of the La Paz neighborhood, one of the last neighborhoods in that southwestern area. It is no coincidence that they broadcast from there, because La Paz, which owes its name to the Dutch priest Cyrillus Swinne, is one of the most representative community self-management models in Barranquilla due to the entire history of social transformation that has been written there. Those kinds of stories—those that are built collectively—are the ones that are told on Vokaribe. They are told, for example, on the program Tu Caribe Joven (Your Young Caribbean), with Isaac Martínez and Alejandra Ortega, who promote the youth initiatives and discussions present in the south of the city. Also in Vivir en Paz (Living in Peace), hosted by Alex Vásquez, where students and professors from the University of the Coast, CUC, share their knowledge and dialogue on key topics for citizenship. And in others like Habla la diversidad (Diversity Speaks), produced by the Caribe Afirmativo corporation to make visible the realities of the LGBTIQ+ population and talk about diversities.

“Here we are not anyone’s voice nor do we speak for anyone, our duty is to amplify voices so that diversity continues to express itself. But people have their own voice, it’s just the first principle denied,” says Milton Patiño, one of the co-founders.

Young people also participate in and lead radio productions on Vokaribe.
Photo: Vokaribe image bank

Not for rent or sale

At Vokaribe, someone can come from, for example, the El Bosque neighborhood and say, I want to talk about the surcharges on energy bills in my neighborhood. Or I want to have a space to talk about Afro-Caribbean music. Or, I even want to have my own show. And? “Let’s do it, you can,” says Walter Hernández, who is also a co-founder of the visual-music collective Systema Solar. He says this because the community radio station, in addition to being a radio station, offers free training programs so that residents of the area can acquire tools to co-produce with them. “This is not a space that is rented or sold, but it is free and open to people’s initiatives,” explains Belén Pardo, the radio’s anthropologist.

It is a commitment to democratize citizen participation in the media. If people don’t feel represented, if no one else tells their stories, who better than themselves to tell them? For this, Vokaribe has developed workshops focused on radio production, writing, community reporting, research, and resource management for radio stations in which people participate for one to six months. It has also advised on the design of radio programming grids, radio management, and has accompanied schools in the city in their radio-school processes.

The question of how the Caribbean sounds, how the south of a Caribbean city sounds, and how it is told has a sea of answers. The word itself is like water, which is everything and is everywhere. Its sound is, among many places, in the southwest of Barranquilla, on Vokaribe and the diverse voices that its waves bring.

(*) Journalist

(**) This article is part of the special #TejidoVivo, a product of a journalistic alliance between the Dejusticia study center and El Espectador.