Singing for peace: documentary traces remote Colombian community’s fight for liberty

Published on the 04 March 2026

The people of the Yurumanguí Palenque live in the precarious safety of the Yurumanguí River on the Pacific Coast of Colombia. Photo: Sergio Leyva Seiglie.

The Yurumanguí Palenque perform culture as rebellion in their centuries-long fight for freedom.

A research-led documentary bears witness to the power of culture as peaceful rebellion for a remote community in Colombia. The people of the Yurumanguí Palenque are the descendants of enslaved people who ran away. They live on an isolated stretch of the Pacific Coast in the precarious safety of the Yurumanguí River.

The film, Viva Yurumanguí, follows members of the community as they leave the river to compete at Petronio Álvarez, the biggest African Diaspora festival in Latin America.

“The band sings about the situation on the river, drawing on the cultural practices and traditions of their rebel ancestors,” says Associate Professor Emma Christopher from UNSW’s School of Humanities & Languages who co-directed, produced and wrote the film.

“Their performance – its irreverent strength – embodies their enduring fight for freedom, their collective resilience and the beauty and history of the Yurumanguí,” the award-winning documentary maker says.

Viva Yurumanguí, co-directed with photographer and documentary maker Sergio Leyva Seiglie, began with a journey up the Yurumanguí River to document the community’s unique Easter celebrations.

“High in the hills along their beloved river, figures in African-style wooden masks, known as manacillos, heckle Jesus,” A/Prof. Christopher says. “The tradition represents their ancestors’ resistance to the religion of their enslavers, and yet today they are deeply Catholic.

“This is such intriguing syncretism [collision of different religions, cultures and thought]; for this tradition to have survived is incredible.”

Today, these traditions can no longer stay in the river community, she says. “The Yurumanguireños, as they call themselves, are living in one of the most unstable parts of the world through no fault of their own.

“Their determination to live freely on their own terms remains under threat from armed groups and external environmental destruction. As former leader Dalia Mina says, ‘We have a chain of struggle, since we were taken from Africa’.”

Their ancestors were brought to the region in 1734 to mine for gold, the climate considered inhospitable for white people. “They may have had one or two white overseers, but none were living there.” Today, the community remains remote, accessible only by boat.

One of the world’s most humid and biodiverse regions, the land is rich in resources, but the community resists mono-crop logging and mining interests, as well as the planting of illicit crops, that would bring violence, pollution and environmental harm.

“The Yurumanguí motto is, ‘The territory is life, and life is not for sale’. The people are not armed. Instead, they protect themselves in the ways of their ancestors, calling on their strength and wisdom, to live sustainably in their own river,” A/Prof. Christopher says.

“They perform their traditions to show their Palenque still exists, that they are still holding onto their territory and to life in spite of everything, and to honour their leaders who have been ‘disappeared’.

“The film tells part of their story of survival, of their astonishing courage and their defiance against a world that has never treated them as equals.”

A/Prof. Christopher is a writer, documentary maker and historian who researches the African diaspora and their forms of resistance. She is the director, producer and researcher of They Are We (2014) which has screened in more than 70 countries and won six Best Documentary Awards.

They Are We was chosen as the United Nations’ Remembrance of Slavery film (2015); Secretary General Ban Ki-moon described A/Prof. Christopher’s work as “an inspiration; a victory over slavery”.

In the Yurumanguí, slavery is ongoing

The people of the Yurumanguí Palenque were among the first Latin American peoples to be awarded land rights. “In the 1990s, the Yurumanguí leadership was on the frontline, alongside other river veredas [subdivisional administrative bodies within municipalities], campaigning for political recognition of the Afro-Colombian Pacific in the 1990s,” A/Prof. Christopher says.

“With the passing of Ley 70 [Law 70] in 1993, people of African descent in the Americas were recognised for the first time as ancestral-Indigenous landowners.”

The Yurumanguí lobbied for and eventually received the official title for the Yurumanguí in 2000. Yet, despite their semi-autonomy, the struggle for freedom continues, A/Prof. Christopher says.

“After we had filmed the Easter traditions, we had the extraordinary privilege (and anguish) of experiencing what came after, a glimpse into their world that few people see: the history of enslavement is now.

“While outsiders may think slavery ended centuries ago, when you spend time with these communities, it really brings home that slavery is ongoing.”

The territory provides a means to fight back, and access to a more expansive understanding of freedom, she says. “Their land provides life on their own terms, a sanctuary, a barricade from which to defend themselves against whatever unimaginable horrors the outside world might rain down upon them.

“Their cultural practices then are a mechanism of defence; they sing traditional songs to safeguard their land, to gain courage from each other and from their past, and to show their aggressors that they are not afraid.”

The Yurumanguireños are committed to liberty, across generations. As community youth leader Duvan Valencia Valencia says in the documentary: “I have faith. I have faith that one day we'll get over the slavery of the mind.”

The Yurumanguí Palenque perform culture as peaceful rebellion in their centuries-long fight for freedom. Photo: Sergio Leyva Seiglie.

‘I am because we are’: the fight for collective, peaceful freedom

The Yurumanguí understanding of liberty is collective. “They're very clear that freedom is for all of us: ‘I am because we are’. It’s not just for the individual and not at the expense anyone else,” A/Prof. Christopher says.

“When you look at how individualism comes from capitalism and capitalism’s ties to slavery, this idea of liberty is very subversive.”

Their response to external threats is non-violent, their community non-hierarchical. In the film, Naka Mandinga, a formidable leader like his ancestor Juan Bautista Mandinga, describes it: “We can’t fight war with more war”.

“The Yurumanguireños adopt a collective means of passive resistance, responding en-masse, men and women, if any problem emerges with a determination that they will not all be killed.

“To the Yurumanguireños, death within the territory, as long as they are buried there, is ‘just another part of life’, whereas to be stolen away is to be lost on an entirely different level.”

Viva Yurumanguí follows members of the community as they travel to compete at Petronio Álvarez, the biggest African Diaspora festival in Latin America. Photo: Sergio Leyva Seiglie.