Artist Profile
Jota Ramos
Colombia
Status: Threatened
Consulte el artículo en español aquí.
The municipality of Villa Rica is cradled by the Andean mountain ranges of Colombia’s southwest, located in the flat, warm, and fertile stretch of land to the north of the Cauca region. These are lands that, for generations, have produced plantain, corn, sugar cane—the crops that Jota Ramos has cultivated with his own hands since childhood.
Afro-Colombian rapper, activist, community leader, lyricist, human rights defender: among the many attempts to define him and his work, Jota Ramos makes it clear that, before anything: “I am a campesino, [laborer of the land].”
Jota Ramos’ artistic-social vision is rooted in his region, in the communities that inhabit this territory, and in confronting the challenges that they face. It is Ramos’ response to the external systems that are not designed for his well being or that of his community. He asserts that becoming an activist or artivist, is not something you can just decide to be.
“I haven’t identified the moment in which I began to defend my rights,” Ramos explained to ARC. “I have identified when my rights began to be violated.”
Jota Ramos descends from the last African community to be forcibly displaced to the northern Cauca region by the Arboleda family and enslaved into forced agricultural labor.
“As an African person, an agricultural person, a person without a ‘good education,’ I have been able to understand that there exists…certain rights and I have tried to defend…my own,” Ramos declared.
Today, Ramos has been displaced from his hometown by the violence and persecution that seek to silence his message and call to action: “¡Haga que pase! [Make it happen!]”
Haga que pase: labor and oeuvre
“Make it happen like single mothers
they give everything for their children, becoming warriors
[…]
like agricultural laborers
they cultivate their meals for daily sustenance”
- lyrics from “Haga que pase,” Musical Pal’ Barrio (2015)
Inspired by rap, poetry, and the regional intersection of traditional afro-Colombian and indigenous music, Jota Ramos composes music with unique sounds and lyrics that represent “the realities of the working class, of rural communities, of the humble folk.”
When he was 15, Ramos began to compose lyrics based on his life experiences. He founded the band Soporte Klan and wrote songs like “Palenque”—alluding to San Basilio de Palenque, considered to be the first free African community in Colombia and the Americas. The rapper cites local artists as inspirations, hailing from the Cauca region and the Pacific: Herencia de Timbiquí, Alfonso Córdoba “El brujo,” and Fernando Maclanil, his poetry teacher.
“I am passionate for those artists that have been able to transform and preserve instruments, art,” Ramos explains. “That’s where my inspiration is, in every drum they construct, [in every instrument]…”
The musical sensibility of Jota Ramos combines the urban and modern with an appreciation for tradition, in particular the tradition linked to regional creations and communities rooted in the land. Ramos highlights the use of local plants to construct instruments that produce unique sounds. In his hometown of Villa Rica, for instance, violins are constructed from guadua bamboo. And the band Herencia de Timbiquí uses marimbas made from the wood of the chonta palm.
It is art that cannot be extracted from the sociocultural and ecological realities of the Cauca region, or how Jota Ramos puts it, from “those moments that we live through together.”
His current project, Haga que pase, is both a band and a foundation for community action. Despite having been officially registered in 2020, the group has undertaken artistic-social work for over a decade. Ramos has a longstanding collaboration with his partner who is an artist from Cali, Carol Hurtado, and various members from his communities as part of Haga que pase.
Their mission is to undertake “social work with agricultural laborers to promote [organic and] sustainable agriculture…mentorship to children and teens to encourage the creation of positive life projects…the promotion of art as a source of new perspectives through which to view life.”
As the name of the project indicates, Ramos firmly believes that: “if we do not make it happen, nothing will happen.”
“An artist without an audience…does not exist”
Since 2008, Jota Ramos has confronted a series of serious threats, which is the experience of many community leaders in Colombia, especially those who are based in rural contexts. Despite the much-celebrated launch of the peace process in 2016, the assassination of community leaders has accelerated in the past five years.
To protect his own life and that of his family, Ramos has had to appeal to international organizations, such as Amnesty International, who provided refuge to the artist and his family in Spain from 2018 to 2019. In 2023, Artists at Risk Connection, along with other NGOs such as Front Line Defenders, have supported Ramos as he confronts charges brought against him—charges he denounces as unjust—and a long period under house arrest. In addition, there are serious concerns expressed by NGOs regarding the behavior of the local authorities and the way that case against Ramos has been conducted.
“The defenders [of human rights] are in distress,” Ramos told ARC. “Right now, you have given us major help during this moment of detention, which I am living through and bearing like a stone in the way forward on the unending path to liberty.”
Beyond the threats to his life, Jota Ramos highlights another important issue that he faces: marginalization within the art world due to his position outside of the institutions and the mainstream.
“The music that I decided to create, the art that I decided to share with the people, there are no channels designed to transmit it [in the media],” Ramos explained.
The issue of transmission and visibility has also been highlighted by artists belonging to other marginalized communities in Latin America, for instance the indigenous mapuche musicians in Chile. These denunciations demonstrate that it is not enough to combat violence and conflict in Colombia. It is also necessary to examine how art spaces exclude artists of different origins, whether it be ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic backgrounds.
“What we need is that these [artistic expressions] that languish in agony, in the same way that humanity languishes in agony, in the same way that the environment languishes in agony…we need our work to be recognized,” Ramos declared.
Art on the Ground and in the Grassroots
The work of Jota Ramos represents an artistic-social conviction that anchors and involves its audience in the realities of the land, without which no type of art or creation would be possible.
Within contemporary Colombian art, there exists a tendency to write and create while thinking and imagining the geography, the territory and the violence of the country—two examples being the award-winning illustrated poem La mata (2021) and the celebrated debut novel Esta herida llena de peces (2021). However, visibility is not given to the holistic visions from agrarian creators that encompass territory, community, and art.
Jota Ramos and Haga que pase have decided to circumvent the conventional streams of transmission: “We plan our own communal song creation and construction with the community…concerts have been organized in places where no one goes, and we feel that true passion of displaying your art to the people that recognize it and recognize themselves in it.”
At the same time, Ramos and his collaborators continue their fight in the region, one of which will finally result in a source of potable water for his hometown, Villa Rica.
“After 15 years of this fight, we will finally be able to establish, alongside the community and other allies, the first collection point of potable water for our neighborhood,” celebrated Ramos. “[I] already grew up without water, but those who are growing up now in Villa Rica, they will be able to see that if we didn’t do this for ourselves…it wouldn’t happen.”
The art of Jota Ramos is: the drinking water, the artisanal drums, the earth without pesticides, the rap rhymes, the sustainable polycultures, the sound of chonta marimbas, the youth free from arms and violence, and the flourishing of rural communities in their territories.
This article was based on an interview conducted in Spanish and translated to English by the author.
By Andrea Villa Franco, October 12, 2023. Andrea works on artist protection and casework for Artists at Risk Connection. She holds an International Joint Masters (EMJM) degree through the EU's Erasmus Mundus program and a BA from Stanford University.