Cumbia: The Rhythm That Crossed Borders and Became Identity

Cumbia does not ask permission. It comes in through the neighborhood speakers, through the open bus window, through an improvised party on a street corner. It is danced on dirt patios, in community halls, in migrant clubs in Los Angeles—and while it plays, it builds something more than a dance floor: it builds belonging.

That is the point of departure for Cumbia, the long-form audiovisual project by Karla Gachet and Ivan Kashinsky, a journey across Latin America that follows the pulse of a musical genre until it becomes a map of migration, peripheries, and resistance.

The segment filmed in Monterrey—Cumbia En Mi Tierra: Monterrey, México, Cumbia Sonidera—was recognized by POY LATAM. But the project reaches further: a passage through Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, and the United States to understand how a rhythm born in Colombia’s Caribbean coast became one of the most powerful cultural languages of the continent.

It all began with an impossibility. Gachet was recovering from an accident that prevented her from walking when she watched the film Ya no estoy aquí and discovered slowed-down cumbia. “My first impulse was that I wanted to dance… and I couldn’t,” she recalls. Frustration became ignition: if that rhythm could move her even when she could not move, something profound was happening there.

Kashinsky, a trained musician, had lived with cumbia for more than a decade in Ecuador before seeing it as a narrative subject. “It was on the buses, it was at the parties,” he says. At first it was a soundscape; later, cultural awareness. “Little by little I learned… the joy people were feeling.” For him, cumbia was energy before it was theory.

With the support of a grant from the National Geographic Society, they decided to trace the genre from its origin in Colombia—the Magdalena region, where Afro and Indigenous legacies converge—to its urban and migrant transformations. Along the way they understood that cumbia never travels alone: it is carried by workers, by the displaced, by those who move in search of a future.

“It has always been the working class that transported cumbia,” Gachet says. And for that reason, the rhythm has historically lived in the peripheries. In Peru it electrified and became chicha, with psychedelic guitars that, in Kashinsky’s words, one could listen to “all day long.”

In Mexico, sonideros transformed it into a community network, a living archive of vinyl records, shout-outs, and recordings that crossed borders. In Argentina, cumbia rooted itself in the migrant outskirts of Buenos Aires. In Los Angeles, it blended with rock and Chicano culture.

In Lima, a technical failure marked Kashinsky more than any perfect shot. His camera overheated during a chicha night and he couldn’t photograph. He could only listen. “The music was so rich and so powerful,” he remembers. Without a lens in between, he grasped the emotional dimension of the project: elders dancing as if time did not exist, guitars that seemed to narrate memories never written in books.

Monterrey offered a different intensity. In Colonia Independencia, the sonideros did more than play music: they sustained community. “They’re key because they basically brought cumbia to Mexico,” Gachet explains. They recorded parties, sent greetings to migrants in New Jersey, turned loudspeakers into bridges. Music as thread stitching neighborhoods to diasporas.

But it was in Los Angeles that cumbia revealed its political force without metaphor. During a protest against ICE, Kashinsky describes a scene of extreme tension: police firing rubber bullets, arrests, collective fear. Suddenly, cumbia began to blast from the speakers.

“For a while the protest felt like a party… everyone was dancing,” he says. “I realized how powerful music can be… the music was stronger than all the police.”

For Gachet, that force is personal. A migrant and mother in the United States, she connects cumbia with identity and territory. “When all your territories are taken from you, the only thing you have left is your body,” she says. To dance is to occupy space. It is to refuse to hide who you are. It is pride in times when Latino identity is once again questioned.

Cumbia is not a nostalgic tribute. It is a living archive in motion. A project still seeking to close cycles and return the work to the communities that made it possible.

“It changed my life,” Kashinsky says simply. Gachet speaks of clarity, of direction, of continuing to tell stories where music becomes shared territory.

Because cumbia did not end on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. It keeps crossing borders, keeps mutating, keeps lighting up dance floors in the midst of chaos. And as long as it keeps playing, it will keep reminding us that Latin America is also written—and defended—with rhythm.