Colectivo Bámbula company information, Employees & Contact Information

Colectivo Bámbula (CB) is a fiscally sponsored project of A Better Way Foundation and serves as a collective of Boricua educators, organizers and storytellers who build the capacity of Diaspora Ricans to embody liberation and drive transformative change. Together, our team is composed of Bori educators and creatives with demonstrated experience in community leadership, political organizing and popular education. We represent diasporic histories across the U.S. at various intersections of race, gender, and education all on the journey of rediscovery and decolonization. Our name, Bámbula, pays homage to a rhythm and dance in Bomba, Puerto Rico's oldest surviving music and dance form established by the island's African descendants. Community Educator & Musician, Alex Lasalle, teaches us that: “Bámbula is also a word found throughout the Caribbean and Latin America deriving from Kongo, [a former African kingdom located in west central Africa], to mean 'to re-remember.' It refers to the process of reconnecting with one's collective ancestral unconscious in order to remember who one is, to find peace and balance.” Theorist and author, Jacquelyne Ogorchukwu Iyamah, reminds us in her work, Remembering is Resistance: Archival Practices to Disrupt Memoricide, “Cultural memory refers to the shared body of knowledge, traditions and experiences that are transmitted from one generation to the next within a particular community…Colonizers erase the physical objects and places that hold people’s cultural memories.” As a people who have and continue to endure the violence of colonialism, displacement and erasure, Colectivo Bámbula is grounded in a practice of remembering as a form of resistance and believes the strength of our memory will determine our capacity to resist. Threaded across all our efforts is an unwavering commitment to the individual and collective evolution and liberation of all Puerto Rican people.