Spotlight: Sara Curruchich

Sara Curruchich may well be the first woman to stand on international stages singing contemporary songs in Mayan Kaqchikel. When her voice soars, the syllables of her language ripple through the air, bestowing blessings of mystery and goodwill.

Curruchich was born in San Juan Comalapa, within a Mayan Kaqchikel community in Guatemala’s central highlands. Her people are renowned for ancestral traditions of art, weaving and knowledge, as well as a history of courageous resistance during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war.

During her recent Mujer Indígena tour through the US, Curruchich and I chat over Zoom. An eloquent, insightful conversant, she is passionate in expressing how her music emerges both from her people’s collective memories, as well as her own perspective as an artist and an Indigenous woman.

Curruchich began to sing as a child as a way of gaining courage. The unstable electricity in her home kept spaces darkened; singing helped her overcome her fear of entering into the darkness. The desire to sing is one of her first memories – she remembers wanting to take religious song classes at about seven years of age, but her father refused to give her permission because she was too young.

Nevertheless, community radio resounded in Comalapa, and that was how Curruchich heard the marimba (Guatemala’s national instrument) for the first time. Without ever having seen such an instrument at the time, she loved it, and exclaims, “There was something in those rhythms and melodies that invited your body to dance!”

Another key musical milestone came about when she was about ten and her brother shared a cassette with her that had songs by Nicaragua’s Dúo Guardabarranco and Cuba’s Silvio Rodríguez – musicians within the nueva trova protest music movement. Curruchich laughs as she reminisces about how she used a pencil to twirl the tape back in the spool so she could listen to certain songs over and over again.

Shortly thereafter, a song in Kaqchikel by her cousin gained fame in the area and, for Curruchich, it was a revelation — hearing that love song incorporating the viewpoint of the Mayan cosmovision, Curruchich deduced singing could be a way to combat rejection of Indigenous world views.

All of these early experiences would come into play in her own songs – from gaining courage and illuminating darkness through music, to incorporating the danceable rhythms of the marimba, to purposefully incorporating the Mayan cosmovision to overcome racism and misogyny.

Her earliest compositions were very private, explains Curruchich, and primarily a channel to heal the pain she suffered because of discrimination: “It was such a blow to feel that I would have to reject and deny my identity as an Indigenous woman to be accepted in certain groups and spaces. I began composing to become stronger and recover and find my roots, embrace what I am, my Mayan being, my Kaqchikel being. And I wanted to share this feeling with other women and girls who were living a similar situation.”

Today, Curruchich is a lauded, recognised star of her community who has toured and sung in Kaqchikel and Spanish on stages around the world. Her debut album Somos (2019), as well as 2021’s Mujer Indígena, clamour for dignity and respect for Indigenous women worldwide while sharing hopes for a different kind of future.

She generally performs in one of two formats. One is intimate, accompanied by Luis Juárez Quixtán, a virtuosic K’iche’ Mayan guitar player and conservatory professor from Guatemala who is based in Paris. She calls it “a spiritual musical experience, a dance between the guitar and the voice.”

In the other configuration, Curruchich surrounds herself with a crack team of female musicians, deploying her velvety, potent voice upon lush tides of marimba chords and rocked-out guitar riffs. These serious dance grooves are created by drummer Moty, bass player Karla Molkovic and marimba player Sandra Moreno from Chiapas, Mexico.

In both settings, Curruchich declares an intention to reaffirm the deep emotional connection that music creates as a potent reminder of our shared humanity. At the same time, she wants to amplify the participation of women in the music industry and considers the band’s performance an affirmation of equality, noting that when they perform in festivals, there are normally less than 50% of women in the line-ups.

“It’s a revolutionary act,” she proclaims. “We defy stereotypes and claim our space on stages.” Indeed, Curruchich has often created controversy in her homeland for being a Mayan Kaqchikel artist who presents a contemporary persona, as well as for her forthright expression of critical political sentiments. At one point, she cut her waist-long hair somewhat shorter, and in a style with a half-shaved side; at another point she also had her nose pierced – both forms of adornment created unpleasant misogynistic debates on social media.

“It was such a level of aggression,” she observes, “and it seems awfully sad to have had to explain that we [as women] own our own bodies and are able to make decisions about them. We have to continue fighting against all of this and continue to accompany and support each other from the perspective of love.”

Yet Curruchich also confesses that she is still in the process of recovering her cultural legacy, as Mayan cosmogonic practices have been demonised by conservative religious institutions in her homeland: “I am 30 years old, but I’m still learning. I wasn’t even part of a Mayan ceremony until 2012! Now, it’s a part of me – a way to approach life and existence, and spiritually and lovingly tie us to the life of other beings and animals. Even if I don’t always express this in an explicit way, it’s part of what I do and a part of the sensibility that Indigenous peoples have had, so it’s also a way of loving our ancestrality.”

This continued learning and healing has taken Curruchich to participate in collective endeavours such as performing at the first standalone International Indigenous Music Summit in Toronto in 2023. She describes it as a healing experience, a space of convergence for Indigenous musicians, that planted “seeds now germinating into a beautifully transgressive musical vision.” She describes the summit as a beautiful and safe space, where she found a human family which reminded her of trees – often growing at great distances from each other, but connected underground by intertwining roots.

The International Indigenous Music Summit, Curruchich contemplates, also challenged colonist frameworks that reject Indigenous music for not fitting within established Western music parameters. As she wryly observes, “They constantly try to nullify our venerable structures because of the perspective that, ‘this time can’t be counted, that tempo can’t be measured.’ That all reflects a Western vision that always tries to box us into its own ideas of time and timing. Right?”

And therein resides the immense power of Curruchich’s music, as it artfully shares another way of being. She uses ‘k’u’xlab’äl’, a word from her own beautiful language, to manifest what is expressed through her songs: “K’u’xlab’äl signifies what is woven in your heart, in other words, memory. It’s the memory of your body and other memories, but includes the sense of not just individual but collective memory. Our memory has been erased in so many ways. So, to name our memories is an act of rebellion.”

This article originally appeared in the June 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today