In 2019, cultural manager and feminist music researcher Daniella Cura published Esther Forero, La Caminadora, a groundbreaking book that through its approach to the life and music of this composer and other women artists, has fostered spaces for conversation around the approach of feminist musicology, a little explored field in Colombia.
Esther Forero researched and disseminated the folklore of the Colombian Caribbean, was part of the pioneer generation of radio in the country and was one of the most important composers and performers of the Atlantic Coast throughout the twentieth century. Despite so many reasons to know and admire her, the city where she was born renamed her “the bride of Barranquilla”, a label that ended up overshadowing her own brilliance. Many only know her by that epithet and for what exclusively concerns her city, overlooking her long traveling career and her advanced ideas about what it means to be a free, transgressive and courageous woman, who always lived against the macho and misogynist prejudices of the time.
Therefore, this book is not a biography, but a critical essay from the perspective of feminist musicology, a discipline that seeks to analyze, repurpose and vindicate the artistic work of women, a field of research still little explored in Colombia and Latin America. Esther Forero’s life is not the subject of the book, but the guiding thread and the narrative line that allows a reading of the cultural context of the 20th century in Colombia and different latitudes of the American continent while recognizing other women who, like her, have excelled in music despite being a structurally sexist environment.
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