Hora Cero
junio 16, 2025
Monarch butterflies have a pair of orange wings with which they use to embark on an unusual migratory phenomenon. They cross more than four thousand kilometers from the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada to the mountains of central Mexico. Their scientific name is Danaus plexippus, which in Greek means «sleepy transformation.» Therefore, it’s no coincidence that a collective of Latin American artists—in exile—decided to title their first collective album with this title.
Monarch was born from the urgency of expressing and reaffirming the sense of belonging among artists displaced by other «monarchs» and by authoritarian regimes. With the support of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and musicians from Colombia, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, this musical compendium was born, addressing exile, migration, uprooting, and the challenge of adapting abroad. The collective is made up of artists from a wide range of backgrounds: poets, multi-instrumentalist, storytellers, theater, flow art, and audiovisual production.
“It’s really a multicultural album that talks about migration, about forced migration. But yes, we want to identify ourselves within that intersectionality that runs through us all,” explains Nicaraguan artist Kenya Nairobi, who arrived in Costa Rica in 2021 and joined the collective that gave life to Monarch. Kenya was dedicated to the art of puppetry in Nicaragua.
The idea of this collective of artists is to support each other, “to be able to express everything they’ve been through in this process, from uprooting themselves from their land and their family, finding new things here, how difficult it is to adapt, and being able to find love even within the turmoil of exile,” Kenya adds.
Monarch has a heterogeneous sound: bullerengue sentado, chalupa, chandé, son nica, rumba, rock and progressive touches, ska, ballads, bossa nova, funk, and musical chronicle. Each song brings rhythms and emotional resources from the artist who composed it, to which are added collaborations that enrich the musical and emotional register of the pieces. The songs are presented almost as personal journeys and routes of exile: nostalgia and the sustenance of hope.
In this context,Kenya composes and creates La macumba of the death, With arrangements by Colombian percussionist Anjula Arévalo, whose project trained her in Costa Rica. According to its author, the song explores desperation, rage, and thirst for justice, as well as the strength of the community that accompanies displacement.
Another of the songs is Where you go, by Andrés Somarriba Palma, which through the verses: I know that wherever I go I will go / with your memory and I know / that wherever I go they go / all my dead refers to the deaths caused by the repression of the regime in 2018. According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), 360 people were killed in the context of the protests.
Amia Tikpara Pauta, is another of the songs on the album. It is written in Miskito, the indigenous language of a community resisting the illegal seizure of their lands by settlers in collusion with the state. Amia Tikpara means «don’t forget,» and is an invitation to Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities forced to migrate to remember their communities, their rivers, their forests, and their culture.
«Ar Costa Rica ra wama sin (Or maybe you’ll go to Costa Rica too)
Ar bankra España ra wama kra (Or maybe you’re going to Spain)
Ar bankra States ra wama sin (Or maybe you’ll go to the United States)
Kupiam ra bribas (Keep it in your heart)
Kiamka kum sma ba (That you are an indigenous people)
Amia tikpara (Don’t forget)».
Since 2018, Nicaragua has experienced a closure of civic space caused by repression by the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has documented a pattern aimed at stifling dissent and dismantling critical voices, with impacts on the media, academia, and culture. In 2025, the IACHR again denounced transnational repression and called for an end to all forms of persecution.
The UN and human rights organizations describe a coordinated policy of repression that includes arbitrary arrests, torture, denationalizations, and confiscation of property, affecting journalists, writers, and cultural workers. At the same time, the government announced its withdrawal from multilateral forums such as the Human Rights Council and, later, the UNHCR, in a clash with international protection mechanisms.
This siege has pushed the diaspora. In April 2022, a raid was carried out on critical artists and musicians who maintained a cultural resistance in Nicaragua. On April 12, the National Police arbitrarily detained Josué Monroy, vocalist of the Nicaraguan band Monroy y Surmenage; and the managers of Saxo Producciones, Xochilt Tapia and Salvador Espinoza, music producers who were subsequently exiled from the country.
One of them was Leonardo Canales, a Nicaraguan music producer exiled in Costa Rica and one of the participants of Monarch. Canales was director of the collective Antesala who were dedicated to the musical and artistic promotion of Nicaragua.
“The album (Monarch) was quite emotional, and also in the sense that it allowed us to achieve a kind of closure,” he says via phone. “It’s not that the album ends all our problems, but I think it allowed us to move on a little toward other things. It was important to support the grief of migration and to release the emotions that each of the composers had bottled up,” he adds.
International reports agree: when governments close civic space, art is one of the first targets. Freemuse documented this 2025 global trends of censorship, self-censorship and criminalization of artistic discourse. According to this organization’s recent report, in authoritarian environments, «anti-hate» or «sovereignty» laws are used to label critical artists as «traitors,» enabling arrests, trials, and exile.
PEN International is another international organization that has documented patterns of harassment and violence against writers and creators, including the Nicaraguan case.
In this sense, Monarch is introduced as a living archive of the Nicaraguan exile. It functions as memory—to name what was intended to be silenced—and as a political act. Because in contexts of repression, art becomes an extension of resistance.
