Colombian Classrooms Dance as Haiti’s Compas Finds a New Home

In Colombia, a Haitian-Chilean singer is turning compas into a living bridge, part concert, part lesson, part diaspora reunion. After UNESCO recognized the genre in 2025, its beat is spreading through Bogotá and beyond, carrying memory.

A Voice That Arrives With A Passport Of Rhythms

On a stage in Colombia, Ayiiti does not simply perform a Caribbean groove. She translates a homeland. She sings in Haitian Creole and Spanish, and the shift between languages feels less like a stylistic trick than a soft insistence: we are closer than we think.

In interviews with EFE, she describes how the rhythm lands here almost without friction. “In Colombia, the compas is received very well, in a very natural way,” she says, adding that “there is an immediate connection with Caribbean rhythm.” It is a striking claim in a country where music often travels along linguistic and marketing lines. Yet in her telling, compas enters through the body first, hips, shoulders, the reflex to clap on time, and only later through the intellect.

That matters because compas, emblematic of Haiti, was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2025. To have a global institution certify a national rhythm can be a kind of rescue story, but it can also be a kind of museum label. Ayiiti’s work in Colombia resists the glass case. She treats recognition as permission to expand, not a command to freeze.

Born in Paris to a Haitian father and a Chilean mother, she lived in Haiti for more than 15 years, where she grew up listening to compas before emigrating. She later lived in the United States and France and now resides in Colombia, a move she credits with helping her make “the best music” of her career, according to her EFE interview. Her very biography carries the routes that the compass itself has traveled, across borders, across registers, across the complicated feelings that come with exile.

“As a Haitian, the UNESCO recognition was great news,” she tells EFE, explaining that “Haiti has suffered a lot, but it has an impressive culture,” and that “it was time to recognize at least one of its genres. The line lands as both pride and exhaustion, the kind that comes when a country is too often discussed through catastrophe instead of creativity.

Identity, Exile, And The First Question A Child Asks

Her presence in Colombia has not been limited to music venues. She has sung in schools in Bogotá, where students hear Haitian Creole for the first time. “The kids always ask me what language that is,” she tells EFE. “That’s where the curiosity begins, not only about the music, but about Haiti.”

It is a small moment, but it carries an entire political geography. In Latin America, migration is often framed as a crisis to be managed, a problem to be contained. In a classroom, migration becomes human again: a child hears an unfamiliar cadence and wants to name it. The question is not “Where are you from?” in the suspicious sense; it is “What is that?” in the open sense. It is how cultures meet without turning into slogans.

According to figures from the Embassy of Haiti in Colombia, between 15,000 and 20,000 Haitians live in the country, concentrated mainly in Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali. Those numbers are not just demographics; they are the invisible audience that makes a genre feel necessary. A song becomes a place to gather when home is no longer one location.

Her performances have also reached mass audiences. She appeared at a solidarity concert at El Campín stadium before thousands of people in August and at EVA, a major entrepreneurship fair in Colombia in 2025, according to EFE. In those settings, compas is not presented as an exotic import. It is offered as another Caribbean dialect in a region already fluent in rhythm.

Compas Evolves By Refusing To Sit Still

Compas was born in 1955 with the maestro Nemours Jean-Baptiste, and since then, it has absorbed influences from jazz, rock, R&B, and electronic music without losing its danceable core. That flexibility is not a modern marketing strategy; it is part of the genre’s DNA.

In comments to EFE, Haitian producer Jean-Marc Desrosiers, who has collaborated with several classic compas orchestras, insists on the genre’s movement. “Compas has never been static,” he says, emphasizing that it is music “designed to dialogue with other rhythms of the Caribbean and the world.” His framing matters because it protects compas from being treated like a relic. A tradition survives not by resisting change, but by shaping it.

Ayiiti takes that philosophy into the studio and gives it a name: “compatón,” her fusion of compas and reggaeton. “I always thought they were cousin genres,” she tells EFE. “They don’t use the same instruments, but the rhythm talks.” The phrase “the rhythm talks” is not a metaphor in the Caribbean; it is literal. Drums and basslines are social language, how neighborhoods recognize themselves across distance.

This is also where Colombia becomes more than a backdrop. The country has long conversed with non–Spanish-speaking Caribbean sounds. The text notes that salsero Joe Arroyo drew on Haitian compas influences in his musical search, and that newer generations are reopening that exchange. In 2025, the Colombian artist Beéle reinforced the openness with a live session of his hit “Quédate” across eight consecutive concerts at Movistar Arena in Bogotá, helping broaden visibility for other Caribbean rhythms, with the song and compas dance trending on social media, according to the text.

For Ayiiti, international recognition is not a fence. “UNESCO is an honor, but it won’t lock compas up,” she says to EFE. “This music has always evolved with the world.” From Colombia, her work argues that compas is not only something you dance. It is something you inherit, carry, translate, and, when you are far from home, use to find each other again.

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