Interview with Alex Merbouti, Cumbiamba Band

Alex Merbouti is a Miami based multidisciplinary artist. He’s a photographer, DJ, and musician with a history and acclaim for performing in popular projects. His most recent endeavor is Cumbiamba, a psychedelic Cumbia band which formed in May 2025. Late to the party, I caught Cumbiamba's set closing out the inaugural Mango Festival in Lake Worth, where they played the outdoor stage of the block party. This introduction to the band was impressive. The large crowd danced and grooved to the music through the entire performance, even as it began to rain. I spoke with Merbouti the following day to learn about the development of the band. 

Steve Imas

I remember you putting out a video introducing the band, explaining that Cumbiamba started after you saw Los Mirlos perform live at the Bandshell last April. I've been watching what you guys are doing and seen your progression and it looks like you guys are really picking up steam, kudos for all that you've you know grown in such a short time. 

Alex Merbouti

Thank you.

S.I. 

Was that Mirlos show your first live experience with Cumbia?

A.M. 

No, I had seen Cumbia here and there. I grew up in California, in L.A. so I saw a lot of Mexican Cumbia there. But that was my first time seeing a band of their caliber. In terms of a psychedelic Cumbia band, which is like the style of Cumbia that I first got into and what we lean most heavily towards. I remember being at the Bandshell, it was a near sold out show. I didn't know Miami had such a large Peruvian audience but it also got me to thinking: there's all these other Latin genres in Miami like Salsa, Bachata, & Meringue but I'd never really seen Cumbia represented at large in the city. I know a couple vinyl DJs that spin Cumbia and I would spin Cumbia when I DJ too, but like it is really just kinda a handful of people. There's a couple of bands like Sonora Tukukuy, they do kind of a different flavor, I guess like modern and more alternative fusion. There's another band called Paziflora and they do more like Colombian Folklore, Afro-Colombia style. So yeah, I thought "no one's hitting that psychidelic 60's/70's middle ground", and I kind of saw an opening. The next day after the Mirlos show I posted a story on Instagram and I was like "OK just looking for people that are down to jam on some Cumbia". I listed all the instruments and it got a lot of interest, the story got 600 0r 700 views. 

S.I. 

Wild, so a lot of people were passing the story around. How many people showed up in the end?

A.M.

I got maybe like 20 or 30 replies of interest. I set up to rent out a rehearsal space and gave the address, date, & time to whoever responded and half of them showed up so like 15 people came out. 

S.I.

Did anyone you know show up? What happened next? 

A.M. 

Yeah, some friends & some people I had never met made it out too and it was fun. We had a few preliminary jams and then I kinda made it like a weekly thing and I was like yeah whoever just wants to show up can with no pressure, I wasn't even necessarily trying to start a band. I was just wanted to jam with anyone who was into this music too. 

S.I. 

Super loose open door policy type thing, that's cool, a great way to figure out who is down for it.

A.M.

Yes, that's a big funnel, we had a couple of these jams you know anywhere from like eight to like sometimes 15 people. I thought it was cool, people are having fun, but I didn't expect anyone to stick around or wanna do it seriously. And to my surprise a month or so later, these people kept coming back and the core group started forming. 

S.I. 

Well there's a good segue to talk about everyone in the band and and what they do. I know you have nine members in the band, can you tell me their names and what everyone in the band does.

A.M.

Yeah, so Cody, plays the drums as you know, Caro on bass, then Kevin is our keyboard player, then we have Liz is a vocalist, Vanne our other vocalist, Camille on guiro & vocals, Chris on percussion & trumpet too, Sara on flute & vocals, and myself on guitar & vocals. With the core in place we put together a DIY show together on July 28, the Peruvian Independence Day. Our Peruvian guitarist (now former guitarist), worked at a bakery in North Miami and we had the event there. We decided to make a goal to have some songs ready for the show. We thought it was gonna be a cute little soft opening, maybe 40 or 50 people. We posted the flyer and it got like 40,000 views and I think it was shared over like 700 times, people sent it to each other that much. 

S.I. 

Wow, you guys were breaking some capacity laws there I'm sure, hahahaaa.

A.M.

Hahahaa yeah, definitely. we set up outside in a parking lot in the back area and I wanna say at some point maybe like 300 to 400 people were there. 

S.I. 

Wow, amazing that's so cool and you guys are just starting up at this point. 

A.M.

Yeah, we were fresh, never played in front of anyone and essentially we didn't sell anything but it was a sold out vibe for a show.

S.I. 

Right on, what an insane turnout! 

A.M. 

Yeah, yeah that was the craziest debuts I've ever had for a band. The fact we did it on Peruvian Independence Day there were probably 200 Peruvians there. Then this is also right around the time that Churchill's and Las Rosas reopened. A couple weeks after the event I left to New York for the entire month of August to DJ and solo gigs and that kind of created a demand because we played this great show and people were trying to book us everywhere but I was gone, so we had to say no. 

S.I. 

That made more of a demand I'm sure, when you can't get what you want.

A.M. 

Yeah, so we planned a show for Las Rosas in September, for when I came back and it was packed out. That was our second show and it was like at an actual venue so it felt kinda like legit. 

S.I. 

So you have your year anniversary coming up, right, based on that gig? 

A.M.

Yeah, it's gonna be on September 18 back at Las Rosas. 

S.I.

That makes sense yeah, the first official show like you said at a legit venue.

A.M.

Yeah, official legit venue show so that's kind of what the anniversary is based on. We have three anniversaries, getting together in May, our bakery gig in July and the September one for the Las Rosas gig.

S.I. 

That is great and the momentum keeps going, at least one gig a month. 

A.M.

Yeah, ever since that show the inquiries never stop scrolling in, sometimes several times a month. Yeah, in those next two or three months, we played Gramps, Zey Zey, and Propaganda in Lake Worth. 

S.I. 

Yeah, and people in Palm Beach County are loving it, huh? 

A.M.

Yeah, actually decent up there. Last night I saw some familiar faces that have been to the Propaganda shows. Actually, after our set we hung out super late and we went to the after hours party at Frenchies and there were people there were coming up to us "hey you guys played on J St".

S.I.

So nice to get recognition like that in the moment. I know you guys play a mix of covers and originals. What is the dynamic when you like fleshing out the tunes, like different people like start a seed of a song?

A.M.

Yeah, so what is cool about having so many members that we have so many different styles of songwriting and ideas to bounce off of we kind of never run out of juice in that form. So until recently had 10 people in the band and so pretty much each one wrote one or two songs so that's like we basically have an album's worth of material in the works already. 

S.I.

What a nice advantage you all have, so have you started recording an album? 

A.M.

We bought a mixer recently that works as an interface so we've been recording ourselves, recording every rehearsal and recording our songwriting like multi tracking our songwriting session so we kinda like reference everything, it's sped up the process a lot. As for a release date we don’t have a concrete date yet but definitely by the end of the year. There will be singles and a full album. We’ll most likely start with a 45 record.

S.I.

So cool.

A.M.

And yeah, we are a large group, so we have that like a weekly meeting time usually every Tuesday, but in between that some of us kind of live closer to each other and so we'll have little like breakout writing sessions or if we can't all meet before a big show or something we get as many little groups as we can. 

S.I.

That helps to get a core tight, yeah that's cool. You guys sounded great! I've been seeing all your posts and all the buzz about you guys. I've been wanting to go to the shows but it's tough with an 8 year old. I am glad to have finally seen you all last night on that proper stage and in that block party environment. What is next for you all, a tour? 

A.M.

Yeah, yeah we've been trying to come up with more Sunday daytime kids friendly shows, a lot of our friends have kids too. It's cool with this band, we do bring quite the party, we definitely plan to get it on the road north, out west, and then internationally too.

S.I.

With Latin communities all over all over the place, I see what you do as a show that people that enjoy all over the US and beyond.

A.M.

Yeah, definitely feels very very universal. I grew up in California so I'm familiar with the L.A. and up in San Francisco scene. Also having spent a month in New York I've made a bunch of connections. We've had people from all over reach out. I basically found like every Cumbia party and collectives and that are active but kind of worldwide and like it's actually like a pretty small community so everyone's kind of aware of everyone else so it makes kind of like a tighter network

S.I.

Very cool Alex, thank you so much man for taking the time to talk to me. 

A.M.

Yeah man, thanks for reaching out to us. 

The Language Behind the Door

María Benedetti and the Long Road Back to an Identity That Had Always Been There

During María Benedetti's childhood, Puerto Rico was a twenty-block walk away. From their home in Jackson Heights, Queens, the family would walk to Elmhurst to visit her grandmother, María Cristina. Those family gatherings had food, long conversations around the table, music, and that affectionate chaos of families who talk, sing, and argue almost at the same time. There was a bar in the basement, and when the parties got going, salsa brava (old-school salsa) filled the room.

María, from six years old, would dance nonstop while her uncles cheered every turn.

Puerto Rico was there in Tito Puente and La Lupe, in arroz con gandules, in the musical clappings after meals, and in the game of passing an orange from neck to neck without using their hands. PR was there in the closeness, the musicality, and the family drama.

But something remained beyond her reach: the language.

At home, Spanish was not spoken in front of the children. Her mother and her uncles saved it for conversations with their grandmother about adult matters, sometimes risqué, that the children could not o understand. Spanish was a door closing in the middle of a conversation, a wall separating her from her identity and her origins.

"Me gusta lo prohibido" ("' like what's forbidden"), María remembers with a laugh.

That became a "burning desire" to become bilingual, to master the forbidden language and make it her own. It did not begin with a grammar lesson, but with curiosity about what was happening whenever the adults switched languages. Learning Spanish meant finally being able to enter the whole conversation.

Music was one of her first teachers, a teacher that began revealing a world that belonged to her but that she had not been able to fully enter. Johnny Pacheco, Tito Rodríguez, Tito Puente, and La Lupe were part of the soundtrack of the home. The first 45 rpm record she bought was

Todopoderoso, by Héctor Lavoe. She was not bilingual yet, but the rhythm showed her a part of her that words could not reach.

At college, she began to feel that the English-speaking academic world was not her true territory. The students were simply not her people.

During her third year, she left for Seville with a personal mission: to come back speaking Spanish. She lived there for a year, walked everywhere imaginable, danced flamenco, sand in the University chorus and immersed herself in Sevillian life. In her second language, she discovered a different way of inhabiting the world.

When she returned to the United States, she found a Puerto Rican community at her university. A friend gave her a biography of Don Pedro Albizu Campos, she learned to dance salsa, and she began debating with her grandmother; now in Spanish; mostly about women's rights and Puerto Rican nationalism. Later, at Hunter College, she immersed herself in the island's history, literature, folklore, and culture. At El Museo del Barrio she studied latin percussion, and on Sundays she never missed a Cuban rumba in Central Park. She was not simply accumulating information: she was gathering the scattered pieces of an inheritance.

In 1987, after 10 years of herbal studies with Susun S. Weed, she came to Puerto Rico for the first time to interview people known by their neighbors for their experience with medicinal plants and traditional healing practices. She arrived academically prepared, but Spanish also knows how to set traps.

On one occasion, she needed something from a pharmacy and asked for a drogueria (ok in Colombian, but PR sounds like an illegal hangout for drug addicts. On another, whenever a man helped her, she would approach his wife and tell her how much she "gustaba" her husband (friendly in Colombia, but in PR, she was "hot for him." It did not go well with the neighbor ladies.

The words were correct. The cultural translation was not.

During her field interviews, deeper difficulties emerged. María spoke a Spanish shaped by her Castilian education and years with her Colombian boyfriend. The people she interviewed spoke with the cadence, vocabulary, and slang of the Puerto Rican countryside, with that particular way of speaking that makes us unique. The women she interviewed; understood her and sometimes laughed affectionately at her particular way of speaking, but Maria could not always follow them.

To transcribe those precious recordings, she used a machine controlled with her feet: one pedal moved the cassette tape forward and the other rewound it. She listened to each phrase again and again, sometimes spending hours working on a single page. Beside her, she kept pressed plants inside a book. Whenever someone mentioned a species, she opened the plant press so she could see and smell what plant they were talking about.

Between 1987 and 1989, she returned to Puerto Rico 3 times to read the transcriptions back to the people she had interviewed. They added details, corrected mistakes, and laughed with her all over again. Maria gladly accepted every correction because she understood that "oral history is not my story; it belongs to the people who lived it, and have carried this knowledge through generations." From that process would emerge her first book about our ethnobotanical traditions, Earth and Spirit: Medicinal Plants and Healing Lore from Puerto Rico.

Her discipline with the language became radical. During her first ten years living in Puerto Rico, she avoided reading in English except when it was necessary for translation work. She cultivated friendships with people who spoke only Spanish and celebrated how a language does not enter only through the intellect.

It enters through affection

María remembers old expressions she had heard many times without retaining them. But when her mother said "me patina el coco" (literally, "my coconut is skidding," a fun way of lamenting a mental lapse or "para comer y rascar, solo falta empezar" (literally, "to eat and to scratch, all you need is to start"; a saying about how once you begin, you want to keep going), the words stayed with her. The difference was the emotional connection. Without it, language could pass right in front of you without ever finding a place to settle.

Today, after almost four decades in Puerto Rico, Maria considers bilingualism her greatest achievement. She continues learning with the same curiosity she had as a child listening to adults switch languages. On Sundays, she attentively listens to boleros and studies the vocabulary, the turns of phrase, and "the tenderness that macho men so surprisingly express" through this genre. Music, she says, was her doorway, and it still is her school.

Her search was never simply about speaking correctly. She wanted to belong and to contribute to the culture her family had been forced to leave behind for economic and political reasons.

"Amo la locura de aqui" ("I love our particular craziness,") she says when talking about Puerto Rico: the drama, the musicality, the sense of humor, and the connections she has cultivated with farmers, students, and other friends. Everything she treasured about her family in New York, she found alive on the island.

María Benedetti spent much of her life searching for a language she had heard since childhood without ever being able to fully enter it. By learning it, she did not recover an untouched past, nor did she resolve the contradictions of living between cultures. She found something more human: a way to draw closer, make mistakes, listen, and try again.

Perhaps recovering an origin does not mean returning to the exact place where our story began. Perhaps it means recognizing its music when it begins to play again and, this time, knowing how to join in.

Contact Maria Benedetti:

www.botanicultura.com |botanicultura@gmail.com |+1-939-255-2235

Morazul: The Streets Belong to Everyone

An interview with Diana Herrera, the Colombian urban artist known as Morazul, who has been painting the streets of cities across Latin America and now Miami for twenty years.

Her first mural happened at age five. No permission, no plan - just her hands and whatever paint was within reach, pressed against her mother's wall. She doesn't describe it as the beginning of a career.

She describes it as the beginning of a conversation.

Twenty years later, Morazul is still having that conversation, only now the walls are several stories tall and the neighborhoods are different cities, different countries, different worlds from the one she grew up in. She studied at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, traveled to Buenos Aires at eighteen, and found herself standing in front of a graffiti festival watching people paint walls so large they seemed impossible.

Se me volo la peluca, she says. It blew my mind completely. She was in love before the day was over. She never looked back.

What draws her to the street rather than the studio is something she has thought about carefully. The street, she says, belongs to everyone. Not to a particular social class, religion, skin color, or gender - to everyone. A piece of work placed on a wall will be seen by the person going to the supermarket, the person who just had the worst fight of their life, the child on the way to school, the person with no home walking the same block over and over. Nobody had to decide to go to a museum. Nobody had to know anything about art. The work simply enters their life, the way a song does when it comes through an open window.

There is also the experience of making it.

When you paint a mural, you are there for seven, ten days. People watch you work. They ask where you are from, how you do it, why. You learn the neighborhood. You go places you would never have gone - other barrios, other cities, other countries - and you come back changed. Con la experiencia y con la foto, she says. With the experience and with the photograph. That's what you keep.

The most challenging moment of her career happened on a scaffold above one of Buenos Aires' most ambitious public art projects - a collaboration led by Martín Ron, one of the best muralists in the world, painting every column of an underpass in the Liniers-Ciudadela intersection. Seven artists, thirty people, walls taller than anything she had painted before.

And somewhere above a certain height, she discovered something she had never known about herself: she was afraid.

Not of the wall. Of the height.

She had ridden roller coasters, climbed mountains, never noticed. But here, on scaffolding above Buenos Aires, the fear arrived and she didn't know what to do with it. What she tound was a mantra - something related to love, she remembers, though the exact words have blurred with time - and she sang it to herself until she could finish the mural.

Then she spent years finding where the fear had originally come from, what wound it was protecting, and how to move through it rather than around it.

Simplemente lo trasciendes, she says. You simply transcend it. Not by eliminating the fear, but by choosing a higher vibration - love, gratitude, joy - and letting that be stronger.

She has since learned that some of the best muralists in the world have the same fear. They just don't talk about it. She thinks they should.

The other challenge has been her subject matter. Morazul paints women - not decorative women, not passive women, but women connected to their power, their bodies, their divinity. A vulva painted in Bogotá, framed like a rose, with the center of a galaxy behind it, caused enough conversation in the neighborhood that she ended up in deep dialogue with a sixty-year-old neighbor whose perspective was entirely different from hers.

Eso me encantó, she says. That, she loved. Art that provokes is art that works.

Colleagues have told her it doesn't sell. Family members have questioned it. She keeps painting.

The inner work - meditation, breathwork, processes of healing she describes with a list long enough to fill a page - is what keeps her grounded in her own voice. She is not painting for the market. She is painting because she has something to say, and she intends to keep saying it. Se vienen unos murales picantes, she says, and smiles. Hot ones are coming.

The piece of public art in Miami that has stayed with her is not her own. It's a mural by Criola, a Brazilian artist, at Jungle Plaza in the Design District. Two women with blue braids. Hummingbirds - one of the four sacred animals in indigenous cosmogony, alongside the jaguar, the condor, and the serpent.

Figures behind them that feel like ancestors, or like the mystical, healing part of womanhood that carries knowledge across generations. Serpents winding upward, representing

transformation, the shedding of old skin, the energy that rises through the body toward something like illumination.

She passes it almost every day, on the way to the gym or simply moving through the city. There are moments, she says. When she feels disconnected - when Miami still feels new, the territory unfamiliar, the community not yet fully hers. And then she sees the mural, and it brings her back to her center.

Amiga, tú sabes cuál es tu propósito.

Friend, you know what your purpose is.

She does.

Morazul is a Colombian urban artist based in Miami. Find her work at @morazul.art