Aned Ladino (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, specializing in Latin American Literature and Culture. Her primary research interests focus on female voices in literature, culture, and sound studies, with an emphasis on hybrid narratives that engage with race, gender, and queer theoretical frameworks. Her dissertation, titled “Afro-Andean and Diasporic Oral Feminisms: Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador,” analyzes orality as a form of political expression and decolonial feminism in musical and literary productions (1999-2021) by women of the African diaspora in the Andean region. Aned is also a co-founder of Georgetown’s graduate student publication, Plaza Pública. She earned a master’s degree in Spanish and two bachelor’s degrees—one in Spanish and the other in Latin American Studies with a minor in Journalism—from the University of Central Florida. Additionally, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador from 2015 to 2017.
Research Project: Afro-Colombian Feminism: Exploring Resistance Through Oral and Musical Traditions
This research examines the resistance of Black women in Colombia through the oral and musical tradition of bullerengue, a folkloric rhythm originating in maroon communities that foregrounds women’s voices and performances. It focuses on Petrona Martínez, an Afro-Colombian singer and composer and her recent album Ancestras (2021). This album highlights voice, orality, listening, and poetry as political expressions, featuring the voices of 14 Afro-descendant women from various countries, including Susana Baca (Peru) and Enerolisa Núñez (Dominican Republic), to honor their ancestral legacies. Ancestras showcases how Afro-Colombian oral traditions and music have served as forms of resistance for Black women, presenting their lived experiences in rural contexts exposing how pain and violence intertwined with hope and spirituality. My research adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining sound studies with Black and decolonial feminism to explore the transnational connections and sisterhood among Afro-descendant women in Latin America through music, ancestral memory, and shared experiences. Building on recent scholarship in sound studies, which suggests that sound destabilizes hegemonic power structures embedded in text-based knowledge systems (Ochoa Gautier), I analyze how Afro-Colombian oral and musical traditions subvert dominant forms of knowledge by privileging the voices of female cantadoras (singers and composers). These women not only lead but also produce and assert agency over their own stories. I argue that the bullerengue rhythm and its collaborative practices enable self-representation, allowing these women to articulate past experiences and traumas in ways that transcend to the present, creating a lexicon for learning, healing, and generating new epistemologies.