Draft:Petrona Martinez

Petrona Martínez is an Afro-Colombian singer and songwriter of bullerengue. She is recognized for positioning bullerengue, traditional music mainly performed by older women in rural Afro-descendant communities in the Colombian Caribbean, at the national and international level. Petrona Martínez won her first Latin Grammy at the age of 82 in 2021 for her album Ancestras (2021). The album privileges, voice, orality, listening, and poetry as a politic of expression. It manifests as a sonic reunion among sisters of the African diaspora connected with rural life and their ancestral memory

Early Life
She was born in 1939 in San Cayetano Bolívar, one of the palenques on the Atlantic coast of Colombia. In the early 1980s, Petrona and her family arrived to Palenquito, a town in the department of Bolívar, on the way to San Basilio de Palenque, where she made a living by removing sand from the river. It was during this time that she began to compose.