Bullerengue is a musical tradition and epistemic site sustained by cantadoras—elderly women singers—in the Afro-Colombian Maroon Caribbean. In advanced age, cantadoras cultivate a vocal materiality shaped through lifelong performance, communal responsibility, and ancestral inheritance, gradually resembling their ancestresses’ vocalities and ethics of care. This paper ethnographically analyzes how the bullerengue-voice is inherited, matured, and socially enacted through two lineages of cantadoras represented by octogenarians Juana Rosado and Petrona Martínez. While Western biomedical discourse frequently frames aging as bodily decline (Powell and Gilbert 2009), cantadoras instead understand aging as privilege, authority, and accumulated wisdom. The bullerengue-voice enables them to remain productive, creative, and indispensable within family and community life.

Drawing on the concept of worlding—“ways of knowing, practicing, and making [a] distinct world” (de la Cadena)—this paper argues that voice and worlding are mutually constitutive through an “acoustemology” (Feld 2015) that illuminates how deep listening to Maroon territory and matriarchal positionality generates knowledge through performance. I propose the concept of epistemic aurality of voice to describe this reciprocal relation between the bullerengue-voice and worlding. Framed through Escobar’s notion of ontological design (2018)—where humans design worlds that in turn design them—the bullerengue-voice emerges as an ongoing life project attuned to relational existence. Such developments allow cantadoras to build constructive ontologies in the face of adversity, as exemplified by their ethos of “las penas alegres,” a poetic construction that casts singing as a vehicle to assuage the adverse existential effects of marginality and life itself.