Healing The World Through Poetry: Sana Sana

Photo by Sam Ray-Johnson.

Rap and hip-hop for some listeners, is a form of poetry. It’s a way to get messages across to the masses in a musical format, speaking truths that are sometimes hard to swallow. Artists can use it as a way to educate, which is exactly what Sana Sana is doing.

Originally a visual artist, he uses his craft to bring awareness to the issues native peoples face and to share their history. His lyrics talk about colonization, the plights of capitalism and institutionalized racism. Emphasizing themes of reconnecting with the spiritual world and honoring familial ancestry, it’s plain to hear Sana Sana’s conviction through his songs. He embodies the ‘soldier of love,’ archetype, slamming you with the realities of the indigenous experience in the United States — even throwing in clips of news segments between his verses.

While Sana Sana’s rhymes are heavy, his personality certainly is not. When I asked him what inspires him, he said monarch butterflies. Sana Sana is Purépecha, a tribe from the northwestern region of Michoacán, Mexico, and Coahuiltecan, a tribe from the Rio Grande Valley of what is now southern Texas and northeastern Mexico. The monarch butterfly takes three generations to migrate from Mexico to Canada, and to come back.

“They move the way that they need to so that their people can continue life itself,” he said. “They don’t know what the destination and the end of it’s supposed to look like, but they know that they need to move forward.”

He chose hip-hop and rap as a genre because of its flexibility artistically, but also because he says his ancestors value poetry as the highest form of understanding the universe, alongside playing music, creating art and moving through dance.   

“They said for a man to try and understand reality would be like a stone trying to understand life,” he said. “We’re transient beings, but we’re existing in the infinite existential.”

Sana Sana's music not only delivers a memorandum to enlighten the listener of indigenous past and present, but he encourages the public to expand their consciousness in a compelling way. He says the problems we run into today are because we've separated ourselves from life itself, from our connection to the soul. He believes we exist in two forms: our biological bodies and our spiritual bodies, and oftentimes the two have different motives.

“The problem is the way we think… the Earth is our mother, it gives us everything we need,” he said. “When we have this understanding and we come at it respectfully, we can empower life.”

Sana Sana’s album, Niño Santo, will be coming out in January. He says some of his tracks feel medicinal, like they’re a conversation with the Creator. The pandemic hasn’t slowed him down and he hopes to heal others through his music coming out of it. Even his MC name, ‘Sana Sana,’ is from a Mexican saying to soothe children when they fall or injure themselves, translating to ‘heal, heal.’ 

“When we love each other, we honor the divine,” he said. “We honor that and we bless each other.”

To listen to Nino Santo, visit their SoundCloud profile here.

Sana Sana also holds live streams on KWNK Radio on Thursday nights 9:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time (PDT).