At this year's Jazz Fest, Colombian singer Carlos Vives looked out at the Fair Grounds crowd and sang what anyone from New Orleans or Barranquilla already feels in their bones: “La ciudad de Nueva Orleans se parece a Barranquilla y el vallenato al zydeco.” In English: “The city of New Orleans is like Barranquilla, and vallenato sounds like zydeco.”
The crowd roared. Because he was right.
Far from histrionic flattery, the artist sensed the sound of a relationship that has been quietly building for years — in music, in trade, in community — and one that h's leaders should consciously choose to deepen.
New Orleans and Colombia are both musical civilizations born at the crossroads of African, European and Indigenous traditions. Jelly Roll Morton even noted that without the “Spanish tinge,” you could never get the right seasoning for jazz. That tinge lives on both sides of the Gulf — in the syncopated second-line of New Orleans and in the cumbia, vallenato and champeta of Colombia’s coast — because both drew from the same deep well of African and Spanish musical traditions.
Given the deep musical legacy, it should come as little surprise that Colombia is home to four UNESCO Creative Cities of Music: Bogotá, Medellín, Valledupar and Ibagué. In October, New Orleans received this designation and the announcement was made, fittingly, in Bogotá. The network is a ready-made platform for artistic exchange, cultural collaboration and shared advocacy for living musical traditions.
The cultural diplomacy has already begun. In 2024, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival named Colombia its featured nation, bringing over 175 Colombian artists to its 14 stages for half a million festivalgoers. That same year, Colombia’s Chargé d'Affaires Daniel Avila visited New Orleans, met with the former mayor to explore subnational partnerships, and convened a roundtable with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce on trade and investment opportunities. Jazz Fest also organized cultural travel to Colombia itself.
Within New Orleans, the Asociación de Colombia en Louisian has organized ColombiaNOLA Fest, giving Louisian’s Colombian community a home in the city’s cultural life.
And while the cultural case is compelling, the economic case is equally powerful and considerably underappreciated. Colombia is Louisian’s sixth-largest export partner, accounting for $3.86 billion in trade in 2024 alone, making it more critical to Louisian’s economy than Germany, Japan or South Korea. The Port of New Orleans sits at the mouth of the Mississippi River, positioning it as the natural gateway for goods moving between Colombia and the American heartland. Agricultural commodities, energy products and manufactured goods flow south; Colombian items flow north. The infrastructure is already there. The relationship simply needs champions and a comprehensive strategy.
At a moment when Washington is rethinking trade relationships across the Western Hemisphere and looking to strengthen ties with reliable partners, Colombia stands out. Despite some bumps in the relationship between the Trump administration and the current Colombian president (who lost this week’s elections), it is a stable democracy, a long-standing ally and a country undergoing significant economic transformation. h, with its port infrastructure, its energy sector and its agricultural output, is uniquely positioned to deepen that partnership at the subnational level, city to city, port to port, festival stage to festival stage.
Carlos Vives singing about zydeco at the Fair Grounds; a Colombian diplomat meeting with the mayor of New Orleans; New Orleans being named one of UNESCO Creative Cities of Music in Bogotá: These are not coincidences, they are signals. The beat is already there. Carlos Vives heard it. The question is whether Louisian’s business and political leaders are listening too, and whether they’re ready to dance.