Since 2006, Josefina Klinger (Nuquí, Chocó, 60 years old) has run Mano Cambiada, a company which above all promotes solidarity relationships to sow social development for the inhabitants of the Pacific. One hundred families have benefited directly from the impulse that Klinger generates from the organization, and another 9,000 indirectly, because “what moves in Nuquí always generates changes in other families in neighboring territories, such as Bahía Solano. In the Pacific, everything works in a focused way,” he says.
She is proud to say that she is also the director of the Colombian Pacific Migration Festival, an event that, by celebrating the natural wealth of the Gulf of Tribugá, one of the most biodiverse places in the world, has empowered the community and transformed its vision. “The festival celebrates life and promotes a different paradigm among the new generation: instead of poverty, exclusion and victimization, it speaks of shared responsibility, ancestral values, empathy and concern for the common,” he explains.
This year alone, the Nuquí event brought together 150 women from different municipalities and indigenous communities, more than 400 children from all over the region, 100 elderly people and 250 young people, in addition to the volunteer public who participate in the academic spaces. Each year, the latter have a concept that inspires them: in 2024 it was “feeling different to be different” and in 2025 “taking care of yourself to decide”. “As humanity, we must make changes if we want to achieve different outcomes. And we must strengthen the practice of care, not only for ourselves, but also for the extended family,” says Klinger.
Klinger’s road has been long. She says she has her navel stuck in Nuquí. She was born there, on the beaches of Chocó in the North Pacific, where Narcisa Zúñiga, her mother, gave birth to her before taking her to Panama until she was 5 years old. “When I came back, I went to live in Quibdó with my father and his wife; I had many brothers, so everything was shared by the closest affections. I started working at 7 years old, because I earned everything that way.”
Already young, he went to Nuquí to find his mother, his first child was born there and he returned to Quibdó because, he thought at the time, nothing was happening in Nuquí. “That’s what I thought, that the failures stayed there.” With the lack of support that accompanied her for many years and with two children, she looked for opportunities, getting up before sunrise and going to bed only after leaving the children asleep. He was looking for ways to enter the public sector in this capital. “But there was a terrible practice in this sector: if women wanted to progress, they had to sleep with their boss. I never accepted that. I was always rebellious about it,” she remembers.
Without a professional alternative, he returned to Nuquí with the ghost that it was the land of chess. Her goal was to find a tourist who would hire her as a housekeeper: “It was the only thing I thought I could aspire to so that my children wouldn’t go hungry. » With the promise of working for only six months, she found a tourist who hired her: “It was at that time that something happened. I began to see Nuquí in a different way, because when the territory offers possibilities, we stay. A vocation was awakened in me that will accompany me until the day I die: the permanent search for the common good. This is how he managed to form a community movement that promotes the development of the territory.
Nuquí: the strength he inherited
There is an idea that Klinger has championed ever since: that the common good cannot be disrupted by favoring the individual. “What we have wanted to do for almost 20 years in Mano Cambiada is to demonstrate that Nuquí is not a hotel with a city. Thanks to the work of the entire community, we have made our territory a destination of social strength that goes beyond the stories marked by the violence that crossed the Colombian Pacific,” he says.
Thanks to Klinger’s work, which earned her Cafam Chocó Woman recognition in 2015, the way of building territorial sovereignty and nurturing more dimensions of the economy has been strengthened. Each family has a role, “from those who sell fuel for boats, to those who buy it; to those who rent the boat, to those who sell the fish. This is done to give solidity to an idea: the territory is defended by everyone.” It was under this maxim that he took charge of the Migration Festival.
Migration Festival, the joy that sustains Klinger
Klinger closed his eyes in front of the Nuquí Sea. I had waited hours for the whales to appear, but the water was calm. Then she placed her hands on her chest and asked that if in a past life she had harmed a whale in these same waters, she would be forgiven, allowed to be there, in peace, among them. When he finished the prayer and opened his eyes, a distant song crossed the horizon. “A whale answered me,” she said, referring to one of her greatest prides: the Colombian Pacific Migration Festival.
Since 2010, he has taken over the coordination of this event. Previously, what was known about Nuquí came from stories other than those of the region. “The external narrative has always wanted to define our history and our destiny,” he says. But that has changed: with the festival, the inhabitants tell the story of their territory, always guided by the oldest compass in the region: the song of the whales, “which is the way of telling the world that we have a place and a voice”.
The Colombian Pacific has always been wounded by armed violence, dispossession and inequality, ingredients of a banquet of wounds that Klinger seeks to evoke with the festival: “Hate is disempowering. The festival is about unpacking it and creating a narrative that gives power to our story,” she says.
The Colombian Pacific Migration Festival celebrates the biodiversity of this region of the country – whales, birds, turtles, mangroves – and the cultural strength of its inhabitants. It takes place in the last week of August each year and is positioned as a striking and informative tourist experience through art, whale watching and a visit to the Utría National Park.
The event is a commitment for children and young people in the Pacific to grow up as stewards of the natural wealth of their territory, as Klinger points out: “We have managed to significantly reduce the consumption of turtles; our children and young people live in a much gentler way with the whales” and, according to what he says, they have understood the role they have as bearers of ancestral heritage.
Every day, Josefina Klinger looks at the long slab of ocean and closes her eyes to find new ways to live with the whales that arrive every year, and so that their song brings Nuquí back with her own voice and her own story. She considers that from this detail – listening to the whales – her vocation was born: working with her people to protect Nuquí.
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