Ra Jikotea Niaku’no Ruiz León is a kiwari (queer), vegan, mixed Taíno-Borikua dancer, singer, poet, organizer, and teaching artist from Boriken. Her work is focused on celebrating and promoting Indigenous Caribbean identity. She is the founder and director of the grassroots initiative “Wuru Taíno Tekiro’uo” (Proud Taíno School). Ra makes music in the Taíno language which can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube. She recently performed at the Indigenous Peoples’ Day event in Philadephia. She teaches Taíno language courses as well as “Intro to Taíno History, Language, and Culture”. She leads workshops and presentation for public schools, organizations, and universities. Ra is the host of “Taino Voices/Voces Tainxs”, a monthly virtual gathering that aims to showcase and celebrate the diversity of creativity in the Taino community by featuring different Taino community members. She leads a Taino poetry workshop called “Anaba Taino Poetry Circle”. She is also the creator of “Kiwari (queer) Taino Voices”- a growing archive of personal narratives by Kiwari Taino relatives. In the summer of 2023, Ra was a featured presenter and performer at the Reencuentro Taino Conference in Canovanas, Boriken. Ra
is an enrolled tribal member of Higuayagua and is also a member of the Hiwatahia Taino language team.
Ra has been a featured performer for the annual Indigenous Day of Remembrance event organized by the Taino activist, Luis Sanakori Ramos. She was also a member of the Indigenous group, Shorakapok Earth Keepers, a collective of volunteers who cared for the land at Inwood Hill Park in NYC.
Ra began spoken word as a struggling homeless youth competing in poetry slams across the so-called “United States” and was even featured in the New York Times multimedia project “1 in 8 Million”. Ra has led workshops for The Nuyorican Poets Café, Wesleyan University, The New School University, The Bowery Poetry Club, and many other venues and institutions.
—- With dance roots in the Afro-Indigenous Bomba y Plena, she has taught Flamenco, Salsa, and poetry as a Teaching Artist for various dance organizations such as Ballet Hispanico, Dance Wave, and Flamenco Vivo. In 2018, she worked on a piece mentored by Noche Flamenca’s Soledad Barrio and Martin Santangelo. In 2019, Ra participated in the Flamenco & Spanish Dance Program at Jacobs Pillow. She has also been a dancer for Flamenco Latino. During 2021 she was part of Flamenco Vivo’s Colmena Program. Inspired by her background in activism, she leads the initiative Flamenco Decolonized which presented in the summer of 2021 as part of the Flamenco History and Research Symposium at the Festival Flamenco Alburquerque. The presentation was a discussion between Phyllis Akinyi, Briseyda Zarate Hernandez, and Ra which was titled “Decolonizing My Flamenco: Invoking the Ancestors”.
During her senior year in college, Ra was accepted into the Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Summer Institute where she focused on Africana Studies and wrote her thesis on Afro-Indigenous Boricua Music and Spirituality as a young scholar at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She also studied poetry during a study abroad program at Universidad de la Rioja in northern Spain at the end of her junior year. She graduated from The New School University in 2011, after which she worked abroad in Spain as a teaching assistant. Currently, Ra and her partner reside between Humacao, Boriken and Manhattan, New York (Munsee-Lenape land) with their Borikua rescue pup.