Soy Lalif: Narrating the Pacific without asking for permission
A voice of one's own from the territory
Before there was a profile with thousands of followers, there was a river. Lali Fernando Riascos was born in the rural hamlet of Bolita, along the Tapaje River, in the municipality of El Charco, Nariño, in the heart of the Colombian Pacific. His childhood did not take place on a film set or in a newsroom: it unfolded amidst the forced displacement, poverty, and armed violence that impacted his family and much of his community.
That starting point is not just a decorative biographical detail. It is the raw material for everything that followed.
A territory that teaches how to speak
The Colombian Pacific is one of the regions with the greatest cultural wealth and biodiversity in the country, and also one of the hardest hit by state abandonment and conflict. Its rivers are not just scenery: they are routes, pantries, cemeteries, and festivals. The oral tradition that Lali learned as a child—stories told in the kitchen, corner jokes, songs from patron saint festivals—later became his main communication tool.
Part of his childhood was also spent in Guapi, Cauca, where his family arrived driven by the conflict. That transition between Nariño and Cauca gave him something few communicators possess: an insider, non-touristic view of what it means to grow up on the coast.
- Two river ports of the Nariño Pacific
- Choose a destination to view its position on the coastline, the navigable route from the mouth, and its territorial fact sheet.
- Destination selector
- Tapaje River / El Charco
- Nariño · northern coast
- Guapi
- Cauca · river mouth
- Stylized map of the Pacific coastline between Nariño and Cauca
- Tapaje River
- Guapi River
- El Charco
- 1 masl · Nariño
- Cauca · estuary
- Pacific Ocean
- ~ 60 km
- Navigable rivers
- Straight-line distance
- — km
- Between El Charco and Guapi.
- Main river
- Municipality
- Outline of the Pacific coastline between the departments of Nariño and Cauca. Distances and altitudes are approximate and serve for comparison, not for navigation.
- El Charco, at the mouth of the Tapaje River
- Municipal seat of El Charco, in northern Nariño. This town is reached by river or air; roads do not connect directly. The Tapaje River is the only cargo route into the interior of the municipality and exits to the ocean through a narrow mouth that forces boats to wait for the tide.
- Navigable by shallow-draft boats.
- El Charco, Nariño
- Just over 1 m above sea level.
- Tapaje
- Narrow river mouth
- Tide as a clock
- Guapi, among estuaries and mangroves
- Municipality of Cauca in the delta of the Guapi River. The town center sits on an estuary surrounded by mangroves and depends on the river and the air bridge to connect with Popayán and Buenaventura. Artisanal fishing and piangua harvesting sustain a large part of its economy.
- Runs parallel to the coast before emptying.
- Guapi, Cauca
- Settled on an estuary with mangroves.
- Delta and estuaries
- Fishing and piangua
- Distance between the two municipal seats
- Estimated flight over the coastline.
From the community to the screen
Lali did not come to social media looking for fame. He arrived looking for a megaphone. His career is marked by using communication to make the realities of the Pacific visible and to narrate social, cultural, and political issues from the perspective of Afro-descendant communities. He describes his work as social, cultural, and political content, and has collaborated with journalistic media to amplify those voices.
Before being recognized as an influencer, he was a member of the Communication Network for Children, Adolescents, and Youth of Guapi, a youth training and organizational space where he learned to turn his community's concerns into public messages. In 2021, he represented Colombia at the One Young World summit, a global gathering of young leaders.
That background matters because it dismantles a convenient notion: the idea that a content creator "comes out of nowhere" when a video goes viral. In Lali's case, viral fame came after years of community work, not before.
Everyday humor and community reinterpretation
If there is one thing that sets Soy Lalif's content apart, it is that it makes people laugh. But it is not cheap laughter: it is laughter born from recognizing something familiar.
Lali uses costumbrismo—scenes from daily life, typical characters, recurring situations—as an entry point. An exaggerated accent, an aunt who speaks loudly, a neighbor who has an opinion on everything: these elements act as winks of complicity for those who live them, and as windows for those who do not. Comedy does not dilute the message; it makes it digestible for audiences who might otherwise not engage with uncomfortable topics.
Why does humor work as a strategy for visibility?
Because it lowers the barrier to entry. A viewer who laughs is willing to listen to what comes next. Humor does not replace the message: it carries it.
The local as a universal language
There is a tension every regional creator faces: if you speak too locally, you are accused of "not being universal"; if you speak too generically, you lose what makes you unique. Lali resolved that tension by betting on the opposite of what the manual dictates: the more specific, the more it connects.
A Pacific cooking recipe, told with proper names and recognizable scents, goes further than an abstract speech about diversity. Specificity does not exclude: it invites. The viewer who does not know the Pacific gets a glimpse through a window; the one who knows it sees themselves reflected.
- From a loose idea to the territory
- Choose a way to tell the same story and see how the connection with the reader changes.
- Storytelling mode
- Mode A
- Abstract story
- Mode B
- Situated story
- The community organized
- to solve its problems.
- Empathy
- How much the audience identifies.
- Retention
- How much they remember the next day.
- Recognition
- How much they recognize as their own.
- Abstract
- Abstract story:
- nouns are generic ("the community", "the problems"). The audience sees no faces, trades, or landscapes. Without sensory anchors, the story is quickly forgotten.
I have a thousand reasons not to be optimistic and yet, I smile.
Lali Fernando Riascos — Entrevista en Los Informantes, Caracol Televisión
That phrase, which served as the title for a journalistic profile about him, nicely sums up his stance: it is not naive optimism, but a conscious decision to keep telling stories despite the context.
Challenging the stereotypes of the Pacific
For decades, the dominant image of the Colombian Pacific in national media was built on three or four clichés: poverty, violence, exotic folklore. The region appeared in the news when there was a massacre or a natural disaster, and in advertising when a colorful postcard was needed. Little else.
Lali works against that narrowness. His content shows the region as a place of thought, humor, political dispute, complex gastronomy, and daily life, not just as a stage for tragedies or drums for tourists.
- Two ways of telling the story of the same territory
- Toggle to see how the keywords change, who has agency, and how the inhabitants are named.
- Story comparator
- Traditional media narrative
- Narrative from the territory
- Hegemonic media narrative
- Keywords
- Violence
- Poverty
- Drug trafficking
- State abandonment
- Crisis
- Who has agency?
- Armed actors, the central State, and national media. The community appears as a passive victim or a statistic in a headline.
- How inhabitants are named
- "Displaced", "vulnerable population", "red zone". They are spoken of in the third person and in the past tense.
- River
- Territory
- Autonomy
- Memory
- Good living
- Community councils, elder women, youth who plant. The community decides, cares, and proposes.
- "We", "our river", "those who care". They speak in the first person and in the present continuous.
- The same river, two grammars. Notice what becomes visible and what disappears when changing the narrative.
| Hegemonic narrative | Narrative from the territory |
|---|---|
| The region appears only in crisis | The region appears every day |
| Inhabitants are passive victims | Inhabitants are subjects with a voice |
| Culture is reduced to folklore | Culture is memory, politics, and knowledge |
| The narrator is external | The narrator is part of the community |
Dignity, not exoticism
There is a subtle but decisive difference between showing a culture and exhibiting it. The former recognizes people as interlocutors; the latter turns them into an attraction. Lali deliberately moves in the former territory.
This implies concrete decisions: not ridiculing one's own accent, not turning poverty into a spectacle, not talking about the community in the third person as if he were not a part of it. His content makes those who expect only a postcard from the Pacific uncomfortable, and precisely for that reason, it works.
- Who holds the camera changes what is seen
- Extractive external gaze
- Self-representation with one's own voice
- Framing: extractive external gaze or community self-representation
- Scene of a community viewed by a camera that changes framing
- Who names
- An outside team decides what to show and what to cut out.
- What becomes visible
- The picturesque and the lacking. The rest of the neighborhood stays outside the frame.
- Agency
- The community poses for someone else. It does not decide the narrative.
- Move the dial: the same scene changes its framing, who appears, and who writes the caption.
- The neighborhood assembly writes and signs the script.
- The neighbors negotiate with an editor who still sets the tone.
- The trade workshop, the community kitchen, and the community's own photographic archive.
- More trades and more voices appear, but the final cut is still made outside.
- The community decides what is filmed, who speaks, and how it is edited.
- There are local voices, with less power over the editing.
- Community gaze
- External gaze
- Trade workshop
- Picturesque facade
Cuisine and oral tradition as living memory
In the Pacific, cooking is not a secondary topic. It is an archive. A recipe holds the route of a river, the name of a grandmother, the technique learned without writing it down. When Lali talks about food, he is talking about the transmission of knowledge.
Viche, panela (sweet cane sugar), coconut, smoked fish: each ingredient carries a history of commerce, migration, and resistance. Naming them with precision is a way of stating that this culture has a system, not just flavor.
The spoken word as technology
Before writing, the memory of the Pacific was sustained by the voice. Décimas, lullabies, jokes, advice, scoldings: oral tradition was the operating system of a region that for a long time lacked access to official publishing channels.
Lali translates that oral tradition into digital format without domesticating it. He does not "whiten" it to sound neutral, nor does he translate it into generic Spanish. He lets it sound the way it sounds in Guapi, in El Charco, in the homes where he grew up. That aesthetic decision is also a political decision.
- From the lullaby in the courtyard
- · how a verse goes viral
- Animation: sound waves in a riverside house transform into digital pulses that spread across the network.
- 1 · Body
- Voice and clapping in the courtyard
- 2 · Capture
- A cell phone records the décima
- 3 · Network
- Each node repeats and changes
- 4 · New voice
- The verse returns to the courtyard, now changed
- The same verse is copied, corrected, and signed differently with each leap: oral tradition gains reach, but no longer has a single owner.
- node
- Infancia · Domestic oral tradition
Learn the stories, jokes, and recipes in the kitchen and on the street, between Bolita and Guapi.
- Juventud · Guapi Communicative Network
Trains in community communication alongside other young people from the territory.
- 2021 · One Young World
Represents Colombia at the global summit of young leaders.
- 2022 en adelante · Digital consolidation
His content about the Pacific reaches national and international audiences.
Between social critique and digital visibility
There is a question that runs through all of Lali's work: can you celebrate a culture while at the same time denouncing what threatens it? His answer is that not only can you: it is mandatory to do so.
Celebrating without denouncing produces folklore. Denouncing without celebrating produces pity. Lali tries to sustain both things at once: he shows the joy of a celebration and also the state neglect that leaves that celebration without a nearby hospital. He talks about gastronomic wealth and also about the poverty that pushes young people to migrate.
- The scale of narrative dignity
- Move the pointer between the two extremes. In the center appears dignity: telling of pain without turning it into a spectacle, celebrating culture without erasing the wound.
- Celebration only
- Pointer
- Denunciation only
- Position of the scale's pointer, from celebration to denunciation
- Scale with two plates: celebration and denunciation
- Celebration
- Denunciation
- Folklore covers up the wound. Culture shines and the cause disappears from the narrative.
- Narrative dignity
- Culture is told along with its conflict. The victim appears with a voice, not as proof.
- The story revolves around the damage. The audience looks at the pain without seeing the person.
- Balance
- Celebration only: the conflict disappears from the narrative.
- Narrative dignity: culture and its wound are told.
- Denunciation only: the pain overshadows the person.
- Close to pure celebration: folklore without context.
- Close to pure denunciation: revictimization.
- When celebrating erases the conflict, the community is represented without its real history.
- The midpoint sustains both things at once: cultural pride and the truth of what happened.
- When denouncing exhibits the damage, the person is reduced to their suffering.
| Thematic presence | |
|---|---|
| Afro identity | 95 |
| Territory and peace | 85 |
| Racism | 80 |
| Culture and kitchen | 75 |
| Armed conflict | 70 |
Discomfort as a method
In 2024, Lali publicly responded to a columnist who had stated that there were "Blacks to show off and Blacks to hide." His response was not an insult: it was an argument. That episode consolidated him as a voice that does not shy away from confrontation when his community's dignity is at stake.
That type of intervention shows something important: digital visibility is not just entertainment. It is a platform from which the public narrative can be contested regarding who deserves to be heard and on what terms.
The impact and evolution of Soy Lalif
By 2026, Lali Fernando Riascos's public presence is no longer limited to social media. He has been recognized by Forbes as one of the 30 young Colombians changing the world, has participated in international forums on sustainability and education, and has been highlighted by RAP Pacífico for his work in community communication.
His evolution shows a pattern: he began by narrating his territory, then narrated his region, and today he participates in national and international conversations on representation, peace, and development. The megaphone grew, but the message remains anchored in the same place.
Three keys to Soy Lalif's work
What his trajectory leaves behind
The story of Soy Lalif is not just the story of a successful creator. It is the demonstration that historically silenced communities do not need anyone to speak for them: they need access to the channels. When they obtain it, the result is not just visibility. It is narrative power.
- The media network is reorganizing
- Five coastal nodes broadcast toward the center of public conversation
- Network of local nodes flowing toward the center of public conversation
- Local nodes
- Radios, portals, and local correspondents previously left off the national map.
- Center of conversation
- The public agenda becomes a meeting point for contributions that no longer depend on a single broadcasting network.
- Flow in transit
- Each traveling pulse is a local contribution that reaches the center and reorganizes what is discussed.
- Previously, a handful of stations decided what circulated. With decentralization, the agenda is built by adding contributions born in the territory.
- Agenda
- public
And that power, once exercised, is never given back.
Sources
References
- El Tiempo. "Lali Riascos: 'I have a thousand reasons not to be optimistic and yet I smile.'"
- Interview with Lali Fernando Riascos about his communicative work in the Colombian Pacific.
- Colombia Visible. «Twelve Colombian influencers with social impact».
- Los Informantes, Caracol Televisión. «Lali Riascos, the voice of the Pacific».
- 90 Minutos. «Lalif, with his Afro voice from the Colombian Pacific».
- Infobae. «Afro-Colombian influencer responded to columnist Diego Martínez Lloreda».
- RAP Pacífico. «RAP Pacífico awarded 4 leaders for territorial development».