Irka Mateo is a Dominican singer, songwriter and percussionist from Santo Domingo whose four-decade career has centered on reviving the island’s Taíno indigenous heritage alongside its Afro-Dominican folk traditions.

After Convite

She came up in the wave of fusion musicians who followed Luis Días and his band Convite in studying the folk music of rural bateyes, the sugarcane-plantation communities, alongside Xiomara Fortuna and Tone Vicioso, later melding those rhythms with rock, blues and jazz.

A discography built on Taíno memory

Her albums — «Tres Américas» (1996), «Anacaona» (2009, named for the Taíno cacica executed by Spanish colonizers) and «Vamo a Gozá» (2017), developed with the Brazilian composer and arranger Tadeu Demarco — trace her research into pre-Columbian and syncretic Dominican spirituality. «Vamo a Gozá» premiered at Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium in New York before a 2018 Dominican tour.

Recognition

She was a guest vocalist on «El Orisha de la Rosa», the Colombian folk elder Magín Díaz’s album nominated for Best Folk Album at the 2017 Latin Grammy Awards, and the Indigenous Caribbean Network’s Taíno Awards named her their first-ever Musician of the Year before honoring her again as Woman of the Year in 2025.

Legacy

Now based in Los Angeles, where she continues her ceremonial and cultural work under the name Sacred Taíno Healing and researches the reconstruction of pre-Hispanic Taíno ceramic instruments, Irka Mateo remains one of the clearest living links between Dominican popular music and the island’s indigenous past.