Within a few minutes, I’d stripped the mango down to the white pit. I felt better. I rinsed my hands with a bit of water and opened the fizzy drink. Then we set out again. My whole body was slick with sweat, although I have to say I’ve readjusted to the feeling and it doesn’t bother me much anymore.

The students and the guide were up ahead. We re-joined the group for the last uphill stretch, taking the path through the Harmony Hall cemetery.

The road still smelled of mombin and the little orange fruits flooded the path from the narrow shoulder. Many were ripe and intact; others had been smashed under motorcycle wheels, a black paste smeared across the asphalt. I took a closer look at the rowdy group of kids. I heard them saying words I didn’t recognise: ‘makia, pri, bien makia’, they repeated. Not a single one seemed to be native and the age gap between us was undeniable now. Island-born, they’d grown up speaking their parents’ coastal Spanish. Many fit the category of champes, with their own style and idioms. Twenty years ago, there was no way you would see a group like this: many islanders all together at a university. No one, or almost no one, makes it to university in the company of another islander – not necessarily because of cultural differences, but because of the cost of going to the mainland. That’s how it was before the campus was built here, the university outreach programme. Here, some parents sell everything, breaking their backs so their kids can make it to the mainland; many do this, even some Raizals, in the hope that they’ll never return.

I find it sad that I can’t come up with a less-freighted word than ‘champe’ to describe the kids on our walk. It’s shameful, the need to summarise people this way, with nicknames born of bias. The word basically expresses disdain for village-dwellers and residents of Cartagena, for certain coastal Colombians. For the poor, that is, and for everything their popular culture represents: their champeta-music sound systems, their Carnival vallenato music, their sense of humour, their drama, their football. All of the above came over with the housekeepers, the labourers, the lottery ticket and fruit vendors, the shopgirls, the electricians, some taxi drivers. The working-class current flowed in with the Free Port, was isolated from everyone else and became an object of scorn. Now it’s everywhere: towards the top of the social pyramid, towards the bottom, beside and even inside you, inside me, as I heard myself say to Samuel that day on the beach: suave, vale, suave. It’s a known fact that Raizals like vallenato chillón music, plus champeta and other rhythms that have no connection to island Caribbean life; ranchera, for example.