Nueva Yorkinos: Escúchela, la ciudad respirando: Sound Selecting and Land Tending with Sunny Cheeba
There are few sound selectors as intentional and as in love with the craft as Sunny Cheeba. A Boricua Bronxite, Sunny’s love for community and culture shines through all she does. A co-founder of Uptown Vinyl Supreme, a Bronx based DJ collective and community organization paying homage to the analog roots of music, party, and dance culture, Sunny’s love of collecting records and playing them began in 2015 after purchasing her first record—Angela Bofill’s self titled album Angie—from a street vendor on 161st and Gerard Avenue, across the street from Yankee Stadium. Ten years later, you can find her spinning at clubs and parties across the five boroughs, transforming dance floors into sacred spaces.
An artist, archeologist, and archivist, Sunny uses her hands to dig through crates and tend to the land. In the Bronx, Sunny serves the community through the Kelly Street Garden and New Roots Farm in the South Bronx. In 2017, she began her farming journey, attending Farm School NYC as a means to learn about herself, take care of her and the community’s health, and as a means to begin developing a relationship of reciprocity with the land. Recently, her, her partner, and a cohort of loved ones founded Ceiba Arbor, a collective of multidisciplinary QTBIPOC artists and urban farmers from NYC who are actively building resilience through community in the face of displacement, homelessness and food apartheid. Over the past decade, these farmers have nurtured a vision of a cooperative grounded in sustainability, and are currently cultivating 16 acres of land in Salem, CT to help actualize their collective vision.
From music to the land, Sunny sees these two aspects of her life as both inseparable and divinely interconnected. Both DJing and farming are conduits of mind-body-spirit connection, tools for healing, and pathways toward liberation. Whether working the land in Salem or preparing for a DJ set in Brooklyn, Sunny remains firmly rooted in the Bronx: a borough that, despite its continuous disenfranchisement, has remained a beacon of creativity. A multidimensional force to be reckoned with, we speak with Sunny about her love of music, archeology, and lessons she’s learned from the land.
- Nueva Yorkinos
