Tupac in their Veins: Hip-Hop Alteño and the Semiotics of Urban Indigeneity

On June 16, 1971 in east Harlem a young leader of the Black Panther Party, Afeni Shakur, gave birth to a baby boy who later in his life would become known to millions across the globe, as a performer, a rapper, a poet and a martyr. Tupac Shakur remains the hip-hop artist with the most albums sold world wide, more than 74 million—making his very name emblematic of hip-hop on a global scale. For Afeni Shakur, the name Tupac was also an emblem, a sign of antiracist, anticolonial resistance recognized by millions of Indigenous people across the Andes as the name of two anticolonial martyrs from the eighteenth century who led insurrections against Spanish colonialism—the Quechua Tupac Amaru the Second and the Aymara Tupac Katari (Hoye and Ali).

On that summer day in 1971, when this young revolutionary named her son Tupac, could she have imagined that within decades the descendents of her son’s namesake, the descendents of the Tupacs, in cities like El Alto, Bolivia, would look to her son for inspiration? In Hoye and Ali’s 2003 biography of Shakur, they quote him as having said, “I was named after this Inca chief whose name was Tupac Amaru . . . He was a deep dude. If I go to South America, they gonna love me. I’m telling you. They know Tupac” (Hoye and Ali 8). He wasn’t wrong.

One place where there is tremendous love for Tupac is El Alto, Bolivia. El Alto is one of Bolivia’s largest and youngest cities and home to a vibrant hip-hop scene. The panorama of Hip-Hop Alteño, or “El Alto Hip-Hop,” includes MCs who rhyme not only in Spanish, but also in the Aymara and Quechua languages, among which the Wayna Rap collective has occupied a prominent role.

Located on the Andean high plain at nearly four thousand meters above sea level, El Alto is a city populated by migrants from the surrounding countryside, primarily indigenous Aymara agriculturalists, making it home to the largest concentration of ethnically Aymara Bolivians (Albó; Arbona). This population includes nearly half of all Aymara speakers, the total population being nearly two and a half million people residing throughout the region surrounding Lake Titicaca and its adjacent valleys (Hardman; Albó). El Alto forms part of the larger El Alto-La Paz metropolitan area as a working-class bedroom community for its many residents who work in La Paz.

It is not strange that many of the children of Indigenous migrants to El Alto would identify with an African-American cultural expression given the shared social conditions of poverty, racism and discrimination faced by both groups. Despite forming the majority population of the La Paz region, Aymaras have faced political, economic, and cultural exclusion from the times of Spanish colonialism, through the republican period, and into the 21^st century. While advances have been made in recent years, anti-Aymara discrimination persists on the basis of phenotype, family name, and language, among other markers of ethnicity. Spanish spoken with traces of Aymara phonology (particularly the alternating of the vowels u and o, or e and i), for example, is highly stigmatized (Swinehart, “Enregisterment”). While the Aymara language can be heard in various public spaces in the city of El Alto, many Bolivians, Aymara or not, often typify the language and its speakers as rural and poor. A general trend has been for Aymara speakers to abandon Aymara for Spanish upon moving to the city, or for many males following military service, as a mark of linguistic upward mobility. It is against the backdrop of this multilingual social context so stratified along ethno-linguistic lines that these artists’ language choice is so striking. In this society where speech and language choice has long served as a widely scrutinized emblem of group affiliation, these masters of verbal art place the spoken word at the center of their work.

Hip-hop in Bolivia is a relatively recent phenomenon, having arrived through the introduction of pirated U.S. rap cassettes into local music...