Reactions to Karl Swinehart’s “Tupac in their Veins: Hip-Hop Alteño and the Semiotics of Urban Indigeneity”

In taking up a commentary format that we use at the annual conference of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational Histories of the Americas, the editors of this volume hope to offer readers a bit of the unique ethos and onda of the conference. This hope is, I think, both impossible and necessary. Impossible, because commentary at the Tepoztlán Institute conference is part of a particular kind of performative event: we speak our comments to a group of people who have assembled in the moment, a group that in turn immediately takes up those comments and reworks them into another, collective performance. What is more, in any given panel there are multiple papers, placed alongside each other by our program committee and read ahead of time by (it is hoped) all those attending the panel, and thus there are also multiple commentaries. Add to this palimpsest a week’s worth of panels, informal discussions, meals and—the grand performance—our mid-week cabaret, and you have something approaching an unreproduceable event. At times this creative cacophony generates a marvelous, improvised resonance; at other times, it sounds more like gears grinding. Written comments in a journal cannot reproduce the particular performativity of such an event, or the resonant eventfulness of such a performance. The improv temporality of the conference contrasts sharply with a journal’s writerly mode. Journals are also driven by a different sort of ethos, one governed more strictly by institutional and disciplinary practices and performed by more tightly controlled collectivities, the very practices and collectivities that the Tepoztlán Institute seeks to evade and rework. Nonetheless, the material in this volume will also have generated other sorts of events and performances, ones that cannot be fully predicted or controlled. In this sense, then, the editors’ hope is necessary, and we can hope with them that readers will perform—perhaps even purloin—this special issue in ways that do not conform to the collective strictures of institutional and disciplinary governance. That hope may fail. But as I have suggested, sometimes the Tepoztlán Institute conference also fails: the gears of commentary refuse to engage the papers, the discussion goes nowhere. Failure would seem to be a constitutive risk of the event as such, perhaps even a necessary element. Different performances, different events, different risks; and yet, still, performances, events, and risks, in the name of a hope at once impossible and necessary.

Karl Swinehart’s “Tupac in their Veins: Hip-Hop Alteño and the Semiotics of Urban Indigeneity” has much to teach us about these structures of performance, event, and risk. Drawing on historical, musicological, and cultural-anthropological methodologies, he offers a rich and detailed account of the “cultural politics in which the legacies of Tupac Amaru, Tupak Katari, and Tupak Shakur converge” (81), a convergence that in turn “illuminates the changing conditions of indigeneity in contemporary Bolivian society” (81). Specifically, he shows how contemporary raperos in the Bolivian city of El Alto mix rap and hip-hop from the U.S. with Bolivian musical styles to create a politicized soundtrack of and for the region’s social and political conditions. What is more, Swinehart shows how Bolivian hip-hop generates collectivities that are at once profoundly collaborative and fraught with tensions. One tension in particular occupies the essay: for some in El Alto, “mention of ‘raperos Aymaras’ served as a cue to begin a lament of the younger generation’s cultural loss, confusion and delinquency…[and] of continued encroachment of Aymara society by foreign influence and accompanying social problems” (81), whereas for others Alteño hip-hop’s “evident cosmopolitanism” (“these youth read Spanish language hip-hop magazines, received from friends and family abroad…they maintain Myspace, Facebook, YouTube and other social media and networking accounts… they post videos on YouTube…” (82)) is a salutary feature of Bolivian youth culture. Swinehart singles out Alteño hip-hop’s sharp critique of the national state’s policies and the abutment of those policies by international capital during the 2003 “Gas War,” a...