TED Talks Daily - Sunday Pick: An Indigenous Mixtape from Lima, Peru

Episode Date: October 6, 2024

Meet Liberato Kani, a hip hop artist in Lima, Peru—or as he says, “the Andean Bronx”. At his concerts, a typical call and response you hear is "Quechua es resistencia": Quechua is resistance. Though Quechua is spoken by nearly ten million people, Peru's native language is at risk of dying off because of anti-indigenous prejudice. Liberato and other musicians like Renata Flores are here to save it—and restore a country's pride while they're at it. Want to talk more about the show? Share your favorite artist from this episode with host Saleem Reshamwala (@Kidethnic) on Twitter. This episode features music and interviews from Liberato Kani, Renata Flores, Kayfex, and Uchpa's guitarist and songwriter Marcos Maizel. Listen to more from these artists on TED's Spotify playlist, "Quechua es Resistencia.”Pindrop is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Nuzum of Magnificent Noise for TED. Our production staff includes Elyse Blennerhassett, Oscar Durand, Kim Nederveen Pieterse, Sabrina Farhi, Hiwote Getaneh, Angela Cheng, and Michelle Quint, with the guidance of Roxanne Hai Lash and Colin Helms. Additional recordings by Whitney Henry-Lester and Hernando Suarez. Translation and transcription by Hernando Suárez, Eilis O’Neill, and Oscar Durand. This episode was mixed and sound designed by Kristin Mueller. 

TED Audio Collective. Hi, I'm Elise Hu, host of TED Talks Daily. Here's an episode from Far Flung with Salim Rashamwala, another podcast from TED. In each episode, host Salim Rashamwala journeys across the globe to find the most surprising ideas from each place. We're about to go to Peru, where a native language spoken by 10 million people is at risk of dying off. But musicians

are taking part in a cool resistance to try and save it. For the first full season, find Far Flung wherever you listen to podcasts. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do. And with

the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at I'm Salim Rashamwala, and from TED, this is Far Flung. In each episode, we visit a different city to understand ideas that flow from that place. This week, Lima, Peru. And we're here following young Peruvian musicians who are trying to prove that their Andean culture isn't just history. It's the future. So they're remixing it. Oh, and shout out to Marriott Hotels for sponsoring this episode.

Basically, this week's episode is a Quechua language mixtape. And this mixtape starts with... Track one, introducing Liberado Connie! Yeah, that's clearly not my voice. I'm getting some mixtape hosting help from my friend DJ Just John. Okay, here we go. That's Liberado Cane, emceeing at the National Theater here in Lima this past February. He's rapping in a mix of Spanish

and Quechua. If you haven't heard of Quechua, that's kind of the point. It's the most widely spoken indigenous language in Latin America. About 10 million people speak it. And Liberado's bringing it to people in a whole new way. His MC name, Liberado Cani, means I am a free man. And a call and response you hear throughout his concerts is... Quechua is resistance. I met Liberado while in Lima, Peru, and I was in Lima on this totally non-far-flung gig filming young rappers and beatmakers,

which I've been doing on and off for the past seven years all over the world. Anyway, I've always been interested in ways music leads to cultural mashups, like Quechua and hip-hop, and how that intersects with identity and the way people feel about themselves. And when it comes to documenting hip-hop, it's always a cool story when different languages and traditions get mixed into the music, but it's kind of hard to tell what that mixing means. What does it mean when someone is rapping in their ancestral language? How does that relate to a language living or dying? And how is all that culturally significant,

politically significant? Basically, when does it lead to change? On its face, it might seem like the fight for Quechua is about Lima's pride in their past. And that's true, but there's another crucial thing at stake here. It's the ability for Andean culture to survive and to evolve into the future. So to get the significance of what Liberado is doing, we need to start with some background on Quechua. But you don't hear much Quechua outside of the countryside in Peru.

Ever since colonization, Spanish has been the dominant language of government, business, education, really life in general. And there's, of course, all kinds of cultural implications with that as well. In Liberado's music, though, you don't hear any of that hierarchy. He's swapping between languages constantly and letting Quechua lead the way on hooks and his call and responses. He's young, but he's like a classic 90s hip hop head. And when we hung out, he seemed really comfortable in his skin and sincere about everything. Oh, and heads up, we were talking in Spanish in most of this interview, so you'll hear some overdub in English. Track two, deep in the Andean Bronx. This is chicha morada, made from purple corn.

It's very delicious. From corn, you can even make chicha de jora. It is incredible. Okay, so we're walking down a long street. We've been walking for a little bit. We are eating a kind of Peruvian popcorn, canchita. And we're drinking a purple corn-based drink. Chincha morada. It's kind of balmy out here.

It's not that hot. Yeah, again, noisy sirens. Lima is a cultural hub. For Peruvians, it's like they're LA and New York matched into one. About 10 million people live here and the population's growing. While we were walking through downtown Lima, Liberato told me that when he went to New York to perform for the first time in 2018, a lot of what he saw reminded him of home in unusual ways. He told a crowd that he realized he was like a rapper from the Andean Bronx.

They loved it. You know, he's a rapper, so he's good with metaphor. And there's something very hip-hop about his life experience. He grew up in a world that was hostile to his identity, specifically his Andean Quechua-speaking identity.

So Liberado rapping in Quechua flowed great to my ear. As someone who didn't have a lot of linguistic and cultural context, it's just good sounds. But sometimes locals were shocked to hear the language mixed into hip-hop. Track three, welcome to the donkey belly sky. And one of those locals is my friend Oscar Durand. He's producing and basically co-hosting this episode with me. Oscar grew up in Lima in the 80s and first left Peru in 2002 to study and live abroad as a photojournalist.

The first time that I heard Liberato's music, I was surprised. You know, it was not the first time I heard Quechua. I heard it when I was in Peru, obviously. But it was the first time that I heard someone rapping in Quechua. And it was a new context for the language, a different energy. So I knew that I had to meet this guy. Tell me the story, man. I wasn't there. So, you know, I already heard about him. So I was really curious about his story because,

you know, as a journalist, you know, I have my antennas, you know, always scanning for interesting stories. So last time when I was visiting Peru, I was there for work. I sent Liberato a message about meeting up. And he told me, oh, you know, I have this concert. Why don't you come? I couldn't make it. But, you know, him and his band were playing at this rehearsal space. So I just went and met him. Then we started chatting.

And it was just such a great energy because I felt like I knew these guys forever. And then they start playing. And it was just one of the most amazing experiences I had in Peru because it was like I had this concert just for myself. Yeah, but what was it about him that shocked locals? I mean, there's great musicians in Peru for sure. So what was it about Liberado that made him stand out? Well, it's very surprising to hear

Quechua and Lima because when I was growing up, Quechua was not really around me. In school, I remember Quechua being mentioned in our history class when we were talking about the Inca Empire and our glory days. But those days are long gone and many people would not associate Quechua with innovation or success. People connected it to being poor, uneducated, and backwards. It is sad. So to hear Quechua mixed with hip-hop, and to see how proud Liberato was to rap in Quechua, it was just the last thing I would have expected, especially in Lima. Okay, so I'm still trying to understand why there's this stigma against Quechua in Lima. I mean, although Quechua is one of Peru's official languages, the way you're describing things there, it doesn't seem that way. Can you give me some

historical context here? What was Lima like when you were growing up? Well, Lima used to be a totally different place. I remember feeling like we were one of the worst countries in the world. One of the worst countries in the world? Oscar, man, how so? Well, politically, economically, and socially, everything was a mess. Even the sky was, like, against us. In Lima, we call it panza de burro, donkey belly sky. Lima is a desert, but it's also a coastal city near a mountain range. The fog comes off the ocean and just hovers over Lima endlessly. So everything starts to feel kind of static, gray,

depressing. You're making it sound really dark. Was there anything positive that Lima was known for? But honestly, at the time, not really. Argentina is known for its soccer, Chile for their wine, but we were known for hyperinflation, a broken economy, terrorism. There was not much to be proud of. Almost everything native, indigenous, Andean was seen as negative and low class and everything European, white, foreign was seen as the best. Yeah, man, you see that in so many countries with a colonial past. So, you know, basically just not a lot of Peruvian pride at the time. No, not at all. Life was stressful.

It wasn't safe or easy to travel because we were in the middle of a violent conflict. I remember doing my homework by candlelight because of the electricity blackouts caused by terrorists blowing up electric towers. These two violent groups were trying to overthrow the government, and the conflict hit the countryside really hard. Something like 600,000 people fled to Lima and other cities to escape. But Lima wasn't the most welcoming place for Peruvians from the countryside. Why do you think they weren't welcomed? Well, a lot of people who migrated to Lima from the countryside were looked down on. The more Peruvian you seemed, like speaking Quechua or having darker skin,

people assumed that you were backwards, that you were a poor farmer from the countryside, or even worse, they suspected that you were a terrorist. But some people tried to blend in by hiding or even giving up their culture or language, like Quechua. So in all that, where does someone like Liberato get his pride from? So I was wondering the same thing when I met Liberato, because I noticed when I came back that it wasn't just Liberato who was proud of his identity.

It's like there was this wave of pride across Peru. And I think this pride in being Peruvian actually started with our food. There was this gastronomic boom that happened after I left. And actually, Peru has been named the best culinary destination in the world for the past eight years. So all this new attention really did change the way we Peruvians look at ourselves. I mean, indigenous ingredients that people used to look down on are now superfoods. It's interesting. So now that Peru had this state of being the best at something with food, it's like suddenly Lima and Peruvian culture were on trend.

Yeah. I mean, at least on the foodie magazines, we were on trend. But, you know, once I heard Liberato music, I wonder if being cool in this moment was actually more than just a passing trend. You know, like, were things actually changing in a deeper way for all of us Peruvians? Yeah, so Oscar and I had a lot of similar questions. And all these questions come up in Liberado's own life story. So here's some of that story. I'm going to hand this off to Oscar and Liberado.

Track four. Who do you think you are, Mr. Big Headed? Well, I was born in Lima, in Peru's capital. But when I was nine years old, sadly, my mother left this world very early and my grandmother called me to live with her in Apurimac. So I traveled from Lima to the mountains for the first time when I was eight years old or so, and I lived there for three years. When Liberato got there, he found all recordings from his grandfather and realized he came from a long line of musicians.

His grandfather even had a little shop that became a popular hangout spot for local artists. Unfortunately, my grandfather passed away. Because of the social conflict here, he was killed by an armed group. My grandfather's legacy, his songs, everything was left to my father. And my father is the evolution of my grandfather. My grandfather sings very beautifully himself. You have to hear him. There is a song that goes... So although Liberato's grandfather had passed,

Liberato was able to hear his voice on a cassette tape his father gave him. The recording was from 1978. When I listened back to the cassette, it almost made me want to cry because in the tape, a man interrupts my grandfather in the recording and says, hey, hey, hey,

this song is a farewell. It was almost like a premonition of his grandfather's death and all this made him want a richer connection to his history and culture. But when Liberato first came from Lima, it wasn't the smoothest transition. He didn't speak Quechua like the other kids in school.

But when I began interacting with my classmates in grade school, they started to make jokes that I didn't like. At first, I didn't know how to answer back because they would say, for example, masapa or chapisata, jokes that were like insults. So I didn't like that because they would say, for example, masapa or chapisata, jokes that were like insults. So I didn't like that because they'd say something to me and everyone would laugh. I wanted to be in on the joke so I wasn't the butt of the joke. Basically, everyone made fun of him. They were calling him big-headed and big-footed and he decided to fight back. I had to be able to answer back so I started to learn various words or more like bad words in Quechua to defend myself. That's when I started to answer my classmates who bothered me back in Quechua.

But he couldn't just say bad words. So he started to learn more Quechua from his grandmother. And the more he spoke with her, the more he came to appreciate her. She loves making jokes. She's like a little box of surprises, artistically speaking. And he learned a lot from her through the things they did together. They often spent the whole day together outside. I loved it because the goats were really hyperactive, so it was like a game for me.

It was like a mosh pit of goats. Never in my life had I walked so much. Every day we walked a minimum of two hours, three hours, four hours in the mountains. And Liberato remembers how his grandmother would sing to pass the time on their walks. I remember once we got caught in the rain when we were in the country and she took out some coca leaves and started to make a movement in the air and said some words that I don't remember. And so the rain that was coming from the hill across from us began to alter its course. It didn't come with as much force, but rather it just started to drizzle.

And I thought, my grandmother's a witch. But nonetheless, scientifically inexplicable things like that happen in Andean communities. She also taught Liberato words in Quechua that represented cultural concepts about their way of life, like Apus, the spirits of the mountains. And that's the story of how I learned Quechua so fast, because a lot of times I went through the river carrying grass for the guinea pigs, for my grandmother's little animals, and that's where I spent the whole day talking in Quechua with my friends on the riverbanks. Track five, when I say hip, you say hop.

Liberato didn't realize how much he had changed until he moved back to Lima as a teenager. I had left behind my Lima mentality, my Lima way of life, and I felt completely Andean, as if I had been born in the Andes. But getting used to life in Lima again was hard. Things didn't feel right. In the city, he had a hard time connecting to his roots. When I came back, speaking Quechua didn't really feel necessary to me. That was something that surprised me a lot. And the other thing that surprised me was the racism

that I experienced. I realized the kids in my neighborhood, my own friends, they were being racist towards me with their jokes. They would say to me, what's up, Cholo, Cholo, Cholo, Cholo. And it shocked me. And then I had to get used to it to be able to live without being upset. Liberato realized that when people were calling him Cholo, it was an insult, not a compliment. It was hard for him to fit in. Even in his neighborhood in Lima, people didn't listen to the traditional music for him to fit in. Even in his neighborhood in Lima, people didn't listen to the traditional music he listened to back home. They listened to reggaeton and to salsa, which is very good. It has its own whole culture, but it didn't grab my attention. There was also cumbia, but that didn't speak to me. It wasn't something that made me feel free. And on a normal day in high school,

I always sat at the back of the classroom. And during recess, two kids started to do hip-hop. One beatboxed, and the other started to improvise. One made sounds like... And the other improvised, yo, yo, we're here. Of course, the improvisation wasn't so good back then. And so, Liberato started a band.

And there were four of us. And I met with one of the four because he was learning to do instrumental hip-hop beats. Come to my house, he said, and we'll work on it. And while I was there, he said, hey, why don't you write a rap in Quechua, a chorus in Quechua? I swear it had never occurred to me to write in Quechua till that day. But what should it be about, I asked him. And he said, about what you experienced in the mountains, of course. And in that moment, I took a piece of paper and I wrote a chorus.

And that chorus became the song Hip Hop Rurak Shani. At first, when he wrote lyrics in Quechua, it was just about the rhymes and whether they sounded good or not. The sounds of Quechua, for example, the ha, the cha, the eha, those apostrophes sound incredible when in Quechua, for example, it's said that And the more he wrote, the more he thought about the message behind his lyrics. When I rapped in Spanish, I didn't talk about any Andean themes.

That is, there wasn't any historical context when I rapped in Spanish. But when I started to experiment with rapping in Quechua, that's when I started to research, to analyze history, the history of Peru, especially my roots and the experiences that I had in the Andes. And the more he researched his roots, the more he came to appreciate how music has been a way of life for his entire family. I also got to know and came to value that I had a genius in the house, my father. He's a musical genius, a true artist. So I started to analyze his songs and it helped me when it came time to compose my own songs. And I told him, you have flow. He didn't understand, what's flow? Flow is the flavor that it has, I told him. He has flow as if he were a rapper, like from the Bronx. So finally, Liberato was ready to test out rapping in Quechua in public.

And he started in the place he felt most comfortable. First, I sang it in the neighborhood, in the rural zones. And there was a yell like, how crazy. Cholo, you outdid yourself, Cholo. And as he became more confident, he started performing where he knew he would have an audience, on public transportation. I used to board buses to do hip-hop because a friend told me it would be cool if you could sing on the buses. It would be crazy.

So after two hours of hesitating, I did it. You can imagine how scared I was. On a bus, people are not there to listen to a concert. They are not there to hear hip-hop. They want to get to where they are going. People are angry, tired, stressed out. And me, I said, dear passengers, good afternoon. I am a young student who is here to offer you a little bit of my talent, my art.

I'm going to start with a song called Hip Hop Rurachkani. And then I started to sing and people were surprised. And the level of emotion was incredible. The response was, congratulations. That is, just recently, young people started to open up to me and say, my father is from Apurimac, from the Andes, or my grandmother also speaks Quechua. Or people would say, yes, yes, Cholo.

I swear that now I've heard you, it's made me want to learn Quechua more because it sounds good. Quechua sounds good. And I would say, if your grandmother is still alive, take advantage of that. Learn Quechua. Track six, a brief Quechua language interlude brought to you by Marriott Hotels. Wow, that was such a soothing track interlude.

Thank you, John. And yeah, we're going to get a quick lesson from Liberato. He's actually a language teacher and he's going to teach us some Quechua words. So in South America, Spanish and Quechua have a long history together. There's some common Quechua words you might recognize that have been adopted into Spanish, like papas, which is Spanish for potato, and also into English, like condor, jerky, llama, or quinoa. And if you get to go to one of Liberado's concerts in person, he might just teach you some Quechua during the concert itself.

No, that's his uncle. That's his uncle. That's his uncle. That's his uncle. That's his uncle. That's his uncle. That's his uncle. That's his uncle.

That's his uncle. That's his uncle. That's his uncle. That's his uncle. That's his uncle. So Oscar and I asked Liberado to give us a quick Quechua language lesson. We started with some useful phrases for just getting around his hometown. So in the mountains, to say hello or how are you, you say... So if I say... You reply... Which is like, I'm fine, I'm good. or how are you, you say, So if I say, you reply, which is like, I'm fine, I'm good.

Next phrase, means, what is your name? Next word, means, life. But it can't be translated in just one word. It can also mean rebirth, or it can be used to refer to crops or freedom. Next word. Harawi means poetry, but can also refer to the songs dedicated to nature or mountain spirits. And we couldn't resist asking Liberado to tell us some of those

comebacks that he said he learned as a kid, such as chakisapa, which means big footed, and ringri zappa, or big eared. Okay, language lesson over. What happens when Liberato leaves the band and goes solo? More on that when we come back with track seven, breakups to mashups. Now here's an ad I've had a hand in creating, working with our sponsor Marriott Hotels to tell stories that expand horizons and open minds to new perspectives. So, fun fact that frequent listeners may have picked up on,

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and then just sit on deck and look at the water. And I never got bored of that. Every single day the ocean is different and it looks different all around the world. No matter how hectic things got on the ship, the water was always there for me. Now, I think more than ever, people are trying to find those rituals to help ground themselves. And if they're traveling, those rituals may feel a bit different than what we used to do.

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Liberato's band split up in 2015, and Liberato Cani, the Quechua rapper, was born as a solo act. But Liberato got some straight-up resistance to fusing Quechua with such a foreign music style like rap. People ask him... why do something foreign? Why not something from here? Basically, they meant why fuse Quechua with hip hop when there's all these beautiful traditional styles of music? Why hip hop? And what I tell them is that hip hop came during a hard moment in my life. Music arrives in the moment you most need it.

It just fills your life. And for me, the music that opened doors for me and made me feel free was hip-hop. And I'm very grateful for that. That's it. I can't give any other explanation because the only thing I can say is that this is my way of life. So by combining Quechua with a musical genre that was more universal, his language became more empowering, not embarrassing. He's quick to talk about his influences, not just from American hip-hop, but also from Afro-Peruvian musicians. He feels the fusion makes his message stronger, and he was not alone in discovering how combining influences can create new spaces for Quechua to exist, as you'll hear in this upcoming track.

Normally you hear huaynos or other traditional music in Quechua, but to listen to Quechua in another genre and hear it fit well, like in pop, it sounds really good. It's especially beautiful when my friend Renata Flores does it melodiously, like a ballad. Track 8, the cover artists. Every good mixtape has to have a cover song. So Liberato was steeped in throwback 90s hip hop and coming up with some golden age boom bap vibes. Meanwhile, Renata Flores, this artist he just mentioned,

and the singer you're hearing now, was coming up in an entirely different way. Renata has long hair. She's incredibly friendly. She's got this big smile. Actually kind of looks like a Disney princess. I met Renata outside of one of Liberado's shows. She was with her manager, who's also her mom.

They had come all the way from Ayacucho, a city in the Andes, just north of the town where Liberado lived with his grandmother. It's known as being this unbelievably majestic place. It's very quiet. The sky is very, very blue with clouds that look like cotton balls. It's like a little hole that's surrounded by a lot of hills. And it smells like pure, clean air. And it's like a little town with people with big hearts. While she was telling us this, Renata turned a large rain stick.

What's beautiful about Andean music is that it takes its cue from nature, and this is like the river, the rain. Like Liberado, Renata also didn't grow up speaking Quechua, even though her grandparents did. She grew up speaking Spanish, but her house was full of music. I started when I was really little My parents always listened to Uchpa, a rock band that sings in Quechua And I always liked to listen to them So that's where my love for Quechua and my love for music began

More on Uchpa in a bit. So Renata wanted to start singing her favorite pop songs in Quechua, but she didn't speak Quechua, just Spanish. So she had to ask her grandmother and parents to help her with the translation and pronunciation. And then this crazy thing happened. She covered Michael Jackson's The Way You Make Me Feel, and it hit a million views in just two weeks. A lot for an unknown Peruvian musician.

So she's just barely more than a kid, singing in a different language, but she starts to feel important. I never thought that singing in Quechua would but she starts to feel important. I never thought that singing in Quechua would influence young people to learn it, to value it, to feel proud of a language that was being lost. So she's covering classic rock and pop, experimenting with hip hop, and her videos are doing numbers. So Quechua, which is often culturally invisible in the media, was now going viral and presented in a way that almost anyone who heard it could appreciate it, even if they didn't understand it.

And like Liberado, as she gets older, she's writing her own songs and getting more political. The song you're hearing now, Camjina, is a protest about the educational reality of Peruvian people in rural areas. It's very important, not just because it's our ancestors' language. Quechua is also a way of life. Quechua is all about solidarity. It's about being concerned about others. On top of that, it talks a lot about reciprocity. That comes from the Andean culture, but it's contained in the language,

which holds a whole culture, customs that we've left behind. And now Renata is probably Peru's most famous pop musician singing in Quechua. And she's only 19 years old. Track nine, Guinea Piggy Jiggy. So, the way people reacted to Liberato and Renata felt strangely familiar to something in my own life. My dad's from India, so I heard some Bollywood music growing up, but not as much as most of the other Indian kids I met. And I only understood fragments of the songs because I didn't pick up the language growing up. But I did grow up listening to hip hop. And there was this period where Missy Elliott's Get Your Freak On came out and Punjabi MC broke through. And all of a sudden there were these very Indian sounding beats popping up in hip hop.

I felt so proud of that. Like, I know I shouldn't need that kind of validation, but I just felt like, oh, a sound from my dad's country is cool. It's on the radio. It's in the music that the whole country is listening to. And that brings us to Kaifex. who's kind of making the 2020 Andean versions of Get Your Freak On, making electronic music with distinctly Peruvian sounds, like sounds from the Andes, the highlands, the jungle. Kaifex collaborates with Liberado and Renata when they're writing their songs, so that they sound distinctly Peruvian, not just linguistically, but aurally too. Like how the song you're hearing, Tijeras, or scissors in Spanish, incorporates songs from Peru's scissors dance. And there's a detail of Caifex's identity that I love. His beats are hard, cinematic, dramatic.

But the meaning of his name? Well, it's very Peruvian, and it's also very cute. Caifex comes from guinea pig, Cuy, and it was my cousin who gave me the Cuyfex nickname without thinking that someday I'd become a musician or use it as a pseudonym. When I was very young, he'd tell me, you have a Cuyfex belly because I've always been a little chubby, like a guinea pig. That's the second time we've referenced guinea pigs in this episode because there's a lot of guinea pigs in Peru.

It's true. And even though they're cute, they're also delicious. If you Google guinea pig Peru, you can see the photos of how they are served. They look like they're taking a nap on your plate. Their last nap on your plate. Okay, back to the music. When Kaifex was growing up, he noticed that he and his friends

were mostly listening to music that was from the US or from Europe and that nobody paid attention to the music that was from where he was from. Sometimes Peruvian music sounded old and uncool to some of his friends, at least at first. When I was 13 years old, I first started as a DJ, Peruvian music sounded old and uncool to some of his friends, at least at first. When I was 13 years old, I first started as a DJ, but I didn't want to just be a DJ.

I wanted to start producing music. And with that desire to produce music came the wish to have my own sound. And one day when Kaifex was in his room listening to songs from Ayacucho, he played some traditional music that is used in a local dance we mentioned earlier, the scissor dance. Its origins date back to 16th century Peru. Scissors dancers hold a pair of heavy polished iron rods that look just like scissor blades. They hold them in their right hand and kind of strike the blades together in a scraping, scissory kind of way to the rhythm of instruments like violins and harps. They do this while doing all these acrobatic moves.

There's all these half flips and throwing themselves onto the floor. Liberato, who often has scissors dancers performing on stage with him, describes the scissor dance as Andean breakdancing. And it kind of looks like it. And that trebly scraping sound of the scissor dance was exactly what Kaifex was looking for.

It was a sound he'd heard a million times before, but that day he heard it in a new way. So he started listening to the scissor dance album on repeat, just again and again searching for those sounds. Sometimes my family told me, too much scissors dance, change the music because my studio is in my house and my family can hear what I'm working on. But sometimes they say, hey, what you're doing is really pretty. So the scissor dance sounds made it into his track with Renata,

and it's his most popular track. And even though he's not using Quechua himself, most of the music is instrumental, he's pushing deeper into sampling locally and making all these mashups more richly Andean and more richly his own. Most people, especially young people, didn't know these sounds. There's no fusion.

Lots of people will forget about this and they will be lost. And everything has to evolve. Track 10, Throwback. Okay, now's the point in the mixtape where you have a throwback track that catches you off guard, maybe references the origin of a sample. So to review, we've been describing this new vanguard and we've had Liberado, the real hip hop head rapping in Quechua, Renata, the innovator who realized she could reach this huge audience by singing pop covers in Quechua and posting them on YouTube. Kaifex, the guinea pig who brings the sounds and music history from all over Peru into contemporary

electronic music in a non-cheesy way. So all that is what's happening today. And it's this amazing movement. But to start to get an idea of what this all means, how all this remixing of cultures might influence how Peruvians perceive themselves, we have to go back to Uchpa, the band Renata first covered. Uchpa is like the OG of fusing foreign music with Peruvian language and culture. In this case, rock with huayno, a popular Andean folk music. But Uchpa says that their music

is not just rock sung in Quechua, that it has an Andean soul, that when a peasant farmer listens to Uchpa, he will feel that soul. And although Liberado, Reynada, and Kaifex have faced resistance, Uchpa has arguably faced the most. When they first performed, people said, it was like, what are those crazy people doing? What are they doing with our music? Our ancestors, they should leave traditional music as it is, Quechua as it is.

That's Marcos Maizel, Uchpa's songwriter and guitarist. In the early 90s, Marcos was approached by a musician, Freddy Ortiz, who had worked as a police officer during Peru's civil war and had seen terrible things. Freddy wanted to form a blues rock band that performed in Quechua to give Peruvian people a sense of pride in themselves after all that had happened. He named the band Uchpa, which means ashes in Quechua, referencing all that was left after the war. Destruction. Ashes. And so I was thinking like, yeah, Uchpa's music may have resonated with people

from the countryside hit hardest by the war. But what did people from Lima, who didn't even speak Quechua, people like Oscar, think of it? Well, honestly, I didn't know about Uchpo until very recently. And listening to them now, I feel like I missed out on something because I wish I could have that music growing up. What their music did for Peruvians and the musicians we've been talking to, it's just amazing because those were really difficult times for Peru. You know, and this was a time before quinoa was cool. When if you spoke Quechua, people didn't respect you or just didn't want you around. Knowing about this newer movement

and some of the history around it, we were curious what this all meant long term. So we asked Marcos from Uchpa to put this in context for us. His band has been performing for 20 years and seeing all these young people coming up, we were wondering, does it give him hope or does he think the same barriers that Uchpa faced are still there? Now things have changed a lot. Little by little, Peruvians are doing better economically. But it's still a very long process because Peru hasn't done the right things.

Oscar, what does he mean by Peru not doing the right things? Well, there are a few government media campaigns to promote Peruvian pride, but that's not enough. I'd say that that's kind of superficial because pride doesn't necessarily translate to equal rights or access to opportunities. I was recently talking to a Peruvian writer, Marco Aviles, who wrote this amazing book, I Am Not Your Cholo, about how there's still so much discrimination in Peru. And he brought up the point about access to healthcare for Quechua-speaking people.

So for example, if you speak Quechua-speaking people. So, for example, if you speak Quechua and go to the hospital, well, mostly everyone there speaks Spanish and there's no interpreter, so then you're out of luck. You're going to have a hard time. So if you only speak Quechua, you're still really on the edges of society. You can maybe have access to more spaces, but you are constantly reminded that you are not included. Track 11, The Resistance. I'm going to sound a little dramatic.

I'm going to put everything into this until I can go on, because I think Ushpa has a duty. As long as the song lasts, the dream is alive. And when the song is over, we return to reality. So my battle is for the songs, that I make you feel proud of being Peruvian. If only for a moment, and I make you aware of your roots, that's a huge accomplishment. And if there were 30 Renatas and 30 Liberatos, the duty would be easier. But I'm worried about the future. I don't want to be negative,

but if there's no work on the part of the government, it's almost impossible. And Liberato agrees. Quechua is a language that's always having to put up a fight. It keeps on struggling, struggling, struggling. But if there's no support, if there's no work on the part of the state, the struggle is going to take longer because it would be great if they taught Quechua in Peru's high schools. It's as if they view Quechua as a language for tourism, a language for history teachers or anthropologists or whatever. That's what a lot of young people like me are trying to change, that Quechua is a language that's part of modernity, that's also a part of the current world. Yeah, music is powerful, but that doesn't magically fix everything. So much of this is timing.

But it feels like being able to evolve culturally should almost be a human right. And in this case, all this fusion and innovation does play a part in creating a sense of pride. And so Liberado and Marcos hope that this growing pride influences policy. And they hope that that policy formalizes processes like education that will help keep their identities alive. Exactly. And that's the Peru I want to see. For all the young people who, like me, are trying to bring about change, I would tell them to be persistent. I think that in any movement, persistence and determination are important. And try to innovate. Don't be afraid of innovation. Of course, do it

without losing the original essence, but it's good to dare to do something new. There are going to be people along the way who don't like it, but it's necessary to be determined and to resist. That's resistance, not giving up. You have to have that word in mind, resistance. That's it. Just that. There you go, y'all. Resist, because it's the future. Track 12, the credits that most people skip. But please don't skip them because people work really hard. Far Flung with Salim Rashamwala is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom of Magnificent Noise for TED. Our production staff includes Elise Blenner-Hassan and Oscar Duran, Kim Naderfane-Peterson, Huwete Gitana, Sabrina Farhi, Angela Chang, and Michelle Quint. With the guidance of Roxanne Highlash. And Colin Helms.

Voice over by Jonathan Souza, a.k.a. Fess. Hector Adalid. Jay Cruz. Marisol Velez. And John Law, a.k.a. DJ Just John. Additional recordings by Whitney Henry Lester and Hernando Suarez. Translation and transcription by Hernando Suarez, Elis O'Neill, and Oscar Duran. Our fact checkers are Nicole Bode and Paul Durbin. Ad stories are produced

by Transmitter Media. This episode was mixed and sound designed by Kristen Muller. Additional music by Chris Zabriskie. Special thanks to Kane Smigo and Play Play for being in the cypher at the beginning of this episode. And to Liberato Cani, Renato Flores, Kaifex, and Marcos Maisel for sharing your sounds and music. And to Marco Abeles for your time and expertise. Our executive producer is Eric Nuzum. I'm Salim Restromwala. No guinea pigs were harmed during this production.

Special thanks to our sponsor, Marriott Hotels. Looking for a fun challenge to share with your friends and family? TED now has games designed to keep your mind sharp while having fun. Visit TED.com slash games to explore the joy and wonder of TED Games.