Musical youth of Bolivia

Viewpoint

Wednesday May 21st 2008

In a suburb of La Paz in Bolivia, indigenous youths are finding their radical voice in rap. Alongside women in thick skirts and ponchos they sing their support of Evo Morales and talk about spreading their 'message of liberation' through the internet. Andrés Schipani is in El Alto to meet some of them

Wednesday May 21st 2008

The breakdance crew Alto Estilo (High Style) are part of a musical revolution in El Alto. Photograph: Evan Abramson

"Kamisas kunas kaukis... listen, Latino: this is my style, I live on the warrior’s path, I am a peasant, and capitalism is torturing my people... that is the way it pretends to silence my people; but Quechuas and Aymaras are fighting with tons of pride, pa, pa, pa. Can you believe it?" goes a rapid-fire rap song performed by two local teenagers on the streets of El Alto.

The city, La Paz’s violent and neglected satellite on plains almost 4,000 metres above sea level in the Bolivian Andes, has from its start been a flashpoint for protest, and the de facto capital of today’s indigenous Bolivia is producing new ways for people to communicate. Indigenous youngsters vent their feelings about their dismal social conditions in angry lyrics.

The city started as the new home for workers relocated from the tin mines in the mid-1980s. Today nearly a million indigenous people live there in poverty. The younger Aymara generation use rap to express their rage and their support for the "democratic and cultural revolution" of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales.

Groups are mushrooming and graffiti is spreading over the half-brick walls of the slum. El Alto is home to a thriving, politically charged hip-hop culture that mingles ancient Andean folk styles and new beats with lyrics about revolution and social change. Even if these youngsters despise the "[US] empire’s imposed culture", they have adopted hip-hop "because in the Andean world view one never rejects things, one grabs and incorporates".

And they do. Walking alongside indigenous women wearing bowler hats, thick skirts and ponchos, these young men wear baggy trousers, loose shirts and caps. They adopt the poses of rappers in New York or Los Angeles with hand signs and smug talk.

Abraham Bojorquez is renowned among them. Inspired to make music by the violence of the Brazilian slum where he grew up and by his arrival a few years ago in tumultuous Bolivia, he is now the leader of a group called Ukamaku y Ke (This is the way, so?), who released their third "underground" record last month.

"Music should be universal, democratic – and hip-hop is a revolutionary genre, a form of rebellion," Bojorquez says. "Why not then adapt it to our scenario and to what we want to say, what we feel we need to say? It is a powerful instrument of struggle... we still have ancient cultures thriving, like the Aymara and Quechua, the aboriginal peoples who have survived years of oppression and torture. But I believe we are now recovering that identity, renewing it; and people listen to us."

Being penniless, the rappers have taken advantage of new technologies to deliver their "message of liberation". They’ve copied Radiohead’s idea of allowing people to download their latest music for free. "We simply put our record on MySpace," Bojorquez explains. (In Bolivia nobody would ever buy a full-priced CD, as bootlegs are readily available.)

Besides giving rap workshops to miners and coca-growers, Ukamaku y Ke have also toured Latin American countries, and now they are aiming to visit Europe and the US. Other groups, such as Clandestine Race and Urban Movement, are growing in popularity, followed by breakdance groups such as High Style and Sopla La Mia.

In a traditional macho society, such as that of Bolivia, hip-hop has also given young indigenous women a long-awaited voice.

For singer Nina Uma ("fire and water" in Aymara): "Even if people are rejecting you it means that, in any case, they were listening to you, paying at least a bit of attention to what a woman has to say."

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