This is part of Global Sounds, a collection of stories spotlighting the music trends forging connections in 2024.
I still remember my first trip to Cusco in the Peruvian Andes as a kid. My grandmother was speaking a different language with a women in the market, which surprised me. It didn’t sound like Spanish, and every time my grandmother spoke it, she did so with warmth and affection. Like my grandfather, she was born and raised in Cusco, and the Indigenous tongue of Quechua was her first language—but the rest of my family wouldn’t use it anymore.
We weren’t unique: The 2017 Census in Peru (the most recent) showed that 22.3% of the population aged 12 and older identified as Quechua, though only 13.9% of Peruvians spoke Quechua as a first language. Peru continues to be a country where systemic racism and discrimination against Indigenous non-Spanish speakers are is rampant—it’s little surprise that many Quechua speakers have resisted teaching their children the language.
It wasn’t until the pandemic, 20 years after that day in the market, that I felt encouraged to learn Quechua. When I asked other speakers how I could reconnect with our native tongue, the answer was always the same: music.
Quechua, also known as Runasimi (meaning “the people’s tongue”), served as the official language of the Tawantinsuyu, led by the Incas. Today it is spoken by an estimated 10 million people in South America, throughout Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and parts of Colombia, Chile, and Argentina. Because Quechua is an oral language, songs play a critical role in its preservation. Peru has long been home to Andean music genres defined by their use of Quechua language—like waynos, a popular genre talking about love and heartbreak, or harawis, a pre-colonial poetic genre. But now there is also rap, hip-hop, and trap performed in Quechua, thanks to young artists who have chosen to both spotlight the sound, and use it to call out injustices to Quechua people.
