Bolivian Aymara Rap

NPR
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Bolivia's Rap: Protest Songs And Windpipes
By Juan Forero

Day to Day, October 1, 2008 - Visitors to the harsh, cold, windswept Andes of South America are familiar with the traditional music there — it's almost all windpipes, with the occasional haunting lyric. It's been that way for centuries in the remote country of Bolivia, but there are many more kinds of music there, from folkloric to protest to even baroque. The latest trend, generated by indigenous youths, is rap, and it's catching on in Latin America's largest indigenous city.

Bolivian music also comes from the far eastern lowlands — guitar-laden cruceno, music made for dancing. In the south, there's Enriqueta Ulloa and her folkloric songs. Now, a new kind of music has spread across the gritty cinderblock city of El Alto, which is 14,000 feet up in the highlands, home to hundreds of thousands of Aymara Indians.

The music is rap, and it's hard and fast, railing against consumerism and money, and promising to "break the chains of oppression" and spark revolution. The music is, in some cases, sung in Aymara, the predominant tongue among highland Indians in this region of Bolivia.

Newfound Power

The lyrics stem from Bolivia's tradition of protest music — condemning the Yankees, while celebrating the newfound power and influence that have buoyed indigenous people here ever since Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, won the presidency in 2005.

One young rapper is Abraham Bojorquez. Bojorquez explains that one of his songs, "We're Going to Rise Up," tells the story of Bolivia's native people — children of the great warrior Tupacatari — and the Aymara's long struggle. He says that his music tries to speak for the people, to denounce injustice and to honor indigenous communities for what he calls "the recuperation of indigenous identity."

'The Abyss Of Racism'

Alvaro Montenegro, who teaches at the National Conservatory of Music, also produces rap music at his home studio. One song he has worked on, "The Abyss of Racism" by Bojorquez, says that racism is here, there and everywhere — when will it stop? Montenegro says it's a theme familiar to many Bolivians, and that it ranks among the hard social themes that spawned and continue to inspire Bolivian rap.

"The youth of El Alto was looking for a particular personal expression in order to find a vehicle to put forward their own ideas, their own ways of thinking, their own ways of challenging society," Montenegro says.

Montenegro says that young Altenos, as they're called, began rapping in 2003, when Bolivian troops shot several dozen demonstrators. That event helped propel Morales to power.

As Bolivia's first indigenous president, Morales has promised to overturn the old social order. That gave rappers even more to sing about. Many of them fine-tune their work in a radio station in El Alto: Wayna Tambo. Under bare light bulbs, squeezed into a small room, Bojorquez and his two fellow musicians practice. The next day, they're off for a concert in Ecuador.

Freddy Limanchi runs the tracks — the heavy beat at the base of rap music. He says there's clearly American hip-hop in the music, but there's also a fusion with trumpets, bongos and windpipes. That gives it a Bolivian twist.

Baroque Music transforms kids and towns in remote area of Bolivia

Here at the Christian Science Monitor

Music transforms kids and towns in remote area of Bolivia
Inspired by a biannual baroque festival and the legacy of missionaries, young people join choirs and take up the violin and Vivaldi in parishes across the country's eastern lowlands.
By Sara Miller Llana | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the May 12, 2008 edition

San Ignacio de Velasco, Bolivia - Life moves slowly in this town deep in the jungle of Bolivia, 280 miles from the nearest city, where most streets are swaths of red earth, money is made off the land, and TV, for those who own one, is not an after-dinner ritual.

It is not the kind of place one would normally seek out high culture.

But on a recent evening, off the neatly manicured central plaza, the sonatas of Vivaldi and Haydn pour from the town's imposing cathedral. Even more unusual is who is crowding many of the pews: sneaker-clad youths. They are not here under the duress of some imperious teacher. They're eagerly absorbing the sounds of string and wind instruments redounding through the wood-beamed church.

Their rapt attention is one of the most visible legacies of the International Festival of Renaissance and American Baroque Music, which may be leaving as big a mark on the small towns of eastern Bolivia as anything since the Jesuit missionaries 300 years ago. Perhaps in few places on earth is music transforming the lives of a new generation more than in this remote low-land section of South America.

The biennial baroque festival, which wrapped up last week, draws artists from across the globe who perform a repertoire of classical music that always includes at least one piece from the impressive, sacred archive, begun by the missionaries in the 17th century. The festival also attracts well-heeled tourists from Argentina, Chile, the US, and Europe.

But, more important, it has spurred many of the region's kids to gravitate toward the world of Bach and bass clefs. In recent years, some 2,500 youths from area towns, many of them indigenous, have enrolled in music schools, choruses, and orchestras. Some orchestras are fledgling, set up in church basements with members who still can't read notes. Others have begun to produce first-rate musicians.

Music has brought a sense of hope and revival here the way sports do in inner-city America. While American kids might dream of being the next LeBron James, here it is Boccherini and the anonymous 17th century composers who touched the lives of their ancestors.

"There has been a boom in orchestras in all of these mission towns," says Father Andreas Holl, a Franciscan priest originally from Austria whose church in San Ignacio de Velasco started a 35-member chorus for the community's neediest children last year. "It's not just to pass the time, it is to fill them with something more. If we teach them to be mechanics, they can learn to be good mechanics. But music teaches them to express themselves, and perhaps that way, they learn to be nonviolent."

• • •

On a Thursday afternoon, Adelina Anori Cunanguira rushes to rehearsal with the children's orchestra she conducts, ahead of their performance in the festival. The kids, who range in age from 7 to late teens, run through the church grounds in sandals, their instruments dangling at their sides. But as Ms. Anori Cunanguira directs them through a piece by Italian composer G.B. Bassani, recovered from the archives in the nearby town of Santa Ana, they settle down. "Don't forget to be here at 1 p.m. tomorrow," she reminds them after practice. "I want you to concentrate, and look at the director. Good luck."

Anori Cunanguira epitomizes the success that music has brought to the mission towns. A demure woman in her late 20s, she comes from the indigenous town of Urubicha, where a music school was set up in the mid-1990s as the Chiquitos Missions Festival, as the baroque event is known, was born.

She had never studied music, but her father played the guitar and trumpet. Yet all her friends were joining, and, like any 16-year-old, she didn't want to miss out. Since then, she has mastered the clarinet and violin, and today sings in a professional choir. She travels the world, playing in concerts and recording CDs.

Music has not only changed her life – three of her 12 siblings also play professionally today – but that of her entire town. The music institute in Urubicha has received worldwide recognition. "No one even knew there was a town called Urubicha," she says. "What we were given allowed us to transform."

Now she feels a duty to help other kids in remote towns lift their lives through voice and Vivaldi. "Our ancestors played with the Jesuits," she says. "It is in our blood." When the Jesuits arrived in this area of the country, they brought their rich musical traditions, quickly setting up choirs of professional musicians in each mission. But when the priests were expelled in the mid-1700s, and economic decline followed, the towns were nearly forgotten. So, too, was their music.

At the time Lizardo Paraba was growing up on a cattle farm in Cotoca, an hour's drive down a washboard road from San Ignacio de Velasco, no music classes existed in school. Only the elderly played the flute, occasionally. Lizardo, a skinny teen wearing jeans and a baseball cap, never even thought about music, he says, until he saw the Chiquitos Missions Festival in 2004. "I wanted to play right away," says the 15-year-old, who signed up for violin classes as soon as the orchestra in his town was formed seven months ago. He has since learned how to read music and plays in the orchestra with two younger brothers and a cousin.

• • •

For all its remoteness, San Ignacio de Velasco has its charms. True, most of the roads are dirt, and iPods and the Internet are largely notional. But the town does exude a quaintness with its red tiled-roof shops. People seem happy, and a veneer of wealth exists – some of it tied to tourism surrounding the festival.

The musical conclave came together through a confluence of events in 1996, enabled by the diligent work of musicologists transcribing the ancient works of the missionaries. At the time, the region didn't have an organ or harpsichord, or professional musicians to perform. In its first year, 12 groups played in three towns. This year 22 countries participated, including 300 foreigners and 600 Bolivians, across 20 towns.

But Cecilia Kenning, the festival president, says the primary focus has always been the children. The first music school was established in Urubicha, where residents still speak the indigenous Guarayo language, and the model has since spread to towns across the eastern lowlands. They're run by schools, towns, and local parishes, funded by a patchwork of private donations.

"This works very well in small towns, where there is no television," says Piotr Nawrot, a Polish missionary who has dedicated his life to transcribing the 12,000 manuscripts from the missions that include operas, instrumental music, sonatas, and full symphonies. "A violin comes in and it's very attractive."

Now students have a whole crop of role models, such as Anori Cunanguira. "I would love to be professional," says Juan Antiare, who sings bass in a choir called "peace and wellness" at a parish run by Father Holl. Some of his friends at school make fun of him, saying baroque music "puts them to sleep." But he seems unfazed. "Becoming professional now is much more possible with the attention of the festival," he says.

Music is changing more than the local teens. Some politicians now run for office promising to start new choirs. Adults, too, feel swept up in the fervor. Aida Vaca Diez, a local grandmother, finds the changes in San Ignacio de Velasco so dramatic they're hard to articulate. Her only regret is that orchestras don't accept children as young as 4 so she could sign up her grandson.

"Music touches the heart," she says. "You feel like you are in heaven when you listen to it."

Bolivian fighting ritual draws crowds

photos AP - Juan Karita

By DAN KEANE, Associated Press Writer - Thu May 17, 3:13 AM ET

The locals come down from the mountains drunk, dancing and ready to fight. The police come to make sure no one dies. And the tourists, reporters, and documentary filmmakers come for the blood.

The outside world has discovered Tinku, an ancient ritual in which indigenous Quechua communities gather each year in a remote corner of the Bolivian Andes to dance, sing and settle old scores in staggering and bloody street fights.

The largest Tinku takes place early each May in Macha, about 210 miles southeast of La Paz, where this year's festival provided a stunning and sometimes uneasy combination of culture, spectacle and violence.

Relatively unknown outside the Andes for centuries, Tinku remains on the fringe of Bolivia's growing tourism industry. But its heavily asterisked listing in the guidebooks (Lonely Planet calls it "a violent and often grisly spectacle") is beginning to draw both backpackers and media curious to witness the peculiar event firsthand.

The attention has not gone unnoticed by the locals in Macha, a bitterly poor village of adobe houses and narrow dirt streets tucked between cold, dusty hills some 13,100 feet above sea level.

Tinku fighters generally resent the foreigners' gaze and now ask for money to have their picture taken. When drunk enough, a fighter may take an occasional swing at anyone in the street carrying a camera.

Tinku ("encounter" in Quechua) is a pre-Colombian tradition meant to solve conflicts and release tensions within the local community while honoring the Andean earth goddess Pachamama. Participants believe the spilled blood brings fertility to the rocky soil, and the death of a fighter forecasts an especially abundant harvest the following year.

The challenge for Macha city officials is to promote Tinku's authentic heritage while preventing the spotlight from turning its sacred rituals into meaningless blood sport.

"Before, Tinku before was something shared," said Abelardo Colque, who was selling press passes in Macha's one-room city hall. "They didn't just fight; they fought and ended up shaking hands. But now it's turning into just fighting without any point."

The festival includes several days of ceremonies blurred together by sleepless and spirited binges on grain alcohol and chicha, a tart homemade corn beer. There are prayers to a Christian crucifix, llama sacrifices at dawn, and an endless stomping, shuffling dance to the eerie strains of cane flutes and rhythmic, two-chord songs beat out on mandolin-like charangos.

On its climactic day, May 4 this year, fighters marched down the hill into town — still dancing, still singing — with their eyes peeled for particular rivals, intent on resolving everything from love triangles to land disputes.

While most fights are short-lived, death is not uncommon; one person was killed at a smaller Tinku in Macha in February. But with more foreigners turning up each year, local officials have brought in extra police to reduce the violence, and even broadcast radio announcements asking revelers not to attack street vendors.

The police immediately took control of this year's festival, forming an improvised ring in the town square and refereeing the fights. A sergeant selected combatants of equal size and age — women, too — and set a few ground rules ("No kicking!"). Fellow fighters cheered each pair on, while journalists and tourists crowded in, holding their cameras high to catch the bare-knuckle action.

The police ended each clash after only a minute or two, after drunken punches had bloodied one or both of the fighters' faces.

By late afternoon, the increasingly intoxicated crowd repeatedly overran the ring, hoping to revert to Tinku's traditional free-for-all. But the police drove them back each time, occasionally popping a tear gas grenade to clear the square.

Foreigners seemed both relieved and mildly disappointed to learn that Tinku had been toned down.

"Are they making it less violent so that people have a different image?" asked Portuguese backpacker Pedro Pimentel, 28. "It shouldn't have to be changed just by our presence."

Just what the world wants to make of Tinku — cultural celebration or a drunken brawl — remains to be seen, but increased exposure seems inevitable. "It's something that belongs to the world," Pimentel said.

In one Macha boarding house, a poster on the wall advertised an academic conference dedicated "to the rescue of the original Tinku of our collective memories" as a grainy video showed wince-inducing highlights of a previous year's street fight.

Out in the street, a tourist snapped the picture of a defeated fighter stumbling through the crowd, his face streaming with blood.

"Gimme a peso, you (expletive), if you want to take my photo!" the fighter bellowed.

Stiffening with fright, the backpacker quickly dug into his jeans for a coin.

Reviewing the picture later on his digital camera, the tourist was disappointed: The Tinku fighter held his head down to let his blood drip in the street, and his face was covered in shadow.

"I'm going back to take another picture," the backpacker told his buddy. "And this time I'm not going to ask."

Ritualized fighting in Bolivia's highlands

A young man took a swing at a man from a rival village, left, during the Tinku celebration in Sacaca, Bolivia, last week. The last remaining Tinku festivals are held in the Potosí region. Sacaca holds one in February, and Macha has a larger one in May.


Evan Abramson for The New York Times

Before the drinking and fighting began, villagers paraded through the main plaza carrying flags and playing traditional instruments.

New York Times
February 12, 2007
Sacaca Journal
Ritual Fades Into Blur of Drinking and Fighting
By SIMON ROMERO

SACACA, Bolivia — For hundreds of years, the Indians of Bolivia’s high plains have trekked to this town in early February. They dance, drink chicha, the fermented beverage made here from rye, and then fight one another until blood stains the dirt alleyways.

The ritual, called Tinku, a word that means “encounter” in both Aymara and Quechua, was once widespread throughout the Andean world, predating the arrival of the conquistadors. Anthropologists say it now tenuously exists just in this isolated pocket of Bolivia, seven hours southeast of La Paz by bus on a washboard dirt road.

To the chagrin of Roman Catholic priests who would like to see Tinku fade into the past, political officials here want it to survive.

“Tinku is a sublime, beautiful act,” said Wilson Araoz, the mayor of Sacaca and a leading official in the Popular Indigenous Movement, a party that is part of the coalition supporting Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president.

Emboldened by Mr. Morales’s efforts to strengthen Bolivia’s indigenous cultures, Mr. Araoz’s party is one of several political organizations pushing to preserve endangered traditions like Tinku.

“There’s a predisposition in all of us to do Tinku,” Mr. Araoz said in an interview. “I believe that denying that impulse is harmful.”

No one disputes that Tinku can be harmful, at least physically. The fighting, though ritualized through music and dance, is far from organized, less like boxing and more like street brawling.

Not everyone takes part. Men of roughly equal size and age square off against each other on the streets surrounding the plaza, though sometimes women also enter the fray. Some of the men wear leather helmets and gloves and carry woven coca-wallets. But the fighting can also be bare knuckle.

In one fight at a dirt intersection, two men in their 50s punched and kicked each other for about 10 minutes, their faces bloodied as a crowd cheered them on. By the time exhaustion overwhelmed them, both were still conscious, though in a trancelike state.

Bystanders sometimes step in to break up contests that become too lopsided. In addition to bruised faces and limbs, deaths sometimes occur.

No one died at this year’s Tinku here, but blood certainly flowed. Some of the fighting evolved into generalized rock-throwing brawls with screams of aggression in Quechua and Aymara.

Some of the Tinku fighters could be found passed out on the ground, though it was not clear whether concussions or chicha were to blame.

“It was a good year, but slower than before,” said José Acuña Gabriel, 22, a Quechua-speaking Indian who wore a colorful ceremonial vest over a secondhand Operation Desert Storm T-shirt.

Expressing concern with Tinku’s violence, priests in this region, North Potosí, have been trying to eliminate the ritual fighting. Some priests have told indigenous leaders that church aid and community religious services could be withheld if residents took part in Tinku.

“There are profound things within these people that I still don’t understand,” said Carlos Ortigosa, a Spanish priest who has lived in Sacaca for the last 10 years. “But basically Tinku is an event in which people kick each other when they’re down and die with some frequency. It’s not agreeable to see people treating each other so badly.”

Anthropologists say Tinku represents much more than fighting. But the fighting, often between members of different communities, can be a way to confirm or defend collective landholdings, or to bring good fortune at harvest time.

It is also a chance for young men to show off in front of women from other communities. Couples often meet at Tinkus and marriages are known to result.

Tristan Platt, director of the Center for Amerindian Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said Tinku’s origins were hard to pin down though indigenous communities might have practiced something similar as far back as 1100. The periodic channeling of communal violence may serve to reduce conflict during the rest of the year, he said.

Rare acts of cannibalism have occurred, Mr. Platt said, and are thought by participants to be legitimized by the Catholic eucharist, letting them believe they are eating the flesh of a divinized human being.

Ramiro Molina, an anthropologist and director of the Museum of Ethnography and Folklore in La Paz, said blood was required for Tinku’s participants to feel they had consummated a harvest fertility rite.

“The West isn’t used to seeing such violence out in the open, ritualized and organized in such a way,” Mr. Molina said. “So of course this seems shocking at first glance.”

Most of the several hundred people who attended were subsistence farmers who walked to Sacaca and bartered in the town plaza for corn, blankets, shoes, chicha and coca leaf before the dancing began. Those who took part said the fighting was as natural as farming potatoes.

“I do it because it’s fun,” said Esteban Lisidro Aguilario, 20, between turns playing the Tinku dance’s haunting rhythm on his pinquillo, a flute made for the occasion.

Sacaca, even with its isolation, feels the tug of the outside world in ways that are diluting the appeal of rituals like Tinku. Entel, the national phone company, opened a booth here five months ago with three Internet-connected computers. Many of the town’s children and teenagers seemed more entranced by the instant messaging and games on those machines than with the centuries-old ritual unfolding around them.

This year’s Tinku drew only about half the number that had come three years ago.

Bolivia’s largest Tinku is not in Sacaca but in Macha, another town in North Potosí, where thousands gather to fight each May. The police there sometimes disperse brawls with tear gas. Officials in Macha have started charging admission to foreign tourists.

Sacaca’s leaders hope their ritual may become an attraction as well, though for now outsiders are still oddities. The only lodging here is a room in a shopkeeper’s house on the plaza for $3 a night.

“Tinku is like a psychologist that helps us overcome our traumas,” said Osvaldo Echeverría, a Sacaca cultural official. “We have a lot to learn about the world, but the world also has a lot learn from us.”