Hi, Emily. Hugh, host of TED, Talks Daily. Here's an episode from far flung with slim Russian, while another podcast from Ted in each episode hosts Rushanara 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. Amsellem, Russian, Moala, 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 a young Peruvian musicians who are trying to prove that their Indian culture isn't just history, it's the future.

So they're remixing it and shout out to Marriott Hotels are sponsoring this episode. Basically, this week's episode is a Kichwa language mix tape.

And this mix tape starts with track one, introducing Liberato Connie. Yeah, that's clearly not my voice. I'm getting some mixtape posting help from my friend, just Jon.

OK, here we go. That's Liberato Koney emceeing at the National Theater here in Lima this past February. He's wrapping in a mix of Spanish and Kichwa. If you haven't heard of Kichwa, that's kind of the point. It's the most widely spoken indigenous language in Latin America. About 10 million people speak it and librettos is bringing it to people in a whole new way. His name, Lerato Koni, means I am a free man.

And a call and response you hear throughout his concerts is a good time to go. Kichwa is resistance.

I met Liberato while in Lima, Peru, and I was in Lima on this totally non far flung gig, filming young rappers and beat makers, which I've been doing on and off for the past seven years all over the world and back up.

And it's going to be all bad.

But I know anyway, I've always been interested in ways music leads to cultural mashups like Catch One 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 Kichwa is about limas pride in their past, and that's true.

But there's another crucial thing at stake here. It's the ability for Indian culture to survive and to evolve into the future. So to get the significance of what librettos doing, we need to start with some background on Kichwa. But you don't hear much Kichwa 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 librettos music, though, you don't hear any of that hierarchy he's swapping between languages constantly and letting Kichwa lead the way on in 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 in our own heads up. We were talking in Spanish and most of this interview.

So you'll hear some overdub in English, I'm not sure on the track to deep in the Andean, Bronx, La Conchita.

This is teach them what others made from purple corn. It's very delicious from corn. You can even make the hota. It is incredible. Okay, so we're walking down a long street. Would be walking for a little bit. We are eating a kind of Peruvian popcorn, candy and a drink in a purple corn based drink.

Ginger Morada. It's kind of balmy out here. It's not that hot. Yeah. Again, noisy sirens in Lima is a cultural hub for Peruvians. It's like they're L.A. and New York.

Macenta one. About ten million people live here and the population is growing. Well, we were walking through downtown Lima. Liberato told me that when he went to New York to perform for the first time in twenty eighteen, 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 Indian Bronx. They loved it. You know, he's a rapper, so he's good with metaphore.

And there's something very hip hop about his life experience. He grew up in a world that was hostile to its identity, specifically his Indian catch speaking identity. You can put a tiny, tiny minority. That's funny. So Liberato rapping in Kichwa 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 Dark Ebele Sky. And one of those locals is my friend Oscar Durand. He's producing and basically cohosting 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 could live without music, I was surprised. You know, he was not the first time I heard Kichwa.

I heard it when I was in Peru, obviously, but it was the first time that I hear someone rapping, etcetera. And it was a new context for 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 my antennas, you know, always scanning for interesting stories to. Last time when I was visiting Peru, I was there for work, I sent Liberata 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. And then we start 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 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 Liberato that made him stand out?

Well, it's surprising to hear Ketron Lima, because when I was growing up, Kitchell was not really around me in school.

I remember Kitchell 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 with innovation or success people connected to being poor, uneducated and backwards.

It is sad, so to speak, to mix with hip hop and to see how proud leave it at that was to rapping Kichwa, which is the last thing I would have expected, especially in Lima.

OK, so I'm still trying to understand why there's this stigma against Kichwa in Lima. I mean, although catchwords was 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, let me start with 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 meant how so?

Well, politically, economically and socially, everything was a mess. Even the sky was like against us.

In Lima, we call it the donkey belly. Sky is a desert, but it's also a coastal city near a mountain range.

Therefore, comes off the ocean, 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 the 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 wide foreign was seen as the best at men.

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 six hundred thousand 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 would look down on the more Peruvian. You seem like speaking Quechua or having darker skin. People assume that you were backwards, that you were poor farmer from the countryside, or even worse, even they suspected that you were a terrorist. But some people try to blend in by hiding or even giving up their cultural language like Kichwa. So in all that, where does someone like Liberata 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 Liberata 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 these 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 super foods. 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 Liberata 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?

Yes, so Oscar and I had a lot of similar questions and all these questions come up in librettos own life story. So here's some of that story.

I'm going to hand this off to Oscar in Liberata at the for a track for who do you think you are, Mr. Bigheaded Hypernova, when you see in Lima, the capital?

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 and I put him up. So I traveled from Lima to the mountains for the first time when I was eight years old. So and I lived there for three years.

When Luminato got there, he found all recordings from his grandfather, real life. He came from a long line of musicians. His grandfather even had a little shop that became a popular spot for local artists Element Interfacial.

Unfortunately, my grandfather passed away because of the social conflict, too. He was killed by an armed group to my grandfather's legacy, his songs. Everything was left to my father and my father. The evolution of my grandfather. My grandfather sings very beautifully himself. You have to hear him.

There was a song that goes up in the Luna Park where one was funky, the beat out of my way.

So although librettos grandfather had passed, Liberato was able to hear his voice on a cassette tape his father gave him. The recording was from 1978.

You can't stop me when I listen back to the cassette. It almost made me want to cry because in the tape I managed to watch my grandfather in the recording and says, 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 he wrote the first came from Lima, it wasn't the smoothest transition. He didn't speak like the other kids in school. Kind of embarrassing.

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, my Mustapa or Jappy the 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 bigheaded and bigfooted and he decided to fight back and that I had to be able to answer back.

So I started to learn various words or more like bad words in Kichwa to defend myself. That's when I started to answer my classmates who bothered me back in Kichwa, but he couldn't just say bad words.

So he started to learn more catcha from his grandmother. And the more he spoke with her, the more he came to appreciate her.

Lincoln, the artist is yes, she loves making jokes.

She's like a little box of surprises, artistically speaking, and he learnt a lot from her through the things they did together. They often spend the whole day together outside human control. 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 worked a minimum of two hours, three hours, four hours in the mountains and we would have to remembers how his grandmother would sing to pass the time on their walks.

We chidgey yanina, we chidgey suhui does so for you day and no. Yeah, 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 Indian communities.

She also taught Liberata words in Quechua that represented cultural concepts about their way of life, like upas the spirits of the mountains.

Yes, I feel and that's the story of how I learned to catch you up 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 and Kichwa with my friends on the river banks. Yeah.

So look it up with the I don't make it out, but I on it would take a woman Dahlonega Track.

We're not saying if you say hot vibrato, didn't realize how much he had changed until he moved back to Limas. Happy New Year.

But I think I'm in the year I had left behind my Lima Mentallo. My life, my way of life, and I felt completely endian as if I had been born in the Andes, but getting used to life and limb again was hard. Things didn't feel right in the city. He had a hard time connecting to his roots.

But when I came back speaking, Kichwa 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, was a solo show, children's solo. And it shocked me.

And then I had to get used to it to be able to live without being upset, to realize that when people were coming home, children, 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 he listened to back home. They listened to reggaeton and to salsa thrown up do that, 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 at the border.

And as you in the undermind on a normal day in high school, I always said at the back of the classroom and during recess, two kids started to do hip hop, one beatbox and the other started to improvise.

What made sounds like it and the other improvised yo yo we're here.

Of course the improvisation wasn't so good back then and so even at the start of the 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 rapping Kichwa, of course, and catch one. I swear it had never occurred to me to write and catch you until 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. A popular reaction. Good guy. You your. It's funny, Tony.

My career gets money first when he wrote the lyrics and it was just about the rhymes and whether they sounded good or not, they'll catch up on the sounds of Cédula, for example, the hot child, the IHA.

Those apostrophes sound incredible when in Kichwa, for example, it said that that must be Pompano Beach Intercounty Haberkorn excitement, the house buying and the more he wrote, the more he thought about the message behind his lyrics.

When I wrapped in Spanish, I didn't talk about any endian themes. That is, there wasn't any historical context when I wrapped in Spanish. But when I started to experiment with rapping and Kichwa, 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 mean, you're a connoisseur. Yeah.

I also got to know and came to value that I had a genius in the house. My father is 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 them, You have Flo. He didn't understand was Flo. Flo is the flavor that it has. I told him he has flow as if he were a rapper like from the Bronx.

So finally Liberata was ready to test of rapping in Kichwa in Palek. He started in the place he felt most comfortable.

Clennell I mean, when I look at first, I sang it in the neighborhood in the rural zones, and there was a girl like, How crazy you are, Digicel Jomaa now.

And as he became more confident, he started performing well. He knew he would have an audience on public transportation.

But yes, 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 Rusconi. And then I started to sing and people were surprised.

See, the 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 a monk from the Andes or my grandmother also speaks Quechua. Or people would say, yes, yes, I swear that now I've heard you, which made me want to learn Kichwa. Because it sounds good, Kichwa sounds good, and I would say if your grandmother still alive, take advantage of that Kichwa.

The anthrax is a brief with 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 Kichwa words. So in South America, Spanish and coach will have a long history together. There's some common catchwords you might recognize that have been adapted into Spanish like Poppa's, which is Spanish for potatoe and also into English like condor jerky llama or quinoa. And if you get to go to one of librettos concerts in person, he might just teach you some Kichwa during the concert itself to be on the holidays with you.

You got to. He may Nyangatom gig in the. Yeah, we want to get a win, so Oscar and I asked Liberato to give us a quick Chichewa language lesson, we started with some useful phrases for just getting around his hometown, snow in the mountains to say hello or how are you? You say, yeah. So if I say and you reply I English, which is like, I'm fine. I'm good. Yeah. I mean, the next phrase actually means, what is your name.

So next word. Kotsay 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 orally means poetry, but can also refer to the songs dedicated to nature or mountain spirits. And we couldn't resist asking Liberato to tell us some of those comeback's that he said he learned as a kid such as Chucky's, which means big footed and bring these up or big eared, at ease up on the OK language lesson over what happens when Liberata leaves the band and goes solo.

More on that when we come back with seven breakup's Tomarchio.

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That's m a r r i o t hotels.com. And let your mind travel. A member of Marriott ballboy. OK, now, as we promised, track seven breakup's, Tomarchio librettos band is split up in 2015 and Liberato CANY, they catch a rapper, was born as a solo act.

But Liberato got some straight up resistance to fusing Kichwa with such a foreign music style like rap. People ask him for gas.

Why do something for him? Why not something from here?

Basically, the man's is katra with hip hop when there's all these beautiful traditional styles of music.

Why Hip-Hop is Gameel. And what I tell them is that hip hop came during a hard moment in my life. Music arrives in the moment you most needed. 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 Kichwa 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 Parubiy musicians. He feels the fusion make his message stronger, and he was not alone in discovering how combining influences can create new species to exist.

As you'll hear in this upcoming track MiniDisc, which is why I know normally you hear why no other traditional music and Kichwa but to listen to Cédula in another genre and hear it fit well like an opera. It sounds really good. It's especially beautiful when my friend Renata Floras does it. Melodiously like a ballad, just giving drek the cover artists Cinecitta. Every good mixtape has to have a cover song.

So Liberata was steeped in throwback 90s hip hop and coming up with some golden age boom bad vibes.

Meanwhile, Renata Flores, this artist he just mentioned and the singer you're hearing now was coming up in an entirely different way.

And you can see Renata Flores, who has long hair.

She's incredibly friendly. He's got this big smile, actually kind of looks like a Disney princess.

I met Renata outside of one of Liberato shows. She was with her manager, who's also her mom. They'd come all the way from Ayacucho, a city in the Andes, just north of the town where Liberato lived with his grandmother. It's known as being this unbelievably majestic place.

And if we think it's very quiet, the sky is very, very blue with clouds that look like cotton balls. It's like a little hole that 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 range.

She she wanted to allow music. And what's beautiful about Indian music is that it takes its cue from nature. And this is like the river, the rain. Like Liberato, 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.

Ambassadors and we begin I started when I was really little, my parents always listen to a rock band that sings and Kichwa to.

It's and I always like to listen to them, so that's where my love for Kichwa and my love for music began.

More on that in a bit.

So Renata wanted to start singing her favorite pop songs and Kichwa, but she didn't speak Kichwa, 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 the way you make me feel. And it hit a million views in just two weeks. A lot for an unknown Peruvian musician, some inflammatory. So she's just barely more than a kid singing in a different language, but she starts to feel important.

I think I'm getting kids who I never thought that singing in Kichwa would influence young people to learn 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 Kichwa, 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 Liberato, as she gets older, she's writing her own songs and getting more political. The song you're hearing now Come Jena 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, which was also a way of life, Kichwa 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 Indian culture, but it's contained in the language which holds a whole culture, customs that we've left behind by me.

And now Renata is probably Peru's most famous pop musician, singing in Quechua, and she's only 19 years old.

I would come back to this track, nine guinea pig, Gigi.

So the way people reacted to Liberata 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 grew up listening to hip hop and there was a period where Missy Elliott's Get Your Freak On came out and Punjabi emcee 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 Kopeks Kaisers.

He's a deejay and producer who's kind of making the twenty 20 Indian versions of Get Your Freak On making electronic music with distinctly Peruvian sounds like sounds from the Andes, the highlands, the jungle.

Don't take me to the country, not on the CapEx collaborates with Liberato and Renata when they're writing their songs so that they sound distinctly Peruvian, not just linguistically but orally, too.

Like how the song you're hearing He Hit US or Scissors in Spanish incorporates songs from Perus Scissors Dance. And there's a detail of kopeks, his identity that I love, his bits are hard, cinematic, dramatic, but the meaning of his name, it's very Peruvian and it's also very cute. Guy Fawkes being coy.

iPIX comes from guinea pig cooing. And it was my cousin who gave me the nickname without thinking that someday I'd become a musician or use it as a sort of when I was very young.

He told me, you have a crucifix 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 when you take their last nap on your plate. OK, back to the music.

When CapEx 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 deejay. I didn't want to just do that.

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 Kinfolks was in his room listening to the 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 sisters. Dancers hold a pair of heavy, polished iron rods that look just like scissor blades.

They hold them in the right hand and kind of strip the blades together in a scraping cesari 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 HARTH flips and throwing themselves onto the floor. Liberato, who often has scissors dancers performing on stage with him, describes the scissor dance as Indian break dancing and it kind of looks like it.

And that trebly scraping sound of the scissor dance was exactly what I 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 be sometimes my family told me to my scissors dance, change the music because my studio is in my house and my family can hear what I'm working on.

But sometimes I say, hey, what you're doing is really pretty.

So the scissored dance sounds made it into his track with Renata, and it is most popular track like.

And even though he's not using Kichwa himself, most of the music is instrumental, he's pushing deeper into sampling locally and making all these mashups more richly Indian 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 it and there will be lost.

And everything has to be all fresh, kind of tracking through the.

OK, now is the point in the mix tape 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 Liberato, the real hip hop head, rapping in Kichwa Renata, the innovator who realized she could reach this huge audience by singing pop covers and Kashiwa and posting them on YouTube.

Kofax, 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 the Bendery, not a first covered, but is like the OG of fusing foreign music with Peruvian language and culture, in this case, rock with, y'know, a popular Indian folk music, but says that their music is not just rock sung and Kichwa, that it has an Indian soul, that when a peasant farmer listens to UBA, he will feel that soul.

And although Liberato, Renata and Kinfolks have faced resistance, which was 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, SCD atrocities. That's Marcos Mysel, which was songwriter and guitarist.

In the early 90s, Marcos was approached by musician Freddie Ortiz, who had worked as a police officer during Peru's civil war and had seen terrible things.

Freddie wanted to form a blues rock band that performed in Kichwa to give Peruvian people a sense of pride in themselves after all that had happened.

He named the band Yucaipa, which means ashes in Kichwa, referencing all that was left after the war destruction ashes.

And so I was thinking like, yeah, his 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, Kichwa people like Oscar? Think of it.

Well, honestly, I didn't know about which until very recently. And listening to them now, I feel like I missed out on something because I wish I could have had their 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 ketchup, people didn't respect you or just didn't want you around knowing about this new movement and some of the history around it.

We were curious what this all meant long term.

So we ask Marcos from which to put this in context for us. His band has been performing for 20 years and seen all these young people coming up. We were wondering, does it give him hope or does he think the same barriers which are faced are still there? Alchemy, so to see Franco.

Now things have changed a lot. Little by little. Peruvians are doing better economically, but it's still a very long process because it hasn't done the right things.

Oscar, what does he mean by Peru not doing the right things? What better? 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, McAvey Less, who wrote this amazing book. I am not sure about how there's still so much discrimination in Peru. And keeper of the point about access to health care for Kichwa speaking people. So, for example, if you speak, you can go to the hospital. Well, mostly everyone there speak 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 Kichwa, 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 of weapons de resistance. As you look at it, OK, I'm going to sound a little dramatic, I'm going to put everything into this until I can go on because I think which 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 and funny for a moment, and I make you aware of your roots.

That's a huge accomplishment. And if there were 30 minutes and 30 librettos, then it would be easier what I'm worried about the future. I don't want to be negative or if there's no work on the part of the government, it's almost impossible.

And Liberato agrees.

What 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 took Kichwa and Perus high schools. It's as if they view Kichwa 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 Kichwa 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? Right. And in this case, all this fusion and innovation does play a part in creating a sense of pride. And so Liberato and Marko's 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 Paru.

I want to see this bloody battle going on 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. They're going to be people along the way who don't like it, but it's necessary to be determined and to resist that resistance. Not giving up. You have to have that word in mind. But resistance, that's it.

Just that. There you go.

You all resist because it's the future. Track 12, the credits that most people get. But please don't skip them because people work really hard. Far flung with Salema, Shambhala is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Nuzum of Magnificent Noise for Ted. Our production staff includes Elise Blennerhassett and Oscar Luden, Kim Netafim, Peterson, QSA Kitana, Sabrina Farheen, Angela Chang and Michelle Quent with the guidance of Roxann High and Colin Helms. Voiceover by Jonathan Suza, a.k.a. Fest's Hector Adelheid, Jay Cruz, Marisol Billis and John Law, a.k.a. D.J..

Just John. Additional recordings by Whitney Henry Lester and Fernando Suarez. Translation and transcription by Ananda Suarez, Ellis O'Neal and Oscar Goodman are fact checkers are Nicole Bodey and Paul Durbin add stories are produced by transmitted media. This episode was mixed and sound designed by Christian Miller. Additional Music by Chris Zabriskie.

Special thanks to Cain's amigo and play play for being in the cipher at the beginning of this episode and to liberate Ockene, Renate Florescu effects and Marcus mysel for sharing your sounds and music. DeMarco appeals for your time and expertise as our executive producer is Eric Nuzum. I'm Saleem Reston Walla. No guinea pigs were harmed during this production special thanks to our sponsor, Marriott Hotels. PR ex.