“Peru’s Queen of Quechua

Wants to Rescue Indigenous Culture With Her Music

Flores, 19, is part of a generation of Peruvian musicians combining the bouncing beats of Latin trap, rap and reggaeton with the sounds, and language, of the Andean countryside.

Renata

This blend of traditional and transgressive, rural and urban, local and global, has thrust Ms. Flores, 19, and her music into an intensifying debate over identity in the region, and made her a leader among a new generation of artists producing contemporary music in Quechua, which remains the most widely spoken Indigenous language in Latin America.

In the last few decades, internal migration has transformed Latin America into the most urbanized region in the world, but Indigenous languages — spoken by millions who have moved to the cities — have often been dismissed as the speech of poor farmers and relegated to nostalgic cultural spaces, including festivals and museums.

The message conveyed to Quechua speakers is that their identities are part of the region’s past.

In Peru, artists like Ms. Flores and the promoters of urban Andean music — sometimes called rap Andino or Inka trap — are presenting Quechua speakers as also integral to their country’s future.

“There are people with strong criticism who say, ‘This is an aberration,’” said Liberato Kani, 26, one of Peru’s best-known Quechua rappers, who sometimes hears from people who say the language of the Inca should stay “in the audio in my museum.”

Ms. Flores and Mr. Kani, along with soundmakers like Kayfex, who recently signed with the Warner Music in the United States, are combining the bouncing beats of Latin trap, rap and reggaeton popularized by artists like Bad Bunny with the sounds of the Peruvian countryside.

Quechua, which is spoken by an estimated eight million people across at least five countries, was spread across South America by the Inca long before the Spanish arrived.

Her new album, Isqun, or “Nine,” set for release this year, traces “everything that the Andean woman has had to go through, since before and including the arrival of the Spanish to Peru,” over nine songs, she said.

She recorded it at a music school owned by her parents, anddirected the production. She is an independent artist, self-funded with the help of foundation and competition money, event payouts and a contract with a shampoo company.

In “Somos Fusión,” a half-Quechua, half-Spanish song about the life of the half-Incan, half-Spanish daughter of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, she cheekily addresses Rosalía, the Spanish-born pop star who has sometimes been accused of crowding out Latin American artists.

Quachua has survived not only conquest, but the foundation of the region’s independent republics, whose leaders often discouraged the language’s use in an attempt to eliminate Indigenous dissent.

More recently, the language has endured Peru’s internal war, which spanned the 1980s and 1990s and pitted a brutal rebel group called the Shining Path against a sometimes equally violent government — with poor farmers trapped in the middle.

When the violence had subsided, Peru’s truth commission found that 75 percent of the war’s nearly 70,000 victims were native speakers of Quechua or other Indigenous languages.

It was out of that pain that several musicians formed a 1990s rock group called Uchpa, meaning “ashes,” helping to launch a Quechua-language blues-rock movement that became a freedom cry for a generation of Peruvians who had grown up choked by fear.

It is out of that legacy that artists like Ms. Flores and Mr. Kani have arrived, aware of the language’s history, but removed enough from the pain to take on new sounds and political issues.

She first captured Peru’s attention five years ago. At age 14, having failed to win a season of an American Idol-style show called “La Voz Kids,” she and her mother decided to take what would have been her champion song, Uchpa’s Quechua cover of the Animals’ version of “House of the Rising Sun,” to the internet.

Soon, her video of the cover was trending on Facebook in Peru. Then came more covers in Quechua: Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel,” and Alicia Keys’ “Fallin’”

Back then, Ms. Flores just wanted to do “something different,” she said. But she began to think about what it meant to sing in the language of her ancestors.

Her own maternal grandmother had been a teacher in rural Peru during the reign of the Shining Path and had told her about the horror of that time. Her Quechua-speaking students had been recruited by the guerrillas and terrorized by the military, her grandmother said. Speaking an Indigenous language made them both the victims of rebel recruitment and the object of suspicion among other Peruvians.

Her paternal grandmother, who grew up in the countryside, never land then translating them into Quechua with the help of her grandmothers.