This is the introduction for a new History Workshop series on Indigenous Historical Practices.
What does it mean to write history not in books, but with a bassline? Across Latin America, a growing number of young Indigenous artists are using music videos to challenge dominant historical narratives and assert Indigenous ways of knowing. At first glance, a Quechua-language rap track or a Mapuche-Spanish hip-hop anthem may seem far removed from archives, oral storytelling, or ceremonial history. However, music videos have long been used to express political critique – such as Public Enemy’s Fight the Power and Childish Gambino’s This Is America. For the collaborators behind Witrapaiñ and Renata Flores, these videos draw on global genres like hip-hop and trap, but are also anchored in Indigenous languages, historical memory, and lived experience, and function as acts of historical intervention. In this article, I explore how music videos can function as manifestos for Indigenous historical practice by examining the visuals, sounds, and lyrics of two landmark works: Witrapaiñ and Chañan Cori Coca.
My first introduction to both Indigenous rap and Indigenous music videos was through ‘Witrapaiñ – shown at the end of a postgraduate class on urban Indigeneity. Released in 2016, the song is a collaboration between Mapuche artists Jorge Andi Ferrer Millanao (known as Portavoz), Gonzalo Andrés Luanko Castro (known as Luanko), and the DJ and music producer, Cidtronyck. The video itself is rapped in a combination of Spanish and Mapudungun (the language of the Mapuche) by Portavoz and Luanko.
From the first shots, the video itself actively critiques the Chilean education system’s role in subjugating the Mapuche. Traditionally schools across the colonised world were a place to forcefully assimilate Indigenous children into settler-colonial culture, and thus, Indigenous communities as a whole. In one shot, we are shown a young Indigenous schoolchild being handed a worksheet with a drawing of Bernardo O’Higgins – one of the leaders of Chilean War of Independence against the Spanish Empire and one of the country’s founding fathers. At the same time, we hear the lyric ‘We observe your lies’ sung in Mapudungun. And later this is repeated
Chilean education denied us
History the Kilapang, Kallfukura, extermination unfolded
And erased us, like Galvarino I come
They cut off our hands
Here, Witrapaiñ offers alternative historical figures to that of O’Higgins, with Galvarino a particularly interesting example. 1557, during the Arauco War against Spanish colonial forces, he was captured after the Battle of Lagunillas and both of his hands were famously amputated (first his right, then, at his own urging, his left) as a brutal warning from the Spanish Empire. Released to relay a message of fear, Galvarino instead returned to his people and rallied them, showing his stumps and declaring that the same fate awaited anyone who submitted. He was appointed a military leader and, according to legend, strapped knives to his wrist-stumps and fought in the Battle of Millarapue. However, ultimately the Mapuche were defeated and Galvarino was captured again and executed. Galvarino’s significance lies not only in his personal heroism but in what he came to symbolize: the indomitable spirit of Indigenous resistance against colonial violence. His visible mutilation became a rallying point, transforming a tactic of terror into a powerful emblem of defiance. And the lyrics reclaim this violence too, as a mark of the Mapuche’s endurance rather than defeat, even as their history has been erased.
As part of this effort to erase them, Indigenous peoples have often been framed by colonial and academic narratives as purely historical – as if they belong to the past rather than the present. This perspective treats Indigenous cultures as static, vanishing, or “pre-modern”. In Witrapaiñ, the movement between Santiago’s bustling urban streets and the dense green forest of Araucanía constructs a powerful visual narrative of urban Indigeneity. We see Luanko and Portavoz rapping on the streets of central Santiago. These scenes are intercut with scenes of the Araucanía (the Mapuche heartland). This cross-cutting technique visually insists that Mapuche identity is lived both in ancestral territories and in the modern metropolis. This is more than a stylistic choice – it reflects a lived reality. Over 350,000 Mapuche people now live in Santiago, a product of decades of migration driven in particular by economic marginalisation. While Araucanía remains a symbolic and spiritual homeland (home to another 230,000 Mapuche), the city is now also a vital site of Mapuche cultural life, activism, and resilience. In this context, Witrapaiñ resists the colonial tendency to confine Indigenous people to the rural past. It asserts that Mapuche identity is translocal, spanning city and forest, ritual and resistance, and that urban life does not dilute Indigeneity but reshapes it.
Throughout the music video we see the figure of the machi. A machi is a traditional Mapuche spiritual and medicinal authority, often described as a healer or a shaman. Under colonial and postcolonial regimes, machis have been persecuted and marginalised, their practices dismissed or suppressed. Yet they remain central figures in Mapuche resistance and resurgence, embodying a living archive of Indigenous epistemologies. The figure of the machi appears throughout and closes the video, and the camera captures them using a 360-degree tracking shot, keeping them centred while we move around them. By literally and symbolically placing the machi at the centre, the video affirms that any reckoning with Mapuche resistance (past, present, or future) must begin with the historical and spiritual authority they embody.
Musically, the machi is also important. The sound of the kultrun, often used in Mapuche religious ceremonies by the machi, can be heard as part of the track’s beat structure, blending with the traditional hip-hop percussive rhythm. But this traditional beat is blended with the hip-hop beat. Indigenous musicians’ use of hip-hop, rap, and trap is not only a mode of cultural expression but a deliberate alignment with the global struggles of Black communities against racism, state violence, and erasure. These genres, rooted in the histories of African diasporic resistance, offer a sonic language of protest that resonates deeply with Indigenous experiences of colonisation and dispossession. In blending the sacred pulse of the kultrun with the rhythms of hip-hop, the track becomes both a ritual and a rallying cry, sounding out a shared history of resistance and a continuing struggle for justice.
If Witrapaiñ grounds its power in education, spiritual authority, and urban Indigeneity, Renata Flores offers a parallel but distinct intervention – centring language and Indigenous feminism to reclaim Quechua history on her own terms. Flores has been hailed by The New York Times as the “Queen of Quechua Rap”, a title that speaks not only to her musical talent but to the cultural and political significance of her work. Born in Ayacucho, Peru, Flores first gained international attention in 2015 with her viral Quechua-language cover of Michael Jackson’s The Way You Make Me Feel. Since then, she has emerged as a leading voice in a growing movement of young Indigenous artists who are using contemporary music to reclaim language, challenge historical erasure, and assert cultural pride.
Flores’ initial decision to sing in Quechua was itself a politically charged act, drawing attention to the long and ongoing struggle for the recognition, preservation, and revitalisation of Indigenous languages in Latin America. Quechua, once the administrative and ceremonial language of the Inca Empire, remains the most widely spoken pre-Columbian language in the Americas, with an estimated 10 million speakers across the Andean region. Despite its reach, Quechua has been subject to centuries of marginalisation. It continued to serve vital communicative and cultural functions well into the colonial period but was formally banned in 1781 in the wake of the Tupac Amaru II rebellion – part of a broader campaign to suppress Indigenous resistance by targeting Quechua cultural identity. And in recent centuries Spanish-language education policies further reinforced a linguistic hierarchy that persists to this day. Although Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia have all recognised Quechua as an official language and introduced bilingual education programmes, implementation remains uneven and under-resourced. A heritage speaker who only began learning Quechua in her teens, because of the denigration of Quechua, Flores frames her artistic practice as part of a broader commitment to linguistic justice and intergenerational healing. In doing so, she challenges the deep-rooted assumption that Indigenous languages are relics of the past, insisting instead on their capacity to carry complex histories, shape cultural futures, and speak defiantly in the present.
Her 2021 debut album Isqun, looks to highlight and reclaim Indigenous historical figures, and especially women. Isqun means “nine” in Quechua, and each of the album’s nine tracks is dedicated to a different woman from Peru’s history. For each song, Flores includes a personal note in the YouTube description, explaining why she chose that figure and what she hopes modern Peruvian (and particularly Quechua) women can draw from their legacy. The album opens with a track dedicated to Chañan Cori Coca, an Inca noblewoman renowned for her bravery when the Chanka people attacked Cuzco. According to historical chronicles, she fought directly in battle, instilling such fear in the attackers that they retreated even before the Inca army fully engaged. Her story, recorded by Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa and celebrated in Inca material culture, in Flores’ hands and voice becomes not only a tale of resistance but a model for reclaiming female Indigenous leadership.
The music video for Renata Flores’s Chañan Cori Coca juxtaposes two sharply contrasting visual spaces: the archaeological site of Vilcashuamán, a once heavily populated Inca administrative centre, and a minimalist studio setting where Flores and her dancers perform choreographed movements in space-age Lycra costums. The video employs rapid crosscutting between these locations, creating a visual dialogue between past and present. This formal strategy is highly significant: it collapses temporal distance and insists on continuity between Inca heritage and contemporary Indigenous identity. The site of Vilcashuamán, with its massive stone terraces and ushnu (ceremonial platform), evokes historical memory and cultural endurance. In contrast, the studio (often understood as a space of modernity and artifice) becomes a stage for reinvention, with Flores’s futuristic costume and assertive dance placing Indigenous femininity firmly within a modern, global aesthetic. By oscillating between these visual registers, the video refuses to position Quechua identity as either ancient or contemporary. Instead, it inhabits both simultaneously. In doing so, Flores challenges the pervasive framing of Indigenous peoples as relics of the past and reclaims both ancestral space and pop-cultural form as sites of resistance and self-definition.
The music videos of Witrapaiñ and Renata Flores are not just artistic expressions. They are modes of doing history. They challenge assumptions about what counts as evidence and where history can be found. They assert Indigenous presence in the past and the present, and demand that historical authority be recognised in the embodied knowledge of language, ritual, and sound. For historians, educators, and viewers, these works invite a different kind of listening. They ask us to hear the beat of the kultrun alongside the bassline, to read lyrics as archival testimony, and to see performance as a space of historical production. In doing so, they expand the very meaning of historical practice and remind us that Indigenous histories are not only remembered. They are being made, right now.