Magali Revollar Quispe was seven years old when she learned to speak Quechua. His grandmother taught him through music, although he remembers that his mother tongue was always present in his life. “My parents didn’t teach me Quechua to protect me from discrimination, it was an act of love, they didn’t want anyone to humiliate me because of my indigenousness or reject me because of my accent,” she recalls. Now this singer-songwriter and actress, who has lived in Spain for more than two decades, sings, interprets and teaches the language of the Incas in the country that welcomes her.
In Peru, the opportunities to speak their mother tongue were limited to the cultural area. “My mother sang in our language. Our identity could be expressed through music. But at school you could only communicate in Spanish,” he complains. In this country alone, about 3.8 million Quechua speakers were identified in the last census of 2017. Of the 560 indigenous languages identified in Latin America and the Caribbean, Quechua is the native language that has spread most widely in South America, according to the United Nations. It is spoken by more than 10 million people in seven countries in the region: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador and Peru.
One in five indigenous people has lost their mother tongue in recent decades
Therefore, it did not take Revollar long to realize that his passion, music, would be one of the connecting points of his indigenous Quechua identity with his surroundings. At the age of 16 she had already founded a women’s music group with three friends. “I always said I was going to pastry school so my parents wouldn’t find out about me,” she says with a nostalgic smile.
That was the beginning of his artistic life. She learned to play about half a dozen wind instruments, including the quena, or the zampoña—sicu, as she says in Quechua—an Andean flute that, in Revollar’s words, represents the duality of the Andean world. Also the quenilla, the pututu or shell; and her favorite: the waqrapuku, an instrument made of bull’s horns that “represents miscegenation.”
In Spain she combines her life as a nursing assistant in a hospital in Madrid with concerts of Latin American and Andean music. For two years he also taught virtual introductory Quechua courses organized by the Peruvian Consulate in Madrid. His students were Peruvians living in Spain who wanted to reconnect with their native language or learn it from scratch. children and adults. “For the little ones, I wrote some stories that taught them not only Quechua but also the values of the Inca culture, such as respect for animals and connection with nature,” he explains. The current convulsive situation in Peru keeps this project on hold. “The last workshop ended in December 2022, now we don’t know if it will continue because the promotion of interculturality is also in the hands of those who govern us,” he reflects.
a scar from the past
The 49-year-old artist says that while she was able to learn Quechua from her grandmother, the country’s rejection of the language is still a reality. Only in Ayacucho, his hometown, do 31 percent of the population belong to the indigenous peoples of the Ashaninkas and Quechua, and yet the language of social exchange is still Spanish. “No one wanted to speak Quechua because there was a risk of being mistreated in the big cities. Often when a Quechua speaker went to the health center or other facilities, they were not treated as they should be, the rejection was palpable. I remember queuing to shop and in front of me was an indigenous woman in her traditional dress. That’s why the employee wanted to serve me before her. It’s very sad,” he says.
Our identity could be expressed through music. But at school you could only communicate in Spanish
The World Bank warned in 2019 that “half of the languages in the world today will become extinct in this century”. In the case of Latin America and the Caribbean, he added: “One in five indigenous peoples has already lost their mother tongue: 44 of these peoples now speak Spanish and 55 speak Portuguese.” to a legal and effective recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples,” the document says. The conclusions of the latest Social Panorama of Latin America from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) are consistent with this diagnosis, which shows that indigenous people have twice the chance of living in poverty and four times the chance of living in extreme poverty than the non-indigenous population of the region.
“This is a scar from the past that comes from colonization. They made us believe that we aborigines are small, that our culture is worthless, that our language is just folklore. But that’s not how it is,” argues Revollar. And he emphasizes that the basis of this exclusion lies in education. “Believing that we are ignorant, people do not appreciate our language, it is not taught; even our own people would rather learn English or French than Quechua. Learning other languages is not bad, the problem is despising ours,” he claims.
Although the outlook is sometimes bleak, Revollar acknowledges that there are more and more initiatives to promote intercultural education, both from international and national organizations and from their own initiatives. “My fight is through art, because culture connects us. I don’t just want to reach my own people, but everyone, so that they realize that Quechua is a language that has a history, a culture and values. I want them to know us so they respect us,” he concludes.
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