On a warm Friday evening, October 10, 2025, the Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture in the South Bronx—the birthplace of hip hop and ancestral land of the Lenape—vibrates with Afro-Indigenous energy. The crowd hums with anticipation as Mapuche rappers MC Millaray and Luanko take the stage to honor hip hop pioneers and siblings Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell with a special award of recognition. Their tribute follows a lively panel with the legendary siblings, moderated by Rodrigo Venegas, aka RodStarz, who—along with his brother Gonzalo “G1” Venegas—forms the hip hop duo Rebel Diaz, both children of Chilean political refugees who fled Pinochet’s dictatorship in the 1970s.
Speaking Mapudungun in the heart of the Bronx becomes both an act of linguistic resurgence and a land reclamation—a performative assertion of Indigenous presence within a space historically shaped by Afro-Caribbean and Latinx diasporic communities.
Inchiñ tuwün nieiñ taiñ mapu meu, feula Chile pingelu, Luanko says in Mapudungun, his mother tongue, addressing the global audience. “We are the Native People of our land, which is now called Chile,” a nation-state built on Mapuche territory through military invasion and occupation, resulting in the dispossession of most Mapuche from their ancestral lands, Wallmapu, spanning what is now southern and central Chile and Argentina. Mapudungun—from mapu (earth, land) and dungun (language, speech), meaning “the language of the land”—is the tongue of the Mapuche, whose name translates as “People of the Earth,” as Luanko explains. His words reverberate through the auditorium, carried by a reverent silence. Some audience members raise their fists; others record the moment on their phones.
Speaking Mapudungun in the heart of the Bronx becomes both an act of linguistic resurgence and a land reclamation—a performative assertion of Indigenous presence within a space historically shaped by Afro-Caribbean and Latinx diasporic communities. The Mapuche People’s ongoing struggle for territorial sovereignty in Wallmapu resonates with the Bronx’s histories of displacement and resistance, from the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway to the devastating fires of the 1970s, when landlords and officials abandoned the borough, leaving residents to fend for themselves, and continuing through contemporary movements for environmental justice and land stewardship.
From these roots, hip hop spread worldwide, becoming a megaphone for historically marginalized communities demanding justice and land back. From Wallmapu to the plains of Saskatchewan, Canada, it resonates through Mapuche, Quechua, Zapotec, Anishinaabe, and other Indigenous languages across Abya Yala—the homelands of Native Peoples of what is colonially known as the Americas— weaving a transcultural bridge across intertwined geographies of struggle.
“My language is just another representation of how far hip hop has reached—and how far the influence of this man and this woman has reached,” says Plains Cree-Anishinaabe rapper Drezus during the recognition ceremony honoring Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell. Miigwech—he thanks them in his Anishinaabe tongue, meaning “thank you.” He then shares an intimate story: “As an Indigenous boy growing up, I wasn’t too sure who I was. Hip hop became my best friend when I had nothing else. It gave me confidence, filled me with love, light, and inspiration.” With that confidence, he asked himself, “Who am I? And through that journey,” he added, “I found my culture—a culture that residential schools tried to strip away—and I found it through hip hop.”
His journey shows how reclaiming language, culture, and identity through hip hop resists Indigenous erasure and connects to ongoing struggles, including neighborhoods resisting gentrification and displacement led by South Bronx Unite. As a gift to the hip hop pioneers, Drezus sings a song from a dark period when he rediscovered his Native culture. Beating his drum with heartfelt rhythm, he offers a living testament to survival, memory, and intergenerational connection.
The ceremony unfolds during the First International Indigenous Hip Hop Festival, from October 9–12, organized by Action Lab, Hackeo Cultural, BLOQUE, and Rebel Diaz, with support from grassroots community organizations and university programs. This historic gathering unites Indigenous artists from across Abya Yala for concerts, panels, and workshops that strengthen connections to ancestral lands and build solidarity between local struggles in the South Bronx and global Indigenous movements. Alongside Luanko, MC Millaray, and Drezus, the festival features Dioganhdih (Akwesasne Mohawk Nation), Nataanii Means (Diné/Navajo Nation), Bobby Sanchez (Wari/Quechua on Lenapehoking), Mare Advertencia (Zapotec, Oaxaca), and Renata Flores (Quechua, Ayacucho).
The festival opened with “The Rematriation Trail,” a ceremony that grounded participants in returning to the mother at reclaimed community green spaces like the María Sola Garden, while envisioning collective futures through music, dance, and ritual. The route included 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, where DJ Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell’s 1973 back-to-school party launched hip hop—just a month before a CIA-backed coup toppled Chilean president Salvador Allende, leading to thousands of deaths, disappearances, and exiles under Pinochet. The first day concluded at Hostos Community College with a high-energy Open Mic, featuring the Nuyorican Poets Café—a movement through which the first generation of Nuyoricans reclaimed identity amid displacement, in parallel with hip hop’s evolution in the 1970s.
The next day began with an educational program featuring ten interdisciplinary community-care workshops bridging art, politics, and pedagogy. Artists led sessions on Indigenous language revitalization through hip hop, while community activists addressed issues such as climate justice, land back, and popular democracy. The day concluded with a conversation with Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell, followed by Melle Mel performing “The Message,” a historic song that sparked socially conscious commentary on inner-city poverty and urban struggle, energizing an intergenerational crowd and celebrating hip hop’s improvisational spirit.
Their beats and verses carry ancestral languages, Indigenous sounds, and stories of survival and resistance, flowing across genders, cultures, geographies, and generations.
The concert served as the festival’s centerpiece on the third day, showcasing how Native artists engage with hip hop. As Nataanii Means explains, “the way we relate to it is from an Indigenous perspective”—a worldview emphasizing interconnectedness, a spiritual bond with the land, and communities rooted in sustainability and reciprocity. Through their repertoire, the artists challenge settler colonialism, racism, and limiting stereotypes while reclaiming their territories, histories, and identities.
Their performances also confront heteropatriarchy: female rappers Renata Flores, MC Millaray, and Mare Advertencia, alongside two-spirit and queer artists Bobby Sanchez and Dioganhdih, challenge sexism, misogyny, and gender-based violence, advocating for the rights of women, girls, and LGBTQ+ communities while imagining inclusive worlds beyond Western monocultures. Their beats and verses carry ancestral languages, Indigenous sounds, and stories of survival and resistance, flowing across genders, cultures, geographies, and generations.
This activism resonates deeply with hip hop’s origins, which trace back to Africa—its “tribal roots,” as Nataanii Means notes—grounding the culture in centuries of ancestral knowledge-making. Afro-Indigenous scholar Kyle T. May (Saginaw Chippewa), in Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes, shows how Black and Indigenous histories in the United States have long been intertwined through enslavement and settler colonialism, fostering cultural exchange and solidarity. His observation that “Black-Indigenous histories have been crossing paths with each other ever since whites began inhumanely bringing captured Africans to Turtle Island”—the Indigenous name for North America—underscores how the modern world is built on shared dispossession and displacement.
In this context, hip hop becomes a pedagogical decolonial practice—a space where Black and Indigenous communities articulate collective experiences of diaspora, trauma, and resistance. These communities built the foundations of the settler and slaveholding city of New York—originally New Amsterdam—yet their histories have been systematically erased. Indigenous hip hop artists confront this erasure each time they take the stage in the Bronx.
“I don’t see New York here,” Luanko declared. “What I see is Lenape land.” Millions pass through or live in the city, yet few recognize that this land was—and remains—Lenape territory. In speaking this truth, Luanko forged a moment of solidarity and recognition across Indigenous communities and nations, from the original inhabitants of Lenapehoking and their descendants to diasporic Indigenous migrants—histories too often erased.
“I felt at home, I felt like family. We are one big family—the Indigenous peoples,” Luanko told me later while walking along the Hudson River. For him, hip hop and Indigenous communities sustain one another in the struggle for survival and resistance. “Hip hop can touch hearts and spirits; it can educate our people,” he said, a commitment he carries as a history teacher both in his classroom and in the broader community. As Cindy Campbell noted during the panel, “hip hop is a journey”—one that flows through Indigenous languages, contributing to their revitalization and carrying memory, knowledge, and the pulse of a living culture into the future. “The future of hip hop is also in the Indigenous language,” Luanko added, hours before heading to JFK Airport to return to Wallmapu.
Renzo S. Aroni Sulca is a Quechua scholar, musician, podcaster, and oral historian based in New York City. He is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies at New York University, where he teaches and writes on Latin American history and studies, focusing on the Andes, and on hip hop studies, with an emphasis on Indigenous rap.