Karl F. Swinehart

Tupac in their Veins: Hip-Hop Alteño and the Semiotics of Urban Indigeneity

the Black Panther Party, Afeni Shakur, gave birth to a baby boy who later in his life would become known to millions across the globe, as a performer, a rapper, a poet and a martyr. Tupac Shakur remains the hip-hop artist with the most albums sold world wide, more than 74 million—making his very name emblematic of hip-hop on a global scale. For Afeni Shakur, the name Tupac was also an emblem, a sign of antiracist, anticolonial resistance recognized by millions of Indigenous people across the Andes as the name of two anticolonial martyrs from the eighteenth century who led insurrections against Spanish colonialism—the Quechua Tupac Amaru the Second and the Aymara Tupac Katari (Hoye and Ali). On that summer day in 1971, when this young revolutionary named her son Tupac, could she have imagined that within decades the descendents of her son’s namesake, the descendents of the Tupacs, in cities like El Alto, Bolivia, would look to her son for inspiration? In Hoye and Ali’s 2003 biography of Shakur, they quote him as having said, “I was named after this Inca chief whose name was Tupac Amaru . . . He was a deep dude. If I go to South America, they gonna love me. I’m telling you. They know Tupac” (Hoye and Ali 8). He wasn’t wrong. Karl Swinehart is a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities and HarperSchmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago.