A Question of Race: Ana Tijoux’s album Vengo

This article hones in on the question of ‘race’ in hip-hop artist Ana Tijoux’s album Vengo (2014), which anticipates, in a musical format, the social demands which would emerge years later in Chile’s Estallido Social. More specifically, it dissects the ways in which this socially-engaged rapper transcodes (Hall, “Representation” 270) the racialized categories of ‘indio’ and ‘the south’ from a position of colonial difference (Mignolo 61). I argue that, by adopting this subversive and historicizing semiotic strategy, she casts these oppressive labels into productive political subject positions from which to level received racial hierarchies rooted in colonialism and reinforced by neoliberalism. They offer the individuals who are classified as such a blueprint to mobilize themselves and enact alternative ways of being; to come up for their rights; and to resist the inequalities that are perpetuated and naturalized by a system of organization which ranks them as inferior.