Peruvian Pop Star Lenin Tamayo Is Bringing Quechua to the World

Lenin Tamayo is packing his bags for his biggest leap yet.

In many ways, the musician’s first tour in Asia this month has been a long time coming, given that the 24-year-old is the inventor of Quechua pop, or Q-pop, a genre of music that fuses K-pop with the Indigenous language of the Incas spoken by an estimated 10 million people in Latin America. The novel genre has helped elevate Tamayo from an aspiring Peruvian artist to a social media star, with his songs and music videos garnering 6 ­million likes across his TikTok page and tens of thousands of followers on Instagram.

Tamayo, who says he got emotional the first time he heard a K-pop song, was introduced to that genre by a group of young women who later became his friends during a challenging early period in his life. By combining his heritage­—both in his lyricism and his manner of dressing—with the styles and sensibilities of Korean pop music, Tamayo found that he could channel a part of his Andean identity, which once made him a victim of bullying, into art. “I couldn’t imagine singing in Korean. Rather, I imagined myself singing in my language and reclaiming what I am,” he says.

Writing music in Quechua comes naturally to Tamayo. It’s the native tongue of his mother Yolanda Pinares, also a singer, and a language she’s passed down to him since birth. He ascribes to it the ability to convey complicated feelings in a natural manner, perhaps even more so than in Spanish. “Singing in Quechua means looking at your past, but with hope for a better tomorrow. For a [better] future,” Tamayo says. “So I compose the melody and then, when [the song conveys] pure and genuine emotion, I translate [the emotion] into Quechua. And in Quechua it takes on more depth.”

In November, he’ll release the second half of his debut album, the first part of which dropped in August 2023. One upcoming single in particular exemplifies this connection between language and subject matter. Its title, “Llaqta,” translates directly to “village” or “town,” and the song tells the story of someone who has to leave their home country, “not because you want to go, but because you have no other choice than to go and look for better opportunities,” says Tamayo. But there is something that pulls them back to their homeland, a connection that he says “transcends beyond their consciousness.” It’s a connection to their heritage and home. “That’s the llaqta.”

Tamayo himself appears to be embarking on that journey. Feeling stifled by the music industry in Peru, which does not have the same track record of generating megastars as some of its neighbors in Latin America (Colombia, for example, home of Shakira, J Balvin, Maluma, and Karol G), he tapped into social media to grow his career and find a broader audience. It also permitted him to build a fan base that embraces him rather than continuing to dwell on the sexism, racism, and classism that at times his art has provoked.

Peru is historically a conservative country, where Catholicism is a part of the public-school curriculum and same-sex marriage is not legalized. For an artist like Tamayo, who eschews traditional gender norms when it comes to personal expression, opting for makeup and a crocheted off-the-shoulder top during our interview, this was not always a hospitable place to grow up and come into himself.

Discovering K-pop, and the global community of fans that comes together around their love for it, offered a refuge from the harsh realities he faced. “I consider it like armor, because through that armor I felt that I could let myself be an artist in singing, dancing, wearing costumes, and performing,” he says.

All of it is in service of the values he embodies in his art. As the singer introduces himself to me: “Lenin, amor y libertad. Amor para unir pueblos. Libertad para ser uno mismo.” Lenin, love and liberty. Love to unite people. Liberty to be one’s self.

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