Bilingual Intercultural Education and Andean Hip Hop: Transnational Sites for Indigenous Language and Identity

Exploring contemporary Aymara and Quechua speakers' engagements with multilingualism, this article examines two transnational sites of Indigenous language use in Bolivia—a master's program in bilingual intercultural education in Cochabamba and a hip hop collective in El Alto. Responding to the call for a sociolinguistics of globalization that describes and interprets mobile linguistic resources, speakers, and markets, we draw on long-term ethnographic fieldwork to explore the transnational nature of these mobile and globalized sites, ideologies of Indigenous language and identity present there, and flexible language practices therein. From our analysis of selected narratives and interactions observed and recorded between 2004 and 2009, we argue that these sites, ideologies, and language practices constitute productive spaces for Indigenous language speakers to intervene in a historically and enduringly unequal, globalizing world.