Grabado en Vilcashuamán, una joya arquitectónica de los incas en Ayacucho - Perú; con la finalidad de revalorar nuestra lengua ancestral "El Quechua".
In the middle of ancient Incan ruins in the foot hills of the Peruvian Andes, 14-year-old Renata Flores Rivera brings together two things dear to her heart: the ancient Indigenous language of South America, Quechua, and Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel.”
“It’s a project called ‘Las juventudes tambien hablamos Quechua‘ (the youth, we speak Quechua too),” she said. She said it’s important for her “to be able to appreciate this language again, because we are losing it here in Peru.”
Flores’s mother, Patricia Rivera Canchanya, kicked off the campaign this year through a cultural association, la Asociación Cultural Surca,which she founded 11 years ago to promote arts and Peruvian culture in their home city of Huamanga (also known as Ayacucho). Rivera is also a musician, and set up a music school through the association. She said she saw an urgent need to pass on Quechua to younger generations, before the language is forgotten in Peru.
“I speak Quechua, but not very fluently anymore because we don’t use it,” she said. “They teach a lot here, English, which is also really important because it’s the global language, but we can’t abandon our roots because this is ours, it’s a heritage that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to lose.”