Hip Hop Influences
While the Border Mexicans of the early twentieth century kept their culture alive amid a hostility through the use of corridos (Paredes 32), Balam Ajpu chooses to make protest music in a style not so associated with the dominant Spanish tradition, but that is still rooted in fighting the white American cultural hegemony (Bell 169). Hip Hop, a musical style that emerged in 1970s and 80s New York, has always been thematically concerned with the systemic racism that led to the dire social conditions African-Americans were living in (Navarro 568). It in this vein of hip hop, which offers critiques of racism, classism, and sexism that Balam Ajpu finds itself in (Navarro 568).
Hip hop as a genre has never been more popular, and it has spread from New York to all over the world. But while secure language traditions such as Japanese and German have produced hip hop which outright copies its American predecessor, the group Balam Ajpu more faithfully adhere to hip hop’s founding ideology. The rappers are proponents of “keeping it real,” an ideological concept within hip hop stating that the music one makes should conform to local identity and language in order to accurately reflect the community one came up in (Barrett 145). Balam Ajpu accomplishes this by sampling local sounds to make their beats, writing their verses in the variety of Maya dialects present around Lake Atitlán (Bell 169), and structuring their bars in the style of traditional Maya poetry (Barrett 145). While recontextualizing hip hop to their own scene, Balam Ajpu continue to pay homage to the pioneers of the style. They connect their own use of the Maya language, which lacks prestige in Guatemala, with the first rappers writing in their own denigrated vernacular, African American Vernacular English (Barrett 145). Balam Ajpu see themselves as a continuation of the struggle for civil rights that African Americans started in the 1960s-80s (Barrett 147).