My friend Juan Vargas Rollano reminds us of a saying in our maternal language, told to him by Elizabeth Yana, that goes: “Don’t pity q’iwa (queer) people because they walk looking at the stars”
[ Janiwa llaqisañaqiti q’iwanakata jupanakaxa warawaranakana uñxatata sarnaqaphiwa ].
For us, the star is also called Chuqi Chinchay, who the great Aymara chronicler Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti wrote was “muy pintado, de todos los colores, dizen que era apo de los Otorongos, en cuya guarda da a los ermafroditas, yndios de dos naturas”.
We should recall the earliest known carbon-dated depiction of God in the Americas is a gourd etched with an image of Chuqi Chinchay as the “staff god”— Chuqi Chinchay’s iconic fusion with what we call Viracocha. A key attribute of Chuqi Chinchay’s qillqa (iconography or language) throughout millennia has been their hominid, simian, avian, reptilian, amphibian, & insectile transformations, among others.
https://pitchfork.com/news/chuquimamani-condori-shares-self-titled-album-under-new-los-thuthanaka-moniker-listen
