Mexican Singer Azalea Báalam Is Bringing Indigenous Languages Into Pop Music

Azalea Báalam writes pop music in languages many people were told would disappear. At 33, the Mexican composer and singer has built a career around Nahuatl and Maya, placing them inside electronic beats, choreographed movement, and digital platforms that rarely make room for Indigenous voices.

@azaleabaalam

Azalea Báalam – Añaaa te amo mucho mucho michi💖💗🩷 #nahuatl #musica #pop

♬ Añaaa Te Amo Mucho Mucho Michi – Azalea Báalam

Speaking from the rooftop of her home in central Mexico City, Báalam plays the nine notes of a jaina flute, a pre-Hispanic instrument she blends with contemporary production and choreography influenced by artists such as Michael Jackson and Juan Gabriel. Her work, shared widely online and increasingly across Latin American media, has drawn attention for insisting that Indigenous languages belong in modern music spaces rather than museums or classrooms alone.

According to EFE, her recent releases, including “Niyolmatis” and the viral TikTok track “Añaaa Te Amo Mucho,” arrive at a time when both Nahuatl and Maya continue to lose speakers each year, even though they remain the two most widely spoken Indigenous languages in Mexico.

Learning the Language That School Did Not Teach

Báalam grew up in the Yucatán Peninsula, home to the largest concentration of Maya speakers in the country. Her father speaks Maya, yet she did not learn it as a child.

She learned both languages as a teenager after moving to Mexico City because Maya was rarely taught in schools and Nahuatl was the only Indigenous language commonly available to study.

She began with basic Nahuatl classes, a practical decision shaped by what the education system offered rather than by heritage alone. Over time, she added Maya through independent study, family connections, and constant practice, turning both languages into tools for songwriting rather than academic subjects.

That personal effort sits against a wider demographic reality. Over the last two decades, the number of Maya speakers in Mexico has fallen by over thirteen percent, according to national data cited by EFE. Linguists and anthropologists have long warned that institutional neglect and social stigma accelerate that decline, especially in cities.

Báalam chose music as her response.

Pop Music Built From Ancestral Words

She describes her sound as a mixture of everything she loves, including Korean pop, electronic production, and classical Indian dance gestures known as mudras, which shape the movements in her videos and performances.

To give the style a name that young listeners might remember, she created her own labels, “nahuapop” and “mayapop,” framing Indigenous languages as living parts of global pop culture rather than as cultural artifacts.

Her lyrics move between humor, anger, romance, and protest. She has spoken about how Nahuatl verbs allow emotional intensity that Spanish often flattens, especially when addressing rage and injustice from a feminist perspective.

She also uses language strategically when responding to criticism.

In an interview with EFE, she explained that writing in Indigenous languages allows her to answer male critics who dismiss her work without always understanding what she is saying. She described this linguistic distance as a space of freedom, one where she can speak openly without immediate policing from audiences unfamiliar with the vocabulary.

Her songs combine playful visuals associated with Japanese kawaii culture and lyrics that confront capitalism, gender expectations, and suicide prevention, themes that rarely share space in mainstream pop.

Azalea Báalam Is Part of a Growing Movement

Báalam insists she is not working alone.

She points to other artists such as Za Hash, who raps in Mazahua, and Juan Sant, who records in Totonac, as part of a wider effort to rebuild musical ecosystems around languages that colonial history tried to erase.

Their work circulates mostly online, moving through social media platforms rather than traditional radio, where programming still favors Spanish and English.

Ultimately, the singer wants to create a record label dedicated to Indigenous language projects, offering production support and distribution to artists whose work rarely fits commercial formulas.

In her words to EFE, she hopes to build a path that did not exist for her at the beginning, even if the goal feels distant.