The genre that was born inside a miniteca and now fills dancefloors across Europe

From a neighbourhood miniteca to a worldwide sound

In the early 1990s, in the working-class hills of Caracas, a teenager named Pedro Elías Corro started collecting vinyl records and cassette tapes. In 1993 he bought his first mixer and, soon after, watched his first miniteca live: he was sold on becoming a discjockey. Over the years he became known as DJ Baba —and later, after a joke among friends about his looks and his love of “Jurassic Park,” as DJ Babatr.

Across town, in Petare, another teenager —DJ Yirvin— was learning to mix on his own father's miniteca equipment. “Baba was the best on the west side, and I was the best on the east,” he would sum up years later. In the early 2000s they brought those two rival scenes together into a single crew, the Raptor Crew, alongside DJ Linares, DJ Deep, DJ Elieser, DJ Armando and DJ Byakko —the last of whom coined the genre's name: changa tuki, an onomatopoeia for the sound itself: tuki-tuki-tuki-tuki.

Matinées and miniteca wars

The party format was literally that of a miniteca: matinées started at noon to get around nightclubs' age restrictions, and the genre was heard mostly in the barrios, in the trucks heading to La Guaira, and at miniteca wars —the very term this Archive uses to document the 1979 Primera Guerra. At 150 beats per minute, with tribal percussion and strident synths often made on home computers, changa tuki was passed around among friends as it grew into a culture of its own: dance, dyed hair, bright clothes and flat-brim caps.

The stigma of the word “tuki”

The very term that named the genre eventually turned against it. “Tuki” went from a simple label to a classist slur: the Caracas press linked the dance to crime, and episodes of violence at some parties led to legislation against matinées. DJ Baba quit music in 2008, feeling responsible for a scene he himself had helped create, and went to work at a paint store.

The comeback, twenty years on

The scene did not die: in 2013, Baba and Yirvin took part in the documentary “¿Quién Quiere Tuki?,” and a new generation —the Abstractor crew, led by POCZ and Pacheko— began mixing social classes on the dancefloor. During the pandemic, Babatr uploaded his music to Bandcamp; that is where producer Nick León found him, and their collaboration “Xtasis feat. DJ Babatr” (2022) became an international hit. Since then his music has featured in sets by Peggy Gou, Nina Kraviz and Jennifer Cardini, he held an NTS Radio residency, and he played Barcelona's Boiler Room during Primavera Sound 2023. Another of the scene's founders, DJ Yirvin, was sampled by Arca on a remix of “Rain on Me.”

In October 2025, the documentary “Esto es Raptor House” premiered at Barcelona's IN-EDIT festival, directed by Roberto López Buschbeck, telling this story with Babatr himself as its throughline: from a neighbourhood miniteca to a phenomenon now heard across Europe.

In pictures

ILLUSTRATED RECREATION, not a photograph — CMTK Archive.