Category Archives: music

Arguedas Tour: Puquio

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Arguedas’s life was full of movement, and this transience began in his early childhood. Son of an itinerant mestizo lawyer, whose wife (Arguedas’s mother) died while young José María was still an infant, he was constantly on the move, often cared for by relatives. Initially, his travels and displacements took him around the southern highlands, and the provinces of Apurímac, Ayacucho, and Cusco. Later, he would be enrolled in secondary schools on the coast, first in Ica and then in Lima, with a stint in Huancayo (in Junín) in between.

Some of this time was spent in or near the town of Puquio, in Ayacucho, which today is on the road that connects Nazca to Cusco (and on, even as far as Brazil). Puquio was the home of Arguedas’s stepmother, who holds a special place in the writer’s childhood trauma and mythology: apparently resentful of his very existence, she relegated him to the kitchen with the household’s Indigenous servants, who taught him Quechua and “treated [him] just as if [he] were on of their own.” This association with Peru’s Indigenous culture would stay with him for the rest of his life.

Arguedas would go on to revisit Puquio both as an anthropologist, undertaking fieldwork and research in and around the town, and as an author, making it the setting for his first novel, Yawar fiesta, whose title combines Quechua (Yawar) and Spanish (fiesta): “Blood Festival.”

Yawar fiesta is as much about the town as it is about any individual characters. Indeed, arguably most of the characters are collective: the “mistis” or “principales” who are the landowners and merchants; the subprefect who represents the state; the town residents who have migrated to Lima, but now return for its annual celebration of national independence; and above all the “comuneros,” members of the town’s four ayllus, or Indigenous communities. The ayllus both collaborate and compete to put on the show that gives the novel its title: a bullfight that the other characters disdain as barbaric and dangerous, but which, when plans to modernize or “civilize” it fail, the mistis ultimately embrace as if it were their own.

Moreover, the novel opens with a visual description of the town as seen by a traveller arriving at the pass that gives access to the valley in which the town is set, offering a view in which the rooves and spires of the ayllus stand out: “‘Indian town!’ exclaim the travelers when they reach this summit and spy Puquio” (1).

We must have passed through or near this pass on our way to Puquio, but in the early dawn as our coach from Lima approached the town, it was not about to stop for us to take in the view. Later, however, we had lunch at a restaurant on the other side of the valley, from which we could see a similar vista to the one Arguedas describes. And although the landowners’ dominance has long faded, with agrarian reform and the break-up of the haciendas, the four distinct communities, each with their own small plaza and church, are still clearly visible.

It doesn’t take too long to walk around Puquio, which has scarcely grown (only from 14,000 inhabitants to just under 16,000) in the decades since Arguedas was here. We visited all the plazas and churches. There are few modern buildings, though apparently the town hall had to be rebuilt after it was bombed by Sendero Luminoso in 1992. Few if any buildings are more than two stories high. On the outskirts of town, on a small hill, is a bullring, fenced off and contained.

My friend Carmen’s father comes from Puquio, and her family still has a house there, a few blocks from the main square. It is rundown and barely habitable; the family has neither the time nor the resources to figure out what exactly to do with it. But it is also a very material connection, remnant and reminder for a generation that moved to the coast and reinvented themselves there, becoming fully limeños, but never fully forgot their ties to the sierra.

There are plenty of signs of Arguedas in Puquio. A school is named after him, and a restaurant has the name “Misitu,” after the untamed bull that the comuneros bring down from the mountains in Yawar fiesta. In the main square is a statue of the writer, standing and wearing a flowing poncho, book in hand, apparently reading or declaiming to us below. In another square is a statue of a condor atop a bull, another version of the yawar fiesta (or turupukllay) that Arguedas’s novel mentions, but doesn’t describe at length, but which here and elsewhere has come to stand in for the novel as a whole. So this remembering is in part a misremembering.

Similarly, some have suggested that Arguedas’s own childhood reminiscences are unreliable. In José María Arguedas: Biografía y suicidio, Hugo Chacón Málaga argues at length that the writer’s mother was actually an Indigenous woman with whom his father must have had an affair. Whatever the truth of the matter (it seems unlikely to me), the point is that Arguedas’s story about the past was generative for his subsequent work: a story that, either way, is about fictive kinship, imagined relations that come to outweigh the real.

As the sun went down, we went to a small café run by a friend of Carmen’s. He called on a couple of musicians, who played huaynos (Andean ballads or laments) on a guitar and a charango, chatting and drinking with us for several hours. The songs came from various regions of the southern highlands, and the talk was both of Puquio and of other places, both near and far. It was a very Arguedian way to spend the evening.

Music and Dance in the Plaza de Armas

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Music is important in the Andes, and we have certainly heard plenty over the last few days. As I write, outside in the Plaza de Armas is some kind of “battle of the bands,” which has been going on for hours and, we are told, will continue for many more. There is a wide variety of styles and content: from a cover of Bruno Mars’s “Uptown Funk” to a kind of Andean Rock featuring pipes alongside guitars, glorifying the city of Cusco.

Late last night, also in the Plaza, was a rather more impromptu musical performance that gathered up a crowd in the central park singing and no doubt drinking until late. In the streets around the Plaza are bars and restaurants aimed mostly at tourists, some of which feature live bands, but all of which have music blaring until the early hours. During the day, there are also buskers, not least a guy just outside our hotel who sings his heart out from a wheelchair.

A couple of days ago, many of us went to a concert in the Municipal Theatre, featuring upcoming “Q Pop” star Lenin Tamayo, whose fusion of Andean music (and Quechua lyrics) with K Pop beats and extraordinary dancing was quite something. On the same bill was Lenin’s mother, Yolanda Pinares, a veteran singer whose speciality seems to be torch songs that express the struggles and triumphs of Andean womanhood: she sang for her Warmi, even when life was hard and they felt they couldn’t go on.

It is festival season–we are in the midst of Corpus Christi–and so perhaps the music we have heard most has been the marching music, less drum and bass than drum and brass (no band is complete without a couple of tubas, if not half a dozen), that accompanies the parades that thread through the city streets and circle the Plaza. This is the music that accompanied the transport of the saints from the parishes that constitutes the essence of Corpus Christi. But it is also the music of the school parade that we saw the first morning we were here, accompanying a wide variety of Indigenous dance troupes as well as students marching along in their school uniforms. It is repetitive and insistent; it keeps threatening to stop, only to be picked up and continue on. The stamina of marchers, dancers, and musicians is impressive.

Then there was the music of the sung mass held outdoors before the saints paraded around the square. Music and chants drive home the liturgy of the church, not least for a society that historically has had high rates of illiteracy. It adds to the pomp and splendour of the occasion. But even the church music is subject to hybridity and fusion of various kinds: for us, there was a strange recollection of home to hear a Spanish interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” broadcast around the plaza.

Finally, I want to mention the performance I stumbled across in the Plaza yesterday evening, which was not simply music and dance but also a form of narrative theatre that reminded me of everything from pantomime to (what I have read about) the European Commedia dell’arte of the late Middle Ages and beyond. There was no dialogue or lyrics, and there were more or less formal dances but also much play-acting and drama. 

This, one of the audience told me, was specifically a performance called “Los majeños” (put on in this instance by the Centro Qosqo de Arte Nativo), which features a whole set of stock types such as a Harlequin-style clown and satirical portraits (with masks) of the mestizo merchants who once trafficked liquor through the southern highlands, introducing the vice of alcohol. Only a turn to the church and the cross (and the representation of a procession much like those we had seen in the Corpus Christi celebrations) finally saves the day. 

The message was no doubt intensely moralistic, combining nationalism with religion in a version of the Peruvian flag with a cross in the middle panel. But along the way the audience laughed most at the comic consequences of the portrayed drunkenness, oohing and aahing at the physical comedy of bodies falling over or slumped on the ground, or the fights that broke out between women and men alike. The carnivalesque disruption required a moralizing resolution, of course, but that same resolution also enabled the carnival that preceded it, which provided most of the draw and all the entertainment.