Category Archives: peru

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.

Plaza Mayor

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Yesterday we went to Lima’s city centre, a UNESCO world heritage site, designated as such in 1988 for “bear[ing] witness to the architecture and urban development of a Spanish colonial town of great political, economic and cultural importance in Latin America. It represents an outstanding expression of a regional cultural process, which preserves its architectural, technological, typological, aesthetic, historic and urban values adapted in terms of availability of materials, climate, earthquakes and the requirements of society.” And it is indeed impressive: the grand Plaza Mayor, with the Presidential Palace on one side, flanked by the Municipality on another, and the Cathedral opposite, and then buildings that (now) include the headquarters of the Caretas news magazine. In true colonial style, then, some of the major centres of power are represented (or instiantiated) at this symbolic and real heart of the city: politics, religion, and the press.

Other elements of power were also evident. Yesterday, the whole square was essentially closed off (though you could walk the pavements at its edges), with barricades preventing anyone crossing the roads to the park at its centre, and there were plenty of police lurking around the perimeter. Later, I saw a bunch of riot police (with shields) watchfully wandering around. I talked to several people to try to find out what was up: the first person I asked, a guy trying to drum up custom for a nearby restaurant, shrugged his shoulders and said simply the single word: “Politics!” He then apologized, but I told him there was no need. A few minutes later, a policewoman told me the closure was something to do with a “protocol” meeting at the palace. A third opinion (from another police officer) was that it was in preparation for an incoming march by disaffected workers who had just been laid off by the municipality. This last version seemed the most possible, though we didn’t see any evidence of the demonstration over the next few hours, and in any case the laconic first response I’d received had already summed everything up nicely. Politics!

Later some sort of event did start up at one side of the square, with music and speeches and dancing. There were flags, too: someone was carrying around a large Wiphala, the flag associated particularly with the Aymara people in Peru’s far south, near Lake Titicaca, and also in neighbouring Bolivia. It was hard to get close to the event or to hear what was going on (and at point in any case I’d made arrangements to meet the students in the Plaza San Martín a few blocks away), but I heard some reference to Manco Inca, one of the last Inca rulers, installed after the Spanish conquest and originally allied with them as the Inca Empire split and dissolved in internecine disputes much aggravated by the Spanish. He later escaped the Spanish and laid siege first to Cusco and then to Lima. He was murdered in 1544 by Spaniards who had previously also murdered the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, as the invaders similarly broke up into contending factions. Yesterday, around the perimeter of the square, one guy was wandering around holding up a home-made sign saying “Manco Inca Anticolonial.” I asked him if I could take his picture, but didn’t talk to him any further. I have no idea whether he was part of the event on the other side of the square, or whether he was protesting against it for some reason. Perhaps there was simply no relation between the two things.

Meanwhile, life went on around and about. Tourists (including ourselves, of course) looked on, visited the museums, and checked out handicraft shops, while regularly approached by ambulant vendors offering everything from postcards and maps to trinkets and shoeshines. Many but not all of the people trying to make a little cash from the milling crowd were Indigenous. There was at least one wedding about to take place in the Cathedral, the guests waiting in their finery while little boys in matching suits who were perhaps nephews or cousins of the bride or groom ran around and their parents looked on to ensure they didn’t stray too far. And, despite my predictions to the students that Lima the Grey would be perpetually covered by its characteristic cloud as we enter winter and approach the solstice, in fact the sun burned off the sea mist and burnished the buildings’ yellow-painted walls. Later that night, in the Plazas San Martín I saw the riot police get picked up in a van, presumably to go back to the station. It looked like they hadn’t seen any action. The crowds and the music continued long after they, and we, had gone.

T-3 to Peru

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My plane leaves Monday evening. so this is the last weekend in Vancouver before the trip. Arrangements continue… Just this afternoon, for instance, one of the museums we’ll be visiting (the Museo Larco) wrote to tell me that their charges are going up, but that we can still visit for the old price that we were quoted when I asked for a guided tour a few weeks ago, so long as we now pay in advance.

But paying in advance is not simple. This goes also for hotels and everything else. Peruvian businesses much prefer to be paid via bank transfer, which is a long and laborious process to arrange via the university. So I try to pay by credit card (I now have a university credit card precisely for this purpose), but this has its own complications, sometimes at this end, sometimes at the other.

At times the issue is the Peruvian enthusiasm for bureaucracy. Perhaps as a legacy even of colonial administration, as elsewhere in Latin America businesses like things written down and sealed with some kind of identification: National Identification Card (or DNI) for citizens, passport number for foreigners. The lettered city lives on.

But at times the issue is the various ways in which Peruvians try to get around these same strictures of documentation… in ways that make my university’s financial administration’s metaphorical eyebrows raise a centimetre or two. The real city endures, even as the formalities of the paperwork are theoretically respected. “Obedezco pero no cumplo” (I obey but I do not comply), as the old phrase has it.

In my experience, however, everything has a way of working itself out. 

Meanwhile, I’ve been meeting up with the students on a fairly regular basis. Our final get-together is this afternoon. These have been optional exercises in getting to know each other, and there have been varying numbers each time, but I think they’ve been pleased to meet each other, and maybe relieved to discover they have some of the same interests and enthusiasms. To me, they seem like a very good group, and it’s also been good to have a better sense of them before we go.

In many ways they are typical of students I have in other Faculty of Arts classes. They have a variety of different experiences and perspectives. The majority, but not all, are Canadians (mostly but not entirely from British Columbia), and yet even among the Canadians many are first- or second-generation immigrants. A couple have some kind of Latin American heritage. There are (by quite a margin) more women than men. Some have officially graduated, others have still to declare a major. Of those who have, they are studying a variety of different subjects–Latin American Studies, but also Anthropology, English, Sociology, even the Sciences. They seem to be fairly well-travelled, but few have been to South America, and only one to Peru before. Some speak at least some Spanish, but most do not. They all seem almost as excited as I am.

I will be there a day or two in advance, and meeting most of them in at the airport in Lima early in the morning on Thursday. 

Then after settling in at the hotel, our first activity will be a tour of San Isidro, the neighbourhood where we are staying, including the Huaca Huallamarca, a (mostly) reconstructed Indigenous pyramid, and El Olivar, a park featuring olive trees that are descendants of saplings brought over from Spain in 1560.

Two weeks to Peru…

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It has just struck me that it is now less than a fortnight before I will be in Peru, to take a group of twenty UBC undergraduates (accompanied, fortunately, by a very reliable Teaching Assistant) for six weeks of study and exploration in Lima, Cusco, Pisac, Ollantaytambo, and Machu Picchu.

I am asking the students to write a regular travel blog, on which they will reflect on their experiences and observations while they are there (alongside a reading blog, in which they comment on a respond to the texts we will be reading and discussing). And so I thought, pour encourager les autres, that I would do the same.

At present I am still caught up in logistics–just yesterday I heard from our hotel in Cusco, for instance, that there has apparently been a misunderstanding about how many rooms we need; I am very much hoping this gets resolved today! But the sudden realization of how close the trip is may perhaps, paradoxically, help me stand back and think again about what I hope we achieve.

The theme of the course (because it is also a regular, six-credit university course) is “Making and Unmaking Indigeneity in the Andes.” Its basic premise, I suppose, is that we cannot (and should not) take Indigeneity for granted. Indigeneity is a product of history–and of course, specifically colonial and postcolonial history–if only for the fact that, prior to colonization, there was no such category as “Indigeneity.”

There were of course Inkas (and Chankas and Ashánika, and so on; elsewhere, Maya and Mexica etc.), but there were no Indigenous people. Indigeneity is a result or construction of colonialism. Indeed, the term “Indigenous” (in English) is first attested to by the OED in 1632, and it is in 1646 that we have the first occurrence of what we would consider its modern meaning, in a reference (by Thomas Browne) to “indigenous or proper natives of America.”

So we will read and think about how Indigeneity has been made–and at various points, also un-made–in the Andes from the seventeenth century (with Guaman Poma) to a present that we will, partially at least, see around us in Peru itself.

Inevitably, we will be tourists–and I hope that the students have a good time, and do not get sick or break legs and the like–but we will also be studying tourism, thinking about a history of outsiders’ gazes or Occidentalism, reflecting on our own participation, and even complicity, in making and unmaking Indigeneity. There is a lot to learn, and not only for the students. I am very much looking forward to the trip, although I am also a little nervous. . . if mostly in a good way. As I have told the students: we need to expect the unexpected and prepare for our plans to be derailed. That will be part of the learning.

Aves sin nido

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aves-sin-nido2Towards the end of Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Aves sin nido (1889), the mestizo couple Fernando and Lucía Marín, who are in effect the book’s heroes, because they are sufficiently enlightened to take pity on Peru’s indigenous peoples, are shown leaving the highland town of Kíllac where most of the novel’s plot is set. With them are two young indigenous girls, Margarita and Rosalía, their daughters who they are adopting because their parents have died, victims of violence stirred up by the town’s local authorities. There is no place for them in Kíllac, which is (as another character has declared, pages earlier) “barbaric” (49) and perhaps beyond salvation. If there is a future for the girls, it can only be in Lima, the nation’s capital and “antechamber of Heaven” from which can be glimpsed “the throne of Glory and Fortune” (80). Just as much to the point, moreover, is the fact that the Maríns themselves are hardly safe in the Andes. It was their efforts on behalf of the indigenous that provoked the disturbance in which the girls’ parents were killed. It’s time to get out of Dodge.

Along the way, headed for the train that is to be both the vehicle of their escape and potent symbol of the modernity that Kíllac so notably lacks, Fernando and Lucía mull over the dramatic events that have led them to this point. “What do you think of the things that happen?” the wife asks her husband. “I’m stunned just thinking back over the coincidences,” he replies. “Ah! Life is a novel” (140).

But life is not, of course, a novel. And when characters within a novel are made to protest otherwise, rather than heightening the realism of the events depicted, such claims instead undercut it by reminding us that it is, after all, a literary construction that we hold in our hands. The fact that the book needs to tell us that life can assume the shape of a novel is a sure sign that somehow it is failing to show us convincingly that the tale it tells is lifelike. Here, indeed, it is as though Matto de Turner were trying to prepare us for the hardly plausible plot twist with which her book ends. For it turns out that Margarita, too, is mestiza; her true father, as divulged in her mother’s dying breath, is Kíllac’s former parish priest. Worse still, her suitor, a young man named Manuel who is following along behind the family and hopes to ask the Maríns for their adopted daughter’s hand in marriage, turns out to be hiding the very same secret: he too is the lascivious priest’s bastard offspring. The would-be newly-weds are brother and sister! And with the revelation of that shocking coincidence, worthy as much of a telenovela as of a novel, the book’s plot eventually comes grinding to a halt. After all, novels end even if life has to go on.

Yet perhaps there is something lifelike (and indeed, not very novelistic) about this story’s strange and rather abrupt conclusion. For novels customarily end with some kind of resolution: a birth, a death, or a wedding, for instance. By refusing such a tidy ending, by ensuring through the scarcely believable device of making her young lovers siblings that there will be no marriage here, Matto de Turner is perhaps highlighting the artificiality of the novel form. Aves sin nido is true to life, and to Peru’s “Indian problem,” in its final recognition that it has no pat answers. Heaven can wait, as the glimpse of the throne of Glory is snatched away.