Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru

Abstract

Zoila Mendoza’s book, which complements her previous work Shaping Society through Dance: Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes, constitutes a passionate defense of the study of folklore as an individual and collective field of creative activity. She shows that artistic expression is a suitable way to comprehend the social experience of practitioners of music, dance, and theater. Starting from the cultural postulates of Raymond Williams, Mendoza posits that no separation exists between the affective elements of consciousness, that is, feelings, and social and ideological thought. Rather, both concepts are equivalent and interrelated, so that folkloric expressions must be studied as autonomous realities and not as simple reflections of social processes. Mendoza proposes that the heterogeneous folkloric activity that flowered in the city of Cuzco between the decades of 1920 and 1950 inspired a creative revaluation of Incaism, indigenism, and mestizaje. This cultural view allows her to conclude that, by the end of the 1950s, the renewal and recreation of cuzqueño folklore by artists and intellectuals had succeeded in becoming a symbol of national identity, which afterwards was overshadowed by afrocriollo artistic expressions developing in Lima.Creating Our Own offers a chronological review of the artistic cuzqueño scene in the twentieth century. Mendoza challenges the view that the impulse of folkloric art was the result of manipulation by the intellectual and artistic elites, in which racist discourse and ethnic exclusion were fundamental. She shows, on the contrary, that there was a continuous interaction between elites and popular sectors, urban and rural populations, and criollos, Indians, and mestizos in the common wish to create and transmit a new feeling of regional identity. In other words, folklore was a field of redefined identities of all cuzqueños and therefore constituted a heritage shared by the upper and lower classes. To examine the popular results of the process of folklorization, the author describes the international tour of the Mision Peruana de Arte Incaico, led by the indigenist thinker Luis E. Valcárcel in 1923 and 1924; the massive regional contests of folklore organized by the Centro Qosqo de Arte Nativo in the 1920s and 1930s; the great popularity achieved by the radio program “The Charango Hour” in the 1930s; and, finally, the promotion of cuzqueño popular art undertaken by the Instituto Americano de Arte, founded in 1937 by the neo-indigenist writer Uriel García. All these examples show how self-taught and popular artists interacted with the criollo and mestizo musicians of the elite to develop new styles and repertoires that were soon adopted as typically cuzqueños. For instance, the author analyzes the individual paths of the arpista Manuel Pillco Cuba and the cha-ranguistas Pancho Gómez Negrón and Julio Benavente Díaz, and the leadership of popular groups like Centro Musical Cuzco, Conjunto Mosoc Llacta, and Centro Artístico Ollanta. All these show how artistic and cultural cuzqueñismo, in a complex process of negotiation, adopted Inca, mestizo, Indian, and cholo values as symbols of identity.Mendoza’s sources come from the newspapers of the period, the archives preserved in the Centro Qosqo and the Instituto Americano de Arte, and interviews with some actors directly involved in the spread of the cuzqueñista cultural phenomenon, such as the composer Armando Guevara Ochoa. Most of the protagonists are now deceased, but information provided by their descendants partly makes up for this, as in the case of the Pillco family. In sum, this book is a valuable contribution to the understanding of Peruvian cultural history in the past century, arising from an admirable methodological meeting between anthropology and musicology. Creating Our Own not only brings new ideas and knowledge, but the reader can enjoy the musical works studied here by purchasing recordings listed in the discography.