Identity In Peru Research Articles

Factors associated with depression in Peruvian LGBT + individuals exposed to discrimination and violence

We aimed to analyze the factors associated with depression among LGBT + people exposed to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in Peru. We conducted secondary analysis on a subset ( 5846) of cases from an online survey of LGBT + people. Individual (age, work status, prior mental health conditions, identity expression fear), structural (forms, agents, and contexts of discrimination), social (family support, relationship status, community participation, activism, knowledge of LGBT + laws), and institutional (sexual health information) variables were associated with depression in our sample. Mental health inequalities are driven by multiple intersecting layers of social factors across individual, structural, social, and institutional levels.

Higher Education and Urban Migration for Community Resilience: Indigenous Amazonian Youth Promoting Place‐Based Livelihoods and Identities in Peru

This paper offers an ethnographic analysis of indigenous Peruvian Amazonian youth pursuing higher education through urban migration to contribute to the resilience of their communities, place‐based livelihoods, and indigenous Amazonian identities. Youth and their communities promoted education and migration as powerful tools in the context of educational inequality, racial discrimination, and threats to their communities' ways of life from colonization and natural resource extraction.

Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars: Huayno Music, Media Work, and Ethnic Imaginaries in Urban Peru by Joshua Tucker (review)

Reviewed by: Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars: Huayno Music, Media Work, and Ethnic Imaginaries in Urban Peru by Joshua Tucker Francisco D. Lara Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars: Huayno Music, Media Work, and Ethnic Imaginaries in Urban Peru. By Joshua Tucker. (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. [viii, 232 p. ISBN 9780226923956 (hardcover), $90; ISBN 9780226923963 (paperback), $30.] Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Joshua Tucker’s Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars is a much-welcome addition to the growing literature on music and identity in contemporary Latin America. Drawing on extensive field research (2001–8), Tucker explores how the highland Peruvian genre of music known as huayno, specifically the stylistic variant associated with the city and department of Ayacucho, has implicated complex, dynamic, and historically-situated categories of ethnicity and class in its development, circulation, and consumption since the early twentieth century. His focus on radio broadcasting and radio DJs as agents negotiating the boundaries of tradition, modernity, class, and ethnicity in shaping and defining new markets and audiences illuminates more precisely the relationship between music and identity in Peru, as well as the role of media and media producers in the construction, mediation, and circulation of social categories. Timely and relevant, his approach, arguments, and conclusions will appeal to music, culture, and media scholars and students interested in the intersection of music, identity, and technology as well as in the issues of ethnicity and national identity in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin America. Huayno presents a unique case study through which to understand the dynamics of identity construction in Peru. As a general term referencing various regional variants of music and dance originating in the Peruvian highlands and now heard throughout Peru, huayno demarcates a long-standing division in the national ethnic imaginary between the predominantly indigenous and mestizo (of mixed indigenous and European ancestry) highlands and the criollo (American of European descent) coastal region. Yet, as Tucker shows, the same discourses constituting the perceived divide between highland and coastal Peru likewise serve to differentiate the refined huayno of Ayacucho and its upwardly-mobile urban mestizo listening audience from other types of huayno and emergent popular music hybrids, such as chicha, commonly associated with the rural indigenous and proletariat populations. In attending to local discourses of Ayacuchano huayno in their convergence with broader discourses of identity and place in Peru, Tucker reveals how certain discursive tropes and practices, specifically at play in the commercial recording and radio broadcasting of the genre, reify existing social categories while mediating contemporary notions of a more cosmopolitan highland Andean identity. Gentleman Troubadours therefore also addresses the issue of globalization and presents a more nuanced perspective on the related notions of tradition and modernity as they relate to music and identity. Tucker explores the topic and convincingly develops his arguments over the course of six concise yet thorough and well-written chapters, the final of which is an epilogue. Chapters 1 and 2 contextualize the study in terms of the major issues addressed, the theoretical framework employed, the primary arguments posited, and the current Peruvian soundscape within which Ayacuchano huayno is situated. [End Page 666] Here, he calls for closer attention to the ways in which media circulation builds “communities of shared reference rather than shared substance” (p. 32) and shows how currently-operational social categories in Peru that index notions of class and ethnicity constituted during the colonial period are mapped onto the contemporary Peruvian music scene. Chapter 3 discusses Ayacuchano huayno specifically and addresses the ways in which the genre was consciously inscribed with a distinctly regional elite social status cultivated by a growing, upwardly-mobile highland mestizo middle-class listening audience through the work of the Ayacuchano Cultural Center during the early twentieth century. Of significance in this chapter is his discussion of huamanguinismo, a term that makes reference to the Spanish heritage and refined social values and aspirations of Ayacucho’s urban mestizo middle class, and its implications for Ayacuchano huayno composition and interpretation. Chapters 4 and 5 present Tucker’s analysis of the role of the recording industry and radio broadcasting, respectively, in the creation of new consumer audiences for contemporary Ayacuchano...

Whose Diversity Counts? The Politics and Paradoxes of Modern Diversity

Is “diversity” a modern concept, like indigeneity or biodiversity, which is conceived precisely at the time that it seems to be threatened and on the verge of disappearing? In the face of perceived threats to diversity, projects and policies have been crafted to protect, promote, or conserve diversity, but in doing so they have often demonstrated a paradoxical propensity toward purity and authority in representations of diversity. Perceptions of “pure” natural diversity might represent native forests comprised solely of native species; “pure” cultural diversity might represent indigenous peoples who still speak indigenous languages and wear native dress. If purity is emblematic of diversity, what, then, is the place of hybrid landscapes and peoples? In our study, we draw on a range of examples—of agrobiodiversity conservation in Bolivia, satellite mapping initiatives in Madagascar and Ecuador, scientific authority about anthropogenic climate change, indigenous language and identity in Peru, and a comparison of the Amazon and Atlantic Forest in Brazil—to demonstrate gaps between representations of diversity, and the heterogeneous local realities they obscure. We suggest that hybridity is a form of diversity unto itself—albeit a form of diversity that is more complex, and thus harder to codify and categorize.

History’s Peru: The Poetics of Colonial and Postcolonial Historiography

History’s Peru is not an intellectual history of the idea of Peru but rather a series of critical essays on important works and debates in Peruvian history writing from Inca Garcilaso de la Vega to Jorge Basadre. These are organized chronologically in an arc that reproduces the canonical understanding of Peruvian historiography in which Inca Garcilaso creates a philosophical-historical “Peru” that is later reconceptualized by modern republicans. Attentive to intertextuality among the works he studies, Thurner does not examine causal relations so much as offer a series of readings, inspired by the strategies and debates prevalent in European historiography at the time of the works’ creation. The principal thematic link is a strong emphasis on how Peruvian historians negotiated, challenged, and disrupted the conceptual position allocated to Peru in European (and North American) historiography and historical philosophy. Beyond the work’s intervention in Peruvian historiography, the author actively engages postcolonial studies and critical historiography generally.The first three chapters focus on Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s and Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo’s works. To the strong literature on the former, this book contributes provocative readings of the well-known chapters on the naming of Peru and the double beginnings of the work, through the critical lens of Alain Badiou. As to Peralta, Thurner is to be lauded for turning attention to this neglected, but fascinating and highly influential eighteenth-century limeño. The subject position of the creole intellectual is well elaborated and related to Peralta’s efforts simultaneously to defend the Spanish Empire (against European intellectual critiques) and to criticize it (as a marginalized colonial noble). Unfortunately, the discussion of Peralta’s oeuvre suffers seriously (and inexplicably, in a book on poetics) from the failure to examine the political and intellectual significance of genre. That Peralta’s defense of Spain is a generic prose history and his historical account of Peru is the verse epic, Lima fundada, is clearly important to Peralta’s attempts to locate Peru temporally, geographically, and ontologically. More generally, in the discussion of Peralta and throughout the work, Thurner’s analysis reproduces a pronounced Lima-centrism. The decision to focus only on printed texts necessarily excludes other historiographical traditions practiced by indigenous authors, churchmen, and creole vecinos of the viceroyalty’s highland cities.The second half of the book locates the works of important postcolonial Peruvian historians in both Peruvian politics and European intellectual debates with universalizing aspirations. As Thurner argues, formulating a republican identity in Peru engaged the question of location from not only a national but also a postcolonial vantage point, thereby challenging European hierarchies of time, place, and social evolution. This produced, among others, the widely read nineteenth-century history texts of Sebastián Lorente, suggesting that Peru in its history bridged the Oriental/Occidental chasm on which European superiority rested. Finally Thurner turns to two giants of twentieth-century Peruvian letters, Jorge Basadre and José Carlos Mariátegui. It is Basadre, rather than the more doctrinaire Marxist Mariátegui, whom Thurner celebrates. Basadre’s injunction “to write a Peruvian history of Peru” neatly captures the impossible task confronting the colonial and postcolonial scholar: to articulate a Peruvian history in a genre that denies the possibility of such a history. Thurner thus celebrates those historians who have simultaneously imitated and undermined European genres, categories, and narratives in order to valorize an otherwise marginalized Peru. It is a provocative reading of Peruvian historiography, but it is executed through an idiosyncratic and selective reading of Peru’s rich historiographical tradition.One real weakness of this work is a failure to engage with Peruvian historiography after Basadre. The sizable Peruvian literature on Basadre himself is relegated to one listlike footnote. Those hoping for a discussion of the politics and poetics of historiography in Peru during the past half-century, with the explosion of academic history, will be disappointed. This work is instead written into larger postcolonial discussions and critiques of metahistorical narrative and ontology; it consciously offers itself as part of the intellectual effort to de center Europe. The result is a deeply original exploration of how Peruvians have challenged spatial, historical, and ontological categories fashioned in Europe over three centuries. Nonetheless, greater attention to how current Peruvian historians (above all Manuel Burga) have addressed the meaning and goal of writing history in Peru and to synthetic national histories by more recent Peruvian historians (e.g., Franklin Pease) would have helped to locate the book’s project in contemporary Peruvian intellectual life, as well as in North American academe.

AfroPerú: Tras las huellas de la negritud en el Perú

The purpose of this article is to develop a concrete investigation about the afro-descendants identities in nowadays Peru through the analysis of the African presence in the colonial age, focusing on different phases such as the abolition of slavery, the political independence and the statement of rights which for long time has been denied to this social class, until the actuality. Further to the outlining of the historical and social background of the afro element’s complexity in the survey of the variegated biological and cultural Peruvian mosaic, this case study focus on the today’s afro-Peruvian identity’s question, investigating about characteristics, problems and ways of interaction with the rest of the Peruvian population. Moreover, this analysis keeps track of the “negritude”, that is the afro movement, in the Peruvian art, literature and culture. Thanks to a study experience in Peru of the author, this piece offers also a picture of the current situation of afro-Peruvian communities and emphasizes the social and cultural initiatives and also political measures taken in the last years in order to assert the distinctive feature of the afro-Peruvian identity in Peru and all over the world.

The politicization of indigenous identities in Peru

Until now, scholars have argued that, unlike other Latin American countries with sizable indigenous populations, indigenous politics are largely unimportant in Peru because indigenous-based parties or national-level movements are absent. Rather than focusing solely on the emergence of indigenous parties or movements, which ignores the larger consequence of individuals' indigenous identifications for electoral politics, we argue that it is more important to examine the emergence of indigenous political divisions and their effects on indigenous representation. Using data from the World Values Survey across the presidential elections of 1995, 2001, and 2006, we show that, as indigenous identity has become more carefully defined, indigenous voting divisions have emerged in Peru, and concomitantly, parties have begun to recognize and respond to these divisions.

A brief comparison: Mexican and Peruvian National Identities

Most Latin American countries, if not all, have struggled with issues of national consciousness, identity formation within unifying political systems where some countries have struggled more than others in fostering one common goal: national identity or nacionalidad. This chapter compares the Mexican and Peruvian national identities. In Latin America the Hispanic eccentricity is produced and multiplied, more so in countries with ancient and brilliant civilizations such as Mexico and Peru. The chapter analyzes the concept of national identity in Peru (peruanidad) and Mexico (mexicanidad) through the thoughts of Alegria and Mariategui, in the case of the first, followed with Paz for the latter. Alegria and Mariategui constantly spoke about an indigenous resistance and a quest for dignity in one's own territory where the quarrel of oppressed and oppressor has to do mainly with racial factors disguised with cultural folklore. Keywords:Alegria; Jose Carlos Mariategui; Latin America; Mexican national identity; nacionalidad; Peruvian national identity

Las dimensiones de la identidad nacional

El tema de la identidad en nuestro país es uno de los más gravitantes a lo largo de nuestra historia moderna. Se inicia desde el momento mismo en que se produce la conquista.En los últimos años, tanto por la conmemoración de cinco siglos del llamado "Encuentro de dos mundos", como por la cercanía del nuevo milenio, este tema de la identidad nacional ha tomado una mayor impulso. Es terrible advertir que ya iniciado el tercer milenio y tras casi doscientos años de independencia aún no hemos llegado a la madurez de saber quiénes somos.

From Reflection to Refraction: Rethinking Paradigms of Cultural Interaction and Identity in Peru and Mexico

This article explores the construction and reworking of paradigms of culture contact and identity by social scientists and cultural critics in response to contradictory sociocultural experiences of modernity in Peru and Mexico. It seeks to do so in the context of calls made by the Peruvian critic Antonio Cornejo Polar for greater historicism and critical thinking about these, and the concern that this appeal has since generated in the field of Latin American Cultural Studies. Focusing first on the postcolonial, ideologically driven model of ‘mestizaje’, the article then traces continuities and discontinuities between it and latter–day thinking about cultural pluralism.