Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru, and: Black Rhythms of Peru: Reviving African Musical Heritage in the Black Pacific (review)

In Creating Our Own and Black Rhythms of Peru, authors Mendoza and Feldman tell two different parts of the same story: the story of the creation of a “national” canon of Peruvian traditional music and dance. Both scholars show how this process divided the nation further along racial and regional lines, pitting highlands against coast, indigenous and mestizo against black and white. However, Feldman, an ethnomusicologist, examines the roles of black and white criollos in Lima, the capital, while Mendoza, an anthropologist, focuses on indigenous and mestizo culture in the second city of Cuzco.

Mendoza assembles her book from historical material such as performers’ biographies, programs, and repertoire. An archaeological and tourist center, a showcase for Incan history, and a site where indigenous Andean and urban mestizo cultures came together, Cuzco provided a model for national culture heavily promoted by Cuzqueños during the first half of the twentieth century. In the introduction Mendoza explains that her task will be to examine the activities of the institutions and individuals who contributed to the definition of Cuzqueño identity and its folkloric canon, as well as the differentiation between mestizo and “Indian” folklore that was a key part of this process. Unlike some studies of folkloric nationalism, she aims to understand the emotional structure and lived experiences related to these social processes.

The first two chapters analyze the activities of two 1920s folkloric institutions, the Misión Peruana de Arte Incaico and the Centro Qosqo. The first based its representation of Cuzqueño culture on reconstructed Incan traditions; the second developed a more mestizo repertoire through a series of contests and was influenced by Russian and Mexican folkloric nationalism. Through the contests, the establishment of judging criteria, and the efforts of local composers, a folkloric canon began to take shape.

In chapter 3 Mendoza turns to the conjoined development of Cuzco’s regional identity and tourist industry. After the city (located near Machu Picchu) was declared the “archaeological capital of South America” in the 1930s, national interest in showcasing the region’s culture grew, and the Centro Qosqo took a central role. For instance, the group traveled to Lima to perform for the city’s fourth centennial and there found a large audience for their brand of mestizo folklore. Limeño and Cuzqueño views on musical nationalism diverge sharply in chapter 4, however, which focuses on the “Hora del Charango” radio program. While the show helped Andean music gain national recognition, its rural nostalgia and populist viewpoint did not gain currency in the capital due to resentment of the growing number of Andean migrants there.

The fifth chapter furthers the themes of institutionalization and tourism in a study of the Instituto Americano de Arte de Cuzco and the tourist-centered Cuzco Week celebration. Contests continued to be an important means of canon formation within the new institute, but the difficulties judges experienced in awarding prizes demonstrated that it was by no means simple to divide the traditional from the popular or the mestizo from the indigenous, and ethnic categories were eventually abandoned. An epilogue brings the story up to the present, explaining how the Cuzqueño proposal for national identity ultimately failed, overshadowed at different times by Afro-Peruvian, neo-Incan, or pan-Andean performers.

Mendoza’s basic argument is an important one. Past studies of folkloric canon formation depicted middle-class and intellectual participation in peasant or indigenous traditions as appropriation, but Mendoza sees Cuzqueño folkloric groups’ performances instead as a specifically regional art form aimed at creating a pan-Peruvian, even pan–South American...