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2. “What’s Up with You, Condor?”: Performing Indigeneities
- Duke University Press
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2“What’s Up with You, Condor?” perForMinGindiGeneities¿Qué te pasa, condor? (What’s up with you, condor?) —Ironic expression used by Bolivian musicians to refer to the composition “El condor pasa” Around 1977, the sound of the quena “grabbed” Koji Hishimoto. “That year, Andean music was in fashion here in Japan,” he told me. On a November evening of our tour, we were sitting on tatami mats in a traditional Japanese hotel or ryokan. My tape recorder was running.Yuliano Encinas, who shared a room that night with Hishimoto, didn’t pay us much attention; he wore his headphones and his PlayStation was hooked up to the television . Thinking back on the 1970s, Hishimoto didn’t remember exactly why Andean music was in fashion. Maybe because music groups arrived in Japan from Argentina. He mentioned the performances of Uña Ramos, an Argentine quena player who lived in France, and Antonio Pantoja, a Peruvian quena player who had toured with Yma Sumac and settled in Buenos Aires. He suggested that maybe Andean music was popular because Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s “El condor pasa” was all the rage at that time:1 “Sometime around the 1970s, I heard that song on the radio and in the street too.” He admitted that in his earlier days of playing this music, he preferred Peruvian and Argentine forms of Andean music, those with which he was more familiar at the time. Only later did he come to like Bolivian music, live an extended period in Bolivia, and become a professional Bolivian folklore musician in Japan. Hishimoto assumed three roles on our tour: guide, translator, and fellow performing musician. One afternoon, in the role of our guide, he announced “separate rooms tonight,” and we all cheered. On the road, we were often paired off to share hotel rooms, and when you spend three months, 24/7, with nine people, the separate room is a dream. Separate rooms also meant we were staying in a “businessman’s hotel,” and this usually meant we were sleeping in beds rather than on the floor—another reason some of us cheered. With a few exceptions though, tour members still sought company at the dinner hour. We also spent a good deal of time Performing Indigeneities 33 together in three different shopping spaces: supermarkets, “one hundred yen” shops (cien yen, as Bolivians would call it in Spanish), and Book Off stores (a chain that sold used books, comic books, and cds). As we all checked into our separate rooms in the late afternoon, one band member, Victor Hugo Gironda, asked if I would translate some songs on recordings he had just purchased at a Book Off. In his room, he put on Simon and Garfunkel’s “El condor pasa,” a song we knew all too well. As I did my best to translate the song, Gironda’s comment about it was “Nada que ver”— that Simon’s lyrics had “nothing to do” with this composition. “No, they don’t,” I agreed. I suggested that the singers had made it into a song that tangentially and ambivalently referenced unequal social relations: “I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.” Although “El condor pasa” has become the calling card for Andean music, and although it was the second tune we played for every performance in Japan, many Bolivian musicians feel it has little to do with their country. But it has much to do with the shaping of Andean music for global consumption. Bolivian music did not travel directly to Japan, but it went through several detours that structured the rubric of “the Andean” frame, resting on stereotypes of indigeneity and the exotic Other. If a performance of “El condor pasa” was required to get Bolivians to Japan, it was followed by a repertoire shaped with the explicit intention of showing the diverse musical genres of Bolivian music, a multicultural nationalist project. Our group’s staged indigeneity, while distinct from the poncho-clad street band, still formed a nationalist proposal that stood in contrast with a different kind of indigenous performance that has taken center stage in Bolivia’s contemporary politics. While Bolivia is considered a country with an indigenous majority, Bolivian folklore musicians have generally been mestizos. The ambiguities of the term “mestizo,” as introduced in chapter 1, are further complicated by the question of whether or not anyone in Bolivia ever personally claims to be mestizo or if this is an identity assigned by others...