El charango (review)

This short piece, beautifully shot and packed with great performances, offers treasures for the uninitiated and experienced scholars of Latin American music alike. Filmed in Potosí, high in the Bolivian Andes, it largely features footage of local performers playing and speaking about the charango, the small, guitar-like instrument used across the Andean region by indigenous and mestizo performers. These passages are framed with a skeletal history of Potosí, whose vast mines flooded the Spanish empire with silver even as they swallowed the lives of countless Andean peons and African slaves. The musical footage is also leavened with some present-day exploration inside the mines, where the indigenous miners’ harsh working conditions are contrasted with the rich transformations that they wrought upon Spanish cultural and religious practice. The film is thus more than a sketch of the charango’s central place in contemporary potosino music making. It is also a meditation on the charango, local adaptation of a European import, as a metaphor for the fraught history of Spanish colonization, engine of genocide as well as cultural creativity. It should make a welcome addition to the collection of any scholar with an interest in Andean music, or Andean society more generally. At the same time, however, the film is often frustratingly vague with respect to the performers and their music, and some of the information presented is flatly incorrect. As such, it should be used with caution as a resource for teaching or research.

The latter aspect results from the filmmakers’ decision to eschew any editorializing and all but the most basic framing information. Local voices provide almost all of the historical and cultural data that set the charango within its broader context, and the film’s narrative arises from their ideas. This is a worthy approach, richly demonstrating the way that the charango is seen as a symbol of Bolivian mestizo or indigenous identity. However, it means that the piece works better as a portrait of the charanguista’s occupational mythos than as an inquiry into sociomusical history, and it is littered with statements that are largely considered specious by scholars of the region. One of these is the notion that the charango was “born in Potosí,” an entirely unverifiable datum, given that the instrument does not appear in the historical record until long after its wide diffusion throughout the Andes. Similarly, the notion, often repeated but never supported by documentation, that charango playing used to be “prohibited” receives an airing here. This widespread belief, entirely unlikely and almost certainly untrue, seems to have been popularized in the early twentieth century: in Peru it is widely associated with José María Arguedas, who recorded it in print at that time. However, it is fascinating as folklore, since it positions the playing of the instrument as an anti-imperialist and resistant act, and it is easy to imagine a discussion being constructed around the possible reasons for the widespread adherence to this idea.

The film’s general lack of commentary does not, then, constitute a fatal flaw. However, together with its under-specified nature, it does mean that it should be approached with caution as a documentary piece. Its lack of specificity is especially frustrating with respect to the music and its performers, who are left anonymous until the end credits. They perform musical genres that are distinct in important ways, ranging from obscure local wayñu music to the pan-Andean style familiar from world music/New Age record bins, but these differences are not explored or even noted. The result is that all of these styles appear to be equal in their social location, importance, and uptake. This is in some ways a laudable effect, given the general disrespect that is accorded some of the wonderful music featured here. However, by hiding their very distinct generic genealogies, the film evades a serious consideration of the ways in which the featured performers alternately participate in the furtherance of local traditions and values, and the stereotyping of Andean peoples and music that results from...