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  • 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...

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