Permitted Indians and Popular Music in Contemporary Peru: The Poetics and Politics of Indigenous...

Permitted Indians and Popular Music in Contemporary Peru: The Poetics and Politics ofIndigenous PerformativityAuthor(s): Joshua TuckerSource: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Fall 2011), pp. 387-413Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for EthnomusicologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.55.3.0387 .

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Vol. 55, No. 3 Ethnomusicology Fall 2011

© 2011 by the Society for Ethnomusicology

Permitted Indians and Popular Music in Contemporary Peru: The Poetics and Politics of Indigenous Performativity

Joshua Tucker / Brown University

Only a generation ago, two dark futures were widely foreseen for the indige-nous peoples of Latin America: either they would wither away in irredentist

isolation, resistant to the spirit of modern times, or they would be forced into the urban proletariat, losing their distinct identities as they dissolved into the continent’s underclass. Instead, over the past three decades, indigenous actors returned questions of cultural difference and survival to the public agenda. Re-vitalization movements spread widely, indigenous leaders assumed meaningful roles in forums of national and international politics, and legal battles were won over issues like land use, political autonomy, and intellectual property. Amidst these developments, however, the cachet of indigenous cultural forms continues to attract the interest of entrepreneurs who harness indigenous cultural produc-tion, seeking to profit by satisfying metropolitan appetites for the exotic, the picturesque, the spiritual, and the authentic. Even where demands for respect are recognized, the validation of cultural practice can itself become a threat to indigenous well-being if multicultural rhetoric is treated as a substitute for more substantive conversations about economic or political demands (Hale 2002). In sum, the space of indigeneity is more vital and contested than ever, calling for analyses that recognize the diversity of contemporary indigenous experience. In this article I discuss two Peruvian bands whose recent success derives from the unusually central affirmation of indigeneity in their performances. Both sing in Quechua, the country’s most widely spoken indigenous language, but otherwise their methods of evoking indigenous identity differ starkly. The first is Uchpa, a Lima-based band that combines elements of blues, hard rock, and traditional Andean performance in order to promote Quechua language and culture. The second is the expatriate quartet Alborada, whose rhetoric of indigenous consciousness is tied to their use of New Age and Native North

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388 Ethnomusicology, Fall 2011

American motifs, adopted after a career spent playing in the streets of Europe. Focusing on their distinct interpretations of a single song, I mean to suggest some ways that music scholars might approach the articulation of indigeneity in contemporary Latin America.1

The ways these bands have chosen to embody indigeneity are variously both promising and oppressive. Their performances are important not because they provide an outstanding model for cultural politics, nor because they have made great strides in alleviating the disenfranchisement of indigenous Peruvians. Instead, they demonstrate the various pressures and possibilities contemporary actors face when they seek to have their identities as indigenous peoples rec-ognized, even as that label undergoes tremendous change. The contemporary indigenous imagination finds inspiration in sites ranging from local traditions to a global indigenous movement, and it is projected in spheres ranging from party politics to the world music marketplace. The main goal of this article, therefore, is to indicate the parameters within which music scholars might contribute to the analysis of emergent indigenous discourses in Latin America. I also want to argue that the study of hybrid performance genres such as those considered here is especially urgent, given their potential to disrupt longstanding notions of indigenous legitimacy. For although it is true that the emancipatory potential of hybrid forms has become something of an analytical cliché (Taylor 2007), indig-enous peoples have a special, perhaps unique relation to the notion of cultural purity. Claims to indigeneity are often held to rest upon the demonstration of radical Otherness, a temporally extended separation from a national “main-stream,” and the maintenance of originary lifeways (i.e., customs and practices). As such, indigenous peoples’ engagement with urban modernity is often used as evidence to deny their rights to both a distinct identity and protagonism in the contemporary stream of events (Warren 1998; Povinelli 2002). The maintenance of traditional ways can be a mode of cultural affirmation, but also a straitjacket, and performances that obviate the reified distinction between cultural spaces may intervene to break this imposed double bind. Our analyses should help us to understand such struggles over self-defini-tion, clarifying how given instances empower indigenous actors, and how they play into existing structures of representational power. Even if heterodox per-formance genres can free their bearers from the dead end of authenticity, often they too remain beholden to Western desires for exotic Otherness, and many can surely be characterized in both ways. Distinguishing potential from pitfall in particular voicings of indigeneity means performing a number of distinct tasks. First, studies should specify the rhetorical strategies that are used to assert indigeneity, and the means through which they circulate. Second, they should demonstrate how local histories of indigenous poetics inform the discourses of

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indigeneity that animate a given performance. Third, they should specify how musical actions play a distinct role in indigenous cultural politics. And finally, they should attend to the ways that performances like these open room for new identifications and alliances, especially given the extent to which indigenous politics has become an international enterprise. Taken together, such analyses can reveal how musical developments contribute to indigenous political struggles.

Staging the Indigenous: The Poetics of Affinity and Indigenous Misrecognition

My interest in this topic was piqued while conducting research in Peru’s Andean highlands.2 I was studying a commercial variant of traditional huayno music, largely produced by and for Peru’s dominant mestizo (“mixed-race”; i.e., non-indigenous) population.3 Among its performers, a handful—six brothers in all—came from the immodestly gifted Ayvar family. Several of them had left Peru to live and work as street musicians in Europe, but they were still recognized as bearers of mestizo tradition.4 In 2003, however, local radio DJs received a surprising advance single titled “Ananaw,” featuring Sixtucha Ayvar as part of a group called Alborada. As is typical within Peru’s music industry, they had sent their promotional recording to key tastemakers in order to create public interest and boost CD sales. Upon first listening, though, many DJs were unsure how to interpret it. The track was a bricolage of acoustic and electronic drum beats, synthesizer washes, world flutes (discussed below), and electric guitar solos, all supporting a song in the indigenous Quechua language that resembled no Peruvian musical form, and certainly not the neo-traditional mestizo music that the Ayvars were known for. Instead, from its opening moments “Ananaw” traffics in motifs of antiquity and mysticism familiar from New Age recordings worldwide. It begins with rattles and the beating of deep drums, described in the liner notes simply as “tribal” drums. A synthesizer establishes an ethereal harmonic frame, followed by an expository three-note figure performed on the North American plains flute, an instrument that has long served as a New Age sign of spirituality. As drums and bass establish a dance beat, electronic sounds swoop and flange listeners into the main instrumental hook. Here the plains flute reappears, soon doubled by a Chinese dizi flute, and together they perform a unison melody for which the origin is difficult to discern, though its pentatonicism perhaps connotes Andean or East Asian music (see Figure 1, mm. 1–4).5

Finally, Ayvar’s voice enters, delivering the lyrics of “Ananaw” while flutes and synthesizer weave airy, atmospheric harmonies around them. The mood throughout, like much New Age or world beat music, is simultaneously con-

Tucker: Permitted Indians and Popular Music in Peru 389

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templative and danceable, relieved only by an electric guitar solo in the middle of the song. The lyrics seem somewhat mundane, if elliptical:

“My, my,” you say to me;Your eyes fixed upon me alone.“My, my,” you say to me;I will not be here all your life.What kind of man do you think I am,Crying all over the place?If I were to die it would kill you;I wouldn’t want that to happen.6

Overall, the single was considered unfamiliar and off-putting. DJs like my friend Miguel Ángel Huamán, who introduced me to the track, assured me that it would never find a local audience: for his part, he “did not know what Sixtucha [Ayvar] was trying to do” (personal communication, 12 June 2003, Ayacucho, Peru). The arrival of the full CD Five Spirits (in English), along with liner notes and promotional materials, deepened the incredulity of professionals like Hua-mán, for the performers had discarded the Andean attire that local performers traditionally adopt in pursuit of an authentic look. Instead of showing ponchos, ch’ullus (wool hats), and other sartorial signs of Andean origin, the images in Alborada’s liner notes seemed to have been plundered from a storehouse of cinematic indigenous stereotypes. They showed the group dressed in a stylized version of Native North American regalia, set within a Southwestern desert landscape, and their inventory of palominos, teepees, feathers, campfires, fringed leather, stoic and meditative facial expressions, pow-wow drums, tomahawks, war paint, dance bustles, desert landscapes, bone chokers, and war bonnets

Figure 1. Opening guitar riff of “Ananaw.”

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evoked nothing so much as a circa-1950s Hollywood western. The band mem-bers had gone so far as to adopt faux-Native American stage names, including Atuq (Quechua: Fox), Allin Hampiq (Quechua: Good Medicine Man), and most startlingly, Tatanka (Lakota: Buffalo), none of which have anything to do with naming practices in the Andean region. The confusion generated by “Ananaw” was compounded by the fact that the song itself was a cover version of an earlier track titled “Ananao,” by the band Uchpa. Fronted by Fredy Ortiz, an old friend of the Ayvar brothers, Uchpa had always fit awkwardly into Peru’s music scene. Performing original and inherited tunes over a blues-rock foundation, mixing Andean heritage with heavy-metal hokum in performance, and setting Quechua lyrics within a style thought to be proper only for English, Spanish, or other “global” languages, they had always challenged local musical categories, and were alternately ad-mired, reviled, and ridiculed for blurring the lines between Peruvian registers of modernity and tradition. In its original version, from Uchpa’s 2000 album Qukman Muskiy (Quechua: Another Breath), “Ananao” begins not with percussion, synthesizers, and flutes, but with a rolling, thumping bass-and-drum groove, over which a solo guitarist trills a single note while rocking a wah-wah pedal back and forth. This heavy, psychedelic opening soon gives way to the same instrumental hook that drives Alborada’s cover version. However, in its original setting for an electric guitar run through a wah-wah pedal, it becomes clear that this “hook” is a slightly al-tered version of Jimi Hendrix’s classic “Voodoo Child: Slight Return.” “Ananao” quickly settles into a dense Hendrix-derived groove (see Figure 1), with wailing solo guitars and pounding rhythms underneath Ortíz’s voice, which delivers a melody that, in its minor-mode pentatonicism, its overall descending contour, and its AABB form, betrays its roots in traditional Andean performance. Alborada’s later version of Uchpa’s song, then, represented a radical reinter-pretation of what was already an unorthodox indigenous song. It responded to tropes of indigeneity that the group had engaged as street performers in Europe, sonic representations of “tribal primitive” and “indigenous spiritual” Otherness that inform world beat and New Age music, attracting Northern audiences to artists like Deep Forest, and to labels like Wyndham Hill.7 Their use of Na-tive American regalia was not unprecedented, either. Comparable images of Indian-ness have been current in the Ayvars’ adopted German homeland since the nineteenth century. At that time, a romanticized notion of independence, fortitude, and cultural authenticity associated with American Indians drove a widespread fascination with the American West, due to its perceived congru-ence with the character, aspirations, and predicament of German nationalists (Calloway et al. 2002).8 Even in a post-national age, this fascination endures and takes new forms, including weekend reenactment societies devoted to plains


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Indian lifeways, and German powwows complete with all-German drum groups (Watchman 2005). The displaced sense of imperialist nostalgia that drives such hobbyists makes for a lucrative market in Native Americana, and by the time the Ayvars arrived in Cologne several Andean street performers had already adopted Native American attire, catering to a distinctly Nordic vision of indig-enous exoticism (see Meisch 2002). There was no substantial market for this music in Peru, though, and no widespread familiarity with its particular notions of alterity. Artistic projects fusing Andean and non-Andean materials have long existed (see Rozas 2007), but world-beat and New Age recordings were typically aimed at and consumed by the foreign tourists who descend upon Peru’s archaeological sites each sum-mer, seeking a mystical connection with the ancient Inca, or other experiences of alternative spirituality. Given this esthetic gap, musical savants were surprised when Alborada’s version of “Ananaw” became a runaway hit. Street perform-ers in Europe, the band became national celebrities in Peru. Their music was broadcast on leading Andean radio stations, their videos enjoyed high televi-sual rotation, and demand for concert appearances grew apace. Tours became financially feasible, and a triumphal appearance in Lima’s central Parque de la Exposición in 2004, complete with backing choruses, orchestra, and a spec-tacular show of lights and acrobatics, cemented the band’s reputation. Their annual concerts in subsequent years became major events, eagerly anticipated by members of the Alborada fan club and promoted by local radio stations. The band was even awarded official recognition by Peru’s Congress in 2007 “for their artistic trajectory disseminating Andean music throughout the world.”9 Finally, a contingent of Peru-based imitators emerged, singing in Quechua and sporting fantasy copies of Native American clothes. These may seem like derivative developments, experiments in world-music fusion long familiar from other contexts. However, in Peru they have evoked surprise and generated discussion about the substance of indigenous heritage. This in turn suggests the importance of attending to the performative poetics of indigeneity, a matter often neglected both in music studies and in the wealth of recent scholarship on indigenous mobilization. Such works typically focus on areas like governance or land rights, which seem to hold greater weight for indigenous survival, and it is easy to understand why scholars remain leery of popular culture. Designed for metropolitan consumption, performances such as the one just discussed often perpetuate the exoticization of indigenous peoples. Further, it has been argued that an emphasis on the politics of culture actively undermines wider claims of exclusion, encouraging state actors to invest in inexpensive and peripheral matters like rights to performance spaces and attire, instead of recognizing wider claims of disenfranchisement. Hale and Millamán (2006) have referred to the subject position created via such patronage as the indio permitido (“permitted Indian”), and warned against the uncritical celebra-

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tion of a politics that substitutes this low-stakes engagement for substantive action on indigenous oppression. Sentiments like these resonate especially strongly in Peru, given the way that token respect for Andean heritage stands alongside the weak institutionalstatus of indigenous identity. Emblems of indigenous heritage are not difficult to come by in the country’s urban-mestizo precincts: the state routinely reaffirms its respect for indigenous culture, and children are taught indigenous dances in public schools. Nevertheless, since Spanish conquerors subdued the Inca empire that ruled the Andes in the sixteenth century, the story of indigenous dispossession has anchored Peru’s national narrative. As either tribute-paying agricultural freeholders or peons on the landholdings of Spanish and settlers and their mestizo descendents, the indigenous population of the highlands was progressively rendered subject to the European society seated in coastal Lima and smaller cities. By independence in 1824, it was common for indigenous people to seek social advancement by moving to the cities, adopting the Spanish language and mestizo lifeways, and thereby leaving behind their Indian status. In the process, the notion of a metropolitan Indian, standing outside the age-old indigenous milieu of rural tradition, poverty, and servitude, became an oxymo-ron: by abandoning the key markers of language, agricultural occupation, rural residence, and indigenous culture, an indigenous person became, by consent, a mestizo.10 By the 1960s, the term “Indian” remained so stigmatized that the government of Velasco Alvarado sought to abolish it, replacing it with the neutral “peasant” (campesino). Today, Peruvians who live by patterns identified in other national contexts as “indigenous” typically self-identify as campesinos, or use similar euphemisms. And although many people of indigenous origin live in Peru’s large cities, they rarely identify in this way.11 Andean Peru is notorious for being an outlier in a region and an age of intense indigenous mobilization, a place with no significant political party devoted to the cause, and few prospects for a real change in dominant prejudices.12

Precisely because claims of indigenous-ness are so infrequent in Peruvian public discourse, however, it is imperative to study the claims to indigeneity that are made outside the sphere of politics. Understanding indigenous political mo-bilization means considering the ways in which people adopt indigenous subject positions in the first place. And while attempts to voice indigeneity using foreign discourses merit caution, given their potential to erase local distinctiveness, it is possible that in circumstances where the indigenous imagination has become so precariously attenuated, they may also provide possibilities for reconstructing indigenous subjectivity. Each recording of “Ananaw” suggests, in different ways, how popular culture can become a field for forging self-representation when the political arena seems to provide little space for doing so. These recordings show that claims to indigeneity can operate not only through the maintenance of local traditions, but also by importing global idioms into local circumstances,


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where they help to voice new kinds of indigenous subject positions. Examining them in this light yields insight about the way that indigeneity moves through the world today, and about the role of popular culture in the process.

Indigenous Movements, Music Studies, and Peruvian Performing Histories

Scholars need to attend to such interventions, because they reveal ongo-ing shifts in the way that indigeneity is experienced, enacted, and understood. The creation of new arenas in which to air indigenous concerns, ranging from the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to the global mediasphere, has generated an ever-growing, transnational set of conceptual and perfor-mative tools for framing claims to indigenous identity.13 Still, assertions of indigeneity are always designed for particular audiences, and respond to local histories of indigenous imagination. Many recent works have explored the dynamics of this emergent field of articulation (Brysk 2000; Hale 2002; Warren and Jackson 2002, 2005; Niezen 2003; de la Cadena and Starn 2007), but music studies have mostly remained aloof from such discussion. Despite a wealth of musical scholarship elsewhere on identity, performativity, and transnational-ism, indigenousness is most often described in terms of essence, isolation, and continuity. With few exceptions, accounts of indigenous music in Latin America focus on the community level, treating ritual performance as the key site of indigenous distinctiveness, or on the maintenance of ancestral tradi-tions in new social contexts.14 Ritual and traditional practices are important to indigenous people, as they are to others, and often they continue to serve as cultural touchstones. But indigeneity has also outrun these limits, reshaped by those who find themselves outside originary communities and those who seek new ways to perform indigenous heritage. In this context, music scholars too must “examine fundamental assumptions about what actually constitutes Indigeneity on the international stage, because that’s where the major players . . . are conducting their business” (Stewart and Wilson 2008:5).15

My intention here is not merely to reiterate the well-worn point that in-digenous cultural practices survive in the space of the postmodern city. Rather, examining the local and global registers of indigeneity that interanimate popular cultural performances can clarify the ongoing resignification of indigeneity itself. In addition, by calling attention to the contingent nature of indigenous perfor-mance in Latin America, music scholars can make a unique contribution to the burgeoning literature on indigeneity more broadly, which has rarely attended to popular music, or to mass culture in general. In part, this lacuna derives from a historic paucity in indigenous resources. Lacking the means to intervene in the mass marketplace, indigenous peoples of Latin America have more often

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been the objects of representation than propagators of mass cultural forms. But technological change has brought the mass market within reach, especially within the field of popular music, which demands comparatively low levels of expertise and overhead—far lower than film, long a privileged site of analysis for scholars of indigeneity (e.g., Stewart and Wilson 2008). Popular music is a particularly important medium among subalterns in Peru, where the dynamism of Lima’s culture industries, together with the state’s near-total abdication of a role in cultural politics, have created felicitous condi-tions for the shaping of public discourse by independent agents (Vich 2006). One of the most notable trends in recent Peruvian life has been the growth of an informal marketplace in cultural goods, driven by migration from the Andes to Lima. The recombination of cultural forms and identities within this milieu has long occupied the center of scholarly commentary, and by 2006 it was possible for one scholar to write that Lima’s small record labels and radio stations were “the medium by which the popular sectors have imagined Peru and its regions, constructing . . . esthetics and ethics different from those of the elites and the state,” and creating “a new narrative about the national” (Alfaro 2006:148). Nevertheless, the literature on Andean Lima’s popular culture has largely bypassed questions of indigeneity per se, focusing instead upon the adoption of national-popular, urban-proletarian, or mestizo subject positions by Andean migrants.16 Particularly given the longstanding curation of indigenous public culture by mestizo citizens, this represents a missed opportunity, for the new-found ability to address a mass market as a specifically indigenous performer may herald an important shift in social relations. Historically, those performances of indigeneity available to the public at large have involved surrogation by mestizo mediators. In the most influential case, the indigenista intellectual movement of the early twentieth century sought to foster a counterhegemonic vision of na-tional identity by building bridges between indigenous and “mainstream” Peru, enacting these links in part through stylized performances of indigenous music and dance. Indigenista scholars’ sustained, sincere effort to reverse anti-Indian prejudice has been influential ever since, and generations of Peruvian mestizos have learned that cultivating these folkloric genres constitutes an act of respect for Andean cultural heritage. But indigenista folklore was and remains defined by the vanguardist attitude that mestizo thinkers are uniquely qualified to mobilize indigenous culture in the service of collective identity. Its practitioners approach Indian peoples and culture as the raw material of a proleptic nation, rather than interlocutors of equal stature. Here, indigenous artists surrender authority over their own production, and remain within a state of productive stasis, valued to the extent that they continue to replicate the raw cultural material that mestizo intellectuals define as national goods.17


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The mid-twentieth-century development of Peru’s Andean music industry offered a counterpoint to indigenista endeavors, but did not address indigenous underrepresentation to a significantly greater degree. It emerged in response to the demands of Lima’s growing, nostalgic Andean migrant community, and sales of highland huayno grew to dominate the Peruvian record business soon after the first releases in 1949 (Llorens Amico 1983; Turino 1988). But the stars of huayno were not indigenous, did not style themselves as indigenous, and did not perform indigenous music: they were mestizos, and they played mestizo music, for a mi-grant class eager to adopt that identity position and shed any taint of indigenous heritage. A third stream of Andean popular music dating from roughly the same period is the Pan-Andean style, defined by its widely-recognized ensemble of poncho-clad performers playing highland pan flutes and chordophones. Once again, however, the genre owed its genesis to the efforts of leftist mestizo intel-lectuals and folklorists, and involved minimal input from indigenous peoples. Instead, its progenitors in Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Europe took their work as a means of investigating the sonorous possibilities of Andean instruments, and the anti-imperialist possibilities of identification with the hemisphere’s colonized nations. It gained worldwide success and sympathy after its identification with socialist politics in the Southern Cone, and to this day many Andean musicians (like Alborada) make their living by playing derivative pan-Andean music on the streets of Europe, North America, and Japan. Overall, though, its vision of indigeneity bears the staid folkloric earmarks of its time and place of creation. For performers like Uchpa and Alborada, the use of foreign elements allows them to avoid these quaint and static canons of imagery. Their use, however, also demands an appraisal of the ways that they play into the imagistic canon of the world music marketplace, where exoticist gestures typically absorb any serious challenge to existing ethnic structures. Indeed, debates over the extent to which “global pop” (Taylor 1997) essentializes Others for Western consumption, or acts as a space of hybridity for creating new affective alliances (Lipsitz 1994), have long driven musical commentary on the subject. Treatment of African diasporic music provides a particularly effective model for considering performances like those discussed here. Within the transnational network of African diasporic music, an essentialized “African-ness” operates powerfully as a symbol of resistance, value, and solidarity. It is often expressed via rank stereotypes of innate sensuality and genetic musicality, but it is nevertheless cherished widely, and actively cultivated via new and old forms that are adopted as sites of shared identification and musi-cal habitus that comprise a generic “African sensibility” (Meintjes 2001; see also Guerreiro 1998, Feldman 2006). Today, it is widely accepted that such essential-izing tropes can be a rich source of invention and an effective way to elaborate race-based claims to exclusion, as well as a way of perpetuating stereotypes. But these issues have hardly been raised with respect to indigenous peoples, a surpris-

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ing fact given that the world music scene is about as rich in indigenous content as it is in African, organized around stereotypes of spirituality rather than kinesis. Against the background of these considerations, the fabricated indigeneity of Alborada and Uchpa might also be seen as a productive intervention into an ongoing national and international conversation about indigenous relations—a means to make the emergent parameters of indigeneity intelligible to local audi-ences, and to open new spaces for narratives of national diversity.

Uchpa and Alborada: Out of Ocobamba

Alhough characterized by distinct career trajectories, musical styles, and public discourses, Uchpa and Alborada are closely connected. Like the Ayvar brothers, Fredy Ortíz—vocalist and driving force behind Uchpa—was raised in the tiny Andean town of Ocobamba. Tucked into the northwest corner of the Department (state) of Apurímac, in the south-central Andean mountains, the community lies in the country’s Quechua-speaking heartland. Remote from departamental capitals and difficult to access, it has long been isolated: speaking in 2002, Ortiz still remembered the exhilarating, unusual smell of exhaust that arrived with the first automobile in 1967.18 The area is widely seen as one of a handful of Andean regions where indigenous lifeways continue to hold greatest purchase, and both Ortiz and the Ayvars grew up in an environment saturated with Quechua song and speech. Ortíz’s command of his native tongue has led to his occasional employment by Peru’s Ministry of Education in translating Spanish texts for indigenous schoolchildren, and bilingual experts like record producers Arturo Chiclla and Eladio Diaz repeatedly told me that the expres-sive nature of the Quechua spoken by all of these artists was the reason for their surprising success. The two bandleaders’ commonalities do not end with their town of ori-gin and linguistic background. As young men, concerned about the poten-tial for young villagers to become involved in crime, insurgency, drugs, and other community-destroying forces, Ortíz and several members of the Ayvar family became involved in efforts to foster solidarity and engagement among the region’s youth. The result was the original organization named “Alborada” (Spanish: “dawn”), founded in Ocobamba as a youth group dedicated to sport (particularly soccer), and from which the music group later took its name. Members of both bands have therefore long carried a desire to support their local community and to act as guardians of traditional culture. However, the routes taken by each group after departure from Ocobamba lead in unexpected and contradictory directions. If Alborada’s path to a performative indigeneity led from Ocobamba to Europe and back to Peru, detouring through the simulacrum of Old West mythology, Uchpa’s led from an indigenous Andean lifeworld that


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was already in dialogue with US and European popular culture directly to Peru’s distant capital city.

Uchpa: Heavy Metal in the Highlands

Like many highland youths seeking broader opportunities, Fredy Ortíz left Ocobamba for the provincial capital of Andahuaylas in his early teens. He came to enroll in the city’s high school, but he also became involved in a world of music largely unavailable in his hometown. Near to Cuzco, tourist center of the Peruvian Andes, cosmopolitan Andahuaylas had previously unimag-ined appurtenances and infrastructure, and Ortíz told me that this was where he “began to hear radio, new musics. It was the 1970s, and what I liked was the blues, like Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart, a kind of blues-folk.”19 In the pentatonic melodies, emotive singing style, and bittersweet tone of blues and blues-rock, he was sure that he discerned qualities congruent with local indigenous music. He drew these parallels out for me several times, affirming that “if you listen to Deep Purple and waylías, it’s the same rhythm,” and also that “qarawis [see below] are Andean blues. If you listen to Janis Joplin, BB King, it’s like they’re crying, just like qarawis. It’s the same feeling, in different places.” Soon he began putting original Quechua lyrics to a blues-rock backing, and by 1994 he and a guitarist named Igor Montoya had formed a duo called Uchpa (Quechua: “ash” or “grey”). They recorded two CDs in nearby Ayacucho, and began playing small shows in towns throughout the central Andes. They largely targeted audiences of young Quechua speakers whose search for social and economic mobility had driven them away from the language, hoping that the unaccustomed experience of hearing it treated as a language of contemporary popular culture would “raise their self-esteem” and encourage them to reconsider their trajectory. By the 2000 release of Qukman Muskiy, containing the original version of “Ananaw,” Uchpa had changed. Ortíz had moved to Lima, become a presence within the city’s rock-punk-metal community, and recruited a new band from Lima’s larger pool of knowledgeable rock musicians. They performed with a heavier sound, and while Ortíz largely concentrated on lyrics and melodies, he made sure to include instrumental sounds that were redolent of autochthony. The net effect is immediately apparent at the beginning of Qukman Muskiy’s opening track, “Yaykumunan” (“Intro”), which seems designed to make a state-ment and to frame the CD as a whole by deploying a densely-packed series of signifiers indexing distinct traditions. The track opens with Ortíz’s voice, singing a lone couplet in Quechua. The rhythmic syncopation, binary phrases in shifting meter, and pentatonic melody, which alternates cadences on the major and minor tonic tones, are all hallmarks of traditional Andean composition (see Figure 2). However, the vocal style, with

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its blues thirds, rough quality, and emotive vocal inflections, including the use of “bent” pitches, instead recalls the style of urban-rock and blues performers. After four lines of text, the instrumentation of a standard hard-rock band en-ters, with heavily distorted guitars, bass, and drums delivering a crunchy, Deep Purple-like riff (see Figure 3). Following four repetitions, the band halts, making way for the entry of a lone violin. A European import, the violin was vigorously promoted, along with the harp, by evangelizing priests during the colonial period, as they replicated Spain’s chapel orchestras in the New World. Quickly indigenized in terms of form and technique, a duo of harp and violin has long been the primary ensemble in the indigenous highlands, and if world music audiences take pan flutes to be the musical signs of Andean indigeneity, in Peru it is the thin, haggard sound of the violin that invokes the indigenous soundscape. Here, it plays one of the many melodies used to accompany the scissors dance, and few Peruvians would fail to recognize the distinctive style of indigenous violin playing, with its strident tone, jerky rhythms, avoidance of vibrato, and liberal use of portamento. The scissors dance melody crossfades into another instrumental line at the track’s close, giving way to the sound of paired waqrapuku horns. These coiled trumpets, made from cow horns and stitched leather, are played on ceremonial occasions throughout the central and southern Andes, and they too are widely recognized as indexes of the indigenous soundscape. Here they briefly perform one of the unaccompanied tritonic melodies unique to the instrument (see Figure 4), before becoming drowned out by the opening lick of “Ananaw.”

Figure 2. Opening sung portion of “Yaykumunan.”

Figure 3. Guitar riff from “Yaykumunan.”


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The rest of the album abounds in similar juxtapositions. Often, songs adapt older Andean tunes to rock arrangements in ways that gesture toward the tenor of the originals. The pum pin (indigenous carnival) song “Corazón contento” (“Happy Heart”) and the huayno “Chachaschay” (“My Little Doll”) each appear as hard-driving heavy-metal songs, paralleling their upbeat interpretation in traditional performance. A moody, bluesy ballad of alienation titled “Pitaqmi kanki” (“Who Are You?”), by contrast, is prefaced with a qarawi—a stark, free-metered Quechua genre of lamentation. Other tracks do not quote Andean tradition, coming across instead as a free mix of blues, rock, and heavy metal, but their unstinting use of the Quechua language ensures that the album stands as a unified, self-conscious iteration of “Andean modernity.” In live performance, Uchpa’s attire complements the semiotic mixture sug-gested by their music. In general, the band adopts the standard uniform of hard rock music, sporting long hair, tattoos, dark clothing, jeans, leather, and sun-glasses. However, Ortíz tops this off with the enormous hat worn by Andean scissors dancers, which with its truncated cone shape, glittering adornments, and face-shielding tassels, is both outrageously eye-catching, and unmistakably Andean. And Ortíz sometimes has the waqrapuku performers with whom he works, cousins who are both named Juan Espinoza, appear live onstage. The use of their instruments is limited to “Ananao”: however, the Espinozas typically remain onstage, dressed in ponchos and ch’ullus, dancing and holding aloft their instruments, and acting mainly as tokens of Andean-ness. Neither the scissors dance nor the waqrapuku should be seen as arbitrary indigenous signifiers. Both were central symbols of indigenous inventiveness and resistance in the fiction of José María Arguedas, a heroic defender of Andean cultures until his death in 1969, whose work on music and indigenous identity is widely influential. An entire chapter in his 1941 novel Yawar Fiesta is dedi-cated to the voice of the waqrapukus, instruments made of European materials that are described as a holy terror to the mestizo landowners who dominate their indigenous peons, vehicles for transmuting the earth’s sacred power into sound, and a symbol of suppressed indigenous strength and solidarity. Scis-sors dancers appear repeatedly in his work, associated with the transmission of indigenous cosmology and the preservation of indigenous vitality, despite the European elements in their costume and music. Arguedas was radical in his time

Figure 4. Waqrapuku part from opening of “Ananaw.”

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for describing these hybrids as evidence of indigenous survival and creativity, rather than cultural alienation. The contention that hybridity generated from a position of indigenous agency amounted to more than mere cultural imposition was not widely accepted in an age concerned with indigenous purity above all. A similar stance underpins Uchpa’s work, and in 2005 their webpage featured the title quote from Arguedas’s spirited defense of his philosophy: “I am not culturally alienated: I’m a lucky devil who speaks Indian and Christian, Quechua and Spanish.” Below this quote, Uchpa’s philosophy is described in terms that could be derived from Arguedas himself: “Our interest is in the discourse of interculturalism, rooted in the presentation and diffusion of cultural difference as a mechanism for questioning official affirmations, and promoting interest in the local.”20

Uchpa is not one of Peru’s most popular groups. Their album sales are not comparable to those of traditional artists. They perform in small, often chic rock clubs, or occasionally as one group among many performers in the day-long concerts of Andean music that take place every weekend in Lima’s migrant neighborhoods. Nevertheless, they tend to fill the house, and they are generally well received, even by attendees who come seeking other, more familiar musi-cal idioms. My own observations and those of others, such as producer Arturo Chiclla, tend to corroborate Ortiz’s own evaluation of their audience as one that includes “rockers, but also indigenous ladies [mamachas] dancing just a few feet away,” suggesting that he does not exaggerate when he says that “[younger fans] tell me they need another copy of the CD, because their [Quechua-speaking] parents or even grandparents like it so much they’ve made off with it, because of the language.” The band members are often treated as spokesmen for the value of indigenous performance, able to bridge the distance between nominally distinct sectors of Peruvian society. On July 14, 2002, for instance, they appeared on the Andean music TV program Los Gaitán Castro y sus invitados (“The Gaitán Castro Brothers and Guests”), only to appear later the same day on the rock program Disco Club, speaking in each case about the need to make “modern” music in the Quechua language. It is through such communicative acts that the band brings listeners to rethink the place of Quechua speakers, and brings contradictions in Peruvian ideologies of indigeneity to the fore. They are prominent interlocutors in an emergent conversation about the shape of contemporary Peru, widely recognized as a benevolent force for the promotion of the Quechua language. Most impor-tantly, their success indicates some possible parameters for Peru’s indigenous future. In addition, it is Ortiz’s embodied presentation of an indigeneity that is fully coeval with transnational modernity that provides the most suggestive point of contrast between his artistic project and that of Alborada.


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Reading Uchpa Against Alborada: New Performances for a New Age

On its face, Uchpa’s story is a familiar narrative of world musical fusion. Typically, these stories involve the movement of traditional musicians to urban centers, where they become entranced by foreign sounds and modernize their own styles, removing their parochial taint to demonstrate their compatibility with Euro-American categories of musical legitimacy. But some details of Uchpa’s emergence suggest alternate ways of understanding the group’s efforts. In his own telling, Ortíz’s inclination for Euro-American popular music was not precisely the product of parochial embarrassment, but rather the natural outgrowth of patterns laid down in his childhood. The son of a Protestant preacher, Ortíz “always attended church, to hear preaching and singing in Quechua.” Unlike his Catholic peers, he was exposed to American-style hymnody from an early age, and he feels that the experience of hearing Quechua in this idiom, “half gospel, half country,” paved the way for a later identification with American popular music. He did not discover the novel sounds of an alien, aspirational modernity in his encounter with rock and blues; rather, like the American youths who were responsible for popularizing rock n roll in the first place, he found an extension of musical patterns that he already knew. This narrative challenges a portrait of indigenous life as insular and tradition-bound, opening to the world only upon travel to the cosmopolitan city. It suggests that the local and the global interweave even in the “remote” regions of the global South, demonstrating how the “outside” already inhabits “deep Peru.” Furthermore, the way that Ortíz narrates his affinity for rock and blues does not resonate easily with a desire to “modernize” Andean music. It works through a highly constructed interpretation of possible parallels between the music of “two socially marginalized groups, [North American] blacks and in-digenous Peruvians, peoples who are marginalized in every sense.” Promoting this interpretation, Ortíz structures a context of reception wherein the blues and their descendent, rock music, are articulated to indigenous Andeans by way of a common history of social oppression: “both [blues and Andean music] are expressions that have developed in the unofficial world . . . but which have dem-onstrated enormous strength; and both are tragic and emotional” (Joo 2002:39). They become coeval with Andean music, equivalent ways of expressing social frustration, and equally legitimate means of expressing indigenous realities. Uchpa’s cosmopolitan indigeneity, then, does not stem from a fruitful en-counter between an alien modernity and an authenticating autochthony, but instead is rooted in the very experience of growing up as a Quechua-speaking youth in the Andean backlands. In Ortiz’s words, “It’s not artificial, it’s not just a copy. Other people sing from [commercial] motives, but I can’t sing from another subject position [ubicación].” And for this reason, the band’s efforts to

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promote the language as a medium of contemporary expression are more than an adventitious attempt to seize the commercial possibilities of American pop. Indeed, Uchpa’s discourse is full of exhortations like those within the liner notes of Qukman Muskiy, which admonish listeners (in Quechua) to “remember this beautiful Quechua that we speak and sing together.” Ortíz also disdains the notion that indigenous authenticity lies in its priority, distancing himself from those who have “a clichéd image of us, they want to see in Peru the little Indian with his llama at [the Inca fortress of] Sacsayhuamán, they don’t understand that we’re bigger than that. The future of Quechua depends upon what we young people do with it. By singing rock in Quechua we want to show that it is not a dead, archaic language, but a modern language, one that makes noise, with which you can express any facet of modern life” (Joo 2002:39). Alborada’s performative poetics of indigeneity respond to a different set of principles. If Uchpa’s music alerts Peruvian listeners to the proximity of the global and to the worldliness of indigenous life at home, Alborada instead projects listeners backward in time and outward in space. Their recording of “Ananaw” rests upon alien sonic signifiers of autochthony, and it serves the group’s explicit goal of revitalizing Andean indigeneity through the forging of common cause with all indigenous peoples. Indeed, given the clearly foreign nature of their hyperreal indigeneity, Alborada have often been accused of abandoning their Andean roots in favor of a quick buck, and of taking shame in the indigenous heritage of their home region. The most memorable of these accusations may be a video clip titled “Ananau Bananau,”21 where new lyrics ridiculing the group’s perceived ethnic hucksterism are set to the original tune. Charges that they are “trying to be Apache” regularly attend the group’s public activities, and they are easily located in the comments sections of YouTube clips like this one. Nevertheless, the group has denied accusations of selling out, and described their image as the result of a highly personal ethnic awakening. This awaken-ing, it is said in the group’s press releases, hinged upon a transformative trip to Canadian and American reservations, where the group was impressed with the vitality of First Nations and Native American cultural consciousness.22 In-spired, they publicly distanced themselves from their colonized mestizo sub-ject positions, affiliating instead with what they saw as successful emblems of contemporary indigenous resistance. This was a journey they wished to share with other Andeans who were alienated from their racial birthright, whether indigenous peoples in danger of abandoning Quechua language and culture or Peruvian mestizos who, after centuries of colonialism, had lost any affective ties to indigenous culture. As such, their performances aim to construct symbolic links between the Peruvian Andes and other parts of the indigenous world, where identities have better recovered from their stigmatization, and to restage a lost era of indig-enous self-affirmation within Peru. Here, the notion of a common heritage


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is projected into the past in a rather literal way. In an interview on Internet broadcaster Radio Marma (see note 5), Sixto Ayvar insisted to an incredulous listener that their attire was no copy, but rather a recovered memory of ancient Andean attire, and the group generally describes their outfits as an inheritance from the Chanka, a Precolombian people who once ruled the area around Oco-bamba. Their CDs include pictographs copied from potshards, and references to Chanka figures such as leader Anco Wayllu, reminding listeners of the deep indigenous roots that are being translated, via borrowed esthetic languages, into contemporary space. The use of American Indian materials is thus pitched as the restoration of ancient links severed by colonial oppression, rather than cultural appropriation in the present day. The group and their fans argue for the wearing of indigenous regalia not as the abandonment of Andean heritage, but precisely as a means of demonstrating and deepening their identification with a suppressed indigenous history. As Alborada gained fame and success within Peru, followers incorporated such pan-indigenism into their own performances. Artists like Joseycha and Indiógenes, characterized by various degrees of musical and iconographic imi-tation, emerged to service the demand for local shows in between Alborada’s Peruvian tours.23 Fans founded a club, organizing events and discussion groups dedicated to New Age spirituality and Native North America. This uptake is hard to quantify, but the following statement, posted on a fan’s website, typifies a common position: “Alborada unites all of America with their roots, in a mul-ticultural Precolombian symphony of sounds. In their music beats the profound desire of a people, newly unashamed, to clasp the hand of all their brothers in the world without barriers of politics, language, creeds or races.”24

Such utopian statements are not exactly novel, having long been documented and dismissed by commentators on world music. Nevertheless, Alborada’s par-ticular language of ethnic consciousness, and their idea of what Andean indigene-ity might embrace in pursuit of its contemporary expression, were novel within Peru, and have found surprising traction. Alborada and their followers interpret their performance as a liberating, decolonizing hybrid. In their estimation, the band provides Peruvians who are alienated from the country’s indigenous roots with a public site of memory. Furthermore, their music brings listeners into a broader identarian project, one that gestures toward a transnational space that is perhaps akin to the artistically and politically productive African diaspora. Clearly, these evaluations must be considered vis-à-vis factors that militate against a positive reading of the group’s work. Alborada enacts a surrogation as radical as any in the history of Peru’s public sphere, substituting almost every possible element of Andean culture for something else. Aside from the language, there is little here that is recognizable from an indigenous Andean context. Their effort to reframe Andean indigeneity through foreign imageries, more fashion-able and politically vigorous than those at hand within Peru, silences the indig-

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enous peoples who inhabit the contemporary Andes. Their dubious attempts to restage ancient Andean culture, in an effort to reclaim an ancestral birthright, not only misrepresent those ancient cultures by a wide margin; they also insinuate that the culture of living Peruvians is but a lamentable reminder of colonialism, deracinated and unworthy of recognition. In light of this, it is perhaps unsurprising that urban, middle-class mestizos constitute Alborada’s largest fan base. Their infamous reluctance to associate with the country’s indigenous population would seem to find a counterpart in an invocation of indigeneity that is more colorful, exotic, safely distant, and self-consciously staged than the problematically real and disenfranchised local version. And yet the band does appeal to indigenous Peruvians as well. Evidence for an indigenous fan base is anecdotal, but everyone involved with Peru’s entertainment world appears to know indigenous listeners who appreci-ate their music. In the indigenous heartland of the south-central Andes, they have established a sincere, if probably minoritarian, following among Quechua speakers. Language factors heavily here: if in many musical contexts language is no barrier to appreciation, in the Quechua-speaking area it matters a great deal. Speakers place a high value on linguistic skill, displayed via the poetic manipulation of language and meaning, and this has resulted in the wide cul-tivation of ludic verbal genres such as riddling. These skills are a fundamental part of indigenous singing as well. Many festival genres, as well as informal musical interactions, are based on linguistic parallelism, punning, metaphor, and competitive insults (Mannheim 1977; Stobart 2006). As is the case with Ortíz, all of the Ayvar brothers sing in a Quechua that is often described as “exquisite,” in contrast to the monolingual majority of contemporary Andean artists. Furthermore, some of Alborada’s songs turn these skills toward the deft evocation of indigenous Andean life. Songs like “Relámpago” (“Lightning Bolt”), about a horse belonging to the Ayvars’ father, treat the rural context with a heavy dose of idealization, but also with a familiarity and sensitivity that are exceedingly rare elsewhere in Peruvian popular culture. Alborada, like Uchpa, thus occupy a more ambiguous position than might appear upon first glance, insofar as they provide an unusually prominent and sensitive platform for the Quechua language itself. Even so, it is imperative to consider recent theoretical interventions about the utility of indigenous cultural performance and its links to the rhetoric of inclusion, before evaluating the contribution of each performance to the contemporary indigenous imaginary.

Permitted Indians, Wiggle Room, and Cultural Agency

Although the role of the state is muted with respect to indigenous culture in contemporary Peru, these performances might be considered in light of the questions about state-sanctioned multiculturalism raised in Hale’s lucid 2002


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article “Does Multiculturalism Menace?” and his later coauthored piece with Millamán on “the Era of the Indio Permitido” (2006). Together, these authors suggest that attention to the politics of cultural assertion should be tempered by an awareness of the way in which cultural action provides a cover for continu-ing social inequalities. According to these analyses, neoliberal societies such as contemporary Peru routinely concede public space for debates about indigenous identity, as a means of demonstrating their enlightened attitudes, and their term “indio permitido . . . refers to the identity category that results when neoliberal regimes actively recognize and open space for collective indigenous presence, even agency” (ibid.:283). By bringing actors to invest in these debates, they also foster the notion that victories gained in these forums constitute substantive challenges to existing power relations, and distract interlocutors from struggles over territorial and legal concessions that provide real amelioration of indigenous oppression. Such situations, in other words, involve the

explicit affirmation of indigenous culture and the creation of a category within which indigenous people are encouraged to be themselves, to express their cultural particularities [and as] indigenous culture passes from being the battle cry of one side in the struggle to being the battleground on which both sides meet and fight it out, activists and intellectuals alike need new analytical resources to make sense of the challenges that lie ahead. (Ibid.:284–85)

Hale’s pessimistic stance on culturalist struggle reminds us that particular instances of indigenous affirmation are often absorbed effortlessly by exist-ing political regimes. But Uchpa and Alborada also exert what Sommer has described as “cultural agency”: by exploring the cracks in existing regimes of representation, they provide “dangerous supplements that add angles for in-tervention, and locate room for maneuver” (2006:3). Even where cultural de-bate falls into the neoliberal-multicultural trap, indigenous actors may be able to create sociopolitical “wiggle room,” opening wedges in exiting ideological structures for the development of new ideas. Hale and Millamán themselves note that “once the category of the [permitted Indian] is occupied by real social actors, the question ‘who is using whom’ must remain open, subject to case-specific empirical analysis” (2006:299). In other words, if the identities and political rhetorics that are forged in such spaces are “‘called out’ by hegemonic structures of managed multiculturalism” (Clifford 2007:211), they can also wreak surprising effects. With these competing frameworks in mind, it is possible to lay out a num-ber of ways in which the success of Uchpa and Alborada might be interpreted. Firstly, it is striking that both bands avoid indigenista strategies of representa-tion, even as they speak and sing from a specifically indigenous subject position, evading the mestizo identity adopted by most Andean popular musicians. This suggests the insufficiency of the folkloric canon to describe the real heteroge-

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neity of contemporary indigenous experience, and a frustration with the mes-tizo worldview of contemporary huayno musicians, who don’t describe it at all. Rejection might be expected given the shifts in Peru’s social structure over the last half-century, when rural-to-urban migration and an increase in political and economic participation obviated notions of indigenous timelessness and traditionalism among the popular classes. However, these ideas remain in force at other levels of Peruvian society, and performances like these indisputably encourage the dissolution of such ideological holdovers. Alborada and Uchpa may be most salutary, then, for the sheer hybridity of their performative gestures, insofar as they rupture one of the main axes of indigenous-mestizo inequality: the denial of coevalness to indigenous peoples (Bigenho 2007). Peru’s dominant model for representing indigenous culture has limited its public place to the contemplation of ancient glories or to the faith-ful reproduction of ancestral traditions, and helped to perpetuate the image of indigenous peoples as atavistic beings out of time. Indeed, the persistence of these attitudes in other arenas is demonstrated after every incident of protest in the Andean region, when the conservative press and its allies in government describe them as the result of unenlightened savagery (usually barbarie, or “bar-barism”) instead of legitimate grievance. These events are routinely used as an opportunity to lament the supposed persistence of indigenous atavism, and to call for its end via “modernization.” Like the fans of Bolivian music discussed by Bigenho, Peruvian listeners who identify with indigenous peoples via folkloric music tend to “locate their point of intersection in a past [and] identify with this native world of difference without engaging with the other [i.e., contemporary, disenfranchised] genres of indigenous voice . . . ” (ibid.:261). Uchpa and Alborada’s global images of solidarity and oppression, including the articulation of Andean history with African-American narratives of pain and violence, or the invocation of Native North American cultural vitality, might act to obviate this denial of coevalness, jolting consumers out of rote, picturesque evocation of the indigenous past to recognize indigenous grievance and agency. Furthermore, with the political sphere closed to new ideas, it may be that only these kinds of efforts are capable of redrawing intercultural relations, of “constituting new symbols and desires, centered on new political interests” (Vich 2006:67). At the very least, they make visible patterns of indigenous being that are not commonly acknowledged, and their uptake suggests a hunger for alterna-tives among their listenership. This is why Hale and Millamán’s analysis needs to be fleshed out with facts on the ground in each instance of indigenous cultural politics, and this is where scholars of music and material culture can make a signal contribution to the study of contemporary indigeneity. For if scholars are to study the use and abuse of indigenous culture by political actors, they


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must first appreciate the ways in which indigenous identities are established and inhabited. In Peru, where contemporary indigenous voices are unusually suppressed, the most urgent political matter may be the very definition of vi-able identities, sites of identification that reveal the contemporary agency of indigenous peoples themselves. It is also possible that the success of these artists derives precisely from their continuities with past projects of indigenous misrepresentation. Uchpa uses heavy-metal sounds and visuals, which still bear a frisson of angry rebellion for mainstream Peruvian listeners. But their uniqueness comes from Ortíz’s use of folkloric signifiers, decontextualized and converted into identarian tokens, in much the same manner as in indigenista performance. Alborada’s approach instantly recalls the worst impulses of indigenista folklore in its ancient imagery, and the most oppressive essentialisms of the New Age movement in its use of foreign indigenous materials. And yet, both groups are difficult to read solely in terms of continuity. Alborada’s hyper-real Indians carry a most dishearten-ing message: symbols of power should be sought outside Peru, among Native Americans who have attained (limited) sovereignty and respect. However, they may also be a challenge to reevaluate what constitutes a victory for indigenous self-determination, and to rethink the terms on which indigenous Andeans seek redress from their government. By contrast, Ortíz achieves an edifying effect of listener alienation simply by being himself. Speaking only for his own, individuated position as a Quechua from Ocobamba, while making clear the importance of Jimi Hendrix and waqrapukus in his musical formation, he ex-plodes the apparent paradox that such a figure presents. Uchpa’s accomplished rock music offers all Peruvians a means of understanding indigenous peoples as modern interlocutors, and indigeneity as something more than folkloric performance. Overall, both bands refuse the folklorist’s stance of superior dis-tance from an indigenous subject position, asserting their right to an identity as both indigenous and metropolitan. Their marvelous cultivation of the Quechua language authenticates the notion that “real Indians” engage the sounds and discourses of international modernity. And in the end, both groups challenge the mainstream idea that Indians can be relied upon to behave in predictable, quaintly backward ways.

Conclusion

Performances like these draw attention to the forces that contemporary indigenous peoples contend with as they seek to make themselves heard by hegemonic actors unused to treating them as legitimate interlocutors. They are shaped by socioeconomic change, multicultural politics, the booming global market in exoticism, and the shifting rhetoric of the international indigenous

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movement. At the same time, they use unprecedented media resources to address their audiences, and they may wield great potential to influence public debate. Given the disproportion between the ambivalent messages of these performances and their media reach, they should be evaluated with care. But overall, they seem to challenge the hegemonic notion that indigenous peoples lead lives of quiet isolation. As exceptional players working to foster indigenous subjectivity within a shifting Peruvian nation-state, their contribution is unique. A key task for scholars here is to track the options in circulation and maintain a healthy analytical skepticism, as everyday citizens and politicians fumble toward mutual understanding on shifting social ground. These musicians’ work also holds lessons for students of music and in-digeneity elsewhere. Firstly, for scholars of music, understanding contempo-rary indigeneity means attending to the full range of idioms through which indigenous identities circulate (cf. Samuels 2004). Shaped by the international movement of people and sounds, by local histories of neo-indigenous perfor-mance, and by the emergent technological conjuncture, the performances of Uchpa and Alborada are both idiosyncratic and multiply determined. Here, new hybrid identities emerge and wane according to the uses to which they are suited, possibly destabilizing existing regimes of representation. As thick-ening networks of global technology allow images of indigeneity to circulate and take up residence in local contexts, they may allow indigenous peoples to rupture the notion that their only recourse as indigenous people lies in the reproduction of tradition. Secondly, when the political sphere appears closed to indigenous concerns, it is likely that a discussion of their problematics will reemerge elsewhere. In the case of Peru, popular music is the most widely consumed medium of communication, and it has emerged as a key site for such discussions. Given this situation, the merits and possibilities of cultural performances should be approached contextually, balancing Sommer’s style of culturalist optimism against Hale and Millamán’s political skepticism. They should be evaluated with respect to the way that they provide new points of intervention where old models appear exhausted, as well as the way they reproduce oppressive categories. They should be regarded not as intrinsically empowering or dis-empowering, but rather as contingent and revealing utterances of indigeneity. Cultural forms like these cannot intervene directly in the political process, but when other channels of mobilization and imagination appear closed, they can motivate new conversations, propose new models of identification, and allow people to try on emergent subject positions. Particularly as mass cultural production becomes more accessible to indigenous actors, attention will have to be paid to the variegated means by which indigeneity is mobilized in the public sphere.


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AcknowledgmentsThis article is based on research conducted between 2001 and 2007. Support is gratefully acknowl-edged from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the University of Michigan’s Rackham School of Gradu-ate Studies and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and The University of Texas at Austin’s Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies. I would also like to thank Robin Moore, Sonia Seeman, Jessaca Leinaweaver, and Paja Faudree for comments on earlier versions.

Notes 1. A collection of links to images and video clips featuring both bands, including most of those referenced here, is available at http://research.Brown.edu/myresearch/Joshua_Tucker, under the heading “Permitted Indians and Popular Music: Supplementary Materials.” 2. This article is based on observations collected over several periods of fieldwork between 2001 and 2009, including attending live performances, along with informal conversations with DJs, record producers, and fans in Lima and Ayacucho, Peru. I formally interviewed Fredy Ortíz of Uchpa, and gathered information on this band and on Alborada from interviews in other media, websites, reportage in Peru’s daily newspapers, and from the bands’ own liner notes. I was unable to contact Alborada directly. 3. Despite its worldwide popularity, pan-Andean music has received surprisingly thin scholarly treatment. See however Wara Céspedes 1984, 1993; Turino 2008; Ríos 2009. 4. All performed mestizo huayno music, and were among the most traditionalist of its per-formers, often selecting repertoire that is generations old, and hewing closely to a conservative instrumental format of guitar, voice, and charango. Luís Ayvar’s hit CD of mestizo huayno music, Wiñaytakinchiq (2001), exemplifies the kind of music the Ayvars were known for. Porfirio Ayvar had also become a well-recognized soloist, and brothers Wílber and Viterbo still perform regularly as the Duo Hermanos Ayvar. 5. According to a 2006 band interview on Internet broadcaster Radio Marma, later given to me by DJ Pedro Arriola, this instrument was obtained when one member traded an Andean flute with that of a Chinese musician who saw him playing in the street. 6. According to its composer Fredy Ortíz, the song refers to a grown friend who refused to leave his parents’ house: the lyrics are spoken from a parent’s point of view. All transcriptions and translations are my own. 7. See Feld 2000 and Taylor 1997, 2007 for classic accounts of the esthetics and morals involved in such world beat/New Age performances. 8. Karl May’s bestselling cowboy-and-Indian adventures, starring the duo of Winnetou (Mes-calero Apache) and Old Shatterhand (German-American), are this mania’s most prominent legacy. 9. This description is drawn from the group’s profile on the Andean music web page Raíces Milenarias (http://www.raicesmilenarias.com/?cat=83, accessed 14 February 2011), and at the time it was also reported in Peru’s print media. 10. In fact, such a person would likely pass through the intermediate category of “cholo,” a derogatory term for an indigenous migrant in the clumsy initial stage of mastering an alien culture. 11. By this token, it is likely that the individuals treated in this article would not be considered “indigenous” by many Peruvians or academic theorists. As Quechua speakers who have left the rural milieu and taken up a metropolitan lifestyle, they would probably be seen as cholos or mestizos. I am not concerned here, however, with determining whether or not they are “really Indian,” but rather with evaluating how they put into circulation new genres of “indigenous voice” that may produce new subjectivities (Bigenho 2007). Insofar as they claim indigenous identities, I refer to them as “indigenous,” respecting their desire to be recognized in this way.

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12. For analyses of this striking phenomenon, see Van Cott 2005; Yashar 2005; Pajuelo 2007. Indigenous mobilization has taken a more assertive turn in Peru’s Amazonian region. 13. The elements that are typically held constant as markers of indigeneity include descent from a social group that is historically prior to a distinct settler group; the experience of coloniza-tion; the maintenance of distinct cultural patterns, especially language; and an economy based to some extent on ties to the land, which may include farming, pastoralism, or hunting and gathering. 14. For excellent studies in this vein, see Turino 1993; Stobart 2006. For examples of studies that approach indigenous music in the way that I am advocating here, see Seeger 2004; Bigenho 2007. 15. This inattention is striking given the substantial attention to such issues in studies of Native American and First Nations music: see Goertzen 2001; Ellis et al. 2005; Browner 2009. 16. See, for example, Turino 1990; Alfaro 2006. 17. Mendoza suggests that indigenous contribution to indigenista performance is greater than has typically been appreciated (2008). Even so, I would argue, as do many scholars of indigenista scholarship, that the overall effect of folkloric indigenista performance is to reify and freeze indig-enous performance in the way that I have described here. See especially de la Cadena 2000. 18. Unless otherwise stated, references to Ortiz’s opinions and life history are drawn from an interview I conducted with him in July of 2006. 19. As here, when used in the Andes, the term “blues” often indexes music that would not spring to the mind of a knowledgeable Euro-American listener. 20. Ortíz told me that he had no connection with this website, and that he had never read Arguedas’s work. These parallels, then, may point to Arguedas’s considerable influence in fram-ing the public cultural repertoire of indigenous authenticity, and Uchpa’s considerable success in inhabiting that frame. The website, unfortunately, appears to have disappeared. 21. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWpBSC9DgD8 (accessed 1 January 2008), 22. Alborada’s public deployment of this narrative is so pervasive that almost any interview or press release associated with the group might be adduced as a source: I first encountered it in the group’s interview on Radio Marma, mentioned above. For some examples, see the web page Raíces Milenarias (see note 9 above), which includes the statement that “Alborada’s new sound fused the styles of [Andean] communities, and became richer after they came to know the indigenous cultures of Canada and the United States.” 23. The level of popularity reached by these groups is suggested by something I saw in Janu-ary of 2009, while purchasing some pan flutes in the Plaza 2 de Mayo, Lima’s central clearinghouse for Andean instruments. In the well-known store Allpa Yuraq I came across a full complement of imitation Native American powwow regalia, including fringed buckskin shirt and pants, a feathered headdress, and matching bustle, as well as two bicep bustles and a tomahawk. 24. This statement appears anonymously or under the name Bartolina Sisa on several differ-ent websites, including http://es.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090511153133AAsKG19 (accessed 28 January 2011), where it appears within a discussion of the ancient Bolivian site of Tiwanaku.

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DiscographyAlborada. 2003. Five Spirits. Lima. Compact disc.Ayvar Alfaro, Luis. 2001. Wiñaytakinchiq. Lima: Mundo Music. Compact disc.Uchpa. 2000. Qukman Muskiy. Lima: Mundo Music. Compact disc.


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Permitted Indians and Popular Music in Contemporary Peru: The Poetics and Politics of Indigenous...

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