Making Music Indigenous

Popular Music in the Peruvian Andes

Joshua Tucker

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226607474
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

When thinking of indigenous music, many people may imagine acoustic instruments and pastoral settings far removed from the whirl of modern life. But, in contemporary Peru, indigenous chimaycha music has become a wildly popular genre that is even heard in the nightclubs of Lima. In Making Music Indigenous, Joshua Tucker traces the history of this music and its key performers over fifty years to show that there is no single way to "sound indigenous." The musicians Tucker follows make indigenous culture and identity visible in contemporary society by establishing a cultural and political presence for Peru's indigenous peoples through activism, artisanship, and performance. This musical representation of indigeneity not only helps shape contemporary culture, it also provides a lens through which to reflect on the country's past. Tucker argues that by following the musicians that have championed chimaycha music in its many forms, we can trace shifting meanings of indigeneity—and indeed, uncover the ways it is constructed, transformed, and ultimately recreated through music.

1

Setting a Scene

Most of the account that I develop over the course of this text pertains to the city of Ayacucho. However, some of it pertains instead to customs and practices that developed before the late twentieth century—the era of mass migration to that city—in Chuschi and Quispillaccta. Later musical events continue to respond to the social distinctions, political boundaries, and geophysical particularities that organized life in those communities. Thus this chapter provides a historical and geographic overview of the communities, of Chuschi District’s relationship to the city of Ayacucho, and of certain events that undergird the developments traced in later chapters. Above all, perhaps, it underlines a key dynamic of Andean life, a contrast between the persistent disprivilege that indigenous communities have suffered and the vibrant sociopolitical dynamism that they have maintained in its face.

Chuschi and Quispillaccta: Geophysical and Social Topography

The southern part of Chuschi District is located within the valley of the Pampas River, while the northern section lies behind a mountain ridge, around the upper drainage of the Cachi River. The entire surrounding area, typically dubbed the Pampas Valley region, is renowned for the strength of indigenous custom and the Quechua language. That reputation led several scholars of the 1960s and 1970s to choose Pampas Valley communities for a pioneering series of anthropological and ethnohistorical investigations (Palomino 1971 and 1984; Quispe 1969; Zuidema 1966; Zuidema and Quispe 1968; see also Isbell and Barrios Micuylla 2016). Written at a time when Peruvian elites still viewed indigenous communities mainly as barriers to national development, these influential studies instead depicted Andean culture as a complex system worthy of respect. They are invaluable documents, and I quote frequently from those penned by anthropologist Billie Jean Isbell, who worked in Chuschi at that time and has worked with chuschinos ever since (1985; 1997; 1998; 2009; Isbell and Barrios Micuylla 2016).1 However, by seeming to overstate the persistence of traits that dated back to pre-Columbian times (see especially Isbell 1985; Zuidema and Quispe 1968), these studies sometimes mischaracterized the region’s cultural conservatism.2 The towns of the Pampas region have never been isolated from outside forces. For centuries their residents have interacted with outsiders, adapting new practices that were thrust upon them, including Spanish political systems and the Catholic religion, as well as things that suited their needs like the stringed instruments, clothes, and crops of Iberian invaders. The region’s vaunted traditionalism, then, should be seen as a practice of actively controlling the pace and direction of cultural change, rather than a protective isolationism.

This kind of traditionalism is a strong force in Chuschi District, but its indigenous communities are otherwise much like the others of the Peruvian Andes. They span an enormous altitudinal range, from the warm bottom of the Pampas River valley at about 8000 feet, where locals raise tender fruit trees, to freezing puna (high grasslands) between 12,000 and 14,000 feet, where they graze camelid herds beneath snowy peaks. Of course residents of these different zones do not inhabit a single conurbation. Rather, “indigenous communities” like Chuschi and Quispillaccta include many dispersed settlements situated at different altitudes and occupying distinct ecological niches. Called barrios, pagos, or anexos, these settlements are all governed from a centro poblado (populated center), the name of which serves as a synechdoche for the entire community.3 Chuschi and Quispillaccta, situated at the middling altitude of about 10,000 feet, are examples of such community seats (see figures 3 and 4; for a map see figure 5 below). They house important businesses, political offices, religious sites, and transportation hubs, so members of all barrios make frequent trips there in order to conduct business. Much of the time, however, barrios function independently, under the guidance of local subofficials. Such quasi-independence is a necessity given the sheer distance and difficulty involved in travel. Some of Chuschi’s barrios, for instance, are separated from its centro poblado by a journey of almost forty miles over steep, heavily broken terrain.

This dispersed settlement pattern is part of an old strategy dubbed “vertical ecology” by Andeanist scholar John Murra (1972). It ensures access to a diverse set of crops and animals, all suited to different climactic niches, which together provide a sustainable base for community subsistence. Here the seasons play a key role as well, because they drive the annual cycles of crop production and herding. In the rainy season (roughly October–April), a fertile mosaic of greens replaces the drab browns and yellows of the dry-season landscape, and herd animals thrive amid new growth in the high puna. Until the 1980s and 1990s, when the communities’ economic bases were altered by development work, herders spent those wet months in the district’s high barrios, moving animals from site to site as they exhausted local fodder. Around the turn to the dry season, cows and sheep were driven to low areas, and eventually to the district’s lowest corn-growing reaches after July, when the harvest was complete and animals feasted on leftover stalks. There they remained until after the plowing period in September and October, at which point the animals were once more driven to the puna to await the rains. This process has been rendered obsolete by new agropastoral techniques as well as land enclosure in the puna, and no more than a few families still practice it. However, it was once central to social life, for it helped to structure the annual cycle of vida michiy celebrations, and it therefore lives in the memory of older chuschinos and quispillacctinos as a central factor in musical production.

This verticality is also conjoined with various kinds of social relationships, two of which feature in this book. First, it is very common for a resident of one barrio to contract marriage with a partner from another. Such alliances give families access to plots of land in different niches, with all the increased productivity that results from it. They are also expedient since a typical barrio, housing only a few hundred residents at most, may contain no marriageable age-mates outside one’s own family circle. Historically, much of teen life was devoted to the search for a partner in another barrio—and chimaycha played a central role in that search.

Figure 3. View across the Pampas Valley from within the community of Quispillaccta. Photograph by author.

A second important relationship that is conjoined with Andean verticality is an opposition between high-altitude herders and low-altitude farmers. This binary is widely reported in studies of Andean society, and it bears strong characterological associations. Valley dwellers typically regard the pastoral people of the high, cold puna as wild and primitive and their own temperate agricultural settlements by contrast as local centers of civilization.4 Binary oppositions like these are omnipresent in indigenous Andean communities, but quispillacctinos described theirs in especially strong terms. The community functioned as a political unit and presented a united face toward the outside world, but internally there was a recognized division between, on one hand, the barrios of Cerce, Huerta Huasi, Llaccta Urán, Pirhuamarca, Socubamba, Tuco, Yurac Cruz, and the centro poblado of Quispillaccta, all situated on the jagged slope that rises from the Pampas River; and on the other, the higher, colder barrios of Unión Potrero, Puncupata, Catalinayocc, Pampamarca, and Cuchoquesera, all of which lay beyond the peak of that slope, strewn among the grasslands of the Cachi basin. The rivalry between the two factions came alive in musical competition, and it became especially marked during dry-season festivities, when adolescent quispillacctinos departed for the vida michiy from named base camps associated with different factions—a site called Amayni, in the case of the Pampas-side barrios, and one called Pukawasi, in the case of the Cachi-side barrios.5 However, the rivalry was more than a musical matter. Sometimes fierce and deeply felt, it could erupt into violence, and it had even given rise to a sort of ethnic slur used by the residents of the Pampas side to name those of the Cachi basin: they called them qipakuna (the ones behind [the mountain peak]), as if to underscore their geophysical separation from the community’s dominant centro poblado.6

Figure 4. José Tomaylla (left) and Óscar Conde (right) in the main plaza of Chuschi. The peak of Comañawi (also called Wamankiklla) is in the background. Photograph by author.

Between 2013 and 2017 Quispillaccta was stretched to the breaking point as the increasingly powerful Cachi-side moiety sought to secede, a move that Peruvian law had recently made possible. I return to that project in chapter 5 because it is related to chimaycha’s transformation into an emblem of indigenous politics. I raise it here because it demonstrates how indigenous peoples have always accommodated emergent political systems, bending them to their advantage when possible. After the European invasion of the sixteenth century, for instance, Andean communities were placed under the tutelary vassalage of Spanish settlers, who typically lived nearby in planned communities.7 The colonial state created a bipartite structure of governance through which settlers and indigenous subjects chose different slates of community authorities, each responsible for overseeing their respective peoples. The duties of indigenous officials, called varayuqs (staff-bearers) after the ceremonial staffs that marked their office, revolved around the orderly functioning of the indigenous community, and they remained subject to Spanish and mestizo administrators. However, the system allowed them a measure of representation, and as Andean customs and mores changed the varayuqs enforced adherence to evolving community norms. By the twenty-first century, this indigenous authority system was viewed as anything but a Spanish imposition. Rather, in those rare cases where it had been maintained it was viewed as an index of indigenous traditionalism—nowhere more so than in Chuschi and Quispillaccta.8

This is not to minimize the severity of colonial domination. Indigenous peoples owed ruinous taxes to the Spanish crown. Delinquent communities were penalized, partly though the forfeiture of land, and community holdings steadily passed into nonindigenous hands. Spanish administrators, blessed with literacy and versed in administrative chicanery, also used their power to procure territory, wealth, and sex. They consolidated hacienda estates staffed by dispossessed Indian peons, created commercial dynasties, and founded family lines of mestizo descendants. After Peruvian independence, mestizo landlords and politicians used the bureaucratic chaos of the nineteenth century to snatch ever-greater swaths of indigenous territory. Governorships, prefectures, judgeships, mayoralties, and other state positions that came with significant power continued to be filled by well-connected mestizos rather than disenfranchised Indians, largely excluded from access to education and hence lacking the means to assert their rights. By the twentieth century indigenous communities lived in a shocking state of indigence and subjection.

The impact of these events was not homogeneous across the Andean region. Rugged and steep, most of the terrain in the Department of Ayacucho was capable of supporting only small agricultural plots.9 Large-scale haciendas were therefore few in number. The Pampas Valley was furthermore far from Ayacucho City, the local center of cosmopolitan society. The centros poblados of Chuschi and Quispillaccta, for example, lie some sixty winding miles from the city—a journey of three hours or more on today’s mix of paved and gravel roads, and much more in the years before a road connected them to the departmental capital in 1961 or 1962. Somewhat isolated and land-poor, places like Chuschi District saw little Spanish settlement, and they maintained relative territorial and cultural integrity over the long term. Even so, the preceding sketch of interethnic dynamics fits Chuschi District up to the moment that Isbell and her colleagues arrived to do research in the 1960s—the period from which this book departs, and which is therefore useful to summarize.

Quispillaccta had been officially recognized as an indigenous community on August 24, 1935, and Chuschi on May 27, 1941, but conditions remained neocolonial in both communities. Chuschi was a district capital dating from early colonial days. It housed a tiny mestizo population who rotated key governmental positions among themselves, and they had the power to abuse indigenous subalterns with impunity. They secured consent by occasionally defending the interests of the indigenous majority, but all were regarded as perennial outsiders, settlers who defined themselves as mestizos first and only secondarily as chuschinos.10 Writing in the 1970s, Isbell captured the difference from the perspective of the 85–90 percent of chuschinos who called themselves comuneros, holders of title to Chuschi’s collective goods and rights by virtue of membership in the indigenous community: “The comuneros . . . participate in the [varayuq system], wear traditional dress, and speak Quechua; versus the vecinos [Sp. neighbors”], or qalas (literally, peeled or naked ones), who are Spanish speaking, western dressed, foreign nonparticipants in communal life” (1985:67).11 Strangely attired and antisocial people, qala shopkeepers, health workers, agronomists, schoolteachers, priests, and their kin mostly declined to participate in the customary rites, collective labors, and reciprocal obligations that defined the lives of indigenous peasants.12

The comuneros of Quispillaccta viewed Chuschi’s qalas even more negatively, a view that was colored by community rivalry.13 A poorer and more homogeneously indigenous community for most of its history, Quispillaccta is next to Chuschi. Their centros poblados are on opposite banks of the tiny Chuschi River, their main plazas are only a few hundred feet apart, and residents of the two communities have intermarried since time immemorial. Nevertheless, due in part to long-standing boundary disputes and in part to an imbalance between the shrinking district capital and the growing community of Quispillaccta, the two have long had a tense relationship. A recent history of Quispillaccta penned by indigenous comuneros even attributes the conflict’s roots to pre-Columbian times, noting that the two communities descend from rival ethnic groups settled in the Pampas basin by earlier Inca rulers. Possibly spurious, the attribution nevertheless underlines the popular understanding of the community rivalry as ancient, intractable, and quasi-ethnic in nature.14

Statistics gathered in 1961, just as a gravel road to Ayacucho was being completed, testify to the district’s grinding poverty. It was overwhelmingly young, with almost half of residents under the age of seventeen. Educational attainment was extremely low: under 10 percent of Chuschi’s residents were literate, only 26 percent had received any schooling, and fewer than 50 percent spoke Spanish. Quispillaccta’s numbers were far lower. These statistics in turn explain the high contemporaneous levels of outmigration. Chuschi’s centro poblado had shrunk from 1,310 to 1,099 residents between 1940 and 1961, a period when the overall population of Ayacucho Department had grown by 15 percent. Chuschinos and quispillacctinos were already heading in large numbers to Ayacucho and Lima, seeking jobs for themselves and schooling for their children.

Brute statistics and ethnic generalizations hide the variation that existed within these communities. Certain indigenous households, for example, were regarded as prosperous, their wealth measured by ownership of agricultural plots and herds, which grazed in the communal pastures of the puna (Isbell 1985:200). Several comuneros had become merchants, and by 1967 eighty-one district residents supplemented subsistence farming by carrying on a specialized trade (La Serna 2012a:4). Another kind of prominence came from service in the indigenous authority system. Offices rotated, such that every male adult might act as a varayuq at some point in his life, but some men took on more offices than others, moving farther up the hierarchy and accruing greater respect for doing so.

In the end, however, power and progress depended upon access to literacy and education. In 1959 the Peruvian government reopened the Universidad Nacional San Cristóbal de Huamanga (UNSCH), a university in Ayacucho City that had been closed for nearly eighty years, during which the department had lacked any institution of higher education. The reopening was intended to stimulate prosperity in Peru’s poorest region, and its centerpiece was a teaching college, charged with sending grade-school instructors across the department, where they would provide social uplift in new rural schools. Nine years later Chuschi District hosted nine primary schools and one secondary school. Enrollments were very low, especially for girls, but in 1970 Isbell recorded forty-nine students in Chuschi’s secondary school. Remarkably, 40 percent of them were between the ages of 24 and 40, while another 50 percent were between 15 and 23—testament to a fierce adult-level thirst for the tools that might ensure social advantage in a lettered society (Isbell 1985:68–69).

The reopening of the UNSCH brought other kinds of progressive interventions as well. Some of its offices partnered with foreign universities or NGOs to pursue development projects, one of which had transformative effects in Quispillaccta. It was a partnership between a Swiss agronomic organization called COTESU and the UNSCH’s Centro de Capacitación Campesina (Center for Peasant Development, or CCC), devoted to developing livestock management practices in Ayacucho’s puna (Múñoz Ruiz and Núñez Espinoza 2006:77). Aimed at improving husbandry, stock, feed, forage, and irrigation, the project had already targeted several different communities by the time it reached Quispillaccta in 1982, where it focused on managing the town’s communal herds (Múñoz Ruiz and Núñez Espinoza 2006:46). When it withdrew in 1986, it left behind new canals, prized Brown Swiss cattle, improved pastures, and the knowledge required to augment the precious animal resources of one of the region’s poorest communities.

This was in fact a development of major consequence for Chuschi District and for chimaycha music. As will be detailed in chapter 4, the CCC’s work extended beyond agronomy to support for Quechua-language radio and the promotion of cultural traditions, and musicians from Chuschi and Quispillacta were key beneficiaries. Perhaps more important, the project focused on the high, Cachi-side barrios where Quispillaccta’s livestock was pastured, empowering them at the expense of the other, historically dominant side of the community and of Chuschi itself. No barrio benefited more than Unión Potrero, from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Prologue
• Introduction: Making Music Indigenous
• 1   Setting a Scene
• 2   Landscape, Performance, and Social Structure
• 3   Song and Sound
• 4   Tradition and Folklore
• 5   Broadcasting and Building Publics
• 6   Success and Sentiment
• 7   Wood and Work
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Online Resources
• Glossary
• Notes
• References
• Index