Staging Lo Andino: the Scissors Dance, Spectacle, and Indigenous Citizenship in the New Peru

Staging lo Andino: the Scissors Dance, Spectacle, and Indigenous Citizenship in the New Peru

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Jason Alton Bush, MA

Graduate Program in Theatre

The Ohio State University

2011

Dissertation Committee:

Lesley Ferris, Co-Advisor

Katherine Borland, Co-Advisor

Ana Puga

Jason Bush

2011

Abstract

“Staging Lo Andino: Danza de las Tijeras, Spectacle, and Indigenous Citizenship in the New Peru,” draws on more than sixteen months of fieldwork in Peru, financed by

Ohio State‟s competitive Presidential Fellowship for dissertation research and writing. I investigate a historical ethnography of the Peruvian scissors dance, an acrobatic indigenous ritual dance historically associated with the stigma of indigeneity, poverty, and devil worship. After the interventions of Peruvian public intellectual José María

Arguedas (1911-1969), the scissors dance became an emblem of indigenous Andean identity and valued as cultural patrimony of the nation. Once repudiated by dominant elites because it embodied the survival of indigenous spiritual practices, the scissors dance is now a celebrated emblem of Peru‟s cultural diversity and the perseverance of

Andean traditions in the modern world.

I examine the complex processes whereby anthropologists, cultural entrepreneurs, cosmopolitan artists, and indigenous performers themselves have staged the scissors dance as a symbolic resource in the construction of the emergent imaginary of a “New

Peru.” I use the term “New Peru” to designate a flexible repertoire of utopian images and discourses designed to imagine the belated overcoming of colonial structures of power and the formation of a modern nation with foundations in the Pre-Columbian past. I ask what does the staging of the dance as national and transnational spectacle do to and for marginalized Andean subjects. And what forms of indigenous citizenship do highly-

ii skilled Andean performers engender and enact when they inhabit the role of the

“millennial” Andean Other on cosmopolitan public stages? To address these questions, I draw on interdisciplinary research from anthropology, folklore studies, visual culture studies, and theatre and performance studies about the ways that indigenous cultural forms acquire value as icons of particular nationalities in transnational public culture. I argue indigenous cultural performances, such as the scissors dance, often gain visibility and public recognition as they become commodities in a world market that increasingly values spectacles of cultural difference. Yet, the emergence of new forms of neoliberal governmenance circumscribe the articulation of cosmopolitan indigenous subjectivities as scissors dancers have become highly visible participants in the remaking of Peruvian national identity within a performative economy of spectacle in a globalizing world.

iii

Dedication

This document is dedicated to my wife Gladys Aragon Ccorahua, my amazing parents,

and all those who have helped me along this long journey.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the generous support of the Graduate School and Office of

International Affairs of The Ohio State University that financed the fieldwork for this project. I was able to spend so much time in Peru with support from the US Department of Education‟s FLAS Fellowship, Ohio State‟s AGGRS Grant, International Affairs

Research Grant, and Presidential Fellowship. I would also like to thank Carol Robison,

Lesley Ferris, and Thomas Postlewait for their painstaking assistance in the search and application process for these various grants and funding opportunities.

This project would not have been possible without my felicitous discovery of the existence of The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in their course in Peru in 2005. I am sincerely grateful to Gisela Cánepa Koch for always agreeing to meet with me to discuss my progress during my fieldwork. Her rigorous attention to the complexities of contemporary Peru has inspired me as an emerging scholar. Professor

Jill Lane was also an invaluable interlocutor during the ebbs and flows of my research.

Most of all, I had the opportunity to get to know the amazing theatre professionals of

Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani. Augusto Casafranca, Teresa Ralli, and Amiel Cayo were sources of encouragement, ideas, and inspiration during the research for this project.

My first few years as a doctoral student at The Ohio State University greatly impacted my intellectual development, primarily because of two sources of guidance and

v inspiration. First, the generosity, thoughtfulness, and care Professor Thomas Postlewait shows to each one of his students are amongst the most important reasons this California boy decided to go to the mid-west for graduate education. I can only hope in the future I can impact young scholars‟ lives in the way he impacted mine. Through his encouragement, intellectual inspiration, and sometimes toughness I began to see that the study of history was so much more than facts but required empathy for the people of the past and the circumstances in which they lived. During my first quarter at Ohio State, I adventured outside of my discipline and took a folklore course taught by Dr. Dorothy

Noyes. Through the work of the Center for Folklore Studies I found a second intellectual home that stimulated my research interests and introduced me to caring people.

I am also greatly indebted to the generous guidance of my co-advisors, Lesley

Ferris and Katherine Borland. The genuine interest Dr. Ferris, then the chair of the

Department of Theatre, showed in my potential as a scholar was another reason I arrived at Ohio State. Over the years she has provided me with a great deal of enthusiastic encouragement and most of all patience. This project was in part born in Dr. Borland‟s course on “Latin American Folklore,” where I wrote a short paper on the scissors dance based on my memory of a single performance the previous year in Peru. Through her guidance I began to see that I could write a dissertation that captured my fledgling interests in Peruvian culture using this fascinating cultural form as a case-study. Katey has been always willing to hear my half-formed thoughts, and has filled some tough shoes in helping me with my writing issues after Dr. Postlewait left Ohio State. Although she came on board relatively late in the process, Dr. Ana Puga more than fulfilled her

vi duties as my third committee member. I wish her a great deal of success in her relatively new position at Ohio State and hope she will continue to help me refine my project.

Two other faculty members at Ohio State deserve my gratitude for opening doors for me in my naïve desires to belatedly become a specialist in Latin American Studies.

Dr. Abril Trigo and Ulises Juan Zevallos Aguilar from the Department of Spanish and

Portuguese have shown a great deal of interest in my work. In various courses and private conversations Dr. Trigo has inspired my interests in the cultural log of globalization and neoliberalism. Dr. Zevallos Aguilar has been a generous interlocutor and friend in my quest to have a better understanding of Peruvian culture.

I could not have completed the fieldwork for this project without the assistance of a number of collaborators in Peru. I would like to thank all of the scissors dance performers, fusion artists, and intellectuals I interacted with during my time in Peru. I am inspired by their tremendous energy working under often adverse conditions. My special gratitude goes out to Angel Rubio Cataño, Romulo Huamaní Janampa, Damián de la

Cruz Ccanto, Oswaldo Machuqa Ichpas, Andres Lares, Pachak Chaki, Walter Velille,

Carlos Sayre, Julio Perez, Amiel Cayo, Luis Millones, Alvaro Zavala, and Jorge Febrero

Navarro. Without the contributions of all of these people I would not have achieved all that I have been able to over the past several years.

I am eternally grateful to all of my amazing friends and colleagues who have live throughout the world. I have known Donna Breitzer and Danny Chung since high school, but they continue to bring both laughter and tears to my life. To the amazing people I met in Ohio, especially Gibson Cima, Gina Di Salvo, and Lizzie Nixon, thanks for

vii helping me to adjust and thrive in a new situation and providing me with both intellectual and emotional support. I have never lived in the same city as Kathy Nigh, but our unique world-trotting friendship has sustained me over the past six years. Kathy‟s humor and fun-loving spirit, and relentless drive are the qualities that make her an amazing person to be close to, even across long distances.

My parents are wonderful people who have always supported me in whatever endeavor I choose. I cannot express in words my indebtedness to the infinite wisdom, generosity, and care they have shown me ever since I was a shy and sensitive young boy.

I only hope I can raise my own children with a small portion of the loving atmosphere I grew up with. To Tricia, Adam and Cameron, I hope I can spend more time with my siblings and new nephew. I am so proud of the young woman and mother my wonderful sister has grown up to become.

Most of all, I would not be who I am today without my beautiful and spirited wife, Gladys Aragon Ccorahua. I know it has not been easy to confront our various differences, of culture, language, and background, but I would not trade these past five years for anything in the world. In terms of this project her emotional support and knowledge of Quechua were invaluable to me. We travelled together to small villages

17,000 feet high in the Andes, with no electricity and running water, and I am not quite sure how I would have done it without her. Beyond that I thank her for putting up with all of my craziness over the past year trying to finish. The energetic spirit visible in her smile has always given me hope even in the most desperate of times.

viii

Vita

June 1997 ...... Lynbrook High School, San Jose, CA

June 2001 ...... B.A Theater, UCLA

June 2004 ...... M.A. Theater, California State University,

Northridge

2005-2008 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of Theatre, The Ohio State University

2010-present ...... Lecturer, Department of Spanish and

Portuguese, The Ohio State University

Publications

“El Gran Reto: Celebrity, Cultural Commodification, and Andean Citizenship,” Journal

of American Drama and Theater. 21.2 (Spring 2009): 91-113.

“Who‟s Thuh Man?: Historical Melodrama and the Performance of Masculinity in Suzan-Lori

Parks‟s Topdog/Underdog,” Suzan-Lori Parks: a Casebook. Eds. Kevin J. Wetmore and

Alycia Smith Howard. London: Routledge, 2007: 73-88.

Fields of Study

Major Field: Theatre

Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii

Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...iv

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..v

Vita……………………………………………………………………………………….ix

List of Ilustrations……………………………………………………………………….xiii

Chapters

1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..1

1.1 Statement of the Problem…………...…………………………………………1 1.2 Conquest as Ritualized Social Drama…………………………………………3 1.3 Constructing an Andean Icon…………………………………………………8 1.4 Ritual/Spectacle…………….………………………………………………..14 1.5 Between Anthropology and Theatre and Back………...………...…………..19 1.6 Performativity/Theatricality………………………………………………….21 1.7 Towards a Critical Genealogy of The Society of Spectacle…………………28 1.8 Chapter Overview……………………………………………………………34

2. The Dance from Another Hell………………………………………………………39

2.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………….39 2.2 Idols Behind Altars…………………………………………………………..42 2.3 The Dance of the House of the Devil………………………………………..45 2.4 Andean Ritual Specialists and the Performance of Memory………………...49 2.5 Taki Onqoy…………………………………………………………………..52 2.6 The Marginalization of the Andean Sorceror………………………………..56 2.7 The Andean-Catholic Interculture…………………………………………...62 2.8 Andean Utopias……………………………………………………………...71 x

3. The Long Nineteenth Century………………………………………………………76

3.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………….76 3.2 The Tensions of Postcolonial Nation-making……………………………….78 3.3 Prohibitions and Stigmatizing Discourses…………………………………...83 3.4 Travel Narratives…………………………………………………………….88 3.5 Costumbrista Visual Culture………………………………………………...96 3.6 The War of the Pacific……………………………………………………...107 3.7 The Staging of the Inca Past………………………………………………..111 3.8 La Patria Nueva…………………………………………………………….117 3.9 The Folklorization of Andean Performance………………………………..124

4. The Agony of José María Arguedas……………………………………………….129

4.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………129 4.2 (Auto)Biography and the Performance of Self……………………………..132 4.3 Creating the Authorial Persona……………………………………………..136 4.4 Ethnographic Self-Fashioning……………………………………………...143 4.5 Rivers of Passage…………………………………………………………...149 4.6 Andean Cosmopolitanism…………………………………………………..154 4.7 La Agonia de Rasu Niti…………………………………………………….160 4.8 El Zorro-Danzaq……………………………………………………………167 4.9 A Culture Hero of the New Peru…………………………………………...175

5. The Rise and Fall of a New National Popular……………………………………..177

5.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………...177 5.2 State Folklore and the Refashioning of the National-Popular……………...179 5.3 Maximo Damian y sus Danzantes de Tijeras……………………………….186 5.4 The Urban Andean Public Sphere………………………………………….189 5.5 Urban Communities of Practice……………………………………………196 5.6 The New Limeños………………………………………………………….201 5.7 Sasachakuy Tiempo………………………………………………………...208 5.8 The ADTMP………………………….…………………………………….213 5.9 Violence, Economic Collapse………………………………………………216 5.10 Conclusion…..…………………………………………………………….219

6. The Peformative Economy of a New Peru………………………………………...221

6.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………...221 6.2 The Hypermasculine Indigenous Warrior…………………………………..224 6.3 Local Development with Identity…………………………………………..228 xi

6.4 The Pedagogy of Cultural Identity…………………………………………233 6.5 Hyperreal Indigenous Identity……………………………………………...237 6.6 An Andean President for a New Peru…………………………..…………..243 6.7 The Nation as a Brand………………………….…………………………..248 6.8 El Gran Reto………………………………………………………………..253

7. The Double-Agency of Contemporary Scissors Dancers…………………………....266

7.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………...266 7.2 The Maximum Exponents of the Scissors Dance…………………………..269 7.3 Los Hermanos Chavez……………………………………………………...289 7.4 La Nueva Generación………………………………………………………298

8. Conclusion……………………..…………………………………………………..310

Endnotes………………………………………………………………………………..315

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………350

xii

List of Illustrations

Illustration

1.1 Map of Southern Peru…………………………………………………………….8

1.2 Paqcha Chapari at Rural Festival………………………………………………..10

1.3 Kusi Kusi Performing Pruebas de Valor……………………………………… 12

3.1 Painting by Paul Marcoy…………………………………………………………95

3.2 “Danza de los Chunchos” by Pancho Fierro……………………………………..100

3.3 “Danse des Ciseaux” by Pancho Fierro……………………………………….....102

3.4 Mate Burilado, Ayacucho, 1848……………………………………………...…103

3.5 Pilar Alberto in Chaupi, Puquio…………………………………………………105

3.6 Folklore Performance Group of Moises Vivanco……………………………..127

4.1 Máximo Dámian Huamaní at Arguedas‟s Funeral…………………………….174

5.1 Map of the Conos of Metropolitan Lima……………………………………...191

6.1 Advertisement for El Gran Reto………………………………………………254

xiii

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1. Statement of the Problem The state promotion agency PROMPERU recently distributed the sleek television advertisement, “Peru: Live the Legend,” to select international markets. The commercial presents an enticing iconography of Peru‟s impressive cultural and biological diversity.

PROMPERU reimagines the nation as a brand image packaged as commodified spectacle for transnational consumers. This brand depicts Peru as a mystical wonderland outside of history and devoid of conflict, erasing all signs of the colonial past. The only signs of a

Western presence are a couple of strategically placed tourists able to discover the mysterious landscape and culture of Peru as if for the first time (PROMPERU 2008).

Thus, “Peru: Live the Legend” re-stages the theatricality of the “scenario of discovery,” enacting the aura of the Other of Western modernity for globalization (Taylor 2003). The commercial draws heavily on the overdetermined imagery Orin Starn calls Andeanism,

“a way of seeing in which the Andean highlands appear as an alien fascinating land untouched by the West and modernity” (Starn 1999: 19). He claims that Andeanist ethnography has produced a “stock imagery” of the Andes that “evokes an island of otherness removed from the world” (Ibid.).

The third segment of “Peru: Live the Legend” features the virtuosic Andean ritual dance that is the subject of this dissertation, danza de las tijeras (scissors dance). We see a raindrop falling in slow motion cut into multiple fragments by a pair of steel scissors.

Three costumed male dancers appear to be suspended in mid-air, performing acrobatic pirouettes in unison through the rain. The narrator dramatically intones, “Where scissors- handed mortals dance for days on end.” The dancers seem almost inhuman, or perhaps superhuman. The cinematic spectacle transforms a “real” cultural practice into fantasy, giving the uninformed spectator a sense of the layers of mystique this performance genre has acquired in the Peruvian imagination. The advertisement captures something fundamental about the relationship between the particular cultural form I study and the broader transformations of the Peruvian imaginary over the past half century. It clearly has a global audience in mind. Nevertheless, it is within such transnational arenas that contemporary Andean subjects constitute themselves and are constituted as citizens in an age of neoliberal globalization.

This dissertation draws on sixteen months of fieldwork and archival research in

Peru to produce a historical ethnography of the scissors dance. After the interventions of

Peruvian intellectual José María Arguedas (1911-1969), the scissors dance increasingly became an icon of Andean identity and valued as cultural patrimony of the nation. Once repudiated by colonial and national elites precisely because it embodied the irrationality of indigenous ritual practices, this cultural form is now a celebrated emblem of Peru‟s cultural diversity and the perseverance of Andean spiritual values in the modern world. I examine the efforts of anthropologists, cultural entrepreneurs, cosmopolitan artists, and scissors dance performers themselves to stage the scissors dance as part of the emergent national imaginary of a “new Peru.” I use the term new Peru in order to gloss a flexible repertoire of utopian images and discourses that imagine the overcoming of colonial

2 values and structures of power and seek to construct a modern Peruvian nation rooted in an authentic Pre-Columbian past.

I argue that the new Peru emerged as a counter-hegemonic discourse that sought to fashion a new national-popular in opposition to the national project of dominant Creole elites. Over the course of the past few decades, a depoliticized vision of the new Peru has achieved a fragile hegemony in an exemplary case of what Charles Hale calls “neoliberal multiculturalism” (2002, 2006). The scissors dance has become one of the most visible icons of a performative economy that constitutes multicultural subjects as citizens through the elaboration of spectacles of cultural difference staged in both national and transnational arenas. This study asks what the staging of the dance as national and transnational spectacle does to and for formerly marginalized Andean subjects. And what forms of cosmopolitan indigenous citizenship do highly-skilled Andean performers engender, enact, and model as they inhabit the role of the “hyperreal” Andean Other on the global stage? (Ramos 1998). I argue that indigenous cultural performances, such as the scissors dance, often gain visibility as they become commodities in a world market that increasingly values cultural difference. Yet, these new articulations of cosmopolitan indigenous citizenship are circumscribed by neoliberal multiculturalism at the same time that they have enabled the performers to become cultural agents in the remaking of

Peruvian identity through a performative economy of spectacle.

1.2. Conquest as Ritualized Social Drama

In 1925, the pioneering Peruvian socialist thinker José Carlos Mariátegui theorized one of the earliest evocations of a “New Peru.” He wrote:

The dualism of the Peruvian soul and of Peruvian history is defined by a conflict between the historical form elaborated on the coast, and the indigenous sentiment that survives in the sierra, deeply rooted in nature. Peru today is a coastal formation. The new Peru has sedimented underground. Neither the Spaniard nor the Creole knew how to nor was able to conquer the Andes. In the Andes, the Spaniard never was more than a pioneer or a missionary. The Creole is what the Andes extinguish in the Conquistador, creating little by little an Indian. This is the drama of contemporary Peru. A drama that was born [. . .] of the sin of the Conquest. From the original sin that was transmitted to the Republic, a Peruvian society and economy was constructed without and against the Indian. (Mariátegui 1972, cited and translated by Thurner 1997: 204-205)

The founder of the Peruvian Socialist Party uses the theatrical metaphor of a national drama to rehearse a familiar trope of Peruvian historiography. He represents Peru as tragically divided in an epic struggle between the colonizing coastal region and the colonized indigenous highlands. The dominant coastal Creoles perform their power by excluding Andeans from participating in the political, economic, and social life of the nation. He locates the origins of this ethnic and geographic antagonism in the events of the Conquest as Spanish colonial power transmitted total authority directly to the coastal

Creole aristocracy. (Cadena 2000, Baptista 2006, Kokotovic 2006). Yet, Mariátegui also evokes the utopian possibility of a more just and perhaps authentically Peruvian national community. The “new Peru” called for by Mariátegui was a socialist utopia founded on the communitarian values of Tawantinsuyo, the Quechua name for the Inca Empire.

Mariátegui was perhaps the most eloquent figure of the early twentieth century intellectual movement known as indigenismo. As the eminent historian Jorge Basadre famously declared, “the most important event in twentieth century Peruvian culture is the increasing awareness among writers, artists, men of science, and politicians of the existence of the Indian‟ (Basadre 1978: 326). Indigenismo was an ideologically diverse

4 artistic, political, and scientific movement, “whose stated goals were to defend the Indian masses and to construct regionalist and nationalist cultures on the basis of what mestizo, and largely urban intellectuals understood to be autochthonous or indigenous cultural forms” (Poole 1997: 182). These non-indigenous intellectuals constituted Andean culture as a legitimate object of knowledge and nationalist representation, articulating

“Andeanism” as an emergent “structure of feeling” (Williams 1977). Only rarely did indigenous Andean subjects play more than a highly subordinate role in these alternative nationalist regimes of representation. Nevertheless, indigenismo began to erode the dominance of the Creole nationalist project, which conceived of the nation according to the logic that Angel Rama called The Lettered City (1984). Rama‟s well-known text traces a genealogy of the role of intellectuals and writing in the construction of Latin

American nations. He argues that since the colonial period, writing has been an instrument of power in which lettered intellectuals have assumed the power to represent the internal “other,” who by definition does not possess the ability to read and write.

The Conquest was a recurring trope in indigenista discourse, perceived as a founding event that fractured the potential national community (Baptista 2006, Kokotovic

2006). More recent historical studies have significantly nuanced the narrative of unbroken transmission from Spanish imperial regime to Creole republic. They argue that the Creole nationalist project was not a colonial holdover, but rather a phenomenon of the second half of the nineteenth century when the combination of new developments in global capitalism and scientific racism enabled the expulsion of the “Indian” from historical time (Kristal 1987, Mallon 1996, Mendez 1996, Poole 1997, Thurner 1997,

Starn 1999, Larson 2004, Earle 2007). Rather than historicizing the role of so-called

Indians in the formation and development of the nation, the indigenistas uncritically accepted an ahistorical imagery of the Andes and its native inhabitants from earlier

Creole nation-builders. Instead of questioning oppositions between Andean indigeneity and the modern nation they merely reversed the binary, imbuing the figure of the

“Indian” with a positive value as the embodiment of authentic cultural resistance (Starn

1992, 1999, Thurner 1997, Abercrombie 1998). The Conquest took on an aura that approximated Victor Turner‟s notion of “social drama,” constituting a “breach” in the primordial national community that required “redressive action” before the potential for a final “integration,” that would heal the fragmented national body (Turner 1974).

At the very moment that a less threatening articulation of the indigenista imaginary, mediated by scientific anthropology, began to creep into the public sphere, historian Jorge Basadre made the famous distinction between “Official Peru,” and “Deep

Peru” (Basadre 1947, Mayer 1992). In its original formulation, “Deep Peru” had little to do with indigeneity, but rather theorized an irreparable division between the state and national society made up of “the profound spirit of the people” (Mayer 1992: 192).

Nevertheless, as Andeanism gradually acquired a hegemonic status as a nationalist discourse, Basadre‟s concepts were reinterpreted as “the historical roots of Indianness as a component of Peru‟s nationhood” (Ibid.). The concept of “Deep Peru” now embodies an “authentic” nation buried underneath centuries of colonial and postcolonial imposition, and a repertoire enacted by repeated acts of self-discovery. Particularly under its recent reinvention through “neoliberal multiculturalism,” the new Peru incorporates

6 both Basadre‟s original concept of a cleavage between nation and state, and the value of authenticity bestowed upon the subject-position of the indigenous Andean Other. The new Peru comes into being through a repetitively re-enacted scenario of discovery that stages the speech-acts of multicultural recognition.

In earlier articulations of an indigenista imaginary, indigenous subjects rarely participated in regimes of representation that included them as their object. However, with the dramatic expansion of global capitalism over the past few decades, these representations became available as roles to inhabit in the construction of modern indigenous selves. As Starn asserts, the stock imagery of Andeanism has “conditioned not only how the world perceives the Andes but also how Andean people understand themselves” (Starn 1992: 175). This study traces a genealogy of “the subtle channels of representation and self-imagination that have shaped the identities of Andean subjects both prior to and during the era of neoliberal multiculturalism (Ibid.). I show that that the scissors dance has become an emblematic model for the process by which Andean subjects repeatedly discover the "other" within themselves, constructing their newfound status and visibility as Peruvian citizens in a rapidly globalizing world.

1.3. Constructing an Andean Icon: Ethnographic Narratives on the Scissors Dance

Illustration 1.1

Map of Southern Peru

Courtesy of http://www.Go2Peru.com

According to various ethnographic studies, the scissors dance is a masculine

Andean ritual dance that originated in Pre-Columbian rituals of the Chanka region in the south-central Andes of Peru (Vivanco 1976, Barrionuevo 1988, Nuñez Rebaza 1990,

Bigenho 1991, Yaranga 1997, Millones and Tomoeda 1998, Cavero Carrasco 1998, 2001,

Casco Arias and Rojas de la Cruz 1999, Arce Sotelo 2006). This region encompasses the present-day departments of Ayacucho, Huancavelica, and Apurimac, one of the poorest and most marginalized areas of Peru. The region acquired recognition as a culture-area in 1958 in a now classic study by José María Arguedas, who included the scissors dance as one of the signs of a supposed cultural unity (Arguedas 1975 [1958]). Andeanist ethnographers have viewed this otherwise stigmatized culture-area as an important reserve of authenticity. Moreover, the region has acquired a unique stature as the home of the canonized forbearers of Andeanism, the Andean-identified intellectuals Felipe

Guaman Poma de Ayala (1535-1616) and the aforementioned Arguedas (1911-1969).

Both of these figures are associated with the present-day province of Lucanas in the southern region of Ayacucho. Primarily due to the interventions of Arguedas, the scissors dance style from this particular region is largely perceived as the most indigenous variant of the dance, emblematic of the authenticity of the genre as a whole.

More recently, this region was at the center of the horrific internal war waged between

Shining Path insurgents and the military between 1980 and 1992. In the aftermath of the conflict, state and civilian reconstruction and development projects valued the scissors dance as the most recognizable symbol of a revived Chanka identity in order to promote self-esteem and healing amongst its victimized residents (PROANDE 2000).

Illustration 1.2

Scissors Dancer Paqcha Chapari Performing at Festival of Water in Cabana Sur, Lucanas

Photo by Author

The scissors dance gets its name from the two independent steel blades the dancers hold in their right hands in the style of scissors. These “scissors” act as percussion instruments that mark the rhythm of the dance with a distinct metallic sound. In accordance with

Andean conceptions of the complementarity of gender roles, the dancers refer to the smaller blade as female and the larger as male, creating a harmonic complementarity between higher and lower pitched sounds produced by the female and male blades

10 respectively. A musical ensemble of harp and violin accompany each individual dancer.

Colonial priests introduced these instruments into the Andes as part of their evangelizing efforts. Since the nineteenth century, harp and violin is paired exclusively in indigenous communities, while the more sensual guitar is associated with mestizo musical forms

(Romero 2000, Tucker 2005). The scissors dancers, as well as their musicians, are paid specialists contracted by the cargontes (sponsors) of local festivities related to the agricultural cycle and the Catholic liturgical calendar. In Huancavelica, these dancers perform mostly during the Christmas season. In southern Ayacucho they most often perform during the Festival of Water, the ritual cleaning of agricultural aqueducts performed since Pre-Columbian times, but now associated with a specific patron saint.

These festivals typically last five to seven days, during which the dancers perform with very little rest. They compete against each other in one-on-one battles known as atipanakuy, where they try to outdo their opponents through the elaboration of a rigorous and complex musical and choreographic repertoire of various tonadas (melodic sequences). These sequences imitate animals, scenes from local life, comic outsider figures, and the death and resurrection of a legendary scissors dancer from the past. At the end of the complete choreographic sequence, the atipanakuy terminates in pruebas de valor (tests of valor), where the dancers demonstrate their extraordinary abilities to withstand pain as they perform grotesque stunts. They pierce their skin with cactus, knives, and broken glass, swallow swords, and fire, and eat frogs, and snakes.

Illustration 1.3

Scissors Dancer Kusi Kusi performing Pruebas de Valor

Photo by Author

Many commentators have noted that the costumes of the scissors dancers have a medieval Spanish quality similar to the trajes de luces worn by bullfighters.

Ethnographers typically note such evidence of colonial hybridity before glossing over it through assertions of a pre-colonial essence, based on a supposed inheritance from shamanic ritual practices. A corpus of myths, even today, claims that the scissors dancers enter into pacts with the devil in order to gain mysterious powers and demonstrate

12 superhuman physical abilities. The older generations also speak about an intimate relationship between the dancer and the sirena, a beautiful blonde woman, representing the spirit of a mountain waterfall, who enchants male onlookers with her beautiful singing. According to ethnographic narratives, these hybrid figures, related to Andean interpretations of the Catholic notion of hell, are nothing more than Europeanized masks for a Pre-Columbian Andean spiritual pantheon. They reiterate the discourse Thomas

Abercrombie calls “the idols behind altars resistance paradigm” (Abercrombie 1998).

The evidence that legitimates this narrative is the ritual offerings the scissors dancers make to the apu-wamanis, the deified spirits of the mountains that protect each highland community. Ethnographers conflate these mountain-gods with the Pre-Columbian concept of the huacas; sacred shrines that recent evidence suggests are not embodiments of the landscape itself but rather the burial sites of founding ancestors (Gose 2008).

The conflation of the huacas with the mountain-gods has enabled the now conventional narrative, popular since the 1990s, which proposes that the scissors dancer represents a direct inheritance from the sixteenth century native spiritualist revival movement known as the Taki Onqoy (dancing sickness). During the Taki Onqoy, already converted indigenous Andeans in Ayacucho rebelled against Catholicism in a large-scale revival of the cult of the huacas. Specific oracular mediums possessed by the huacas performed ecstatic dances and preached the expulsion of all Spanish and Catholic objects and practices from the Andean community. The Taki Onqoy has since become emblematic of Andean cultural resistance within a postcolonial intellectual framework

(Mumford 1998). The genealogical link between the sixteenth century nativist movement

13 and the contemporary scissors dance, tentatively theorized by anthropologists in the

1990s, has since become an unquestioned myth of origins in both academic and popular narratives (Millones 2007). By the turn of the millennium, the scissors dance had consolidated its status as a global icon of Andean cultural resistance that embodied authentic Andean spirituality. As one article claims, it has travelled, “from the communities of the Chanka nation to the largest cities in Peru and the world [. . .] to become little by little for almost half a century, one of the most distinguished and visible symbols of Andean art and culture” (Tincopa Calle 2008: 48).

1.4. Ritual/Spectacle

As anthropologists, cultural entrepreneurs, artists, and urbanizing performers have gradually transferred the scissors dance from rural festivities to more cosmopolitan spaces and cultural productions, these same agents have expressed a certain uneasiness about the relationship between ritual and spectacle. Ethnographic narratives in particular construct a reified dichotomy between an originary ritual and various forms of theatrical presentation and spectacle that contaminate the dance‟s authenticity. Consider for instance, the opening statement of an article by Alejandro Vivanco: “Since the 1950s the scissors dance has been presented with certain frequency in theatres in Lima. It is considered by people of scant information as a simple manifestation of grotesque movements, tremendous acrobatic abilities, that seems to have no other function but the entertainment of the spectator” (1976: 39). Citing respected anthropological authorities on shamanism and magico-religious practices, such as Mircea Eliade and Luís Valcárcel, he argues that the dance contains elements of ancient ritual origins. Vivanco promises

14 that in the remainder of the article he will “show the intimate relationship that exists between the scissors dance and the magico-religious conception of the world of ancient

Peruvians” (Ibid.). Thus, he constructs his ethnographic authority through his supposed direct knowledge of the “real” thing in contrast to the trivial versions staged in urban popular entertainments. Yet, he never goes so far to suggest that these theatrical spectacles present a legitimate threat to the survival of the authentic original.

As Ayacucho and Huancavelica were under siege by horrific political violence during the 1980s, ethnographic writers began to express more urgency about the need to preserve the authenticity of the original ritual in opposition to potentially contaminating commercial spectacles. The work of Lucy Nuñez Rebaza chronicles the transformations of the practice during this very trying historical moment (1985, 1990). The extensive direct quotes of her informants, which she strategically places in her text, express the anxieties, conflicts, and celebrations of newfound triumphs in the public sphere experienced by the performers in a moment of intense urbanization, and forced relocation due to the internal conflict. Yet, she reproduced a reified binary between ritual and spectacle. Arguing that the reproductions of rural festivals in Lima allowed for a semblance of authentic transmission of the dance‟s ritual significance, she depicts staged presentations in live and mediated entertainments as an imposition of the values of the dominant culture upon Andean mental structures. Although she celebrates the dance as a successful form of cultural resistance, apparently urbanization and global capitalism present a greater threat to authenticity than centuries of colonial domination. The over- arching framework of Nuñez Rebaza‟s study constructs the anthropologist rather than the

15 practitioners as the ultimate arbiter of authenticity and positions her as a “good” outsider solely concerned with the protection of traditional Andean culture (Starn 1992, Buckland

1999). Thus, she denies the agency of the performers, depicting them as the exploited victims of Westernized capitalism and individualism. However, this rigid dichotomy is difficult for her to sustain. For as she admits, constant traffic flows between urban and rural festival performances and various forms of commercial spectacle. Furthermore, her informants articulate various pragmatic positions that view these different performance forms not as oppositional but as achieving different sets of aims.

After the conflict subsided in the mid-1990s, ethnographers returned to the highlands to observe the scissors dance in its so-called “natural” performance context

(Uriarte 1998). They tended to portray these events in an ahistorical manner, as if the supposed authentic integrity were hardly affected by rapid urbanization and the ruptures of political violence. Yet, nearly all the performers continued to reside in Lima, and the dance had become, for the most part, an urban popular performance that tended to flow from the capital city back to the provinces (Raymundo 2008, Zevallos Aguilar 2009).

Nevertheless, most of these studies insist on representing the dance as an essentially rural form of ritual performance. After focusing his entire article on an analysis of a particular highland festivity, Carlos Prudencia Mendoza concludes by lamenting that in Lima the dance is often presented “in completely inadequate environments (stadiums, cinemas, theatres, radios, music halls). The problem is that presented in this grotesque manner, the dance loses its virtues, degenerates, and degrades its authenticity” (1993: 18). The author depicts the dance‟s virtue and authenticity as if they existed prior to its distinct

16 performative iterations, constructing the situation where any historical change could be considered contamination or degradation.

Even nuanced examinations fall into the trap of essentialization. Rodrigo

Montoya uncritically affirms the nostalgic perspective of the older practitioners who claim that young urban performers reproduce “pure acrobatics” with “little soul” (2004:

70). Yet, he also acknowledges that cosmopolitan forms of dissemination have earned recognition for Andean culture in “the late revenge of a strong culture that has resisted centuries of anti-indigenous colonial politics from 1532 until the moment I write this chapter” (Ibid.). Similarly, ethnomusicologist Manuel Arce Sotelo suggests that the visibility the scissors dance has acquired in broader public spheres has contributed to a revival of Andean ethnic identity amongst urban young people of provincial heritage

(2006: 21). Nevertheless, he asserts that in the process the dance “runs the risk of passing from a ritual and regional musical form to a national manifestation linked to commercial spectacle” (Ibid.). He never explains his presupposition that assumes that these transformations in themselves constitute a “risk.” Ironically, a journalist highly involved in the publicity of specific contemporary scissors dancers goes the furthest in reclaiming urban reiterations as a “new style” of the scissors dance produced by specific historical transformations in the experiences, identities, and lifestyles of new generations of

Andean youth formed in urban space. Jesús Raymundo contends that this new urban style “could represent a risk to its essence, but at the same time an opportunity to transcend” (2008: 2). While he portrays these historical transformations as more positive

17 than most commentators, he retains the notion that the dance possesses a prior authentic essence threatened by urbanization.

This assumed dichotomy between ritual and spectacle, underwritten by an essentialist framework, parallels long-standing anti-theatrical discourses central to

Western thought (Barish 1981, Puchner 2002, Postlewait and Davis 2003). Postlewait and Davis suggest:

Since antiquity, the critique of theatre has focused on both its tendency to excess and its emptiness, its surplus as well as its lack. In this critique, performance is characterized as illusory, deceptive, exaggerated, artificial, or affected. The theatre, often associated with the acts and practices of role-playing, illusion, false appearance, masquerade, façade, and impersonation, has been condemned by various commentators, from Plato to Allan Bloom. This negative attitude, whether engaged or merely dismissive, has often placed theatre and performers at the margin of Western society. (2003: 5)

While conventional wisdom has tended to perceive all forms of mimetic representation as suspect, the theatre has a special place in the critique of representation because its expressive medium is the human body. The actor‟s body possesses an ontological reality at the same time as it becomes a vehicle for semiosis, potentially confusing distinctions between truth and illusion, as well as appearance and essence. In conventional ethnographic narratives, the classification of the scissors dance as ritual redeems it from theatrical suspicion. Yet, these assertions of ritual authenticity bestow the form with symbolic capital and exhibition value enabling the very theatrical representations that they condemn in a mournful fashion.

1.5. Between Theatre and Anthropology and Back

As I have suggested, discourses of ritual origins fuel the decline into spectacle that ethnographic authors critique. This narrative of corruption has deep roots in a modernist form of the antitheatrical prejudice, constitutive of the anthropological notion of ritual itself. As Catherine Bell argues:

The study of ritual has gone through several historical perspectives that, in hindsight, seem to have had less to do with how people ritualize and more with how Western culture has sorted out relationships between science and religion on the one hand, and relationships between more technologically developed cultures and more localized tribal cultures, on the other. (Bell 1997: 253)

A series of ongoing encounters between anthropology and theatre going back to the nineteenth century have produced what Bell calls the “reification” and “romance” of ritual in the twentieth century (Ibid). Theatre historian Julie Stone Peters has traced the relationship between theatre and anthropology in nineteenth and twentieth century ethnography and travel literature (2009). She suggests, “the twentieth century ritualist idea is merely a late revision of a set of much older ideas about primitive performance produced by the conjunction of modern (imperial, commercial, anthropological) travel and the Enlightenment human sciences” (Ibid: 69). Through a series of shifts in classics, aesthetics, and nascent ethnography, nineteenth century scholars gradually reconceptualized the pantomimes and mimetic dances of so-called primitive cultures as rudimentary forms of drama. In this manner, they paved the way for the Cambridge

School who defined ritual through, and later against, the theatre (Ibid.).

By using the fashionable “comparative method,” the Cambridge School searched for the origins of Greek drama in “primitive” ritual dances and purification rites.

According to these scholars, drama and ritual shared the quality of embodied mimesis.

However, Jane Ellen Harrison in particular, argues that “ritual mimesis seemed to transcend mimesis” since it contained “an element of real embodiment” (Stone Peters

2009: 80). She suggested that ritual was less mimesis than methexis, connoting “not imitation but participation in an undivided sacred sphere” (ibid.). The Cambridge School began to depict the transformation of ritual to theatre through a narrative of contamination and decline that became an allegory for the alienating aspects of Western modernity and capitalism. This narrative resonated with romantic accounts of disappearing “folk” cultures that circulated in Europe after the Industrial Revolution

(Burke 1978, Rowe and Schelling 1991, Bendix 2002). Early anthropologists fashioned ritual as a totemic object of study. From its very beginnings, the discipline of anthropology, “came, in a sense, to take seriously the trope of the performing savage,” bestowed with the positive value of authenticity (Stone Peters 2009: 81).

By the early decades of the twentieth century, anthropologists began to view not only theatre in terms of ritual but also ritual in terms of theatre, “reading” ritual enactments as deriving from a pre-existing script (Ibid.). This textual analogy became one of the principal assumptions behind functionalism and later structuralism within anthropology (Cánepa Koch 2002: 23). Until recently, conventional anthropological practice decontextualized ritual, perceived as “fixed by immutable repetition which only allowed limited variation” and therefore “the text in which a culture‟s historical memory was written” (Stone Peters 2009: 82). This abstraction reduces the significance of cultural forms to a singular essence, discounting the agency of both performers and

20 spectators who may refashion or reinterpret ritual enactments in quite different ways

(Cánepa Koch 2002, 2006). In the case of the scissors dance, the reification of an authentic ritual essence has constructed the dance as a decontextualized commodity that circulates in ethnographic texts as well as theatrical spectacles. By concealing their participation in the logic of commodified spectacle, ethnographic authors create a double- bind. They construct the desired authentic original that commodified forms of reproduction can never truly embody. As they protest against the degradation of the authentic original, they merely intensify the circulation of surrogate commodities.

1.6 Performativity/Theatricality

I suggest that in order to get beyond this double-bind the adoption of a

Performance Studies perspective is necessary. Performance Studies provides an avenue to contest objectified notions of culture as an expression of a prior and stable essence

(Cánepa Koch 2002). However, as a new disciplinary formation, Performance Studies has failed to self-reflexively critique the reification of ritual and the residual antitheatrical prejudice central to its own formation. In the 1960s and 1970s, established humanistic disciplines began to take the notion of performance seriously as a challenge to the dominance of the text. In large part conditioned by the thriving countercultures of the time, this shift consisted of the articulation of more dynamic models that focused on the agency of human performers. Folklorists focused less on the collection of oral “texts” and began to pay attention to the contingencies of storytelling and folk dances as performative acts (Bauman 1977). Linguists focused less on language as an abstract system and more on the use of language as social practice. Sociologists, such as Erving

Goffman, began to examine social interactions as the performance of a series of theatrical roles (Carlson 1996). Within this broader “performance turn,” anthropologist Victor

Turner and experimental theatre director Richard Schechner revived the stalled conversation between anthropology and theatre, laying the groundwork for the formation of the new discipline of Performance Studies.

Like the Cambridge School, Turner and Schechner found redemption from the alienating aspects of modern society in ritual. Yet, they located ritual‟s redemptive qualities in its capacity for transformation rather its return to primordial origins. The theoretical basis for this revision is founded in Turner‟s extension of Van Gennep‟s notion of “liminality,” as central to the efficacy of rites of passage. Turner argued that the “liminal phase” of ritual is a state of being “betwixt and between” conventional social categories, creating collective and individual feelings of “comunitas,” instrumental to communal solidarity and bonding (Turner 1977, 1982). He further suggested that in technologically complex societies, the experience of liminality has retained its affective power within specific leisure activities, such as religion, sports, and the arts, activities he referred to as “liminoid.” Turner claimed that while liminality within traditional rituals often reconfirms social hierarchies, liminoid activities produced the possibility of transgressing restrictive social norms, providing the basis for social change (Ibid.).

In the 1970s, Turner encountered a like-minded interlocutor in Richard

Schechner. In collaboration with Turner, Schechner formulated “liminality” as the conceptual paradigm for his general theory of performance. He advocated for a “broad- spectrum approach” to investigate the commonalities between theatre, dance, ritual,

22 spectacle, festival, games, sports, and the social roles of everyday life. In placing all of these activities into the same framework, Schechner theorized the concept of “restored behavior,” defining performance as a series of behaviors based on prior conventions or models, but “always subject to revision” (Schechner 2003: 36). From this theoretical basis, Schechner established the model for the emerging discipline of Performance

Studies. He suggested that cultural performances were not only the central object of study for the new discipline but also a lens through which the researcher can analyze the performative dimensions of all social behaviors (Schechner 2006).

The notion of “restored behavior” has important implications for my examination of the scissors dance. Instead of locating its cultural significance in an unchanging essence, a Performance Studies perspective allows us to reconceive of this and other ritual genres as performative practices. Like all performative practices, rituals enact prior conventions through repetition. Yet, each individual re-iteration is never quite the same as the others. Thus, on one level, by using the term “staging” in the title of this study, I recognize that ritual dances “are not timeless relics of prehistoric performances in cultural deep freeze” (Conquergood 2007: 454). The heightened repetition of rituals makes them appear to approach the fixed nature of the archive, yet their status as embodied practices causes them to seem uniquely vulnerable to contamination and even death. However, from a Performance Studies perspective, continuity and change are always intertwined within the same enactment. Moreover, this framework allows for the agency of individual and collective performers, evoking “the constitutive power of cultural expression that is precisely what grants it political efficacy” (Cánepa Koch 2010). I seek

23 to examine the agency of the performers of the scissors dance instead of reproducing the fetishized role of the ethnographer as “the keeper of the truth” (Buckland 1999).

Yet, I do not want to suggest that interpretive power of the scissors dance belongs to the performers alone. I argue that ethnographic narratives, including my own, as well as other textual and visual representations of the scissors dance can also be viewed as performative iterations, implying their “capacity to constitute and transform what [they] enunciate and express” (Cánepa Koch 2010). This study seeks to examine the ways in that the scissors dancer operates as a stock figure who moves between embodied, textual, and visual cultural productions where meaning flows in multiple directions. The historical layering of these distinct representations has imbued the figure of the scissors dancer with a significant amount of what Stephen Greenblatt calls “mimetic capital”:

A set of images, and image-making devices that are accumulated, „banked,‟ as it were in books archives, collections, cultural storehouses, until such time as these representations are called on to create other representations. The images that matter, that merit the term capital, are those that achieve reproductive power, maintaining and multiplying themselves by transforming cultural contacts into novel and often unexpected forms. (Greenblatt 1991: 6)

This mimetic capital has accumulated through an ongoing series of intercultural encounters and scenarios of discovery that have positioned and repositioned “Western” and “Andean” subject positions. I argue that through the accumulation of representations, and the interaction between them, the scissors dance has gradually acquired a mystical aura as an embodiment of the conventional ethnographic “trope of the performing other” (Conquergood 2007: 501, Stone Peters 2009).

In one of the founding concepts of Performance Studies, Richard Schechner offers a slightly more complex version of the ritual/spectacle dichotomy through what he calls

“the efficacy and entertainment braid” (Schechner 2003, 2006). He argues that all performances combine elements of efficacy, promising “results,” whereas entertainment offers only “fun.” According to Schechner, these categories operate as poles on a continuum rather than a strict dichotomy. While he does not stigmatize entertainment entirely, Schechner clearly privileges efficacy, replacing the binary with a categorical opposition. Through its emphasis on “efficacy,” Performance Studies has sought to overcome the suspect nature of theatre as it is associated with entertainment and spectacle. The new discipline offered the possibility that theatre was not inherently a fallen form, but could redeem itself as performance by drawing on the supposedly “real” efficacy of ritual. In order to construct a space to theorize and create efficacious and transgressive performance practices ritual became the redemptive conceptual paradigm within Performance Studies, further stigmatizing “theatre” perceived as mere impotent and inconsequential entertainment (Bottoms 2002). Despite the fact that its roots were largely in theatrical practice and scholarship, Performance Studies increasingly constructed theatre and theatre studies as its Other.

Performance Studies claims to study the universal phenomenon of performance, but in actuality privileges a rather limited number of performances it considers liminal and transgressive. Jon Mckenzie argues that the discipline‟s privileging of transgressive liminality and efficacy has constructed a “liminal-norm” that “operates in any situation where the value of liminal transgression or resistance itself becomes normative”

(Mckenzie 2001: 50). He further claims, “By focusing on liminal activities and transgressive and resistant practices, or, more generally, upon socially efficacious performance, we have overlooked the importance of other performances” (52). Mckenzie formulates a broader genealogy of the concept of performance that links cultural performance to notions of efficiency in organizational management, and effectiveness in the production of new technologies (Ibid.). Drawing on Foucault and Lyotard, he argues that performance constitutes “a new onto-historical formation of power and knowledge: a fundamental change in our understanding of knowledge, agency, and history” (113). In a similar vein, George Yudice (2002) posits performativity as a “new episteme” accounting for the various crises we normally refer to as postmodernity with their foundations in the recognition of “the constitutive force of signs” in a globalizing world. He argues neoliberal globalization has redefined the notion of culture as a resource, mobilizing difference for the purposes of economic development and the management of subjects, including the self. In a critique of Judith Butler (199), Yudice suggests that “the failure to repeat normative behavior as the constitutive force of subversive performativity may actually enhance the system rather than threaten it” (Ibid. 33). As Yudice and Mckenzie suggest, late capitalism has produced a “cosmopolitan alterity industry” that commodifies performances of cultural resistance and difference for a global marketplace dominated by spectacle (Huggans 2001: 30). According to Baz Kershaw, the triumph of neoliberalism at the end of Cold War has created “performative societies” in which spectacles of difference constitute the very notion of what it means to be human (1999, 2007).

I argue that it is imperative for theatre and performance studies to pay more attention to how cultural performances, such as the scissors dance, circulate as commodified signs in a global cultural economy that increasingly values difference. This new role would entail a shift away from the celebration of the “efficacy” of transgressive performance and the condemnation of normative entertainments, and towards the politics of culture. As David Savran argues:

though it arose in part as a reaction against theater history, performance studies similarly and too frequently isolates its objects of study without considering how radically embedded they are in historical and social process. Much work in both performance studies and theatre studies has a curiously impoverished notion of the social. (2001: 93)

Savran recommends that theatre and performance studies adopt Raymond Williams‟s classic definition of cultural studies as “a historical sociology of culture” implying engagement with fields of cultural production, and forms of capital (2001, 2009).1

The notion of “staging” I employ in this study goes beyond the conceptualization of the scissors dance as a performative practice in the sense of “restored behavior.” I invoke the distinct yet related dimension of theatricality. As Postlewait and Davis note,

“the idea of theatricality is quite evocative in its descriptive power yet often open-ended and even contradictory in its associative implications” (2003: 4). Nevertheless, theatricality, as I use it, is quite specific in denoting the double-identity of the theatrical performer who enacts an embodied mimesis as well as the complex interrelationships of identification and erotic desire created between the presence of the virtuosic actor and the spectators. These aspects of theatricality contribute to the suspicions expressed by the anti-theatrical prejudice, particularly in its modernist iterations. Consider for instance,

27 the critiques of mass culture elaborated by the Frankfurt School that see the modern actor as the root of a problematic relationship between theatrical spectacle and its audience rooted in its links to ritual (Benjamin 2008: 24-27, Puchner 2002: 5).. This apparent common sense betrays “ritual‟s identity as a back formation of the rise of the mass media

(with its overdose of theatricality) and generally, of the hyperreal and hypermaterialist modern” (Stone Peters 2009: 67). Both theatre studies and performance studies have reimagined themselves through innovative and interdisciplinary scholarship. Much of the best work in both theatre studies and performance studies now orients itself toward a critical historiography of “the global mass culture entertainment industry,” which includes the most highbrow theatre and transgressive performance art (Stone Peters

2009). Rather than seeing entertainment as the opposite of efficacy, we can focus on how all performances are efficacious as sites of negotiation between different forms of value and agency, as well as the constitution of identity within global modernity.

1.7. Towards a Critical Genealogy of The Society of Spectacle

Already in 1967, Guy Debord argued that the (post)modern world, “presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation” (Debord 1994: 1). Like a number of postmodern theorists after him, the founder of the Situationist International positioned postmodernity as a crisis of both representation and authentic experience. Central to this narrative of decline is the construction of a prior epoch in which experience was still unmediated, not yet colonized by signification. In other words, the real was not yet the hyperreal, and images still represented objects and products, before the age of simulation and simulacra, when the

28 image has become the original for which the product or practice stands (Baudrillard 1984,

Zizek 1991). However, I contend that this more authentic period is not outside of The

Society of Spectacle but constitutive of its historical formation.

Historians, anthropologists, and folklorists have realized for decades that the longing for authenticity is fundamental to the experience of modernity (Hobsbawm

Ranger 1983, Handler 1988, Kirshenblatt Gimblett 1998, Bendix 1997). In a moment of scholarly reflexivity, interdisciplinary studies have resulted in a number of useful concepts in relation to the modernist longing for authenticity. From history, Hobsbawm and Ranger famously argued that “tradition” is an invented construct useful for nation- building and the constitution of modern identities (1983). Benedict Anderson suggested that the nation is an “imagined community” articulated through the rituals and symbols of print capitalism that bind people with no face-to-face contact together as part of the same community (1991). From anthropology, Trouillot argues that the “savage” is a “slot” that the bodies of the other willfully or unwillfully inhabit (1994). From Folklore Studies,

Kirshenblatt Gimblett has characterized the notion of heritage as “a second life” and “a value-added industry” circulating in a national or global marketplace (1998). Other folklorists have elaborated on this process by conceptualizing “folklorization,” in which cultural practices and people classified as “folk” have acquired value as reserves of authenticity, enabling marginalized groups to represent themselves strategically in broader public spheres (Rowe and Schelling 1991, Guss 2000, Mendoza 2000, 2007,

Borland 2006). These studies suggest that all evocations of authenticity contain a

29 paradoxical theatricality that is not only constructed and staged, but also constitutive of real effects and affective identifications in the modern world.2

Thus, I argue that the notion of authenticity enacts a double-performative, “an illocution that effaces itself as a rhetorical act” (Shepard and Wallis 2003: 106). As

Jonathan Culler argues:

To be truly satisfying the sight needs to be certified, marked as authentic. [. . .] The paradox, the dilemma of authenticity is that to be experienced as authentic it must be marked as authentic, but when it is marked as authentic it is mediated, a sign of itself, and hence lacks the authenticity of what is truly unspoiled, untouched by mediating cultural codes. (Culler 1988: 164)

The desire for authenticity creates demand for what Joseph Roach calls “synthetic experience,” defined by “the human need to not only experience life directly but also vicariously” (Roach 2007: 24). The marking of a particular site or cultural practice as authentic is the first stage in the process of commodification, which leads to a renewal of the desire for authenticity. During the era of late capitalism, “tradition,” “heritage,”

“folklore,” as the most common purveyors of authenticity, are no longer mediated by the nation-state but increasingly circulate as commodified products in the global mass culture entertainment industry. Historicizing these processes provides an avenue for reconceptualizing the mutually constitutive relationships between modernity and postmodernity, classic capitalism and late capitalism, and finally nationalism and postnationalism, not as ruptures but gradual and uneven processes that produce and are produced by the reconfiguration of global capitalism.

Despite his nostalgic and apocalyptic perspective, Debord offers a basic suggestion for a methodological framework, perhaps unwittingly, for the historicization

30 of the society of spectacle through his very definition of spectacle. He argues, “spectacle is not a collection of images [. . .] rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (1994: 4). Thus, the task for the research is to examine the various social relationships produced through the elaboration of spectacle. Theatre scholar Suk-

Young Kim recently redefined performance as “a way of situating commodities in a particular moment of exchange,” suggesting that performance studies could focus its attention on analyzing the cultural biographies of specific performed commodities (Kim

2009, Appadurai 1986). My study performs a cultural biography of the scissors dance, which I view as a commodified stock character operating in a wide variety of forms of cultural production. However, neither the spectacular nature of the dance nor its commodification are entirely new. Even in rural festivities of the past, the dancers were contracted professionals who enacted a highly theatrical stock character for the entertainment of clearly defined spectators. I am less interested in delimiting a definitive before and after when authentic ritual gave way to commodified spectacle. Rather I trace the more subtle shifts in the cultural significance of this particular cultural form.

The aura of the scissors dance in both traditional and modern performance contexts, invites an imaginary identification between the performers and spectators, one of the hallmarks of theatrical spectacle. Debord suggests that spectacle is an “instrument of unification” (1994: 3):

The agent of the spectacle placed on stage as the star is the opposite of the individual, the enemy of the individual in himself as well as in others. Passing into the spectacle as a model for identification, the agent renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the course of things. (1994: 61)

Despite Debord‟s anti-theatricalism, he points to the power of spectacle to create models for identification. Joseph Roach refers to this unique power of performers as a particular form of surrogation created through what he calls “performed effigies- those fabricated by human bodies and the associations they evoke” that “provide communities with a method of perpetuating themselves through specially nominated mediums or surrogates: among them actors, dancers, priests, street maskers, statesman, celebrities, freaks, children, and especially by virtue of an intense but unsurprising paradox, corpses” (Roach

1996: 36). I suggest that the scissors dance has always been emblematic surrogate effigy for the specific Andean communities that practiced it. However, the relationship between the figure of the scissors dance and Andean notions of the self has transformed considerably in recent decades from an “auratic” and highly seductive embodiment of an infernal Other to a model for the articulation of the modern indigenous self within the performative economy of a new Peru.

This process began with “folklorization” as mid-twentieth century Andeanist ethnographers, particularly José María Arguedas, identified the dance as an emblem of authentic Andean identity. Christopher Balme notes, that “metonymic theatricality” arises in “the situation where performances become almost synonymous with indigenous people, where a particular dance or ritual comes to have the metonymic gesture of standing in for the whole of their respective cultures” (2009: 96-97). However, these reinventions of indigenous cultural practices did not occur through the impositions of outside intellectuals alone. Contemporary scissors dance performers have gradually incorporated themselves into Andeanist imaginaries through urban migration and staged

32 folklore presentations, and they now perceive the stock character they inhabit as an external embodiment of a core indigenous self. For this reason, I argue that the new Peru is not entirely instrumental to nationalist hegemony, or later the governmentality of neoliberal multiculturalism. Urbanizing migrants have fashioned an alternative public sphere that increasingly contests exclusive articulations of the nation by the Creole aristocracy. As the imaginary of a new Peru has shifted from an oppositional vision of the national popular to the “performative society” of neoliberal globalization, it has acquired a fragile hegemony that constitutes Andean subjects as citizens in ways they rarely experienced before (Kershaw 1999, 2007).

However, the neoliberal governmentality produced through multicultural spectacles of recognition regulates the experience and enactment of new forms of participation in the national community. The complexities and contradictions of this still emerging situation can best be characterized by the notion of “public culture,” as defined by Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge. They suggest that contemporary public culture is “a zone of debate” and a “conflicted cosmopolitanism” that positions formerly excluded actors as they become protagonists in the remaking of national formations

(1995: 5). Appadurai later added that this process is “neither purely emancipatory nor entirely disciplined but is a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern” (1996: 4). In the new Peru, a dynamic performative economy of spectacle increasingly defines the contours of an emerging public culture rooted in the fragile hegemony produced by neoliberal multiculturalism. This performative economy enables marginalized actors, such as

33 scissors dance practitioners, to participate as performers on national and international stages. Scissors dance performers constitute and model new forms of citizenship through their relationship to their audiences. These new cosmopolitan forms of indigenous identity and citizenship articulate themselves within hegemonic formations, but cannot be entirely contained or regulated by dominant elites, whether traditional or emergent.

1.9 Chapter Overview

In Chapter two, I critically examine conventional ethnographic narratives about the origins, meaning, and function of the scissors dance. These narratives construct the dance as emblematic of what Thomas Abercrombie calls “the idols behind altars resistance paradigm” (1998: 22). I contend that suggestions of Pre-Columbian shamanic origins misconstrue complex forms of surrogation by which Andean communities reconfigured their religious and performance cultures during the seventeenth century in the aftermath of forced resettlement into townships (reducción), and the repressive extirpations of idolatry. This form of popular performance emerged along with a dynamic eighteenth century Andean-Catholic interculture, whereby Andean communities refashioned European festive practices for their own cultural expressions. Far from passively retained memories of shamanic rituals, scissors dancers were specialists delegated by Andean communities as surrogates in order to externalize elements of their own past cultural repertoires. Rather than representing an indigenous self, these performance specialists embodied an infernal Other, temporarily allowing Andean communities to overcome their ambivalence towards and appropriate the powers of, dark magical forces associated with their stigmatized religious past. The theatricality of the

34 dance was never oppositional to the dance‟s ritual efficacy, but rather always constitutive of it in dynamic ways.

In chapter three, I analyze and contextualize the early archival sources of the scissors dance produced during the “long nineteenth century” (1780-1930). In this period, an already hybrid colonial Andean culture encountered new forms of cultural contact at a time of postcolonial nationmaking and the rapid expansion of transatlantic capitalism. I situate the stock character of the scissors dancer, already an Andeanized version of the trope of the performing Other, within the emerging popular ethnographic imagination of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Western observers inscribed the dance into an archive of prohibitions and stigmatizing discourses, travel narratives, costumbrista visual culture, and early ethnographic surveys which contributed to indigenista knowledge production. Although these sources tend to frame the dance using

“trope of the performing primitive,” they also demonstrate that the repertoires of this still emerging performance practice were heterogeneous, mobile, multi-valent, historically contingent, and already circulating in commodified forms of cultural production (Stone

Peters 2009). In contrast to later Andeanist narratives, they reveal the rich and contradictory hybridity and intercultural exchange that characterized the “contact zones” of late colonial and postcolonial Andean Peru (Pratt 1992).

In chapter four, I interrogate the staging of the scissors dance by mid-twentieth century Peruvian intellectual José María Arguedas, as a constitutive element of his public persona as a “culture hero” of the redemption of Quechua culture. Throughout his career,

Arguedas constantly evoked the dance in his literary and anthropological texts, staged

35 folklore performances, and in a highly symbolic performance at his own funeral. The figure of the scissors dance was central to Arguedas‟s highly-calibrated performance of self, which called forth a counterhegemonic and hybrid modern Quechua subjectivity. In his early work, the scissors dance embodied a magical and auratic Other, just outside of the grasp of Arguedas‟s intellectual understanding. Thus, it represented the tensions between intimacy with, desire for, and distance to Quechua knowledge that characterized his early public persona. By the 1960s, the author increasingly viewed the scissors dance as a model for his own changing formation of self, and a metaphor for his own intellectual, artistic, and cultural project. Through the complex interactions between his literary work and his death by suicide in 1969, the dance became forever tied to the celebrated author‟s heroic persona as canonized martyr of the “new Peru.” At his funeral, scissors dance practitioners selected by Arguedas himself performed the “agonia,” the dance sequence that enacts the death of a legendary scissors dancer and his resurrection through the body of his surrogate pupil. Arguedas unforgettably dramatized this sequence as a felicitous transfer of ancestral knowledge from old to young and traditional to modern in “La Agonia de Rasu Niti” (1962), his most famous short story. He refashioned the scissors dance as a primary figure of a new national dramaturgy in a symbolic performance of ritual purification that enacted a “utopian performative,” temporarily actualizing his vision for a “new Peru” (Dolan 2005).

In chapter five, I analyze the dramatic deterritorialization of the scissors dance from the death of Arguedas until the end of the internal war (1980-1992) that devastated the highland region. First, the populist military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado

(1968-1975) followed Arguedas‟s lead in fashioning the dance as a charismatic emblem of a renovated national-popular repertoire. During his government, a second even more massive wave of urban Andean migration relocated many scissors dance performers and their audiences from the highlands to Lima. Second wave migrants established urban communities of scissors dance performance in the newly-emergent conos that surrounded the traditional districts of metropolitan Lima. By the mid-1970s, a new generation of performers formed in the urban space began to radically reinvent the musical and choreographic repertoires of the scissors dance according to cosmopolitan aesthetics borrowed from a wide variety of sources, especially urban and global popular youth cultures. This first generation of genuinely urbanized performers became particularly important during the 1980s when massive political violence in the highlands forced a near total deterritorialization of the populations who practiced the scissors dance from the highlands to Lima and other urban areas. However, the practitioners of the dance and their migrant Andean publics did not remain passive victims of the ruptures produced by violence and rapid urbanization. Rather, they sought new spaces of recognition in urban spectacles and the folkloric stage and refashioned the dance as a cultural form that expressed the experiences of urban poverty and violent dislocation in which they lived.

In chapter six, I interrogate the urban and transnational renaissance of the scissors dance in what Terence Turner calls “the contemporary global culturalist conjuncture”

(1999). After the political violence in the highlands subsided in 1992 and 1993, local development projects promoted the scissors dance as an emblem of the ethnic cultures of the effected regions. Cosmopolitan performers increasingly became valued commodities

37 on the global folkloric stage as an embodiment of idealized indigeneity. With the election of Andean-born economist Alejandro Toledo to the presidency, Peru became an exemplary case of what Charles Hale calls “neoliberal multiculturalism” (2002, 2006).

The Toledo administration empowered state promotion agencies to use sophisticated media to reconstruct Peru as a brand-identity, selecting the scissors dance as one of the most visible icons of Peru‟s “millennial” cultural diversity.

In chapter seven I argue that contemporary scissors dance performers have developed sophisticated strategies that utilize the “double-agency” of the theatrical performer to achieve recognition for cosmopolitan indigenous identities and forms of citizenship within the performative economy of a new Peru. In quite different ways, the leading performers exchange their highly visible roles as theatrical performers who enact idealized indigeneity on the global stage for domestic cultural capital in order to achieve

“the myth of the triumphant cholo or provinciano” (Alfaro 2005). Yet, this theatrical role is not merely an instrumental fiction, but rather an idealized model that they embody through repetitive enactment, constituting a millennial “essence” dwelling inside the cosmopolitan indigenous self.

Chapter 2 The Dancer from an Other Hell: A Genealogy of the Scissors Dance as Andean Sorcerer (1532-1780)

2.1. Introduction The scissors-danzak‟ came from hell, according to the pious women and the Indians themselves; he came to dazzle us with his leaps and his costume full of mirrors. Clicking his steel shears, he would walk across a rope stretched between the church tower and the trees in the plaza. He came as a messenger from another hell, one different from that described by the priests when they were impassioned and angry. – José María Arguedas, Deep Rivers (1978 [1958])1

This passage from canonical Peruvian author José María Arguedas is one of the most concise and powerful descriptions of the mystique of the figure of the Peruvian scissors dancer. Arguedas portrays this character as not quite human. He possesses an extraordinary theatrical virtuosity with the power to transfix both indigenous and non- indigenous spectators with the display of extraordinary physical and magical abilities.

Most fascinating of all is the ambiguity of the provenance of this mysterious performer.

What and where is this other hell the dancer comes from? What kind of message does he transmit from this other world and to whom? What is the relationship between this other hell and the one described by the priests?

Recent Andeanist ethnographers writing about the scissors dance have primarily attempted to explain away the magnetic ambiguity of the figure he describes. They have progressively developed theories of how the dance originated in Pre-Columbian shamanic rituals. They assert that charismatic shamanic preachers performed either the scissors

39 dance or an earlier related form during the Taki Onqoy (dancing sickness). Perhaps the

“other” hell of which Arguedas speaks is not hell at all but the very essence of pre- colonial Andean spirituality, stigmatized by Catholic missionaries. These ethnographers celebrate the scissors dance as an icon of Andean cultural resistance according to the theory Thomas Abercrombie calls “the idols behind alters resistance paradigm”

(Abercrombie 1998: 23).2 Such perspectives unwittingly reinscribe the dominance of

Western epistemologies by privileging the interpretation of the researcher over that of the native informant, whose testimony becomes the raw material for the examination of

“deep structure.” Ethnographers locate a reified notion of resistance not in the actions of particular cultural agents but in the persistence of culture as an essence.

These studies have discovered important resemblances between the scissors dance and Pre-Columbian ritual practices. Nevertheless, they tend to gloss over a number of fascinating contradictions and ambiguities that Arguedas highlights rather than explains.

They fail to account for the fact that according to Arguedas, not only pious Christian women but also indigenous Andeans themselves perceive the scissors dancer as a diabolic outsider figure. Recent research on Andean dance has revealed that nearly all forms of Andean performance embedded within Catholic festivities feature the mimetic enactment of an often dangerous and threatening “other” (Poole 1990; Cánepa Koch

1998, Mendoza 2000). Such scholars argue that Andean dancers mimetically embody the

“other” in order to appropriate its power for use by the community at large. Andean performers become “surrogate effigies,” reenacting of the cultural memory of the community‟s relationship with external forces. As Joseph Roach argues, “performers are

40 routinely pressed into service as effigies, their bodies alternatively adored and despised but always offered upon the altar of surrogacy” (1996: 40). In the case of the scissors dancer, the specialized virtuosity of the performers heightens this effect. Even if we accept that the dance originated in Pre-Columbian rituals, we might pause before glossing over diabolic pacts in search of pure Andean spirituality.

Arguedas and other contemporaneous commentators noted that the costumes, music, and choreography of the scissors dance are of European origin, later creatively combined into indigenous performances for mostly indigenous audiences (Castro Pozo

1924, Bustamante 1943, Jimenez Borja 1951, Arguedas 1978 [1953, 1958], Holzmann

1966, Cruz Fierro 1981). Only after the peak of Andeanism in the 1970s did ethnographers began to theorize that the scissors dance originated in Pre-Columbian rituals as an intimate relationship developed between Andeanist ethnohistory and ethnographic field studies. Andean ethnohistorians developed a missionary zeal, searching colonial documents for traces of authentic pre-colonial Andean religion and culture and field ethnographers looked for resistant mentalities within contemporary

Andean culture. Both repeatedly neglected the interim period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, privileging a vision of lo andino as a pure ahistorical essence outside of historical transformation (Thurner 1997, Cahill 2002). More recent historical studies reveal that Andean communities actively participated in the imagining of a postcolonial nation and transformed their culture through complex intercultural dialogue with outside forces. I suggest that the embodied practices that formed the scissors dance began to emerge in the dynamic Andean-Catholic interculture of the eighteenth century

41 through the creative bricolage of mostly European performance practices.

I also argue that the parallels between the figure of the scissors dancer and precolonial Andean ritual specialists are far from insignificant. Specialized Andean performers creatively combined the hybrid cultural forms as a means to reenact a historical memory of a highly ambivalent stock character of the Andean past. They became surrogates who enabled Andean communities to access the power of subterranean infernal forces. In this chapter, I perform what Roach calls a “performance genealogy” of this stock figure theatrically embodied by the scissors dancer. That is, I examine the “historical transmission and dissemination of cultural practices through collective representations” paying particular attention to how “discontinuities interrupt the succession of surrogates” (1996: 25). The figure of the scissors dancer was far from a passively retained memory of pre-colonial rituals, but rather embodied an imaginative engagement with the ambivalence of Andean colonial memory. The theatrical virtuosity, liminality, and otherness of the scissors dance were necessary to its ritual efficacy.

2.2. Idols Behind Altars

In a recent article, Peruvian anthropologist Ranulfo Cavero Carrasco (2008) describes a theatrical reenactment of the Taki Onqoy staged in the community of

Huancaray in Apurimac. Over 400 professors and students of a local school participated in the performance as a celebration of a heroic event of regional history in front of thousands of mostly local spectators. The performance reimagined the Taki Onqoy in a utopian fashion as a successful anticolonial resistance movement, in which the enactment of “the millenary and apocalyptic scissors dance [. . .] symbolized the end of Spanish

42 military aggression and religious imposition” (Ibid. 2). To the author of the brief article, this reenactment of the Taki Onqoy “was an intense bath of nationalism and

Peruvianness” that “condensed [. . .] many years of the tragic and bloody but also hopeful history of Peru” (Ibid.). In this construction, the cultural resistance of Andean indigeneity stands in for the potential for national liberation. Local schoolteachers based the libretto partially on Cavero Carrasco‟s own book Los Dioses Vencidos (2001), creating a mutually constitutive relationship between the work of the anthropologist and the cultural object upon which he fixes his gaze. However, Cavero Carrasco interprets the event as an example of the “millenary consciousness” of the people of the southern

Andes. The protagonism of anthropology and educational institutions in the reenactment would seem to belie such primordialist interpretations. I suggest that such essentialist discourses fail to explain the complexities of the Andean past from a historical perspective. In order for the stock character of the scissors dancer to theatrically represent a resistant authenticity, however, it must refer back to a pure origin that conceals the hybridity of the object itself. Romantic discourses tend to “repeat the idols behind altars, or baptized but not evangelized rhetoric of colonial administrators and extirpators” and imagine colonized Andeans and the colonizing Spanish as homogenous blocs diametrically opposed to each other in an epic struggle (Abercrombie 1998: xx).

The adaptation of the “idols behind altars” paradigm, to the scissors dance occurred gradually within the discourses of Andeanist ethnographers between the 1970s and 1990s. For example, the work of Lucy Nuñez Rebaza (1985, 1990), argues that after the conquest “the population clandestinely venerated the same gods, but with the

43 dominion of the devil the schema changed. The evangelization had been such that in some places it achieved favorable results, but in other places of the Andean region the populace continued to unconsciously invert the schema” (Nuñez Rebaza 1990: 36). She suggests that the pact with the devil is in reality a continuation of the worship of native ancestral deities, sidestepping the interpretations of her own informants by arguing that resistance is an unconscious mental process accessible only to the anthropologist. This author was one of the first to theorize an inheritance between the Taki Onqoy and the contemporary scissors dance, drawing on Arguedas‟s notion of the Chanka region as a particular culture-area with a certain cultural unity going back to the Pre-Inca Wari

Empire and the later Chanka Confederacy (Arguedas 1978 [1958]). Later ethnographers have uncritically accepted these notions and in the process have in many cases contributed to transformations in how the performers think about their own practice.

The aforementioned Ranulfo Cavero Carrasco wrote the most assertions that the scissors dance originated in Pre-Columbian shamanic rituals, inheriting the ideology of the Taki Onqoy (2001).3 He hypothesizes that “these dancers probably originated in the

Pre-Inca epoch, within the ethnicities of the Hatun Soras, Rukanas, and Angaraes, fulfilling the role of priests and shamans” (Ibid. 271). He asserts that despite historical transformations the dance maintains its “Andean essence linked to the traditional cosmovision and religion” (Ibid). Cavero Carrasco classifies scissors dancers as itinerant religious specialists comparable to Andean curanderos (healers), who interpret the

“millenary consciousness” of the contemporary Andean people from the Chanka region

(Ibid. 286). He notes that the scissors dancer appears to synthesize the powers of diverse

44 contemporary and ancient Andean religious specialists. However, one of the dancers he interviewed responded, “We know a lot about the earth in order to heal, but we are not healers. The healers are others” (289). Cavero Carrasco never examines the distinction the dancer makes between Andean healers and scissors dancers, who at times appear to borrow some of the healer‟s powers. I suggest that these ambiguities allude to the mimetic faculties of the figure of the scissors dancer, embodied by theatrical performers who appropriate the powers of Andean ritual specialists.

2.3. The Dance of the House of the Devil

Many ethnographic studies have made it clear that the scissors dance is a name imposed on Andean performance practices by outside observers. The term scissor dance derives from a particular aesthetic element, a musical instrument, which the performers utilize in the practice of the dance. In contrast, all of the names previously used by local communities refer to a particular character type the dance embodies within a larger festival dramaturgy. These include: Tusuq Laiqa (Dance of the Sorcerer), Tusuy Supay

(Dance of the Devil), pacha-angeles (earth-angels), Danza del Brujo Huamanguino

(Dance of the Witch from Huamanga), Villanos (Villains), Saqra (Feline Devil), Machay

Wasipi Tusuq (Dance of the Cave House), and most commonly Supaypa Wasin Tusuq

(Dance of the House of the Devil) (Blanco [1834] 1974, Mac-lean 1942, Cruz Fierro

1982, Barrionuevo 1988, Nuñez Rebaza 1990, Arce Sotelo 2004). This character type bears some relation to Andean-Catholic conceptions of the devil, hell and sorcerers who engage in diabolic pacts. The conceptions are genealogically linked to ancient Andean mortuary rituals, and the religious specialists who conducted them. Nevertheless,

45 previous Andean ethnographers have leapt too quickly from notions of the diabolic to assertions of pre-colonial survivals.4 I argue only by taking these infernal concepts seriously can we begin to see the intercultural richness of the genealogical relationships between the figure of the scissors dancer and pre-colonial Andean ritual specialists.

The most common Quechua name for the scissors dance is supaypa wasin tusuq or the dance of the house of the devil. Supay Wasi (The Devil‟s house) refers to specific mountain caves that act as entrances to uku pacha, the interior world of Andean cosmology. While scholars debate whether the concepts of supay wasi and uku pacha preexisted the Spanish invasion, it is clear that Andeans have assimilated them to

Christian notions of hell (Gose 2008, Millones 2010). Uku Pacha is a dark world populated by malignant spirits associated with the devil and a number of repressed human deeds such as abortion and incest. According to Gerald Taylor (1980), Catholic missionaries identified the Andean notion of supay with the Christian devil during the initial years of the Conquest and a purely Andean significance of the figure of supay is notoriously difficult to identify.5 Colonial chroniclers asserted that supay referred to a fallen angel who lives inside the earth, a reference that recalls not only the biblical story of Lucifer but also Christian explanations of pagan earth deities among European peasant cultures.6 Bartolome Alvarez he suggested that supay refers to the spiritual force that emanated from revered ancestors whose bodies were mummified and buried with material riches and human servants in specialized cave-tombs (Alvarez [1586] 1998:

155). A series of contemporary myths collected across the Andean region associate these cave-tombs with a host of malignant gentiles, condemned people, and insatiable incest

46 demons from a prior epoch (Marzal 1985, Millones and Tomoeda 1998, Salazer Soler

1997, 2006, Gose 2008, Millones 2010).7 Inside these ancient cave-tombs, scissors dancers legendarily engage in pacts with devils, sirens, and other spirits of the uku pacha.

The cave-tombs of mummified gentiles are intimately linked to the core elements of Pre-Columbian Andean religion and politics (Isbell 1997, Abercrombie 1998, Gose

2008). Andean ayllus, localized ancestor-worshipping polities, defined themselves as descending from a founding ancestor, embodied in the present by a hereditary Curaca, or divine king. Every ayllu worshipped a series of huacas, physical objects that they perceived as embodiments of the founding ancestor. When the Curaca died, particularly their mummified remains became particularly vital huacas that linked the ancient past of the founding ancestors to the contemporary life of the community. Andean communities frequently engaged in ethnic rivalries and conquests of neighboring groups.8 The conquered and conquerors typically assimilated each other in terms of hierarchical frameworks of ancestry. The accommodationist strategies of the colonized to interpellate invaders as ancestors were not entirely capitulative, as conventions of reciprocity required colonizers to provide for the well-being of the colonized.9 Peter Gose (2008) has recently argued convincingly that Andean communities perceived and experienced the initial years of Spanish imperialism within these Andean frameworks. By looking to

Spanish invaders as ancestral authorities they recast Conquest as an inter-ethnic alliance.10 Appropriating the imperial strategies of the Incas, the Spanish ruled most

Andean subjects indirectly, and Andean Curacas retained their power over their subjects until well into the eighteenth century. The colonizers utilized the Curaca elite as

47 mediators in order to collect tribute taxes and mandatory labor from indigenous commoners. Most Andeans probably experienced the initial decades of Conquest as more continuous and less traumatic than is commonly assumed.11 Far more devastating than the actions of the invaders were the outbreaks of diseases that immediately began to reduce the demographic strength of Andean societies (Mumford 1998, Gose 2008).

Common Andean subjects had far less contact with Spanish political authorities than they did with Catholic evangelizers in these early years of the Viceroyalty of Peru.

The mendicant orders, particularly Franciscans and Dominicans, undertook most of the early missionary efforts in the Andes. Both of these orders took a relatively tolerant approach to native religion, exemplified by the writings of Bartolome de las Casas, viewing indigenous Andeans as ignorant rather than heretical (MacCormack 1991).

Many even saw parallels between native religion and Christianity that they exploited to facilitate religious teaching. However, the accomodationist strategies of Andean subjects created numerous contradictions in the evangelizing process. Missionaries found it relatively easy to convert Andean subjects, but more difficult to convince them that

Catholicism was mutually exclusive to native religious cults. Baptized indigenous converts perceived their relationship with Catholic evangelizers as similar to their relationship with their own religious specialists, further challenging oppositions between indigenous and Christian religious frameworks Spanish missionaries (Mills 1997, Gose

2008).12 These contradictions contributed to a more hard-line stance by lay Catholic clerics in the late sixteenth century who contested the authority of the mendicant orders.13

2.4. Andean Religious Specialists and the Performance of Memory

Anthropologists are correct in pointing out significant parallels between contemporary scissors dancers and Pre-Inca religious specialists. However, I argue the relationship between ancient ritual specialists and contemporary scissors dancers constitutes a complex genealogy of transformation rather than being a matter of direct decent. Cavero Carrasco‟s assertion that scissors dancers are itinerant religious specialists who synthesize the functions of diverse types of ancient healers is a useful point of departure for an examination of this genealogy. It is also necessary to keep in mind that the available sources on pre-colonial Andean religion are fragmentary and inflected by the antagonistic interests of their producers. These sources recount religious practices that may have undergone significant changes in between initial colonial encounters and the time of their production. Nevertheless, we can provisionally examine the recycling of certain elements from pre-colonial Andean religious framework in the early to mid-colonial periods. In this section, I focus on the parallels between what the sources are able to tell us about Andean priests and specialized mimetic.

Pre-Columbian priests and religious specialists were integral parts of highly mobile networks of interconnected ritual obligations that mediated between the living and the dead (Mills 1997: 95, 106).14 Local specialists often held a great deal of charismatic authority within Andean communities. They communicated with ancestral forces using diverse methods from spirit possession to mimetic reenactment. Many religious specialists were also guardians of specialized techniques of collective memory, keeping calendars and reenacting mythical genealogies that linked founding ancestors to the

49 current Curacas.15 The role of the huaca ministers changed greatly during the Inca

Empire. Inca rulers suppressed numerous rebellions and riots staged by localized religious specialists in protest of the imposition of the imperial cult of the sun

(Rostworowski 1999: 157).16 In the initial decades of Spanish rule their power often increased due to the removal of the Inca state, even though Catholic missionaries targeted them for persecution from the start. As keepers of ancestral memory in societies without writing, most priestly vocations utilized performance in order to mediate between the living and the dead. Oracles entered ecstatic states of spirit possession, becoming mediums for the embodiment of the huacas. Other priestly offices specialized in performing taquis, a form of sung dance that praised ancestral deities and reenacted complex genealogies that linked ancient mythic characters with the present ayllu

(Beyersdorff 2008, Estenssoro 2003, Gose 2008). Others excelled at mimetic dances and entertainments that chroniclers routinely interpreted as rudimentary forms of native theatre.17 Other masked dancers reenacted the huacas in ritual purification ceremonies staying up all night and dancing for five days or more (Beyersdorff 2008, Taylor 2004).18

The most detailed source on Andean religious specialists is The Huarochiri

Manuscript compiled in 1608 by Francisco de Avila, an early extirpator of idolatries

(Salomon and Urioste 1991). This text recounts the mythic origins of several ayllus in the vicinity of Huarochiri in the highlands immediately east of Lima as told by native religious specialists to the colonial religious inspector.19 The manuscript describes two types of religious specialists that observe the cult of the huaca Paria Caca in distinct ways. The yanca priest was an inherited post with a great deal of local prestige and

50 power (Salomon and Urioste 1991: 18). Priests performed ocular possession rituals in which Paria Caca spoke to them, were guardians of calendrical knowledge, and directed when plantings and harvestings should be conducted. In addition to the high yanca priest, Paria Caca ordained that specialized performers, known as huacsa or huacasa, should dance in his honor three times a year. These performers impersonated important huacas and reenacted their myths (Ibid). Both of these religious specialists demonstrate certain parallels with the contemporary scissors dance. The yanca engaged in spirit possession and was a hereditary office, while scissors dancer imitates the entrance of a deity into the body of a shamanic medium. Like the yanca, the transmission of the scissors dance is hereditary, passing mostly from father to son in particular families. The huacsas were specially trained surrogates who performed purification rituals for five days without interruption (Salomon and Urioste 1991, 70). Like the scissors dancer, their choreographic repertoires included imitations of animals and common scenes of agrarian life. Moreover, the huacsas sometimes performed to the point of extreme physical exhaustion and even death, after which they were immediately replaced by small children who trained as their apprentices. A corollary performance exists within the scissors dance tradition: the agonia mimetically reenacts the death scene of Rasu Ñiti, a legendary scissors dancer of the past. Huacsas performed certain rituals before dancing in festivities and played a particularly important role in annual ceremonies celebrating the ritual cleaning of agricultural aqueducts much like contemporary scissors dancers. These parallels do not necessarily suggest that the scissors dance originated in Pre-Columbian

51 shamanic rituals, but does appear to reenact a memory of such religious specialists filtered through the historical experience of the Taki Onqoy to which I now turn.

2.5. Taki Onqoy

Prior to 1964, all that Peruvian/ist historians knew about the Taki Onqoy came from a few paragraphs in a single colonial chronicle by Cristobal Molina. Molina wrote,

“It was ten years ago [. . .] that there was a disaffection amongst these Indians [. . .] Most of them had fallen into the greatest apostasies separating themselves from the Catholic faith that they had received and returning to the idolatry that they had committed in the time of their infidelity” (Molina 2007: 129). A well-coordinated network of traveling preachers associated with the rebel Inca state, which retained a fortress in Vilcabamba in the jungle near Cuzco, spread a radical separatist ideology from the movement‟s center in

Huamanga all the way to Cuzco, La Paz, and even Lima. These itinerant religious specialists preached that the regional huacas destroyed by Spanish missionaries had come back to life. The Huacas were collecting two great armies preparing for an upcoming battle with the Christian God. The Taki Onqoy preachers implored native Andeans to reject hybridizing accomodations with Catholicism and Spanish colonial culture claiming those who did not would suffer the vengeance of the huacas after their upcoming victory.

Molina claimed that the Taki Onqoy lasted seven years, from 1564 to 1571, ending with the repressive efforts of colonial evangelizers (Molina 2007: 127-132, Mumford 1998).

Until the 1960s, historians gave only passing attention to the events described by

Molina. In 1964, anthropologist Luis Millones discovered new documents that recount the Taki Onqoy in more detail in the Archivo de las Indias in Seville (Millones 2007).20

These documents were formal testimonies of the career of Cristobal de Albornoz, an ambitious ecclestiastical inspector and early extirpator of idolatries.21 Albornoz claimed his campaign arrested over 8,000 native adherents of the idolatrous movement. One of the principal dogmatists was a Spanish-speaking Curaca named Juan Chocne. He travelled in a group comprised of the movement‟s highest-ranking preachers, including another man and a woman.22 In 1967, the French Andeanist scholar Pierre Duviols discovered a later document in the Archivo de las Indias, also written by Cristobal

Albornoz.23 Albornoz claimed that the main instigators of the Taki Onqoy were intimately linked to the sorcerers who surrounded the rebel Inca camp in Vilcabamba.

They travelled to distant parts of the former Inca Empire in co-opt local huaca priests.

From this perspective, the Taki Onqoy attempted to undo Spanish colonialism and to reinstate the social controls the Inca state exercised over local religious specialists

(Urbano and Duviols 1990: 163-195, Mumford 1998: 154-155, Gose 2008: 114).

These three sources have stimulated an extraordinary amount of scholarly interest in the Taki Onqoy over the past several decades. The earliest studies celebrated the movement within a nationalist framework as an act of cultural resistance to Spanish colonialism. They followed both Molina and Albornoz‟s “Instruccion” in linking the religious cult with the military insurrections of the rebel Inca state in Vilcabamba

(Millones 1964, 1973, Zuidema 1965, Duviols 1971). In the 1970s a second group also celebrated the movement as a protonationalist form of cultural resistance. However, they disassociated it from the neo-Inca rebellion, asserting the Taki Onqoy aimed to revive an older and more locally-based popular religious culture (Pease 1973, Curatola 1976, Cock

53 and Doyle 1979, MacCormack 1988, 1991, Burga 1988, Cavero Carrasco 2001).24 Both of these first two groups perceived the Taki Onqoy within a celebratory nationalist framework, suggesting that authentic Andean culture had survived the Spanish conquest.25 A third group offered a less optimistic interpretation, suggesting the movement was a symptom of the social pathology, trauma, and epidemic plagues experienced by Andeans after the Spanish Conquest (Wachtel 1971, Stern 1982).26 In the

1990s, a group of younger historians suggested a fourth interpretation, locating the significance of the Taki Onqoy primarily in colonial discourse itself (Varon 1990, Urbano

1990, Estenssoro 1992, 2003, Ramos 1992). These scholars questioned whether the movement ever existed except as an invention of careerist lay clerics who competed for authority with the mendicant orders (Ramos 1992, Estenssoro 1992, 2003).27

More recently, Peter Gose argues that the significance of the movement lies in the complex interactions between different factions and interests in an analysis that incorporates all four of the preceding interpretations to different degrees (2008). He reads these sources against the grain for interpretations of the movement they suggest from indigenous perspectives. Validating the third interpretation, Gose claims the movement arose out of profound social crisis and trauma related to the destruction of their huacas and the epidemic plagues that decimated indigenous populations (81-117).

Moreover, he suggests that the movement sought a renewed negotiation between Inca state religion and local religious cults, evolving from a top-down Inca revival into a legitimately popular cult (106).28 Surprisingly for a social movement that centered largely on ecstatic dance, little of the extensive scholarship about the Taki Onqoy

54 provides much analysis of the embodied practices employed by the dancers.29 Gose offers a rough sketch of some of the embodied practices of the Taki Onqoy and what they contributed to the movement as a whole. The possessed priests danced in enclosed circles vigorously raising and lowering their arms and legs. They painted their faces red and often their bodies with multiple colors (Molina 2007: 129, Alvarez [1588] 1998: 124-127,

Gose 2008: 114). They made high-whistling sounds that Alvarez described as “u,u,u”

(126). The dancers fasted and abstained from sexual activity for up to a week before participating in these great festivals of huaca possession. They ingested high quantities of alcohol, coca, and perhaps even a psychotropic substance called maca. The festivals lasted up to five days, and the combination of exhaustion, hunger, and intoxication was enough to bring the dancers into a trance state (Alvarez 1998: 126).

Spirit possession is the strongest link recent ethnographers have made between the Taki Onqoy and the scissors dance, arguing that scissors dancers go into trance-like states while performing (Roel Pineda 1976, Vivanco 1976, Barrionuevo 1988, Nuñez

Rebaza 1990, Castro Klaren 1990, Cavero Carrasco 2001). According to Barrionuevo,

“In the heat of competition [. . .] the dancers stop being mere men to become the deities that they say enter their bodies” (1988: 229). Nevertheless, contemporary dancers attribute such a state to the heat of competition rather than possession by a deity, simulating a true state of possession.30 In another parallel with the contemporary scissors dance, Molina testified that native Andeans swept and tidied their homes before receiving a visit from a Taki Onqoy priest (2007: 129). Gose interprets these gestures as evidence that Andean commoners perceived Taki Onqoy preachers as agents of purification (2008:

99). A few early ethnographers of the scissors dance claim that contemporary festival sponsors receive visiting scissors dancers in their homes in a contrasting manner. That is instead of cleaning their homes before the dancers arrive, the sponsors and their families rigorously clean their houses after the dancers leave the festival after fulfilling their contract (Vivanco 1976, Cruz Fierro 1982). This suggests that contemporary Andean communities view scissors dancers as potential agents of pollution rather than purification. I do suggest that scissors dancers are completely stigmatized by the communities in which they practice the dance. Rather the ambiguity of the character the scissors dancer embodies makes up a significant part of its highly theatrical aura.

2.6. The Marginalization of the Andean Sorcerer: Resettlement and Extirpation

The campaign undertaken by Albornoz to suppress the Taki Onqoy reflected centralizing transformations of the colonial state that began in the 1560s. Albornoz became the ecclesiastical inspector of Huamanga in 1569 in the same year that Francisco de Toledo ascended to the post of Viceregal of Peru. As Viceregal, Toledo undertook a host of initiatives designed not only to civilize indigenous Andean subjects but also to discipline the rampant greed and corruption exercised by Spanish landowners. His most ambitious program was called reduccion, the consolidation of dispersed Andean settlements into a single town centered on a main square anchored by a church (Gose

2008: 119). Although reduccion accomplished certain goals related to the political and economic discipline of conquered subjects, Toledo clearly framed its major purpose as evangelical. In a 1571 speech he clearly stated that the objective of reduccion “was to extirpate idolatries, sorcerers, dogmatizers so that the Evangelical teaching would fall

56 well-disposed upon ground where it could bear fruit” (Toledo 1986: 36). The organized spatial structure of urban life was thought to instill the early modern Spanish value of

“policia,” linking civilized public life to Christian piety.31 One of the central goals of settlement consolidation was the reform of Andean burial practices. Ecclesiastical authorities identified oracular consultations with the mummified dead as the most incessant form of communion with the devil (Cieza 1984, Alvarez 1998, Gose 2008:

127). The imposition of church burial on indigenous subjects was important in shaping the hybrid Andean-Catholic interculture that emerged in the eighteenth century. The separation of Christianized Andean dead from their pagan predecessors also held major implications for later innovations in Christianized Andean ancestor worship.

While the Taki Onqoy’s power as a widespread mass movement seems to have effectively ended by the early 1570s, its separatist ideology survived underground for several generations. More localized outbursts occurred in numerous localities through the first two decades of the seventeenth century. The leading figures of these smaller- scale movements were itinerant preacher-mediums who recycled the ideology and practices of the Taki Onqoy. Most of these preachers were Spanish-speaking ladinos who had partially internalized the Christianity they rejected so vehemently. These figures developed complex networks of clandestine preaching and the training of apprentices.

As the seventeenth century wore on, Andean religious specialists hybridized Andean ritual practices with European witchcraft, increasingly becoming separated from

Christianized Andean communities (Gose 2008: 116-118). It was the discovery of idolatries related to mortuary practices amongst his parishioners in Huarochiri, which

57 prompted Francisco de Avila, the compiler of the aforementioned Huarochiri

Manuscript, to initiate the first major extirpation of idolatry campaign (Salomon and

Urioste 1991, Griffiths 1996, Mills 1997, Gose 2008).

Manuel Burga has written about the major anti-idolatry campaigns as cycles of extirpation driven by the interaction between zealous priests and periods of the revival of indigenous cults (1988: 195). The first cycle between 1609 and 1622 was the most systematic and cruel designed to eradicate the evolving remnants of the Taki Onqoy throughout the Andean region. The standard procedures of anti-idolatry campaigns included the visitation of a particular community by an official party that included the

Visitador General, several assistants and scribes, and a few Jesuit priests (Duviols 1971:

202-203).32 This first cycle of extirpation produced a great deal of information about

Andean religious practices in order to aid in eradicating them.33 In addition to the earlier texts of Albornoz, and Avila, the most consulted treatise on extirpation is Pablo Jose de

Arriaga‟s The Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru (1621). The Jesuit priest wrote this text as a compendium of knowledge for later anti-idolatry campaigns and dedicated the third chapter to classifying the various specializations of “The Ministers of Idolatry.”34

Numerous records of anti-idolatry trials recount the continuing existence of separatist

Andean preachers who counterposed themselves against Christianity.35 In 1613, Jesuit priests recorded a particular colorful case in Huancavelica. These particular sorcerers built churches and organized clandestine diabolic confraternities. Evoking the devil, they spit out flames from their mouths (Mujica 1994: 247).36 During the extirpation campaigns, many religious specialists fled to the high plateau and formed their own anti-

Christian communities (Mills 1997: 113, 296; Silverblatt 1987, Gose 2008). Numerous legends circulated about these extraordinary sorcerers and witches, who maintained a certain respect and authority amongst Andean commoners. Nevertheless, the increasing acceptance of Christian forms of worship by the latter created barriers between them

(Mills 1998, Gose 2008). In that sense, the extirpators accomplished one of their major objectives, to cordon off idolatry from correctable superstition and error (Griffiths 1996).

However, the Andean residents of consolidated townships articulated hybridized forms of

Christianity as complementary rather than opposed to Andean ancestor worship.

Some of the earliest signs of hybridized Andean-Catholicism were the chronicles of two early seventeenth century Andean elite intellectuals. El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was a descendent of Inca royalty who glorified the Inca Empire as a civilizing force that prepared Andeans for the full embrace of Christianity. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, a

Curaca from Lucanas in southern Ayacucho, wrote the most fully articulated reconciliation between Christianity and Andean ancestor myths. His New Chronicle and

Good Government (1615) was a 1,000 page letter informing the King of Spain of corruption amongst the governors of Peru. In a combination of Quechua and broken

Spanish with hundreds of illustrations, Guaman Poma represents the origins of the

Andean people as a tribe of original Christians present on Noah‟s ark. Unlike Garcilaso,

Guaman Poma portrays the Incas as agents of religious corruption, introducing idolatry to the Andean people.37 By opposing idolatry and supporting the Spanish crown, Guaman

Poma was not merely capitulating to the whims of the colonizer, but he strategically

59 protested against corruption and demand that Spaniards recognize Andean people as partners in the colonial regime (Gose 2008: 181-190).38

By the time of the second cycle of extirpation (1649-1671), most separatist preachers had become cut off from consolidated Andean towns. Those that remained yielded to repressive measures enough so their practices could be classified as superstition rather than idolatry. Those who fled trafficked in hybridized black magic, witchcraft, and Andean ancestral cults. According to chronicler Bernabe Cobo‟s description in 1653, “Under the name of sorcerer are included all those who use superstitions and illicit arts to achieve objects that surpass human faculties through the invocation of and aid of the Devil, with whom an explicit or implicit pact is the basis of such power and knowledge” (Cobo 1956: 14, 17). The fascinating character of the sorcerer became a legendarily figure in mid-colonial Andean and colonial imaginaries.

Nevertheless, except in isolated cases the second extirpation campaign found mostly idiosyncratic Andean Christianity, often setting itself to reform syncretism rather than persecute outright idolatry (Mills 1997). Most studies of the extirpation of idolatry and

Andean religion follow George Kubler‟s assertion that the 1660s marked a watershed decade in the transformation of Andean spirituality (Kubler 1946, Duviols 1967, 1971,

1986, G. Cock 1980, Marzal 1983, Burga 1988, MacCormack 1991).39 By the final decades of the seventeenth century, the separatist Andean sorcerer figure appears to have become extinct except in the memories of Andean commoners and Catholic authorities.

G. Coch (1982) has argued that the rhetoric of extirpators succeeded in marginalizing

Andean specialists from functioning Andean religion and society by the 1670s.40

This chronology remarkably parallels the cultural memory of contemporary

Andeans given in some ethnographies of the scissors dance. For example, in Michele

Bigenho‟s masters thesis (1991), she cites a local official who tells the story of the origins of the town of Aucara. The official claims that the townspeople have always been

Catholic. However, he tells of a time when heretics appeared rebelling, terrorizing faithful Christians and destroying images of the saints. The majority of the townspeople fled Aucara to the high plateau. Their Catholic faith returned around 1660, and they reestablished the abandoned town of Aucara (1991: 120). Bigenho also cites a parallel narrative that suggests the scissors dancers came from colonial times when Catholic priests persecuted them as heretics. They began to rebel, imitating warriors in order to counter they abuses the suffered at the hands of Spanish priests (1991: 90). The first account clearly repudiates the heretics, and the second demonstrates a kind of nostalgic identification with these figures as heroes of cultural resistance. However, both refer to the figure as located in a past era that ended around 1660 and related to the persecution of

Andean ritual specialists. In a classic study, George Kubler argued that “The sorcerers played a role in the formation of Quechua Catholicism, while bringing support to

Quechua idolatry. In essence, their crafts were contrary to religion whether Quechua or

Christian in that their magic was illicit, infrasocial, and proliferant without relation to doctrine” (1946: 398). He characterized the sorcerer not as a representative of a generalized culture of resistance, but as a figure marginalized from mainstream Andean society. Recent studies by Mills (1997) and Gose (2008) suggest that the militancy of

61 these figures was instrumental to the legitimacy of more accomodationist stances that expanded the boundaries of Catholic orthodoxy rather than rejecting it outright

2.7. The Andean-Catholic Interculture: The Eighteenth Century

Thus far I have established significant parallels between the contemporary scissors dance and the figure of the Andean sorcerer that played such a significant role in the colonial imagination. Now I turn to how this mostly extinct figure became the object of Andean-Catholic theatrical representation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, contributing to the gradual emergence of the scissors dance as a genre of

Andean festival performance. Contemporary accounts of the Tusuq Laiqa (Dance of the

Sorcerer) told by scissors dance performers from Huancavelica offers some provocative clues to how this process may have occurred. The Tusuq Laiqa were originary ancestral figures who suffered at the hands of evangelists and extirpators. They found refuge on the high plateau and continued to practice idolatries in defiance of colonial authorities.

While working in the mercury mines of Huancavelica, they encountered Spanish dancers with castanets, handkerchiefs, and embroidered costumes. The Tusuq Laiqa fabricated musical instruments out of leftover ore from the mines in a creative imitation of the

Spanish castanets and fashioned embroidered costumes with the most elegant and extravagant materials they could find or afford. They began to dance so impressively that local Catholic priests requested they perform in competitions during Christmas festivities

(Barrionuevo 1988, Personal Interview “Ccarccaria” 2007, Personal Interview “Rey

Chicchi” 2007, Personal Interview “Mercurio” 2009).41

These origin stories appear to represent an outsider figure, which local dancers adopted as a character for local theatrical enactments (Poole 1990, Cánepa Koch 1998,

Mendoza 1999). The shift from representation of an ancestral self to the masked mode of representing the “other” in Andean cultural performances goes at least as far back as the middle of the seventeenth century.42 Deborah Poole suggests this transformation in the representative mode of Andean performance is tied to evangelical distinctions between dance as a form of recreation and as a form of idolatry. Even the most zealous extirpators encouraged the former in order to assist in eradicating the latter (Poole 1990: 107). In order to reproduce their identities under unfavorable conditions, Andean communities turned toward the ambiguity of mimicry and the embodiment of the “other.”43 Through the embodiment of externalized characters, Andean performers enacted the transference of power from the foreign elements to localized Andean individuals and communities

(Cánepa Koch 1998: 24). If the Andean strategy of incorporating the “other” through embodied performance has a long genealogy, it gained a new legitimacy within the fertile

Andean-Catholic interculture of the eighteenth century. As the missionary zeal of extirpation gradually subsided, accomodations between Church officials and Andean popular religiosity produced a rich Andean performance culture. As David Cahill notes,

“Andean popular culture of this time belied illusory dichotomies between the sacred and the profane, as well as engendered multi-dimensional exchanges between popular and learned cultural forms and practices during this period (2002: 72).44 Catholic festivities and pilgrimages in Andean parishes engendered multi-layered hybrid cultural forms. Far

63 from strictly localized sites of communal solidarity, these practices took part in both the intensity of competition and forms of commercial and cultural exchange (Ibid. 71).

Parish priests introduced diverse European performance practices, including

Golden Age drama, Moors and Christian plays, matachines sword dances, as well as more religious plays such as autos-sacramentales, into Andean festivities. Through these forms, Andeans found new ways to represent competition, rivalry, and conflict, including numerous theatrical representations of the Conquest (Burga 1988, Beyersdorff 2008).45

The myriad forms of battle between good and evil enacted by early modern Spanish drama became fertile material for Andean creativity in representing the complicated relationship between self and other central to the reproduction of Andean identities.

Religious plays such as, Pastorelas, Adoracion de los Reyes Magos, Easter Plays, Corpus

Christi plays, and Stations of the Cross plays became the foundations for most popular forms of Andean festival performance. These religious plays included skits that represented local life and customs in between the major scenes, which allowed for the construction of local forms (Beyersdorff 1988, 2008: 410, Gisbert 2002). Many of these festival enactments continue to this day long after the original scripts have been lost, passed down orally from generation to generation. The scissors dance style from

Huancavelica appears to have emerged out of the creative combination of a number of these hybridized performance traditions.46 The festivities in which the Huancavelica practitioners most often perform are Christmas and Bajada de los Reyes, in which the other characters of the festivities maintain a direct link to Pastorelas and Adoración de los Reyes Magos plays.47 The scissors dancer‟s role in both of these festivities suggests

64 the combination of the devils who tempt the shepherds in the Pastorelas, and the reyes magos, orientalized traveling kings or astrologers who come from afar to adore the baby

Jesus.48 The competition amongst the dancers substitutes for the battle between angels and demons typically enacted during the pastorelas. The festival also domesticates the potential “resistance” of the Andean sorcerer figure, as the scissors dancers willfully submit to the demands of the copleros, satiric representations of Catholic priests.

However, in practice the triumph of Christianity over paganism is represented far more playfully than earlier scripted versions of autos-sacramentales.

A further element of the origin narratives of the Huancavelica style of the scissors dance associates it with one of the most fertile sites of intercultural exchange in eighteenth century Peru and the home of subterranean diabolic elements from the Andean ancestral past. The Tusuq Laiqa first encountered the Spanish dance they imitated while working in the famed mercury mines of Huancavelica.49 During the eighteenth century, mining activity and forced labor migration increased after the colonial state constructed new roads linking Lima, Huancavelica, Huamanga, Cuzco, and finally Potosi. Workers constantly travelled back and forth between provincial townships, urban commercial centers, and the hard subterranean labor of the mines. Numerous scholars have suggested that this ambivalent transition accounts for the prevalence of myths about miners who engage in pacts with the devil (Taussig 1980, Salazar Soler 1999, 2006). In The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, Michael Taussig argues that the devil contract represents a veiled criticism of the evils of capitalism put forth by laborers peripheral to the world economic system.50 Without going so far as Taussig, Salazar Soler offers a more

65 balanced ethnographic account, relating the intimacy between Andean miners and diabolic figures to both ambivalence about their participation in capitalism, and the miners frequent descent into the dangerous subterranean realm that Andeans call uku pacha (1999). She associates the muki, the devil that Huancavelica miners believe is the owner of the mines, to a number of other characters who reside in uku pacha.51 While uku pacha is an infernal semantic universe shared by agrarian peasants and miners alike, the culture of the miners exhibits greater intimacy with the underworld due to their precarious and dangerous occupation and frequent entrance into the interior world of the earth. The other figures of the uku pacha include the gentiles who are the former pagan residents of the earth, supay who is the devil himself, condemned men who committed certain social taboos such as abortion or incest, and Amaru the snake who resides in water

(Ibid.). Andean myths often conceive of this last figure as the female pair to the male supay or muki, also associated with the serena.

In addition to the Amaru, a mysterious female apparition named Juana or Juanita creates a bridge between the mythology related to the scissors dance in Huancavelica and that of the southern region of Ayacucho. The female apparition from Huancavelica resembles the diabolic female seductress associated with all musical expressions in the latter region, La Serena.52 La Serena is the spirit of falling water typically described as a beautiful blonde woman with an enchanting singing voice that she uses to seduce men, sometimes killing them and sometimes making them crazy.53 Throughout the Andes, La

Serena is the muse who inspires the musicians who play stringed instruments, all of which are of European derivation and only played by men. Contemporary Andean

66 mythology imagines the sirens as inhabiting freshwater lakes, rivers, and springs of the highlands after they left the sea sometime near the time of the arrival of the Spaniards

(Turino 1983, Millones and Tomoeda 2004, Arce Sotelo 2007).54 Sirenas are ambivalent figures associated with the devil and the dangers of seduction, but nevertheless are guardians of water, a precious resource for agricultural production. Scissors dance performers from this region engage in pacts with La Serena by making offerings of

Quinoa, coca, and chicha (corn beer) at the mouths of mountain caves (Nuñez Rebaza

1990, Personal Interview “Juan Cacpcha).” The relationship between the scissors dance and La Serena reinforces the connection between the dance and water in this particular region and gives them an ambivalent status within local Andean communities.55

Andeanist ethnographers tend to perceive the scissors dance style from the southern region of Ayacucho as the most authentically indigenous variant of the scissors dance.56 Significant evidence suggests that the scissors, costume, and some of the mythology of the scissors dance developed first between Huamanga and Huancavelica.

Migrants brought these performance elements to Southern Ayacucho at the turn of the nineteenth century (Personal Interview “Chuspicha” 2008, Personal Interview “Astro

Rey” 2009). Subsequently, the variant from the latter region developed a more indigenous character as it interacted with local cultural practices in a more geographically isolated and agrarian area. Mining in Huancavelica and its close relationship to the urban capital of Ayacucho, Huamanga, gave the Huancavelica style a more hybrid and mestizo character, even though the performers and their audiences belonged to indigenous communities. I do not wish to contest the conventional origin narratives by creating an

67 alternative origin narrative. These performance practices emerged with the dynamic flow of cultural materials and practices that characterized the Peruvian Andes at the end of the eighteenth century, not from a single localized origin only later hybridized.57

The myths of origin of the scissors dance from the southern region of Ayacucho lend themselves more readily to claims of Pre-Columbian origin than those from

Huancavelica. Local elders tell a number of variants of a story about a young boy who encountered a mysterious boy his own age at a river while completing chores for his family. The mysterious child wore a beautifully embroidered costume and held a pair of steel scissors, teaching his new friend an enchanting dance and presented him with scissors and a costume of his own. The young boy then returned to town and rehearsed the new dance during his free time, eventually becoming a legendary local dancer in

Patron Saints festivals (Cruz Fierro 1982, Barrionuevo 1988). Spaniards, obvious diabolic figures, or explicit hybridity are typically not found in these stories, and ethnographers often suggest they refer to events that occurred in the Pre-Columbian past.

However, they include small details that suggest later surrogations of Pre-Columbian beliefs and ritual practices.58 Although always represented as benign with few obvious diabolic characteristics, the children of the caves inspire fear in the adult members of

Andean communities. The version recounted in Barrionuevo (1988) explicitly refers to these cave children as gentiles, the former residents of this world condemned to live in the underworld because they had not been baptized as Christians. Both Cruz Fierro

(1982) and Villegas Falcon (1998) identify these young people as demons known to local populations as Juanico or Juaniquillo.59 As Millones (2010) has suggested, Andean

68 cosmologies contain the belief that children are particularly susceptible to the allure of the devil and those who die without being baptized are buried in the same way as adults who engaged in pacts with the devil. The relationship between the scissors dance and these small denizens of the caves of uku pacha appears to suggest that the dancers are mediators between the underworld of uku pacha and Christianized Andean communities.

The identification of scissors dancers with cave-tombs and the mummified remains of Pre-Columbian Andean people suggest a primordial relationship between the dance and ancient Andean ritual specialists. Nevertheless, these cave-tombs have clearly become marginalized elements of Andean culture as the most visible embodiments of the infernal uku pacha analogous to the Christian notion of hell. Peter Gose (2008) has recently written a fascinating study of the long-term transformations of Andean ancestor worship into multidimensional hybrid forms of Andean Catholicism by the end of the colonial period. He locates the end of the eighteenth century as the period when these transformations became clearly articulated after Andean communities had digested and absorbed the historical experiences of settlement consolidation and extirpation. He further suggests the “internalization of the Extirpation occurred in fundamentally Andean terms, through the retention of the past as a subordinate lower moiety” (Ibid. 286).

Catholic Andeans articulated Christian oppositions between heaven and hell within the traditional Andean framework of complementary dualism and mapped this spatial distinction onto the temporal differentiation between a pre-Christian era associated with

God the Father, and a Christian era associated with God the son.

Gentiles, devils, and other malevolent beings that reside in the uku pacha are thus the denizens of a past pagan epoch. Numerous myths collected by twentieth century ethnographers register this epochal differentiation, with some variation, cultural groups across the Andes speak of the gentiles as the primordial residents of the Earth. They were covetous and jealous, as well as idolatrous witches. They were unrepentant sinners who committed incest, abortion, and adultery. Either God or Christ became angry with the gentiles and wiped them out with a great flood or burned them with a tremendously hot sun. Some remained protected in deep caves, yet Andean peasants typically do not recognize the gentiles as their ancestors. They claim that the Incas created their ancestors, and introduced Christianity to Peru before the arrival of the Spanish.60 Gose argues that these narratives demonstrate that “people did not forget the mummified past [.

. .] but conserved it as a malignant subterranean force, largely (though not entirely) stripped of its Andean ancestral functions. This dis-identification built on earlier Andean recognitions that ancestral power is ambivalent, and early Andean moiety strategies of conserving vanquished ancestral orders under new regimes” (Ibid. 314). Consistent with the framework of complementary dualism and moiety strategies, Andean communities did not entirely stigmatize the subterranean infernal forces. They reconfigured the uku pacha as a subordinate realm, which nonetheless is the source of uncontrollable reproductive powers necessary for fertility and the procurement of mineral wealth.

Gose‟s argument brings us toward a richer and more complex interpretation of

Arguedas‟s characterization of the scissors dancer as a messenger from another hell than simply asserting Pre-Columbian origins covered by diabolic masks. As the distinction

70 between pagan ancestor worship and Andean Christianity became intimately tied to

Andean interpretations of heaven and hell, and distinctions between Angels and Demons, the scissors dancer emerged as a surrogate performer who revived the repudiated figure of the Andean sorcerer as a character for theatrical enactment. While the Andean communities where the dance is performed viewed this character as a threatening

“outsider” figure, the specialized theatrical performers who embodied it became a vehicle of pleasure that expressed ambivalence towards the pre-Christian Andean past. The surrogate scissors dance performer became a partially contained conduit allowing agrarian communities a point of access to the mysterious earthly forces found in the uku pacha. That the scissors dance is such a hybrid pastiche of elements from mostly

European performance genres does not necessarily contradict the indigeneity of the dance and dancer. Rather this hybridity has enabled Andean communities to express ambivalence toward their pagan past even as they appropriate the reproductive powers of externalized pagan forces.61

2.8. Andean Utopias

In much of the ethnographic literature on the scissors dance, Andeanist authors avoid the diabolic aspects of the dance by emphasizing the intimacy between the scissors dancer and the apu wamanis, the mountain spirits who guard and protect particular

Andean communities. Most ethnographers have assumed that mountain spirits are a primordial aspect of Andean religion and culture. However, contemporary ethnohistorians have argued that they emerged out of the reconfiguration of Andean ancestor worship and its rapprochement with Christianity in the eighteenth century (Isbell

1997, Gose 2008). While earlier articulations of Andean religion perceived mountains as sacred sites, yet they worshipped the founding ancestors who remain in cave-tombs located in particular sites on the side of mountains. In contrast, apu wamanis are direct personifications of the mountains landscape. Gose argues that contemporary Andean communities typically conceive of wamanis as Christian forces opposed to the repudiated figures that dwell in the uku pacha (2008: 185). Numerous Andean myths suggest that

Jesus Christ himself created the wamanis, as they appear as localized manifestations of

Christ, and the saints, who are also associated with the Incaic figures of the sun and

Inkarri, the decapitated body of the last Inca King (Dean 1999).

The dynamic Andean-Catholic intercultural of the late eighteenth century both contributed to and was conditioned by the emergence of an anti-colonial national project that imagined the restoration of the Inca Empire, commonly referred to as the “Andean utopia.”62 By the eighteenth century the boundary between Spaniards and Indians was increasingly porous. Interstitial categories like the cholo, mestizo, and criollo were a growing presence on the colonial scene unsettling old distinctions between a Republic of

Spaniards and a Republic of Indians (Thurner 1997: 18). An indigenous elite had always served as mediators between indigenous commoners and the colonial state, having access to Western education and often participating in Spanish and Creole intellectual circles.

During the eighteenth century, a group of indigenous elites in Cuzco who traced their lineage to Inca nobility began to circulate the idea of reviving the old Inca monarchy. As this group had some exposure to Enlightenment ideas, it is not hard to imagine they had encountered the central place of the Incas in the cultural production of French

Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire (Poole 1997).63 The porous boundaries of eighteenth century Andean popular culture enabled idealized representations of Inca rule to spread rapidly from a specialized class of neo-Inca elites to mestizo and indigenous commoners throughout the Andean region. Theatre, painting, and other artistic representations exalted the Inca state as a utopian community, often using European artistic forms to represent Inca history (Flores Galindo 1986, Mendez 1996: 121).

These artistic representations also contributed to the popular myth of Inkarri, where the decapitated body of a mythical Inca King is recomposing itself underground until the day he returns to liberate the Andean people and restore the Inca empire.64 The resurrection of the Inca, grafted onto the figure of Christ‟s body, is a particularly Andean way of conceptualizing the coming third age of man, the epoch of the Holy Spirit (Mujica Pinilla

1996, Gose 2008). Eighteenth century Andean-Catholicism engendered an anti-colonial revival of the figure of the Inca, mediated by the close intimacy between Jesuit religious teachers and Christianizing Andean communities. This myth shaped an emergent

Andean imaginary that transcended local and regional affiliations.

The role of the Inca King as liberator became embodied by the charismatic persona of Tupac Amaru II, who led a massive popular rebellion in 1780-1781 that nearly crippled the Spanish colonial state, and contributed to later independence movements that finally put an end to nearly three centuries of Spanish rule in 1821 (Walker 1999, Cahill

2002). The Tupac Amaru rebellion emerged within context of the modernizing reforms of the Bourbon Spanish Empire, particularly during the reign of Carlos III (1759-1788).65

Inspired by the French Enlightenment, the Bourbon rulers sought to create a more

73 efficient and centralized colonial bureaucracy. By reducing the complex network of mediators fostered by the indirect rule of their Hapsburg predecessors, they attempted to redirect the flow of resources and capital directly to the Spanish crown. While in the short-term they succeeded in reasserting the authority of the Spanish empire, these reforms created tensions that contributed to indigenous rebellions.66 Furthermore, colonial authorities attempted to reduce the privileges of the indigenous nobility. Many indigenous elites, such as Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui who later became known as Tupac

Amaru II, spent much of the 1770s involved in protracted battles defending their titles in colonial courts.67 Tupac Amaru II was a charismatic and imposing figure.68 His rebellion was composed of a diverse group of indigenous commoners, highland mestizos, and even a few disaffected Creoles. They rose up against the corrupt colonial government in the name of the King. The rebellion was highly successful during a one- year period, threatening the stability of colonial rule. In 1781, colonial armed forces captured Tupac Amaru II. He was publicly drawn and quartered in the main plaza of

Cuzco, the same place that colonial authorities beheaded Tupac Amaru I in 1582.

After the suppression of the Tupac Amaru rebellion, the colonial state banned all titles of indigenous nobility, effectively ending the indirect rule that characterized

Hapsburg colonialism (Cahill 2002, Gose 2008).69 The colonial government also outlawed all displays of Inca symbolism and identity as well as tightly controlled mass spectacles and festivals. Nevertheless, It was in the aftermath of the Tupac Amaru rebellion when the first archival documents that represented the scissors dance appeared.

However, it is not until the 1830s, in the first decades of the Republic that a number of

74 archival documents register a theatrical figure who bears a close resemblance to the contemporary scissors dancer in terms of the representation of a diabolic Andean sorcerer. I suggest that it is no coincidence that archival traces of the scissors dance began to appear in the aftermath of the Tupac Amaru rebellion until the first decades of the Republic. The dance emerged as a performance practice at a major transitional moment in the history of Andean culture and its relationship to the ancestral Andean past.

Gose suggests that “Andean Christianity revised the subject position from which ancestral notions were formulated, replacing Curacas and their mummified predecessors with peasants and their agrarian life activities” (2008: 319).70 Within this transformational moment, the scissors dance became an ambivalent and externalized reenactment of ancestral figures of the Andean cultural past. I argue that the dance is a more recent invention than Andeanist ethnographers have claimed, but that does not take away from the dance‟s power as an active vehicle of Andean cultural memory, and an expression of the multiple ways Andeans conceptualize their own cultural past in relation to external “others.” The ambivalence and theatrical aura of Arguedas‟s description of the scissors dancer as a messenger from another hell is far more evocative of the dance‟s complex relationship to the Pre-Columbian past than ahistorical claims of Pre-Columbian shamanic origins.

Chapter 3 The Long Nineteenth Century (1780-1930): A Genealogy of theScissors Dance in the Postcolonial (Trans)National Imaginary

3.1. Introduction

The Andean utopia provided a powerful subaltern challenge to the exclusionary politics of the Creole state, and ensured that Andean peasants played a more active role in the formation of postcolonial Peru than previously acknowledged by historians (Flores

Galindo 1986, Burga 1988, Mallon 1995, Thurner 1997, Walker 1999, Gose 2008). Only in the second half of the nineteenth century were urban Creole elites in collaboration with large highland landowners able to wed positivist discourses of scientific racism to their privileged position in the global economy in order to cast “the Indian” as a backward and inferior race destined to disappear under the onslaught of modernity (Jacobsen 1993,

Cadena 2000, Larson 2004). Contemporary historiography has not only revised conventional narratives about the formation of Latin American nations, but also situated them within broader transnational processes related to North Atlantic capitalist expansion. Latin American historiography now uses the period concept of “the long nineteenth century,” in order to examine the contentious period between the Tupac

Amaru rebellion and the consolidation of populist politics in the 1930s (Pratt 1992,

Jacobsen 1993, Mallon 1995, Mendez 1996, Poole 1997, Thurner 1997, Larson 2004,

Earle 2007).1 The ethnographic imagination, which romanticized European peasants and non-Western people, became a powerful force within Western intellectual circles (Burke

1978, Fass Emery 1996, Bendix 1999, Stone Peters 2009).2 A multi-directional flow of people, ideas, and capital played a decisive role in how nations imagined themselves leading to the emergence of new representational economies whereby Western subjects represented the popular customs of the Andes (Pratt 1992, Poole 1997).3

In this chapter, I examine how these new forms of representation produced many the earliest archival traces of the scissors dance. These sources include: prohibition documents and stigmatizing discourses, travel narratives, visual culture, and early twentieth century ethnographic surveys of Andean cultural practices. Although a number of ethnographic studies have cited at least a partial list of these sources, they tend to interpret them as transparent reflections of the dance‟s continuity over time and ignoring the circumstances in which these documents were produced, circulated, and exchanged as complex intercultural productions in themselves (Nuñez Rebaza 1985, 1990, Vega 1995,

Millones and Tomoeda 1998, Villegas Falcon 1998, Arce Sotelo 2006). I situate these sources within the broader national and transnational processes produced within the

“contact zones” of Peru in the long nineteenth century (Pratt 1992: 7). I ask what they can tell us about the emergence and transformation of the scissors dance. Moreover, I use them to interrogate the ways in which Andean popular performance intervened in the articulation of competing national imaginaries, representational economies, and productive transatlantic relations of knowledge and power.

I argue that these sources offer subtle glimpses of indigenous agency through the medium of popular performance during a period in which cosmopolitan national discourse excluded indigenous culture from national hegemony. Rather than a ritual

77 frozen in time and fixed to strictly local cultures, these sources collectively portray a robustly hybrid, heterogenous, mobile, and historically contingent performance practice.

I argue that these sources progressively enact what Taylor calls “the scenario of discovery,” participating in the modern invention of the “primitive,” which authorized the subjectivity of “civilized” producers of knowledge (Taylor 2002, Stone Peters 2009). .

Nevertheless, the ethnographic imagination elided indigenous agency by containing the figure of the “Indian” as an objectified icon within the exclusionary confines of lettered cultural production. Such representations played a formative role in the construction of

Andeanist paradigms, valuing indigenous culture as both a picturesque object and a disruptive presence with the potential to slow the inevitable march of Western modernity

3.2. The Tensions of Postcolonial Nation-Making

The period concept of “the long nineteenth century” has provided recent historians with a critical lens in order to demystify two opposing, yet equally totalizing narratives of conventional Peruvian historiography. First, a triumphalist national teleology asserts that independence was a liberating event for all Peruvians, concealing the continuation of colonial structures of power. A later Marxist counter-narrative argues that the first century of the republic merely refashioned colonial structures of power under a liberal veneer (Mariátegui 1971, Baptista 2006). Both deny agency to individual and collective indigenous subjects, either by positing their assimilation into a homogenous national culture or declaring unambiguously their subjugation under neocolonial rule. Recent studies influenced by the notion of “history from below,” have uncovered the hidden strategies indigenous groups wielded to protect their political and

78 cultural autonomy and fashion themselves as citizens of an emerging national community

(Mallon 1995, Thurner 1997, Walker 1999). The frame of “the long nineteenth century” organizes the earliest documentary evidence of the scissors dance, prior to its construction as an icon of regional and national culture. The trajectory of this fragmentary archival record parallels the changing status of “the Indian” within the emerging hegemonic national culture.

The earliest archival sources arose out of the aftermath of the Tupac Amaru rebellion, when the Bourbon colonial state took extreme repressive measures to re- establish their authority. Colonial officials banned all titles of indigenous nobility, suppressed public displays of Inca identity and iconography, and censored a good portion of the works of indigenous chroniclers such as el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (Walker

1999: 54-61).4 They much less successfully attempted to discipline and control Andean festive culture (Cahill 2002: 73, 2007). Despite these efforts to contain the Andean utopia, ethnic revival continued to thrive in the southern Andes. The continuing specter of Inca revivalism constructed broad multi-ethnic coalitions against the colonial government. Peasant guerilla brigades known as the Indian montoneras played a major role in all of these rebellions, which imagined the restoration of the Inca monarchy. In

1815, a rebellion centered in Cuzco represented the largest threat to the colonial regime since the Tupac Amaru uprisings. The figure most associated with the 1815 rebellion was an indigenous Curaca known as Pumacahua, a 70 year old patriarch with pretensions of installing himself as the new Inca emperor (Flores Galindo 1986, Walker 1999, Klaren

2000: 129). However, the brutal repression after the Pumacahua rebellion left highland rebels depleted and disillusioned.5

After 1815, the struggle for Peruvian independence shifted from the highlands to the Creole-dominated coast. Creole independence movements were slower in Peru than other parts of Latin America, finally taking hold only after the outside interventions of

José de San Martín and Simón Bolivar.6 Inca revivalism did play a limited role in the ideology of San Martín, whose mother came from the indigenous nobility of what later became Argentina. He imagined a modern republic unified by the installation of a new

Inca monarchy, which would rule over much of South America. The transfer of leadership from San Martín to Bolivar signaled a shift away from Inca nationalism to liberal republicanism (Thurner 1997: 10). As the first president of Peru in 1825, Bolivar eschewed the use of the Inca past in the construction of the nation (Thurner 1997: 10).7

He introduced liberal legislation designed to remake Indians into small farmers in preparation for the acquisition of full citizenship in the modern republic (Larson 2004:

144). When Bolivar left the country in 1826, conservative forces re-established Indian tribute as a means to finance the growing national debt. The military leadership of the independence wars fought amongst each other for political control, establishing the caudillo (military strongman) as a recurrent figure of Peruvian politics (Walker 1999).8

The contradictions of a weak centralized state‟s policies towards indigenous tribute and general political instability opened a space for indigenous political claims that they were corporate citizens of the nascent nation.9 Mark Thurner argues, “The useful slippage between tributary subject and propertied citizen generated a subaltern form of

80 indigenous citizenship wrapped up in the hybrid notion of republican” (Thurner 1997:

35). These indigenous political strategies included the radical refashioning of indigenous political culture from a hereditary kinship group descended from a founding ancestor to a territorially defined and egalitarian community led by an elected staff-holding varayoq

(mayor) (Gose 2008).10 A resurgent indigenous identity contributed to a thriving Andean trade economy based on a new export market for Peruvian wool. Andean trade fairs became dynamic intercultural spaces where European travelers came into direct contact with indigenous Andean culture (Klaren 2000 138, Larson 2004). This combination of ethnic revival and new forms of intercultural contact with European travelers produced the most fertile period for the documentation of the scissors dance during the first twenty- five years of the republic. The initial phase of North Atlantic capitalist expansion brought European traveler-reporter-artists to South America in droves, following in the pioneering footsteps of Alexander von Humboldt (Catlin 1989, Pratt 1992, Poole 1997).

These romantic figures combined commercial and scientific exploration with the artistic representation of picturesque and exotic landscapes and social types.

The relative autonomy and prosperity of many Andean peasant communities ended abruptly with the rise of an urban Creole export elite during the second half of the nineteenth century (Walker 1999, Klaren 2000, Larson 2004). The discovery of the fertilizing properties of guano (bird dung) created a booming export economy in the mid-

1840s, when coastal merchants began to sell raw materials to British industrial firms.

The government of liberal caudillo Ramón Castilla collaborated with the export elite in order to strengthen the central state, construct modern financial institutions, and systems

81 of transportation (Kristal 1987, Klaren 2000). In 1854, Castilla eliminated the Indian tribute tax, effectively taking away the state‟s financial interest in protecting indigenous collective land rights. Self-made mestizo sheep herders rapidly appropriated ayllu lands, consolidating small farms into large hacienda estates.11 The coastal export elite and large highland landowners formed a fragile coalition drastically reducing the abilities of indigenous groups to retain their cultural, economic, and political autonomy (Walker

1999: 223). Creole nation-builders utilized liberal discourses in order to justify the

“redefinition of indigenous peasants with codified tributary obligations and rights into an inferior „race‟ sentenced to the margins of the nation” (Larson 2004: 246). Creole nationalism, commonly known as criollismo, did incorporate a very limited aspect of the

Andean utopia into its exclusive ideology. Cecilia Mendez argues that Creole elite intellectuals articulated a persistent aspect of Peruvian nationalism by “invoking the memory of the Incas in order to spurn and segregate the Indian” (165). National historiography imagined Creole elites rather than the degraded Andean peasants as the true heirs of the glorious Inca past (Thurner 1997: 10-11).12

In contrast to Benedict Anderson‟s well-known thesis, the advent of print capitalism did not produce the imagination of an expansive and inclusive national community in late nineteenth century Peru (Anderson 1994). Cadena argues that

“criollismo produced a picture of Peru in which Indians were anchored to the Sierra and rhetorically absent from the coast, populated by mestizos and Creoles” (2000: 45).

Creole elites constructed a delimited public sphere of lettered culture and effectively erased the Andean majority from the national script (Rama 1984, Larson 2004: 245).

Indigenous people virtually disappear from historical records in the second half of the nineteenth century and after a period of rich documentary sources in the 1830s and

1840s, there are virtually no records of the scissors dance from 1850-1882. After the disastrous War of the Pacific (1879-1884), the Creole elite made the Indian into a scapegoat, hardening the racial and geographic schism between the progressive coast and the retrograde mancha india (Indian stain) of the southern highlands (Cadena 2000: 46).13

Out of an emerging provincial intellectual culture arose indigenismo, a radical opposition that evoked the romantic primitivism of a picturesque and ahistorical Andean essence in order to contest the dominance of the coastal oligarchy. The romantic idealization of “the indio” has shaped utopian longings for the making of a “New Peru” ever since.

Nevertheless, these representational practices conjured “the Indian” as merely an object of lettered cultural production (Coronado 2008).

3.3. Prohibitions and Stigmatizing Discourses

Ethnographic studies have failed to distinguish between actual Andean ritual specialists and the contemporary scissors dance. These authors construct the colonial period as a melodramatic narrative that denies contingency and heterogeneity to both the colonizer and colonized. They overstate the case that the scissors dancer embodies a heroic figure that has resisted centuries of continuous colonial repression. While recognizing that some of the earliest archival sources are prohibitions and stigmatizing discourses towards Andean popular performance, I argue that we should not conflate these sources with the texts produced by earlier extirpations of idolatry. A closer examination of these texts reveals that early republican prohibitions and efforts to control

Andean popular culture were historically contingent, contradictory, representative of particular interests, and often ineffectual. In addition, these sources often show extraordinary ambivalence, betraying curiosity and fascination, as well as horror, towards

Andean popular performance.

Historian David Cahill recently discovered a complaint written in 1784 against

“the pernicious custom of exhibiting dances in religious festivals” in the town of San

Juan Bautista de Cerca in the province of Aimaraes (Cahill 2007: 106). Cahill claims that the dance in question was the scissors dance.14 The Visitor General of Cuzco, José

Gallegos, issued a prohibition against the dance, defining it as “a seminary of evil and abomination against God” (Ibid). In a related document from 1800, the local priest complained that the enforcement of the prohibition had failed. He asserted that such licentious dancing was “synonymous with mortal sin” (Ibid. 107). However, he did not have the necessary authority to eradicate a practice deeply rooted in community life due to the “relative weakness of the political and ecclesiastical jurisdictions in remote areas”

(Ibid.). Due to its early date and harsh religious rhetoric, this particular source is the most likely candidate to represent continuity with the Extirpation of Idolatry campaigns.

Nevertheless, Cahill rightly situates the document within the fraught historical context of the aftermath of the Tupac Amaru rebellion.15 Colonial authorities attempted to discipline popular festivity by relocating the celebration of popular religiosity from the streets to the interior of the church. However, popular festivity was central to the religious cultures of the highlands and proved quite difficult to eradicate or control.

Cahill argues that festive dances “were converted into a space of dispute between top

84 ecclesiastical authorities and the lay clergy, whose income often depended on the observation of fiestas” (109). Rather than embodying a totalizing narrative about

Catholic persecution of Andean religious practices, this prohibition text came out of a particularly tense moment in the history of Andean popular festivity where various interests clashed, including popular celebrants, local elites, lay clergy, and top ecclesiastical authorities.

The first of two letters addressed to the Subprefect of the province of Lucanas in

Ayacucho written in 1899 notes the prohibition of the ritual cleansing of local aqueducts due to “the scandalous acts publicly committed by Indians” (Montoya 1990: 17). The author complains that indigenous residents repeatedly ignored these edicts and continued to engage in uncivilized behaviors during such celebrations. The second letter, probably written by the same author, contains the passage, “You should not ignore the prohibition

[. . .] of the scissors dance [. . .] and other spectacles of that nature that struggle against moral civilization and good customs, resolutions that were passed in order to inhibit the great demoralizing acts committed during said spectacles” (Ibid.). Montoya and other ethnographers interpret these texts as evidence of the continuity of colonial and religious persecution of Andean popular culture during the nineteenth century.16 However, the language of the document is not religious, but rather turns on liberal oppositions between civilization and savagery. During the 1880 and 1890s, local elites in the southern highlands attempted to discipline indigenous festivities as they found the invasion of public space by the unwashed masses offensive (Larson 2004: 177). This document betrays local struggles for power amongst local elites and indigenous communities

85 specific to the period after the War of the Pacific. Furthermore, the pleading tone of the letter suggests that in this case such prohibitions laws were not enforced. No matter how repressive the actions rising local elites took to discipline the indigenous masses, they could not control popular culture, which found strength in communal organization.

The most intriguing example of stigmatizing discourses against the scissors dance is an account of marvelous events published in a treatise on the history of the region of

Huamanga compiled by the Bishop of Ayacucho in 1924.17 The account describes the mysterious disappearance of Atanasio Miranda, a scissors dancer from the town of

Corculla.18 The events described occurred in 1834, but the previous Bishop wrote the account in 1871 as the result of an official investigation supported by the direct testimony of Atanasio‟s widow, Tomasa (Olivas Escudero 1924: 424). The brief account describes

Atanasio‟s friendship with a strange young man who mysteriously appeared underneath the dancer‟s harp during a festival competition with a more skilled opponent. The mysterious figure helped Atanasio learn more impressive pruebas de valor in order to defeat his rival. Upon their triumphant return to Corculla, Atanasio and the young man became close friends and Atanasio‟s reputation grew as the best scissors dancer in the region. Atanasio‟s wife became suspicious when she witnessed her husband‟s friend flee from the church laughing, and descend from the church tower onto the plaza with cat-like agility on a very thin cord. When she brought Atanasio to the local priest, he confessed his sins and agreed to submit himself to an exorcism. His soul cleaned, Atanasio quit dancing and took a job in the mines of Huaillara. Three years later, he encountered Don

Angelino Torre, a wealthy local gentleman, who requested that Atanasio dance in the

86 local festival under his sponsorship. When Atanasio refused, Don Angelino conspired to get him drunk. Emboldened by alcohol, Atanasio accepted the proposal. During the festival his scissors sounded with a surprising force and he performed acrobatic pirouettes with his feet almost never touching the ground. After Atanasio won the competition, he disappeared. His wife led a search party through the mines. Four days later they encountered his mutilated body at the bottom of a deep cave (Ibid. 424-427).

Clearly the primary motivation for this account is pedagogical. The author assures the reader that countless reputable townspeople witnessed these events. The

Bishop warns the theological community that the devil is still active in the Andes and scissors dancers like Atanasio are particularly vulnerable to his enchantments. However, the account also betrays a certain fascination with the aura of the diabolic scissors dancer.

Like many myths and legends that surround the dance, this account draws on a common repertoire of folkloric tale-types of magicians, artists, and musicians who engaged in pacts with the devil in order to achieve extraordinary powers.19 In these stories, a powerful theatrical aura penetrates the stigma of the devil, who is perceived to be the seductive agent behind the charisma and virtuosity of extraordinary people. The narrative voice projects both fascination and horror at the prospect of diabolically inspired Andean dancers active in the parish.20 This account both draws on and extends the boundaries of the stock character portrayed by the scissors dancer, unsettling the distinctions between theatrical representation and reality. In aggregate, these sources show that far from representing the continuity of colonial stigma against Andean religious culture actually respond to nineteenth century realities and tensions.

3.4. Travel Narratives (1824-1875)

The production of scientific knowledge about Andean cultures greatly expanded over the course of the nineteenth century. In 1778, the Bourbon colonial state opened up the Spanish-American colonies to free trade and the expeditions of Alexander von

Humboldt (1799-1804) initiated the exploratory period of the traveler-reporter-artist

(Catlin 2008).21 These romantic figures contributed to the increasingly popular literary genre of the travel narrative, depicting South American landscapes, social types, and popular customs with a combination of scientific detachment and fascination for the picturesque (Catlin 1989, Pratt 1992). Pratt argues that European travel writing in the first half of the nineteenth century constituted “a new Eurocentric form of planetary consciousness” closely tied to “the consolidation of bourgeois forms of subjectivity and power” (9). Scientific exploration went hand in hand with North Atlantic capitalist expansion, providing valuable knowledge for the extraction of resources and acquisition of inexpensive sources of labor. European traveler-reporter-artists contributed significantly to the imagining of new Latin American nation-states by constructing catalogues of recognized social types and popular customs and providing models for

Creole subjects who sought to transcend the national frame and participate in global modernity represented by science. Following in the footsteps of famed European explorers, especially Humboldt, Peruvian intellectuals produced their own travel accounts in which they surveyed the newly independent national territory and “manufactured their own landscapes, racial types, and historical icons” (Larson 2004: 292).

Travel writing became a valuable contributor to the development of the

88 ethnographic imagination. As the nineteenth century wore on, the production of spectacular images of Andean nature by Humboldt became displaced onto the bodily practices of Andean subjects. Travel accounts engaged with the new scientific discipline of ethnology by producing what Pratt has called “manners and customs descriptions,” which classified the racial types and popular customs of so-called “primitive” societies

(Pratt 1992: 34). According to Deborah Poole, this change in focus contributed to the emergence of new typological systems of classification central to the objectifying scientific concepts of race and culture (Poole 1997: 100).22 Julie Stone Peters argues that nineteenth century travel literature first articulated “the trope of the performing savage” prior to a series of public displays of the exotic in world‟s fairs and other large-scale global spectacles. She suggests that “scenes of savage performance- particularly mimetic dances and pantomimes were everywhere in nineteenth century literature on exotic travel.

Indeed, performance [. . .] largely overtook cannibalism as the ur-trope of savagery in the popular ethnographic imagination” (Stone Peters 2009: 68-69). While betraying fascination for the cultural purity and physical talents of performing primitives, most travel writers maintained reified oppositions between the civilized Western subject of knowledge and the primitive as the object of the ethnographic gaze. A few travelers observed the scissors dance during the first half of the nineteenth century. These accounts perceive the dance as an ancient practice, but also acknowledge its hybridity making frequent comparisons between the dance and European popular entertainments.

The earliest European traveler to describe an encounter with the scissors dance was the German merchant Heinrich Witt.23 He embarked from Liverpool to Peru in 1824

89 and observed the first years of the newly-independent republic. On his first trip to the

Andes in 1826, he attended the Fiesta de la Concepción in the village of Huancañe in

Puno. During the festival, Witt observed “amongst the parading Indians, the principal dancers distinguished themselves by wearing masks, ankle-bells attached to their costumes, and they carried a pair of large scissors in their hands in order to keep the rhythm” (Witt 1992: 114).24 His description suggests a performance practice with a genealogical relationship to the contemporary scissors dance, although performed in a different region, with some distinct aesthetic elements, and by members of a distinct ethnic group.25 Unlike later travelers, Witt perceived the performance from the utilitarian perspective of a merchant.26 Little interested in engaging in lengthy ethnographic descriptions of popular customs, he focuses his narrative on potential business transactions. Moreover, he narrates the account from an assumed position of superiority over local residents, ridiculing the audacious displays of the local elites. He shows slightly more generosity in his depictions of the festive indigenous commoners, but is still unimpressed by the spectacle of Andean dancers who “paraded on the streets of Puno, continuously dancing to the sound of their horrible instruments” (Ibid.)

During the tumultuous early years of the republic, Peruvian political and military leaders traveled to the countryside to survey the national territory, connect with their regional base, and fight in civil wars against competing factions (Walker 1999: 148).

Associates of these political expeditions wrote travel accounts where they described

Andean cultural practices they encountered on their travels. The most well-known is El

Diario del Presidente Orbegoso al Sur del Perú (1974), written by José María Blanco.

Blanco was a learned Franciscan priest from Quito who served as the personal chaplain to liberal caudillo General Luis José Orbegoso. He accompanied Orbegoso on his travels throughout the southern regions of Peru in 1834 and 1835, when the General was acting as interim president of the republic. Blanco was a liberal romantic quite familiar with contemporaneous scientific discourses in Europe and took particular interest in highland culture.27 According to Blanco, President Orbegoso‟s party encountered scissors dancer on several occasions during their stay in the vicinity of Huamanga (Blanco 1974: 45, 53,

58, 75). He refers to the dance as pacha-angeles, which literally translates to „earth angels.‟ While this name references the ritual significances of the dance, Blanco experienced it purely as entertainment.28 Local authorities of the towns of Huanta,

Paicasana, Quinua, and Huamanga each organized festive greeting parties to welcome distinguished guests. The welcoming parties consisted of jugglers, acrobats, archers, and local festive dancers such as the impressive pacha-angeles. The staged nature of these encounters suggests that local authorities did not always stigmatize the dance as a diabolic indigenous practice, but sometimes offered it as a gift to highly distinguished guests as a valued element of local culture. The account suggests that the staging of the dance as theatrical entertainment outside of local festivals long predates the second half of the twentieth century when the dance became a global icon of Andean culture.

Blanco offers his most complete description of the pacha-angeles at the end of the chapter on Huamanga in a short section where he classifies local customs. He describes the pacha-angeles as “indigenous dancers who wear red pants and large round hats with great wings full of feathers, a sailor‟s jacket with silk and muslin ruffles covered with

91 bands of many colors and shoes of the same class. They dance with scissors in their hands to keep the rhythm of the music” (Blanco 1974: 70). He clearly categorized the dancers as indigenous, yet the costume recalls eighteenth century European fashions and costumed dancers. When Orbegoso and his party were the guests of honor at a festive meal in Paicasana, they had the privilege to witness, “the skill and barbarity of a pacha- angel make an incision in his tongue and cheeks with the scissors” (Ibid. 48). Blanco described an extraordinary act quite similar to the pruebas de valor performed by contemporary dancers making this the earliest direct observation of a performance practice in which the basic repertoire and mythology of the scissors dance were already in place. Blanco‟s admiration for the dancer‟s skill is complicated by his use of the descriptive term „barbarity.‟ The Diario is the earliest source that explicitly contributes to the invention of the ethnographic primitive.

One of the most flamboyant adventurers to reach Peru was Paul Marcoy, the pen name of French gentleman Laurent Saint Cricq. Marcoy fashioned himself as a romantic traveler-reporter-artist in the mold of Humboldt.29 Marcoy‟s travels to Peru from 1840 to

1846 coincided with a period of rapid social change, economic modernization, and international exploration incited by the guano boom and the presidency of Ramón

Castilla. His masterwork, Voyage à Travers l’Amerique du Sud did not appear in book form until 1869, and later was rapidly translated into English and published in London and New York in 1873.30 Marcoy‟s accessible literary style and talents for evoking the picturesque made his narrative a popular best-seller in both the French and English- speaking worlds. However, the scientific community, to which he desperately wanted to

92 contribute, severely criticized the work as pseudo-science.31 In the span of time between

Marcoy‟s travels and the publication of his narrative, the sciences of naturalism and ethnology were in the midst of transition from the era of the romantic traveler-reporter- artist to a more positivist and detached mode of inquiry (Catlin 1989).

However, the favorable reception the work garnered with the broader public reveals that a combination of scientific discourse and picturesque romanticism continued to engage the popular ethnographic imagination. A highly positive book review of the

English edition praised Marcoy‟s “acquaintance with ethnology and several of the natural scientists” (New York Times 1874). The reviewer constructs Marcoy as an idealized masculine figure, defined by “sympathy with the harmless savagery of Indian life and character that shows his true manliness” (Ibid.). Another passage furthers a similar construction of masculinity, “As M. Marcoy penetrates into the interior his notes become even more interesting for they relate to the customs and peculiarities of tribes with which few if any white men, and none who have cared to take the trouble to describe what they had seen, have ever come into contact” (Ibid.). He positions Marcoy‟s narrative within the terrain of the “scenario of discovery,” juxtaposing Marcoy‟s sympathetic masculinity against the femininity of South American nature and the primitive “other.” Rhetorically the review conceals the imperialist and misogynist force of the metaphor of penetration by portraying the civility and empathy projected by Marcoy‟s ethnographic gaze.32

Marcoy devotes the majority of the first volume of Travels in South America to describing the various ethnic types and cultural practices of indigenous highlanders of the

Cuzco region, where he resided between 1841 and 1845. Historian Pablo Macera has

93 suggested, “There have been few that could give an image as direct and personal of Peru as Marcoy [. . .] His narrative continues to be, as it was for France in the 19th century a rich deposit of information about highland reality [. . .] For the first time he mentions popular folk dances [. . .] Throughout he captures the vibrations of the living” (Macera

1999: 101). Marcoy described the scissors dance, which he referred to as the

Huamanguino, amongst the many other dances of the Cuzco region that combined the sacred and the profane. He wrote the dance represented the:

Inhabitants of ancient Huamanga. From the time of the Incas that province had the privilege of providing Cuzco with dwarves, buffoons, actors, and mountebanks destined for the entertainment of the court. Now that the Incas have disappeared, the Huamanguinos, fallen from their estate, follow the fairs as common clowns, and figure in the annual processions. Their customary performance is a kind of military dance, which they perform to the clinking noise made by the blades of a pair of scissors, one suspended from their thumb, the other from their forefinger, which they use as castanets. Some of them play juggling tricks with their daggers and balls, pierce their tongue with needles, or like Mutius Scevola hold their hands over a brazier to the astonishment of the gaping crowd. (Marcoy 1875: 264)

Marcoy recounts a story of origins of a glorious past linked to the court of the Incas, later devolving into a kind of itinerant circus performance. Like Blanco, he emphasizes the spectacular nature of the performance, with little mention of any religious or ritual significance. While he suggests indigenous origins of the dance, he relies heavily on

European references, juggling, clowns, making facile comparisons between Andean and

European popular entertainments.33 The pruebas de valor captured his attention as displays of physical skill comparable to ancient European performances.

Illustration 3.1

Dancer “El Huamanguino” Painted by Paul Marcoy, 1873

Reprinted in Juan José Vega. “Antecedentes Historicos de la Danza de las Tijeras”

Marcoy was also an accomplished visual artist.34 Along with his description of the

Huamanguino, he includes a small sketch of an individual male dancer playing a scissors- like musical instrument. The dancer wears a blindfold, probably illustrating that he is performing a prueba de valor. His costume includes pants that fall just below his knees, stockings, a white ruffled shirt, and darker long coat. On his head he wears a triangular black hat, adorned with a single feather. This costume clearly bears similarities to eighteenth century European clothing and costumed dancers. It appears to represent finery; however, the pants of this particular dancer are torn and his stockings contain several holes. The dancer probably is of indigenous and peasant status, performing a dance that partially imitates European performance practices and character types.

Marcoy‟s drawing demonstrates remarkable similarities to the contemporary dance, showing the particular affective power of visual culture sources.

3.5. Costumbrista Visual Culture

Marcoy‟s work best exemplifies the complex and multi-faceted intersections between the narrative and visual codes of European travel literature and emergent modes of national literature and visual culture in Latin America. Marcoy‟s travels in South

America coincided with the formative period of Latin American costumbrismo (Catlin

1989: 63). According to performance studies scholar Jill Lane, “Costumbrista arts in literature, theatre, and lithography paid keen attention to documenting and elaborating scenes of local life and creating catalogues of so-called typical figures and social types that made up the special character of a given locale” (Lane 2005: 20). The roots of this genre go back to the late eighteenth century when Enlightenment-inspired empiricism

96 entered the visual arts and literature, transforming their traditional function in relation to religion (Catlin 1989: 41, Lane 2005: 20, Ziter 2003). After independence, the influx of

European travelers, merchants, and diplomats as well as an emergent market for

European books made transatlantic aesthetic techniques available to Latin American artists (Majluf 2008: 24). Lane suggests that costumbrismo “engaged the representational economy of what would later coalesce into the new discipline of ethnography” (Lane

2005: 20). By participating in the transnational circulation of aesthetic techniques, costumbrista writers and artists produced national typologies that had an enormous influence on the construction of emergent national imaginaries (Majluf 2008: 80).

Paul Marcoy shared a visual and narrative vocabulary with numerous Peruvian artists and writers at the time of his travels in South America. However, by the time he published his popular travel narrative not only the international scientific community but also the contours of Peruvian costumbrismo had shifted. Costumbrismo became the privileged mode of representation for Creole intellectual elites who limited their imagination of the national space to the coastal urban region. Marcoy‟s work became the principal target for Manuel Anastasio Fuentes‟s Lima (1866), a beautifully illustrated satire of European travel writers who fixated on the exotic landscapes and “primitive” cultures of the Andean region.35 During the second half of the nineteenth century, Creole writers used the techniques of costumbrismo as principle vehicles for the construction of the exclusive nationalist ideology of criollismo. Authors such as Fuentes and Ricardo

Palma manufactured a Creole essence that glossed over the stark power relations of Lima.

For example, they represented coastal Afro-Peruvians, descended from slaves, as the

97 subservient but happy bearers of the colorful musical and culinary traditions of the coastal region. This visible inclusion of Afro-Peruvians, however stereotypical and subservient, was instrumental to the ways in which elite Creole intellectuals constructed a national-popular imagery that excluded the Andean majorities as remnants of the past and the primitive “other” to the modern national self (Poole 1997, Thurner 1997, Larson

2004, Kokotovic 2005, Feldman 2005).

While the scissors dance and other forms of Andean popular culture were largely invisible to the most recognizable Peruvian costumbrista writers of the late nineteenth century, earlier visual artists incorporated such cultural practices into their repertoires of national types. The first Peruvian visual artist to depict the scissors dance was Pancho

Fierro (1807-1879). Fierro was a mulatto watercolor and sketch artist from a working class background. After taking some free classes at La Escuela Nacional de Dibujo

(National School of Drawing) in 1830, he made a comfortable living selling his watercolors of the social types and popular customs of Lima to a clientele of foreign travelers and diplomats on urban street corners. After 1853, he largely worked under the patronage of Peruvian art collectors, including such major Creole literary figures as

Ricardo Palma (Majluf 2008: 18).36 Creole intellectuals mythologized Fierro as the privileged illustrator of Peruvian criollismo. Majluf argues that the paradoxical construction of Fierro‟s persona as simultaneously an original and individual genius and a spontaneous, irrational, and untrained artist, allowed Creole nation builders to forget the historical formation of criollismo and to incorporate a vision of the popular within an elite national imaginary (Majluf 2008: 20). The production of the myth of Pancho Fierro

98 has selectively edited the immense repertoire of images the artist produced over a nearly

50 year career into a few serially reproduced icons of coastal popular culture. These icons include: Afro-Peruvian dances such as the zamacueca and Son de los Diablos, street vendors, bull-fighters, various clerical and professional types, and Lima‟s famous covered women known as tapadas.37 During his early career, Fierro painted numerous depictions of Andean types and popular dances that were quite visible in Lima during the early years of the republic. Included in these lesser-known works are two visual depictions of the scissors dance, suggesting that it is quite possible that the dance might have become a national icon within costumbrista visual repertoires much earlier if it had not been for the exclusionary tactics of nineteenth century Creole intellectuals.

One of Fierro‟ depictions of the scissors dance is a sketch dated to the early 1830s currently on display as part of the Ricardo Palma collection at the Pinoteca of the

Municipality of Lima. The bottom of the sketch bears an engraving with the title “Danza de los Chunchos,” most likely made later by Palma. Chuncho is a derogatory term referring to lowland rainforest tribes, roughly translating to „savage.‟ Ethnographic studies of the scissors dance have tended to dismiss this title as an effect of Palma‟s infamous racism (Nuñez Rebaza 1990, Villegas Falcon 1998).38 That may be the case, however, Fierro‟s also appears to draw on emerging stereotypes of “the performing savage” (Stone Peters 2009). The sketch figures four male indigenous dancers, who hold large scissors in their right hands, wear skirts or loincloths around their waists, and crowns of feathers on their heads. Two musicians, a violinist and another whose instrument is not visible, accompany the dancers. Each dancer performs a different step.

Illustration 3.2

Danza de los Chunchos

Reprinted in Juan José Vega. “Antecedentes Historicos de la Danza de las Tijeras”

The costuming portrayed in this sketch is quite distinct from the hybrid European costumes worn by scissors dancers in contemporaneous visual and narrative representations of the dance. The primitivism of the image may be a reflection of the

100 exotic taste of Fierro‟s European audience, or may suggest that Fierro perceived these figures as largely outside the urban landscape.

Fierro‟s other visual representation of the scissors dance is a watercolor currently held in the unedited collection of Leonce Angrand in the Cabinet de Estampes at the

National Library of Paris (Rivera Martínez 1969, Nuñez Rebaza 1990).39 It shares in the exoticism of the earlier sketch. Instead of depicting “primitive” indigenous dancers, the watercolor figures four male dancers wearing orientalized costumes and conical headpiece with veil-like feathers on top. The bottom of the painting bears the inscription in

French “Danse des Ciseaux (Scissors Dance), which he explained “is executed in processions in some of the villages of the coast of Lima- Purely Indian Festivals, 1835”

(Rivera Martínez 1969: 181). In 1969, art historian Edgar Rivera Martínez wrote that it:

Represents the celebrated scissors dance [. . ]. The artist depicts the musicians in a vibrant and picturesque style. It represents the choreographic sensibilities and the emotions which move the artist, suggesting the strong primitivist rhythms of the dance [. . .] The anatomical and perspectival defects of the painting do not diminish the artistic quality of the image, qualities based on other values than the learned, and that in this case are accompanied by an exceptional documentary interest. (Rivera Martínez 1969: 182).

This statement inadvertently reveals the many layers of representation that constitute

Fierro‟s work and persona. From the historian‟s perspective in 1969, the scissors dance was already an icon of national culture, but to Fierro and his audience it was far more exotic. Angrand, a French diplomat, collected the watercolor and kept it in a collection with his own visual depictions of exotic Andean types. The canonization of Fierro as the embodiment of Criollo sensibilities has marginalized his earlier representations of

Andean popular culture. While Andeanist ethnographers and some art historians have

101

Illustration 3.3

Danse des Ciseaux by Pancho Fierro, 1835

Reprinted on http://www.hermanoschavez.com

recovered some of the artist‟s depictions of Andean types, they have accepted Creole attributions of ahistorical documentary value, authenticity, and even the exotic to both

Fierro‟s work and Fierro himself. These layers of mystification conceal the commercial sensibilities of Fierro‟s work and the degree to which Andean popular culture was once not as marginal to the national imaginary as later narratives suggest (Majluf 2008).

102

Illustration 3.4

Mate Burilado, Ayacucho, 1848

Reprinted in Lucy Nuñez Rebaza Los Dansaq

Other vernacular artists produced visual depictions of the scissors dance during the 1830s and 1840s. In 1848, an anonymous artisan from the city of Huamanga included the image of a scissors dancer on a mate burilado (engraved gourd) adorned with costumbrista designs. The art of painting gourds is one of the oldest in the Andean

103 region, going back to 4000 BC (Sabogal 1946, Wood 2002: 61). Indigenista artists collected this mate in the 1930s and it is currently on display at the Museo de la Cultura

Peruana.40 This particular work prominently displays the image of a tall, lanky, and elegantly dressed scissors dancer. He wears a European-derived costume with a wide- brimmed hat adorned with a single feather, and holds a pair of large scissors in his right hand and a handkerchief in his left hand. From the hat to the dancer‟s thigh hangs a long tail, clearly evoking the dance‟s association with the devil.41 He is barefoot with one- knee raised in mid-step. A harpist and a violinist accompany the dancer. They wear clearly westernized clothing styles. A number of early ethnographic observers refer to this particular source as evidence that the dance is a practice brought to Peru by the

Spanish and incorporated into indigenous culture and indigenized afterwards (Arguedas

1958, Holzmann 1966, Roel Pineda 1976). Mates have primarily acquired value within the ahistorical category of traditional art. Rather than being an example of primordial artistic techniques, the 1848 mate was the earliest example of a piece commissioned by an emergent self-made mestizo middle-class for use as a decorative object (Wood 2002:

62). Distinguished mestizo craftsman assimilated the representational strategies of costumbrismo, adorning these boutique objects with designs that evoked local cultural traditions. Local provincial elites distinguished themselves from both the coastal oligarchy and Indians through the display of indigenous culture as picturesque objects.

Another nineteenth century visual depiction of the scissors dance is a fountain sculpture that adorns the plaza of the neighborhood of Chaupi in the city of Puquio.42

Below the seated figure of an individual scissors dancer appears an engraved inscription

104

Illustration 3.5

Pilar Alberto in the Barrio of Chaupi in Puquio

Reprinted in Alfonsina Barrionuevo Ayacucho: La Comarca del Puka Amaru

with the date July 12, 1846. The sculpture is known locally as Pilar Alberto.

Contemporary scissors dance performers from Puquio remember Alberto as a legendary scissors dancer from the 1830s and 1840s. According to reputation, he could perform extraordinary pruebas de valor, including the magical ability to move objects with his mind (Barrionuevo 1988: 214, Personal Interview “Encanto,” 2009). The figured dancer wears a multi-colored costume remarkably similar to the regional costume from southern 105

Ayacucho still worn today, including the tall headdress called a montera. The fixed statue cannot circulate except in the form of photographed images. Yet, as the scissors dance has become a national emblem, the statue itself has acquired the status of an icon of the local culture of Puquio and its proud long-standing tradition, being home to some of the best scissors dancers, both past and present.43

These visual sources, along with the nineteenth century travel narratives, demonstrate that the scissors dance was not simply a timeless Andean indigenous practice. These documents do not merely reflect a pre-existing performance genre, but are circulating cultural practices in themselves that contributed to the complex visual and textual economies that determined the way both transnational interests and Peruvians themselves imagined the Peruvian nation and national types in the early republican period. The 1830s and 1840s saw the largest concentration of these representations during a period when Andean peasants had a relatively high degree of participation in the national economy. If the presence, however marginal, of the scissors dance in the emerging repertoire of national types and emblematic cultural practices during this period was later obscured by the exclusive national project of Creole elites, we should not mistake this marginality and exclusion for simplified romantic notions of cultural resistance. After a period of absence of nearly thirty years, the scissors dance only intermittently re-entered the repertoires of national representation during the crisis brought on by the disastrous War of the Pacific (1879-1883) and the emergence of the cultural nationalist movement known as indigenismo in the early twentieth century.

106

3.6. The War of the Pacific: A Crisis of National Identity

The guano boom enabled urban Creole elites to forget that the Peruvian nation was populated by a majority of indigenous highlanders. Peru‟s disastrous defeat to Chile in the War of the Pacific briefly brought indigenous soldiers into the national spotlight as patriotic heroes (Larson 2004: 178). This conflict left a traumatic scar in the national collective memory that has yet to completely heal. The events that led to the War of the

Pacific revolved around the competition between Peru, Bolivia, and Chile for British export capital as the supply of guano deposits dried up.44 Chile‟s superior naval strength financed by British corporations allowed the smaller southern neighbor to enter easily into Peruvian territory. Political squabbling against the political elite further weakened

Peru‟s position. By 1881, Chile established an occupying government in Lima. Only a small pocket of resistance by peasant guerilla fighters in the highlands, led by General

Andres Avelino Caceres held out until the signing of the Treaty of Ancón in 1883 (Klaren

2000: 188, Larson 2004: 183). Caceres was a Quechua-speaking former landowner from

Ayacucho, who succeeded in channeling the anger of indigenous peasants at the racism of invading Chilean army. He became one of the few heroes to emerge from the Peruvian side of the War of the Pacific.45 For the indigenous soldiers who fought under his command, Caceres came to embody their hopes and dreams for greater participation in the national community, which they expressed through Inca revivalism.46 The mutual respect between Caceres and his soldiers opened a space for an alternative vision of national identity to re-emerge from the ruins of the Creole nationalist project (Mallon

1995, Thurner 1997, Larson 2004). The peasant soldiers took the opportunity to pay

107 retribution to the large highland landowners who exploited them, many of whom opportunistically collaborated with the Chilean soldiers (Mallon 1983).

The figures of Caceres and his soldiers loom large over Andean festivities even today. Numerous localities enact ritual battles between Chilean troops and Caceres‟s montoneras. El Niño Lachoq, the Baby Jesus figure who serves as the patron of one of the most important scissors dance festivities in Huancavelica, appeared as a miraculous apparition to Caceres‟s troops warning them of the coming onslaught of Chilean forces as they passed through Huancavelica near the Christmas holiday. During the annual festivity, mayordomos contract scissors dancers who offer their competition as a gift in honor of El Niño Lachoq. These festivities commemorate a period in which Andean communities forced themselves into the national picture and articulated an inclusive vision of national citizenship through a multi-ethnic alliance with Caceres (Mallon 1995,

Thurner 1997, Larson 2004).

Out of the intimacy between Caceres and his troops came the documentary source that re-entered the scissors dance into the archival record. Caceres‟s wife, Antonia

Moreno de Caceres, accompanied her husband to the central highlands, as he took command of the Compaña de la Breña. She played an important, if gender defined, role in the military campaign, leading the indigenous women in taking care of the soldiers‟ wounds, and cooking and washing their clothes for them. Along the journey she kept a detailed diary of what she observed on their travels and the harrowing experiences of war

(Moreno de Caceres 1974).47 The narrative portrays empathy and intimacy, which both

General Caceres and Antonia showed to the indigenous peasants they led into battle, and

108 the peasants reciprocated to an even greater degree.48 Although not without a certain paternalism, Moreno de Caceres‟s narrative enacts the potential for a more equal partnership between Creole elites and indigenous peasants that would once again only find a marginal place in the national discourse after the war‟s end.

Remembering the stay of Caceres and his peasant brigades in Huamanga in 1882,

Moreno de Caceres described in her diary a surprise encounter with a group of scissors dancers:

One day we had the surprise to encounter a group of cheerful dancers, reminiscent of Inca times and of the Viceroyalty. One was dressed like Louis XIV, in a beautiful costume of crimson silk with frills of pretty lace in the back of the jacket, in the elbows of the sleeves, and in the pants that fell above the knees; on his head he wore an elegant hat of white feathers. This character held enormous scissors in one hand, in order to keep the rhythm of the dance, like one can see in Inca ceramics representing a dancer that celebrates the harvest. (Moreno de Caceres 1974: 65).

She further mentions two musicians, a harpist who “wore modern dress,” and another whose instrument she did not remember who wore a poncho. Like other nineteenth century observers, Moreno de Caceres depicts the dancer‟s costume as reminiscent of eighteenth century European fashions and costumed dancers. She clearly identified the dancers as indigenous peasants, and associated the dance with the time of the Incas as well as Louis XIV. Moreno de Caceres closed the description by asserting that her party attentively watched the performance, “content to see they had the good taste to guard the lovely traditions of the past” (Ibid. 65). The account is lodged within a larger narrative that sentimentalizes the national territory and its traditions. Moreno de Caceres perceived highland indigenous culture as an integral part of a larger national culture and identity.

This empathy for and intimacy with indigenous peasant cultures foreshadowed the

109 emergence of indigenista literature, and the central place of women authors in that genre, in the decades that followed the War of the Pacific (Kristal 1987).

The War of the Pacific offered peasant-soldiers an opportunity to construct themselves as political subjects and voice alternative notions of citizenship. Using similar strategies as indigenous groups in the early decades of the republic, they staked their political hopes on their intimate relationship with Caceres, who assumed the role of the paternalistic caudillo (Klaren 2000: 193, Larson 2004: 185). However, shortly after the conflict ended, Caceres‟s political ambitions forced him to abandon his former peasant brigades. In June 1884, he led a military campaign to repress peasant groups in the central highlands who occupied hacienda estates. As President, between 1885 and

1895, he turned the full force of the Peruvian military against the indigenous movements

(Larson 2004: 185). Peasant resistance to these campaigns muted an emergent narrative that honored the montoneros as patriotic citizens and war heroes. With reconstruction underway, elite intellectuals created a hardened image of the savage “Indian” as the scapegoat blamed for the epic defeat (Klaren 2000: 193, Larson 2004: 196). During the final decade of the nineteenth century, “The Indian Problem” became a key question of national identity hotly debated well into the twentieth century. Conservative voices of export elite asserted that the indigenous majority was a backwards race who lacked national sentiment.49 Positivist discourses of scientific racism widened the gulf between a modern and “white” coastal region and the primitive and “Indian” highlands. After

Caceres served two terms, the Civilista Party associated with the aristocratic oligarchy gained power from 1895 to 1919 in a period that most historians refer to as the

110

Aristocratic Republic (Kristal 1987, Klaren 2000, Larson 2004).

3.7. The Staging of the Inca Past: The Emergence of Indigenismo

However, neither the rule of the Civilista Party nor dominant images of apathetic and savage Indians went uncontested. If scientific positivist discourses of race and space fueled these dominant visions of nationhood, positivism also enabled alternative national visions that evoked “the romantic primitivism of an ahistorical culture” (Larson 2004:

199). Critical voices, such as those of Manuel Gonzalez Prada and Clorinda Matto de

Turner, accepted the oligarchy‟s assertions that Peru had lost the war because the Indians‟ lacked nationalism. However, they blamed this situation not on the innate backwardness of the Indians themselves, but on the exploitative practices of highland landlords and the negligence of aristocratic urban elites (Kristal 1987, Klaren 2000). The emergence of dissident discourses in the 1890s paved the way for the indigenista movement of the early twentieth century. Yet, while romantic images of “the Indian” race and culture were central to these desires for a “New Peru” to emerge out of the ruins of colonial and neocolonial structures of power, these discourses often denied historical agency to the indigenous subjects they claimed to redeem.

The emblematic figure of late nineteenth century dissident views on “the Indian: was the poet and orator Manuel Gonzalez Prada. He modeled his position on enlightenment values, scientific positivism, and artistic realism.50 Gonzalez Prada proposed that education and science were the only solutions to the stark national divisions that plagued the country. In numerous public appearances, including his famous speech at the Politeama theatre in 1888, Gonzalez Prada argued that the

111 indigenous masses were the most authentic embodiments of the nation with the capacity to progress through education and the modernization of the countryside (Gonzalez Prada

2003). He claimed:

The real Peru isn‟t made up of the groups of American-born Spaniards living on the strip of land situated between the Pacific and the Andes; the nation is made up of the masses of Indians living on the Eastern slope of the mountains. For three hundred years the Indian has been relegated to the lowest strata of civilization, a hybrid with all of the vices of the savage and none of the virtues of the European. Just teach him to read and write and in a quarter of a century you will see if he is capable of achieving dignity or not. It is up to you schoolteachers, to galvanize a race fallen to sleep under the tyranny of the justice of the peace, the governor and the priest, that unholy trinity responsible for brutalizing the Indian. (Gonzalez Prada 2003: 49).

Although he had no first-hand knowledge of Andean life, Gonzalez Prada became the most important influence on provincial indigenista writers. His Circulo Literario became the intellectual home of Clorinda Matto de Turner, the author of Aves Sin Nido (1891), which many consider the first Peruvian indigenista novel. Matto de Turner adopted

Gonzalez Prada‟s positivism and realist lens on the social problems of highland life, offering a liberal enlightened heroine as the savior of the victimized indigenous race

(Kristal 1987). Later indigenistas of the 1910s and 1920s, like Gonzalez Prada and Matto de Turner, imagined the indigenous masses as an authentic and pure race that required an enlightened vanguard to liberate itself from its degraded social condition. After a period of exile in Europe in the 1890s exposed him to anarcho-syndicalism, Gonzalez Prada returned to Peru and became an inspirational leader of the still nascent labor movement and a precursor for the socialist thinkers of the 1920s (ibid.).

The emergence of dissident politics and indigenismo during the 1890s intersected

112 with an influx of foreign archaeologists, anthropologists, and linguists who applied new positivist theories of race and culture to Peru‟s glorious Inca heritage. The German medical doctor, linguist, and archaeologist Ernst Middendorf observed the scissors dance on the outskirts of Cuzco in the early 1890s.51 According to his own account Middendorf was a medical doctor by profession, but his greatest passion was scientific research on ancient AmerIndian languages, archaeology, and cultures. Although technically an amateur scientist, Middendorf embodied the new more specialized models of European exploration in South America. His three-volume travel account, entitled Perú (1893-

1895), was widely read by both the scientific community and a general readership. He made acknowledged contributions to both Andean archaeology and linguistics.52 In the third volume of Peru, Middendorf described a small chapel he came upon in the village of

Pocoy, just outside of Cuzco.53 He witnessed, “An Indian wearing the picturesque costume of a dancer, with a crown of feathers on his head [. . .] who danced in front of the altar. He executed strange jumps while another was seated in a pew making the rhythm with a violin made of old boards” (Middendorf 1973: 410). His guide told him that the dance was an act of devotion performed during the Festival of Holy Cross.

Middendorf was the first and only nineteenth century commentator to explicitly note a religious significance to the scissors dance. He was quite familiar with the developments in comparative religion and other disciplines that contributed to the

Cambridge School and the later emergence of anthropology as a scientific discipline

(Stone Peters 2009). Middendorf suggests that the dance was a survival of the Inca Cult of the Sun later admitted into Catholic festivities by colonial priests. Middendorf

113 universalized the notion of performance as a sacred offering by comparing the dance to familiar ancient Western practices from the bible. Stone Peters argues that the decade of the 1890s represented a major shift in ethnological discourses about “primitive” performance. Cultural practices ethnographic observers had previously perceived as merely strange entertainments suddenly came to the forefront of the ethnographic sciences. Ethnographers came to perceive the performance of ancient civilizations, including classical Greek drama, as derived from primitive ritual needs and urges. The equation Middendorf makes between the religious performances of European antiquity and Andean peasants can be seen as part of this larger schema. He argued that, “offering dances to the gods has been common amongst the most diverse groups of people such as

King David dancing in front of the Arc of Alliance upon entering Jerusalem” (Ibid.).

The late nineteenth century dissident movements, the growing interest in the

Andean region by European archaeologists, anthropologists, and linguists, and the modernization of the countryside conditioned an important early twentieth century cultural nationalist movement known as indigenismo. This movement challenged the centralism, elitism, and Eurocentrism of the Lima-based oligarchy‟s vision of nation by rooting an alternative vision of the nation in Peru‟s Inca heritage and to a lesser extent, the authentic Indian race (Poole 1997, Mendoza 2000, Cadena 2000). As the former capital of the Inca Empire and the home of a well-developed colonial tradition of

Quechua literature, poetry, and theatre, Cuzco became the center of early indigenista activity. The Cuzco school of indigenismo has its roots in the increasing study of the

Quechua language and Inca archaeology in the 1880s and 1890s by both foreign scholars

114 and Peruvian intellectuals. During this same period, a new educated middle-class that benefited from the burgeoning wool export industry turned towards a romantic view of

Andean peasants in order to claim Cuzco as a regional center of Peruvian culture.54 The years between 1910 and 1930 represented the climax of Cuzco indigenismo and its influence in the larger national culture (Poole 1997: 182). Modern Inca drama became a national phenomenon that articulated a strengthening provincial nationalism against the coastal oligarchy. One major impetus for this large-scale Inca revival was the reformation of the Universidad de San Antonio Abad de Cusco in 1909, brought about by the first student strike in Peruvian history against the conservatism and traditionalism of the curriculum (Tamayo Herrera 1980: 122).55

While most studies of indigenismo have focused on literature, the development of

Inca theatre became a primary way Cuzco intellectuals gained influence in the larger national culture (Itier 1995, 2000, Cadena 2000, Mendoza 2007).56 Through the enactment of Inca history provincial intellectual elites claimed Inca heritage as their own, distinguishing themselves from both exploitative gamonales and common Andean peasants (Itier 2000).57 Between 1912 and 1919, Inca theatre companies travelled the country, becoming a voice of expression of the oppositional movement that led to the election of labor-friendly and populist presidential candidate Guillermo Billinghurst in

1912 (Itier 2000, Klaren 2000: 222-223). While the principal artists behind Inca theatre companies were intellectual elites, the productions had wide appeal for a mass, mostly

Quechua-speaking audience, and sometimes included artists from popular backgrounds as musicians and dancers (Itier 2000: 37, Mendoza 2007). Cesar Itier argues, “A large

115 public, probably mostly monolingual, attended the performances. Quechua dramatic performances were probably the only space in Cuzco at the time where people from different social strata could share the same cultural and intellectual experience, and they therefore represented one of the few venues in which the presence of a national community, over and above the ethnic and cultural differences separating the different groups in everyday life was evident” (2000: 37). Music and dance performance embedded within Inca drama formed a great part of its popular appeal. Inca drama intersected with an art music scene that drew on Inca themes. Classically-trained erudite composers collected indigenous melodies and used them to construct harmonized symphonic composition, which very often became incorporated into theatrical productions (Mendoza 2007). The most important composer of Incaic music of the 1910s was Huanuco-born Daniel Alomía Robles. Robles composed the legendary zarzuela El

Condor Pasa, which premiered at the Teatro Mazzi in Lima in 1912.58 Robles and other composers of Incaic music drew on the music of contemporary peasants in order to reconstruct the lost national traditions from the Inca past. At the time it was common

“for contemporary Andean culture to be considered a direct extension of Inca culture, devoid of any changes or transformations, as well as for Andean music to be deemed as a homogenous entity, with no local or regional variation” (Romero 1985: 223).

The revival of Inca music inspired the first systematic ethnographic investigation of Andean music, by French husband and wife team Raoul and Marguerite D‟Harcourt.59

In 1924, they published their immense monograph Les Musique de los Incas y Sus

Supervivances (The Music of the Incas and its Survivals) (D‟Harcourt 1990). They

116 argued that the peasant‟s illiteracy and rich oral tradition enabled the preservation of musical elements that reached back to the time of the Incas.60 In the chapter about

Festivals and Dances the D‟Harcourt‟s briefly mention the scissors dance as a seasonal ritual linked to the annual harvest of alpaca wool. Situating the dance within their larger argument about the continuity of Andean culture overtime, they argue that such festivities and the dance itself were survivals of a rich Inca culture that revolved around communal agricultural work (Ibid. 117). At the end of the text, they included the earliest available photographic evidence of the scissors dance. The photograph, taken by a Dr. Vergne in

1914, portrays eight dancers from the city of Ayacucho. They wear simple costumes, suggestive of peasant dress of the time period. Several harpists stand behind the dancers, their instruments towering above the dancers‟ heads and dominating the frame. Although the D‟Harcourt‟s account emphasizes cultural purity and continuity, the photograph depicts contradictory evidence of hybridity and change (Ibid. 547).

3.8. La Patria Nueva (1919-1930)

The final years of the D‟harcourt‟s research (1919-1921) corresponded to the triumph of this heterogenous coalition with the defeat of the Civilista Party by Augusto

B. Leguia in 1919 (Klaren 2000: 256).61 As a former Civilista President himself with strong ties to North American capital, Leguia‟s artful use of populist rhetoric had always been fraught with contradictions (Klaren 2000: 241). Nevertheless, Leguia appropriated the Inca revivalism that had unified the opposition and baptized his regime as a new era in Peruvian politics “La Patria Nueva” (new nation) (Itier 2000: 58). He sought to modernize and industrialize the national economy and strengthen the centralized state.

117

Although contradictory, Leguia‟s evocation of a “New Peru” invited a vigorous debate over the future of the nation that reverberated for the entirety of the twentieth century.

While Leguia‟s Patria Nueva brought about remarkable social, political, and economic transformations in Peru, his populist rhetoric contrasted sharply with his reliance on foreign capital and his increasingly autocratic style of governance (Klaren 2000: 241-247,

Cadena 2000: 86-88). As part of his populist platform, Leguia adopted a liberal indigenista ideology that he called “official indigenismo” (Cadena 2000: 87). A new constitution in 1919 recognized the collective property rights of indigenous communities for the first time. In 1920, Leguia created the Office of Indigenous Affairs, headed by radical indigenista sociologist and lawyer Hildebrando Castro Pozo, as part of the

Ministry of the Interior (Klaren 2000: 247). Leguia threw his support behind the Comite

Pro-Indigena Tawantinsuyu, was a coalition between Lima-based Pro-Indian activists, radical provincial indigenistas, and self-identified indigenous leaders from Puno, Cuzco, and Ayacucho. They proposed a quite radical platform of “indigenous citizenship empowered by literacy” (Cadena 2000: 88). Contesting the dominant definition of indigeneity limited to illiterate agriculturalists, they showcased literate indigenous leaders as political actors on the national stage (Cadena 2000: 89-96). Leguia‟s need to foster alliances amongst the popular classes opened a space for the articulation of indigenous citizenship within a renovated national community.

Leguia‟s self-anointed title as the protector of the Indian race had always coexisted uneasily with his aggressive program of capitalist modernization largely financed by foreign loans. His Ley de Conscripción Vial, which allocated forced unpaid labor on

118 state road-building projects, was presumably extended to all able-bodied adult males but in practice was limited to only indigenous peasants (Cadena 2000: 88). Although the law had existed since 1920, the massive acceleration of road-building in 1923 caused a vigorous debate within the Comite Pro-Indigena Tawantinsuyo, splintering the organization into liberal and radical factions. During the same year, Leguia‟s increasingly autocratic style of governance and violent repressive actions against the peasant movements he once supported caused widespread disenchantment with the modernizing President from the left. After consolidating his support amongst liberal modernizers and forcing most of his strongest Civilista enemies into exile, Leguia no longer needed the radical dissident elements whose support he once courted (Cadena

2000: 96-97). According to Itier, this fragmentation meant the decline of Inca theatre as a popular expression of a unified and utopian national identity (Itier 2000: 81). After 1923,

Leguia‟s “official indigenismo” became largely symbolic, endorsing the valuation of a romantic, and unthreatening indigenous culture as the iconic face of the Peruvian nation.

The leftist opposition that came to represent new possibilities for imagining a more inclusive Peruvian nation from the mid-1920s onward arose out of the social movements that brought Leguia to power. The paradigmatic figures of the Peruvian left,

Victor Haya Raul de la Torre and José Carlos Mariátegui, both rose to prominence with the student and labor movements of 1918-1919 (Klaren 2000: 258). Haya de la Torre was the leader of the student movement who initially supported Leguia but turned against him in 1923. That year, Leguia forced him into exile where he founded the Alianza

Popular Revolucionario de America (APRA) from Mexico in 1928. APRA was largely

119 based on the populist nationalism and anti-colonial myth of mestizaje that fueled the

Mexican Revolution and became one of the most important forces in twentieth century

Peruvian politics (Klaren 2000: 254). Just as important to the emergence of a strong

Peruvian left despite his early death at just thirty-six years of age, was José Carlos

Mariátegui. Mariátegui was an independent journalist with a developing socialist ideology who became an early critic of the Leguia administration from the left (Liss

1984: 129). In late 1919, Leguia offered him the choice between exile in the form of a government stipend to study in Europe or a jail term. Mariátegui‟s exile in Italy solidified his socialist convictions and education in the nuances of Marxist theory.62 He returned to the Peru in 1923 with a renewed identification the popular classes.63 He took over the leadership of the Peruvian left after the recent exile of Haya de la Torre, who remained an ally until after a highly publicized split in 1928 (Klaren 2000: 258-259).

Upon his return to Lima, Mariátegui‟s house on Jirón Washington, nicknamed “el rincón rojo” (red corner), became the most important meeting place for an emerging leftist intelligentsia (Klaren 2000: 256, Coronado 2008: 26-27).64 From 1926-1930,

Mariátegui edited the journal Amauta, which became the most important indigenista and socialist intellectual forum of the period (Wise 1980). Most of the most important indigenista works in literature, poetry, visual arts, sociological essays, and political theory first appeared on the pages of Amauta (Becker 1993, Escajadillo 1999). One of the most important works published in the early issues of Amauta was La Tempestad en los Andes, by Cuzco-based historian, archaeologist, educator, and activist Luis E.

Valcárcel. Valcárcel‟s romanticized view of the Inca Empire as a socialist utopia

120 profoundly impacted Mariátegui‟s own thinking about the potential for creating a “New

Peru” through the figure of the Revolutionary Indian.65 In his messianic manifesto,

Valcárcel called for the rebirth and resurrection of Tawantinsuyo through the uprising of the oppressed indigenous commoners with the aid of sympathetic intellectuals like himself (Leibner 1999: 150-157, Escajadillo 1999). The language of the survival and rebirth of the spiritual purity of the Indian race adopted by both Valcárcel and Mariátegui, and disseminated through Amauta, animated later ethnographic characterizations of the scissors dance. Although neither Mariátegui nor Valcárcel directly mentioned the scissors dance, one short section of La Tempestad en los Andes, “La Danza Heroica” depicts warrior dancers from Cuzco who defend themselves from a military attack with a

“magical” ritual dance in remarkably similar terms as later ethnographic comparisons between the scissors dance and the Taki Onqoy (Escajadillo 1999: 185).

In his own masterwork, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality,

Mariátegui appropriated the messianic utopianism of Valcárcel into his own historical- materialist account of Peruvian history.66 He recast “the Indian Problem” as a socioeconomic issue tied to land tenure and the latifundia system. He argued that despite their subjection to semi-feudal domination, the Indians retained the cultural and spiritual values which animated Tawantinsuyo and suggested that the ayllu was an archaic form of communism. Thus, through the interventions of a committed Marxist vanguard, the two conflicting strands of Peruvian society and history would finally converge, creating a new society founded on the marriage between indigenous and modern forms of socialism

(Liss 1984: 138, Leibner 1999, Klaren 2000: 256, Coronado 2008: 28-29). For an

121 intellectual who wrote passionately about the intersections of history and culture,

Mariátegui painted a decidedly ahistorical portrait of indigenous culture. He valued indigeneity primarily for its disruptive qualities; it‟s very alterity made it the natural enemy of Western capitalism and imperialism. Mariátegui evoked the objectified figure of “the revolutionary indio,” available to him only through lettered indigenista cultural production, such as the messianic manifesto of Valcárcel, the poetry of Cesar Vallejo, and the paintings of José Sabogal (Coronado 2008: 21-51). If Mariátegui became the most articulate early voice of the “New Peru,” he valued indigenous culture as a timeless repository of tradition, nature, and communal ethos, yet denied the possibility of a modern indigenous subjectivity and agency until the coming of a distant and utopian future (Ibid.).67 While Mariátegui never wrote about the scissors dance, and was probably not aware of its existence, he sounded the major notes central to its recognition and canonization by later Andeanist intellectuals as a representative icon of the authentic and disruptive presence of Andean indigeneity.68

Besides Valcárcel, one of the most important sources for Mariátegui‟s utopian view of the ayllu as a precursor to modern socialism was the work of sociologist

Hildebrando Castro Pozo.69 In 1920, President Leguia appointed Castro Pozo as the first

Head of the Office of Indigenous Affairs. He instituted the research and infrastructure necessary to implement the official registry of indigenous communities mandated by the new constitution and presided over the national congress meetings of the Comité Pro-

Indigena Tawantinsuyu between 1921 and 1923. In 1923, he split with Leguia over the president‟s repressive actions against peasant rebellions in Puno. After a short exile in

122

Panama, he returned to Peru illegally and published Nuestra Comunidad Indigena in

1924 (Leibner 1999: 121-123). This massive monograph was one of the earliest proto- ethnographic studies of the lifeways and institutions of Andean indigenous communities.

Although Castro Pozo had conducted the research as an official representative of a decidedly capitalist administration, his newfound independence allowed him to unambiguously interpret his findings through a Marxist lens. He mystified the ayllu as a vital and surviving form of ancient indigenous communism with revolutionary potential in the present. Mariátegui himself acknowledged that Castro Pozo‟s work provided the empirical basis for his own theories of indigenous socialism (Montoya 1979: XIV-XV,

Wise 1980: 76, Liss 1984: 138, Franco 1989, Leibner 1999: 121-122).70

The ninth chapter of Nuestra Comunidad Indigena provides a broad overview of popular customs, myths, poetry, musical forms, and dances of Andean communities.

Castro Pozo defined these practices as collective representations that encourage the communal solidarity binding the ayllu together. He pays particular attention to Andean folkloric dances as important sites of the production of communal solidarity. He argues that these dance forms “not only represent the aesthetic emotion of the movement that is generated by the voluptuousness or happiness of triumph, but also the state of civilization in which they exist” (Castro Pozo 1924: 225). The variety and inventiveness of Andean indigenous dances reflects the survival of the highly civilized Inca race. The scissors dance is amongst the many dances he describes. He classified the dance as a hybrid practice closely resembling European mummers, jugglers, and acrobats performed for the purposes of recreation and entertainment. Castro Pozo appreciated the “admirable tests

123 of agility, balance, and skill, such as rolling up like a snake, dancing on their hands or one dancer over another without losing the rhythm or abandoning the scissors accompaniment” that the dancers realize in competition (Ibid. 232). While he emphasized the entertainment value of the dance rather than ritual efficacy, he placed his description of the dance within the larger framework of dance as an engine of collective solidarity. This work anticipates later Andeanist ethnographic depictions of the dance by attempting the first systematic classification with a general description across regional varieties, rather than an observation of a single performance in a particular locality.

3.9. The Folklorization of Andean Performance

Although he seldom used the term, Castro Pozo‟s perspective on the popular customs of Andean indigenous communities signals the broader shift in indigenismo from

Inca revival to the discovery of Andean “folklore.” By the time the Misión Peruana de

Arte Incaica embarked on their international tour of 1923, they only performed short segments of well-known Incaic dramas such as Ollantay, filling the rest of the program with folkloric music and dance scenes (Mendoza 2007).71 In 1924, members of the

Misión founded the Centro Qosqo de Arte Nativo, the first cultural institution dedicated to the investigation and staging of folkloric music and dance in Peru (Mendoza 2007).

That same year, the publication of the studies of the D‟Harcourt and Castro Pozo helped solidify interest in idealized representations of peasant customs as a strategy to construct provincial and regional identities. Such provincial intellectuals and artists initiated the process that recent scholars call “folklorization,” in Peru (Rowe and Schelling 1991, Guss

2000, Mendoza 2000, 2007, Borland 2006).72 Mendoza defines “folklorization” as the

124

“process whereby public forms of expression are selected as being representative of a whole region or nation and are staged and promoted as such” (Mendoza 2007: 6). Others have also located the related phenomenon of the golden age of ethnographic research on

Andean folkloric practices in the 1930s and 1940s, contributing to the formalization of

Peruvian anthropology (Degregori 2000, Mendizibal 2000).

One of Leguía‟s gestures towards “official indigenismo” was the staging of the first Concurso de Música y Bailes Nacionales (Contest of National Music and Dance) in

1927 at Pampa de Amancaes in the district of Rimac near central Lima. After 1923, after his tumultuous split with Haya de la Torre, Castro Pozo, and the Comité Pro-Indigena

“Tawantinsuyo,” Leguía‟s “official indigenismo” was limited to a series of symbolic gestures (Mendoza 2007). The event was held on June 24, which in 1921 Leguía had declared “Día del Indio” (Day of the Indian), showcasing Andean musical and dance groups amongst the expanding masses of migrants in the city of Lima. This first contest was such a success, drawing nearly 50,000 spectators. The next year it expanded to include qualifying contests in all of the departmental capitals of Peru. By the mid-1930s migrant performers from the popular classes participated in the event in large numbers contributing to the opening of new venues for commercial Andean folkloric performance

(Vivanco 1973: 34-37). To open the second contest in 1928, Leguía offered a speech that illustrates the nationalistic value placed on folkloric performance:

Nothing expresses better the collective psychology of the people than its music. The race, the imperial power, the catastrophe of the conquest, the pain of more than three centuries of domination, and the richness of a glorious dawn after this unfortunate event exist in our Incaic music. The vernacular artists that have come from all corners of the country to take part in this occasion attest to the marvels of our folklore, the riches of our

125

musical sources and original choreographic art. This is not a product of study or a maneuver. This is born spontaneously, because it exists in the nature of our passionate people. (qtd. in Vivanco 1973: 37).

The president evoked the notion of the collective psychology of the people, represented by the disembodied and homogenous essence of the figure of the “Indian.” He portrayed the colonial age as degenerative of the national spirit and celebrated the revival of Incaic and Andean culture as embodying the emergence of a new nation.73

The scissors dance was largely outside of the Cuzco-centered cultural production of the national symbols during the classic period of indigenismo of the 1910s and 1920s.

However, the major economic, political, economic, and cultural transformations initiated by Leguía‟s modernizing administration, had a major impact on the scissors dance‟s development as a national icon. The folkloric activities of middle-class Ayacuchano intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s were closely tied to major transformations in the economic and cultural influence of the Ayacucho region as a result of Leguía‟s modernizing projects of the 1920s (Bustamante 1943, Arguedas 1975 [1958], Vivanco

1976, 1988). Prior to the construction of two major highways in the 1920s, one that connected the city of Ayacucho to the rising provincial metropolis of Huancayo, and another that connected Puquio to Nazca, Huamanga was the center of a prosperous economy of artisanal production (Arguedas 1975 [1958], Tucker 2006, Ulfe 2006).74

After the construction of these two highways, the prosperity of this regional economy dried up and the single circuit of performance split into two, creating two highly distinct regional styles. The style from Huancavelica remained connected to the

126

Illustration 3.6

Folklore Performance Group of Moises Vivanco, c. 1940

From the Collection of Martin Chambi Reprinted in Thomas Turino Music in the Andes

mestizo city of Huamanga and developed further connections to Huancayo. As indigenous musicians from this region often worked under contract with indigenista composers in Huamanga and Huancayo, the dance acquired a more Westernized look and sound in the early twentieth century. incorporating classical harmonies, elements of ballet, the French minuet, and the Spanish and coastal zamacueca (Villegas Falcon 1998:

61). It was this particular style that intellectuals such as Manuel Bustamante, linked to the Centro Cultural Ayacucho, began to value as part of the regional folkloric repertoire in the 1940s (Bustamante 1943, Tucker 2006). In the same decade, the folkloric performance companies of Moises and Alejandro Vivanco incorporated several scissors 127 dancers into their staged performances in Huamanga, Lima, and other provincial cities

(Arguedas 1976 [1944], Vivanco 1988, Turino 2007). Meanwhile, the regional style from southern Ayacucho, imagined by ethnographers to be more authentically indigenous entered the national imagination primarily through the interventions of influential mid- twentieth century public intellectual José María Arguedas (1911-1969), whose work I analyze in the next chapter.

128

Chapter 4 The Agony of José María Arguedas

4.1. Introduction In his acceptance speech for the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega Prize in 1968, novelist and anthropologist José María Arguedas staged a poignant moment in the transformation of Peruvian identity.1 He referred to himself as a “modern Quechua individual who thanks to his awareness of the value of his culture was able to broaden and enrich it with what he had learned and assimilated of art created by other peoples” (Arguedas 2000:

268). Arguedas recognized his own subjectivity as a point of encounter between

Quechua culture and Western modernity. Later in the speech he exclaimed, “I am not an acculturated man. I am a Peruvian who like a cheerful demon proudly speaks in

Christian and in Indian, in Spanish and in Quechua” (Ibid. 269). He signaled the transgressiveness of his hybrid identity in relation to the dominant national culture.2 In this speech, Arguedas staged his own identity as emblematic of the bilingual and bicultural subjects who populated his utopian vision of a “New Peru.” He later implied that his objectives as a hybrid intellectual included decentering the epistemological status of Western rationality. After acknowledging his debts to Mariátegui and Marxism as a way of understanding the stark economic and political inequalities and injustices that characterized Peruvian society, he added, “How far my understanding of socialism went I really do not know. But it did not kill the magic in me” (Ibid. 270). As numerous critics have suggested, this passage critiques orthodox Marxism‟s devaluation of culture as a

129 basis for political action (Montoya 2004, Hayatoshi 2002, Cadena 2005).3 Yet beyond the status of “magic” as an alternative to the hegemony of Western rationalism, few critics have explored what this term might have meant for Arguedas‟s intellectual project.

Arguedas is a towering figure of Latin American literature and the concept of

“magic” has formed an important, if undertheorized, aspect of literary perspectives on his work.4 Literary studies on Arguedas have often invoked the notions of “mythic thought” and “oral culture” to describe the multivalent uses of Andean popular culture in his work

(Castro Klaren 1973, Rowe 1979, Lienhard 1981, Columbus 1988). However,

Arguedas‟s literary staging of Andean popular culture exceeds the interpretive frame of

“magic realism” that typically contains it (Franco 2006: 178). Angel Rama and Antonio

Cornejo Polar offer related but more complex and historicized perspectives on

Arguedas‟s uses of popular culture through their theories of “narrative transculturation” and “heterogeneous literature” respectively (Rama 1982, Cornejo Polar 1980, 2003).5

They celebrated Arguedas as a mediating figure able to not only translate subaltern cultures into objects of literary representation, but also to destabilize the dominant

Western form of the novel through the incorporation of indigenous cultural forms into lettered cultural production. Through the interventions of Rama in particular, Arguedas acquired a privileged place in the genealogy of the concept of transculturation, originally formulated by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz (Ortiz 1947).6 I do not wish to deny

Rama and Cornejo Polar‟s seductive characterizations of Arguedas‟s work, but rather suggest they are constitutive elements in the construction of Arguedas‟s public persona as a “cultural hero” (Cornejo Polar 1991, Montoya 1998, Flores Galindo 2007).7

130

In this chapter I explore the multi-layered connections between Arguedas‟s uses of “magic” and performance through a careful examination of the scissors dance as a symbolic figure he repeatedly evoked throughout the different phases of work. In my analysis, the concept of performance refers to two distinct but interrelated aspects of

Arguedas‟s work and public persona. I focus on the central importance of Andean cultural performance to Arguedas‟s intellectual project. By staging the scissors dance in literary and anthropological texts, and theatrical folklore performances, Arguedas incorporated the dance into the national imaginary as an emblem of the creativity of

Andean popular culture. Unlike other indigenista writers, he constructed Andean popular culture not as a picturesque object but as a “legitimate subject and producer of knowledge” capable of creating an alternative Andean modernity (Lambright 2007: 10).

The magic Arguedas attributed to the dance corresponds to Michael Taussig‟s ruminations on Benjamin‟s notion of “the mimetic faculty.” Taussig argues, “The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power”

(Taussig 1993: xiii). The power of mimesis lies in “the compulsion to become the Other”

(Ibid. xviii). In Arguedas‟s work, the scissors dancer appears less as a human performer than a purifying point of encounter between the human community and the otherness of subterranean sacred forces. Taussig‟s suggestion of the magic of mimesis links

Arguedas‟s staging of the scissors dance to the performativity of his public persona.8 He aimed to deterritorialize the dominant language and culture, constituting literature (and anthropology) as a performative domain that called into being new subjectivities and

131 cultural configurations (Deleuze and Guattari 1986).9 Between Arguedas‟s performative refashioning of his childhood memories of intimacy with indigenous culture, his mimetic engagement with the scissors dance, and his death by suicide in 1969, the dance became forever linked to the continuing presence of the author‟s public persona in the national imaginary. During Arguedas‟s funeral ceremony, indigenous scissors dancers performed the “agonia,” the melody and dance sequence that Arguedas unforgettably dramatized in his most famous short story, “La Agonia de Rasu Ñiti” (1962). Equal parts utopian and tragic, this event offered Arguedas‟s bicultural subjectivity as a sacrificial surrogate that called forth a modern indigenous subjectivity and a new Peruvian nation.

4.2. (Auto)Biography and the Performance of Self

Arguedas‟s memories of his childhood intimacy with indigenous culture inform his fictional and ethnographic writing and set him apart from earlier indigenista writers and has endowed the writer with a powerful aura of authenticity as a “cultural hero” who embodies the collective experience of a nation in transition (Cornejo Polar 1991, Flores

Galindo 2007, Montoya 1998, Landreau 1998, 2002, Tarica 2008).10 Posthumous critical admirers frequently portray him as “an Indian of the Heart” able to project an authentic indigenous worldview into works written in Spanish (Muñoz 1982, Landreau 1998,

Tarica 2008). However, John Landreau notes that Arguedas‟s fiercest critics use similar language to denigrate his writing as simplistic, naïve, and even primitive.11 Landreau argues that the truth-claims of Arguedas‟s unique (auto)biography should be viewed critically as “a complex fiction; an intricate textual and performative mediation, not only an intuitive or transparent form of representation” (Landreau 1998: 100).12 He advocates

132 for a performative understanding of Arguedas‟s reworking of his childhood memories as material for fictional and anthropological writing, and for the construction of his public persona. Arguedas‟s work constituted a complex and transformative poetics of the self

(Smith and Watson 2010: 214).13 Through performative life-writing he sought to recreate his past intimacy with indigenous culture and to work through traumatic experiences (Fass Emery 1996: 48-49). The scissors dance was a charismatic and mysterious element of those childhood memories of intimacy with indigenous culture.14

Arguedas was born on January 11, 1911 in the small highland city of

Andahuaylas to a typical provincial middle class family.15 His mother died in 1914 when

Arguedas was only three years old, a tragic event that haunted him throughout his life. In

1917, Arguedas‟s father remarried the widow Grimanesa Arangoita de Pacheco, the wealthy owner of a large hacienda in San Juan de Lucanas, near Puquio (Pinilla 1994:

34). Grimanesa apparently disliked the boy and sent him to live and work amongst the indigenous servants, where he found much-needed maternal love.16 He later recalled,

“The Indians, especially the women, saw me exactly as if I were one of them, although being white I required even more affection, which they gave to me with open arms”

(Arguedas 1969: 36). Arguedas became fluent in Quechua and participated fully in the life of the indigenous community on the hacienda. When his father visited the hacienda every Sunday, José María was cleaned up, dressed in respectable clothes, and allowed to sit in the parlor with the family.17 But when his father left he returned to the Indian quarters. He began to identify with the world of the servants in the kitchen and the saw the parlor as space of oppressive discipline and artificiality (Pinilla 1994: 35). After

133 more than a year of living in this manner, his stepbrother Pablo Pacheco returned from his studies and took over as the overseer of the indigenous servants. He humiliated the men and forced Arguedas to witness him raping countless indigenous women.18

In 1921, José María and his elder brother Aristides escaped from this oppressive environment, taking refuge with an uncle at the hacienda Viseca, near Puquio. Arguedas encountered the free landowning indigenous communities of the region. He learned to differentiate between subjugated hacienda Indians and the wealthier and more independent Indians of Utej Pampa.19 The indigenous leaders Felipe Maywa and Victo

Pusa counseled the young Arguedas, forever remaining a strong presence in his life. He admired how the indigenous authorities drew on their ancestral knowledge and a desire for progress for their communities.20 The differences between hacienda and free Indians during his time in Lucanas had a profound impact on the formation of Arguedas‟s intellectual project (Pinilla 1994: 38-39).21 He later wrote, “In Puquio and San Juan de

Lucanas I was a spectator and actor of all the power the indigenous population felt it had and I felt it effectively had” (Arguedas 1986: 18). The theatrical language of this statement reveals the tensions between intimacy and distance that defined Arguedas‟s complicated relationship to “authentic” Indians during his childhood. His perspective as both a participant and observer of indigenous culture situated him as the ideal ethnographer many years before he formally trained in anthropology. His early fictional works constantly dramatize the possibilities and trauma associated with a liminal position between conflicting social worlds, belonging to both and neither at the same time.

134

In 1923-1924, Arguedas spent a year travelling with his father to various highland towns including Ayacucho, Yauyos, Cuzco, Chalhuanca, and Andahuaylas.22 Finally, he settled in the city of Abancay in order to continue his studies.23 Later in 1924, he began secondary school in Ica. This was his first extended stay on the coast where he experienced discrimination against highlanders firsthand, as “the Serrano (highlander) and the Indian constituted one bloc different from the coastal and Western world” (Pinilla

1994: 50).24 Furthermore, his rejection at the hands of the most beautiful girl in his class caused Arguedas to experience his first emotional crisis.25 Yet the alienation he felt in

Ica deepened his identification with indigenous culture and he vowed to dedicate his life to correcting Peru‟s deep-seated prejudices. Due to this emotional crisis, his father sent him to Huancayo where he attended Colegio Santa Isabel. Through the pages of Amauta,

Arguedas began to associate his intimacy with Andean culture as part of a growing national consciousness (Pinilla 1994: 54-56). Inspired by the work of Mariátegui and the other authors of Amauta, he founded the literary magazine Antorcha with some friends.26

In 1931, Arguedas enrolled at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in

Lima, the oldest and most prestigious university in Peru, where he studied literature. The other students in his literature classes saw his direct knowledge of indigenous culture as a unique and valuable asset. For the first time, Arguedas began to fashion himself as an authentic Quechua-speaking indigenous writer. At San Marcos, he participated in the growing leftist student movement inspired by Mariátegui and Amauta. Carmen María

Pinilla argues that Arguedas modeled his authorial persona on the heroic writer described by Mariátegui, who had the ability to give voice to the “new Peruvianness” by creating

135 master works that captured the interiority of the indigenous soul (Pinilla 1994: 66-72).27

Nevertheless, he developed a critical perspective on the representation of indigenous culture by the writers of Amauta and other indigenistas.28 As he read more Peruvian literature, the false image of indigenous characters he encountered strengthened his resolve to write against simplistic stereotypes. He reflected, “When I arrived at the

University and I read the books that attempted to describe the indigenous population [. . .]

I felt so indignant, so strange, so defrauded that I considered it indispensable for me to describe Andean man as he was and as I knew him from direct experience” (Arguedas

1976: 412). In 1933, San Marcos closed due to increasing leftist demonstrations.

Arguedas took advantage of this interruption in his studies to publish his first short stories.29 His literary career began in a corrective fashion, utilizing his childhood memories in novel ways to create a realistic portrait of indigenous reality.

4.3. Creating the Authorial Persona: Arguedas’s Early Fiction

The relationship of Arguedas‟s fiction to literary indigenismo is one of the most debated critical points on Arguedas‟s contributions to Peruvian culture. Since

Mariátegui, indigenismo has been defined by the identity of its authors rather than by a set of literary conventions. Arguedas‟s hybridity has placed him in an ambiguous position between the “inauthenticity” of indigenismo and the “authenticity” of a truly indigenous literature.30 Many of the author‟s staunchest admirers set him apart from indigenismo, arguing that his intimacy with indigenous culture allowed him access to the indigenous spirit (Rowe 1979, Rama 1982).31 Others historicize Arguedas‟s career as a passage from “classic indigenismo” to a more complex “neoindigenismo” or place him

136 into a new subcategory such as “intimate indigenismo” (Escajadillo 1994, Tarica 2008).

I suggest that it would be productive to situate Arguedas‟s fiction within the history of literary indigenismo as an author with an exceptional knowledge of, and affinity towards indigenous culture, who nevertheless both made use of the literary conventions of indigenismo and reacted against them. What sets Arguedas apart from his peers is not necessarily greater authenticity, but rather an explicit awareness and an intense struggle with the politics of representation previous writers lacked.

The element that distinguishes the early phase of Arguedas‟s literary career is his restless search for a literary form that could adequately express his bicultural identity.

Confronted with the challenges of a bilingual writer, he struggled to adequately convey

Quechua culture in literary Spanish, “a difficult proposition since he was vindicating an oral culture through writing- the very instrument frequently employed for the purpose of its subjugation” (Archibald 2003: 407). He developed an imperfect solution to this delicate problem by creating “a forced poetics” he would later call “mistura” (Tarica

2008).32 He sought “to discover subtle ways to disarrange the Spanish in order to make it into a fitting mold, the adequate instrument of expression” (Arguedas 1985: xv). He invented “a special language” for Quechua-speaking characters “based on the Spanish words that have been incorporated into Quechua and the elementary Spanish that some

Indians manage to learn in their own villages” (Ibid. xvi).33 These linguistic experiments reflected a nascent performative project creating a new national identity out of the anguish of the bilingual mestizo soul (Tarica 2008).34

137

Most of Arguedas‟s early short stories dramatize the stark power dynamics of the rural Andean villages in which he lived as a child. Writing about his first collection of stories published under the title Agua (1935), he reflected “That was really written with hatred, with the fury of pure hatred, the kind that springs from universal loves up there in the regions of the world where two factions confront each other with implacable cruelty- one group that bleeds and another that squeezes out the last drop of blood” (Arguedas

1985: xv).35 These stories represent a world of interminable conflict between the exercise of tyrannical power by highland landowners and the ways indigenous communities deflect that power, using their culture as a source of strength in order to have a modicum of control over their lives. Within this conflictive existence there is very little room for potential mediation. The primary mediating agent in these stories is the young narrator- protagonist, Arguedas‟s fictional surrogate who appears in one form of another in most of his fiction. This figure struggles to reconcile his ambivalent position between the dominant social class into which he was born and the indigenous communities he closely identified with. The other potential transformative force in these stories is Andean embodied knowledge. In “Doña Caytana” and “Los Escoleros” (The Schoolboys) he introduces the figure of the scissors dancer as a charismatic and mysterious character who embodies the enchantments of indigenous culture.36

“Los Escoleros” dramatizes the conflicted relationship between Don Ciprian, the powerful landlord of the town of Ak‟ola, and Juan, the story‟s young narrator- protagonist. Juan closely identifies with the indigenous residents despite being the son of a lawyer. He is painfully aware of the limits of his bicultural identity, characterizing

138 himself as a “mak‟tillo falsificado” (False Indian boy), a position he sometimes uses to his advantage but mostly underscores his uncomfortable situation caught between antagonistic social worlds. The scissors dance appears in the story exclusively as an object of imitation for Juan and Bankucha, his indigenous companion. When Juan and

Bankucha find the missing La Gringa, the best and most beloved cow in the region, they celebrate by imitating Untu, a legendary scissors dancer from Puquio. Juan reports, “he felt agile, playful, and skillful in the Indian dance. We whistled the tune of Untu, the father of the scissors dancers of Lucanas: We raised our hands high as if we carried scissors” (Arguedas 1974: 88). Here Juan shares with Bankucha the ability to participate in indigenous culture. Little separates the boyhood friends as they engage in a game of make-believe imitation of a master scissors dancer. After Don Ciprian shoots La Gringa and Juan stands up to the violent landowner, the protagonist experiences a loss of innocence. By strategically using his position as the son of a misti (white landowner) to speak out against the abusive landlord he simultaneously binds himself to and distances himself from the indigenous community. Later, Juan and Bankucha gather the children together in a game where they chase and subdue large pigs. Bankucha wins the game by taming the fiercest hog in town. In celebration, Bankucha whistled the melody of Father

Untu. He “became truly animated. He danced like a master scissors dancer [. . .] All of the comuneros got really quiet. Their eyes watched with pleasure and pride as the young

Indian boy, a son of Ak‟ola, knew how to dance as well as the masters of Puquio and

Andamarka” (Ibid. 113). While Bankucha momentarily transforms into a master scissors

139 dancer, Juan remains in the role of the observer, reflecting on the impossibility of truly belonging to the community he so closely identifies with.

While the short stories of Agua introduced a number of Arguedas‟s literary innovations, they utilized the standard plot conventions of literary indigenismo.37 In

Arguedas‟s first novel, Yawar Fiesta (Blood Festival) (1941), he moves the literary setting from the rural village to the provincial city of Puquio, significantly complicating the power dynamics of the Andean world and the impact of modernizing transformations.

The conflict of Yawar Fiesta centers on the struggle for the control of the turupukllay, a hybrid Andean bullfight staged on July 28, Peruvian Independence Day during the 1930s.

A new subprefect from the coast views the Andean bullfight as a savage custom and issues an edict ordering its replacement with a more “civilized” Spanish-style bullfight.

During several important moments of the novel, a scissors dancer named Tankayllu intervenes in the action by displaying his dancing skills. Critic Martin Lienhard faults the novel for marginalizing the scissors dance and not realizing the symbolic possibilities of the form in relation to the author‟s later fictional works (Lienhard 1983: 152-153). While the dance plays a relatively minor role, I show in what follows that in Yawar Fiesta he articulates the figure of the scissors dancer with three major themes of the novel, which are recurring preoccupations of Arguedas‟s intellectual project.

From its appearance, Yawar Fiesta evokes the magnetic aura of the scissors dancer as a unifying force appreciated by the diverse constituencies of Puquio. The novel significantly complicates Arguedas‟s previous depictions of the social relations of

Andean society.38 The scissors dance is one of the only elements of a shared common

140 ground able to mediate the tensions between these competing Andean groups. When

Tankayllu dances, “people gathered from all four ayllus and when he entered Girón

Bolivar clicking his shears, the girls and mistis came out on the balconies” (Arguedas

1985: 30). The townspeople shouted, “He‟s an artist. They ought to take him to Lima” and “He might be an Indian … But how well he dances” (Ibid. 30). The dancer‟s aura solidifies the temporary position of power the indigenous communities possess during the festival.39 The mistis are so enchanted with the spectacle of the scissors dancer, they see him as a showpiece in order to impress the subprefect (Ibid. 33). The subprefect admits,

“they talk to me so much in this town about the dancing Indian that I‟m beginning to want to see him” (Ibid. 34). The police captain, also from the coast, confides to him,

“That Tankayllu is a filthy Indian like the rest of them but he does some pirouettes and calls attention to himself” (Ibid. 35). If the scissors dance represents a common Andean culture shared across the Andean social spectrum, from the perspective of the coastal oligarchy, this common culture further justifies the view that highland elites are little better than the savage Indians they dominate so brutally.

Second, the presence of the scissors dance in Yawar Fiesta situates the dance as an emblem of the creative transculturation of Andean indigenous culture. This hybridity comes to the forefront when the indigenous ayllus confront the Spanish-style bullfighter who arrives to replace the Andean bullfight. At first, they accept the imposition because they perceive the Spanish bullfighter as “a foreign danzak” (Ibid. 140-141) Arguedas humorously turns the table on his metropolitan readers by comparing the similarities between the scissors dance costume and the Spanish traje de luces from the indigenous

141 point of view. The supposed Spanish original becomes the copy from this perspective.

The hybridity of scissors dance drives Arguedas‟s faith that indigenous communities can become active agents in an alternative vision of modernity from below (Elmore 1993,

Kokotovic 2006, Lambright 2007). It is precisely this aspect of Yawar Fiesta that a number of critics misrepresent because they perceive the novel from within conventional dichotomies that Arguedas attempted to open up. Vargas Llosa argues that Yawar Fiesta is a “conservative” work of fiction that betrayed Arguedas‟s “desire to freeze time” and

“argue against the modernization of the Andean people” (Vargas Llosa 1996: 148).40

More recent critical voices have embraced the ideological ambiguities of the novel, suggesting that Arguedas highlights the contradictions of the post-colonial spectacle of the Indian (Archibald 2003: 410). He attempted to forge a vision of modernity from below where indigenous Andean communities used their culture in order to confront the overwhelming transformations of modernization from a position of agency (Archibald

2003, Kokotovic 2006, Lambright 2007).

The final and most important theme in which the scissors dance resonates with the novel as a whole is the most confounding to critics who perceive a dichotomous relationship between tradition and modernity. It is not the purity of Quechua language or culture that Arguedas celebrates, but their power to transform the world as active forms of knowledge. The almost magical powers of the collective spirit of the ayllus builds to a crescendo in the climactic moment of the bullfight, where indigenous bullfighters confront the terrifying Misitu, a gigantic bull endowed with mystical powers.41

Tankayllu‟s dancing serves as the most visible embodiment of the growing spiritual

142 energies that embolden the indigenous communities. On the night before the bullfight, he dances alone with the rest of the population staying in their homes terrified by the ferocious bull. His steel shears sound with a magnifying force. The members of the ayllus proclaim, “He and the devil are pals, that‟s why he‟s not scared” (Arguedas 1985:

120). On the day of the bullfight, the scissors dancer led the indigenous masses in procession, embodying their collective empowerment (Ibid. 127, 131, 133). Without explicitly describing its ritual significance, Yawar Fiesta gestures towards the dance‟s aura as an intermediary between humanity and the sacred realm of nature.

4.4. Ethnographic Self-Fashioning

Arguedas was never really satisfied with his stylistic experiments and abandoned literature for a long period of time after Yawar Fiesta. Most literary critics view the period between Yawar Fiesta and Los Ríos Profundos (1958) as an unproductive moment of Arguedas‟s career, with his literary silence driven by psychological illness.42 Prior to

Yawar Fiesta, Arguedas had already experienced the frustration of his hopes for radical change. He noted, “We thought social justice was just around the corner” (qtd. in

Cornejo Polar 1996: 20). However, during the 1930s a conservative counter-offensive re- established the power of the Lima-based oligarchy (Degregori 2000, Kokotovic 2006).

Arguedas turned away from formal leftist politics that had “failed to interpret the Andean people‟s deeply held interests and capacity for historical transformation” (Cornejo Polar

1996: 20). According to Arguedas‟s close friend, anthropologist John Murra, the author‟s anthropological work constituted a second phase of his career underappreciated by literary critics.43 He argues that ethnography validated Arguedas‟s knowledge of

143

Quechua as an important asset, and legitimated his personal experience as a source of knowledge but enabled him to return to the Andes and enrich his childhood memories with new experiences and knowledge of Andean reality (Murra 1996: 271).44 This anthropological production stimulated Arguedas‟s increasing attention to the transformational powers of Andean performance in the final decade of his life.

According to one anecdote, the scissors dance played a central role in Arguedas‟s disillusionment with the Communist Party and subsequent turn to ethnography. After

San Marcos re-opened in 1935, Arguedas joined a student cell of the Communist Party and edited the leftist student magazine Palabra (Mayatoshi 2002). One day in 1937, a group of scissors dancer from Puquio arrived in Lima. Arguedas was happy to serve as their guide and interpreter in the capital and proceeded to “lose himself” reminiscing about Andean life, singing, and getting drunk with his guests. He missed several meetings of his communist cell and when he finally returned, the group‟s leader chastised him proclaiming that there would be time for happiness and festivity after the revolution was won. The sensitive José María retired from the party, never to return (Montoya

2004: 222). Earlier the same year, he met Celia and Alicia Bustamante, sisters from

Lima‟s aristocratic elite who ran Peña Pancho Fierro, a club of intellectuals dedicated to the collection and display of Andean popular art (Nauss Millay 2005: 77). Arguedas frequented the establishment and brought his scissors dance companions to the venue to stage an informal demonstration for a small audience of respected intellectuals.45

Through his friendship with Alicia Bustamante, he enthusiastically embraced the collection and study of folklore, sharing Alicia‟s desire “to extend understanding of

144

Andean popular art to the urban Creole republic” (qtd. in Nauss Millay 2005: 77). His turn away from leftist politics and commitment to folklore as an emerging scientific discipline in Peru deepened during his nine-month imprisonment in the El Sexto prison as an accused communist sympathizer in 1938.46

Arguedas‟s initial forays into folkloric study in the late 1930s and early 1940s can be contextualized within a larger folkloric turn within Peruvian indigenismo. By the mid-

1930s, both the academic study and theatrical performance of Andean popular performance became a widespread strategy for provincial intellectuals to vindicate regional identities and create a space for themselves in the larger national culture

(Mendizabal 2000: 76, Mendoza 2000, 2007). The scissors dance achieved a larger visibility within folkloric representation by the 1940s. Groups of middle-class intellectuals formed associations such as the Centro Cultural Ayacucho, formed with the objective of validating the region‟s rich cultural history.47 In 1939, folklorist and historian Manuel E. Bustamante published a short article in La Revista Huamanga, depicting the scissors dance as a formerly glorious but now decaying tradition.

Modernizing trends had separated the traditional elites from the peasant performers they had patronized, resulting in a lack of technique in the majority of the performers

(Bustamante 1943: 92-93). Around the same time, Moises and Alejandro Vivanco included scissors dancers in their highly successful theatrical folklore companies who toured the country, including several performances in Lima (Vivanco 1988: 424).48 This folkloric turn incorporated a scientific ethos into Peruvian indigenismo, creating a

145 network of provincial intellectuals that paved the way for the formalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in 1946 (Degregori 2000).

If regionalism was one contributing factor of the emergence of Peruvian anthropology, the influence of North American researchers and institutions was an equally important factor. North American functionalist anthropologists arrived in Peru with steadily increasing numbers during the 1930s and 1940s to study the cultures of the

Andean region.49 During the dictatorship of Luis Odría (1948-1956), Peru underwent a rapid process of industrialization, quickly transforming from a mostly rural nation to an increasingly urbanized one in a short time. Anthropology, under the guise of North

American development theory, became an active participant in the institutional frameworks that attempted to discipline social change (Archibald 2003, Kokotovic 2006).

Development theory was a metropolitan discourse that “created an extremely efficient apparatus for producing knowledge about, and the exercise of power over the Third

World” (Escobar 1995: 9). By the 1950s development theory constituted an inescapable commonsense that promoted capitalist modernization as the only imaginable alternative to pre-modern feudalism (Ibid. 5).50 Arguedas enrolled in the initial class of The Institute of Ethnology at San Marcos in 1946.51 He published frequently throughout the 1950s, concentrating on the dynamics of modernization in small highland cities.

This work did not escape the ideological pressures of the dominant paradigm of development theory. Nelson Manrique claims that in this period Arguedas was “a culturally colonized intellectual” whose anthropological essays echo “the promise held out by the dominant developmentalist discourse of the 1950s” (Manrique 1999: 97).52

146

Priscilla Archibald suggests that in his earliest publications Arguedas showed a great deference to North American authorities and the tenets of development theory. However, over time he developed an underappreciated counter-narrative. She demonstrates that:

Arguedas argues that the radical discontinuities and contradictions which Andeans have known since the Conquest have produced a fiercely creative and adaptive culture. Far from the ahistorical subject romanticized by the indigenistas and denigrated by modernizing theorists, negotiated at the crossroads of various overlapping traditions, the Andean emerges in these pages as the ultimate historical subject. (Archibald 2003: 429)

Although he never wrote an ethnographic work focused exclusively on the scissors dance, Arguedas frequently cited it as a paradigmatic example of the creative hybridity of

Andean culture. In “La Sierra en el Proceso de la Cultura Peruana” he argued that the cultural repertoires of contemporary Indians were richer than those of the pre-hispanic past due to the creative appropriation and re-invention of foreign elements by indigenous actors. Citing the scissors dance as a primary example, he argued that nearly all of the formal elements of the dance are of European origin, including the costumes, the musical instruments, the melodies and choreographic sequences similar to the Spanish zapateo, and the alleged pact with the devil. Nevertheless, it is “performed exclusively by Indians for an Indian public. Many of the choreographic movements have received Quechua names and are probably creations of the native dancers. The autochthonous musicians have added energetic rhythms of ancient origin to the zapateo” (Arguedas 1975: 24).

Rather than a survival of a unadulterated past threatened by the corruption of modernity, he depicts it as an inventive and creative force able to recreate and renew itself through the incorporation of foreign materials. This historical example of transculturation

147 provided Arguedas with a model for conceptualizing how Andeans may appropriate modernity from a position of agency (Arguedas 1975 [1953]: 24).

Arguedas‟s ethnographic analyses of the scissors dance challenge not only the romantic indigenismo and modernization paradigms of his time but also the ethnographic characterizations of the dance that followed him.53 Towards the beginning “Notas

Elementales de la Cultura Mestiza de Huamanga” he provides his most widely cited ethnographic description of the scissors dance suggesting that the dance is one of the three elements that embodied the culture-area Huamanga-Wankawilka-Pokra-Chanka-

Rukana (Arguedas 1975 [1958]: 151). His major objective in defining this region was to analyze the undermining of traditional routes of artisanal exchange by the forces of modernization.54 Arguedas does not mourn these transformations, but rather celebrates the creativity of mestizo artisans, particularly the retablista Joaquin Lopez Antay, who have successfully navigated a changing marketplace for religious art.55 He argues that not only has Lopez Antay become economically successful by selling his retablos to new national and transnational markets, but he has done so by maintaining his artistic integrity. Although the change in audience has enabled Lopez Antay to introduce formal innovations in the traditional retablo form, primarily the incorporation of costumbrista figures including the scissors dance, Arguedas contends that a profound religiosity and belief in the magical powers of nature continue to animate the master artist‟s work.

The anthropological article that speaks most directly to Arguedas‟s changing conception and utilization of the scissors dance as a central aspect of his intellectual project, does not mention the dance. “Puquio: Una Cultura en el Proceso de Cambio”

148 returns to the site of Yawar Fiesta in order to examine the rapid transformations wrought by modernization in a small Andean city (Arguedas 1985 [1956]). He depicts the changing face of Puquio as profoundly contradictory.56 The bulk of the article engages in the kind of urgent collecting of myths and oral tales James Clifford calls “salvage ethnography” (Clifford 1988). However, Arguedas was not invested in saving a frozen cultural patrimony, but collective knowledge through which Andean communities actively define their history and identity. This catalogue of local knowledge includes the first ethnographic description of the myth of Inkarri, and a complex analysis of beliefs in mountain spirits.57 For Arguedas, the danger in the disappearance of Inkarri was not the loss of cultural purity, but the displacement of indigenous collective organization by the individualism of capitalist modernization. Arguedas concludes the article with an ode to

Inkarri’s power as an agent of Andean redemption. He suggests, “Inkarri returns, and we cannot help fearing that he may be powerless to reassemble the individualisms that have developed, perhaps irremediably. Unless he can detain the Sun, once more binding him with iron hands to Osk‟onta Peak and change man; all is possible where such a wise and resistant creature is concerned” (Arguedas 1985: 192). Arguedas‟s use of Andean myth as an active form of knowledge disrupts the consignment of Andean ways of being to a prehistorical time and anticipates his mobilization of the scissors dance as a surrogate for the regenerative power of Inkarri in his later work.

4.5. Rivers of Passage

Arguedas‟s triumphant return to literature in 1958 with Los Ríos Profundos represented a rite of passage in the development of his public persona. The themes

149 dramatized in the coming of age novel and the author‟s apparent resolution of his earlier struggles to construct a literary form able to express the conflicted world of the Andes significantly contributed to the novel‟s impact in transforming a respected intellectual within circumscribed fields into a towering figure of Peruvian and Latin American letters.

Los Ríos Profundos imaginatively reconstructed Arguedas‟s childhood memories of his travels across the Southern and Central Andes with his father and his subsequent education at a Catholic boarding-school in Abancay. The novel dramatizes the young narrator-protagonist Ernesto‟s painful maturation in a world dominated by the values of a small exclusive elite. Ernesto‟s conflicted rite of passage powerfully demonstrates how the violence of Peru‟s dominant culture permeates all levels of society, enculturating the young into a brutally racist and misogynist vision of the world. Since the dominant mistis infantilize the Indians, “by identifying with indigenous culture Ernesto remains in effect a child, his path to adulthood blocked” (Kokotovic 2006: 85). Through Ernesto‟s poetic memory Arguedas was able to imagine a different kind of society ruled by the values of solidarity, generosity, and complementarity. In this alternative vision, Ernesto will be able to enter adulthood without renouncing indigenous culture. The novel locates the cure for Peru‟s spiritual psychosis in Ernesto‟s poetic voice that evokes the sacred forces of nature, the maternal, and the magical practices of indigenous culture (Lambright 2007:

122). Although the scissors dancer appears as a minor figure in the novel, in one poignant moment he becomes the potential agent of spiritual purification that Arguedas draws upon in order to fashion his interventions into the diseased national body.

150

Both Arguedas himself and his critical admirers have credited Los Ríos Profundos with resolving the author‟s earlier struggles to find a literary form that adequately represented the Quechua voice in literary Spanish. Instead of subtly displacing Spanish, in Los Ríos Profundos Arguedas aimed to translate the particular expressive capabilities of Quechua into Spanish through the associative interlinking of metaphorical language

(Tarica 2008: 105).58 The effect of this process of translation is a powerful sense of musicality indebted to the common use of onomatopoeia in Quechua. Buoyed by the poetic imagination and memory of Ernesto, not only semantic meaning but also the power of sound contributes to the effect of the magic of language to transform the world

(Landreau 2002).59 The rite of passage dramatized in the novel is conjoined with the maturation of Arguedas‟s literary persona in both Peru and Latin America.

Los Ríos Profundos also announces Arguedas‟s re-enty into explicitly political arenas. Kokotovic argues that the novel “registers the beginning of its author‟s radicalization thanks to the novels transculturated form, which permitted Arguedas to imagine the disappearance of feudal social structures, not as a gift of capitalism, but as the result of a struggle motivated by Andean beliefs and values” (Kokotovic 2006: 98).

The first half of the novel shows Ernesto‟s socialization into the dominant white and masculinist values through his experiences at school in Abancay. However, he encounters alternative possibilities in the mestizo sector of Huanupata as the market women who make chicha (corn beer) rise up against the hoarding of salt by the town‟s dominant sectors. Ernesto participates on the margins of the rebellion, inspired by the heroic leader of the rebellion, Doña Felipa. By asserting their agency, the subaltern

151 women offer Ernesto an alternative path to adulthood and a vitally important role as a mediator between the powerful and the excluded (Kokotovic 2006: 86-87). In the novel

Arguedas announced his solidarity with the real-life peasant movements of the late

1950s, which in turn inspired his return as a politically-engaged intellectual working toward social justice and inclusion for his marginalized Andean compatriots.

In a number of episodes of Los Ríos Profundos, Arguedas evokes the scissors dance as a powerful figure from Ernesto‟s poetic memory. He associates the dance with the Zumbayllu, a rapidly spinning Andean top with magical properties. Explaining the meaning of the Quechua ending “yllu,” related to the magic of music and light, Ernesto begins a chain of associations including a description of Tankayllu, a hummingbird. He also remembers a well-known scissors dancer from Puquio of the same name “who danced in the town squares for important fiestas and performed diabolical feats on the eves of the saints days- swallowed bits of steel, running needles and hooks through his body, and walking, about the churchyards with three iron bars in his teeth” (Arguedas

1978: 65). For Ernesto, the dance embodies an intermediary link to an infernal subterranean world. Later in the novel, after soldiers from the coast arrive to quell the chichera’s rebellion, the authoritative force of their uniforms reminds Ernesto of those of the scissors dancers. He describes the scissors dancer as a messenger “from another hell,” a central figure in a repertoire of mythical beings with the power to restore equilibrium to a fractured world (Arguedas 1978: 193). Ernesto does not sanitize the diabolic aspects of the scissors dancer. Yet, by embodying the darker aspects of

152 humanity, he imagines the figure as a potential vehicle for positive change (Usandizanga

2006: 237).

In one climactic moment the scissors dancer leaps outside of Ernesto‟s memory into the main action of the novel. At Doña Felipa‟s chicha bar Ernesto takes in Andean huayno music. The presence of soldiers adds a great deal of tension to the scene, until one of the soldiers begins to dance. He performs spectacular leaps and Ernesto speculates he may have been a scissors dancer in his hometown. The harpist and singer performed in lockstep with the dancer, releasing a palpable energy felt by Ernesto and the rest of the spectators. When Civil Guards interrupt the scene, one of Ernesto‟s friends tentatively picks up the harp and begins to play the same song. Although he lacked technical skill, his playing carried the energy of the moment. Ernesto laments:

I should have danced to the beat of the music. I was at the point of doing it. I had seen the scissors dancers making diabolical leaps on the terraces in front of the churches, moving their legs as if they were cats, springing in the air [. . .] I had seen them dancing on the cemetery walls, clicking their steel scissors blades in such a way that the dawn seemed to be born from their tips. A thousand times I had wished to imitate them; I had done it at school, among the children. I could have done it then and there, to my friend‟s music, before a frightened audience who needed something startling to shake them up to restore their souls that they might go out and rescue Papacha Oblitas. (Arguedas 1978: 179-180)

This scene is a climactic turning point not only in the novel but also Arguedas‟s trajectory as a public intellectual. Ernesto alludes to the possibility that in this moment he might have ceased to be an imitator of the scissors dancer and truly taken on the magical role of the dancer. The question is why he hesitates after presented with such a felicitous opportunity for mediation and intervention.60 One potential answer to this problem is offered by the subtle differentiation between the protagonist of the novel, the

153 young Ernesto, and the narrator.61 Estelle Tarica contends that death lies in the prehistory of the novel‟s narrator. The differentiation between the young Ernesto who lives in the fragmented and conflicted world of men, and the narrator who resides in the integrated world of the sacred suggests that for Ernesto to truly fulfill his mediating function as an artist he must “renounce the body and diminish the self in order to become pure voice” (Tarica 2008: 129). Perhaps Ernesto is unable to inhabit the purifying role of the scissors dancer because he still resides in the world of men. This intriguing interpretation reveals a disturbing link between Los Ríos Profundos, the figure of the scissors dancer, and Arguedas‟s eventual death by suicide in 1969.62

4.6 Andean Cosmopolitanism: Arguedas on Migration

The publication of Los Ríos Profundos ended Arguedas‟s literary drought and brought international acclaim to the Peruvian author. The novel prefigured the increasing radicalization of Arguedas, animated by a renewed hope for Andean protagonism in the renovation of the Peruvian public sphere (Kokotovic 2006, Flores Galindo 2007: 421).63

During the 1960s, he closed the distance between his literary and ethnographic work, focusing on urban Andean migration in Lima “where the anti-colonial battle reaches its culmination” (Archibald 2003: 104). Arguedas theorized an Andean cosmopolitanism in which Andean migrant artists became models for the successful negotiation of Andean culture‟s “entrance into modernity” (García Canclini 1995). As a cultural administrator, newspaper columnist, ethnographer, fiction writer, and high-profile public intellectual,

Arguedas constructed urban Andean artists as the embodiment of a renewed national culture. He facilitated the entrance of the scissors dance into a broader public sphere

154 through his personal relationships with migrant performers and sponsorship of staged folklore performances in popular theatres and international touring companies.

Going back to the 1940s, Arguedas played a significant role in the shift in the presentation of Andean music in Lima from elite-generated Inca-Cusco imagery to stylized and urban adaptations of regional musical styles.64 As Andean migration steadily increased throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Andean musicians maintained a growing presence in the Fiesta de Amancaes by adopting the repertoires of Cusco-Incaic indigenista musical performance (Turino 1990, 2008, Romero 2000, Alfaro 2004).

Andean musicians from the popular classes, such as Pastorita Huaracina, dressed in

Incaic-Cusqueña costumes and played songs from the indigenista repertoire. Arguedas later named this phenomenon “El Monstruoso Contrasentido,” (The Monstrous

Contradiction), which he described as the admiration for the art of the ancient Incas coupled with a perceived rupture contributing to the degradation of contemporary Indians

(Arguedas 1975: 216).65 As the Head of the Folklore Section of the Ministry of

Education, Arguedas gave a series of talks to the directors of the major folkloric companies during the 1940s. Every Sunday, he encouraged performers to believe in their positive role as emissaries of “our” culture (Romero 2000: 104). He also espoused flexible notions of folklore and authenticity that valued creativity and innovation of living cultural forms in conjunction with maintaining the integrity of centuries-old forms of traditional knowledge (Alfaro 2005: 6). Arguedas‟s evolving re-elaborations of the notion of authenticity recognized the self-determination and agency of Andean subjects

155 and the dialogue between the creativity of the individual artist and fidelity to collective cultural repertoires (Romero 2000, Alfaro 2004, Rowe 1996).66

The staging ground of the explosion of Andean popular music in Lima was the coliseos, large open-air theatres often covered by circus tents (Arguedas, Turino 1990,

2008, Romero 2000). Between 1938 and 1970 Lima-based entrepreneurs, often of provincial origins themselves, opened more than thirty such spaces that produced major folkloric spectacles every Sunday. For much of the day, the bill was filled with unpaid amateur folkloric companies or regional clubs who performed local folkloric dance repertoires. During the evening, the solo stars of “Andean country-music” took the stage, performing huaynos in a style highly influenced by urban-Western pop music. Migrants from all regions of Peru attended these commercial folkloric spectacles en masse. These large-scale performance events contributed to both the reaffirmation of local and regional identities and a growing sense of a new over-arching Andean migrant identity (Turino

2008, Romero 2000, Alfaro 2005). Arguedas not only frequently attended these popular performance events, but became an ally, mentor, and father figure to many performers and musicians (Romero 2000: 100).67 Furthermore, in 1947 Arguedas convinced Odeon

Records to publish several titles of Andean music ushering in the Golden Age of commercial recordings of Andean music in the same period.68

During the 1950s, Arguedas developed close personal relationships with several groups of migrant scissors dance performers. In 1954, he staged a public competition between scissors dancers from Huancavelica and Ayacucho. There he met the scissors dancer “La Mar” from Huancavelica and his two young sons (Garcia Ninasqui 2006: 54).

156

Recognizing the regional style from Huancavelica quite distinct from the style he remembered from his childhood in the southern part of Ayacucho, he interviewed La Mar in order to document the choreography and musical sequences of the Huancavelica variant (Garcia Ninasqui 2006, Nuñez Rebaza 1990: 78). According to La Mar‟s son, the group‟s relationship to Arguedas brought them significant popularity in artistic circles and earned them frequent invitations to perform for foreign dignitaries (García Ninasqui

2006: 54). During the mid-1950s, Arguedas heard about a skilled Andean violinist named Máximo Damián Huamaní from Ishua, a town near Puquio.69 The two began an intimate friendship that lasted until Arguedas‟s death in 1969. Arguedas attended

Máximo Damián‟s performances in the coliseos and contracted him to perform with scissors dancers at the Peña Pancho Fierro and for private parties on numerous occasions.

In turn, the young violinist invited Arguedas to attend fiestas costumbristas in Lima staged by the migrant organizations of his own and surrounding towns. Due to his close personal friendship with Arguedas, the violinist became an iconic figure of Andean music and the most visible purveyor of the scissors dance before and after the author‟s death

(Gushiken 1979, Personal Interview “Máximo Damián Huamaní” 2008).

In 1962, Arguedas began to write a biweekly column for the Sunday magazine of the newspaper El Comercio aimed at educating Peruvian elites about Andean cultural traditions and the emergence of a vibrant Andean arts scene in Lima. One particular article, “De lo Retablo Mágico Hasta el Retablo Mercantil” involves artistic representations of the scissors dance in its exploration of both positive and negative models for the negotiation of Andean visual artists with the forces of modernity and the

157 capitalist marketplace (Arguedas 1975 [1962]). The article follows up on the praise

Arguedas expressed for retablo artist Joaquin Lopez Antay, by comparing the work of

Lopez Antay with that of the younger retablista Jesús Urbano Rojas, whose work was on display in the collection of Alicia Bustamante. Arguedas remembers that Lopez Antay represented the danzak as “a majestic figure; a messenger of the devil; a magical being with terrible powers” (Ibid. 255). However, “In the sad retablo by Urbano Rojas, the small dancers are almost lost in the multitude in any direction without any relation between the musicians and the dancers [. . .] along with some of the choreographies invented by the directors of folkloric companies in Lima, it is a falsification of tradition, a deliberate distortion of its unity” (Ibid). According to Lopez Antay‟s appropriation of modern techniques and market tastes melds seamlessly with the artist‟s creative engagement with traditional artistic repertoires. Urbano Rojas creates simple spectacles defined by the tastes of the market with little concern for their responsibility to traditional knowledge. This article both refines Arguedas‟s flexible articulation of authenticity and provides a model for his own forays into staged representations of the dance.

In 1963, President Fernando Belaunde Terry appointed Arguedas as the first

Director of the Casa de la Cultura. Although he would remain in the post for only one year, Arguedas‟s pioneering role gave him a tremendous amount of influence in the direction of the national cultural institution.70 In a series of articles, Arguedas clearly made the promotion of indigenous culture and the conservation of cultural patrimony his priorities (Mildred Merino 1967: 113, Cornejo Polar 1991).71 He formed a scissors dance troupe to perform in important national and international theatres. He recruited the

158 violinist Máximo Damián Huamaní to perform with the group Los Hermanos Chiara, utilizing balletic techniques to choreograph the presentations. In 1964, the troupe performed in Lima‟s Teatro Municipal, appeared on Canal 7, the state-owned television network, and embarked on a diplomatic tour of Chile. Arguedas resigned from his post as Director for political reasons in August 1964. However, the troupe remained active under the leadership of Arguedas‟s colleague Josafat Roel Pineda, continuing to perform in national theatres, and on international tours of Venezuela and Colombia in 1967 and

Mexico in 1968 (Gushiken 1979: 33, Personal Interview “Máximo Damián Huamaní”

2008, Personal Interview “Valentín Chiara 2009). The performers of the troupe maintained a close relationship with Arguedas, appearing at private gatherings in his apartment and at the funeral celebration after his death in 1969 (Millones 2007, Personal

Interview “Máximo Damián Huamaní” 2008).

Throughout the 1960s, Arguedas continued to refine his perspective on the encounter between Andean culture and the forces of modernization in Peru. In doing so, he “challenged the text-based and exclusively Western character of national culture” and contributed to the expansion of the public sphere beyond the exclusive “lettered city”

(Archibald 1998: 29). While he lamented the degenerative effects of commercial spectacles on Andean cultural forms, he generally marveled at the creativity of Andean artists to appropriate the communications media for self-expression.72 In a 1966 article, he proclaimed “the instruments employed to condition the mentality of the masses and uproot their particular national tradition (radio, TV, etc) convert themselves into powerful vehicles for transmission and contagion in the affirmation of the typical and the

159 uncolonizable” (Arguedas 1975 [1966]: 188). Thus, he updated his own theorization of tranculturation beyond the colonial period into an enthusiasm for contemporary manifestations of a new cosmopolitan Andean culture. In 1968, he celebrated the brilliant performances of Juan Aguilar, an Afro-Peruvian born in Lima who enthusiastically learned the huaylas.73 His enthusiasm for Aguilar‟s performances brought Arguedas to exclaim, “The coliseos are forges, genuine forges. Coast and Sierra are fused by fire, and integrate, grow stronger” (Arguedas 1976 [1967]: 247). These performances became the basis for his claim that the huaylas and huayno “are on the road to transforming into cultural patrimony, a nationalizing link for all Peruvians” (Ibid. 243).

In a similar fashion, Arguedas popularized the scissors dance through literature and the sponsorship of staged folklore performance.

4.7. La Agonia de Rasu Ñiti: Surrogation and the New Peru

In 1962, Arguedas published his most well-known short story, “La Agonia de

Rasu Ñiti,” which became his most substantial and important literary and ethnographic portrait of the scissors dance.74 He published the short story at the same time as his first poem in Quechua, “Himno a Nuestro Padre Creador Tupac Amaru.” Arguedas began to represent himself as a politically-engaged intellectual who self-identified unambiguously with an emergent cosmopolitan Quechua culture (Zevallos-Aguilar 2009: 100). The poem is Arguedas‟s most utopian narrative, portraying the mass migration of Andean peasants to Lima as a rebirth of the Quechua people and the final “reconquest” of a colonized geography. Addressing the heroic emblem of Andean regeneration, Tupac

Amaru, the poem triumphantly exclaims, „We are converting [the city] into a village of

160 men, which enters the hymns of the four regions of our world” (Arguedas 1984: 17). At first glance, “La Agonia de Rasu Ñiti” seems quite distinct from the poem‟s celebration of an emergent Andean cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, the short story employs the scissors dance as emblematic of the utopian national vision Arguedas was shaping in this period. Like the poem, the story dramatizes the rebirth of Quechua culture as founded on the transfer of knowledge from old to young and by extension, tradition to modernity in a constellation of forces strong enough to dismantle Creole hegemony.

“La Agonia de Rasu Ñiti” tells the story of the ritualized death of a legendary scissors dancer and his “rebirth” through the embodiment of his young disciple. The structure of Arguedas‟s story can be divided into four acts or sequences. In the first sequence, Rasu Ñiti and his family prepare for his final ritual dance. The protagonist, the

Indian Pedro Huancayre, awakens to a slight pain in his chest. Instantly he recognizes the voice of the Wamani, the mountain god who possesses him, speaking directly to his heart. The moment for his death has come. He declares, “The heart is ready. The world awaits. I hear the Saño waterfall. I am ready” (Arguedas 1974: 170). He dresses in his scissors dance costume with ritual care, transforming himself into Rasu Ñiti, the legendary danzak and human manifestation of a great Wamani. Rasu Ñiti and his wife are able to see, hear, and feel the presence of the Wamani, but their children do not have sufficient knowledge to register his presence. The ritual preparations become a lesson in the ancestral knowledge of Andean culture for the young. Rasu Ñiti‟s wife tells her daughters, “Death makes him hear everything; what you have suffered; what you have danced; what you are going to suffer” (Ibid. 172). The reference to suffering is followed

161 by one of the daughters hearing the gallop of the hacienda boss‟s horse. Rasu Ñiti responds, “the growth of our god is going to swallow the horse. Not the boss. Without the horse, he is only the excrement of a calf” (Ibid. 173). Arguedas not only alludes to

Rasu Ñiti‟s antagonistic relationship to Peru‟s dominant culture, but also evokes the spirit of Inkarri. The regeneration of Inkarri will take away the dominant culture‟s instruments of power, redeeming the Quechua culture from a history of suffering. His wife instructs the daughters, “The scissors are not manipulated by the fingers of your father. The

Wamani makes them collide. Your father only obeys” (Ibid. 173). She implies that the scissors dancer is more than a musician or dancer, but a spiritual medium who facilitates communication between the Wamanis and the human community.

This exchange leads into the second section of the story, where the narrator intervenes with a lengthy ethnographic description of the scissors dance and its cultural significance. Not only is this section the richest and most thorough ethnographic interpretation of the dance Arguedas wrote, but it also clarifies the positionality of the narrator in relation to the events recounted. The narration alternates dialogically between an objective and informative ethnographic voice and a firsthand account clearly identifying itself as an insider to Andean culture (Cornejo Polar 1997, Lambright 2007:

143, Zevallos Aguilar 2009: 105). In many respects Arguedas interprets the significance of the scissors dance in similar terms to those he employs in his previous ethnographic work. The narrator evokes a mysterious and auratic figure closely linked to the forces of the natural world.75 After a broad objective account of the extraordinary feats the dancers realize during the pruebas de valor, the narrator turns to his own childhood memories of

162 the sight of “the great father „Untu” dressed in red and black, covered in mirrors, dancing on a moving rope in the sky, playing his scissors” (Ibid. 173). In the most revealing section, the narrator explains the spiritual significance of the dance:

The genius of the danzak depends on who lives inside of him; the spirit of a mountain (wamani); of a precipice whose silence is transparent; of a cave from which exits torrents of gold and condemned men of fire. Or the cascade of a river that falls from the height of a cliff; or perhaps only a bird or a flying insect that know the feeling of abysses, trees, ants, and the secret of the night (Ibid. 174)

This passage contains the only allusion to the diabolic aspects of the scissors dancer that

Arguedas openly acknowledged in previous work. Perhaps, he intentionally sanitized his representation of the dance so that it would become a better candidate as an icon of a renovated national culture.76 The narrator closes his ethnographic intervention by restoring the focus to Rasu Ñiti, “who was the son of a great Wamani, of a mountain with eternal snowy peaks. At this time, he sent his spirit; a gray condor whose white back constantly vibrated” (Ibid. 174).

New characters arrive to assist Rasu Ñiti with the completion of his ritual sacrifice. The violinist Don Pascual and the harpist Lurucha arrive, trailed by Atok

Sayku, Rasu Ñiti‟s young disciple, and a small group of witnesses from the community.

Accompanied by Don Pascual and Lurucha, Rasu Ñiti begins to dance. The musical sequences performed parallel the great dancer‟s descent towards death.77 Rasu Ñiti enters into trance and sees a vision of the return of Inkarri, “the god is growing. It will kill the horse” (175). At this point, Lurucha begins the melody of the Yawar Mayu

(bloody river), a recurring theme in Arguedas‟s work, which signifies the liminal space between life and death.78 This space between life and death emerges paradoxically as the

163 life-force itself. As Rasu Ñiti‟s body stops functioning, Lurucha changes the melody to the Ilapa Vivon (the edge of lighting) signaling the moment before death. The narrator places great emphasis on the synchronized communication between the musicians, the dancer, and the natural world. Finally, as Rasu Ñiti closes his eyes, his body seems to grow larger, illuminated through the reflection of mirrors of his costume (178).

The final act dramatizes the rebirth of the danzak through the body of his surrogate pupil, Atok Sayku. The young dancer, who prior to his master‟s death ritual only had a vague and partial view of the Wamani, senses the mountain-spirit enter his body as he picks up his master‟s scissors and begins to dance (Ibid. 178).79 The transformation transfixes the crowd as the narrator intones, “It was him, the father „Rasu

Ñiti‟ reborn, with fresh bestial tendons and the fire of the Wamani, flapping its wings with the current of centuries” (Ibid. 178). The Wamani has renewed itself through the body of its human surrogate, transforming Atok Sayku from a young disciple into a new danzak. With newfound recognition and insight, Rasu Ñiti‟s youngest daughter intones the final prophetic lines of the story, “Not dead [. . .] the same! Dancing! [. . .] Condor needs dove. The dove, then, needs Condor! Danzak does not die! [. . .] For danzak, nobody cries. Wamani is Wamani!” (Ibid. 178-179). The adults are left with only partial insight, while the young, Atok Sayku and the youngest daughter in particular, become the privileged inheritors of ancestral knowledge and memory.

This short story is amongst Arguedas‟s most critically and popularly acclaimed works.80 According to John Beasley-Murray the attention given to “Rasu Ñiti” “is surely due to the fact that it is one of Arguedas‟s very few texts that can at all convincingly be

164 shoe-horned into a more or less conventional indigenist critical frame” (6). Indeed, it provides Arguedas‟s most intimate view of rural Quechua culture with an uplifting narrative about the triumph and redemption of the oppressed. Perhaps, the facility of a conventional indigenista reading accounts for the story‟s centrality to the canonization of the scissors dance as a national icon. Arguedas‟s work had begun to cultivate a youth culture that saw him as a revered father figure and a model for a new type of intellectual

(Murra and Lopez Baralt 1996: 77).81 Similar Andeanist readings of the story produced the earliest speculations that the dance descended from the Sixteenth Century Taki Onqoy movement (Vokral 1984, Castro Klaren 1990).82 Yet I argue that Arguedas‟s celebration of the continuity and redemption of Quechua culture is a more complex, if still utopian, work of fiction. The ritual of death and rebirth it dramatizes, paradoxically stages two forms of the transmission of cultural memory theorized by recent performance scholars often seen at odds with each other. Diana Taylor argues that “performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated [. . .] behavior” (Taylor 2002: 2-3). Joseph Roach argues that cultures reproduce themselves through surrogation, “into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure [. . .] survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternatives”

(Roach 1996: 3). While Taylor‟s theory emphasizes a form of unstable continuity through the embodied transmission of cultural forms, Roach emphasizes the role of loss, forgetting, rupture, and the (re)invention of tradition. Both are present in Arguedas‟s acclaimed short story, as rupture transforms into a kind of unstable continuity and regeneration similar to Taylor‟s model. Within the context of Arguedas‟s prolific work

165 of the period, I read “La Agonia de Rasu Ñiti” as enacting a utopian vision of the transmission of the vitality of Andean ancestral memory to a reconstructed Quechua culture, enabling its agency in the remaking of Peruvian identity.

Another consequence of the publication and reception of the story is that the work itself became a powerful emblem of the renewal of Andean culture. It what Roach calls

“performed effigies” embodying the becoming of a new national culture (Roach 1996:

36). The Peruvian critic Augusto Tamayo Vargas famously dubbed the story, “a ballet- scene” (Tamayo Vargas 1968: 850). In 1965, only a few years after its publication, modern dance choreographer Trudy Kressel staged the story as a modern folk ballet called “The Inheritance and Death of the Danzak” (Mildred Merino 1967: 115). That same year, journalist Alfonsina Barrionuevo wrote a profile of the mysterious dance, including interviews with performers associated with Arguedas that featured a very similar narrative of Arguedas‟s story under the name “La Leyenda de Qaqa Ñiti”

(Barrionuevo 1965). In 1985, Augusto Tamayo San Roman directed a made-for- television educational video adaptation of the story that featured real-life scissors dancers and musicians. In 1999 and 2000, Peruvian theatre artists created two separate one-man theatrical adaptations of the story.83 In 2008, student filmmaker Gaby Yepes released her award-winning short film, “El Danzak,” an updated adaptation of Arguedas‟s story set in the contemporary slums in the outskirts of Lima and with a female protagonist playing the role of the disciple. In 2011, The Ballet Nacional del Peru will debut a new ballet adaptation of the story in honor of the centennial of Arguedas‟s birth. Like the events narrated in the story, the death of Arguedas has left a dynamic “archive” for the creation

166 of new cultural repertoires. The symbolic capital of Arguedas‟s legacy in turn has bestowed a great deal of cultural capital onto the dance and its performers themselves.

4.8. El Zorro-Danzaq: The Death and Resurrection of the Author

Another reason “La Agonia de Rasu Ñiti” has received so much critical attention is the intimate connection between the story and Arguedas‟s staging of his own suicide.84

By the mid-1960s his mental health deteriorated once again due to a number of unfavorable personal and professional circumstances. In April 1966, he attempted to take his own life for the first time. After a brief recuperation, Arguedas completed a quite productive last three years of his life before successfully committing suicide on

November 28, 1969. Andean musicians and intellectuals commemorated the author‟s life and work with a massive funeral celebration in the streets of downtown Lima. Arguedas stage-managed the event himself through explicit instructions in several letters to different individuals. In the central act of the celebration, migrant scissors dance performers closely associated with Arguedas performed the agonia, the melodic and choreographic sequence that dramatizes the death of a great danzak. The close symbolic interrelationship between the earlier short story, the final novel, the act of suicide, and the commemorative celebration theatricalized Arguedas‟s utopian vision of a “New Peru” emerging from the rebirth of a modern and cosmopolitan Andean culture.

The author left the unfinished manuscript of his most complex and tortured novel, which included an alternatively dystopian and utopian prophecy invoking both the promises and challenges of a new era of Peru. The novel, entitled El Zorro de Arriba y el

Zorro de Abajo, was published posthumously in 1971. The performative force of

167

Arguedas‟s final novel is apparent from the first pages of the text, where the narrator announces his intentions to commit suicide by the end of the narration. The distinct currents of Arguedas‟s life and work converge in a text in which “mythical narrative, testimonial fiction, ethnography, diary, suicide note and novel coexist” (Flores Galindo

2007: 409, Kokotovic 2006: 146).85 The project began shortly after Arguedas‟s first suicide attempt as ethnographic research on the survival of Andean mythology in the northern coastal boomtown of Chimbote.86 If Arguedas‟s previous work had shown that

Creole hegemony had entered into crisis, in Chimbote he saw that the future of the new

Andean nation he desired was complicated by the entrance of transnational capitalism into Peru.87 Clearly excited by the possibilities of the project, he wrote to Murra, “I will be able to write a narrative about Chimbote and Supe that will be like sipping from a strong liquor, the substance of the simmering Peru of these days, its boiling point and the burning materials with which that liquor is stirred” (Arguedas 1990: 350). However, he experienced frequent frustrations in his ability to write about sweeping transformations he could hardly comprehend. His psychiatrist encouraged Arguedas to write about his inability to write and he incorporated these diaries into the novel, giving it a fragmented and confessional tone. He confessed his conflicting feelings about Chimbote, “the city I understand the least and the one I‟m most enthusiastic about” (Arguedas 1990: 186).

With deteriorating mental condition on full display in the diaries, critics have heatedly debated whether Los Zorros represents a defeat for Arguedas‟s social vision.88

For example, Albert Moreiras offers a convincing argument that Los Zorros represents

“Arguedas‟s dramatic staging of the implosion of meaning in transculturation” contesting

168 what he views as a concealed version of the hegemony of the myth of mestizaje in Latin

American thought (Moreiras 2001: 190).89 For Moreiras, the fragmented, almost incomprehensible nature of Arguedas‟s final novel performs a defiant refusal of signification, the only remaining recourse to the hegemony of transnational capitalism in a postmodern world (Ibid.).90 Priscilla Archibald astutely recognizes that the ubiquity of such defeatist approaches to Arguedas‟s novel relates to the temptation to conflate the narrator‟s loss of the ability to speak, dramatized in the “Final Diary” and ultimately to the author‟s suicide, with the collapse of his values and hopes for the future of Peruvian society (Archibald 2007).91 Lost in the oppressive and degrading environment of

Chimbote and the overwhelming despair at the heart of Arguedas‟s suicide, the characters in the novel of heterogeneous backgrounds struggle not only to survive, but reconstruct a meaningful cultural life (Ibid.).92 Los Zorros represents not a rejection of Arguedas‟s previous work, but a radicalization of his social vision, embodying his most thorough and convincing theorization of his concept of “magical socialism” (Ibid.).93

Los Zorros posits the vitality of Andean ancestral memory as a “changeable resource” for the formation of a viable Andean modernity (Cornejo Polar 1990,

Archibald 2007: 7).94 According to the well-known interpretation by Martin Lienhard, the scissors dance plays an integral role in the interventions of Andean ancestral memory through the figure of “the zorro-danzaq.” Lienhard argues, “The zorro-danzaq is the most extravagant and complex character in Arguedian narrative, converting the novel into one of the most extraordinary experiments in contemporary Latin American fiction”

(Lienhard 1981: 145). In another example of the interrelationship between Arguedas‟s

169 ethnographic and literary work in the last decade of his life, Los Zorros draws heavily on

Arguedas‟s own translation of The Huarochiri Manuscript.. The two mythical foxes from the novel‟s title, representing the complementarity between Pre-Columbian highland and coastal cultures, serve as ancient trickster deities in the Quechua manuscript. Arguedas inserted the foxes into the novel in key moments where they intervene with magical transformative powers. They function as extensions of

Arguedas‟s authorial persona and are central its final act of intervention.95

The role of the foxes in the novel is most effective through the character of Don

Diego, a surrogate of “The Fox from below.” In two key moments, Diego intervenes in the fictional representation of Chimbote as the zorro-danzaq, whose hypnotic dancing exerts transformational powers over his human interlocutors. Diego first appears in

Chapter 3, which recounts the dialogue between the mysterious messenger with a fox-like demeanor and Angel Jaramillo, the boss of the Nautilus Fishmeal Factory. The strange appearance of the visitor unsettles the factory boss. Nevertheless, he explains the inner workings of the factory with frank acknowledgement of the exploitation of the workers and the coordinated attempts of industrial corporations to coax the workers into spending their wages in company-owned bars and brothels. As Angel begins to laugh uncontrollably, Diego initiates an enchanting scissors dance, “whirling round and round in one place, as if he were holding something invisible in his hand that hummed with a melancholy steel rhythm” (Arguedas 2000: 115). Diego‟s strange and acrobatic dance inspires Angel to begin his own dance, the long-forgotten Yunsa of Cajabamba, his hometown. Diego infects his interlocutor with a repressed memory of his own Andean

170 past, exposing the self-hatred deeply buried in the psyche of the ex-highlander. The choreographic duet entices Angel to reveal the full extent of the exploitation of both man and nature by the multinational corporation (Vokral 1984: 300, Lambright: 238-239).

The second intervention of Diego, occurs in the “Second Part” of the novel. This scene follows a long conversation between Cardozo, a North American priest with leftist leanings, Maxwell, an American ex-Peace Corps volunteer who has assimilated into indigenous culture after living so many years in the highlands, and Cecilio Ramirez,

Maxwell‟s serrano boss. The scene reveals that Maxwell and Cecilio are the true revolutionaries assisting the needy in finding food and shelter while Cardozo is hypocritical and patronizing in his dealings with the poor (Arguedas 2000, Lambright

2007: 241). Diego arrives and his presence unsettles Cardozo, making him admit his own hypocrisy and call for a genuine Marxist revolution. The priest asks Maxwell to play

Andean music on his charango, and as Diego begins to dance, his:

head began to be adorned with plumes, like some peacock or long- shadowed hummingbird. They all stepped back to the walls. Diego began to make his legs quiver- they were apart and bent from difficult angles; he made them vibrate more rapidly than all the charango strings man has bloodied and sent ablaze, then he did a somersault in the air and made the lamp swing, making a sound like water, like the voices of the highland ducks, of the tatara reed plumes, which make a wailing resistance to the strength of the wind. (Arguedas 2000: 253)

The celebratory scene seems to give Cecilio hope, who exclaims, “I‟ve never, ever, had hope!” (253). Cecilio too begins to dance. Maxwell and Cecilio leave with renewed energy for organizing a radically democratic community. Cardozo remains in his study reflecting on a passage from the bible that espouses love as the greatest virtue of man, finally recognizing why those he cares for so often look at him with contempt.

171

This final scene comes just before the placement of “The Final Diary” creating an incongruent juxtaposition between hopefulness and despair. The interrelationship between dystopian and utopian elements in the novel enable the staging of Arguedas‟s suicide as a ritual sacrifice, as his authorial voice merges with the interventions of the zorro-danzaq.96 Although the zorro-danzaq is not yet able to defeat transnational capitalism, through his presence Arguedas “explores the margins where unleashing occurs that attempts to reorganize meaning in the face of huge negotiations and very few promises” (Ortega 1990: xxxvi). Significant evidence suggests that one of the reasons why the scissors dance became a symbolic resource of increasing importance in

Arguedas‟s later works is that he began to perceive the dance as a metaphor for his own role as a writer.97 He evokes the scissors dance in order to construct his own writing as an instrument of spiritual purification for the national body. The performative relationship between Los Zorros and Arguedas‟s suicide speaks to this affective dimension, giving an ethical and aesthetic force to his death (Vokral 1984, Columbus

1995, Monte Alto 2009, Arriarán 2011). According to Arriarán, Los Zorros “should not be understood as a novel but as a script that theatricalizes the death [. . .] a kind of map that orients Peru towards the future and [Arguedas] towards the beyond” (Arriarán 2011).

In this powerfully theatrical act, Arguedas fused his own performative autobiography into the history and future of the collective body and subjectivity of Peru.

Recognizing the theatrical and performative nature of Los Zorros as a script for a suicide staged as ritual sacrifice sheds light on the disjuncture between the dystopian and utopian dimensions of the novel. The “Final Diary” and various suicide letters published

172 in the novel, quite explicitly imagine a utopian future for the Peruvian nation. These letters “insist on the capacity of young people to change the present situation” (Lienhard

1981: 176). Arguedas represents the young people of Peru, as well as Cuba and

Vietnam, as the hope and possibility for the realization of a new future. In the “Final

Diary,” read by literary critic and Arguedas‟s long-time friend Alberto Escobar at his funeral, Arguedas poetically expresses his belief in the coming of a new era of Peru:

Perhaps with me one historical cycle draws to a close and another begins in Peru, with all that represents. It means the closing of the cycle of the consoling calendar lark, of the whip, of being driven like beasts of burden, of impotent hatred, of mournful funeral „uprisings‟ of the fear of God and of the predominance of that God and his protégées, his fabricators. It signals the opening of the cycle of light and of the indomitable liberating strength of Vietnamese man, of the fiery calendar lark, of the Liberator God. That God who is coming back into action. (Arguedas 2000: 259)

He clearly alludes to elements of the myth of Inkarri, and Andean millennialism within the context of the present and with a dialogic relationship to liberation theology. In his own funeral, Arguedas sought to theatricalize these utopian sentiments by actualizing what Jill Dolan calls a “utopian performative,” a live performance that “provides a place where people come, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning-making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intimations of a better world”

(Dolan 2005: 164). Arguedas‟ public funeral staged his suicide as an ethical and aesthetic act with a potent theatricality.

On December 3, 1969, thousands of Andean peasants, migrants, workers, students, intellectuals, musicians, artists, and revolutionaries took to the streets of downtown Lima accompanying the procession of Arguedas‟s coffin to the Main

Cemetery. Famous Andean musicians commemorated their most enthusiastic supporter

173

Illustration 4.1

Máximo Dámian Huamaní Performing at Arguedas‟s Funeral

Reprinted in Variedades, Sunday Magazine of El Peruano, Jan. 18, 2011.

with huaynos in both Quechua and Spanish. As per Arguedas‟s instructions, several young provincial students gave eulogies and Alberto Escobar read “the Final Diary.” The culminating act of this event was the performance of “La Agonia,” by Máximo Damián

Huamaní and Los Hermanos Chiara. According to Vargas Llosa, who was in attendance:

the violinist Máximo Damián Huamaní of San Diego de Ishua, Lucanas, and the musicians Jaime Guardia, Alejandro Vivanco and Los Hermanos Chiara, accompanied the funeral entourage playing the harp, violin, quena, and charango to the tune of “La Agonia de la Danza de las Tijeras,” while two of these Indian dancers that had fascinated Arguedas since he was a child, danced alongside the coffin dressed in their multi-colored costumes of feathers and mirrors. (Vargas Llosa 1996: 13) 174

The presence of the scissors dancers in the procession was immortalized in a photo published in El Comercio on December 7, 1969 accompanied by a testimonial written by

Máximo Damián Huamaní. The article and an image of the violinist, republished in several sources, further consolidated the violinist‟s public image as “Arguedas‟s violinist.” The procession served as a theatrical metaphor for Arguedas‟s suicide as a ritual sacrifice modeled on “La Agonia de Rasu Ñiti.” As Edith Vokral observes,

“Arguedas completed the destiny of the danzak, waiting for the future, in which another dancer will take his scissors in order to dance in a world of condors and foxes” (Vokral

1984: 303). I contend that the performance did not address a singular potential known or unknown individual dancer, but rather a collective national future, represented most clearly by young intellectuals, revolutionaries, and migrant Andean artists.

4.9. A Culture Hero of the New Peru

This funeral procession consolidated and dramatized the process of “the dissolution of a personality into the national conscience” already begun in the last years of Arguedas‟s life (Arriarán 2011). According to a number of commentators, Arguedas became a cultural hero in the years after his death (Cornejo Polar 1991, Columbus 1995,

Montoya Rojas 1998, Flores Galindo 2007). If Mariátegui and Valcárcel were the founding figures of the discourse of the “New Peru,” Arguedas became the patron saint and Christ-like postcolonial martyr, repeatedly commemorated and canonized as an embodiment of the coming into being of a new nation (Roach 1996: 103). His suicide was a “sacrificial expenditure” that “paradoxically posits surplus” (Roach 1996: 74,

175

Columbus 1995: 117). Reflecting on the meaning of Arguedas as an icon of contemporary Peruvian culture, the late historian Alberto Flores Galindo remarked:

Arguedas was a person caught up in historical crossings and conflict which he lived with an exceptional intensity, until they contributed to his suicide. But the personal cost gave us as a result an exceptional body of work that opened the possibility of thinking about Peruvian society in another manner, while the social sciences were stuck in old paradigms and schemes. (Flores Galindo 2007: 428).

In retrospect, Arguedas was correct in his prophecy that his death marked the beginning of a “new era” in Peru. However, the crisis of Creole hegemony that began to be apparent during the 1960s did not yield the utopian vision of a new society founded on the values of solidarity, brotherhood, and inter-ethnic dialogue as Arguedas had imagined. The thirty years after Arguedas‟s death wrought a chaotic period of military dictatorship, unplanned urban growth, political violence by both state and non-state actors, and the rapid expansion of transnational capitalism in Peru. Nevertheless, this should not diminish the vitality of the radically multi-ethnic democracy Arguedas envisioned. Just because his “prophecy” has not come to fruition does not mean it has not had an impact on the cultural, social, and political history of Peru.

176

Chapter 5 Urban Refashioning: Populist Nationalism, Mass Migration, and Political Violence

5.1. Introduction José María Arguedas staged his suicide as a rite of passage that marked the transition into a new era of Peru as a pluricultural nation. The timing of this utopian performance dramatically increased its affective power. By the end of the 1960s, the

Creole nationalist project of the traditional oligarchy was clearly in crisis, creating the potential for marginalized actors to participate in the construction of a new and more inclusive Peruvian society (Franco 2004). Arguedas‟s collected works and public persona continued to embody the incompletely realized project of an alternative Andean modernity, and a radical pluricultural Peruvian democracy. His literary and ethnographic depictions of the scissors dance became the script that inspired new cultural repertoires in a changing Peruvian public sphere. This chapter chronicles what urbanizing scissors dancers accomplished with the symbolic capital Arguedas bestowed on the artform.

However, this pregnant moment of possibility fostered an ambiguous legacy of competing political and cultural projects, chaotic urban expansion, and large-scale political violence over the next quarter of a century.

In October 1968 a left-wing military regime came to power in a bloodless coup

(Krujit 1994: 31-46). The Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces (RGAF), led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, swiftly proclaimed a fervently nationalist and populist ideology rooted in Latin American dependency theory, and initiated a series of

177 sweeping economic, social, and educational reforms (Ansión 1986: 47, Turino 1993:

140). While it produced a rhetoric that encouraged popular participation, the RFAF

“relied on a top-down corporatist power structure which often reverted to coercion” in order to contain popular mobilization (Turino 1993: 141). Nevertheless, the populist- nationalism that the RGAF promoted had a profound effect on the re-organization of state-peasant relations and stimulated an even larger second wave of urban Andean migration. The military regime successfully promoted the recognition of emblematic

Andean cultural practices, such as the scissors dance, as part of a renovated national- popular cultural repertoire (Turino 1993: 140, Zevallos Aguilar 2009: 93). Furthermore, migrant performers and their audiences established new urban communities of scissors dance performance in Lima and incorporated the dance into a growing cosmopolitan

Andean public sphere. New generations of performers formed in the metropolitan habitus incorporated aesthetic elements from global popular culture and the urban experience into the musical and choreographic repertoires of the scissors dance. Thus, during the 1970s migrant artists from Ayacucho and Huancavelica fashioned new hybrid styles of urban scissors dance performance that began to flow from Lima back to the provinces (García Canclini 1995, Raymundo 2008, Zevallos Aguilar 2009: 115).

The process of urban renovation and hybridization dramatically intensified during the 1980s under the devastating circumstances of political violence and the forced relocation of entire rural communities to the relative safety of Lima and other cities. The internal war fought between the guerilla insurgents of the Shining Path and state security forces between 1980 and 1992 centered in Ayacucho, Huancavelica, and Apurimac, the

178 traditional home of the scissors dance. The celebration of rural festivities became virtually impossible to such a degree that urban hybridizations of the form became the only viable surrogates for the more “complete” rural festival repertoires. Nevertheless, I argue that the dance was not merely exiled in Lima by the violence nor were the performers and their audiences simply its passive victims as conventional ethnographic narratives suggest (Nuñez Rebaza 1985, 1990, Bigenho 1991, 1993, Arce Sotelo 2006).

The collective organization and entrepreneurial energies of young scissors dancers and musicians contributed to an urban renaissance of the dance in migrant popular culture at the height of the conflict. Furthermore, the scissors dance became a cultural resource through which effected populations responded to the horrors of their traumatic experiences and present situation in a transculturated revival of an earlier Andean infernal imaginary (Theidon 2003, 2004, Millones 2010).

5.2. State Folklore and the Refashioning of the National-Popular

In the first few years of his administration, General Velasco concentrated his energies on political and economic reforms. Once agrarian reform and the nationalization of selected industries were firmly underway, the regime turned its attention towards education and the building of cultural institutions. Educational reforms sought to “create a new consciousness amongst all Peruvians of the basic problems of our country; and will contribute to forging a new type of man within a new social morality”

(Velasco 1972: 63).1 The re-structuring of cultural institutions was an integral part of this larger pedagogical project. The RGAF elevated the status of the Casa de la Cultura, dramatically increasing its shoe-string budget and prestige within the hierarchy of the

179 state bureaucracy. The renamed Instituto Nacional de Cultura fostered the study and promotion of Andean folklore (Turino 1993, Feldman 2006, Mendoza 2007). While the military regime sought to create modern national subjects out of marginalized Andean peasants “the indigenous referent maintained a mystifying character as a central pillar of

Peruvian nationality” (Ansión 1986: 48). The INC and other cultural institutions elevated the status of the scissors dance as a visually-appealing national icon evoking an authentic

Andean identity. The representations of the dance authored by Arguedas gained greater state patronage as the particular artists associated with his public persona became star performers in staged folklore performances disseminated by various arms of the INC.

In 1969, Velasco appointed Victoria Santa Cruz, a leading figure of the Afro-

Peruvian cultural revival, as Director of the National School of Folklore. On December

1973, the newfound Conjunto Nacional de Folklore debuted on the stage of the Teatro

Municipal in Lima, under Santa Cruz‟s direction (Feldman 2006: 76). Los Hermanos

Chiara, the scissors dance group who had performed under the sponsorship of Arguedas, were integral members and featured soloists of the state folklore company. The Conjunto, composed of distinct Andean and Afro-Peruvian performance troupes, sought to create visually-appealing and artistically professional representations of a multicultural national identity on Peruvian and especially international stages. As Anthony Shay and Barbara

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argue, such staged folklore companies perform a distinct genre of

Western theatre dance that represents local and regional traditional cultures (Shay 2002,

Kirshenblatt Gimblett 1998, 2004).2 Like many successful staged folklore companies,

Victoria Santa Cruz directed the Conjunto Nacional de Folklore with charismatic

180 leadership expressed with a distinctly anti-imperialist and cultural nationalist conviction

(Shay 2002: 238, Feldman 2006: 76-77).3 For the next nine years, the Conjunto performed on a regular basis throughout Peru and various international tours to South

America, North America, Europe, and Asia.

Santa Cruz self-consciously directed the Conjunto‟s aesthetic style to further the goals of the military revolution. She wrote:

The current process of changes entails the valorization of essential elements of our popular traditional culture with the high quality and technical level that the folklore riches of Peru demands. Considering that the dynamic of the revolutionary process and the changing international situation demand different proposals and actions the Conjunto Nacional de Folklore uses totally new criteria to focus its work. (Santa Cruz 1978: 19)

These “new criteria” implied an anti-imperialist ideology and performance pedagogy that minimized the dominance of European balletic techniques in favor of methods more appropriate to Peruvian reality.4 While the Peruvian company represented the nation as a multicultural tapestry rather than constituted by a singular ethnic identity, Santa Cruz emphasized the complementarity of Afro-Peruvian and Andean expressive cultures with their common roots in collective work and agricultural cultivation.5 Due to Santa Cruz‟s nationalistic and folksy choreography, the dance critic for the New York Times called the

Conjunto, “one of the best and most interesting folk dance companies to be seen in years that avoided “the unnatural slickness of groups like the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico”

(Kiselgoff 1975). Despite the generally warm reception by international critics and audiences, Santa Cruz‟s efforts to put Afro-Peruvian expressions on an equal plane with those of the Andes often clashed with the stereotypical expectations of international audiences. The same New York Times reviewer was confused by the “strange, almost

181

African appearance” of the Afro-Peruvian dances, but affirmed the Andean dances “as supremely fascinating from an ethnic standpoint” (Kiselgoff 1975).

Perhaps due to this stereotypical identification of Peru with Andean culture, the visually-appealing and virtuosic qualities of the scissors dance quickly made it an audience favorite and earned the coveted slot of the show‟s finale (Personal Interview

“Valentín Chiara” 2009). The members of Los Hermanos Chiara were already seasoned theatrical performers before they joined the Conjunto Nacional de Folklore. In addition to their experience performing under the sponsorship of Arguedas, their relationship to

Victoria Santa Cruz went back to their participation in the Peruvian cultural delegation she directed at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City (Feldman 2006: 77, Mendoza 2007:

146, Personal Interview “Valentín Chiara” 2009). According to harpist Valentín Chiara, participating in the Conjunto was the highlight of their careers. They felt joy and pride upon arriving in Mexico and being serenaded by mariachis, meeting internationally- known artists and political figures, or shaking hands with the President of the United

States (Ford). The harpist emphasized that they came from a forgotten village and grew up in utter poverty, yet they were able to represent their country as important artists on the international stage (Personal Interview “Valentín Chiara” 2009).

On the other hand, the early international exposure and audience appreciation the group received also distinguished and distanced them from the larger scissors dance community, whether in Lima or rural Ayacucho. Valentín positions himself as a folklorist, connoting a professional status as a compiler of ancient customs.6 He repeated frequently, “in order to present in theatres, you have to be prepared. Not everyone can

182 perform in Europe or the United States” (Ibid.). He explained theatrical performance requires discipline, punctuality, and the ability to create a compressed synthesis of a complex and lengthy sequence of melodic and choreographic progressions that typically last up to a week in traditional rural festivities into a theatrical presentation of no more than ten to fifteen minutes.7 This role as professional folklorists conditioned the group‟s contradictory traditionalist position in relation to public representations of the scissors dance. In a separate interview, Valentín‟s son told me that his father obsessively conserved the melodic sequences of the dance from his childhood. Valentín would not allow his sons, both of whom became dancers, to travel to rural Ayacucho because contemporary performers were ruining the tradition. He further did not allow them to practice the dangerous pruebas de valor. Their father‟s instruction emphasized the more sophisticated acrobatics the group itself had introduced into the dance based upon their experiences on the international folklore stage (Personal Interview “Fredy Chiara” 2008).

Thus, Valentín positions himself as the protector of a sanitized traditionalism, embracing the unthreatening innovations appropriate for the respectable folkloric stage, but rejecting more popular innovations.

Despite the distinction that distanced Los Hermanos Chiara from the larger scissors dance community, their staged folklore performances became important models for the urban innovation of the dance. As Anthony Shay argues, staged folklore is a genre of Western theatre dance, distinct from dancing in the field, which deserves to be studied in its own right. One of the reasons why such forms of cultural expression deserve scholarly attention is because they do not merely imitate but also constitute

183

“authentic” folk dances, in a mutual influence with more rural and popular iterations

(Shay 2002). Shay and others have argued that Russian and Mexican folkloric ballets are the paradigmatic examples of the genre. Los Hermanos Chiara and later performers widely acknowledge the influence of the highly-technical acrobatics of Russian folk ballet dancers.8 Both Valentín and Fredy Chiara told me the same story about an impromptu competition between the group and Russian dancers in the late 1970s. The less formally trained scissors dancers apparently defeated the more technical Russian dancers by adapting and improvising upon the Russians‟ own acrobatic maneuvers

(Personal Interview “Valentín Chiara” 2009, “Fredy Chiara” 2008).9 These choreographic influences flowed in multiple directions. The Soviet Embassy later invited the group to travel to the USSR to teach the scissors dance to Russian folk-ballet dancers.10

The earliest available video footage that depicts the scissors dance is found in a

1978 documentary about Victoria Santa Cruz, entitled Black & Woman, directed by

Italian theatre director Eugenio Barba (Barba 1978). The film includes Barba‟s interview of Santa Cruz interwoven with footage of the Conjunto Nacional de Folklore rehearsing on a street corner in Lima. At one point, Santa Cruz explains that her earlier investigations of the origins and spirit of African-derived dances has allowed her a point of entry into the cultural manifestations of indigenous, European, and Asian cultures.

This segment of the interview is juxtaposed with multiple shots of Los Hermanos Chiara performing the scissors dance as the singular example of Andean dance portrayed in the documentary. Thus, it reinforces the exceptional uniqueness of the scissors dancers as

184 specially-skilled crowd-pleasing soloists who stand out from the larger ensemble of

Andean performers. The video shows the dancers Gerardo and Zacarias Chiara engaging in a mock competition dance in modern street clothes and the simple black wide- brimmed hats typically worn by rural Andean peasants. Violinist Narcasio Gambray and harpist Valentín Chiara accompany the dancers in similar clothing. The style of the dancers appears to be influenced by urban cosmopolitan movement aesthetics. The acrobatics are less developed than those of contemporary scissors dancers, but the roots of such aesthetic innovations are clearly visible in the performance of the troupe.

Los Hermanos Chiara performed with the Conjunto Nacional de Folklore from

1973 until early 1983. Although initiated during the Velasco regime as a clear demonstration of cultural nationalism, the more conservative second phase of the RGAF led by Morales Bermudez (1975-1980), left the group untouched. This second phase returned Peru‟s political economy to the earlier status quo, but maintained the prestige of national cultural institutions with a softening of the populist rhetoric and a lack of dynamism, growth, or innovation (Krujit 1994: 163). During the democratic government of Fernando Belaunde Terry (1980-1985), the state reorganized state institutions along emerging neoliberal lines. They drastically reduced the budget and scope of the

Institution Nacional de Cultura, privatizing a number of its earlier functions and dissolving the Conjunto Nacional de Folklore altogether (Ansión 1986). In December

1982, the group staged a farewell concert entitled “Adiós al Perú” at the Teatro

Municipal in Lima (Feldman 2006: 71).11

185

5.3. Máximo Damián y sus Danzantes de Tijeras

The scissors dance troupe formed by Arguedas during the 1960s begat another high-profile theatrical group, headed by Máximo Damián Huamaní. The violinist famous for his close friendship to Arguedas separated from Los Hermanos Chiara shortly after the author‟s death. His public persona was more directly indebted to Arguedas‟s legacy than his former partners. While Máximo Damian benefitted from his association with

Arguedas during the author‟s lifetime, it was Arguedas‟s death that bestowed legendary status upon the violinist. The author dedicated his posthumous novel, El Zorro de Arriba y el Zorro de Abajo, “to Máximo Damián Huamaní of San Diego de Ishua” (Arguedas

2000). In “The Final Diary,” Arguedas addressed Máximo Damián and charango player

Jaime Guardia by instructing, “you are never going to let yourselves be used (as long as you‟re like when I first met you) for puppet shows” (Arguedas 2000: 259). It is these sentiments that Máximo Damián‟s presentation of self (and presentation by others) conveys; a humble highlander with an authoritative authenticity. The violinist‟s speech at Arguedas‟s funeral, published in El Comercio, was entitled “With Tears, not Play-

Acting.”12 At the end of the speech, he uttered with sincerity, “the other day, everything was dark for me. I was his friend, his violinist. I feel as if I am abandoned here alone”

(Damián Huamaní 1976: 343). To this day, Máximo Damián is a central figure of the growing Arguedas industry, popularly known as “Arguedas‟s violinist.”13 Through a double-layered public persona of humble authenticity and cosmopolitan artistry,

Arguedas‟s violinist became an important model for later scissors dance performers to enter broader public spheres.

186

After Arguedas‟s death, Máximo Damián Huamaní found a support network amongst Arguedas‟s intellectual circle. He began performing with his wife, Isabel Asto who sang huaynos and harawis, his brother-in-law Lazaro Asto, who was an accomplished scissors dancer, and harpist Modesto Tomayro, in limited theatrical engagements in 1973, mostly sponsored by Peruvian universities. The press baptized the group “Máximo Damián y sus Danzantes de Tijeras” (Gushiken 1979, Personal Interview

“Máximo Damián Huamaní” 2008). In 1976, the Director of the INC, linguist Marta

Hildebrandt recruited the violinist for the position of professor of traditional Andean music at the Escuela Nacional de Folklore “José María Arguedas” (Arce Sotelo 2006,

Personal Interview “Máximo Damián Huamaní 2008). Between 1976 and 2008, he taught numerous students not only the technical principles of the Andean violin, but also the oral tradition associated with Andean music, “so that their spirit is prepared along with their ear; because technique without sentiment is not worth anything” (Cornejo

1997: 58). His association with the state-sponsored folklore school brought an informal state patronage to his theatrical troupe. The Escuela Nacional de Folklore invited the group to perform frequently on their own stage, or other events sponsored by the INC.

They performed in major national theatres, embassies, and by the late 1970s inaugurated the tourist hotel circuit in dinner theatre shows at the Hotel Crillón in the central plaza of

Lima. During the 1980s, Máximo Damián and his group, which featured a revolving door of performers, received numerous private engagements to perform internationally in

Europe and the United States. In 1979, José Gushiken published an oral history of the violinist‟s life as exemplary of the migrant Andean artist. Finally in 1982, Máximo

187

Damian and his performance group appeared as the scissors dancers in several scenes of

Luis Figueroa‟s film Yawar Fiesta, based on Arguedas‟s 1941 novel.

Perhaps Máximo Damián‟s most important public role was, like his famous mentor and admirer, as a mediator between the Ayacuchano scissors dance community and the larger world. Not only did his group introduce the dance to numerous national and international publics through theatrical presentations, but he served as a field guide and key informant to numerous ethnographers and literary scholars in search of the world represented by Arguedas and he taught several ethnomusicologists the basics of the

Andean violin (Roel Pineda 1974, Vivanco 1976, Lienhard 1981, 1983, Cruz Fierro

1982, Nuñez Rebaza 1985, 1990, Bigenho 1991, 1993, Arce Sotelo 2006). This openness to ethnographic inquiries has helped to consolidate and sustain the larger-than life legacy of Arguedas in subsequent ethnographic representations of the dance. Furthermore, his theatrical group has provided a training ground for other scissors dance performers from

Ayacucho to reach a wider audience. Los Hermanos Chiara was largely a self-sustaining family troupe, with at least two dancers and the harpist from the same family. Máximo

Damián is only a single individual, who by necessity recruited younger migrant scissors dancers and harpists to fill out the company. From the mid-1970s, nearly all of the scissors dance performers from Ayacucho who entered the theatrical stage first had to earn their stripes as performers for “Máximo Damián y Sus Danzantes de Tijeras.” From the early 1970s to the early 1980s, this first generation of dancers and harpists included

Añascha, Ccecchele, Richard Saire, Chuspicha, Qori Sisicha, Champa, and Alacrán, all of whom played a major role in the urban reinvention of the dance during the 1980s and its

188 later expansion on the international stage (Personal Interview “Qori Sisicha” 2007,

“Máximo Damián” 2008, “Ccecchele” 2008, “Añascha” 2008, “Champa” 2009).

5.4. The Urban Andean Public Sphere

Numerous studies have located the period of the Velasco government as a major turning point that accelerated the crisis of the old Creole republic and the emergence of the urban Andean cholo as the paradigmatic figure of a new Peru (Quijano 1980, Matos

Mar 2004, Nugent 1992, Turino 1993, Williams 2002, Kokotovic 2006). According to

Matos Mar, the RGAF “did not achieve integration, but created the conditions for a powerful liberation of the latent energies of the Andean world and popular sectors,” producing a “popular overflow” (Matos Mar 2004: 37). This release of popular energy reconfigured Lima as an Andeanized space that shaped the “new face” of Peru (Ibid. 21,

39, 41, 95). The dynamic hybridity engendered through the encounter between rural indigenous cultures in transit and modern urban cultural and spatial practices “wrought the radical fragmentation of modernity‟s national scripts” (Williams 2002: 23). The combination of the RGAF‟s populist policies and urban Andean creativity “softened the marginality of highland culture by the mid-1970s (Schaedel 1979: 408). Migrants from

Huancavelica and Ayacucho established distinct but overlapping multi-layered networks of scissors dance performance in Lima. These complex performance networks linked the city to the countryside and dramatically increased the visibility of the scissors dance as an emblem within the heterogeneity of an emerging urban Andean public sphere.

Prior to the 1960s, Andean migrants in Lima had to navigate a series of bureaucratic webs designed to protect Creole privilege.14 During and after the

189 demographic explosion, which doubled Lima‟s population between 1961 and 1972, urban

Andean residents became increasingly conscious of their critical mass. They engaged in collective grassroots organizing in order to increase their standard of living and create community in the city (Turino 1993: 32, Burt 2007: 93). Despite their top-down organization, the Velasco regime partially succeeded in renovating national hegemony through the incorporation of rural Andean youth into the “new nation.”15 Agrarian reform and the expansion of rural education generated the desire for progress and stimulated further urban migration. However, when new migrants arrived in Lima, they discovered that most formal employment opportunities were still closed to them and the growth of industry could not keep pace with the dizzying rate of urban migration.

The disjuncture between expectations and formal opportunities led to a dramatic intensification of alternative strategies of informality (Turino 1993: 34-35). Initially, migrants settled in the existing popular districts of central Lima. These areas became densely urbanized and crime-ridden inner-city slums with rapidly deteriorating living conditions (Millones 1978, Driant 1991, Burt 2007: 93). A lack of housing caused by the demographic explosion in the 1960s led to a second-wave of land invasions that expanded into the vast unoccupied desert and hillsides to the north, south, and east of the traditional demarcations of metropolitan Lima (Riofrio 1978, Burt 2007: 93).16 If they successfully remained in the unoccupied lands for several weeks, the new community petitioned the government for land titles and basic services (Turino 1993: 30-31).17 With the RGAF‟s tacit support of land invasions and willingness to provide services, many new barriadas or pueblos jovenes (young towns) were established during the 1970s,

190

Illustration 5.1

Map of the Conos of Metropolitan Lima

Courtesy of http://www.urbano.org.pe

creating the northern, southern, and eastern “cones” that jet out from the traditional urban districts (Collier 1978, Turino 1993: 31, Burt 2007: 93). Despite an unsavory reputation

191 in the national media, the barriadas are relatively safe and well-organized neighborhoods whose “sole existence would be inexplicable without hope for progress” (Nugent 1992:

31).18 By augmenting the potential to transform their condition of poverty, the establishment of the barriadas has enabled migrants to exercise new forms of cultural and moral agency in the fashioning of a powerful myth of the triumphant cholo or provinciano (Degregori 1986, Nugent 1992, Cánepa Koch 2002, Alfaro 2005).

The urban Andean culture industries, comprised of interlocking networks of coliseos, commercial musical recordings, and radio programs, were crucial to the development and dissemination of this myth of provincial social mobility (Alfaro

2005).19 Nevertheless, numerous studies of Andean music and dance identify a major historical shift in Andean cultural performance in the capital during the 1970s (Llorens and Nuñez Rebaza 1981, Llorens 1983, Turino 1988, 1993, 2007, Romero 2000). As migrants fled the overcrowded city center and formed barriadas they increasingly abandoned the centrally located coliseos in favor of new cultural spaces developed by regional migrants associations. Most of these studies explain the gradual decline of the coliseo in terms of an increasing demand for authenticity, regional specificity, and economic control over cultural events on the part of newly-arrived Andean migrants

(Turino 1988, 1993, 2007, Romero 2000). While these explanations undoubtedly contain a degree of truth, they employ an overly-schematic distinction between the articulation of an over-arching provincial identity and the re-elaboration of specific regional identities.

The 1970s produced a significant diversification of performance opportunities and hybrid aesthetic styles that constituted interlocking heterogeneous networks of cultural

192 performance in Lima. Even though second-wave migrant performers and their publics tended to position themselves as defenders of tradition and specific regional identities, the legacy of the coliseo remained very much alive as even the most traditionalist reproductions of Andean festivities appropriated its hybrid aesthetics (Alfaro 2005).

The regional migrants associations and their staging of reproductions of rural

Andean festivities in urban space have acquired a paradigmatic status in the ethnographic literature on “the Andeanization of Lima” (Doughty 1972, Millones 1978, Llorens and

Nuñez Rebaza 1981, Altamirano 1984, 1988, Nuñez Rebaza 1985, 1990). These studies focus on these regional associations as recreations of Andean modes of social solidarity in the city, and the urban reproductions of Andean fiestas they stage as more or less faithful imitations of the rural originals. Thus, they reproduce the notion of the Andean as the national “other” kept outside of the now figurative city walls of Lima (Cánepa

Koch 2002: 79-80). The important ethnographic study of the effects of urban migration on the scissors dance, by Lucy Nuñez Rebaza, views these reproductions of Andean fiestas as a form of more or less authentic transmission of the dance to urban space and contrasts them with degrading commercial spectacles of the Andean folklore market

(1985, 1990). This purist position forces her to constantly complain about the contamination of the former by the latter and portray the performers as exploited victims of urban assimilation and capitalist hegemony. However, in cited interviews her informants seem to take a variety of pragmatic positions that often combine nostalgia and the valorization of tradition with pride in the visibility and popularity they have acquired in multiple performance contexts. If we disentangle Nuñez Rebaza‟s descriptions from

193 her dichotomous interpretive framework, the study reveals the emergence of multi- layered networks of scissors dance performance in Lima during the course of the 1970s.

Regional migrants associations have existed in Lima since the 1920s and 1930s.20

However, until the 1960s most of these associations represented the departmental and provincial levels with the bulk of the membership reserved for provincial elites. After the growth of the barriadas, the number of associations multiplied rapidly, representing the district level with memberships from more humble backgrounds (Altamirano 1984: 15).21

While only a small minority of clubs have established their own locales, the others rent the locale of a club associated with a neighboring locality.22 These locales are walled-in rustic spaces, usually about 1000 square meters, which include a soccer field, a small chapel for religious services, a stage for musical performance that opens onto a concrete dance floor and gathering place, and several kiosks for the sale of beer, soda, and typical highland meals. A system of cargos, modeled on highland practice and chosen from within the club‟s membership, provide the festivals with economic support, organization, and labor. The particular cargontes (sponsors) who have the most interaction with scissors dance performers are the mayordomo, the head sponsor, and the carguyoq, who contracts the musicians for the festival (Nuñez Rebaza 1990: 93-95).

While highland fiestas typically last for up to a week, their urban reproductions are confined to a single weekend. The work of the scissors dance performers begins on

Saturday evening during the anticipa, a gathering of the cargontes and leaders of the association, taking place at the home of the mayordomo. The dancers perform a preview of the main competition and serenade the image of the particular virgin or saint being

194 honored, as well as each of the cargontes. On Sunday morning, they attend mass at a neighboring church and accompany the patronal image in procession. After a meal provided by the mayordomo, the cargontes and artists head to the locale for the Día

Central of the fiesta (Ibid. 96-97). This event is a commercial spectacle, to which the association charges admission, directed towards a larger public of migrants from the neighboring region and their friends and families.23 The scissors dance competition is the main event of the first phase of the spectacle, lasting from approximately two to six in the afternoon.24 The performers have to reduce a sequence of choreography designed to last several days into a few hours on a single day. The performance space is limited to the stage and concrete dance floor within the walled-in locale in comparison to the open space of highland plazas. The second phase of the fiesta, the general dance, begins between 6-7 pm and typically lasts until 10-11 pm. An orquesta típica, a kind of Andean brass brand, or a series of folklore singers who perform the commercial huayno style, take the stage and the public dances and socializes (Ibid. 98-102.25

While Nuñez Rebaza portrays these urban Andean festivities as examples of the continuity of Andean forms of solidarity and reciprocity in the city, these elements are intertwined with the informal capitalism of the commercial Andean folklore industry in a variety of ways. The Día Central is a commercial spectacle that participates in both monetary and prestige economies. The organizers sell beer and concessions, a major transformation from highland festivals where the sponsors freely distribute locally-made chicha and cane liquor. In order to increase attendance, the cargontes advertise the festival on radio programs directed towards migrant audiences, on flyers with photos of

195 the star performers, and in the popular chicha tabloids sold on nearly every major intersection in Lima. The performance aesthetics of the festivals draw not only on the model of rural fiestas, but also on the spectacles of the coliseos, including the presence of the stage, sound equipment, commercial huayno music, the frame of folklore, and most importantly, the ubiquitous presence of an animator. The animator is a master of ceremonies who constantly talks into a microphone in Spanish. He tells the audience information about the performers, directs them when to applaud, and praises the wonders of regional and national folklore. The animators are entertainers in themselves, most often successful or aspiring radio hosts. A significant part of the informal economy revolves around the hundreds of fiestas celebrated in different parts of the barriadas in

Lima every weekend (Ibid. 113, Turino 1993).26

5.5. Urban Communities of Practice: Second-Wave Migrants

The significant increase in regional associations and urban Andean fiestas in the barriadas during the 1970s accentuated the distinction between the first wave and second wave of migrant Andean performers in metropolitan Lima.27 The first wave of scissors dance performers was almost entirely comprised of migrants from the provinces of

Lucanas and Parinacochas in southern Ayacucho, mostly from the provincial capitals of

Puquio and Cora Cora. This group struggled for a place for the dance in the commercial

Andean folklore market, aided by the recognition of Arguedas and his circle of folklorists. Although they sometimes performed in urban Andean fiestas, their activities were confined to short staged folklore presentations in the coliseos and theatres sponsored by state and academic cultural institutions. Among this group were Los

196

Hermanos Chiara and Máximo Damián Huamaní who achieved the highest level of name recognition on national and international stages, but also groups who performed in the coliseos, such as El Conjunto de Danzantes de Tijeras de Puquio and Los Hermanos

Yawarcha. These groups were mostly comprised of lower-class indigenous performers directed by a middle-class mestizo entrepreneur, a framework that derived from the large folkloric companies of the 1940s and 1950s (Nuñez Rebaza 1990: 125-126).

The second wave of migrant performers arrived in Lima as adolescents or young people in their twenties between 1960 and 1980, having already learned the dance in the highlands and having some experience in highland festivals. They found the folkloric culture industries already established, and became subordinate to the greater name- recognition of successful first wave migrant artists. Thus, they established a space to distinguish themselves in urban the fiestas costumbristas.28 Both generations tended to differentiate themselves from each other according to different criteria of authenticity.

The older artists claimed they performed a more original style with a greater degree of purity of melodic and choreographic sequences. The second wave artists argued that their predecessors only knew how to perform in theatres and were not accustomed to the higher levels of competition in rural fiestas (ibid. 127).

During the 1970s, second wave migrants from Ayacucho and Huancavelica established distinct but overlapping communities of scissors dance performance with their requisite performance spaces, and audiences, in the southern and eastern cones respectively. Previous ethnographic studies have not sufficiently delimited the complex levels of interaction, competition, and mutual influence between these two communities.

197

The influence of Andeanist interpretations of Arguedas has bestowed greater public recognition on the variety from southern Ayacucho.29 Ethnographers portrayed all regional variants as having a common essence, and the Ayacucho style became emblematic of the genre as a whole. Yet, this conventional representation derived from a circular logic that constructed a primordial essence out of a series of cosmopolitan relationships between Arguedas and later folklorists and migrant performers. For example, two folklorists closely associated with Arguedas published article-length studies of the scissors dance in the 1970s, which relied almost exclusively on first-wave migrant performers from Ayacucho (Roel Pineda 1974, Vivanco 1976). Both authors developed their arguments from Andeanist interpretations of Arguedas, initiating the claim that the dance represented a survival of ancient shamanic rituals. Although they primarily relied on testimony from migrant performers, these authors barely acknowledged the presence of the dance in Lima. Like the staged folklore performances sponsored by professional folklorists, these studies enact a double-performative. They efface their representational mediation in the construction of an image emblematic of spatial and temporal otherness.

The first-wave migrant performers from Ayacucho garnered a great deal of prestige from their association with Arguedas and other folklorists. The later second- wave of migrant performers had to compete for recognition with an already established community of performers and drew on Andeanist representations of the dance at the same time as they sought to construct strategies for distinguishing themselves from earlier migrant performers.30 The Huancavelica scissors dance community established itself during the 1970s in the eastern cone of Lima largely through the collaborations between

198 violinist Leoncio Rua and the dancer Máximo Hilario Solis (Derrepente).31 Performing in newly-constructed locales on the central highway in the district of Ate-Vitarte, Hilario

Solis established an emerging network of urban scissors dance performance from

Huancavelica with the newly-arrived dancers Chicchi Para, Kishkamico, Pulgarcito, and

Los Hermanos Yawarcha (Personal Interview “Chicchi Para” 2007, “Kishkamico” 2009).

This small community of performers experienced less generational tension and appears to have been much less conflicted about the renovation of musical and choreographic repertoires because they were driven by the need to create distinction for themselves. A modern, acrobatic version of the Huancavelica style began to emerge most clearly in the

1980s, even surpassing their competitors from Ayacucho on international stages.

By the late 1970s, these two communities of practice were increasingly aware of each other‟s presence and entered into mutually influential relationships of both solidarity and competition. The scenario for these initial interactions was the scissors dance contests staged by cultural institutions, regional radio programs, entrepreneurs, and high- profile scissors dance artists themselves. SINAMOS, the military government‟s arm for the organization of popular mobilizations, staged a network of folklore contests called

Inkari at the district, provincial, and departmental levels.32 Departamental winners received an invitation to perform in an immense music and dance festival at the Teatro de

Pardo y Aliaga in central Lima (Turino 1993: 142, Ansión 1986: 191-192, Nuñez Rebaza

1985, 1990). The contests contributed to the RGAF‟s legitimacy amongst the popular classes by officially sanctioning the recognition and participation of the previously ignored heterogeneous cultures of Peru (Ansión 1986: 192). The events also stimulated

199 further migration of folklore performers by providing an all-expenses-paid trip to Lima.

Chicchi Para, a well-respected dancer from Huancavelica, came to Lima for the first-time to participate in the 1971 festival. After being inundated with requests for contracts to perform in fiestas costumbristas in the capital he did not return home, seeing both the event and migration itself as an opportunity to make a name for his village and artform in the wider world (Personal Interview “Chicchi Para” 2007).33 These events enabled the performers to attain popularity and progress not by leaving behind their cultural practices, but rather by bringing them to a wider audience.

By the mid-1970s, regional associations and popular radio stations began to adopt the model of the Inkari Festival, staging contests on a smaller-scale as a mode of publicity and fund-raising. The dancer Añascha arrived in Lima in 1974 for a contest organized by several regional associations representing localities in southern Ayacucho.

His account of the event dramatized the often prejudicial attitudes of established first- wave migrants towards newly-arrived cholos who they perceived as more indigenous than themselves. Añascha arrived in Lima “as a complete cholo … I didn‟t even have a suitcase” (Personal Interview “Añascha” 2009).34 During the competition, a well- respected first-wave migrant from Puquio and father of a competing dancer insulted

Añascha. The father took offense that a newly-arrived cholo would dare to challenge his son. Nevertheless, like so many similar anecdotes I heard in the course of my interviews, this story ended in triumph. Añascha took first prize in the contest, beating his rival and winning the begrudging respect of his tormentor. He received so many contract offers he did not return to the highlands as planned and his newfound popularity led to his

200 recruitment by Máximo Damián Huamaní to perform in prestigious theatres in Peru and throughout the world (Personal Interview “Añascha” 2009).

Nuñez Rebaza reserved her most virulent criticism for the presence of the scissors dance in such folklore contests as a particularly vile form of the exploitation of performers and the degradation of the dance‟s authenticity (1985: 390-398). A number of her informants complain of rampant exploitation and corruption on the part of the producers of such events. Nevertheless, these contests did not disappear as Nuñez

Rebaza predicted. The next generation of urbanized performers appropriated control of the framework for their own benefit, as they sought to convert themselves into informal cultural entrepreneurs. These events also became a staging ground for increasing interactions between Ayacucho and Huancavelica performers and a place of mutual influence in the experimentation with hybridized cosmopolitan innovations of the form.

5.6. The New Limeños

Not long after the second-wave of migrant performers established these distinct communities of practice, a new generation began to learn the dance. According to Nuñez

Rebaza, a third type of scissors dancer began to emerge in the mid-1970s. This group consisted of the children of migrants from Ayacucho, Apurimac, and Huancavelica born in Lima, or arrived in the capital before the age of five or six years of age (Nuñez Rebaza

1990: 127). This new generation constituted what various studies have called, “the new limeños,” who constructed new identities and popular cultures out of the urban experience and a continuing sense of being different from the dominant ethnicity of the coast (Portacarrrero 1993, Tapia 1997, Molero 2007).35 The city of Lima became a

201 laboratory of hybridization producing complex interweavings of tradition and modernity, as well as the cultured and the popular, through diverse circuits of mass consumption

(García Canclini 1995, 1999, Molero 2007, Archibald 2007). Young urban scissors dance performers reinvented the dance through the appropriation of a dizzying variety of models from international youth culture, film and television, and popular music (Turino

1993: 143). This first generation of urbanized young performers fashioned an acrobatic and cosmopolitan style of scissors dancing, which by the early 1980s had begun to flow from the city to the countryside (Raymundo 2006, Zevallos-Aguilar 2009: 114).

The appearance of commercial audio recording of the scissors dance became a central form of transmission of the dance to new generations of performers. By the

1970s, recorded Andean folklore music began to outsell all other types of music in the capital (Vivanco 1973: 100-101, Llorens 1983, Turino 2007: 108).36 Informal businesses emerged that recorded music directed towards particular regional niche markets, shifting audio recordings to a wide variety of indigenous styles and genres (Turino 2007: 109).

During the 1970s, a number of successful scissors dance artists recorded discs, which they sold themselves at performances or to independent kiosks in the central market called Mesa Redonda (Nuñez Rebaza 1985: 379). The most well-known recordings were those of Conjunto de Danzantes de Tijeras de Puquio, a group that formed in 1968 based on the model of the large folkloric companies of the 1940s and 1950s. The performers, including harpist Modesto Tomayro, violinist Inocencio Espinoza, and scissors dancer

Ruperto Canales (Qori Chaleco), were all migrants from Puquio with lower-class indigenous backgrounds.37 The director of the troupe was Cesar Gutierrez, a successful

202 informal entrepreneur. Growing up in Puquio he wanted to be a musician and he even began to learn the scissors dance. However, his parents refused to allow him to pursue music further and encouraged him to receive an education. Later, he was able to pursue his early affinity for music by directing this troupe of scissors dancers and making records (Nuñez Rebaza 1985: 380-381).

The story of Gutierrez alludes to a series of complicating factors of the changes in the transmission of the dance due to the presence of audiovisual recordings.

Ethnographers tend to accept at face value the idealized myth of the face-to-face transmission of the dance from master to disciple depicted so beautifully by Arguedas as

“the true traditional process of learning” the form (Nuñez Rebaza 1990: 138). Yet, the testimony of various performers about how they actually learned suggests that if this form of transmission ever existed it had begun to change long before the appearance of audio recordings. Going back to the first-wave of migrant performers in the 1940s and

1950s, in nearly all cases parents refused to teach their children the art form they themselves practiced. The parents claimed that scissors dancing was a life of suffering and drunkenness, and encouraged their children to get an education.38 However, the idealized relationship between master and apprentice has remained as a myth in the oral tradition of the dancers. Therefore, the transformations in the transmission of the dance are far more complicated than a simple opposition between learning with the aid of audiovisual recording and the face-to-face transmission from master to pupil.

Audiovisual recordings enabled a new generation of performers to acquire an improvised competence in a very difficult performance genre.39

203

The most important innovation these urbanized young performers introduced into the dance was the elaboration of more sophisticated acrobatics. By 1980 most young dancers were taking gymnastics classes at the National Stadium. They began to adapt moves from martial arts films, street clowns, and hip hop dance to the scissors dance.

These performers invented new pruebas de valor out of the urban environment, including lying on a pile of broken beer bottles, eating fluorescent light bulbs, and piercing themselves with various knives and sharp objects. They began to use more colorful embroidered costumes and exchanged simple wool slippers for canvas sneakers with multi-colored laces.40 The musicians abandoned locally-made violins and harps for cheaper imported instruments and began to incorporate melodies from chicha, an already hybrid blend of Andean huayno and tropical styles into the scissors dance repertoire.

While young dancers and musicians from both regional styles engaged in these stylistic innovations with a certain level of mutual influence, performers from Huancavelica embraced the wholesale reinvention of traditional repertoires more forcefully. Lacking the public recognition of the Ayacuchanos and with a smaller community of performers in Lima, even the older Huancavelica artists tended to encourage the modernization of the form in order to compete for public recognition.41

However, cosmopolitan reinvention alone did not determine the legacy of this important generation to the subsequent urban renaissance of the scissors dance. The most committed and successful young performers began to compete in festivals in the highlands. Cosmopolitan aesthetic styles enabled them to distinguish themselves from the older generations and highland experience in the more competitive rural festivals

204 enabled them to claim distinction from the young beginners with no highland experience.

These forms of travel initiated multi-directional flows of influence between rural and urban space.42 In many cases, urbanized performers experienced firsthand the need to make offerings to the Wamanis or suffer serious bodily consequences, such as mysterious illnesses. For most practitioners the ritual elements of the dance are a matter of embodied necessity rather than simply a question of belief. They claim that they do not perform the requisite rituals in Lima not because they no longer hold magical-religious beliefs, but simply because the urban landscape is not a living entity requiring payment. Moreover, by travelling to the highlands these young urban performers introduced rural spectators to cosmopolitan aesthetic values. They became role models for an upcoming generation of rural youth as the distinctions between traditional and modern increasingly became more about generational difference than rural or urban residence.

The most important young dancer of this generation from Ayacucho was Romulo

Huamani Janampa, who goes by the artistic pseudonym of Qori Sisicha (little golden ant). He arrived in Lima from his hometown of San Antonio de Chipao in 1966 at only five years of age.43 Like most performers of his generation, he learned the dance by listening to the records of Conjunto de Danzantes de Tijeras de Puquio and watching and imitating older and more advanced dancers at fiestas costumbristas in Lima.44 At the age of thirteen, he began to compete in fiestas costumbristas and earned a reputation as an able young dancer. During his secondary school years, Qori Sisicha became interested in gymnastics and began to incorporate acrobatics into his dancing after seeing another dancer from Huancavelica perform a hand-stand on top of a harp. From 1979 to 1981, he

205 performed in “Máximo Damián y sus Danzantes de Tijeras,” leaving after differences with the famous violinist and in order to pursue his own entrepreneurial ambitions.

Moreover, he appropriated ethnographic techniques in order to augment his knowledge, tape recording interviews of respected masters about the ritual significance of the dance

(Personal Interview “Qori Sisicha” 2007). In 1981, he competed in his first rural festival, claiming he earned the respect of a more knowledgeable and discerning public (Nuñez

Rebaza 1985: 366).45 Later in the 1980s Qori Sisicha would become the most visible scissors dancer not only due to his dancing talent but also his self-promotional skills..

The initial author of the revival of the Huancavelica style was undoubtedly

Máximo Hilario Solis, who goes by the artistic name Derrepente.46 He arrived in Lima in

1962 to perform at the Coliseo Nacional. At this time, no dancers from Huancavelica resided in Lima, and he joined forces with the violinist Leoncio Rua performing in coliseos and theatres (Nuñez Rebaza 1985: 34). By the 1970s, Derrepente began to train a new generation of dancers from Huancavelica in Lima such as Kishkamico, Pulgarcito,

Supay Wayra, and his own sons Lucifer and Luzbel. His eldest son, Lucifer, began to dance at an early age, but stopped practicing for a while as other children insulted him as a cholo. He returned to performing in 1978 or 1979, using audio discs and some instruction from his father. Lucifer began perform at fiestas costumbristas in Lima and in the highlands.47 His father encouraged him to invent new acrobatic sequences and the father and son team created the theatrical troupe, “Corazon del Mercurio,” that greatly expanded the dance‟s presence on the tourist show circuit.

Around 1981, “Corazon del Mercurio” received a steady job performing for a

206 dinner-theatre show at the five-star Hotel Crillón in Lima‟s central plaza. The colorful costumes and acrobatic choreography of the group quickly won over the favor of tourists

“satisfied because they saw the exotic flavors of indigenous Peru” (Nuñez Rebaza 1990:

149). Lucifer and the very young dancer Ccarccaria became the major authors of renovated acrobatic choreographies that they incorporated into the Huancavelica style during the 1980s and 1990s.48 Although the pay was low and the organizers treated them like common cholos, the Hotel Crillón show gave the group the opportunity to transform dancing into a full-time profession and began to achieve equal name-recognition for the

Huancavelica style in relation to the Ayacucho variant.49 Unlike theatrical presentations by dancers from Ayacucho, “Corazon del Mercurio” began to innovate by synchronizing the choreography with two to three dancers performing in unison, later developing into the so-called scissors dance ballet style practiced today by numerous groups.

In the early 1980s, the scissors dance contests staged by radio stations, informal entrepreneurs, and the dancers themselves became places of encounter and competition between young dancers from Ayacucho, like Qori Sisicha and those of Huancavelica, such as Lucifer and Ccarccaria. Nuñez Rebaza suggests that older performers maintained their distance from such commercial events and the new generation was attracted to the potential to gain popularity and monetary benefits. However, rampant exploitation and corruption on the part of the organizers stained the reputation of these contests (Nuñez

Rebaza 1985: 397). Learning from these experiences, young performers began to organize contests for their own economic benefit. Derrepente and Lucifer produced the first of these performer-organized contests on April 8, 1981, during Holy Week. Qori

207

Sisicha won the contest, explaining “the struggle was tremendous, with new pruebas.

The Huancavelicano told me that the public does not like the repetition of pruebas. I agreed and I renovated and transformed all the pruebas” (qtd. in Nuñez Rebaza 1985:

403). This event initiated a close relationship between the enterprising young

Ayacuchano dancer and Lucifer and later Ccarccaria.50 In 1984, Qori Sisicha produced his own contest in order to celebrate his 10th artistic anniversary. Through these events

Qori Sisicha and Lucifer became important models for other scissors dancers to follow in a dramatic increase of the popularity of the dance in Lima, as the rural highlands were swept up in a nightmarish decade of political violence and forced exile to the capital.51

5.7. Sasachakuy Tiempo: Political Violence and the Forced Deterritorialization

During the 1980s and a good part of the 1990s, Peru experienced a devastating internal conflict between ideologically dogmatic insurgent groups and state security forces.52 Both non-state guerilla groups, particularly Shining Path, and military forces committed rampant sexual violence, torture, murders, and other severe human rights violations (Poole and Renique 1992, Stern 1998, CVR 2003, Theidon 2003, 2004, 2009,

Taylor 2006, Burt 2007). The center of the conflict was the departments of Ayacucho,

Apurimac, and Huancavelica, the historical home of the scissors dance. The widespread political violence engendered a third wave of massive migration from the highlands to the relative safety of Lima and other urban areas. Lima became the refuge of scissors dance performance as the violence impeded the realization of nearly all rural festivities in the region for over a decade. Entire communities were abandoned and migration acquired a quality of forced exile (Nuñez Rebaza 1991: 14, Bigenho 1991: 3, Arce Sotelo 2006: 37).

208

I argue that this almost total relocation did not merely deterritorialize the dance, but conditioned the specific ways in which performers refashioned it in response to their new urban residence and the experience of political violence.53

The conflict arose out of the specific conditions of agrarian reform and the transition from military to civilian rule (Degregori 1986, 1989, 1998, Stern 1998, Taylor

2007, Burt 2007). In August 1975, the more traditional arm of the military staged a bloodless coup, replacing Velasco with General Francisco Morales Bermudez (Burt

2007: 27).54 The regime came to resemble a conventional right-wing Latin American dictatorship, yet preserved a measure of populist rhetoric without innovation (Krujit

1994, Ansión 1986).55 In 1977-1978, emboldened workers, students, and peasants organizations initiated violent protests and strikes. Morales Bermudez called for a

Constituent Assembly in 1978 and general elections in 1980.56 The majority of Peru‟s new left parties enthusiastically participated in the national elections and the alliance

Izquierda Unida (United Left) gained a significant presence in parliament. However, an enigmatic Maoist organization known as Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) initiated their revolution on the day of the election by burning ballot boxes in the forgotten village of

Chuschi in central Ayacucho (Isbell 1992, Poole and Renique 1992, Burt 2007).57

Sendero Luminoso emerged out of a burgeoning university culture and the dramatic growth of rural education in Ayacucho in the aftermath of agrarian reform

(Degregori 1986, 1989, 1998). Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy and education professor at the Universidad Nacional San Cristobal de Huamanga, created Sendero in the aftermath of a series of fragmentations of the Communist Party of Peru in relation to the

209

Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s.58 A disciplined network of university professors and students, as well as rural schoolteachers established a strong presence within rural communities in this region. The party constructed a cult of personality around Guzmán and appealed to the crisis of identity of educated rural youth caught between the peasant communities of their families and the broader national culture.59 By recruiting these rural young people, the mostly non-Andean intellectual leadership gained access to the majority of peasant communities in the region, establishing a presence as a kind of shadow state in an area where the “real” state was almost entirely absent (Degregori

1986, 1989, 1998: 132, Lewis 2007, Burt 2009: 86).

While Shining Path quickly established its presence in many rural communities through the interventions of educated youths, the acceptance of Shining Path by the broader community was often more pragmatic and ephemeral than ideological. The guerillas were inflexible, but they replaced incompetent authorities and punished thieves, adulterers, and abusive husbands (Degregori 1998: 131). As soon as Shining Path took power in a community, contradictions and conflicts developed that produced the first signs of rupture between the peasants and their new Maoist bosses (Ibid. 132). The peasants appeared to the Shining Path leadership as one-dimensional subaltern groups outside of history and lacking their own closely-guarded forms of social structure and hierarchy.60 Shining Path actively prohibited the celebration of fiestas, believing that folklore was an unscientific remnant of semi-feudal forms of production. Claiming that they represented the peasants‟ interests without recognizing their agency, the actions of

Shining Path often presented an affront to Andean conceptions of time and space and the

210 conventions that governed social interaction.61 By early 1983, many localities sought to expel Shining Path, which they considered to be a polluting external force, from their communities (Ibid. 139-140, Theidon 2003, 2004, 2008).

The early signs of peasant rejection of Shining Path resulted in the paradigmatic events of Uchurraccay. In January 1983, eight journalists journeyed to Huaychao to investigate reports of peasants enacting violent retributions against Shining Path. As they passed through the community of Ucchurraccay unannounced, local peasants attacked and killed them with stones, sticks, and axes. Belaunde assigned an investigative commission headed by world-renowned novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, and comprised of a team of experts, including several anthropologists (Mayer 1991). While the commission‟s report ostensibly excused the peasants of wrong-doing, Vargas Llosa skillfully weaves together several strands of anthropological theory, depicting the peasants as an “other” distant in both time and space from the modern nation. His prose reveals the close relationship between the image of the noble savage constructed by

Andeanist anthropology and popular notions of the beastly primitive rooted in nineteenth century national literature (Mayer 1991: 489, Starn 1998: 227). In a related 1983 article,

Vargas Llosa drew on Andeanist readings of the scissors dance in order to interpret the ritualized nature of the killings. He wrote:

The murders had magico-religious as well as sociopolitical roots. The horrible injuries found on the cadavers were ritualistic. The perpetrators buried the eight journalists face down in pairs, in the form that the comuneros bury those they consider „devils‟ or people like the scissors dancers, that they believe have entered into pacts with the devil. (Vargas Llosa 1984: 14).62

Although it presented itself as sympathetic marginalized Andean communities, the report

211 served to legitimate the military‟s plans to launch a “dirty war” style offensive that conflated Andean peasants with “terrorists” (Theidon 2003, 2004, 2008).

In January 1983, Belaunde turned the reigns of counter-insurgency over to

General Clement Noel, a graduate of the School of the Americas who employed similar tactics brutally unleashed in the Southern Cone in the previous decade (Starn 1998: 228,

Burt 2007: 58). During 1983-1984, more than 7,000 civilians died in the indiscriminate use of violence by the state and Shining Path counter-attacks directed towards peasants they accused of collaborating with the military.63 The “dirty war” impeded the developing ruptures between Shining Path and peasant communities, enabling them to more than replace its losses with new recruits and expand its operations throughout most of the highlands and the Amazon Basin.64 Due to the increasing violence, the majority of peasants in the region fled to Lima, swelling the barriadas to an unprecedented degree.

The combination of the use of anthropological knowledge in the Uchucarray report and the worsening violence in the highlands dramatically changed the conditions of ethnographic fieldwork on Andean cultures.65 Peruvian anthropologists shifted their gaze to the city as their traditional rural field-sites transformed into extremely dangerous war zones. Anthropologists revived older preoccupations with folklore, redefined as popular culture, conceived as a heroic form of cultural resistance in opposition to the dominant culture. However, these studies did not critically approach the essentialization of Andean culture, reproducing reified dichotomies between tradition and modernity

(Degregori 2000: 52, Cánepa Koch 2002: 79-80).66 Lucy Nuñez Rebaza‟s study of the survival of the scissors dance in Lima is clearly on example of these early urban studies

212 profoundly conditioned by political violence.67 Conducting fieldwork in such a fraught political context, Nuñez Rebaza, initiated the interpretation that depicted Lima as the refuge of the scissors dance during the years of violence (Bigenho 1991: 3, Arce Sotelo

2006: 37). The dance became caught “between two fires” resulting in the forced deterritorialization of Andean culture (Theidon 2004). This perspective does not take into account more complex relationships between the scissors dance as a cultural practice and the political violence that performers and their audiences experienced.

5.8. The ADTMP and the Urban Renaissance of the Scissors Dance

During the mid-1980s, the scissors dance acquired new visibility in urban popular cultures, mostly due to the collective actions of migrant performers. A group of younger performers held a meeting on November 16, 1984, establishing the Asociación de los

Danzantes de Tijeras y Músicos del Perú (ADTMP). This self-help network was a collective effort to assist several older performers suffering from various ailments and illnesses (Nuñez Rebaza 1985: 423).68 Shortly after this first meeting, the participants staged a commercial spectacle in Local Abtao in order to raise funds for the nascent organization. The event achieved a level of success beyond their expectations and they soon established legal status and an official hierarchy of roles and offices. The very young but well-connected dancer Qori Sisicha became president and the harpist Llapla served as his vice-president. The first few years of the organization stand out as a past golden age when the artists achieved a certain level of unity beyond professional jealousy and regionalist tensions.

The business and networking acumen of Qori Sisicha, combined with the

213 favorable conditions of new forms of state patronage, enabled the nascent organization to establish itself in urban Andean popular culture. Izquierda Unida had swept the municipal elections of 1983, installing the leader of the leftist alliance, Dr. Alfonso

Barrantes, as the mayor of Lima. In 1985, the charismatic young leader of APRA named

Alan García took the presidency with a decidedly populist platform. Both administrations, which developed a close working partnership, developed a host of new social programs that benefited popular sectors including folkloric artists (Burt 2007: 73).

In this context, Qori Sisicha acquired the sponsorship of the Municipality of Lima to produce several well-attended commercial spectacles a year in high-profile venues in downtown Lima from 1986 to 1989. The first competition occurred in November 1986 at the Parque de la Reserva, under the direct sponsorship of Mayor Barrantes. Qori Sisicha worked directly with the municipal government‟s cultural wing in order to coordinate press coverage, print flyers, rent sound equipment, and oversee the logistics of the event attended by an audience of 3000 spectators (Zevallos Aguilar 2009).69

During the same year, Qori Sisicha gained visibility for the association with numerous radio and several television appearances. According to one dancer, the other performers were afraid of the national press, but their leader had a level of education that prepared him to promote the dance in the public sphere (Personal Interview “Ccecchele”

2008). A group of musicians and dancers affiliated with the association participated in the short film adaptation of Arguedas‟s “La Agonia de Rasu Niti,” produced for the international video market but also broadcast on the state-owned Canal 7 in 1986. The production cast nationally-renowned actors, from visibly Creole backgrounds, for the

214 principal roles and “authentic” scissors dance performers in mostly non-speaking roles.

The dancer Ccecchele played the disciple Atok Sayku, a principal role, although most of his lines were given to a newly-invented character. While the production team sought to draw on the authenticity of casting genuine performers, they preferred them not to speak and the performers accepted this predicament out of deference to the prestigious institutions of Peruvian high culture (Tamayo San Román 1986, Zevallos Aguilar 2009:

114). Qori Sisicha, however, began to create a space for the performers as speaking representatives of Andean culture in the national media. During his term as president of the ADTMP, the aesthetic renovations of the form, of which Qori Sisicha was one of the principal authors, captured the attention of a broader public. Ironically, the entrepreneurial and promotional skills and aesthetic renovations of a dancer that Nuñez

Rebaza critiques as exemplary of the individualism of the dominant culture enabled the success of an organization she celebrates as a form of cultural defense (Nuñez Rebaza

1985: 422). However, it is also clear that the same dancer‟s unique cosmopolitan knowledges that made him a positive leader under favorable conditions contributed to a growing level of distrust and discontent amongst other performers. When circumstances turned less favorable these sentiments transformed into outright accusations of corruption.

If the ADTMP experienced a brief golden age under the leadership of Qori

Sisicha, after 1989 their situation considerably worsened, paralleling the trajectory of many self-help organizations during the administration of Alan García. The president developed a heterodox economic plan that rebuked the policies of the Washington

215 consensus. This populist strategy was initially a great success, and a number of community organizations thrived during the first three years of his presidency (Tover

1986, Blondet 1986, Ballón 1986). However, García‟s economic model quickly fell into crisis after the IMF declared Peru an ineligible borrower in December 1987. Throughout

1988 and 1989, a worsening economic crisis produced hyperinflation, the rapid decline of purchasing power, massive crime waves, and the intensification of political violence

(Burt 2007: 37). As state budgets fell dramatically and patronage dried up, were left in a sudden state of instability.70 Already existing tensions, struggles for power, and ideological differences dramatically intensified as the membership accused leaders of bossism and corruption (Del Pino 1991, Burt 2008: 73). In the case of the ADTMP a rift gradually developed between Qori Sisicha and other members, which has not repaired itself to this day. Other leaders accused him of using the name of the organization to produce a commercial spectacle for his personal benefit that alienated previous collaborators and funders of the organization (Personal Interview “Ccecchele” 2008,

“Llapla” 2008).71 However, after Qori Sisicha resigned, the new leaders did not possess their predecessor‟s skill in publicity and sponsorship further declined (Personal Interview

“Ccecchele” 2008). The organization became only a shell of what it once, and to this day has not achieved its ultimate goal of constructing its own locale (Personal Interview

“Qori Sisicha” 2007, “Ccecchele 2008, “Llapla” 2009, “Añascha” 2009).

5.9. Violence, Economic Collapse, and the Return of the Andean Infernal Imaginary

Despite the conflicts that produced the decline of the ADTMP, the dance remained popular in urban public culture. Michele Bigenho, who conducted

216 ethnographic fieldwork on the dance in Lima in 1990 and 1991, notes that the organization actually split into two opposing organizations that each held their own well- attended events during Holy Week (Bigenho 1993: 241). Bigenho notes a continuing relationship between the scissors dancer and the devil. She cites a young woman in attendance who claims, “This holy week we should be with God. But who are we with now? [. . .] The devil attracts more attention. [. . .] Here is where the devil conspires against God” (Bigenho 1993: 241). Recent ethnographic fieldwork on the period of political violence reveals another interpretation of why the figure of the devil would make a dramatic return to interpretation of the scissors dance at the precise moment of

Bigenho‟s fieldwork. According to Andean interpretations of the violence during the

1980s, the portals to the uku pacha opened up, bringing the dominion of infernal beings on the earth (Isbell 1992, Degregori 1998: 149, Theidon 2004, Millones 2010: 121-123).

Peasant communities perceived Shining Path militants as condenados or pishtacos, shape shifters from another world who transform into llamas, foxes, and other animals and attack humans in order to consume their fat. The militants apparently brought offerings to the mountains and engaged in pacts with the devil by entering mountain caves.

(Theidon 2004: 40-41, 126). During the economic crisis and Shining Path‟s offensive in

Lima from 1989 to 1992, rumors and legends of the appearance of condenados and pishtacos transferred from rural villages to the capital city (Kraniauskas 1998, Williams

2002: 249-250). In a period in which individual and social bodies became threatened by political violence and the corrosive effects of economic crisis, the popularity of the scissors dance grew as potential surrogates for invading diabolic forces in a revival of an

217 earlier Andean infernal imaginary.

The degree to which the performers willingly took on the diabolical role to satisfy the desires of their audience appears to have varied according to regional style. Bigenho, whose research focuses on scissors dance communities from southern Ayacucho, noticed a disjuncture between the scissors dance performers and the general public, in terms of an association between the devil and the dance. The scissors dance performers denied that such a relation exists in the present and clearly differentiated between the figures of the

Wamani, the sirena, and the devil. Other members of the community claimed that pacts with the devil still existed and conflated all three of these spiritual figures. While the performers accepted a certain theatrical representation of the past association by submitting to a whipping at the end of all-night events during Holy Week, they distanced themselves from it (Bigenho 1991: 126, 130, 135). It is probable that these performers had already internalized Andeanist interpretations of “La Agonia de Rasu Niti” to construct themselves as the guardians of more legitimate Andean ritual practices.

However, performers from Huancavelica had relatively less connection to

Arguedas‟s legacy and a less established place in the larger public sphere. Therefore, many of these performers appropriated diabolic roles in search of greater fame and recognition. In addition to taking on diabolic artistic pseudonyms such as Lucifer,

Ccarccaria, Luzbel, and Runa Miko (cannibal), they developed new pruebas de valor in order to display endurance for greater levels of physical pain. Some high-profile dancers brought these claims to the press, finding information in occult books in order to scare the public and garner more attention (Personal Interview “Ccarccaria” 2007, “Victor

218

Chavez” 2009). One dancer, whose artistic pseudonym is Condenado, told me that a cultural promoter in Huancayo gave him the name in order to attract more attention and popularity. In 1990 or 1991, a rumor of the presence of a condenado started after several unattributed killings occurred near Huancayo. At an event in a coliseo, a group of community leaders confronted him and accused him of being the condenado. He eventually succeeded in alleviating the tension by presenting his identification card as a registered artist with the Instituto Nacional de Cultura. In hindsight, he claims that this incident served to heighten his popularity and fame and significantly raised the monetary value of his contracts (Personal Interview “Condenado” 2007). Thus, the scissors dance performers may have served as surrogate effigies who contributed to the ritual acts of repudiation and externalization of Shining Path enacted by both rural and urban Andean communities between 1989 and 1992 (Degregori 1998: 148, Theidon 2003, 2004).

5.10. Conclusion

The trajectory of the scissors dance shifted dramatically between Arguedas‟s death in 1969 and the gradual end of the internal conflict in the Peruvian highlands in

1992 and 1993. The demographic explosion in Lima and especially the rupture caused by the political violence transformed the dance from a rural festival dance into almost exclusively a highly spectacular genre of urban Andean popular culture. Older generations of performers as well as anthropologists complain that the aesthetic innovations introduced by young practitioners have reduced a rich cultural tradition into pure acrobatics and circus clowning with very “little soul” (Montoya 2004: 70).

However, it is probable that this urban reinvention enabled the scissors dance to not only

219 survive but thrive under new circumstances at the dawn of the twentieth century. The transformations of the form reflected and expressed the changing experiences of the performers and their audiences in relation to urban poverty and political violence.

Moreover, these transformations positioned the dance to achieve a prominent place in the emerging regime of multicultural recognition that followed the internal conflict, which I turn to in the next chapter.

220

Chapter 6 The Performative Economy of a New Peru

6.1. Introduction The “contemporary global culturalist conjuncture” produced by the end of the cold war, the expansion of globalization, and the triumph of neoliberalism has conditioned a recent “indigenous renaissance” throughout the world (Turner 1999).

Terence Turner argues that, “cultural identities like ethnicity, gender, or indigeneity have become the preferred medium for ascribing social power, demanding rights and laying claims for status and honor for many subnational groups. Culture has tended to replace nationalism as a political resource in struggles for empowerment within a nation-state”

(Ibid. 5). Indigeneity has acquired new value in a rapidly globalizing world since the

Quincentennial of Columbus‟s “discovery” of the Americas, celebrated in 1992 (Starn and Cadena 2007: 10, Robin Azevedo and Salazar-Soler 2009). In 1993, Maya activist

Rigoberta Menchú won the Nobel Peace Prize and the UN declared the same year “Year of Indigenous People.” By the late 1990s, even the World Bank and the IMF began to elaborate a new model of “development with identity,” advocating a limited program of indigenous cultural rights (Starn and Cadena 2007: 14).

Since this moment, a number of academic studies have exalted the appearance of indigenous social movements in Latin America. Peru stands out as an exception to an otherwise continent-wide trend, despite the large percentage of its population who speak indigenous languages (Albo 1991, 2004, Yashar 1999, 2004, Warren and Jackson 2002).

221

Social scientists have explained this apparent weakness of indigenous identity in Peru with recourse to an absence of indigenous-identified intellectuals, and the hybridity produced by the particularly intense demographic explosion of urban Andean migration in that country. Moreover, the political violence of the 1980s impeded the growth of ethnic social movements at the same time they developed elsewhere. However, recent work by Peruvianist scholars has problematized the notion that indigenous movements flow naturally from the interests of native people. They call for more contextualized investigations that go beyond the sphere of politics proper to the micro-politics of everyday identity construction in relation to public culture (Degregori 1993, Cadena

2000, Lucero and García 2004, García 2005, Greene 2006, Cánepa Koch 2007).

In the aftermath of the internal conflict, cultural politics in Peru became an exemplary laboratory for the emerging disciplinary regime Charles Hale calls “neoliberal multiculturalism” (Hale 2002, 2006). Hale argues that the cultural logic of neoliberalism,

“thrives on the recognition of cultural difference, and by extension, on high-stakes distinctions between those cultural rights that deserve recognition and those that do not”

(Hale 2006: 36). Through the mediation of national and transnational institutions, corporations, and NGOs, neoliberal multiculturalism increasingly casts indigenous people in the role Alcida Ramos identifies as “the hyperreal Indian,” constituted by commodified images of the model Indian produced for Western consumption (Ramos 1998). Such images may be exoticist fantasies, having little to do with the ways actual indigenous people conduct their lives in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, they produce indigeneity as a mirror image of Western capitalism and regulate emerging forms of

222 global indigenous citizenship. Drawing on Foucault‟s notion of governmentality in relation to the constitution of subjects, Hale suggests, “the leading edge of neoliberalism‟s cultural project is not radical individualism, but rather the creation of subjects who govern themselves in accordance with the logic of globalized capitalism”

(Hale 2006: 220). Neoliberal multiculturalism manages diversity by recognizing cultural difference as valuable while it masks the continuation of structures of racial and economic inequality (Ibid., Zizek 1998, Yudice 2003, Postero and Zamosc 2004).

By the turn of the millennium, Andeanist ethnographers, provincial intellectuals, tourist agencies, and the performers themselves had transformed the scissors dance into a cultural resource that embodied both the exotic spectacle and mystical authenticity of the indigenous Andean Other on Peruvian and global stages (Yudice 2003). I contend that this process dramatized the passage of the discourse of a new Peru from an incompletely realized vision of the national-popular to a performative economy of multicultural recognition conditioned by the regimes of neoliberal governmentality. Contemporary scissors dance performers have participated in the theatricalization of the dance as a fetishized commodity representing an “almost metaphysical idea of cultural resistance as a recontextualized image” (Vich 2007: 3). Within the global cultural economy the direction of representation has inverted; the commodity no longer embodies a concrete cultural object or practice, but rather cultural practices now stand in for images (Zizek

1989). The scissors dance as an iconic sign of authenticity and Andean resistance has increasingly replaced a more complex choreographic and musical repertoire. In this chapter, I trace the development of the “new Peru” as a performative economy of

223 neoliberal multiculturalism between the governments of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), and Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006). I argue that an unmarked and supposedly universal subject position has conferred recognition and value upon the scissors dance and its performers as models for a neoliberal pedagogy of identity in order to teach Andean subjects to perform their ethnic identities in permissible and unthreatening ways.

6.2. The Hypermasculine Indigenous Warrior

Although the political violence did not begin to subside until the capture of

Abimael Guzmán in 1992, the roots of a post-conflict Andean ethnic revival go back to the surprising election of little-known agronomist Alberto Fujimori in 1990 over world- renowned author Mario Vargas Llosa. After the disastrous final years of the García regime, traditional political parties and strategies had very little legitimacy in the eyes of most Peruvians and the climate was ripe for a political outsider.1 The Fujimori campaign skillfully connected his ethnic and professional background to those of the disenfranchised indigenous and mestizo majorities (Lee 2007: 48). Drawing on essentialized ideas about his Japanese ancestry, Fujimori conflated Asian neoliberalism with an emergent Andean modernity as alternatives to the Westernizing Creole elite embodied by Vargas Llosa. His campaign promised, “A President Like You” and in one speech he directly pitted, “the chinaman and the cholos against the whites” (Lee 2007).

Fujimori tirelessly campaigned in poor shantytowns and rural areas in a cart pulled by a tractor called “the fujimobile,” often wearing Andean traditional dress and dancing with older women to Andean folkloric music in televised appearances (Burt 2007: 224).2

Oliart argues, Fujimori “symbolically satisfied the need for inclusion and recognition by

224 groups previously excluded” (1998: 412). However, his performative neopopulism established “a relationship of complicity” with the masses that legitimized the

“authoritarian reconstitution of the state” his administration enacted (Ibid. Burt 2007).

The election of Fujimori corresponded to a major shift in the counter-insurgency strategy of the Peruvian military (Rospigliosi 1996, Tapia 1997, Burt 2007: 175). The armed forces began to develop closer ties to peasant communities at the same time that

“many villagers were weary of war, ready to take any measure to end a revolution that had brought them only suffering and death” (Coronel 1996: 92). Moreover, the military began to develop partnerships with the nascent rondas campesinas, peasant self-defense patrols organized to fight Shining Path as the ambiguous coexistence highlanders shared with the insurgents gradually transformed into armed resistance (Starn 1998, Degregori

1998, Theidon 2003, Burt 2007: 177). During the Fujimori regime, the state co-opted the rondas by placing them under the command of the military in exchange for massive distribution of weapons. Fujimori himself presided over public ceremonies handing over shotguns to peasants, often dressing in highland dress in order to connect with the masses

(Tapia 1997, Starn 1998: 232).3 The militarization of highland life left an ambivalent legacy, introducing new models of masculinity that drew on both military codes and globalized popular culture.4 As Kimberly Theidon argues, an epic narrative of masculine heroism took on an explicitly ethnic component through the hypermasculinity of the figure of the indigenous warrior (2003: 72-78). These complex processes of ethnogenesis inverted generational hierarchies that granted authority and respect to older men and women, enabling young Andean men to negotiate their claims to cultural citizenship in

225 broader national and transnational public spheres. (Theidon 2004: 293, 2008).5

Despite its association with the otherness of infernal forces, and thus Shining

Path, the scissors dance gradually became a local model for the construction of new

(hyper)masculine Andean subjectivities. The young migrant scissors dancers of the early

1980s preceded the militants in the hybrid construction of triumphant Andean masculinities through the appropriation of images from international popular culture within the competitive framework of scissors dance performance. Like the scissor dancers, the ronderos constructed a shadow self represented by their noms de guerre, drawn from international action films such as Rambo, Tiger, Wolf or the Andean infernal imaginary, such as Beast, Red Devil, Pishtaco, or Jarjacha (Starn 1998, Theidon

2003:72). The young ronderos often narrate their experiences of war by claiming that they first needed to enter hell in order to defeat the dominion of the devil (Theidon 2003,

Millones 2011). In this moment, Andean conceptions of the scissors dance from a theatricalization of infernal otherness began to shift toward a crystallization of an emergent Andean masculine identity embodying the cultural resistance of a Pre-

Columbian warrior. Narrating the origins of the dance, a young violinist told Bigenho:

The [scissors] dancers are from the colonial era when they were persecuted as heretics. [. . .] During the Inquisition [. . .] the Spanish tortured and abused them. Andean man began to grow rebellious … in order to demonstrate to the Spaniards that he has the capacity to be a warrior [. . .] The scissors dancer was born in this manner, as an imitation of a warrior in order to resist the abuses they experienced during the inquisition (Bigenho 1991: 90).

Although the musician narrates events from the distant past, this discourse parallels those of the ronderos collected by Theidon (2003, 2004). Furthermore, this emergent subject

226 position sheds light on the resonance of ethnographic narratives that began to locate the origins of the scissors dance in the Taki Onqoy at this very historical juncture (Nuñez

Rebaza 1990, Castro Klaren 1990). The supposed connection to the Taki Onqoy added another layer of historical complexity to the interplay between ethnographic representation and the constitution of Andean subjectivities, as the dance became associated with an emblematic colonial Andean resistance movement.

At the same time the scissors dance became a model for triumphant and resistant

(hyper)masculine Andean selfhood, the phenomena of women scissors dancers began to emerge. Both transformations are intimately related to the experience of war and the militarization of everyday life that reconfigured traditional Andean gender roles. The combination of mass migration and internal conflict brought new opportunities for subaltern women to participate in local and national public life (Coral Cordero 1998,

Theidon 2006).6 As Theidon argues, it is often the case that “women‟s‟ agency is recognized only when women act in ways which resemble traditional male behavior”

(Theidon 2006: 464). Thus, Andean women inserted themselves into the scene of hypermasculinity in a process that one of Theidon‟s informants describes as “making ourselves macho” (2004: 72-73). The first women scissors dancers, Yuya Killa from the

Ayacucho style and Defensorita from Huancavelica, emerged in the early 1990s from practitioners of parallel women‟s festive traditions (Personal Interview “Accarhuaycha”

2009). As the best practitioners of their genre, these women began to envy the popularity of the male scissors dancers from their communities. They began to learn to play the scissors and imitate the steps of the male dancers. Soon, they achieved recognition as

227 they reinvented new acrobatic choreographies that displayed their flexibility. However, most women scissors dancers have given up the practice after adolescence due to their child-rearing responsibilities.7 Moreover, the recognition of women as legitimate practitioners of the artform still depends on the acceptance of male leaders. Although the founding figures of women scissors dancing came from both the Huancavelica and

Ayacucho styles at around the same time, the new tradition has taken root more easily within the Huancavelica community, due to the relatively greater modernizing positionality of the male leaders. Nevertheless, the two women dancers I interviewed view themselves as exceptional to these general tendencies. Both Pura Sangre and

Accarhuaycha are single mothers who continue dancing despite their responsibilities to multiple children. While these women dancers recognize certain limitations they have in relation to the male dancers, they also emphasize their strengths, claiming they can perform certain choreographic elements better than the most-skilled of their male counterparts. Furthermore, while they honor the efforts certain popular male dancers have made to bring them to new public spaces, they position themselves as fiercely independent, following their own paths instead of remaining subordinate figures to particular male leaders (Personal Interview “Pura Sangre” 2009, Accarhuaycha” 2009).

6.3. Local Development with Identity: Post-Conflict Reconstruction

Although it greatly intensified in the 2000s, Peruvian neoliberal multiculturalism initiated during the “authoritarian reconstitution of the state” enacted by the Fujimori administration (Burt 2007). Despite the deepening partnerships between peasant communities and the military, the economic crisis worsened and Shining Path was on the

228 verge of taking over state power almost two years into Fujimori‟s presidency (Burt 2004,

2007). The administration had difficulty passing economic reforms and counter- terrorism legislation as the result of strong opposition from APRA and FREDEMO in congress (Lee 2010: 53).8 Through the interventions of Vladamiro Montesinos,

Fujimori‟s principal advisor and a shadowy intelligence operative, the president developed intimate ties to the upper echelon of the military. On April 5, 1992, Fujimori,

Montesinos, and the armed forces staged an autogolpe (self-coup), dismissing congress and the judiciary and assuming dictatorial powers over the state (Burt 2007: 159). The newly authoritarian regime pushed through draconian anti-terrorist measures, resulting in widespread human rights violations. Yet, in September 1992 an elite police unit captured

Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán in a raid on an upper-class home in Lima.

Fujimori used the turn of events to legitimate the coup and public opinion widely supported him. As the threat of Shining Path gradually receded, the regime submitted to international pressures to reconstitute democratic governance by the end of 1993.

However, the president retained control over the Constituent Assembly and the apparent democracy retained its authoritarian character (Burt 2004: 266). The 1993 Constitution formalized the administration‟s efforts to concentrate powers in the executive branch and authorized neoliberal restructuring. Reflecting the contradictions of neoliberal multiculturalism, the constitution included language that recognized cultural rights to difference even as it dismantled the concrete protections on labor and peasant activism and the collective land rights of indigenous and peasant communities enshrined in previous constitutions (Greene 2006, Millones 2007. 171).

229

After the passage of the 1993 Constitution, the armed forces instituted rural development projects in collaboration with the rondas as well as NGOs linked to the

IMF, World Bank, and Oxfam International (Cánepa Koch 2007, Burt 2007: 180). The development efforts constructed new roads, rebuilt churches and municipal buildings, installed communications technology, and established cultural institutions in war-torn areas. President Fujimori himself appeared at the inauguration of many of these projects in staged media events that established vast clientelistic networks linking local communities directly to the highly-popular president‟s public persona.9 Furthermore, with the crisis of legitimacy of traditional political parties, labor unions, leftist ideologies, and the unraveling of the traditional hierarchies of peasant community politics, new local elites emerged to fill the gap in political representation. These new elites were typically young hijos of the community who studied anthropology, history, tourism, or agricultural engineering at state universities in Huancayo, Ayacucho, or Lima. They promoted ethnic discourses in order to garner state and NGO funds and buttress the self-image of their war-torn communities (Durand 2006: 20). In Ayacucho and Huancavelica, well- connected scissors dance performers established themselves amongst these emerging local elites, despite their relative lack of education.10 The generation of performers who modernized the repertoires of the dance in the late 1970s and early 1980s legitimated themselves as leaders in the reconstruction of traditional rural festivities because they had acquired knowledge of cosmopolitan codes of conduct as well as experience in rural festival performance prior to the violence.11

The ethnographic documentary Ritual Encounters: The Dansaq in Huacaña

230

(1998) captures both the exhilaration and tensions surrounding the reconstruction of rural

Andean festivities in the wake of the internal conflict. The film documents the Festival of Water celebrated on July 25-29, 1997 in the town of Huacaña in southern Ayacucho.

Anthropological consultant Rodrigo Montoya explained:

The four people of the TV Cultura team who filmed the performance of the scissors dance in the five days of the festival and the anthropologist who writes these lines were amongst the few outsiders who dared to travel to the site after the occupation of the Shining Path and the armed forces. The memories of the wounds were still fresh: three deaths caused by Shining Path and five by the army, in addition to the dozens of displaced residents and the destruction of the colonial façade of the Municipality by a Shining Path bomb. (Montoya 1997: 46)

Yet, the documentary erases all traces of the effects of the violence from its narration and visual presentation. Instead, it opts to highlight the continuity and authenticity “of the magic of the scissors dance in its natural surroundings so different from the performances played for tourists in Lima,” implying that the only possible iterations of the dance in urban space are the trivial representations produced for tourist consumption (Uriarte

1998). Ritual Encounters depicts the survival or disappearance of cultural traditions as an either/or proposition. Even the description on the front cover “the role of the scissors dance is decisive in order to reproduce a symbolic universe of a culture that struggles to survive” is fraught with the high stakes of the post-conflict reconstruction (Ibid.). The three dancers who compete in the festival, Halcón, Alacrán, and Paqari, were quite young at the time with little experience in the demands of the lengthy rural festivals. All three were born in the highlands, but had arrived in Lima at a very young age after fleeing from the violence. In one scene, the violinist Juan Capcha and an older dancer Añascha are shown instructing the dancers how to make offerings to the Wamani.12 The young

231 dancers clearly are adept at a more modernized and acrobatic style prompting one of the village elders to complain, “It‟s not like it was before” (Ibid). Instead of critically examining the complex dynamics of these generational tensions, the filmmakers position themselves clearly on the side of the nostalgic older generation. Given little historical context, viewers are left to assume that these ruptures are irreparable as the film ends what began as a celebration with a mournful tone.13

I suggest we should view Ritual Encounter and other ethnographic representations of the scissors dance as both products of and active agents in the processes of cultural transformation they mourn in a defeatist fashion. When I met Halcón in Lima, he proudly showed me a pirated copy of the documentary as if it were his starring role in a feature film (Personal Interview “Halcón” 2009). The performers put the products of salvage ethnography to their own uses as a form of cultural capital. However, scenes like this do not simply contradict the romantic idealizations of indigenous culture depicted in ethnographic narratives and visual cultures. In fact, the presence of this ethnographic documentary in burgeoning markets for pirated videos may have made this particular cultural text one of the most efficient mediums for the transmission of ethnographic narratives of ethnic identity to the performers and their audiences for their own forms of modern self-constitution. Towards the end of the film, the narrator notes, “for centuries

Catholic priests have disseminated the idea that the scissors dancers have a pact with the devil that has nothing to do with reality. Well, the so-called Devil is the mountain god of the Andean religion” (Uriarte 1998). This sanitization of the devil in favor of a supposedly purified Andean spirituality is a common postcolonial narrative of cultural

232 identity that ethnographic representation has bestowed upon the dance.

6.4. The Pedagogy of Cultural Identity

Drawing on the work of Nuñez Rebaza and Castro Klaren, a host of new ethnographic studies set out to document the dance in its rural context during the period of post-conflict reconstruction. Established national and international anthropologists undertook some of these studies (Yaranga 1997, Millones and Tomoeda 1998, Vilcapoma

1998, Cavero Carrasco 1998, 2001, Arce Sotelo 2006). Furthermore, local historians and ethnographers published booklets and pamphlets that claimed the dance as an emblem of local pre-hispanic ethnic identities (Ccoñas 1993, Espinoza 1995, Villegas Falcon 1998,

Monteagudo 1997, Caso Arias and Rojas de la Cruz 1999, PROANDE 2000, Herrera

2005). Through these ethnographic representations, notions of Pre-Columbian origins and links to the Taki Onqoy began to constitute a new common sense as essentialist

Andeanist tropes shifted from a discourse about the “other” to narratives of cultural identity that posited an essentialized indigenous self.

Furthermore, assertions of Pre-Columbian origins no longer became the exclusive domain of the Ayacucho style of the dance. In Huancavelica, local schoolteachers, historians, and NGOs with funding from Oxfam and other international umbrella institutions called for “the rebirth of the Anqara nation” (Durand 2006).14 Narratives about the cultural significance of the scissors dance from Huancavelica began to shift from a symbol of ambivalent mestizaje and hybridity to an emblem of the cultural resistance of a warrior nation (Ccoñas 1993, Monteagudo 1997, Caso Arias and Rojas de la Cruz 1999, Salas Guevara 2008). In a clear demonstration of the pedagogical nature of

233 these texts, the authors chastise performers for taking on diabolic pseudonyms and personas as a negation of their cultural identity.15 Ironically, this postcolonial pedagogy of identity often reproduces traditional forms of exclusion based on education, by proclaiming the enlightenment of intellectual elites and the oppressed ignorance of the unwashed masses. Cultural identity became a new disciplinary regime distinguishing those who have the knowledge to yield ethnographic and NGO-inspired discourses from those who do not, as well as a new form of development pedagogy directed not only at the construction of institutions but also the constitution of the modern self.16

These reformulations of local and ethnic selfhood also began to spill across national borders. An author from Huancavelica who goes by the pseudonym Wanka

Willka, lives in Jujuy, Argentina working with NGOs on the vindication of Quechua identity in both Argentina and Peru. In 1999, he published a children‟s book for use in local schools, entitled Danza de las Tijeras, which includes a number of folk tales collected from various local communities in Huancavelica. In an introductory section

“About Cultural Identity,” the author argues that cultural identity is a valuable inherited possession requiring recognition and the development of the self (Wanka Willka 1999).17

Other internationally-led NGOs have explicitly mobilized the scissors dance as a model for self-development with cultural identity. In 2000, the NGO PROANDE, which works primarily in rural communities surrounding Andahuaylas, published the three-volume series of booklets entitled Kallpanchakuyninchikkunamanta = Nuestra Resistencia

(PROANDE 2000).18 The bilingual pamphlets were part of a broader effort to strengthen cultural identity amongst rural schoolchildren, as the organization suggests, “All people

234 have innate abilities and talents that can be recognized, valorized, and utilized in order to strengthen their self-esteem” (PROANDE 2003). They chronicle the Taki Onqoy as an icon of the rebellious spirit of the Chanka nation and the scissors dance as its contemporary manifestation. The authors cast the scissors dancer as “a character who exemplifies much of what sacrifice and happiness mean in the life the Peruvian Andes through the development of his skill and movement” and “one of the most important elements of Chanka culture that expresses fundamental aspects of our rebellious identity”

(Ibid. 4). These pedagogical efforts have become the script upon which staged presentations by PROANDE founder Holly Wilhelm are based. In 2008, I saw her perform a one-woman show based on her experiences in these communities in a small festival of woman‟s theatre in Lima. At the end of the piece, she performed an imitation of a scissors dancer in full regalia in order to symbolize the resurrection of the communities and their “millennial” identities after the internal conflict.19

That is not to say that the pedagogy of cultural identity is simply another form of domination. In August 2008, I travelled with Carlos Gallegos Aponte, a journalism student in Lima, to the Festival of Water in his hometown of Andamarca in southern

Ayacucho. Although Carlos spent most of his childhood in Lima, he returned to

Andamarca during the mid-1990s in order to participate in the community revitalization efforts. In 1995, he and several other young “hijos” of the community inaugurated the

Case de la Cultura in Andamarca and established the week of the Festival of Water as the

“Semana Turistica de Andamarca,” that included a fair of local cuisine and food products, the display of handicrafts, and greater involvement of the municipal

235 government in the staging of the Fiesta as they transformed it into a showcase of local culture.20 Carlos introduced me to Fatima, an “hija” of Andamarca who spent most of her childhood in Holland, adopted by a Dutch couple after her parents were killed by the

Shining Path. After finishing college in the late 1990s she returned to Andamarca and became a local schoolteacher and the Director of the Casa de la Cultura. Fatima became the most energetic force behind local cultural revitalization projects, including the creation of a small museum of local history and culture and handing out honors and commemorations to well-known artists and performers.21

The leadership of these young intellectual elites often encounters a quiet resistance from respected community elders. In 2004 journalist Carlos Herrera Alfaro, published an oral history of the life of Cirilo Inca, the 90 year-old patriarch of scissors dancers from Andamarca (Herrera Alfaro 2005). According to Cirilo Inca‟s nephew,

Ccecchele, the account of his uncle‟s life is full of inaccuracies as the elder dancer deliberately told his interlocutor lies and untruths (Personal Interview “Ccecchele”

2008).22 Furthermore, the efforts of the Casa de la Cultura and the municipal government to improve the festival as a showcase for local culture have met with some resistance from artists and older residents. The year I attended, a panel of two highly-recognized scissors dancers and a former mayor the town, all of whom reside in Lima, judged the atipanakuy, instead of the public itself. This innovation led to accusations of favoritism and the deliberate defiance of tradition by some of the veteran artists. Moreover, a promotional poster for the festival angered some local scissors dance artists, as it depicted dancers from Puquio and not Andamarca.23 Despite their legitimate affective

236 identification with the local and ethnic identity of their village, these young professionals often contribute to generational tensions by abstractly and rhetorically honoring the elders, but giving them little voice in how their cultural revitalization projects are carried out.

6.5. Hyperreal Andean Indigeneity: Staging a Transnational Icon

Armed with appealing discourses of “millennial” authenticity and competent in an unthreatening and spectacular form of staged folklore performance, scissors dance performers of the 1990s found themselves ideally situated to take advantage of a favorable global market for indigenous performance. International experiences further consolidated the leadership of the most successful members of the generation of performers who initiated the urban reinvention of the form in the late 1970s and early

1980s. These performers incorporated themselves into “the globalization of the discourse of indigeneity” by mobilizing their connections to networks of ethnographers, NGOs, international folklore festivals, and transnational indigenous organizations (Hodgson

2002). In doing so, they reconstructed hierarchies within the scissors dance community according to a criteria of competence in cosmopolitan discourses of indigeneity and performances of the role of “the hyperreal Indian” on the global stage (Ramos 1998).

While they became central figures in the ethnogenesis of Andean indigeneity, “the forms in which these new ethnicities expressed themselves are influenced- even conditioned by- the demands of the West” (Favre 2009: 37). Through the disciplinary apparatus of staged folklore, high-profile scissors dance performers have constructed themselves as modern and cosmopolitan artists by inhabiting a newly-valued indigenous subject position for the

237 consumption of a first-world audience.

At the end of the Cold War, the global network of international folklore festivals known as CIOFF changed their organizational strategy. They entered into a formal relationship with UNESCO and began to promote a multicultural ethos to go along with a new era of globalization. As the Quincentennial Celebrations of Columbus gave indigenous cultures visibility worldwide and the UN declared 1993 as “the year of indigenous people,” CIOFF sought to expand its representation of indigenous cultural groups from third-world nations on the folkloric stage (CIOFF website). During the

Quincentennial, the two scissors dance troupes long associated with state-sponsored folklore, “Los Hermanos Chiara” and “Máximo Damián y sus Danzantes de Tijeras” performed internationally in Europe. However, the privatization of staged folklore opened the door for new groups to acquire an international presence without the mediation of state cultural institutions. In 1992 and 1993, multiple scissors dance troupes from both Ayacucho and Huancavelica embarked on international tours. Notably the modernist positionality and aesthetic of the Huancavelica troupes adapted more easily to the exigencies of the folkloric stage. Groups like “Corazón del Mercurio,” “Los

Hermanos Chavez,” and “Los Galas de Villallacta” established themselves as regulars on the circuit of annual folklore festivals affiliated with CIOFF, as the Huancavelica style gradually came to dominate international and touristic folkloric stages.

Prior to the absolute dominance of the Huancavelica style, another theatrical troupe named “Los Danzaq de Ayacucho” had great success on the international circuit during the 1990s. The stable members of this troupe were the dancer Qori Sisicha as

238 director, as well as the violinist Chimango and the harpist Llapla. In 1995, a group of

Native American artists from the state of Washington arrived in Peru as part of an intercultural exchange sponsored by North-South Connections, a small NGO founded by

Peruvian-American theatre artist Rose Cano. Qori Sisicha and his musicians performed for the distinguished guests at a showing of both North American and South American indigenous performance at the ruins of Pachacamac near Lima. Cano and the Native

American delegation decided to invite the scissors dance group to Seattle to perform on the pow-wow circuit as the artists noted similarities between the scissors dance and

Fancy Dancing in terms of their competitive virtuosity (Personal Interview „Rose Cano”

2010). Later in 1995, “Los Danzaq de Ayacucho” performed in several pow-wows throughout Washington, the Festival of Northwest Folklife, and a school tour sponsored by the Seattle Children‟s Theatre. All parties declared this first collaboration a resounding success. However, tensions developed in 1997, when Cano invited the group to return to Seattle for a longer tour. The scissors dancers violated the no-alcohol policy at several reservations, drawing complaints by tribal leaders. In addition, the musicians went to Cano to accuse Qori Sisicha and later Cano herself of exploiting them and the tour ended in disarray.

Despite these tensions, the group maintained a cordial relationship with Cano, and requested her services as an interpreter when Qori Sisicha arranged for a series of performances in 2001 and 2003 at the Kennedy Center‟s AmericaArtes series through his own contacts. The Kennedy Center performances were the crowning achievement of

“Los Danzaq de Ayacucho.” They expanded their standard fifteen minute theatrical

239 presentation to a full hour show that garnered an enthusiastic audience response and positive critical reviews. In one of these reviews, the author cites Qori Sisicha who has clearly internalized transnational discourses of idealized indigeneity. He claims, “The rituals of the dance are still practiced today. It is impossible for a person of the Andes to erase the memory of the ancestors” (Durban 2001). Despite these discourses of authenticity, the aesthetic innovations initiated by Qori Sisicha in the 1980s largely defined the appeal of the performances to foreign spectators. A video of one of these presentations shows Qori Sisicha competing against the young dancer El Chino de

Andamarca in a mock atipanakuy judged by the audience, whom Cano‟s invites to imagine themselves as part of the rural Andean community. The dancers played to the crowd, attempting to outdo each other in a display of increasing acrobatic virtuosity that drew comparisons to break dancing in the Kennedy Center‟s promotional literature.

However, the video also shows several members of the audience proudly displaying their

Peruvian immigrant identities, unsettling any narrative that might depict these events as simply the staging of exotic Andean indigeneity for a first-world audience.

The dramatic increase in Peruvian immigration to the United States and Europe since the 1980s has played a major role in the emerging “transnational performanscape” of contemporary scissors dance performance (Dacosta Holston 2005). In addition to invitations to perform for Peruvian migrant communities, many performers have used their newfound opportunity to acquire artist visas as a strategy to emigrate themselves.

Numerous scissors dancers and musicians now reside in major cities throughout North

America and Europe, opening more permanent spaces for international scissors dance

240 performance. One group, “Los Danzaq del Perú,” travelled to Toronto in 2000 in order to perform in several multicultural events throughout Ontario. After their visas expired, each member of the group independently filed for asylum status in order to remain in

Canada. At least the harpist, Champa, acquired his residency through asylum as Shining

Path insurgents had murdered his father a decade earlier. However, the process dissolved the group as the young dancer, Killincha, and the violinist returned to Peru after their claims were denied. Champa still performs informally with the group‟s director, the dancer Alacrán. Yet, with no violinist they rarely make public appearances anymore.

Unlike the vast majority of immigrant performers, Champa‟s legal residency has enabled him to bring his family to Canada and return to Peru as he pleases. He returns to his hometown of Andamarca every August to serve as a role model for younger musicians, who he claims are limited in their acquisition of the traditional musical repertoires.

International experience gives Champa a certain authority within the local community as a guardian of authenticity (Personal Interview “Champa” 2009).

Newer Ayacucho theatrical troupes such as “Los Danzaq de Ayacucho,” and “Los

Danzaq del Perú” tend to be created solely for the purposes of international travel and

“Máximo Damián y sus Danzantes de Tijeras” still perform both internationally and in

Peru in concerts tied to universities and cultural institutions. The Huancavelica troupes, on the other hand, have found more steady employment through a growing circuit of folkloric dinner theatres and hotel shows staged for tourists in Lima. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, “Corazon del Mercurio” were the pioneers in bringing the scissors dance to these new spaces in the early 1980s through their crowd-pleasing presentations

241 at the Hotel Crillón. In the late 1980s, this show and others like it closed as international tourism in Peru almost entirely halted with the urban offensive of Shining Path in Lima

(Personal Interview “Victor Chavez” 2009). After the conflict subsided, the Peruvian tourist industry became the fastest growing sector of the national economy in the second half of the 1990s. New hotels sprung up rapidly, some owned by foreign chains such as

Hilton, Sheraton, and Marriot (Tamborini 2005). By 1997, the phenomenon of touristic dinner theatres had returned with a new force, employing at least three well-established international scissors dance troupes from Huancavelica. Unlike the homogenized

Andean and Afro-Peruvian dance companies these shows also employ, the scissors dancers are independent contractors who perform exclusively as soloists in the final act.

The modernist positioning of the Huancavelica community has enabled them to develop ever more crowd-pleasing acrobatics and balletic choreographies with four or more dancers performing in unison. On the other hand, these innovations have created a more homogenized aesthetic style with less room for improvisation than their Ayacucho counterparts (Personal Interview “Victor Chavez 2009,” “Fredy Chavez” 2009).

The genre conventions of staged folklore mitigate the differences between various local and national traditions performed under similar theatrical conditions. These events celebrate difference as a commodified value at the same time that the conventions of the genre bring a certain level of continuity to each act. Multicultural exhibitions enact a dialectic between strangeness and familiarity common to many displays of the exotic

(Handler 1988, Kirshenblatt Gimblett 1998, Huggans 2002, Balme 2008). The genre of staged folklore favors virtuosity, colorful costumes, and the spectacular over more subtle

242 forms of cultural display (Ness 1992, Kirshenblatt Gimblett 1998, Desmond 2000). As such, the scissors dance is not only well-equipped for the folkloric stage, but the apparatus of this distinct genre has transformed and reduced its more substantial repertoires into a brief display of spectacular acrobatics. Prior to the administration of

Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006), which significantly amplified the performative economy of neoliberal multiculturalism in order negotiate Peru‟s entrance into the global economy, the scissors dance was already a commodified icon of hyperreal indigeneity. In the

2000s, its global circulation increased as state promotion agencies and cultural institutions increasingly performed the nation with ample doses of strategic exoticism in order to promote Peru as the central attraction of international tourism in South America.

6.6. An Andean President for a New Peru

The Fujimori regime succeeded in rebuilding state institutions and implementing neoliberal reforms in the immediate aftermath of the initial conflict. The “authoritarian reconstitution of the state” provided a measure of stability despite abuses of power and severe violations of human rights (Burt 2007). The national economy significantly recovered and violence subsided and Fujimori handily won re-election in 1995. He remained extremely popular until at least 1997 (Conaghan 2005, Burt 2007, Lee 2010).

By 1998, a group of mafia-like leaders led by Montesinos gained control of the state, deepening vast webs of corruption aimed at “simply maintaining power and assuring its continued impunity” (Burt 2004: 266). They arranged for a constitutional mandate legitimizing Fujimori‟s bid for an unprecedented third term. Fujimori‟s chief opponent in the 2000 election, Alejandro Toledo, accused the administration of election fraud. On

243 inauguration day, Toledo headed a massive citizen protest questioning the legitimacy of an authoritarian leader. Through the protest, popularly called “La Marcha de los Cuatro

Suyos,” Toledo utilized his Andean ethnicity to construct himself as a patriotic hero leading the marginalized against a corrupt dictator (Lee 2010: 54). Later in 2000, the

Fujimori regime quickly unraveled as undeniable video evidence revealed the large-scale corruption and bribery employed by Montesinos in order to keep Fujimori in power

(Conaghan 2005, Burt 2007, Lee 2010).

After the interim president, Valentín Paniagua, called for new elections to be held in April 2001, Toledo quickly emerged as the front-runner. His public opposition to

Fujimori, Andean ethnic heritage, and rags to riches biographical legend made him an appealing figure for broad sectors of the Peruvian population (Lee 2010: 54-55).

Alejandro Toledo was born into a family of peasants in the Andean department of

Ancash. He helped to support his family as a shoe-shine boy at a very young age. As a talented student, a Peace Corps volunteer assisted Toledo in earning a scholarship to study at the University of San Francisco. After getting a bachelor‟s degree in economics, he received doctoral degrees in education and economics at Stanford University. Toledo went on to an illustrious career in development economics at the United Nations, World

Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank (Lee 2010: 54-55). This biographical narrative of the self-made man appealed to both the popular and upper classes in Peru yet made him an unlikely candidate to lead a protest movement. In a speech at the “Marcha de los Cuatro Suyos,” Toledo cast himself as an “obstinate cholo” leading the forces of

“Peru Profundo” against the oppressors, now embodied by “the dirty chinaman”

244

(Giménez Micó 2006: 7). Invoking the Andean utopia, Toledo took on the role of the

“New Inca,” weaving his personal biography of upward mobility into a narrative of the triumph of the Andean people (Ibid. 6). During the 2001 campaign, Toledo effectively instrumentalized this potent imagery in order to project a populist message relatively inoffensive to neoliberal national and transnational elites.

Paradoxically, Toledo‟s Belgian wife, Eliane Karp, played an equally important role in the ethnic populism of her husband‟s campaign. Trained as an anthropologist and a near fluent Quechua speaker, Karp spent much of her career working on Andean development issues with several NGOs and transnational institutions. The couple symbolized a productive marriage between Andean and Western in which each partner appropriated the symbolic capital of the other (Roncalla 2002, Vich 2003: 454). Running for the presidency enabled Toledo, the self-described cholo, to interact with world leaders on the global stage. As a potential First Lady, Karp took every opportunity to cast herself as a romantic defender of marginalized indigenous people. Indeed, it was Karp rather than Toledo who frequently travelled to the highlands, giving speeches on behalf of her husband in Quechua (Vich 2003: 454). In one memorable appearance, Karp addressed an audience of elite Peruvian women by claiming, “Listen to me carefully Miraflores yuppies, the apus have spoken; my cholo is good and sacred” (qtd. in García 2005: 170).

Positioning her husband as blessed by the Andean mountain deities, Karp refashions

Andean spirituality as a fetish available for political appropriation. In both the campaign and Toledo‟s term in office, the couple bestowed new visibility and recognition on

Andean spiritual concepts at the same time as they domesticated these very concepts

245 according to romanticized Western stereotypes of indigeneity (Roncalla 2002).

After Toledo won a close runoff election against former president Alan García, the international press hailed the victory as the vindication of Peru‟s disenfranchised indigenous masses. On July 29, 2001, Toledo staged a ceremonial inauguration at the ruins of Machu Picchu. In a spectacular televised performance, complete with Inca costumes and thousands of folkloric dancers, Karp and Toledo declared the beginning of a “new era” with recourse to the return of Tawantinsuyo (Vich 2003, García 2005: 171).

Two Andean shamans conferred spiritual legitimacy on Toledo as the reincarnation of the

Inca Pachacuteq, burning flowers and coca leaves in an offering to the pachamama (earth mother), and the apus. Toledo declared, “I have come to give thanks for the force and courage that the apus and the earth have given me” (qtd. in Bridges 2001). After the ceremony, the event continued with an immense folkloric spectacle the visually interpellated the recognition and participation of “all the bloods” in performing the “new” nation. Appropriating this felicitous phrase from the title of Arguedas‟s 1964 novel

Todas las Sangres (All the Bloods), Toledo and Karp reduced the author‟s complex and politically oppositional utopia to a sanitized multicultural celebration. For the domestic audience, the event performed a powerful, if domesticated, moment of national belonging that revived the indigenista imaginary from a postmodern perspective (Vich 2003: 452).

However, Toledo‟s performance of a renovated Inca nationhood clearly addressed multiple audiences. The grandiose stage chosen for the event, Machu Picchu, is Peru‟s most iconic tourist destination and a pilgrimage site for new age spiritualists worldwide.

Flanked by world leaders, Toledo proclaimed, “I want to send a message to the world to

246 come visit this mystical place” (qtd. in Bridges 2001). He pledged to increase international tourism in Peru fivefold during his term, exalting the nation‟s fastest growing industry as benefitting the entire population by creating jobs and facilitating the recognition of cultural diversity. Cynthia Vich reads the inaugural ceremony as producing “a script of identity for Peru‟s entrance into global multiculturalism” (2003:

451). With Toledo as the protagonist, the inauguration offered disenfranchised Andeans the opportunity for participation by performing their cultural difference, aestheticized as attractive commodities on the global stage. In the era of globalization, new articulations of nationhood are “more transparently than ever before produced with a global audience in mind” (Buell 1999: 554). The inaugural ceremony enacted a rite of passage that incorporated marginalized “others” into the national community by making indigeneity safe for neoliberalism as the fruits harvested by Tawantinsuyo were now available to all.

The Toledo government could not sustain the high expectations produced by the euphoria of the democratic transition and his inauguration, with his approval ratings hitting single digits by 2004 (Vich 2007: 4). Nevertheless, the performances of nationhood enacted by the ceremony at Machu Picchu went beyond the ephemerality of the president‟s political capital. Toledo‟s performance as the New Inca, the latest in a long line of utopian articulations of a “new Peru,” came to embody the process by which

“liberal democracy, late capitalism, and global mediatization together create performative societies (Kershaw 1999: 11-12). These societies produce performative economies of spectacle that constitute multicultural subjects as citizens through rituals of enfranchisement disciplined by neoliberal governmentality (Kershaw 2007). Moreover,

247 these performances of multicultural nationhood domesticate cultural difference in a way that no longer threatens the neoliberal market economy (Hale 2002, 2004). We do not need to doubt the sincerity of Eliane Karp‟s multiple written and spoken articulations of pluricultural nationhood in order to acknowledge the limits and failures of her top-down approach in leading a coalition of Amazonian and Andean indigenous movements, which ended in accusations of clientelism and the mismanagement of funds (Greene 2006).

Furthermore, we do not need to question the good intentions of the Peruvian Truth and

Reconciliation Commission to recognize the silent work of hegemony in the almost entirely unnoticed absence of indigenous leaders in its membership. In both cases, the cultural logic of neoliberalism conceals the gaze of the unmarked and supposedly universal subject necessary in order to recognize multicultural “others” as performers in the spectacle of nation-building.

6.7. The Nation as Brand: The Logic of Promotion

The Toledo administration significantly empowered the promotion agency

PROMPERU to fabricate spectacular images of Peruvian diversity for the consumption of international tourists (Tamborini 2005, Galdos 2006). Founded during the Fujimori regime in order to improve Peru‟s global image amidst political violence and the drug war, PROMPERU had developed marketing techniques to construct Peru as a brand even before Toledo took office. In October 2000, the agency publicly unveiled its work on country-branding in a special issue of their colorful bilingual magazine Peru: El Dorado, entitled “Towards a Vision of Peru.” The editors encouraged the nation to promote and market its “megadiversity,” arguing that “our unique identities and qualities are our

248 principal resource to construct a new future” (PROMPERU Oct-Dec. 1999: 9). In a section that illustrates the sensuality and visual appeal of traditional music, dance, and festivities, a full-page spread features a photo of a scissors dancer from Ayacucho leaping high into the air (Ibid. 74-75). PROMPERU‟s efforts at branding the nation literalize

Yudice‟s argument that neoliberalism mobilizes cultural difference as an economic and sociopolitical resource for development (Yudice 2003). After the election of Toledo in

2001, PROMPERU received much greater state support and funding, greatly intensifying their efforts at promoting Peru as the most desirable tourist destination in South America.

The agency selected the scissors dance as one of the icons it repetititively used to promote Peru in print and advertising campaigns. Moreover, a select group of scissors dancers directed by Ccarccaria travelled extensively with Toledo and/or Karp as part of quite expensive theatrical spectacles staged PROMPERU at dozens of annual international tourism fairs (Tamborini 2005, Personal Interview “Ccarccaria” 2007).

Both the advertisements and theatrical spectacles invent a Peru that does not exist, a “mystical” and “magical” fantasy world outside of history (Tamborini 2005: 139, Vich

2007). Victor Vich argues that the tourist industry in contemporary Peru is “a discursive machinery that produces representations of the nation that have important consequences on the ways in which history and cultural identity are conceptualized” (Vich 2007: 2).

He likens the spectacular strategies of tourist promotion and the performance of Toledo as Peu‟s first indigenous president of Peru on the international stage to the figure of the brichero. The mythical gringa hunter validates himself and acquires social mobility through virtuoso performances of authentic otherness that conform to the desires of the

249 foreign tourist (Ibid. 3). In another article, Vich reads the figure of the brichero as “an allegory of the nation in the neoliberal context of the contemporary world” reflecting

Peru‟s subordinate position in the global economy and efforts to fulfill the West‟s desire for exoticism at any cost (Vich 2006). Even if he became a rather unpopular president, it appears that Toledo became a rather successful role-model for the strategic exoticism deployed by many Peruvians in their interactions with tourists and the tourist industry.

The president‟s own global performance of indigeneity and PROMPERU‟s promotional strategies depended on a gentle if not very subtle, imperative for other Peruvians to perform their identities as if to say, Be exotic so they can come to see you!

That many scissors dancers were already performing Andean otherness on the global stage made the dance particularly attractive within the state‟s newly coordinated strategies of tourist promotion. Visually appealing staged presentations and ethnographic narratives of Pre-Columbian authenticity and cultural resistance reduced to marketing slogans enabled the promotional agency to simultaneously market the nation‟s diversity and appeal to indigenous rights. On one 2004 tour sponsored by PROMPERU, after a series of performances in several international tourist fairs the scissors dance directed by

Ccarccaria appeared with President Toledo at the opening ceremony of the National

Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. As the guest of honor, Toledo gave a speech in English in which he called for the unity of indigenous people throughout the world in the coming of a new age of triumph. He also proclaimed himself the first indigenous president of Peru, a self-representation he exclusively used for international appearances. Along with ethnic performance troupes from around the world, Ccanto

250

Scissors Dancers performed a short presentation of short improvised acrobatic choreography. Narratives of authenticity coexisted with and legitimated this otherwise cosmopolitan performance event (NMAI 2004). A self-identified indigenous Peruvian immigrant blogger claimed that the scissors dancers “came from remote rural areas, their dark red complexions could only come from working under the searing hot sun and the freezing night winds high in the Andean mountains” (Benavides 2004). Coming from a position of solidarity, the blogger nevertheless racializes the scissors dancers as “other,” clearly missing the fact that this was an urban theatrical troupe quite accustomed to performing for foreign audiences around the world.

If Toledo‟s discourse of indigenous rights was often conflated with tourist promotion the same could be said about efforts to preserve cultural patrimony. In 2004,

Karp heavily promoted the Instituto Nacional de Cultura‟s adoption of a UNESCO style program to recognize specific living cultural practices as Cultural Patrimony of the

Nation. In April 2005, upon the petition of the municipal government of Andamarca, the

Instituto Nacional de Cultura declared the scissors dance as Cultural Patrimony of the

Nation along with the Festival of Water of Andamarca. In an article in its own official magazine, Gaceta Internacional, INC officials describe the efforts of state anthropologists to research and safeguard the authenticity of the practice. The article characterizes the dance‟s cultural significance with similar “millennial” language, and visually appealing photographs as the promotional materials of PROMPERU, albeit with a slightly more nuanced presentation of historical context (Carlos Picón 2005). The final lines of the article pay tribute to “all the men and women who cultivate, disseminate, and

251 teach it” (Ibid. 36). The discourse of cultural patrimony bestows agency upon the dance itself as a clearly-defined cultural object that exists prior to its enactment by human practitioners, conceived as merely interpreters (Handler 1984, Kirshenblatt Gimblett

1998, Taylor 2008). This logic reduces cultural practices to objects, images, or commodities that acquire value in their own right while their practitioners can sometimes be undervalued or exploited. Contemporary performers proudly utilize the designation as a badge of honor, but complain that it has only served to enhance the value of the iconic image of the dance in the global and cultural marketplace with no tangible benefits for the practitioners. Furthermore, patrimonialization calls into question issues of intellectual property; partially legitimizing the notion that culture in the abstract sense belongs to the state. This situation could become even more complicated as UNESCO recently declared the scissors dance as Immaterial Cultural Patrimony of Humanity.

The logic of the promotion of diversity has continued under Toledo‟s successor,

Alan García, without the genuine if contradictory interest Toledo and Karp showed in promoting indigenous rights. García belittled the recommendations of the Truth and

Reconciliation Commission, which implicated his former government, as representing the interests of terrorists (Theidon 2010). He has frequently used repressive measures against indigenous and peasant demonstrations against mining claims and natural gas exploration on community lands. On June 5, 2009, national police violently suppressed indigenous demonstrators in the Amazonian region of Bagua, resulting in the death of over 30 police officers and upwards of 200 protestors (Lucero 2010: 70-71). García has frequently cast these demonstrations as the work of terrorists, revealing quite explicitly

252 the limits of “the indio permitido” (Hale 2005). Nevertheless, PROMPERU maintains its central importance within the state bureaucracy, promoting the nation with even more spectacular images of “hyperreal indigeneity,” including the “Peru: Live the Legend” campaign I described in the introduction. Moreover, the role of a few privileged scissors dance groups as international ambassadors of Peruvian culture has greatly amplified. In

November 2008, several scissors dance groups played a feature role in cultural events staged for the entertainment of world political and business leaders when Lima hosted the

APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Summit. The dance has become the central showpiece as the nation performs itself through selected images of hyperreal indigeneity.

6.8. El Gran Reto: the Moral Economy of a New Peru

In a concrete example of the conversion of the scissors dance into a sign-image of

Andean authenticity, the television network Frequencia Latina released a short telenovela in 2008 that dramatized the lives of several high-profile scissors dancers. Advanced advertising for El Gran Reto (the great challenge) promised “magic and mysticism,” a

“millennial tradition,” “where every moment indicates a destiny,” and “much more than a dance.” These marketing strategies echoed those of state promotional agencies, especially PROMPERU, that depict Peru as a mystical land outside of history. What is surprising is that the target audience for the telenovela was not international tourists or even globalizing Peruvian elites but rather the urban poor of Andean migrants residing in the barriadas of metropolitan Lima and other large cities in Peru. Since the Toledo administration, a newly hegemonic public sphere has increasingly incorporated migrant culture industries into an immense network of spectacle appealing to this emergent mass

253

Illustration 6.1

Advertisement for El Gran Reto

Courtesy of Frequencia Latina http://www.frequencialatina.com.pe

public (Alfaro 2005, Tucker 2006). Situated precariously between nostalgia for Andean peasant cultures of their places of origin and their newfound access to the signs and modes of consumption of global modernity, migrant spectators increasingly consume a new slate of national telenovelas that dramatize frictions and productive encounters between Andean heritage and a globalizing world. Many of these programs chronicle the lives of highly-successful stars of commercial Andean folklore music, such as Dina

254

Paucar and Sonia Morales. Through melodramatic rags-to-riches narratives, these telenovelas have become the principal mode of transmission of the myth of the triumphant cholo or provinciano to emerging Andean publics (Alfaro 2005, Tucker

2005). Although Toledo lost much of his political capital because of scandals and dissatisfaction with his aggressively neoliberal policies, his persona partially inspired

“the narration of social mobility with a multicultural tint; the provincial-Peruvian version of the American dream” (Ibid. 120).

Television producer Susana Bamonde is a pioneer in this recent televisual trend.

During the Toledo administration she worked with Iguana Producciones, the event and production company that created elaborate spectacles for PROMPERU. In 2004, she and a few colleagues embarked on what she calls the “insane” journey of creating “Dina

Paucar: La Lucha por un Sueño” on a shoe-string budget. The miniseries tells the story of struggle and triumph of the iconic folkloric singer who rose from obscurity as a market vendor to mega-stardom through grassroots networks of audiovisual recording and live concerts in the informal marketplace. Although they initially found it nearly impossible to finance and find a network to air the program, a limited run on Frequencia Latina garned the highest ratings of any domestically-produced telenovela in Peru. After a long run with new chapters, Bamonde produced a string of miniseries using a similar framework, including the biography of chicha legend Chacalón, who has become somewhat a folk saint after his early death (Aguila 2011). By 2007, the producer had tired of producing telenovelas with very similar rags-to-riches narratives about iconic figures. After viewing the Chinese film, The King of Masks: Bian Lian, she and her

255 production team decided to adapt the story of a traditional mask maker to a Peruvian context (Puga 2008). They contacted high-profile scissors dancers Ccarccaria and Qori

Sisicha about the possibility of creating a miniseries based on the scissors dance.

In newspaper coverage prior to the run of the series, Bamonde attempted to frame it as a departure from her earlier productions, given the importance of preserving a traditional cultural practice. She claimed, “Recently we have dedicated ourselves to showing the lives of figures related to the contemporary moment, but we also should get to know our own culture” (qtd. in Puga 2008). She thanked the network for taking a risk on a miniseries about such a profound and traditional world, implying that it was less commercial than the earlier focus on the hybrid culture industries of Andean folkloric music. Immediately prior to the premiere of the program, she more confidently declared,

“This is not a typical miniseries. On the contrary, it is different, and unusual, the story of a dance that is recognized not only on the national but also the international level, and here we present it with all of the mysticism and religiosity that characterizes it”

(“Protagonizan” 2008). However, Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria framed the series quite differently in their own press coverage. The entrepreneurial scissors dancers clearly depicted El Gran Reto as the story of their lives, in order to acquire a celebrity status approaching the level of Dina Paucar or the now deceased Chacalón. Furthermore, the conventions of the telenovela favored this interpretation as the network clearly understood that its audience was interested in stories of the triumph of provincial figures.

In the resulting production, the weight of Andean tradition and spirituality, embodied by the scissors dance, acts as the moral compass for a new Peruvian community, guiding the

256 social mobility of provincial Andean migrants in Lima.

The respected Peruvian actors Pold Gastello and Gerardo Zamoa, known for major roles in Bamonde‟s previous productions, portrayed Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria respectively. Despite the fact that the dancers tend to portray the miniseries as the story of their lives, neither character is truly the protagonist. Borrowing a conceit from The

King of Masks, that distinction belongs to Julia, an adolescent provincial girl who disguises herself as a boy in order to achieve respect as a scissors dancer. In the first episode, she encounters her father, a scissors dance master, dying in his fields, victimized by the witchcraft of a rival dancer. While her father has taught her the basics of the dance, Julia disguises herself as an adolescent boy in search of a new master in order to avenge her father‟s death. At first she tries to convince Ccarccaria to accept her as an apprentice, but he refuses as he is already instructing his own son, Alex. However, he agrees to bring Julio to his close friend and rival Qori Sisicha, who currently has no pupil.

They encounter Qori Sisicha in the middle of a confrontation with Cirilo, a young scissors dancer who Julia instantly recognizes as her father‟s murderer. Cirilo has entered into a pact with the devil in order to achieve fame and fortune beyond his abilities. While Qori Sisicha refuses to challenge the “incomplete” dancer, Ccarccaria suggests a competition between Cirilo and the apprentices, Alex and Julio. The miniseries depicts the drama that unfolds in the preparations for the competition.

Like most melodrama, El Gran Reto enacts and confirms a conventional moral framework that defines positive and negative values through Manichean characterization.

Stephanie Orue, the young actress who plays Julia in her star-making role, claims that “it

257 is a story with various morals. It is the struggle of a woman in a world dominated by men, but also the search for justice through a mystical dance. Moreover, it is a story where love prevails over hate and vengeance” (“Protagonizan” 2008). As Bamonde‟s press statements make clear, El Gran Reto seeks to reaffirm an idealized Andean spirituality as the moral compass for a modern Andean community. As I showed in the last section, Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria frequently narrate the story of past victimization and the demonization of the dance by colonial priests, transcended in the present through a reclaiming of authentic Andean spiritual values. El Gran Reto uses this narrative as a foundation, positing the two scissors dance “masters” as the voices of the positive values of reciprocity, respect for nature, justice, and family solidarity. Joining them are Yuya, an altamisayuq (Andean shaman), a muki (the ghost of a miner), a condor, and other figures from the pantheon of Andean spirits and deities, as well as Qori Sisicha‟s family who adopt Julia as one of their own. Opposing this “good” community are Cirilo, a malignant brujo (witch), and Allin Supay (the devil himself), who represent the negative values of jealousy, hate, and vengeance associated with the alienating aspects of modernity and irresponsible capitalism.

If an “authentic‟ Andean spirituality frames the moral compass of El Gran Reto, when the scene shifts from the provinces to Lima, these values guide an idealized vision of provincial social mobility that posits a rapprochement between Andean traditions and urban lifestyles. After Qori Sisicha reluctantly accepts Julia as his pupil, she follows him to Lima to prepare for the competition. Amelia, Qori Sisicha‟s sister, adopts the provincial girl into her home, as she shares a room with Amelia‟s young son Huascar.

258

The program sanitizes its depiction of Andean migration considerably, as the family resides in a residential district that resembles upper-rent Miraflores much more than the barriadas located on the city‟s periphery. After Amelia falls ill from the witchcraft practiced by Cirilo, Ccarccaria and Julia miraculously cure her, using traditional Andean medicine. The medical professionals who attend to her are incredulous and make an informal agreement with Ccarccaria promising a collaboration between modern and traditional medical techniques. After healing from her illness, Amelia receives an invitation by an international NGO to start a cooperative producing traditional Andean woven blankets for an international free trade market. The fledgling business almost immediately turns a profit, becoming a provider of better employment opportunities for provincial women. Thus, the series promises a productive partnership between traditional Andean culture and globalization, submitting an idealized portrait that conforms to the logic of neoliberal multiculturalism.

What is truly at stake in El Gran Reto is the transmission of Andean knowledge and spiritual values to the next generation. The series depicts rural and urban Andean youths as precariously situated between two worlds and uniquely susceptible to the seductions of global modernity. The apparent villain, Cirilo, is really just an inexperienced young scissors dancer who desires fame and fortune without making the requisite sacrifices. Manipulated by Allin Supay, who convinces him that Qori Sisicha killed his mother, he enters a pact with the devil in order to achieve his vengeance. In one scene he appears performing the scissors dance at a nightclub in Lima, flanked by a chorus of scantily-clad female dancers who gyrate against him. Overt sexuality becomes

259 an allegorical figure for the seductiveness of overconsumption. Luchita, a girl from the neighborhood who dates Ccarccaria‟s son Alex, is a little too flirtatious and promiscuous.

Thus, she becomes the bait for manipulation by Allin Supay, who possesses her in order to create tension and conflict within his rivals who have begun to create a modern

Andean community. The clearest demonstration that the younger generations represent the stakes of the conflict between good and evil is the important role of the youngest major character, Huascar. After Cirilo, his cousin, shows him a good time at a video arcade, Allin Supay kidnaps the young boy. The evil partnership almost succeeds in turning Huascar into the sacrificial victim of a ceremony that would bond the spirit of the devil to the body of Cirilo.

One of the most contradictory and troubling aspects of El Gran Reto’s portrayal of a potential modern Andean community revolves around the politics of gender. As the show‟s producers approach the narrative from an undeniably liberal perspective, they depict some modern innovations as positive. In particular, their sympathies quite explicitly lie with Julia in her efforts to disguise her gender in order to succeed in a masculine world. While the male characters accept her masculinity without question, the other women, especially Amelia, see through her mask almost instantly. These women agree to assist her in order to show the male characters that women are as able as men.

However, they urge her to reveal her true gender identity to her master before it is too late. The conceit of gender disguise creates confusion that brings to the surface an implicit homophobia, treated uncritically for comic effect. In an early episode, the young

Huascar accidentally catches sight of Julia‟s naked back, horrified by his attraction to his

260 supposedly male roommate. When confronted, she reveals her true identity, allowing

Huascar to maintain his sense of masculinity. This scene is repeated with Alex, who reacts to his sudden attraction to a rival dancer through violent confrontation. Yet, strong feelings develop between the two characters, masked by animosity. When Julia reveals her secret to Alex, they discover their love for each other and begin a clandestine relationship. At this point, gender confusion and implicit homophobia begin to drive the plot when Ccarccaria walks in on the two kissing. After Julia reveals her secret, he is so relieved that his son is not gay that he blesses both the relationship and her bid to become the first female danzaq. However, Qori Sisicha does not react so favorably to the news, banning his former pupil from his sight just before the competition with Cirilo, initiating a rift with Ccarccaria in the process.

If El Gran Reto depicts provincial youths as at risk for manipulation by diabolic forces in the urban environment, they also acquire the potential for redemption by embracing Andean spiritual values. In a bit of creative casting, the well-known Cumbia singer Maricarmen Marin plays Teresa, an anthropologist with a provincial background.

While the actress and singer is most commonly seen dancing in skimpy outfits with her group, Las Diablita de la Cumbia, in El Gran Reto she portrays a candidate for redemption through her pairing with Yuyu, the Andean shaman. Reynaldo Arenas plays

Yuyu who instructs the urban-raised Teresa in the ways of traditional Andean shamanism. This veteran actor‟s iconic status as a hero of Andean redemption lives on through his most well-known role as Tupac Amaru II in a bio-pic of the historical figure,

This pairing reveals that El Gran Reto’s reverence for Andean mysticism as a moral

261 compass relies on rather conventional gender politics. A beautiful and independent female character, played by a performer most famous for her revealing costumes, achieves enlightenment through the guidance and leadership of an authoritative older man. Through this relationship, the character and thus the actress, re-discovers her

Andean identity. Meanwhile, the spiritually-assured Yuyu receives the companionship of a beautiful and much younger woman. In another example of the power of Andean tradition to redeem lost youth, a young homeless couple assault Julia and Alex in an early scene. After they discover that the couple are not really criminals but have a young child they struggle to feed, Julia and Alex befriend the young couple and enlist their assistance in recovering a magical pendant in order to defeat Cirilo. During the conventional happy ending, Amelia promises to give the young couple a second opportunity at life by employing them in her weaving cooperative. By the end of the series even the manipulated young characters, Luchita and Cirilo emerge as candidates for redemption.

All of the intersecting strands of El Gran Reto reach their climax in the final confrontation that gives the series its name. At the start of the competition, the community that has gradually developed throughout the program has fragmented. Julia has returned to the highlands, rejected by her former master. Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria are feuding due to their disagreements over the former‟s treatment of Julia and the latter‟s own son Alex. As individuals, even these great scissors dancers are no match for the powers of Cirilo and Allin Supay. In the middle of their separate demonstrations of their dancing skills, they each fall victim to Cirilo‟s witchcraft, unable to finish the competition. Just as the young diabolic dancer is about to declare victory, Julia arrives to

262 challenge him to continue the competition the next day. In a pivotal scene, Yuyu explains to her that in order to defeat Cirilo she has to forgive him and forget about her desires own desires for vengeance. The shaman touches her head, showing her a vision of her father who urges her that he is not interested in vengeance, but wants her to follow the principles she has learned through the practice of the scissors dance. At the competition, Julia tells Cirilo that she understands why he did what he had done and publicly forgives him. As she dances, an unconvinced and still diabolically possessed

Cirilo prepares to attack her with witchcraft. But just as he momentarily succeeds in paralyzing the young scissors dancer, the former delinquents arrive at the competition after successfully recovering the pendant that blocks Cirilo‟s powers. Through the pendant, they channel Yuyu who successfully separates the spirit of Allin Supay from the body of Cirilo. As the competition resumes, the superior choreographic knowledge of

Julia easily defeats the undisciplined Cirilo, who dances awkwardly and without rhythm.

In the final scene, the protagonists celebrate their triumph and the initiation of a genuine community based on the social norms of an emerging Andean modernity. Qori

Sisicha and Ccarccaria reconcile, promising to collaborate on the project of building a national school for the scissors dance, reflecting a central aspect of the real-life dancers‟ public personas. In a final tableau of the new family standing together in an unbroken line, Julia addresses the mountain-gods in a voiceover:

I want to thank you my dear Apu, with all of my heart: for all the help you have given me; for allowing me to attain my dream of becoming the first female danzaq; for the love and affection I have found in a new family; for not allowing evil to prevail; for bringing me together with my guide, my master, my father; for allowing me to find the love of my life.

263

This speech neatly summarizes the moral code enacted by El Gran Reto. It incorporates

Andean spirituality as a set of guiding principles in an over-arching narrative in which love, family, and genuine vocation triumph over jealousy, greed, and the desire for vengeance. The miniseries is much less about the scissors dance as a corporeal practice, and indeed it shows very little dancing, than as a role-model and guide for proper moral conduct in the constitution of modern Andean individual and collective identities.

One of the central contradictions of the generic framework of melodrama is the tension between its over-arching moral code and its exploitation of the popular appeal of spectacle. Indeed, in many melodramas the villains are often the most appealing characters, inviting a carnivalesque identification with transgression prior to an ultimate affirmation of conventional social norms. Partially for this reason, many scissors dance performers who did not participate in the series complain about the program‟s fantasy and exoticism. They fixate on the good versus evil Andean mysticism framework central to the narrative, which may redeem Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria as figures of the positive pole, but leaves the door open for other practitioners to retain their association with the devil, witchcraft, and even human sacrifice. These criticisms should also be seen in light of the broader feelings of some performers that their more publicized counterparts will do anything for fame and are out only for themselves, ironically linking them with the character of Cirilo within the structure of the miniseries. These performers strongly argued that Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria should have convinced the show‟s producers to opt for a more realistic portrayal of the scissors dance that featured more actual dancing, and less witchcraft and conventional melodramatic romance (Personal Interview “Llapla”

264

2008, “Chimango” 2008, “Juan Capcha” 2009). It appears that Qori Sisicha and

Ccarccaria had very little control over the representation of the dance it produced. In the next chapter I address the question of the performer‟s agency in performing on national and transnational stages.

265

Chapter 7 The Double Agency of Contemporary Scissors Dance Performers

7.1. Introduction The performative economy of the new Peru has transformed the scissors dance into a commodified icon of hyperreal indigeneity on the global stage. It could be argued, as suggested by Zizek (1998) and Vich (2007), that neoliberal multiculturalism is nothing more than a more effective form of colonialism. Performing for international audiences disciplines the performers in certain ways. Successful theatrical groups distinguish themselves through their competence in “civilized” and “professional” codes of behavior, such as punctuality, hygiene, and the artistic unity of their presentations. Contemporary performers tend to confer an abstract authority upon their ancestors, yet I have heard several performers patronizingly refer to less cosmopolitan practitioners as ignorant, uneducated, unclean, unable to communicate effectively in Spanish, and lacking proper identification documents. They accept hegemonic notions that education and urban lifestyles are legitimate means to construct hierarchies over those more “Indian” than themselves (Mendoza 1999, Cadena 2000). This strategy of domestication is comparable to earlier folk performers who used the disciplinary apparatus of the stage in order to appropriate a mestizo identity (Turino 1993, Mendoza 1999, Cadena 2000, Romero 2000,

Cánepa Koch 2002). Yet, contemporary scissors dance performers do not construct themselves as mestizos. As Charles Hale remarks, “multiculturalism is the myth of mestizaje for the new millennium” (2002: 490). Instead of fleeing from hegemonic

266 notions of the “Indian” as an inferior being, contemporary performers fashion themselves according to the model of the newly legitimized subject position of the domesticated hyperreal Indian.

We should also remember that most scissors dance performers are not only engaged in staged folklore performance. The same performers frequently perform not only for international audiences, but also in a variety of urban popular entertainments and rural festivities for Andean audiences. I would like to suggest that this multiplicity of audiences and performance contexts enables the performers to fashion complex hybrid identities for themselves, acting as models for the construction of modern indigenous subjectivities. As theatrical performers who mimetically enact an “other,” they perform their identities according to the dialectical relationship between actor and role that

Hastrup calls “double-agency” (1998). The character that the scissors dancer enacts now approximates global discourses of exotic indigeneity rooted in the authenticity of

“magical” otherness. Yet, the performers maintain a distinct identity as modern and cosmopolitan artists, represented by their given names as distinguished from their artistic pseudonyms. As theatrical performers who spend much of their lives off-stage and out of character, they have distinct advantages over other global icons of hyperreal Andean indigeneity. For example, the weavers of the island of Taquile feel burdened by the role of idealized indigeneity thrust upon them even in their own homes by the international tourists they host (Zorn 2007). The explicit theatricality of the scissors dance gives its practitioners a space of distance from the confines of the role.

267

Perhaps because of this distance, scissors dance performers do not perceive their performances of “millennial” indigeneity as purely instrumental. Unlike how we normally think of an actor putting on a role, they do not see the character they enact as a mere fiction, but rather a model for an essentialized indigenous self. Through the embodied acts of dance performance they repeatedly discover the “other” within the modern self. Traci Zamir calls the “imaginative bonding” between the theatrical actor and his/her role as “the existential amplification of the actor,” arguing that this process

“requires the presence and recognition of the audience to be completed” (2010: 227).

The scissors dance performer acquires a positive, if domesticated, indigenous identity through the recognition of their corporeal embodiment performed by the audience‟s appreciation. The performers nearly always narrate their diverse performance activities from a position of agency. The formerly marginalized indigenous performers experience audience appreciation as a form of affective empowerment. As Mary Weismantel argues,

“embodied knowledge is itself a form of cultural capital, more meaningful because it is enacted through the body” (Weismantel 2005: 192).

By performing on cosmopolitan stages and constituting themselves as entertainment entrepreneurs who produce spectacles in urban Andean popular culture, contemporary scissors dance performers seek to acquire the social mobility and cultural capital of an emerging cholo middle class. The scissors dance has become not only a commodified object of multicultural recognition, but also a model for new articulations of cosmopolitan indigenous Andean subjectivity and citizenship. Revising Renato

Rosaldo‟s original concept, Aihwa Ong redefines cultural citizenship as a “dual process

268 of self-making and being made within webs of power linked to the nation-state and civil society. Becoming a citizen depends on how one is constituted as a subject who exercises or submits to power relations [. . .] in shifting fields of power that include the nation-state and the wider world” (Ong 1996: 737). I argue that contemporary scissors dancer performers have utilized this double-agency as a resource in order to negotiate the terms of their visibility and recognition from a position of agency. They have become central actors in the performative economy of spectacle that constitutes the new Peru as a renovated national imaginary produced as much for the consumption of global spectators as it is for an exclusively national public sphere. Although most contemporary performers enact specific forms of double-agency, they do so according to quite different models, exacerbating the tensions and conflicts within the communities of scissors dancer performance. In this chapter, I analyze some of these strategies in order to situate the cultural agency of the performers within the broader contours of national and transnational representations of Andean indigeneity.

7.2. The Maximum Exponents of the Scissors Dance

The participation of Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria was instrumental to the ratings success of El Gran Reto. They served as principal advisors in the conception of the story and the scriptwriting process, trained the principal actors in the basic sequences of the dance, and replaced them as stand-ins for more virtuosic maneuvers. Most importantly they served as the public faces of the series in various cross-promotional strategies, appearing on popular television programs, radio interviews, and newspaper profiles.

Despite their significant role in the production and marketing of El Gran Reto, the

269 dancers received no payment for their efforts (Personal Interview “Ccarccaria”2008,

“Qori Sisicha” 2008). Were the enterprising performers merely the exploited victims of entertainment capitalism as Nuñez Rebaza might suggest? It would be easy to claim that

Frequencia Latina exploited the dancers for their own economic benefit, yet that characterization should not ignore the question of why the performers were willing to be exploited. Ccarccaria told a newspaper interviewer, “We feel vindicated in our own land thanks to this miniseries. Now they treat us like celebrities, they even ask for our autographs on the streets of Lima. Before, that only happened in Europe, Asia, and the

United States where we travelled to perform this millenary dance” (“Ratings” 2008). In his customary self-promotional rhetoric, Ccarccaria portrayed the celebrity worship he receives from audiences as a reaffirmation of a previously forgotten cultural form and ethnic identity. By participating in El Gran Reto, these entrepreneurial performers sought to enhance their own brand identities in Peru, leveraging their cultural capital of their international experience to achieve celebrity status in their own country. Their iconic brands have become performances in themselves, skillfully positioning the dancers as both living embodiments of a “millennial” Andean tradition and cosmopolitan artists in an over-arching narrative of the triumph of the emergent middle class cholo.

Romulo Huamani Janampa, better known as Qori Sisicha, was born in 1961 in the community of San Antonio de Chipao in southern Ayacucho. After his family migrated to Lima when he was only five years old, he learned the dance in the capital by imitating the dancers he saw at fiestas costumbristas and practicing along with audio recordings.

By the late 1970s, he began to perform in highland festivities. At the same time, he

270 performed in the theatrical troupe of Máximo Damián Huamaní in important theatres in

Lima and began to take gymnastics courses in order to invent new acrobatic steps. By using the ethnographic technique of tape-recorded interviews, he learned about the ritual significance of the dance through conversations with older masters. In 1984, Qori

Sisicha became the first president of ADTMP, using his impressive network and publicity skills to lead that organization in a brief golden age, until around 1990 when tensions flared up within the organization forcing him to resign. During the 1990s, he frequently travelled to the highlands with his musicians, Chimango and Llapla, participating in the inauguration of development projects and leading efforts to reconstruct rural festivals in the aftermath of the internal war. Although he retains an ambivalent status within the

Ayacucho scissors dance community, he is clearly the most visible performer from that style within broader public spheres (Personal Interview “Qori Sisicha” 2007).

Damián de la Cruz Ccanto, better known as Ccarccaria, was born in 1970 in a small village just outside of the capital city of Huancavelica. He claims that his family inheritance in the scissors dance goes back at least five generations. At only eight years old, he had to migrate to the city as his father died in a freak accident. He claims that his grandfather had already begun to teach him the dance, but numerous other performers told me that Lucifer formed him as a dancer for the troupe “Corazon del Mercurio”

(Personal Interview “Astro Rey” 2009, “Lasta Para” 2009, “Accarhuaycha” 2009).

During the 1980s, Ccarccaria along with Lucifer authored many of the renovated acrobatic steps now an established part of the scissors dance repertoire of the

Huancavelica style. He expressed pride in his contributions to the modern style of

271 scissors dancing, which he credits with the dance‟s achievement of worldwide recognition. Yet, as he has gotten older he has positioned himself as an authority of traditional knowledge, competent in both the modern style and the more complete traditional repertoires performed by his ancestors. By the late 1990s, Ccarccaria broke away from Lucifer‟s group, forming his own theatrical troupe, “Los Galas de Villallacta,” with his brothers Runa Miko and Maldición. They frequently performed in international festivals in Europe and maintained steady employment in touristic dinner-theatres in

Lima. Ccarccaria claims that he is the only scissors dancer able to make a living exclusively from his art in a clear construction of a middle-class status. By the time

Toledo took office, he had surpassed his mentor Lucifer as the most visible and important scissors dancer from Huancavelica, paving the way for his partnership with Qori Sisicha over the past decade (Personal Interview “Ccarccaria” 2007).

In 2000, the two high-profile dancers collaborated for the first time on a project sponsored by the Instituto Nacional de Cultura to construct a national school of scissors dancing. The director of the INC contacted Qori Sisicha and offered him a space at the

Museo Nacional in the district of San Borja to create the school. Qori Sisicha selected himself, Chimango, and Llapla as the master teachers from Ayacucho, Ccarccaria,

Alejandro Escobar (violin), and Edgar Belito (harp) from Huancavelica, and the young dancer Qesqento as the representative from Apurimac. The course lasted for about half a year, attracting numerous theatre artists, interested youth from the three departments, and the according to Ccarccaria even a German tourist. However, after the INC changed its directorship in October 2000 with the fall of Fujimori, the funding dried up and the

272 project was cancelled. The experience left Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria hungry to build their own institution as a center for the teaching of the dance. They teamed up in order to construct a “Casa de la Danza de las Tijeras,” a project long abandoned by the ADTMP.

Although they still have not achieved this goal, they still dream about and put pressure on the state for assistance in establishing their own locale, a national school, center for investigation, performance space, and housing for performers who reside in the highlands when they travel to Lima (Personal Interview “Qori Sisicha” 2007, “Ccarccaria” 2007,

“Chimango” 2007). Other performers feel frustrated by the broken promises of an always soon to be constructed locale, questioning whether the highly-publicized duo should be the authorities who represent the practice as a whole (Personal Interview “Rey

Chicchi 2007, “Condenado” 2007, “Ccecchele” 2008, “Llapla” 2009).

During the Toledo administration, Ccarccaria and to a lesser extent Qori Sisicha became beneficiaries of a new form of state patronage. Between 2002 and 2006, Los

Galas de Villallacta became featured performers in the promotional advertisements and spectacles of PROMPERU. Ccarccaria told me that Karp exploited him. He accepted to perform in these elaborate spectacles without payment for the sake of publicity and the promise of state officials to provide them with the property for their locale, which never materialized. Nevertheless, he Ccarccaria claims that he holds no bad feelings because these performances showed the world the wonders of his artform, making his ancestors and the apus proud of him (Personal Interview “Ccarccaria” 2007). Through his association with PROMPERU, Ccarccaria has honed his publicity skills, carefully- calibrating idealized notions of Andean spirituality into pithy slogans designed to appeal

273 to Western audiences. In a profile published by PROMPERU, he vigorously rejects the notion that the scissors dancers have a pact with the devil, claiming that instead that they have a pact with nature.1 In the concluding passage of the same article, Ccarccaria describes how he learned to make offerings to the apus and the pachamama from his maternal grandfather, a famous curandero from Huancavelica. He learned how to read coca leaves and perform cleansing rituals, constructing himself in the role of shaman, which he readily performs for attention and monetary compensation from a Western audience at PROMPERU‟s various events (Personal Interview “Javier Maravi” 2008).

While Qori Sisicha travelled with Ccarccaria in 2004 on an international tour to

France sponsored by PROMPERU, he had fewer direct ties to the Toledo government and the state promotion agency. He found a space for promotion amongst the cultural and human rights left that flourished with its successful opposition to the Fujimori regime. Some have argued that with his status as an opposition hero, the Toledo government co-opted the intellectual and cultural left making them complicit in the institution of an aggressive neoliberal multiculturalism and the logic of the promotion of diversity as commodified spectacle (Roncalla 2002, Personal Interview “Javier Maravi”

2008). Carlos Iván Degregori, one of Peru‟s most distinguished anthropologists and a member of the TRC, put the conclusions of the commission into practice by theorizing the notion of a “Diverse-We” not only in specialized anthropological texts but also a

Thematic Encyclopedia of Peruvian Diversity published by El Comercio (Degregori

2000, 2004). The colorful book includes a full-page photospread of the scissors dance, featuring Qori Sisicha in various poses demonstrating the choreographic sequences of the

274 dance (94-95). These well-intentioned cultural productions furthered the promotion of

Qori Sisicha‟s image that connected the scissors dance directly to his persona.

Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria have strategically appropriated ethnographic narratives and the marketing discourses of PROMPERU to acquire cultural capital as cosmopolitan artists within more circumscribed public spheres. In 2001, Qori Sisicha contracted journalist Jesús Raymundo, then a writer for El Peruano, about running the press campaign for the dancer‟s anniversary event. Raymundo, born of migrant parents from Huancavelica, already had some familiarity and interest in the dance. He has partnered with Qori Sisicha and later Ccarccaria to build their brand identities in various niches of the Peruvian communications media. Raymundo claims that this collaboration marks a significant departure from earlier journalistic depictions of the dance, which had focused on the mysticism described by Arguedas, but rarely the individuality of the performers (Personal Interview “Jesús Raymundo” 2008). At first, they sought to just make an impact in different media outlets, constructing appealing personas for newspaper profiles and television appearances. Around the time the INC bestowed the dance with the honor of Cultural Patrimony of the Nation, they shifted the direction of their efforts away from respected newspapers and news programs directed towards national elites and concentrated on the vast consumer public of the conos, as the dancers intensified their insertion into the market of live spectacles (Ibid.).

The elaboration of this new strategy took place at a time when the culture industries catering to Andean migrants had began to shift their emphasis from recorded music to live concerts and spectacles. New technologies had dramatically reduced the

275 cost of production of audiovisual recording. The addition of visual images through the now inexpensive sale of DVDs made the visually-spectacular scissors dance more available and appealing to audiences beyond the regionally-orientated publics of migrants from Ayacucho and Huancavelica. An expanding network of independent video producers filmed and distributed edited versions of rural Andean festivities. At the same time, Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria initiated the trend of creating packaged video products dedicated to the triumphs of an individual performer. Moreover, rampant piracy began to re-orient the marketplace. Audiovisual recordings no longer turned a profit, but rather enhanced the image of the artist in a dynamic network of live spectacles and entertainments (Alfaro 2005). This shift empowered star performers, such as Dina

Paucar and Sonia Morales, who became brands whose business ventures spilled over into the creation of theme-restaurants and film and television production. More than ever before, “musical styles of one locality within the Andes have come to stand for a more generalized ethnic and class positionality, first within Lima, then returning to the highlands” (Tucker 2006: 57). With the aid of Raymundo, Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria sought to construct their own “brands” as iconic performers who embodied the scissors dance as a whole as it increasingly became an emblem for broader Andean indigenous and provincial identities. They constructed publicity narratives that linked the personal triumph of the artists to cultural reaffirmation and the reconquest of national space

(Alfaro 2005: 11). While the publicity of both dancers repetitively invoked the themes of triumph and legitimate authority, their personas are quite distinct, yet complementary.

These marketing discourses depict both dancers as the legitimate heirs to a

276

“magical” and “millennial” tradition. Raymundo‟s first profile of Qori Sisicha opens with the statement, “His acrobatic steps are guided by the telluric force of the Andes.

They are inspired by a profound respect for nature and a persistent defense of origins [. .

.] In each presentation, the danzaq from Ayacucho Romulo Huamani also remembers the masters of his native land of Lucanas” (Raymundo 2002). In a later piece, Raymundo elaborates on the same theme, “With his steps inspired by the footprints of his masters and the force of the mountains, Qori Sisicha will continue to lead the cultural resistance of a dance that symbolizes the liberty and faith of the Andean people” (Raymundo 2008).

Both statements repeat the refrain of the dancer‟s profound connection to the natural landscape and his inheritance of a “millennial” tradition from ancient masters, drawing directly from the tropes of globalized discourses of idealized indigeneity. In newspaper interviews, television spots, and even my own interviews, the manner in which the dancers repeatedly tell the same stories and anecdotes varies only slightly, constructing publicity slogans out of narratives of cultural resistance.

Among the most effective of these slogans creates a scenario of past victimization by the colonizers and reclaims an originary identity in the present. In one profile,

Ccarccaria exclaims, “They say we have a pact with the devil, but that is not true. What we do is connect to the pachamama (earth), and with our ancient Gods. We danzaq are like priests or shaman” (qtd. in Torres V. 2006). Ccarccaria still carries his diabolic pseudonym. Prepared to explain this discrepancy, he often tells an anecdote about his two cousins who married each other. The community in which they lived began to call the young couple Jarjacha or Ccarccaria, which refers to a demon resulting from the act

277 of incest. As a child, Damian de la Cruz Ccanto took this insulting name as his pseudonym, vowing to vindicate his cousins by becoming world famous (Torres V. 2006,

Personal Interview “Ccarccaria” 2007). This anecdote not only distances the dancer from his pseudonym‟s diabolic connotations, but it links his individual triumph to the collective reaffirmation of his family as well as culture and ethnicity. Ccarccaria has a particular talent for weaving such tales. He claims that he was born for the scissors dance, pointing to the suggestiveness of the three parts of his given name. Damian alludes to the devil, de la Cruz to the Catholic cross, and Ccanto to a sacred Andean flower, making him the quintessential embodiment of a cultural form that emerged through conflicted encounters between distinct sacred landscapes and imaginaries

(Personal Interview “Ccarccaria‟ 2007).

The parallel trajectory of personal triumph and collective reaffirmation within

Ccarccaria‟s persona enables him to seamlessly connect what might be considered contradictory themes such as millennial authenticity and cosmopolitan social mobility. In an allusion to his transcendent artistry, one article compares him to an “Andean Mikhail

Baryshnikov,” who uses his considerable physical skills to impress world leaders (Torres

V. 2006). Ccarccaria declares, “I have danced for President Clinton in Presidential

Summits, as well as at cultural fairs. When you dance at the tips of your feet or jump from your backside the gringos get excited and scream” (qtd. in Torres V. 2006). In a more conventional image of social mobility, the author of the same piece claims that the dancer‟s home distinguishes itself from those of his neighbors, with three completed floors made out of noble materials. The article describes the many photos of Ccarccaria

278 in full scissors dance costume, posing besides the Eifel Tower, the Great Wall of China, the Red Square of Moscow and other iconic world destinations, on display in his living room (Ibid.). These images explicitly connect to a broader promotional strategy used by both dancers, often imitated by other performers. They adorn their DVDs, and websites with similar images, visually claiming their conquest of the world stage. The author further suggests that Ccarccaria has not forgotten his humble roots, like any good cholo or provinciano “who triumphs in life” (Ibid.). However, it is also clear that his social mobility depends on catching the attention of the first-world gaze. In a literalization of the figure of the brichero, this and other sources claim that the dancer is engaged to a

French anthropologist and even has a green-eyed son who practices the dance in France.

Regardless of the truth-value of these publicity narratives, this more suspect claim illustrates the degree to which the triumph of Ccarccaria‟s persona is dependent on the attracting the desire for the other projected by a first-world audience.2

Qori Sisicha‟s persona is much less flamboyant in its construction of social mobility and a luxurious lifestyle. While his publicity rarely makes boastful claims about personal wealth, they certainly position the dancer as a world-renowned artist comfortable in a cosmopolitan environment. Referring to performances in international festivals, Qori Sisicha explains, “The goal of these activities is to gain recognition for

Peruvian culture. Our presence in other festivals has enabled the scissors dance to be today recognized as one of the most beautiful dances on the international stage” (Vadillo

Villa 2007). The dancer directly links his own individual persona to the positive qualities of the dance. He depicts himself as a thoughtful leader, disseminating the dance to new

279 publics with artistry and restraint. He claims, “It is a new experience for us to get to know other cultures and new lifestyles. We have committed ourselves to the scissors dance and Andean culture. Therefore we dedicate ourselves to representing it with responsibility” (Raymundo 2002). Although muted in comparison to Ccarccaria, these discourses of artistry with responsibility are also a narrative of social mobility and construct a modern identity for the dancer. Furthermore, the ultimate objective behind these various newspaper profiles is most often to promote an event staged by the dancers, revealing more commercial aims behind Qori Sisicha‟s mask of genuine artistry.

Qori Sisicha has staged commercial spectacles since the 1980s, most often in

April to celebrate his artistic anniversary. Many performers stage such events once a year in a bricolage that combines commercial motivations with Andean notions of reciprocity, as well as a community gathering for migrants. The events Qori Sisicha and

Ccarccaria have produced over the past decade are much more frequent than once per year, and are much larger commercial spectacles that seek to attract a more general migrant audience beyond specific regional-identified communities, as well as a few tourists and anthropologists. In April 2008, I served as Qori Sisicha‟s padrino, a monetary sponsor and honored guest, for his thirty-fifth anniversary as a scissors dance artist. The event follows a similar structure as the fiestas costumbristas. In the afternoon there was a three to four hour scissors dance competition, followed by a musical concert featuring folkloric singers. I attended the preparations for the event in the morning, including the filming of a thirty-second television commercial that featured a choreographed sequence of several young dancers rapidly performing different pruebas

280 de valor in succession. Unlike theatrical performances on the international stage, the grotesque appears to be the most appealing aspect of the scissors dance for a popular

Peruvian public. While the scissors dance competition was well-attended by a few thousand spectators, it was also clear that despite the identity of its the producers, the major draw was not the scissors dance but rather the folkloric concert at night, featuring

Dina Paucar. More than 5,000 spectators were in attendance for this part of the event.

The challenge for Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria over the past decade has been to find the right balance between catering to the audience‟s desires for the folkloric singers and promoting the scissors dance as an appealing spectacle in itself. They rely mostly on the physicality of young scissors dance performers, who constantly invent new acrobatic choreographies and grotesque pruebas de valor. At these events, the role of Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria is largely as producers, taking care of all the arrangements and making frequent appearances in front of the audience. Between the larger competition between the younger performers and the folkloric concert, the duo typically make an appearance in their costumes, staging a mock competition for ten to fifteen minutes, which illustrates their public relationship as an oscillation between close friendship and intense rivalry.

In a third narrative strand that combines traditional knowledge and social mobility, they portray themselves as the legitimate authorities for the transmission of the dance to the next generation of performers. Their publicity locates this authority in ritual knowledge, the mastery of “complete” choreographic repertoires, as well as their cosmopolitan knowledge that connects them to various circuits of multicultural recognition. Although their own stories of how they learned the dance are significantly

281 more complicated and improvised, they perform the role of the idealized master with a close relationship with his pupils. This positionality authorizes them to make claims that young dancers have lost certain elements of the ritual significance of the dance, even though their elders made similar complaints against them when they were younger. In one article, Qori Sisicha exclaims, “scissors dancers are not complete masters unless they know how to work with metal, how to construct their costumes, and how to play the scissors within the rhythm of the harp and violin” (Raymundo 2002). Through this narrative strand, they continue to campaign for state support to construct the “Casa de la

Danza de las Tijeras.” It appeared as if the Toledo administration would fulfill its promise to provide them with some land after the recognition of the dance as Cultural

Patrimony of the Nation. However, the project got held up by complaints by a rival group and with the change of government in 2006, conditions became less favorable.

They realized in order to legitimate their claims to authority they needed to form their own association having the appearance of being representative of the scissors dance community as a whole (Personal Interview “Ccarccaria” 2007, “Qori Sisicha” 2007).

In 2006, the two dancers jointly founded La Asociacion Tradición Andina

“Wamani” with support from the NGO Achachi, directed by a French woman married to a Peruvian from Huancayo who was an aficionado of the scissors dance. The organization had two fundamental objectives. First, they seek to aid the NGO in the distribution of clothes and other forms of tangible aid to impoverished children in

Huancavelica. Second, they advocate and raise funds for the construction of the “Casa de la Danza de las Tijeras.” In June 2007, the association led a delegation of scissors

282 dancers to perform at the Palacio del Gobierno for President Alan García and distinguished guests. Qori Sisicha took the opportunity to request that the government grant the practice considered to be Cultural Patrimony of the Nation a small piece of land in order to develop their national school and train the next generation of performers in the proper manner. The President publicly agreed to the request and for a time it appeared as if the project was moving forward (Personal Interview “Qori Sisicha” 2007, 2008).

However, for various reasons it has stalled and now seems unlikely considering President

García only has a few months left in office. These frequent moments of hope followed by setbacks have eroded what little confidence many performers outside of their tight- knit circle have in their more famous counterparts‟ ability to lead a properly-run institution (Personal Interview “Rey Chicchi” 2007, “Condenado” 2007, “Llapla” 2008,

“Victor Chavez” 2009). While the association receives collaborations from a wide range of artists for its activities, only a small clientelistic network of their close associates identify as core members.

Partly to raise awareness for the plight of their fledgling institution, sometimes

Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria have staged events catering for a higher-class public within

Peru. On November 4, 2007 they held the exhibition El Gran Desafío de la Danza de las

Tijeras (The Great Scissors Dance Challenge) at the Parque de la Exposición in downtown Lima. This performance space is significantly more “respectable” for a cultured public than the scattered locales of the conos. The different target audience allowed them to experiment with more directly featuring the scissors dance in both portions of the program. Like many of their other events, El Gran Desafío began with a

283 competition between younger scissors dancers. They significantly toned down the more grotesque pruebas de valor and focused on the exhibition of elaborate acrobatic choreographies. Ccarccaria also presented a ballet of child scissors dancers performing in unison appropriate for this more tasteful event. The evening concert featured a series of fusion rock bands, headlined by La Sarita. This group combines punk rock, chicha, and Andean folkloric music and have for several years incorporated scissors dancers into their live concerts. The highlight of the show was Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria leading more than twenty scissors dancers in a special presentation accompanied by La Sarita.

They later admitted to me that El Gran Desafío was an artistic rather than commercial success. However, the event did lead directly to their participation in El Gran Reto, as the successful television producer of telenovelas Susana Bamonde was in attendance

(Personal Interview “Qori Sisicha” 2007, “Ccarccaria” 2007).

The constant presence of Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria in cross-promotions undeniably contributed to the unexpected ratings success of El Gran Reto. The participation of the real-life scissors dancers gave the show an air of authenticity and legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Although they received no monetary compensation, the dancers‟ brands were suddenly ubiquitous. After it was clear that the program had resonated with an audience, the now celebrity scissors dancers organized a series of entertainment spectacles that promised El Gran Reto: En Vivo (Live). Nearly every weekend during the six-week run of the show, these events occurred in various sites throughout the conos of Lima. The structure of these spectacles evolved considerably over time. The first event I attended on July 20, 2008 to celebrate the debut of the series

284 took place in Club de Tiros, a huge locale in the district of Rimac. Though much larger, the structure of the event was nearly the same as the dancers‟ annual anniversary celebrations and the other events they staged several times a year. The scissors dance competition lasted three to four hours in the afternoon, with young performers displaying acrobatics and eye-catching pruebas de valor. Like earlier events, the major draw was still the high-profile folkloric singers contracted for an evening concert. As the run of the program continued, however, they began to realize that they no longer needed to spend so much money on expensive big-name singers. The scissors dance itself and the actors of the miniseries, who signed autographs and took photographs with adoring fans, became the main draw. Moreover, they realized that their most enthusiastic audiences were now very small to pre-teen aged children. They limited the sale of beer, shifting concessions towards candy, popcorn, and soda and made several other accommodations to make the events more family-friendly.

These transformations became even more apparent after the run of the program, when they embarked on a nation-wide tour to large provincial cities in September,

October, and November. They eliminated the folkloric singers altogether and staged much shorter events that focused on the scissors dance competition and autograph sessions with the actors. I attended the events in two cities that attained contrasting levels of success. In Ccarccaria‟s hometown of Huancavelica the event failed to garner an audience of over 1,000 despite the reduced admission prices for the impoverished city.

The dancer complained that his “pueblo” did not love him and justified the poor attendance by claiming that most residents did not own a television set and reception was

285 spotty for those who did. I would suggest that beyond poverty and the small-size of the city, these events held little appeal in a region where scissors dance festivities were routine. However, in Cuzco they were clearly a novelty. Over 8,000 spectators attended the event in the former Inca capital. The producers charged three times the admission price as in Huancavelica. Kishkamico won the competition, a dancer known for his large-size, making his acrobatic abilities and grotesque pruebas quite amazing. As novelty acts, these performances had little to do with the display of more subtle dancing skills. Nevertheless, the children at the event idolized the dancers as heroes. They requested autographs and photographs from the scissors dancers as well as the actors. I also observed numerous children attempting to imitate their movements. A common refrain in my interviews was that performers most often began their vocation as dancers or musicians by imitating the performers who they had seen at local festivities on school playgrounds and agricultural fields as if they were their superheroes. In this respect, the phenomenon of El Gran Reto achieved the objective of Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria to transform the dance from a regional to national cultural form. It remains to be seen whether this phenomenon is entirely ephemeral or if it will produce a new generation of performers, some of whom with little to Ayacucho or Huancavelica.

Their success in achieving an emblematic status for the scissors dance in an emerging national popular culture is not outside of the strategies of bricherismo, which

Qori Sisicha and especially Ccarccaria engage in to attract foreign audiences. At the spectacle in Huancavelica, Ccarccaria asked me to speak in front of the audience in order to praise him and pledge assistance in his project providing clothing for poor children.

286

That was the first moment I became explicitly aware that I had a secondary role to play in these dancers‟ public performances of self-legitimation. I remembered that not only Qori

Sisicha and Ccarccaria but also other performers had insisted that I participate in their pruebas de valor, standing on their chests as they lied on broken glass. This imperative to perform a secondary role not only had to do with my large size in comparison to most

Peruvians, but the cultural capital of my ethnicity, nationality, and profession. One dancer who had invited me to his home village for a rural festival, addressed all those present in the festival by announcing that I was the first tourist to arrive in Huachocolpa and in the future more may follow. I had become a surrogate performer who stood in for the regime of neoliberal multiculturalism, the usually unmarked (but in these cases quite marked) subject who conferred recognition and value upon Andean culture.

For this reason, something intimately familiar flashed before my eyes when in

November 2008 I read the headline “Ccarccaria: El Rey del APEC (King of APEC)” in a popular urban tabloid. During the APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) Summit in Lima, the scissors dancer performed to enthusiastic applause in front of an audience of global political and economic leaders. The author of the article cited Ccarccaria, who claimed, “It was a beautiful ceremony of Peruvian music and dances. The heads of state applauded the scissors dance with great force. I saw President García explaining the significance of the dance to the President of the United States, George Bush” and later emphasized “foreigners value our Andean dances” (“Ccarccaria Será” 2008). When the wives of the leaders toured the ruins of Pachacamac, Ccarccaria returned in the role of

Andean shaman, asking the apus for positive results for this important international

287 meeting. He exclaimed, “The Asian first ladies were surprised by my spiritual work and

I blessed them with cleansing and flowering rituals. The world has gotten to know this

Andean ritual up close, bequeathed to me by my grandfather, Valerio, who was a famous shaman and dansaq from Huancavelica” (Ibid.). The reference to the “Asian first ladies” was rather telling, for President García was at the same moment in the process of wooing the President of China and Chinese business leaders, negotiating the final details for a proposed Free Trade Agreement with that country.

In a final anecdote, Ccarccaria involved me more directly in his strategies of brichero performance in order to enhance his public image within Peru. During my final weeks of fieldwork, he was preparing for his annual artistic anniversary in May 2009, an important event to keep him in the public eye almost a year after El Gran Reto. He requested that I present him with a trophy of recognition as a great artist who embodied a sacred ritual tradition. He took care of the trophy himself. All that mattered was my performance as a designated representative of first-world and academic cultural capital that I conferred upon this provincial Andean artist in front of a mostly provincial Andean audience. With some reservation, I agreed to his request out of a feeling of obligation to a performer who helped me a great deal during the course of my investigation and out of a curiosity for an act that had potentially fascinating implications for my own research. It also made me reflect on the sophistication of this dancer‟s tactics in order to use the positionalities I represented as a marketing strategy. Unlike most other performers I interacted with, Ccarccaria never asked me for a single monetary contribution for the staging of a particular event or a project of cultural restoration, and he always invited me

288 to enter his events without paying the admission fee. He was more interested in taking advantage of my inescapable performance of difference as a white male US academic amongst a provincial Peruvian public

7.3. Los Hermanos Chavez

Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria are still the dominant figures of the scissors dance in the national public sphere and to a lesser extent on the international stage. However, they are far from the only models of the intertwined relationship between the dance and globalization. One group, Los Hermanos Chavez, has achieved near equivalency with their more famous rivals in one area of contemporary scissors dance performance by focusing their efforts on the staging of appealing presentations for the international and tourist stages. The group, founded and directed by four brothers from Huancavelica, spends much of their time each year performing at folkloric festivals, diplomatic events, and artistic conferences in North America, Europe, and Asia. The roots of their success lie in the group‟s development of a form of theatrical scissors dance show based on the conventions of international folk ballets, placing eight to twelve dancers on the stage in uniform costumes and moving to highly-synchronized unison choreography.

Furthermore, they have constructed a well-developed institution and school and the most visually pleasing website of all current scissors dance groups. Surprisingly, they position their elaboration of quite tame but appealing visual spectacles and mastery of cosmopolitan media as a critical response to globalization. On their website, the group proclaims, “we have a different proposal of doing national art and culture because we believe that any act of the negation of a culture is a form of domination and any act of

289 reaffirmation is a form of liberation” (Los Hermanos Chavez website). This seeming contradiction resolves itself in a quite consistent discourse and set of performance practices that model themselves on notions of artistic excellence, collectivity, the clear articulation of a cultural philosophy, and disciplined self-education as antidotes to the habits of over-consumption, and alienated individualism imposed by the dominant market forces. While these discourses and practices may appear counter-hegemonic, they also reproduce conventional hierarchies based on education and a concealed classism enacting a mode of distinction seeking to legitimate the authority of Los Hermanos Chavez over the ignorance of their fellow performers.

The brothers, Gabriel, Victor, Fredy, and Arturo Chavez, founded Los Hermanos

Chavez as a cultural institution before embarking on their first international stage tour at the Festival of Confolens in France. They came from a relatively wealthy peasant family from the provincial capital of Pampas, Tayacaja in the department of Huancavelica.

Their father was a municipal authority, marking a class distinction between them and the majority of scissors dance performers from the start. According to Victor Chavez, the brothers do not come from a family inheritance of artists, but they loved the dance since they were children. The Chavez brothers pretended to be famous scissors dances on the schoolyard, and on certain occasions even performed a rudimentary version of the dance in school talent shows. When they each arrived in Lima at different times between 1980 and 1985 to begin their secondary education, they encountered the nascent community of scissors dance performance from Huancavelica. Derrepente encouraged them to take artistic pseudonyms and helped them integrate themselves into the evolving network of

290 urban scissors dance performance. Nevertheless, they were more dedicated to education than many young performers. Education was the only way for them to defend themselves from the explicit racism in the capital city (Personal Interview “Victor Chavez” 2009).

Tensions emerged when a group of scissors dancers with a family inheritance, but lacking their educational level, reached a certain age and attempted to marginalize the brothers from the growing community of Huancavelica scissors dance performance.

They defended themselves and Lucifer and Derrepente left them their job dancing at the

Hotel Crillón for a few months in 1989, when the more established group travelled to perform in the United States. This act of generosity was probably due to the feeling that these inexperienced adolescents were no threat to the veteran group. Nonetheless, they discovered an aptitude for theatrical folklore performance and clearly still look up to

Lucifer and Derrepente as models, even as they have developed a heated rivalry with

Ccarccaria (Personal Interview “Victor Chavez” 2009, “Fredy Chavez” 2009). In 1993,

Los Hermanos Chavez travelled to France to perform in the Festival of Confolens where they met and began a close relationship with CIOFF founder Henry Corbaget. At the same festival, they saw a Russian folk ballet performing a series of highly synchronized acrobatics in unison choreographies. Highly impressed, the three younger brothers discussed the idea of trying to adapt the idea to the scissors dance. Gabriel, the eldest brother and director of the troupe, disagreed and defended the authenticity of a faithful theatrical imitation of one-on-one competitions. However, the majority overruled him.

Gabriel stood up for his principles and retired from the theatrical troupe, although he remained the designated teacher who prepared the group‟s new members (Personal

291

Interview “Victor Chavez” 2009). Since 1994, Los Hermanos Chavez has become a mainstay on the international folklore stage with their highly synchronized fifteen minute choreography, which they call “El Ballet de la Danza de las Tijeras.” Eight to twelve dancers begin and conclude the presentation with several minutes of unison choreography. In the middle, each dancer takes one to two solo turns, demonstrating their individual acrobatic virtuosity as the other dancers back them up by playing the scissors and performing a few minimal movements in unison. Turn taking is extremely regulated. This style of balletic choreography has become the most attractive variety of scissors dance performance on the international stage and has opened up new spaces of exhibition for the scissors dance in Lima (Ibid.).

In addition to international performance, in the late 1990s the group became ubiquitous in dinner-theatre shows staged for tourists, bringing the scissors dance to the

Sheraton Hotel and especially Brisas de Titicaca. Brisas stages the largest and most distinguished folklore show in Lima and unlike other venues they exhibit the scissors dance every night of the week. The group has travelled several times with the renowned in-house performance company of Brisas. Furthermore, they frequently perform with the larger company at important civic events, including the multicultural exhibition “Retablo de los Sueños” every year since 2003 on July 28, Peru‟s Independence Day. This presentation, sponsored by the municipal government of Lima, takes place in the central

Plaza of the capital city and broadcast on national television. Troupes of specific regional folkloric dances from all over Peru display themselves in costume, like figurines on a gigantic multi-level retablo. The troupes each perform ten minute presentations on

292 the bottom floor of the retablo, which opens onto a larger proscenium stage. The presentation visibly performs the exhibition value of the nation‟s multicultural diversity, and the incorporation of visually-appealing cultural difference into a single unified frame, making it an emblematic articulation of the new Peru from a hegemonic perspective.

The collective balletic choreography and organized institutional structure of Los

Hermanos Chavez embody a set of values upon which the group attempts to distinguish itself based on education, discipline, artistic excellence, and intellectual leadership.

While highly critical of Ccarccaria, Victor Chavez looks up to the celebrity dancer‟s mentor, Lucifer. He claims that while Lucifer always took care of his image, other scissors dance performers often showed up late to their appointments, without proper hygiene, and improvised poorly practiced choreographies. Furthermore, he critiqued the lack of care with which younger dancers often treat their costumes, musical instruments, and scissors. Victor admits that for a long period of time Ccarccaria was the most talented and best scissors dancer from Huancavelica who the entered the stage or plaza with a forceful presence. However, he suggests that after Ccarccaria left Lucifer‟s group, who apparently kept him disciplined, he began to improvise in any way he could in order to garner attention (Personal Interview “Victor Chavez” 2009). Los Hermanos Chavez model their institution on these values of discipline, punctuality, and care for the integrity of their artistic product, previously practiced by Lucifer and Derrepente.

The value the group places on notions of artistic excellence manifests itself in the use of ballet not only as a framework for synchronized choreography but also the adaptation of the classical positions as a training technique. Moreover, Fredy Chavez

293 took over the role of Director and Choreography from his elder brother, Gabriel, in 2000.

He studied theatrical direction and choreography at a university in Argentina. Now he no longer dances, and takes the role of the outside eye who directs the performers toward greater levels of synchronized perfection. Fredy told me that he attempts to develop the group‟s presentations based on the universal tendencies of dance and theatrical technique, drawing not only on ballet but also the writings of Eugenio Barba (Personal Interview

“Fredy Chavez” 2009). Los Hermanos Chavez addresses their work to a more cultivated audience, although they claim that all their performers are equally proficient in performing in rural and urban fiestas. Victor positions himself as the most “complete” dancer, becoming the only close rival to Ccarccaria in the late 1990s in rural festival performances. However, the group as a whole directs their work towards a cultured audience and first-world public in order to show the world that Andeans can produce a sophisticated and quality artistic product (Personal Interview “Victor Chavez” 2009).

The emphasis Los Hermanos Chavez places on the values of discipline, decency, and respectability shapes their views on the ritual significance of the scissors dance.

According to Victor, his brother Gabriel was one of the first Huancavelica performers to reject the notion of the pact with the devil. He attributes this to the fact that his brother had achieved a higher level of education. Gabriel began to investigate the origins of the dance, reading the work of and interacting with anthropologists. He found no evidence of the existence of the devil, but rather theorized that the figure of the scissors dancer has a pact with nature (Personal Interview “Victor Chavez” 2009). The group positions its work as an anthropological revival of tradition, and their philosophy develops out of a

294 kind of ethnographic realism. According to Fredy, nobody can prove the existence of the devil or God, but it would be impossible to deny not only the existence but also the power of Tayta Inti (the sun), water, or the mountains (Personal Interview “Fredy Chavez”

2009). According to this perspective, animism is significantly more logical than the abstractions required by Christian belief. This philosophy has contributed to the broader shift where the figure of the scissors dancer has transformed from a theatrical representation of an infernal Other within Andean communities to the very embodiment of a core essential self within cosmopolitan articulations of Andean identity. It also points to the importance of Andeanist ethnography and globalized discourses of indigeneity as models for this emerging Andean subjectivity. Victor Chavez offered one of the clearest articulations of the double-agency of the scissors dancer, distinguishing between the human dancer and the mythical figure he portrays. This mythical figure becomes a core element of the dancer‟s sense of self through repeated enactment and embodiment, acting as both a model for identification and a guide for conduct for the dancer and to a lesser extent his audience. According to Victor, the dancer feels like himself the most when he is on-stage or in the plaza performing his role. He also claimed that the recognition and appreciation performed by the audience significantly heightened this effect (Personal Interview “Victor Chavez” 2009). Thus, he offered me a lay theorization of the paradox of the actor.

The intellectual philosophy of Los Hermanos Chavez underrides their artistic rivalry with Ccarccaria. In the 1990s, the group initiated a heated debate with Lucifer and Ccarccaria over the notion of the pact with the devil. The latter dancers defended the

295 diabolic pact because it was more commercial and it represented their legitimate family inheritance. When the political situation changed with the government of Toledo,

Ccarccaria adopted the discourse of Los Hermanos Chavez, taking on the role of an

Andean shaman with a pact with nature, because this role offered new commercial potential in a now global marketplace (Personal Interview “Victor Chavez” 2009).

Although they admire Ccarccaria‟s genuine dancing talent, skill, and dedication to his craft, Fredy and Victor portray him as a crafty opportunist who will do or say anything for the sake of publicity. However, Lucifer has always defended the devil and maintains his diabolic persona to this day. Although they disagree with his interpretation, the

Chavez brothers respect his unwavering maintenance of a set of principles even though they may now be unpopular (Ibid.).

The tensions between the group and Ccarccaria are most apparent in the theme of the transmission of the dance to the next generation of performers. Los Hermanos

Chavez has developed an institutionalized school that trains youth from Huancavelica in the practice of the dance in order to ascend to the regular folkloric troupe. The group claims that they have a structured pedagogical technique that seeks to transmit not only embodied practices but also a spiritual and intellectual philosophy centered on the cultural significance of the scissors dance and the development of a disciplined staged presence. Their objectives are to create an association without jealousy and to form

“complete” dancers who live and work according to principles instead of the continual improvised search for popularity. They describe this utopian ideal as a spiritual brotherhood and portray their development of balletic choreographies as an embodiment

296 of this idealized synchronization of the collectivity (Personal Interview “Victor Chavez”

2009, “Fredy Chavez” 2009). However, they claim they have not yet achieved these ideals. Their students often attain a certain level of skill in the dance and leave the group in order to work with Ccarccaria in search commercial opportunities and media popularity. Ccarccaria himself accused the Chavez brothers of exploiting these young students, not paying them sufficiently for their labor in the folkloric show. He claims Los

Hermanos Chavez often initiates projects with fusion musicians or municipalities who later cut ties with the group when they realize they can pay other dancers less money

(Personal Interview “Ccarccaria” 2009). The group claims that the high prices they charge for their services reflect the high quality of the artistic product and their unwillingness to be exploited, unlike most contemporary scissors dancer performers

(Personal Interview “Fredy Chavez” 2009). Many performers within the Huancavelica community take Ccarccaria‟s side in the conflict, claiming that Los Hermanos Chavez only know how to dance for the stage and not for the heightened competition of rural festivals. To many performers, their emphasis on theatrical performance and lack of family inheritance makes Los Hermanos Chavez merely aficionados and not “real” scissors dancers, without the qualifications to truly rival Ccarccaria. Ccarccaria himself suggests that the group speaks beautifully about the ritual significance of the dance, but they do not know how to actually perform the rituals (Personal Interview “Ccarccaria”

2007). Clearly, both positionalities construct notions of authenticity in different ways in order to distinguish themselves from the other.

Los Hermanos Chavez has continued its success on the international and touristic

297 stages, which they attribute to their superior institution. Recently, the group has travelled to the United States to perform at the National Museum of the American Indian, and to

China as part of a cultural delegation to celebrate the finalization of the Free Trade

Agreement between that country and Peru. Moreover, Fredy has recently served as the

President of the Peruvian Chapter of CIOFF. Every year he organizes the Festival of

Lima, a demonstration of staged folklore groups from throughout the world. Most of these groups are from Latin America, but at least one or two special guests from Europe or Asia appear each year (Personal Interview “Fredy Chavez” 2009). They shared the honor with the ADTMP to represent the scissors dance as part of the Peruvian delegation to the UNESCO meeting in Kenya in November 201, as the organization declared the scissors dance Intangible Cultural Patrimony of Humanity. Conspicuously absent from the ceremony were Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria. I suspect that the less commercial positioning of these two institutions appealed to the mission of UNESCO, giving Los

Hermanos Chavez an avenue for distinction over their more famous competitors.

7.4 La Nueva Generación

Qori Sisicha and Ccarccaria as well as Los Hemanos Chavez place great emphasis on the transmission of a moral content to the next generation of scissors dance performers. The public leadership still belongs to the particular generation who learned the dance just prior to the outbreak of political violence in the 1980s. Although the cultural practice had long been undergoing a series of modern transformations due to migration and the changing relationship between rural and urban space within Peru, this group perceives the internal war as a total rupture that justifies their moral leadership.

298

The effects of the violence have sped up time in both rural communities and their urban colonies. Qori Sisicha told me that today‟s youth lost their soul in the midst of the internal chaos of violence and forced exile in the capital. Under the suffocating conditions of urban poverty, they have no space to express themselves and most of them, including his own son, do not speak Quechua. Those who practice the dance do so because they feel attracted to their family inheritance, the spectacle of the acrobatics and the costume, or the opportunities it provides to perform in respectable theatres, travel the world, and to make money. But they are hardly aware of what it truly means to be a scissors dancer, founded in the ritual content of a priesthood and guardian of the customs and memory of a people (Personal Interview “Qori Sisicha” 2007). Chimango complained that his generation struggled to make a better life for their children, and the new generation does not use the resources at its disposal for anything constructive.

Instead, they spend all their time playing video games and wasting their parents‟ hard- earned money (Personal Interview “Chimango” 2007).

However, it would be a mistake to repeat earlier ethnographers‟ uncritical acceptance of this generational nostalgia. A still older generation of performers ushered very similar complaints towards these practitioners when they were younger. I have found that the self-positioning of today‟s young scissors dance performers is significantly more varied, complex, and interesting than these nostalgic sentiments of a lost youth would suggest. I found it both surprising and compelling that when I asked young performers to respond to the critiques of the older generation that they knew hardly anything about what it means to be a scissors dancer, in most cases the younger

299 performers agreed. However, they tended to turn the tables on the older generations, placing the blame on them for not adequately sharing their knowledge. They suggest that the masters maintain their jealousy and secrets and only express generosity towards the young when commercial opportunities make it convenient (Personal Interview “Encanto”

2009, “Killihuara” 2009, “Pachak Chaki” 2009). They turn to a stunning variety of models to construct their identities, from comic book and sports heroes to anthropological texts and globalized discourses of indigeneity (Turino 1993: 143).

Yet, the very structures of the complex circuits of contemporary scissors dance performance favor the reinvention of rather than discarding local and ethnic identities.

As the generation of performers who formed themselves immediately prior to the violence still maintains its near-exclusive control over global and national stages, the primary spaces for young performers to construct their own public personas are rural and urban festivities. Dancers born in Lima still carry the name of their parent‟s village as part of their artistic pseudonym. Although they no longer have to travel days on foot from village to village to complete their cycle of contracts in rural fiestas, the very exigencies of the length and competitive intensity that such rural festivities place on the body invite them to learn previously ignored ritual practices, asking for the protection of the apu-wamanis. I heard several stories from young performers about their first plaza

(rural competition), in which they did not perform the requisite rituals and found themselves suffering from a wide variety of bodily calamities that weakened their performance (Personal Interview “Killihuara” 2009, “Qoronta” 2008, “Cristal” 2009).

Moreover, the very cultural capital the dance has acquired as spectacle in

300 cosmopolitan spaces sometimes strengthens the performers‟ ties to their place of origins and ethnic identity. Cristal, a young dancer from Huancavelica arrived in Lima at the age of only four months old. He comes from a family of musicians and his older brother is

Ccarccaria‟s long-time harpist. Yet, as a child he had no interest in the scissors dance, finding himself more attracted to break dancing. He told me that he became interested in the scissors dance after he saw a group of scissors dancers performing acrobatics on the streets, similar to break dancers, and a group of onlookers threw money at them. He made his own costume and practiced mainly the acrobatics. His brother later instructed him that he needed to learn to play the scissors properly and taught him the various tonadas. He did not learn Quechua until he began to earn contracts for rural and urban festivals. Today, he proudly dominates the language almost like a native speaker and claims he is a “complete” dancer after finishing several annual cycles on the rural festival circuit in Huancavelica. He first learned to perform the pagapa (payment to the apu) with Ccarccaria and his brothers, a major point of distinction for the young dancer as he claims they rarely allow young performers to participate in these ceremonies. Yet, none of the above cancels the production of a very identity. Cristal models himself on

Ccarccaria, envisioning himself as a cultural entrepreneur in the manner of his mentor.

He has inherited Ccarccaria‟s theatrical troupe and position within the tourist dinner- theatre circuit, after the celebrity dancer left it behind to concentrate on producing events.

Cristal has organized several of smaller-scale events of his own, which have turned a small profit. He and his brothers also perform with fusion pop star Damaris during her frequent concerts in Lima. His ultimate goal, he claims, is to make a name for himself,

301 his dance, and his village in the wider world, a common refrain amongst the dancers and exemplifying the interaction between local and cosmopolitan identities and objectives, which constitute his generation of performers (Personal Interview “Cristal” 2009).

The rupture produced by the years of violence as well as dramatic improvements in transportation communications infrastructure has brought urban and rural space much closer together. Many of the most accomplished young dancers, such as Killihuara, have significant experience living in both Lima and the rural highlands. Although born in

Lima in 1989, Killihuara‟s family returned to his hometown of Andamarca in 1996 during the post-conflict repatriation efforts of the state. He learned the dance in

Andamarca, mostly on his own through imitation, but with some help from his father. At age fifteen, when he had formed himself enough as a dancer to compete, he moved back to Lima on his own. From the capital, it was easier to secure contracts and make a name for himself. During the festival season from June to October, he travels constantly by bus from Lima to different villages in the highlands. Killihuara clearly distinguishes himself from urbanized dancers who have only performed in theatres or urban contests. Yet, he is not a traditionalist who rejects the validity of theatrical performances or commercial activities outright. In fact, he aspires to acquire the level of Qori Sisicha or even higher as a cultural entrepreneur. Rather, the intensity of competition and the knowledge of a more “complete” performance repertoire required to triumph in rural festivities distinguish him from the more urbanized performers based on specific skills rather than an absolute essentialist position. As a novice he presented himself before the paccha

(mountain cave with a waterfall) to enter a pact with an apu-wamani like the generations

302 of rural performers who preceded him. Yet, he also shares with many urban performers the notion that the apu-wamani is a more metaphysical space, rather than a physical location, which resides within the dancer‟s self (Personal Interview “Killihuara” 2009).

Almost opposite to Killihuara in his urbanized and cosmopolitan positioning,

Encanto de Puquio has live in Lima his whole life. His father is a much older migrant who arrived in Lima from Puquio as a young man in the 1950s, and Encanto‟s much older brother is Richard Saire, the so-called first scissors dancer born in Lima. Encanto has spent most of his brief career as a scissors dancer performing in theatres and with the fusion rock group La Sarita. In everyday life, he often wears heavy metal t-shirts and black fingernail polish, which sometimes alienates him from other young performers. He has never performed the dance in a rural festivity and only recently began to earn contracts in urban fiestas costumbristas despite being several years older than Killihuara.

Yet, he shares with the more rural dancer the idea that the apu-wamani is always present inside the dancer. Performing the dance allows the dancer to feel and communicate with the spirit inside (Personal Interview “Encanto” 2009). Both dancers stressed the need for young performers to educate themselves and learn more about the origins of the dance by reading the work of anthropologists. Anthropological interpretations have become models for moral and philosophical comportment of a globalized rural and urban Andean youth (Personal Interview “Killihuara” 2009, “Encanto” 2009).

A group of young scissors dancers and musicians who take this logic to its extreme have become active participants in the Tawantinsuyista movement. A full analysis of the ideology and practices of this complex form of globalized indigeneity are

303 beyond the scope of this study. It is comprised of associational groupings of urban intellectuals and their youthful followers who theorize that Tawantinsuyo was an alternative civilization as advanced as the modern West. Rooted in indigenista discourses that glorified the Inca Empire, these groups go far beyond them by situating the Incas as only the most unified manifestation of a long evolutionary development of

Andean civilization going back to the founding of the city of Chavin around 3,000 BCE.

Beyond a particular narrative of Andean history, Tawantinsuyistas construct a pan-

Andean and postcolonial nationalism, which roughly comprises the territory within the limits of the former Inca Empire. They argue that the modern nations of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, as well as parts of Colombia, Chile, and Argentina are illegitimate due to their roots in Spanish colonialism. Tawantinsuyistas often affiliate with the vast networks of the global indigenous movement, situating the Andean nation within the broader continental framework of Abya Yala. Through the use of anthropological and ethnohistorical sources, they attempt to live by the spiritual and cultural principles of ancient Andean man (Anchita 2005, Personal Interview” Pachak Chaki” 2009).

Despite this postcolonial ideology, these groups often receive financial and spiritual support from US and European NGOs affiliated with various cults of New Age spirituality. For example, Intip Megíl Guaman is a tawantinsuyista author who lives in

Paris and is affiliated with the French NGO, Association Pachamama. One of his most well-known works, Tawa: Más Alla del Paititi, is essentially a spiritual travel narrative of his re-encounters with his Andean homeland (2010). He constructs a typology of yachaq;

Andean wise-men. Included in this typology are the Layqa, who the Spanish called

304 witches. Creating a bricolage of reinventions of tradition associated with both the

Huancavelica and Ayacucho scissors dance styles, he situates the scissors dancer as the contemporary inheritor of this Andean sacred tradition. He seamlessly merges the origin myth of “El Niño Leñador” and the legend of „La Agonia de Rasu Niti” as well as the origin myth of the Tusuq Layqa from Huancavelica in order to construct a coherent and originary figure who embodies the survival of an ancient Andean priesthood (Megil

Guaman 2010: 34-41). Thus, he extends the notion that the contemporary practice of the dance takes on an emblematic character which links the present to the Pre-Columbian past and actualizes the purity of origins within a dynamic contemporary moment.

The initial links between young scissors dancers and the broader tawantinsuyista movement came about through the interventions of Fortunato Anchita, the founder of

Integración Ayllu. A civil engineer by profession, Anchita is a migrant from the community of Chipao in southern Ayacucho, who arrived in Lima more than forty years ago. As a hobby he became interested in investigating Andean ethnohistory in order to know more about his origins. He also was a major enthusiast of the scissors dance, which had seen practiced since he was a child in his place of origin. In the 1990s, he became fascinated with the dance‟s potential origins in the Taki Onqoy movement. Since 1992,

Fortunato has become a close associate with the ADTMP, participating as an unofficial spiritual guide to the association (Personal Interview “Fortunato Anchita” 2009). In

2005, he published a pamphlet manifesto entitled, Taki Onqoy=La Danza de las Tijeras, in which he narrated the entire 5,000 year history of Andean civilization. He located

1992 as the year of the beginning of a new Taki Onqoy, where the Andean people had

305 begun to abandon their forced syncretism and colonized mentality. This pamphlet depicts the scissors dance as a heroic figure of this new era ushering in the rebirth and flowering of Andean civilization. Several of the current scissors dancers from Ayacucho received titles of symbolic danzaq (Anchita 2005). Narrating the Ensayo Ceremonial staged on April 9, 2004, Anchita claims that with the spiritual guidance of Integración

Ayllu, the scissors dancers have restored the adoration of the Wakas in place of Jesus

Christ. He suggests that “for the first time after 471 years of Spanish invasion they danced openly in adoration of the Wakas in an event we call the stage of spiritual restoration” (Ibid. 49). Many of the younger members enthusiastically embraced the interventions of Señor Anchita (as they call him). Nevertheless, older members often accepted the changes but quietly expressed skepticism. In 2009, the year I observed the

Ensayo Ceremonial, generation tensions flared up due to the change of leadership in the association and the restoration of the image of Christ as the adorned figure of the event.

In order to better situate this conflict I first examine the perspective of the youthful participants in Integración Ayllu. Toward the end of my fieldwork, I struck up a friendship with a young dancer named Pachak Chaki. Although less accomplished as a virtuoso performer than others, Pachak Chaki is an intellectual leader of a group of young practitioners who view the dance as the central activity of a spiritual revival movement.

In the larger scissors dance community he is better known as the best confectioner and embroiderer of costumes on the contemporary scene than as a dancer. He adorns his costumes with colorful images drawn from Inca and Pre-Inca iconographies. The dancer claims that although he realizes that most of his buyers are attracted to the eye-catching

306 designs as simple decoration, they serve as the initial phase of a pedagogical process.

Once the dancers have the costume in their possession and begin to wear them on their bodies, they may begin to wonder what these symbols refer to. Central to this theory is

Pachak Chaki‟s own notion of double-agency. He distinguishes between the mythical figure of the danzaq and the human dancer. He views his spiritual compromise with the dance as a form of embodiment that brings him closer to the ideal of the prophets of the

Taki Onqoy (Personal Interview “Pachak Chaki” 2009).

Pachak Chaki is less interested in the Taki Onqoy as a historical event than as an embodied model for indigenous identity in the contemporary moment. The dancer has developed close links to the transnational indigenous movement, by participating in conferences in Bolivia and Ecuador. Every June 24, the day of the ancient Inca solstice festival Inti Raymi, he leads other scissors dancers affiliated with Integración Ayllu in an offering to the Wakas at the ruins of the Pre-Inca shrine Pachacamac. The group invites indigenous organizations from neighboring Andean countries as well as several NGOs to participate in the event. At the end of my fieldwork, Pachak Chaki offered to make me a special honorary scissors dance costume to be finished for my next trip to Peru. In talking about the design of the costume, he wanted to symbolize the marriage between the United States and Peru, which constitutes my current professional and personal life, by combining Inca iconography with images of Apache warriors. This association of the

Apache warrior as an emblem of all North American indigenous groups was a common refrain in my research. An under-researched phenomenon of global indigeneity is the appropriation of Hollywood popular culture stereotypes of American Indian warriors as

307 models for South American indigenous identity. These appropriations create both affiliations and tensions within the interrelationship between North American and South

American indigenous groups. References to Apache warriors by scissors dance performers were made less out of a desire to offend other native groups as to express an imagined brotherhood with them. These images also demonstrate the continuing resonance of the heroic masculine warrior in articulations of cosmopolitan indigeneity.

After the leadership of the ADTMP in 2009, older scissors dancer practitioners took back the Ensayo Ceremonial from the Integración Ayllu faction of the association and restored the image of Christ as the adored figure of the ceremony. Anchita and the younger practitioners protested baldly, threatening to boycott the event and stage their own Ensayo Ceremonial. From their perspective, the deference paid to Christ at the initiation of the ceremony and the flogging the dancers submit to afterward, repeated a colonized imaginary. However, I suggest that it would be a mistake to accept uncritically this distinction between colonized and decolonized enactments. During my conversations with Pachak Chaki, he clearly showed reverence for academic study. By reading anthropological and ethnohistorical texts he believes he has better knowledge of the true significance of the dance than the less enlightened older practitioners (Personal

Interview “Pachak Chaki” 2009). Pachak Chaki and his younger compatriots portray the older generations as ignorant and uneducated. Therefore, in addition to a series of postcolonial discourses and practices, these young performers have reproduced the hegemonic sacralization of education as the basis for legitimate hierarchies. The older practitioners who restored the Christ image legitimately feel that the actions of

308

Integración Ayllu disrespect their practical and embodied knowledge and represent an affront to a time-honored tradition and the important role of the scissors dancer in local versions of popular Catholicism. I contend that these generational conflicts are far too complex and contradictory for an outside researcher to claim one or another represents a legitimate defense of tradition or alternatively a decolonization of indigenous knowledge.

309

Chapter 8 Conclusion

I have shown that rather than originating in Pre-Columbian shamanic rituals, the scissors dance emerged as a highly-specialized genre of folk theatrical performance in the hybrid Andean-Catholic intercultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If the dance developed out of the bricolage of mostly European performance practices, the stock character of the scissors dancer enacted an ambivalent memory of earlier Andean ritual specialists, reconfigured as a diabolic Other. The early documentary sources of the dance depict a more mobile, hybrid, and historically contingent performance practice than later Andeanist ethnographers have portrayed. At the same time, these sources contributed to the emergence of the Andeanist ethnographic imaginary, progressively participating in imagining the Andean Other in an idealized and ahistorical fashion.

Modernization efforts of the 1920s dramatically began to alter the relationship between the national coastal center and marginalized highland peripheries. The realignment of the so-called Chanka region, caused by the construction of modern highways, created two distinct circuits of itinerant performance and exacerbated local differences into two quite different forms of performance. José María Arguedas brought of these forms of the scissors dance into the broader national imaginary by staging it as an emblem of the creativity of Andean culture in his fictional and anthropological writings, and staged folklore performances. Arguedas‟s representations of the dance embody the author‟s

310 evolving performance of selfhood in relation to his intimacy to Andean indigenous culture, enacted most clearly in the utopian performance of a new Peruvian nation staged at his own funeral.

In the quarter century after Arguedas‟s death, populist nationalism, mass urban

Andean migration, and political violence dramatically transformed the scissors dance from a rural festival form into a cosmopolitan genre staged in multiple urban entertainments. This nearly complete relocation reduced the complexity of a rich musical and choreographic repertoire. Nevertheless, it is quite probable that the dance would have disappeared or emerged from the rupture of the internal war extremely weakened if it were not for these aesthetic transformations that garned popularity in urban spectacles.

Moreover, the improvisatory flexibility of the genre enabled young migrant performers to express their new experiences of urban poverty and to creatively respond to the insecurities of living through extreme political violence and economic collapse. In the aftermath of the internal war, the scissors dance increasingly became a commodified icon of “millennial” Andean authenticity in a global cultural marketplace that values cultural difference. The development of neoliberal multiculturalism during the successive governments of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) and Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006) favored the incorporation of the marginalized masses through spectacles of multicultural recognition. Tourist promotion companies, cultural institutions, television producers, and the performers themselves reduced ethnographic narratives of authenticity and cultural resistance into marketing slogans that accompanied virtuosic spectacles of Andean

Otherness on the global stage. These narratives of authenticity and cultural resistance

311 constituted a significant part of the dance‟s appeal. Nevertheless, the performances domesticated indigeneity within the parameters of the unthreatening figure of the hyperreal Indian.

One of the central aims of this study is to examine authenticity and resistance not as objective realities but as perfomative tropes that may accomplish quite different ends than either authenticity or resistance. As numerous folklorists, historians, and anthropologists have recently suggested, the authentic is a notion inextricably tied to the alienations produced by the experience of modernity. It names the desire for an imagined otherness, distant in either time or space or sometimes both, perceived to be more holistic and pure than one‟s own society. Performances of authenticity, often linked to the exotic, have an affective power that may produce profound effects on the constructions of identity of both performers and spectators. In the neoliberal society in which we live, globalization has made such performances of authenticity both more available and more appealing to the masses throughout the world. Commodified expressions of indigeneity increasingly serve as an imagined antidote to the excesses of Western modernity. As postmodernity has undeniably transformed hegemonic conceptions of global history, melodramatic narratives of heroic indigenous resistance are no longer threatening to late capitalism as long as they are projected onto the past. Both first and third world elites tend to appreciate diversity only when it has been aestheticized, sanitized, and disembedded from continuing histories of political and economic inequality, as well as the political agency of marginalized people. Paradoxically, contemporary scissors dance performers now create improvised hybridized performances of heroic cultural resistance

312 in order to conceal their own hybridity from the wider world.

Yet these dramatic transformations of the aesthetic form and performance contexts of the scissors dance have also entailed a shift in its significance for the people who practice it and the communities that nourished them. Prior to these transformations, the scissors dancer theatrically embodied an ambivalent yet charismatic diabolic other tied to the repudiated Andean religious past. Following the example of Arguedas and the intensification of commodified representations of the dance, contemporary performers now enact a character that increasingly resembles globalized discourses of idealized indigeneity. Rather than an instrumental fiction this character becomes the essence of a modern indigenous self that the dancers repeatedly embody in performance. On the one hand, they strategically use the value of hyperreal indigeneity as cultural capital in order to become cosmopolitan artists who travel the world, cultural entrepreneurs who achieve the status of the emerging middle class cholo, and even the leaders of indigenous spiritual revival movements. On the other hand, the performances connect them to an imagined past, place of origin, and essential identity that brings some degree of coherence to their lives. As the performers get closer to the model upon which they construct their identities through embodiment, sometimes they also become models for Andean spectators to imagine their own identities.

Although it may not seem like what we traditionally define as theatre, I argue that the scissors dance embodies the power of theatricality to shape the identities of both performers and spectators. Thus, I position my study within a reinvigorated Theatre

Studies, which has begun to gently and sympathetically push back on Performance

313

Studies. Performance Studies has too hastily conflated unmarked everyday performances of identity with theatrical events where actors self-consciously perform in front of an audience. Rather than enacting the self, theatrical performers usually portray an “other,” which nonetheless can have a profound effect on the actor‟s self-fashioning. The specialized mimetic competency of scissors dance performers encourages the development of multiple subjectivities that gives them access to agency in the remaking of Peruvian nationhood and the fashioning of modern indigenous citizen-subjects. The distinct modes of audience reaction by Western and Andean spectators partially shape these constantly evolving performances of identity. I contend that the conceptual lens of performativity alone is not sufficient for a full understanding of these complex intercultural performances. The related notion of theatricality helps us to articulate both the creative agency of theatrical performers and their interactions with various audiences.

A theatrical understanding of the staging of the scissors dance allows us to account for the ways in which performative economies of spectacle shape the reconfigurations of

Peruvian nationhood in the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization.

314

Endnotes

Chapter 1

1 In agreement with Savran, I add that a critical historiography of culture has the potential to reinvigorate the stalled interdisciplinary conversation between theatre and anthropology which played such a major role in the foundations of performance studies. Too often we base our conceptual models on outmoded frameworks borrowed from anthropology at the same time as we repeat the now hegemonic critique of ethnography with little knowledge of the significant ways in which anthropology has transformed over the past several decades.

2 In the 1970s, Dean MacCannel suggested that authenticity could be “staged,” yet he too maintained a structuralist position, implying authenticity existed prior to the artifice of its enactment (1974).

Chapter 2

1 (Arguedas 1978: 131)

2 They look past the external hybridity of Andean cultural forms in order to reveal, “the Spanish overlay as a merely thin veneer covering a clandestine but ongoing survival of a coherent and purely Andean cosmology” (Abercrombie: xix). They acknowledge some degree of external change and syncretism, yet they perceive these processes as masking an unchanging essential core.

3 His book celebrates the Taki Onqoy as a millenarian anticolonial resistance movement which contributed to the “millenary consciousness” of the contemporary populations of the southern highlands, particularly the descendants of the Hatun Soras in the southern part of Ayacucho. The scissors dance is amongst the contemporary cultural practices that he suggests exemplify the inheritance of the “millenary consciousness” of the Taki Onqoy.

4 As Fernando Cervantes notes in the case of Mexico, historians of popular culture and ethnographic observers have tended to react with embarrassment to indigenous assertions of diabolic pacts, treating them as a simple imposition of a hegemonic idea (1994: 2).

5 Even early colonial Andean chroniclers Garcilaso de la Vega and Guaman Poma de Ayala, both of whom had converted to Christianity, vigilantly associated the term supay with the devil.

6 Cieza suggested that supay inspired Andean funerary, and still others asserted that supay huasi was the abode where the pagan Andean ancestors served perpetual condemnation (Taylor 1980: 43).

7 These myths almost invariably deny any ancestral relationship between these ancient pagan beings and contemporary Andean peasant groups, who trace their lineage to a mythical vision of the Incas imagined as a civilizing force. 315

8 Various Andean polities regularly invaded other ayllus, large regional empires emerged at various times long before the expansion of the Inca empire in the first half of the fifteenth century. The conquered groups typically incorporated the conquerors as their ancestors and Andean intercultural encounters became enmeshed in increasingly complicated sacred landscapes with multiple and overlapping ancestral obligations and origin points. The interconnected networks of ancestral huacas typically divided Andean polities into hierarchical upper and lower moieties. The duality of Andean political and social organization functioned on multiple scales organizing relationships not only within local ayllus, but also between highland and coastal cultural groups. The superior upper moieties typically constituted a wealthier class of llama and alpaca herders, and the inferior lower moieties a lower class of agricultural peasants. Each interconnected political unit performed its own confessions, sacrifices and libations for its ancestral mummies; whose camaquen, an Andean notion loosely translated as soul but refers more specifically to a kind of embodied spirit double, animated the collective and individual lives of ayllu members and mediated their access to water and other vital resources necessary for fertility (Gose 2008).

9 About a century before the Spanish invasion, the Inca state in Cuzco completed an unprecedented expansion into a massive territory which encompassed nearly half of the continent of South America. They exercised an impressive amount of state power, creating significant class divisions between a landed aristocracy of Inca rulers and their peasant subjects. They succeeded in directing a great deal of economic and political capital toward a centralized state and religious worship toward the imperial cult of the sun. However, the success of the Inca state was in large part due to their reorganization and manipulation of time-honored Andean frameworks of ancestral affiliation. They instituted new forms of political and religious surveillance that monitored the activities of local Curacas and the religious specialists of local ancestral cults. Yet, as long as these political and religious authorities openly supported the hierarchical hegemony of the Inca state and religious cults, they retained certain levels of autonomy (Rostkrwowski 1997).

10 In fact, many Andean polities did explicitly collaborate with Spanish conquistadors in order to liberate themselves from what they viewed at the time as despotic Inca rule. For at least the first few decades after the arrival of the Spaniards, these groups enjoyed significant political and economic privileges. Even after the initial years of Conquest, Spanish encomienderos were often too busy appropriating valuable resources and fighting amongst each other to directly rule over Andean subjects.

11 I do not mean to suggest that relations between colonized and colonizer were harmonic, but rather Andeans already had well-established repertoires of strategies of how to deal with invasion and conquest.

12 Andean commoners performed certain ritual obligations themselves, but also consulted a highly differentiated network of oracles, priests, and deities. Probably because of their similarities as much as differences with Catholic priests, these Andean religious specialists became the principal targets of colonial religious persecution. Seventeenth century extirpators of idolatry isolated these individuals as the purveyors of false religion rather than the simple superstition and error practiced by Andean commoners. The latter could be molded and disciplined through proper religious instruction, whereas the former could not. Through their protagonism in the Taki Onqoy movement and later separatist apostasies, the specialized class of Andean priests and oracles became stigmatized figures vehemently persecuted during the Extirpation of Idolatry campaigns beginning in the late sixteenth century. As they transformed over time, these figures became the models synthesized into the stock character type the scissors dancer later came to embody as a reenactment of historical memory.

13 In the religious, as well as political and economic domains early Spanish colonial rule resembled far more of a conflictual competition for power amongst various factions, including indigenous elites and commoners, than the domination of one homogenous bloc of Europeans over an equally homogenous indigenous bloc as it is conventionally represented. 316

14 These priesthoods included both men and women officiants, as well as hereditary and non-hereditary forms of the transmission of specialized knowledge (Rostworowski 1997: 159).

15 Amongst the most important religious specialists were those who cared for and communicated with the mummified remains of past heroic figures in elaborate man-made cave-tombs known as chullpas. Chroniclers of the early colonial period often disgustedly report that these ministers of the mallquis often broke into church tombs and stole dead Andean bodies in order to perform mummification rituals and entomb them in these cave-houses. The mummified dead were particularly important sources of fertility and access to water.

16 The Incas replaced disobedient priests and oracles, who they routinely executed, with new officiants who favored the Inca state. Furthermore, they installed multiple forms of surveillance monitoring those huaca specialized who remained, included those they had hand-picked. Those who retained good relations with the Inca state and their high imperial priests travelled once a year to Cuzco to convene in Coricancha, the temple of the sun, for the capacocha festival (Gose 1996). Despite numerous tensions and sometimes open conflict between imperial cults and regional ancestral networks, the Incas ruled through a hegemonic model of hierarchical differentiation and control which favored the continuity of local religious and political systems instead of their forced erasure. Although subject to state surveillance and control, Andean religious specialists retained a great deal of power amongst their local constituents.

17 Although from a Western perspective many of these specialized performers resembled mummers, clowns, and acrobatics, Andean societies revered them as priests. They did not oppose mimetic entertainments to purely sacred rituals, but rather perceived both as “gifts of human expenditure to divine forces” (Taylor 2004: 371).

18 The specialists who performed in such ritual purifications prepared by fasting and abstaining from sexual activity for up to a week beforehand. A number of ethnographic accounts of the scissors dance hypothesize the origins of the dance in these ritual performance practices (Barrionuevo 1988: 214, Cavero Carrasco 2001).

19 In recent years Andeanist ethnohistorians have celebrated the document as an Andean version of the Popul Vuh or the Rabinal Achi. Although it reflects the missionary interests of its compiler, Avila appears to have gone to great lengths to preserve a measure of the voice of his native informants.

20 With Millones‟s discovery of the Información de Servicios de Cristobal de Albornoz, the principal extirpator of the Taki Onqoy, the emerging field of Andean ethnohistory began to pay more attention to the sixteenth century nativist movement. Many ethnohistorians began to ask new historical questions about indigenous Andean experiences of colonialism. Did they resist? Did any elements of authentic Andean culture survive the Spanish invasion and the imposition of Catholicism? A number of Andeanist ethnohistorians in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s hailed the Taki Onqoy from a nationalist perspective as a genuine Andean resistance movement which demonstrated the early development of a Pan-Andean protonationalist identity (Mumford 1998: 150).

21 His major accomplishment was the suppression of the Taki Onqoy when he served as the inspector of the Diocese of Huamanga between 1569 and 1571. The four informaciones of 1569, 1570, 1577, and 1584 not only exalted Albornoz‟s accomplishments but also engaged in detailed descriptions of the ideology and embodied practices of the Taki Onqoy (Millones 1990, 2007, Mumford 1998, Gose 2008).

22 The subordinate preachers typically travelled in groupings which repeated this gendered pattern, and included mostly already baptized Spanish-speaking indigenous elites. In his testimony on behalf of Albornoz from 1577, Molina claimed “Certain Indian women called themselves Santa Maria and Santa 317

Maria Magdalena and other names of the Saints [. . .] in order to be revered as saints” (Millones 1990: 181). The women appear to have adored female saints as if they were added to the established pantheon of huacas.

23 Written in 1584, more than a decade after Albornoz suppressed the movement, “Instruccion Para Descubrir Todas las Guacas y sus Camayos y Haziendas” served as a functional guidebook in how to successfully extirpate idolatries for use by later evangelists (Urbano and Duviols 1990: 192). His treatment of the movement in this later manual differs considerably from those found in the Informaciones.

24 This group drew on worldwide scholarly interest in popular culture and history from below, as well as new archaeological discoveries that proved that the reign of the Inca Empire was much shorter than previously thought (Mumford 1998: 57).

25 The influence of this view within academic circles tempered in the 1990s, at the same as it began to permeate popular culture in Peru and throughout South America. The Taki Onqoy appeared as a symbol of Andean cultural identity in popular songs, theatre productions, modern dance, poetry, graffiti, textbooks for Andean schoolchildren, and even televised historical fiction (Millones 2007:57-63 ).

26 They did not necessarily deny that the Taki Onqoy constituted a resistance movement. However, they questioned the effectiveness of a purely inward-looking spiritual revival cult unaccompanied by military action or political negotiation.

27 These revisionist historians argue that early colonial indigenous Andean resistance is unknowable at best, as Spanish colonial authorities produced nearly all of the traces that remain in the archival record (Mumford 1998).

28 It was only after the military threat of the Inca rebels was subdued in the late 1560s, that the Spanish colonial state turned its attention to suppressing the religious apostasy under the authority of Cristobal de Albornoz.

29 Most studies have focused on the movement‟s ideology mediated by discourse. Estenssoro (1992) does situate the movement in broader colonial discourses about native music and dance, yet he is more concerned with Spanish views and ecclesiastical debates about native performance rather than the embodied practices actually performed during the Taki Onqoy. Some recent studies have noticed certain parallels between the rituals and dances of the Taki Onqoy and Pre-Columbian purification rituals, such as the Inca Situa, and a Pre-Columbian healing ceremony from Ayacucho which shares the name Taki Onqoy (Millones and Tomoeda 1998, Cavero Carrasco 2001). However, their claims remain rather speculative and they tend to reduce the Taki Onqoy to a primordial essence. Partially this lack of detailed research on the performance practices associated with the Taki Onqoy is due to the limitations and biases of the available sources. Nevertheless, drawing on some newly available sources which mention the Taki Onqoy and research on other Pre-Columbian and early colonial performance practices,

30 Other parallels, such as the length of the festivals, the element of competition valorizing bodily expenditure, along with the simulation of spirit possession performed by the dancer suggest that the scissors dance is a performed reenactment which remembers the Taki Onqoy and later derivative movement.

31 Toledo directed his reforms as much towards Spanish encomienderos, who claimed failed to provide adequate religious instruction and exercised rampant corruption in the collection of tribute taxes, as towards indigenous Andeans themselves. Nevertheless, the contradictions of the colonial enterprise, where economic interests often clashed with religious instruction, continued to undermine the discourses of complementarity between religious and economic goals promoted by colonial administrators. In particular, 318

the continuing mediating power of indigenous curacas in collecting tribute taxes and enforcing mandatory labor undermined the supposed exclusivity of Catholicism, as the authority of indigenous elites was based on religious beliefs in Divine Kingship (Gose 2008: 128).

32 The Jesuits conducted specialized religious instruction while the inspectors carried out trials against accused idolaters. The inspectors handed out punishments which ranged from public humiliation and flogging to exile and even execution for extreme offenders. Inspectors often found Curacas and smaller regional elites as well as religious specialists the guiltiest offenders of idolatry due to their particular interests in keeping Andean ancestor worship alive (Burga 1988: 203).

33 In fact, the vast majority of what we know about Pre-Columbian and early colonial Andean religions comes from the various chronicles, instruction manuals, and the records of idolatry trials produced by the first Extirpation of Idolatry campaign (Griffiths 1996, Mills 1997).

34 For example, according to Arriaga, the macsa were healers, the socyne were diviners, the moscoc were interpreters of dreams, and cuachos were the most feared sorcerers and witches (Arriaga 1621: 34-41). He also wrote about similar ecstatic dances and purification rituals as performed during the Taki Onqoy, arguing that Andeans easily concealed idolatry under the guise of Catholic festivities (Ibid. 56-62).

35 Charged with the maintenance of traditional ancestral authority, they echoed the exclusivist discourses of Catholic priests and preached that the huacas were famished from neglect, sending epidemics and plagues to Andean populations as punishment. Despite their anti-Christian ideology these religious specialists often appropriated aspects of Christianity.

36 All of these elements are suggestive of the figure of the scissors dancer. The multi-colored costumes, including crowns of feathers, which appear to have been associated with idolatry by Spanish clerics and shamanic specialists by both the Incas and Amazonian communities, describe similar costumes to early scissors dancers recorded in nineteenth century documents. The dancers‟ scissors may have developed out of imitations of these animal claws and other sharp objects held by the diabolic priests, later fashioned into musical instruments. Finally, the descriptions of the priests as spitting fire and performing other extraordinary physical feats recall some of the elements of the pruebas de valor performed by contemporary scissors dancers.

37 He did not think highly of Andean sorcerers who he represented as deceivers and agents of the devil. Guaman Poma resided in the central area of diffusion of the Taki Onqoy and served as Cristobal de Albornoz‟s native interpreter and aid during his extirpation campaign. The indigenous chronicler clearly blamed the sorcerers of Vilcabamba on the outbursts of idolatry of the Taki Onqoy, which may provide further evidence suggesting the movement developed out of a revival of Inca imperial cults or may just be another manifestation of his clear dislike of the Inca elite.

38 In fact, he blamed indigenous idolatry mostly on Spanish abuses as they caused Indians to flee consolidated towns to gullies and high plateaus. Furthermore, he argued that Spanish landowners frequently acted like Incas, receiving taquies and other forms of ancestral adoration from indigenous commoners (Gose 2008)

39 Some recent research has nuanced this chronology by pointing out that a diminished number of idolatry trials continued until the second half of the eighteenth century. They further suggest that religious change was far more gradual and uneven, and intercultural exchange was far more dynamic than classical notions of syncretism allow (Griffiths 1996, Mills 1997, Cahill 2002, Gose 2008).

319

40 Cock further suggested that the infiltration of exterior influences such as witchcraft and black magic brought about the end of a recognizably Andean religious system distinct from Catholicism and with it the various religious specialties that sustained it (1980: 195).

41 Either because of their resemblance to dancers from Galicia or because of similarities between their costumes and trajes de gala, priests and townspeople began to call these mysterious dancers galas.

42 In 1653, Bernabe Cobo wrote “Each province throughout the Inca Empire had its own manner of dancing which the Indians never exchanged; now, however, any nation [. . .] may imitate and simulate dances from the other provinces” (Cobo 1653: 14, 17).

43 Poole argues that Andean communities sought to represent the “other” in quite different ways and for different reasons than conventional Western performance traditions. She suggests, “The power politics of dance is not a willful means to react to, satirize, or otherwise passively „represent‟ power. It is a means to incorporate power first by impersonating it and secondly by using this decentered, individualized act of impersonation as a ritual for the social-political reproduction of local Andean communities” (1990: 118).

44 Recent historical research has revealed that much of what contemporary Andeanists portray as timeless and primordial Andean culture actually emerged and transformed in the dynamic intercultural exchanges of the second half of the eighteenth century (Flores Galindo 1986, Burga 1988, Cahill 1999, Beyersdorff 1999, Gose 2008).

45 Within traditional Andean systems of duality, competition engenders complementarity and the end result of fierce competition is often conceived of as a utopian form of reconciliation between oppositional forces (Cánepa Koch 1998).

46 While the origin myth cited above only mentions a single Spanish dance with handkerchiefs and castanets, the competitive aspect where individual dancers face each other, recalls the sparring of matachines sword dancers. Visual illustrations of the dance from the nineteenth century appear quite similar to the costumes of matachines of the same period. Like sword dances and other weapons dances, the choreography of the scissors dance includes an introductory circular passage where the competing performers attempt to intimidate each other (Poole 1990: 149).

47 For example, a female dance called the guiadores which shares a number of choreographic elements with the scissors dance represents a combination of the singing angels who announce the birth of the Baby Jesus to the shepherds and the stars which guide the wise men to the site of Christ‟s birth.

48 The descent of diabolic sorcerers from the high plateau to adore the Christ child enacted by the festival dramaturgy parallels the origin narrative told by contemporary dancers.

49 After Potosi in modern Bolivia, Huancavelica was the most important mining center in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Discovered in 1560s, during the height of the Taki Onqoy, the Huancavelica mines were long sites in which the contradictions of the Spanish colonial state were most clearly visible. The colonial government appropriated the Inca system of the mita, renovating the forced labor of young indigenous men for an emerging capitalist economy, sending migratory workers to build roads, construct towns, and above all work in the silver mines of Potosi and the mercury mines of Huancavelica. However, the itinerancy of labor migration undermined evangelical justifications in general, and the objectives of settlement consolidation in particular (Gose 2008).

50 Taussig‟s account draws heavily on the research of June Nash about the mythical figure of el Tio amongst the tin miners of Bolivia. El Tio is a small bearded white man who is the owner of the minerals found in the mines. He is often figured with the horns of a devil, and known by outsiders by the name 320

supay. The miners make offerings to the diabolic figure in exchange for the extraction of mineral ore (Taussig 1980).

51 Salazar Soler recounts several variants of the origin myth of el muki, who lived on the earth in the past era concurrent with the Incas. On the seventh day, supay tempted the muki by promising that all the riches of the mines could be his in exchange for his soul. When the Inca King, Roal, found out about the diabolic pact Jesus Christ condemned him to eternal life in the infernal Uku Pacha. Despite the diabolic associations, Salazar Soler‟s research confirms that to the miners he can be both a malignant and dangerous force or a generous provider, depending upon if the miners are generous in their offerings to the earth demon (2006).

52 The text of a 1951 linguistic study of the regional dialect of Quechua from the province of Parinacochas suggests a further connection between the Serena and the mysterious female apparition from Huancavelica. One brief oral text cited by the study describes the cult of the serena by referring to her as Juanita (Centro de la Colaboracion 1951: 291-292). The common use of the name Juana or Juanita to describe the female apparition suggests a close interrelationship between the mythologies of the underworld in these two regions where the scissors dance is performed. Furthermore, this name draws a specific connection between the female serena and male diabolic figures, who often bear the name Juan, Juanico, or Juaniquillo.

53 This figure derives from the Greco-Roman tradition of the siren and the mermaid. The mermaid is a fantastic beast that reentered the European imagination with the discovery of the Americas. Columbus himself recorded seeing mermaids in the Caribbean in his diaries. The figure probably entered Andean culture and mythology through seventeenth century religious art, and perhaps more importantly Baroque religious theatre, in particular the autos of Calderon de la Barca. In a number of his plays, Calderon portrays the allegorical figure of sin as a beautiful mermaid.

54 Numerous accounts associate sirens with trout, freshwater fish introduced by the Spanish invaders.

55 The work of Bigenho suggests an interesting dynamic where scissors dancers and musicians vehemently distinguish between the Serena and the devil, while performers of other folkloric dances, as well as most residents of particular localities conflate the two infernal figures (Bigenho 1991: 124-126)

56 This particular region was the center of the Taki Onqoy movement. Thus, the attribution of the origins of the dance to southern Ayacucho and narratives of a close intimacy between the early colonial nativist movement and the origins of the scissors dance tend to reinforce each other. In addition, José María Arguedas popularized this particular style in the 1960s, so it had a much larger national profile and was more familiar to anthropologists than other regional variants.

57 However, the evidence that suggests the flow of materials from the mining center of Huancavelica and urban Huamanga to the more agrarian areas of Lucanas and Parinacochas supports my larger argument that the relationship between the scissors dance and Pre-Columbian performance and religious practices is the result of surrogation and theatrical reenactment rather than direct descent.

58 For instance, in the versions recounted in Cruz Fierro (1982) and Barrionuevo (1988) the young dancer becomes a presence in specifically Catholic festivities in honor of local patron saints. Furthermore, the multi-colored embroidered costumes suggest a European rather than a purely indigenous style.

59 These names recall an association with the devils which inhabit the mines of Huancavelica and Bolivia. In Umachiri, a small town in the department of Puno near the Bolivian border, local residents call the devils who live in nearby mountain caves, el Tio Juaneco or Juaniquillo. Furthermore, the use of the name

321

Juanico in stories about contracts with the devil is widespread throughout Latin America, including folk tales in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.

60 Abercrombie even notes that many contemporary Andean peasants take extreme offense when researchers suggest that remaining Pre-Columbian mummies are their predecessors (1998: 117).

61 Some of the appropriated cultural elements appear to map well onto notions of the outsider, foreigners, traveler and instability that contrast with the supposedly stable peasant community. For example, the scissors dancer is a contracted itinerant performer, who appears to borrow elements from fakirs, and other European itinerant performers. In the dramaturgy of Christmas festivities in Huancavelica, the scissors dancer appears to play a similar role as the three wise-men in traditional nativity stories. They are clearly foreigners from the outside the community who are domesticated by the copleros, parodic imitations of learned colonial priests. The main task of the scissors dancers in these festivities is to venerate the Baby Jesus. The competition itself is sometimes described as a gift to the Jesus figure that serves as the Patron of the festival. This indicates that early modern auto-sacramentales of the Christmas story are clearly one of the sources for the cultural practices of these festivities including the scissors dance.

62 John Rowe (1955) called this movement Inka nationalism and more recently, Manuel Burga (1988) and Alberto Flores Galindo (1986, 1987) have traced the continuing reverberations of what they call the “Andean utopia”

63 Even if they had little knowledge of these intellectual developments, idealized representations of the Inca state in both places had a common source. A widely circulated 1723 edition of the “Royal Commentaries of the Incas” by “El Inca” Garcilaso de la Vega included a preface that cited a legendary prophecy by Sir Walter Raleigh that the English would defeat Spain and restore the Inca kingdom in the Andes (Flores Galindo 1987: 203; Pratt 1992: 144). Flores Galindo suggested that this legend passed into the oral tradition to such an extent that by the end of the eighteenth century Andeans of all social classes believed that Garcilaso himself had written it, turning him into a kind of anti-colonial folk hero (1987). 64 Flores Galindo calls attention to a number of theatre pieces and paintings from the period that represented the decapitation of the late Inca king. These works often conflated the events and personas of Atahualpa who was captured and executed in Cajamarca by Pizarro‟s troops in 1532, and Tupac Amaru I, whose was the last sovereign Inca king executed in the main plaza of Cuzco in 1572 (1987: 203).

65 The French Bourbon family took over the Spanish throne from the Hapsburg‟s in 1713, after the Spanish War of Succession (1701-1713), after the last Hapsburg King, Carlos II died without an heir. During the first half of the eighteenth century focused their attention on reforming the colonial state apparatus in Spain itself. By the 1750s, they turned their attention to the American colonies (Klaren 2000).

66 Amongst the chief sources of unrest amongst indigenous and mestizo commoners was the repartimiento de mercancias, legalized in 1752. The repartimiento de mercancias was a forced system of production and consumption in which colonial authorities compelled indigenous and mestizo commoners to produce marketable goods and purchase expensive Spanish products in special state-controlled stores. The system saddled many commoners with unsustainable debts (Klaren 2000).

67 Condorcanqui was a moderately wealthy landowner, muleteer, and a member of the indigenous curaca class from the village of Tinta near Cuzco. He was educated at a Jesuit college in Cuzco exclusively for the indigenous aristocracy. Condorcanqui claimed descent not only to the Inca ruling class, but to Tupac Amaru, the last sovereign Inca king himself. During the 1770s, his title of Inca nobility was challenged by the colonial state. He traveled to Lima to defend his title, where he encountered new Enlightenment ideas in a burgeoning liberal intellectual circle. He adopted the name Tupac Amaru II and became the center of an anti-colonial movement by grafting liberal ideas of popular sovereignty with rising popular sentiments of Inca nationalism (Klaren 2000, Flores Galindo 1987). 322

68 The role of Tupac Amaru II in the larger Inca nationalist movement is rife for a performance studies analysis. Such an analysis might look at his public persona in light of a range of eighteenth century representations of the Inca, from French theatre, opera, and ballet related to the Enlightenment, to Ollantay, and other theatrical depictions of the end of the Inca empire popular in Peru in the eighteenth century, as well as the Inca rebels own autobiographical text Genealogia written in 1776 as a document to defend his claims of lineage to Inca royalty. Tupac Amaru himself was highly conscious of the theatricality of his highly public persona. He typically costumed himself in the finest attire of the European aristocracy, a bowler hat, which only partially covered his flowing long black hair, and a prominent Inca insignia associated with colonial titles of nobility for the heirs of Inca royalty. 69 Numerous curacas challenged these policies with protracted battles in courts, yet the power of indigenous elites gradually dwindled away during the period before independence.

70 Gose further argues that through the revival of the Inca as an Andean manifestation of Christ and the rise of the mountain spirits as localized lineage ancestors linked to the broader powers of the Christian pantheon, the Sun, and*, Andean societies became more egalitarian and articulated themselves as citizens in the emerging independent Republic (2008: 319).

Chapter 3

1 See Hobsbawm 1962, 1975, and 1987.

2 Historian of European popular culture Peter Burke notes, “It was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when traditional popular culture was just beginning to disappear, that the „people‟ or the „folk‟ became a subject of interest to European intellectuals” (Burke 1978: 5). Bendix (1997) argues that romantic intellectuals during this period invented the concept of “authenticity.” The term “ethnographic imagination” is an amalgamation of Fass-Emery‟s “anthropological imagination,” and Stone Peters frequent use of “popular ethnographic imagination.”

3 Poole (1997) refers to this same period as the Andean postcolonial, using a similar logic. Her study looks at the visual economy of images, particularly photographs, of Andean geography which flowed between Europe and the Andes. Pratt‟s (1992) foundational study of travel narrative and transculturation argues that popular travel writing constituted modern European subjectivity in relation to the rest of the world.

4 Indigenous Curacas had some success defending their titles in colonial courts, and indigenous commoners used various legal and extra-legal strategies to defend their communal lands from appropriation and their cultural practices from censorship. Nevertheless, the authority of the indigenous nobility gradually declined in the decades following the Tupac Amaru rebellion. By the beginning of the republic, most indigenous communities had replaced the ancestral authority of the Curacas with the rotating elected office of the staff-carrying varayoq (mayor) (Walker 1999, Gose 2008). Nevertheless, state propaganda succeeded in uniting most coastal Creoles with the peninsular Spaniards despite the former‟s resentments of Spanish privilege, due to their fears of mass indigenous uprisings.

6 Many coastal Creoles, particularly in Lima, were entrenched in the colonial bureaucracy and fearful of unleashing a popular revolution amongst the Andean masses (Thurner 1997, Walker 1999, Klaren 2000).

7 As the first president of the newly independent republic in 1824 and 1825, Bolivar argued that America had no usable history. The new state would not be forged out of the Andean past, but a modern and liberal future (Pagden 138, Thurner 1997: 10).

8 The military strong men who dominated the presidency for the first twenty years of the republic mostly came from the provincial highland mestizo landowning classes. They developed strong regional bases, 323

mobilizing multi-ethnic and multi-class alliances through various forms of populist rhetoric, paternalism, and clientelism (Walker 1999: 223).

9 The continuation of colonial systems of tribute actually appears to have allowed indigenous communities to retain some level of collective land ownership. Many indigenous leaders fought against measures to abolish the Indian head tax. They understood that by paying the tax, which made up 60-70% of the early republican state revenues, they gained leverage they needed to keep their communal lands, as the state had a strong financial interest in protecting the productivity of indigenous agricultural production (Walker 1999: Larson 2004).

10 Gose (2008) argues that this transformation in Andean politics was closely linked to long-term religious change and the Andean utopia. Andean religion displaced their ancestral beliefs from ancestor worship onto the worship of the landscape paralleling the definition of the ayllu from a hereditary to a territorial institution.

11 Far from a holdover from colonial feudalism, the brutal latifundia system emerged out of capitalist modernization, weakening the indigenous market economy and forcing many peasants into debt peonage, toiling as cheap laborers for expanding hacienda landlords (Walker 1999, Larson 2004).

12 For the most part, Creole elites in Lima looked towards Parisian fashions and British intellectual culture in order to distinguish themselves from both the indigenous majorities and the Spanish colonial past (Poole 1997, Klaren 2000).

14 Cahill does not explain why he believes the particular dance in question is the scissors dance, nor is there an explicit description of the dance in the parts of the document he cites. Aimaraes is part of the contemporary area of diffusion of the dance, but this document appears fifty years before other documents from the area that show a dance similar to the contemporary scissors dance. Perhaps, the prohibited dance was an early variation of the scissors dance, but it is impossible to say to what degree its choreography or significance bore definitive similarities to the contemporary practice.

15 Official recognition and use of Andean popular performance coexisted alongside prohibitions in a way that unsettles simple oppositions between elite and popular, Spanish and Andean, and repudiation and validation. The heightened emphasis that top Bourbon appointed officials placed on reforming popular culture after the Tupac Amaru rebellions was short-lived, waning by 1788 (Cahill 2000: 71). In 1790, scissors dancers living on the periphery of Lima participated in a celebration of the ascent of Carlos IV to the throne of Spain (Estenssoro 1989: 67).

16 For example, Montoya asserts, “the verb to prohibit is part of the whole colonial scheme of domination” Montoya 1990: 17). He interprets the early republican period as essentially continuous with the colonial period, opposing a rhetorically homogenized Andean culture against an equally homogenized Catholic culture.

17 Bishop Olivas Escudero published Apuntes para la Historia de Huamanga in order to commemorate the centennial of the Battle of Ayacucho, the final battle in the struggle for Peruvian independence.

18 Corculla is located in the province of Parinacochas in the extreme south of the department of Ayacucho. It was originally part of the Diocese of Cuzco, but in the early republican period became part of the Diocese and department of Ayacucho.

19 This repertoire is the basis of an extraordinary amount of folk tales and legends that permeate both popular and learned culture, including such legendary figures as Faust and Robert Johnson.

324

20 Certain specifically Andean qualities are also present in the text, particularly the connection between the diabolic scissors dance and mining as well as the profound depths of mountain caves.

21 Spanish protectionism greatly limited the numbers of non-Spanish travelers, scientists, and traders who arrived in South America until the final decades of the eighteenth century. In 1778, in an effort to modernize their American colonies, the Bourbon monarchy loosened these restrictions and opened up the colonies for free trade (Poole 1997, Klaren 2000).

22 She pinpoints the work of Humboldt as representing a key shift in European perceptions of nature, whereby the classification of physiognomy or the distinctive essence and character of a region contributed to the objectifying language of type central to later racial and cultural discourses.

23 Witt was born into the rising German bourgeoisie in the beginning of the 19th century. He spent a good part of his adolescence in London, apprenticing with successful merchants. As a young man he sought to make his own fortune in far off lands. In search of new commercial enterprises, he embarked from Liverpool to Peru in February 1824. Witt settled in Peru for the rest of his life. He returned to Europe often enough to keep up with European scientific and economic trends, but spent the majority of his life in his adopted country. He kept careful notes of his observations in a diary he wrote in German. After writing more than 10,000 pages by 1859, he began to compile an abridged version in English for publication. Despite his desire to publish these diaries, he never had the opportunity to do so in his lifetime. Custodianship of the historical value of the diaries was passed down amongst a small circle of prominent Peruvian historians, including the aforementioned Jorge Basadre. Basadre affirmed the diary was “of incalculable value” for its firsthand knowledge “about the social, economic, and political life of Peru of the past century” (Basadre 1971: 102).

24 The masks and ankle-bells are performance elements not present in either contemporary scissors dance styles, or other nineteenth century sources which represent the dance in Ayacucho.

25 While the culture of Puno, a mostly Aymara-speaking region, is quite different from the cultures of Ayacucho and Huancavelica, cultural practices and products flowed easily between the mining centers of Potosí. Puno is quite close to the latter and was on the route from Potosí to Cuzco to Huamanga to Huancavelica to Lima.

26 Pablo Macera, another prominent historian who published portions of the diary in 1973, described Witt‟s positionality in similar terms to the inside-outside dialectic of modern ethnography. Macera suggested that when Witt returned to Germany, “He gazed upon Europe not only as a native European, but also with the distanced eye of a foreigner” (Macera 1971: XXIX).

27 Blanco spoke the Quechua dialect from Quito and attempted to translate what he could of the local dialects from Cuzco and Huamanga in the Diario, commenting frequently on the differences between regional customs.

28 Mujica Pinilla suggests that the term pacha-angeles referred to fallen angels, as a way to speak about the demons of uku pacha (Mujica Pinilla 1996: ). Although Blanco may not recognize it, the name of the dance he cites clearly suggests a connection between these dancers and a demonic mythology similar to that of the contemporary scissors dance.

29 In an 1848 article, he declared, “I entered into our project a little bit of an artist, a little bit of a bohemian, and a little bit of a scientist” (20).

30 Upon returning to Paris, Marcoy published numerous articles in the Bulletin de la Societe de Geographie de Paris, and Le Tour de Monde during the 1850s and 1860s (Rivera Martínez 2001: 20). 325

31 The principle complaints leveled at his work by scientists, the dominating subjective presence of the author in the text, the picturesque and often humorous tone of the work, and the indulgent exoticism of Marcoy‟s language and visual depictions, were the elements which most attracted general readers (Rivera Martínez 2001:. 21).

32 The gendered portrait of Marcoy‟s persona is furthered by the reviewer‟s intrigue at Marcoy‟s exotic descriptions of mestiza and chola women, “these charming creatures who are allied to Spain by their ancestors, and to Peru by their ancestresses” (New York Times 1874)

33 This comparative strategy implicitly links the short description to one of Marcoy‟s over-arching theories about the origins of American man. Like other scientific writers of the time, he argued that indigenous people of the Americas originated in two races, an inferior mongol racial type from Asia, and a civilizing racial type descended from ancient Egyptians. The latter group was responsible for the great Pre- columbian civilizations in Mexico and Peru. Thus, the frequent comparisons and other nineteenth century ethnographic observers made between Andean societies and old world antiquities were often thought to have a historical basis (Chaumiel 1994: 276-277).

34 Throughout the text he frequently augmented the sensuousness of his narrative descriptions with sketch drawings, illustrating various social types and exotic cultural practices of the Andean and Amazonian regions.

35 The full title of Fuentes‟s book was Lima: Apuntes Historicos, Descriptivos, Estadisticas y de Costumbres in 1866, simultaneously published in Spanish, French, and English editions. He argued that driven by their fascination with the Incas and the uniqueness of Andean geography and cultural heritage, European travel writers had circulated false images of Peru as an exotic fairyland (Poole 1997: 142). He singled out the work of Marcoy as a particularly egregious example of these forms of exotic representation, writing “Right now in Paris, a travel account is being published in which, [. . .] you might think that the authors had set out to write a novel whose characters should have all the gross type of a savage” (Fuentes 1866: ). He does not name Marcoy specifically, but according to Deborah Poole the three woodcuts he specifically critiques are all found in Marcoy‟s travel narrative, which Fuentes probably read in the early serial edition published in the magazine Le Monde between 1862 and 1866.

36 Palma was perhaps the most important Peruvian writer of the nineteenth century. He invented the genre of the tradición, an exaggerated take on a real-life event or legend, rooted in costumbrista sensibilities. He was an avid enthusiast of Fierro‟s work, acquiring the first part of his collection as a gift from Augustin de la Rosa Toro in 1885, and collecting others himself (Majluf 2008: 29). In one passage from his Tradiciones Peruanas, Palma respectfully refers to Fierro as “el Goya Limeno” (qtd. in Barrenechea 1959: 15).

37 Tapadas were upper-class Limeña women who veiled their faces. These women became the object of exotic and erotic fascination by costumbrista artists due to the mystery of their covered faces. Although culturally „white,‟ they were often depicted with eroticized bodily features similar to Afro-Peruvian women and prostitutes (Poole 1997: 119).

38 Nuñez Rebaza (1990) suggests that Palma did not really appreciate the work of the mulato Fierro. However, this assertion is contradicted by the time and money Palma spent in amassing his collection. Far more likely, Palma used the term chuncho as a generic term for Indian, perhaps referring to the crown of feathers the dancers wear.

39 Angrand was the Vice-Consulate of France in Lima between 1834 and 1839, and a prominent Peruvianist artist and archaeologist. Rivera Martinez was surprised to discover amongst this collection, forty nine 326

paintings by Fierro. The collection is entitled Costumes Peruviens: Scenes de la Vie Religiese Populaire a Lima (1969).

40 I viewed this piece as part of an exhibition on “Music and Dance in Peruvian Popular Art” at the Museo Nacional in August 2007.

41 Until recently, a similar tail was part of the traditional costume of scissors dancers from Ayacucho, representing the dancer‟s intimacy with the devil (Vivanco 1976, Cruz Fierro 1982, Nuñez Rebaza 1985,1990).

42 Puquio is the capital of the province of Lucanas in the department of Ayacucho. I visited the sculpture on September 15, 2008 on a quick trip to Puquio on my return to Lima from the Festival of Water in the village of Cabana Sur.

43 Recently, young dancers from Puquio who reside in Lima have included shots of themselves dancing beside the statue in promotional videos of their public personas in order to pay tribute to their provincial roots.

45 He became known as “el brujo de los Andes” (The Wizard of the Andes) and his leadership of the Compaña de la Breña catapulted him into the presidency to lead national reconstruction efforts in 1885 (Klaren 2000: 184).

46 As they had with Tupac Amaru a century before, indigenous highlanders adapted the myth of Inkarri for the present circumstances According to the general‟s wife, Antonia Moreno de Caceres, “For the Indians, Caceres was the reincarnation of the Inca” (Thurner 1998: 200)

48 For example, Ricardo Palma famously wrote, “The principal cause of the great defeat is that the majority of Peru is composed of a wretched and degraded race we once attempted to dignify and ennoble. The Indian lacks a patriotic sense; he is a born enemy of the white and of the man of the Coast. It makes no difference to him whether he is a Chilean or a Turk. To educate the Indian and to inspire in him a feeling of patriotism will not be the task of our institutions, but of the ages” (Kristal 1987: 97-98).

50 He categorized the Peruvian population in three groups: Indians who were both unenlightened and servile, unenlightened whites who were free but ignorant, and a very small group of enlightened whites, who were neither ignorant nor in servitude. The duty of the final group was to assist the Indians liberate themselves from the bondage they suffered at the hands of the second group (Kristal 1987:114 ).

51 Middendorf spent twenty five years in Peru, serving as the medical doctor for Peruvian presidents Balta and Prada, and undertaking his own independent investigations of archaeology and the linguistics of indigenous cultures. After he graduated in philosophy and medicine in 1854, Middendorf departed to travel the world. He found his way to Australia and Africa before arriving in Peru in 1856. He stayed in Peru from 1856-1863, 1865-1871, and finally 1876-1888. In this final stay he did not have formal medical obligations, allowing him to focus on his own scientific studies.

52 Although an amateur scientist, he published in respected journals, and made original contributions to both Andean archaeology and linguistics. His scientific investigations were stimulated by an initial question, “to study the origin of the American races and their possible Asiatic origin and to prove this Asian origin through linguistic comparison.” He was one of the first scientific voices to challenge Inca Garcilaso de la Vega‟s idealized view of the Incas as the first civilizers of South America. Middendorf argued that the ruins on the Peruvian coast were evidence of earlier urban civilizations, later conquered by the Incas. This revisionist impulse carried over to his linguistic analysis. He criticized the translation of the Quechua drama Ollantay by German Quechuista Tschudi, who Middendorf argued was an expert in 327

ancient Quechua, but was not well-versed in the contemporary usage of the language. Middendorf established that this famous tragic drama, at least in its theatrical form, was of colonial and not Inca origins. Like many foreign travelers attracted to Peru‟s ancient indigenous heritage, Middendorf complained of the racism and neglect of Lima‟s elite towards Peru‟s autochthonous cultures.

53 The three volumes are divided geographically with the first chronicling Lima, the second, the rest of the coastal region, and the third, the sierra.

54 The opening of the Centro Cientifico del Cuzco in 1897 created new opportunities for social scientists to conduct research on contemporary rural peasants, who they constructed as the guardians of Inca heritage (Mendoza 2000: 49).

55 President Leguia named North American Albert Giesecke as the new rector of the University. Giesecke initiated a number of modernizing reforms in the bureaucratic structure and curriculum leading to a renaissance of Cuzco culture centered in the burgeoning university life. In addition to other cultural events, Giesecke was an enthusiastic supporter of Inca theatre. Furthermore, Giesecke was instrumental in assisting and publicizing the “discovery” of Machu Picchu in 1911 by his former Yale colleague Hiram Bingham. The discovery of such a well-preserved Inca city consolidated the place of Cuzco in Peruvian and international imaginaries as the archaeological capital of South America (Mendoza 2007).

56 These first modern Quechua dramas, such as Yawar Waqaq (1892), La Tragedia de Waskar (1896), and above all Sumaq T’ika (1899) dramatized the responsibilities of this emerging elite as caretakers of the popular classes and agents of the modernization of rural life (Itier 2000)

57 These erudite Quechua dramatists invented a particular form of Quechua that they claimed represented the language spoken by the royal Inca elites. They distinguished Capac Simi (Royal Language), from Runa Simi (The people‟s language), the everyday Quechua spoken by indigenous commoners (Itier 2000, Cadena (2001).

58 This nationalistic folk opera dramatized a miners‟ strike against the North American corporation that owned the Cerro de Pasco mining corporation since 1904. Robles and his librettist Julio Badouin, developed the image of the Andean condor as a symbol of freedom and autochthonous Peruvian identity (Mendoza 2007).

59 Attending one of the first performances of El Condor Pasa in Lima in 1912 piqued the antiquarian interests of Raoul and the musical interests of Marguerite, a classically-trained composer herself. They befriended Alomía Robles, and after hearing some of the melodies he had collected in his travels throughout the Andes, they decided to embark on their own investigation of the Inca roots of Andean musical traditions.

60 The title reveals their debts to prevailing notions in both indigenismo and French ethnology that contemporary Andean peasants preserved the culture of the Incas intact.

61 Leguia was a self-made capitalist from a modest but well-connected family. Educated at a British commercial school, he made his fortune as an agent and manager for New York Life Insurance Company. In the first decade of the twentieth century, he entered politics as part of the progressive wing of the Civilista Party. His presidency from 1909-1912 revealed the growing rifts between liberal industrialists and the aristocratic export oligarchy within the ruling Civilista Party. The latter won the battle and chased Leguia into exile, where he became the sworn enemy of Civilismo (Klaren 2000: 241-244).

63 Mariátegui himself wrote, “we discovered, in the end, our own tragedy, that of Peru. The European itinerary has been for us the best, the most tremendous discovery of America” (qtd. In Vanden 1986: 120). 328

64 During this period he published frequently in leftist newspapers and journals, and his first book La Escena Contemporanea (The Contemporary Scene), in 1925. In this work, he first began to theorize about the potential to construct a “New Peru,” a national-popular imaginary that drew on the “archaic communism” of the Inca Empire still present in the social structure of the indigenous community (Mariátegui 1925).

65 He argued that peasants retained their racial memories of the Inca regime intact, but had lost their historical memory. Thus, through the interventions of vanguard intellectuals they could liberate themselves from their colonial oppressors, creating a “Nuevo indio” (Leibner 1999: 150-157).

66 An unorthodox Marxist, who rejected the demands of the second Comintern, he argued that Marxism was a flexible theory and praxis adaptable to the historical and cultural conditions of different nations (Liss 1984: 131-138).

67 For example, the last chapter in Siete Ensayos interrogates the revolutionary potential of Peruvian literature. His categorization of literary discourse on the Indian has become one of the most often-cited critical positions in Peruvian literary criticism. He famously distinguished between an earlier indianismo, which exoticized the Indian, and indigenismo, a literary discourse that advocates for the Indian written by mestizos. He further imagined the possibility for a genuine indigenous literature, produced after the moment of revolutionary liberation, which would become the most authentic form of national literature (Mariátegui 1978, Escadajillo 2004, Coronado 2008: 21-51).

68 He was perhaps the most important figure in constructing the mythic discourses of Peruvian dualism, and the “idols behind altars” paradigm, that became central to the configurations of Andean identity by indigenismo and Andeanism (Coronado 2008: 21-51, Mills 1995).

69 Castro Pozo was born into the provincial middle class of the northern department of Piura. As a young lawyer and social scientist, he gravitated toward emerging socialist circles in the 1910s (Franco 1989).

70 In 1936, Castro Pozo extended Mariátegui‟s work and his own fieldwork into a theoretical treatise entitled Del Ayllu al Cooperativismo Socialista (From the Ayllu to Socialist Cooperativism)

71 In the first decade of the twentieth century, Inca theatre and music had mostly confined itself to the representation of the Inca nobility, imagining the emerging vision of national and regional identity of a rising elite intelligentsia. As the genre popularized in the 1910s, it increasingly incorporated contemporary Andean music and dance as performed by anonymous peasant performers in the so-called cuadros costumbristas (Itier 2000, Mendoza 2007).

72 The radical intellectuals associated with Amauta, including Sabogal, Valcárcel, and Uriel García played major roles in this shift, drawing on the folkloric discourses and practices produced by the Mexican and Russian Revolutions (Mendoza 2007: 8).

73 Both Mariátegui and Leguía drew on a common repertoire of images and symbols for their evocations of a new genuinely postcolonial nation, illustrating one of the major arguments of this study. Although socialists and liberal capitalists may have imagined very different political projects for remaking national hegemony throughout the twentieth century, they often drew on quite similar discursive repertoires, evoking the national essence through the indigenous past and promising a utopian future.

74 The scissors dancers appear to have travelled in a single circuit of performance centered in Huamanga, prior to the construction of these roads. Some evidence suggests that in this early period, the performers of the dance were highly-skilled indigenous specialists often patronized by members of the landed gentry, 329

much like the skilled indigenous and mestizo artisans (Bustamante 1941, Arguedas 1958, Vivanco 1976, Cruz Fierro 1982).

Chapter 4

1 The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega Prize is the highest honor in Peruvian letters named after the early colonial mestizo chronicler.

2 Unlike hegemonic notions of mestizaje in Latin American thought, he did not imagine his bicultural identity dissolving into a new homogeneous synthesis. Rather he celebrated the radical heterogeneity embodied in the mastery of distinct cultural competencies. See: De Castro 2002.

3 According to Marisol de la Cadena, Arguedas:”proposed an alternative politics of knowledge, one that saw the necessity of Western reason and its incapacity to translate, let alone capture or replace Andean ways of being [. . .] I want to read Arguedas as proposing multiontologism and a nationalism [. . .] articulated by reason and magic, both on equal standing, and socialist at that” (Cadena 2005: 15).

4 In Latin American literary history, Arguedas is situated as one of the most important precursors of the “Boom” and a founding figure of the literary phenomenon known as “magic realism” (Franco 2006).

5 Rama define “narrative tranculturation” a process whereby Latin American writer situate their work at a cultural intersection between different ethnic and linguistic traditions. He classifies particular writers of the mid-twentieth century, most notably Arguedas, as “los transculturadores,” mediators between dominant and dominated cultures, tradition and modernity, national and regional spaces, and written and oral mediums (Rama 1982, Spitta 1995, Kokotovic 2006). Cornejo Polar defined “heterogeneous literature” as a methodological lens in order to study Latin American literature as a whole. He argues that all literary works from Latin America are products of the collision of cultures since the conquest. He focuses in particular on indigenista literature whose referent, the indigenous, is distinct from the conventional realist aesthetics of the Western novel used to represent the indigenous object. He situates Arguedas as his primary example of the best indigenismo, which “not only takes up the interests of the indigenous peasantry; it also incorporates to varying degrees timidly or boldly, certain literary forms organically derived from its referents” (Cornejo Polar 1978). See also: Cornejo Polar 1996, 1997, Spitta 1995, and Kokotovic 2006).

6 Adding a complex circularity to Rama‟s argument, Ortiz‟s notion of transculturation informed Arguedas‟s own literary and anthropological practice (Rama 1975, Kokotovic 2006).

7 Both the efficacy and redemptive qualities Rama attributed to transculturation have undergone significant critique in recent years. John Beverley argues “the idea of transculturation expresses in both Ortiz and Rama a fantasy of class, gender, and racial reconciliation” (Beverley 1999: 47). However, I concur with Jean Franco who argues we should not simply dismiss such fantasies, which partially constitute Arguedas‟s affective power as a cultural agent whose political value continues to resonate on a collective level (Franco 2006: 10). Franco argues that both Arguedas himself and his advocates have engaged in a complex “ethnopoetics” that she defines as “a form of translation that negotiates the meeting of disparate epistemologies and transforms their energies in the cause of justice and hence political action” (Franco 2006: 172). I suggest that the creativity and constitutive power of the imagination invoked by Franco‟s term and definition bring us much closer to the political force of Arguedas‟s valuation and appropriation of “magic” as an alternative epistemology to Western rationalism.

8 For if the powers of mimesis describes compare to the mimetic capabilities of the scissors dancer, I suggest they apply equally well to Arguedas‟s representations of the scissors dance, drawing on its powers as he attempts to poetically transform Peruvian nationhood. On a similar note, Landreau argues that 330

Arguedas‟s work embodies “the magical, luminous power of language to transform what it touches. To name the nation by bringing its voices into contact, through the language of translation, is to transform it” (Landreau 2002: 185).

9 In their work on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari defined “minor literature” as a deterritorialization of a major language through the introduction of specific elements of a minor language. “Minor literature” is always political in its very existence, taking on a collective value through the creation of new ways of speaking, writing, and being in situations of unequal power. The performative force of “minor literature” relates to what musicologist Alejandro Madrid calls “performative composition,” suggesting “the act of composition might allow a liminal composer to intentionally or unintentionally resolve he contradicting discourses s/he experiences as an individual living at cultural borders or contact zones, while performing his/her self in relation to these discourses as part of the compositional process” (Madrid 2003: 11). Considering the liminal subjectivity of Arguedas and the importance of music as an organizing concept for his work Madrid‟s notion would seem to have some rich resonances with my objectives here.

10 Although born into a privileged class of highland landowners, his orphanhood led him to deeply identify with indigenous culture. Arguedas neatly summarized the basic contours of this autobiographical legend as follows, “Due to very unusual circumstances my childhood took place in two Andean towns where the predominant language was Quechua. Due to the same circumstances, as a child I fell into the protection of monolingual Quechua Indians. My mother died when I was three. Among the Indians I found adequate compensation for my orphanhood. They were my family … I understood and experienced the world as they did … the rivers, the trees, the canyons, many insects, certain rocks and caves had a special meaning and life. Happiness or evil could be caused by them. (qtd. and translated by Landreau 1998: 98)

11 The most notable example is Mario Vargas Llosa‟s book La Utopia Arcaica, which patronizingly praises Arguedas‟s literary work as a beautiful fiction based on a nostalgic vision of the Peruvian nation that struggles against inevitable modernity and progress. For critics like Vargas Llosa, who view the relationship between tradition and modernity as necessarily dichotomous, Arguedas‟s visions for a specifically Andean form of modernity is untenable (Vargas Llosa 1996). As Priscilla Archibald notes, at times it is tempting to read Vargas Llosa‟s text as a self-serving attempt to belittle his primary competition for the title of greatest Peruvian novelist of the twentieth century (Archibald 2007).

12 Roland Forgues has exposed the myth, often disseminated by Arguedas himself later in his life, that he was a mono-lingual Quechua speaker until adolescence (Forgues 1991). For example, in 1968 Arguedas wrote, “I was a monolingual Quechua speaker; I lived during my infancy and childhood in many towns within the immense area in which what Alfredo Torero calls Quechua II is spoken” (Arguedas 1968: 84). Forgues argues that although there is nothing unusual about Arguedas speaking Quechua as a boy, since most highland elites spoke Quechua at a time, the social status of his family almost assuredly meant that he also spoke Spanish since infancy. Furthermore, he only began to represent himself as a mono-lingual Quechua speaker in childhood in the late 1950s, when he went to greater lengths to fashion himself as an indigenous intellectual. Forgues suggested that Arguedas‟s dissemination of the myth was a sincere result of the traumatic death of his mother and abandonment and cruelty on the part of his family, and the tenderness he experienced on the part of Quechua-speaking peasants (Forgues 1991: 47-58).

13 In their well-known text on autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson “adapt the concept of performativity from postmodern theory to define autobiographical occasions as dynamic sites for the performance of identities that become constitutive of subjectivity” (2010: 214).

14 For this reason, I do not believe we should see Arguedas as a particularly trustworthy witness to the scissors dance in an earlier era, as some have suggested (Bigenho 1991, Zevallos Aguilar 2009). He performatively re-created the dance, endowing it with certain affective associations in both his fictional and anthropological writings. I do not mean to diminish the ethnographic value of his testimony, merely to 331

point out that we cannot assume Arguedas‟s viewpoint is the ultimate authority on the scissors dance in a prior, more authentic era.

15 Andahuaylas is located in the western part of the department of Apurimac, about half way between Cuzco and Huamanga. His father was a provincial lawyer and judge from Cuzco who made a modest income and his mother was a member of the landowning elite of Andahuaylas.

16 The years Arguedas lived on his stepmother‟s hacienda in San Juan de Lucanas had profound consequences on the young boy‟s life. He would later explain, “I am a product of my stepmother [. . .] She was the owner of half of the town, and she had many indigenous servants and the traditional prejudices and ignorance of what was an Indian, and she had as much contempt and resentment towards me as the Indians, she decided that I would live with them in the kitchen” (Arguedas 1969: 36).

17 His father, who found a job as a judge in Puquio, was absent most of the week.

18 In an interview with Sara Castro Klaren, he admitted that these events were the cause of his life-long aversion to sex, that he associated more with violence and domination than pleasure (Castro Klaren ). Arguedas frequently thematized sexuality as a form of violence in his fiction, especially Warma Kuyay (1935), Los Ríos Profundos (1958), and El Zorro de Arriba y El Zorro de Abajo (1971) (Fass Emery 1996). The brutish ways of his stepbrother became the model for the figure of the archetypal gamonal, a term employed in Arguedas‟s later fiction for the most violent exploiters of indigenous labor (Pinilla 1994: 38).

19 In the short story “Los Comuneros de Utec-Pampa” (1934), Arguedas wrote, “The Utec are not humble or cowardly Indians; they are propertery owners. Everyone together works the land, and when the fields are full, they pull down the fences that block the entries to the granges and herd the animals on, so they can eat the sweet green maize husks. Utec, then, is for everyone, equally; the animals run about the fields as if they belonged to the same owner. For this the Utec are united and proud. No misti abuses the Utec” (qtd. In Pinilla 1994: 39).

20 They became models for Arguedas‟s vision of an alternative Andean modernity, a central theme of his literary and anthropological work. Through their own volition, and driven by the competitive desire to become more modern than surrounding towns, the ayllus of Puquio built a 150 kilometer road from Puquio to Nazca on the coast in 28 days. This act of extraordinary collective effort directly linked the city of Puquio to coastal cities, and Lima in particular, empowering the indigenous communities further as they gained greater access to commerce. Arguedas would narrate this extraordinary event in his first novel, Yawar Fiesta (1941) (Pinilla 1994: 38).

21 He would later state that “my childhood and part of his adolescence occurred amongst the Indians of Lucanas, they are the people that I love and understand the most” (Arguedas 1966: 18).

22 While his writing shows a clear identification with the culture of Lucanas, it also displays an appreciation and knowledge of regional cultures throughout the Andes.

23 These travels and his stay in Abancay inspired his most celebrated novel, Los Ríos Profundos (1985).

24 When he entered the Colegio “San Luis Gonzaga” in Ica, the secretary of the school named Bolivar, saw his scholastic record full of 20s (100% score). The secretary exclaimed to the boy, “These serranos! They always put 20s in their records when they recite any old verse: Here we will see if you achieve 20s.”24 The young Arguedas took the challenge to heart, and achieved the record of the most 20s in all of the history of San Luis de Gonzaga because it was a responsibility of the serrano to do it and I did it” (Arguedas 1969: 39). 332

25 The prejudice he experienced firsthand in Ica also came in the form of rejection by the first girl he loved. Arguedas was madly in with Pompeya, the most beautiful girl in his class. He spent hours each day writing poetry in her honor. When he finally gathered the courage to tell her how he felt, she flatly rejected him. She told him, “I don‟t want to have anything to do with serranos!” (Arguedas 1969: 39).

26 On the pages of Antorcha, the autobiographical self-making project of the mature Arguedas was already evident. A short article published in a 1928 edition of the magazine was entitled, “The Thought of (of my work in preparation „The History of a Man”) Jose Maria Arguedas.” Arguedas and his companions were highly influenced by the writings of Victor Hugo, particularly Les Miserables. The stark class divisions of Hugo‟s novels resonated with their experiences in Andean Peru. Arguedas told an interviewer in 1937, “When I began to read books, no author influenced me until I read Victor Hugo and Baudelaire.” Another major influence on Arguedas and the other writers of Antorcha, was much closer to home. The magazine Amauta edited by Peruvian socialist pioneer Jose Carlos Mariátegui was in wide circulation and quite popular in the Peruvian highlands of the time. Arguedas described his participation in detailed and serious readings of Amauta with other members of the Antorcha writing team (Pinilla 1994: 54-55).

27 The other students in his literature classes saw his direct knowledge of indigenous culture as unique and valuable. He later remembered, “The students of my generation that today are important people, saw in me a person that brought something they did not know and they looked at me with a great deal of respect and admiration.” Encouraged by this sense of admiration, Arguedas began to intentionally fashion himself as a Quechua-speaking Indian first and an educated writer second (Arguedas 1966: 18, Pinilla 1994: 66).

28 In a later article, Arguedas wrote, “Mariátegui did not have a wealth of information about indigenous culture. He had not studied it, nor did he have the opportunity or time to do so. He did not know it from experience and it is probable that in those days he did not even know that much about Inca culture” (Arguedas 1978: 192).

29 Before the publication of his first novel, Yawar Fiesta (1941), Arguedas published twelve short stories, “Warma Kuyay” (1933), Los Comuneros de Ak‟ola” (1934), “Los Comuneros de Utec Pampa” (1934), K‟ellkatay- Pampa” (1934), “El Vengativo” (1935), “El Cargador” (1935), “Doña Caytana” (1935), “Agua” (1935), “Los Escoleros” (1935), “Yawar” (1937), “El Baranco” (1939), and “Runa Yupay” (1939). See: Lambright 2007: 45).

30 Mariátegui distinguished between indianismo, indigenismo, and an authentically indigenous literature. He characterized Indianismo as an exotic representation of indigenous culture. Indigenismo grew out of the genuine interest of non-Indians in improving the lives of Indians. Nevertheless, because of a lack of intimate knowledge, it too was subject to romanticism. Mariátegui yearned for the day when a genuine indigenous literature would be born in order to speak for the “new Peruvianness” (Mariátegui 1971, Escajadillo 1994).

31 Arguedas distanced himself from indigenismo. He wrote, “people speak of the indigenista novel, and my novels have been called indigenista or Indian. And that is not the case. It‟s a matter of their being novels in that Andean Peru appears in all of its elements in its disturbing and confused human reality, of which the Indian is really one of many different characters” (Arguedas 1985: xv).

32 He would later tell an amusing anecdote about how he wrote the stories originally in the most proper Spanish he knew. He gave them to some of his classmates, who would later become important authors, to read. They thought they were very good. But when he read them again he thought they were artificial and horrible. Against the wishes of his friends he tore them up and wrote them again, combining Quechua syntax with Spanish, “in a truly infernal struggle with language.”32 He put the stories away for a while.

333

When he came back to them, he thought they were true to the world and people he knew as a child (Arguedas 1969: 41).

33 He emphatically declared that this invented language was a “fiction.” In a later essay he expressed clear satisfaction with the exaggerated ways that other writers had appropriated this invented language. He feared that the long and arduous process with which he developed a style capable of expressing the “soul” of Quechua speech in Spanish was being used to further disfigure and stereotype indigenous characters (Arguedas 1985: xix).

34 He later wrote, “to realize oneself, to translate oneself, to transform a seemingly alien language into a legitimate torrent, to communicate to the almost foreign language the stuff of which our spirit is made, that is the hard and difficult question” (Arguedas 1985:. xvi).

35 He defined these factions as, “the landowner, thoroughly convinced through the acts of centuries of his human superiority over the Indians, and the Indians, who have arduously conserved the unity of their culture, by the very fact of being subjected to and confronted by such a fanatical and barbaric force” (Arguedas 1985: xvi).

36 In “Doña Caytana,” (1934) like “Los Muertos de los Arango” (1954), the scissors dance appears very briefly as a charismatic element of Andean festivity.

37 According to Cornejo Polar, “the traditional indigenista novel repeats a scheme based on the accumulation of dispossessions, usurpations, and abuses to such a point that it produced either the destruction of the Indian‟s capacity for resistance or a violent and heroic, but always unsuccessful response” (Cornejo Polar 1997: 59).

38 The novel pays attention to both the affinities and tensions between Puquio‟s four indigenous ayllus.38 It not only shows the intricate hierarchies between principal and subordinate misti landlords but also the subtle ways in which indigenous culture has shaped the misti elite.38 Furthermore, Arguedas adds new intermediary social actors the conventional cast of characters of the indigenista novel. Both new middle- class mestizo business owners and migrants from the popular classes have arisen out of the modernizing transformations of Andean social space. The road that connects Puquio to the coast, built in 1926 by the freely chosen initiative of the indigenous ayllus, reconfigured Puquio into a booming commercial center almost overnight. Arguedas returned to the scene of Yawar Fiesta, in order to analyze the social, and cultural changes of Puquio in his 1956 essay “Puquio: Una Cultura en Proceso de Cambio” (Arguedas 1985).

39 Although the mistis appreciate the dancer from the elevated position of the balcony, the townspeople‟s reaction unifies the four indigenous ayllus with pride, “the rejoicing was the same for all the Indians of Puquio. And inside themselves they were taunting the mistis” (Ibid. 31).

40 Misha Kokotovic convincingly argues that Vargas Llosa is unable or unwilling to see beyond the binary configuration of tradition versus modernity and equates the democratizing elements of modernity solely with the civilizing project of the coastal authorities (Kokotovic 2006).

41 Misitu is a legendary wild bull who lives in the altiplano above Puquio. The capture of Misitu by the K‟ayau Indians is one of the extended episodes of the novel. Kokotovic suggests that the creativity with which the ayllu approaches what has been deemed an impossible task demonstrates Arguedas‟s faith in the capacity of indigenous communities to actively participate in modernity (Kokotovic 2006).

334

42 While it is true that his depression worsened in the 1940s, other historical factors played an important role in this literary silence and if we take into account the totality of his intellectual production this period was not as sterile and unproductive as previously thought (Murra 1996, Archibald 2003, Kokotovic 2006).

43 As Muñoz (1982) notes, the style and themes of Yawar Fiesta reveal Arguedas‟s deepening interests in ethnography, an endeavor he took up full-time after the novel‟s publication.

44 I concur with Murra that an examination of Arguedas‟s anthropological production counters the image of the author as a tortured artist who suffered from debilitating depression and endured long unproductive periods of his life (Ibid. 272).

45 A television documentary on Arguedas‟s life claimed that sitting at a table at the Peña Pancho Fierro, Arguedas re-encountered danza de las tijeras bringing him warm memories of his childhood in Puquio. I have not found any documentary evidence that specifically substantiates this claim, but it is possible that Arguedas himself introduced the scissors dancers that visited him in 1937 to the Peña Pancho Fierro (Guerrero 2005).

46 In prison, he wrote his second book, Canto Kechwa, in which he compiled and translated 21 Quechua folk songs. The work includes a prologue that situates Arguedas‟s folkloric activities as a personal and professional quest and places his personal experience in a unique dialectic with scientific knowledge (Nauss Millay 2005: 78). After serving his prison term, he married Celia Bustamante and took a job as a Spanish teacher in Sicuani (Pinilla 1994: 74). He found his return to the highlands refreshing and used the surroundings as his personal laboratory, recruiting his students to help collect the region‟s folklore (Ibid. 74). He published articles on Andean music, dance, festival, and visual arts in La Prensa of Buenos Aires (Nauss Millay 2005: 78). In 1940, Arguedas travelled with a congregation of rural schoolteachers to Mexico, where he encountered state-sponsored anthropology, inspiring his hopes that through folkloric representation indigenous cultures could be incorporated into the Peruvian national imaginary (Pinilla 1994: 75, Nauss Millay 2005: 78).

47 Whereas Arguedas‟s childhood memories were rooted in southern Ayacucho, most other representations of the dance from this time were linked to intellectual movements in the city of Huamanga. The road- building projects of the 1920s, which Arguedas had described in Yawar Fiesta, uprooted the departmental capital from its former prominence as a regional economic and cultural center (Arguedas 1958, Urrutia 1976, Tucker 2005, Ulfe 2005).

48 Furthermore, Roberto Mac-lean included a rare look at the scissors dance from the northern department of Arequipa (Mac-lean 1941).48 Respected national folklorist and musicologist Arturo Jimenez Borja classified and the described the ideophone of the “Tijeras” in his Instrumentos Musicales en el Peru (1951).

49 1946 saw the publication of the landmark Handbook of South American Indians, edited by Julian Steward. The volume became the primary textbook for the Institute of Ethnology at San Marcos, founded in the same year by Luis Valcárcel. A number of its North American contributors spent time as faculty members at the Institute, and the anthropology program founded in the same year at the Universidad San Antonio Abad de Cuzco. Unlike the case of Mexico, while the initial years of Peruvian anthropology initiated a relationship between ethnography and state politics, most of the funding for ethnographic projects came from North American and European institutions (Degregori 2000: ). Thus, from its very beginnings Peruvian anthropology was deeply indebted to North American capital and theoretical frameworks.

50 The emblematic intervention of applied anthropology in the dynamics of capitalist modernization in Peru was the Cornell-Vicos Project, which used new techniques of rapid modernization to remake subjugated hacienda Indians into self-sufficient agricultural entrepreneurs. As numerous recent studies have shown, 335

the Vicos project was informed by good intentions and made undeniable gains in increasing the peasants‟ standard of living. However, its blinding faith in science as a non-ideological approach to social change contributed to strategies that lacked sufficient understanding of the history, culture, and agency of the Andean subjects they ostensibly attempted to liberate (Degregori 2000, Archibald 2003, Kokotovic 2006).

51 Arguedas struggled mightily with anthropological approaches to knowledge and often self-effacingly depreciated his lack of theoretical preparation. Nevertheless, anthropological study facilitated his acquisition of important positions in newly-formed public cultural institutions, most notably Head of the Folklore Division of the Ministry of Education from 1947 until 1963 (Pinilla 1994: 78-79).

52 The primary object of Manrique‟s critique is Arguedas‟s emphasis on the mestizo as a hopeful figure for the future of Peruvian nationhood, that Manrique suggests betrays the deep influence of Mexican nationalism on Arguedas‟s thought. Arguedas did praise the strong sense of national identity and what he perceived as an organic connection between the state and the people in Mexico at that time. In a number of early articles he even appears to advocate “de-indianization” as a solution to Peru‟s social divisions. However, Manrique takes these statements out of context, implying that they refer to a simple process of assimilation or the creation of a new and homogenous synthesis as in the Mexico model of nationhood. By “de-indianization” Arguedas refers to a process Marisol de la Cadena has called “indigenous mestizaje,” the transcendence of the subjugated position of the “indio” in favor of greater contact with the forces of modernity (Cadena 2000). To Arguedas, mestizaje implied not a homogenous synthesis, but rather the dismantling of stable identities creating a highly contradictory and unstable character endowed with the vitality of self-invention (Archibald 2003: 404). Furthermore, Arguedas‟s depictions of mestizaje were inclusive rather than exclusive of indigeneity. According to Silvia Spitta, “In Arguedian narrative there are no pure Indians and no pure mistis. Everyone, to a greater or lesser degree, is situated along a continuum of mestizaje” (Spitta 1995: 141).

53 While at the same time they recognize the external hybridity Arguedas valued, these studies tend to undermine it by invoking a timeless Andean content that constitutes the dance‟s essence. See: Vivanco 1976, Nuñez Rebaza 1985, 1990, Cavero Carrasco 2001, Arce Sotelo 2006).

54 Contemporary ethnographers have borrowed Arguedas‟s definition of this culture-area, shortened to La Región Chanka, in order to situate the scissors dance as a pinnacle of a timeless regional identity with a remarkable continuity since the Pre-Columbian period (Nuñez Rebaza 1990, Cavero Carrasco 2001, Arce Sotelo 2006). Although he evokes Pre-Inca ethnic groups in naming the culture-area and traces the genealogical roots of the unity he describes to the Chanka Confederacy, Arguedas clearly argues that the shared cultural heritage of the region was produced by the economic and cultural routes of the colonial period. The Hispanic character of the regional capital of Huamanga interacted with the almost entirely indigenous populations of surrounding areas to create dynamic networks of commercial and religious artisanship along a multi-directional axis of cultural exchange.

55 Retablos are hand-made religious art pieces traditionally used in the Department of Ayacucho as part of the celebration of festivities for the branding of livestock. Sabogal and Alicia Bustamante discovered Lopez Antay‟s work in the 1930s, just as the construction of highways was undercutting the market for traditional religious objects in Huamanga (Arguedas 1978, Ulfe 2005).

56 On the one hand, the economic boom created by the highway to the coast has liberated the indigenous communities from their subjugation by misti landlords and transformed the relationship between mestizo merchants and peasant agriculturalists from antagonistic into a mostly symbiotic partnership. He notes that indigenous parents have intentionally engaged in a project of indigenous-mestizaje by encouraging their children to become educated mestizos (Arguedas 1985: 159). On the other hand, he cites the authority of several elder leaders of Puquio‟s ayllus who express concern that the younger generation has little knowledge of deeply-held community traditions. 336

57 Unlike later Andeanist ethnographers, Arguedas did not censor or seem embarrassed by the multiple articulations of these myths with Christianity, but rather highlights them in order to foreground the creativity of Andean cultural invention.

58 Arguedas portrayed this technique as the end of an exhaustive search that finally yielded “the use of Spanish as the legitimate means of expressing the Peruvian world of the Andes; noble whirlwind in which different spirits, as if forged on antipodal stars, struggle, attract, repel, and mingle with one another amid silent snows and lakes, frosts and fire” (Arguedas 185: xx).

59 As a number of critics have noticed, the novel does not merely represent Andean music as its object, but functions much like a musical composition itself (Rowe 1979, Rama 1982, Cornejo Polar 1997).59 Arguedas‟s incorporation of the musicality of Quechua culture and language into the novel is the primary reason Rama and other critics have celebrated Los Ríos Profundos as the pinnacle of “narrative transculturation” in Latin American literature.

60 Anne Lambright argues, “Ernesto openly expresses his desire to touch the people, to reach an audience and participate in its transformation, to return to the people their soul” (Lambright 2007: 137). She suggests that the greatest achievement of the novel is the projection of the mestizo artist or intellectual able to move between and bring together Western and indigenous elements, culture and nature, the masculine and feminine (Ibid.). But in her enthusiasm Lambright ignores the obvious. Ernesto was unable to break into the magical virtuoso performance he desired, indicating a continuing paralysis and doubt.

61 Many critics have picked upon the difficulties of identifying the number of Los Ríos Profundos. Some divide the narrator into multiple voices, such as the older Ernesto and the impartial ethnographer (Cornejo Polar 1993). Estelle Tarica argues that these multiple voices cannot be separated. She suggests that the most important quality of the narrator is its self-effacing nature, almost entirely without a distinct persona of its own (Tarica 97). Other authors have attributed this self-effacing quality to what Arguedas had learned from the conventions of ethnographic narrative (Fass-Emery 1996).

62 Indeed, from this moment on, the scissors dance is powerfully linked to death in general and Arguedas‟s death-wish in particular in the multi-faceted work of the last decade of Arguedas‟s life.

63 The success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 bolstered his confidence in the liberation of the Andean people, which he saw as already taking place. Arguedas‟s solidarity with the demands of peasant movements sprouting throughout the highlands and his participation in the emergence of a dynamic urban Andean culture of migration linked Andean agency in both rural and urban spaces and inspired Arguedas‟s revived articulations of Andean modernity (Manrique 1999, Kokotovic 2006).

64 His involvement in the development of spaces for the production of Andean art and music in the capital city goes back to his role as a translator and guide to visiting scissors dancers from Puquio and his close involvement in the Peña Pancho Fierro. Arguedas‟s treatment of the phenomenon of mass Andean migration to the capital through the significant role the Centro Union Lucanas, an organization of migrants from Puquio in Lima, played in his first novel Yawar Fiesta.

65 In another article, Arguedas wrote that these sentiments were held even by self-identified educated indigenous elites such as the indigenista archaeologist Julio Tello. He praises Tello‟s energy and his superior scientific knowledge for his day, however, Tell “lost sight of the living Indian. He admired folklore, but having formed a group of dancers from his native town of Huarochiri, he dressed them in „stylized‟ costumes created from the inspiration in archaeological motives, with contempt for the typical dress of the people of Huarochiri” (Arguedas 1978: 191).

337

66 While some scholars have critiqued Arguedas‟s involvement with the romantic “folklorization” of Andean culture by promoting theater-staged presentations based on urban-Western aesthetics, Arguedas followed ongoing popular processes that sought to appropriate Western staging practices to achieve a presence in broader public spheres for marginalized indigenous and mestizo subjects (Romero 2000, Alfaro 2004).

67 This style of “urban-country Andean music” included the adaptation of traditional huayno’s and other folksong genres to urban-Western aesthetics with a star system of solo singers. They introduced microphones, vibrato, stylized versions of traditional dress, and modern hair styles to Andean folk music (Turino 1990, 2008).

68 According to Murra, Arguedas told him that one of his finest achievements was facilitating the recording of Andean music (Murra 1996: 286). See also: Romero 2000:

69 According to the violinist, one day Arguedas showed up at his humble home in a poor district of Lima, offering him a contract to perform at the Peña Pancho Fierro (Gushiken 1979: 30).

70 Juan Ansión proclaimed that Arguedas was “the first man that gave a serious impulse towards the development of a coherent cultural politics in Peru” (Ansión 1986: 194).

71 In an earlier article in 1962, he praised the results of such state troupes in Russia and Mexico, arguing that Peru had sufficient cultural diversity to surpass even these well-organized groups. He argued that there two paths existed towards similar excellence, “the perfection of ballet choreography and ethnographic techniques or the presentation of original indigenous performers from rural communities themselves” (Arguedas 1976: 232). His initial attempts at forming such a state-sponsored theatrical troupe appear to be inspired by both goals.

72 In a 1962 article, Arguedas wrote “We have been interested and even active witnesses- are nearly repentant of that- to first, the discovery and then the great diffusion and the disorders and transformations that particularly in Lima, these arts have undergone” (Arguedas 1976: 209).

73 It is certain that his ideas of cultural authenticity transformed over the years. In 1944, he claimed that “only the native-born artist, he who inherits the genius of folklore, can interpret and transmit it to others” (Arguedas 1976: 233).

74 In a letter to John Murra, Arguedas confessed, “I am very happy with this story because it has been maturing for eight years and I wrote it in two days [. . .] Rasu Niti was a legendary dancer from Puquio” (Murra and Lopez-Baralt 1996: 66). This statement situates the story‟s sources within oral tradition and the origins of Arguedas‟s adaptation to around the time he re-encountered the dance in Lima through his personal relationship to migrant performers such as Máximo Damián Huamaní. It also clearly places the rapid and inspired process of writing within an enormously creative and productive period of Arguedas‟s career in 1961 and 1962.

75 About the scissors he writes, “Each dancer can produce in his hands with this instrument a light music, like a small water or even fire, depending on the rhythm of the orchestra and the „spirit‟ that protects the dansak” (Arguedas 1974: 173).

76 As William Rowe suggests, “I understand that the scissors dance includes a series of Christian elements, nevertheless, in the story „La Agonia de Rasu Niti‟ these elements do not appear; Arguedas excludes them. It appears that Arguedas in this story is constructing the possibility of an autonomous Andean culture, not dependent, perhaps in a utopian mode” (Rowe 1984: 28). Although Arguedas has not eliminated the foreign elements of the dance, he downplays their significance, while in other cases it is this very hybridity 338

that he celebrates. He aimed at depicting a coherent and persuasive intimate portrait of Quechua culture as a living entity (Zevallos Aguilar 2009). The „living juice‟ of this culture is the profound relationship between the human community and the natural world, embodied in the figure of the scissors dancer (Rowe 1998: 48).

77 He begins by energetically dancing el jaykuy (entrance), and continues on to the sisi nina (fire ant). (Ibid. 175). Little by little his body begins to fail. At a certain point, Lurucha changes the melody to the Waqtay (the battle).

78 In Andean mythology, Yawar Mayu is a subterranean river of the underworld that both originates in the realm of death and is the source of life. According to Carlos Huaman, “This Yawar Mayu is the renewal of life, of man and of nature. Its essence irrigates the countryside, quenches the thirst of livestock, awakens music and dance and nourishes the hunger of man” (Huamán 2004: 211).

79 At this point, Lurucha plays melodic sequences that symbolize the coming of a new day, including lucero kanchi (the illuminated star) and the wallpa wak’ay (the rooster‟s call) (Ibid. 178).

80 The enthusiastic reception of the work by both critics and general readers has increased over the years. Its concise-length and simplistic beauty has made it a favorite of Peruvian secondary school teachers to teach to their students. Literary critic Antonio Cornejo Polar called it “an admirable story, the most beautiful of those that Arguedas wrote” (Cornejo Polar 1997: 164).

81 In a letter to his psychiatrist Lola Hoffman, Arguedas proudly declared “The publication of „La Agonia de Rasu Niti‟ had created great enthusiasm amongst the young people and critics‟ (Murra and Lopez-Baralt 1996: 79). One young critic claimed the story demonstrated that Arguedas the major writer in Peru of that time (Ibid.)

82 According to anthropologist Luis Millones, the first time he heard the idea that the scissors dance represented the inheritance of the sixteenth century movement was in 1966 or 1967 at a private party in Arguedas‟s apartment. One of the scissors dance performers close to the circle of Arguedas made this claim, and a number of the folklorists and musicologists in Arguedas‟s circle agreed (Millones 2007: 57, Personal Interview “Luis Millones” 2009).

83 One of these performers was José Navarro, originally from Apurimac. He underwent a major training process learning the scissors dance in Lima before performing the short theatrical adaptation, directed by veteran Peruvian director Sara Joffre. He has since migrated to London, where he performs the scissors dance in a variety of theatrical venues (Personal Interview “Sara Joffre” 2009). The other theatrical adaptation was created and performed by Javier Maraví, director of Grupo Cultural Waytay. This actor is originally from Huancayo, where he learned the scissors dance style from Huancavelica. While he only considers himself an amateur, his brother, Julio Maraví, is a well-known scissors dancer from the Huancavelica community (Personal Interview “Javier Maraví” 2009).

84 Some evidence suggests that he originally intended the short story as a kind of suicide note. In a letter to his psychiatrist Lola Hoffman referring to “Rasu Niti” he wrote, “I am sending you two versions of the story that I wrote with the idea of suicide. I said farewell to life writing this story, which as you will see is more of a song to life than to desperation” (Murra and Lopez-Baralt 1996: 77). However, after publishing the story in 1962, Arguedas approached his life and work with a renewed vigor.

85 Thus, Arguedas significantly complicates his earlier attempts at performative autobiography in a powerful authorial act that seeks “to write the social into being and even more to write the self taken as its medium of expression” (Archibald 2007: 6).

339

86 As late as the 1950s, Chimbote was a small fishing village that exploded almost overnight to become the largest supplier of fishmeal in the world. By the mid-1960s its population bloated to nearly 200,000, 70% of whom were migrants from the Andean highlands (Ortega 1990, Lambright 2007: 143).

87 Soon, he discovered that ethnographic writing or social realism were inadequate mediums for the expression of the convulsive transformations produced by the capitalist modernity which he experienced in Chimbote. He abandoned his earlier attempts at social realism and adapted the techniques of the modernist avant-garde in a novel tortured by alienation and the degradation of the natural and social environment.

88 The fictional sections of the novel paint Chimbote as an oppressive environment, degraded by massive pollution and the contamination of the social environment. Prostitution serves as a potent metaphor throughout the novel attesting to the effects of unbridled capitalist development on a once peaceful community (Archibald 4, Ortega 1990: xi, Lambright 2007).

89 Furthermore, Roland Forgues argues that, “On observing the deep mutation suffered by Chimbote‟s society, a mutation that radically questions the ideas he had previously formed about mestizaje and the social and cultural integration of the Indians and other marginalized sectors, the writer had to confront the destabilization of what had until then constituted the very foundation of his work” (qtd. in Moreiras 2001). His argument rests on the assumption that Arguedas‟s work posits a myth of mestizaje as a resolution of difference. In addition, he assumes that Arguedas could not adapt his previously held ideas and beliefs to changing circumstances.

90 Even many authors who take a more measured approach to the dystopian aspects of Los Zorros tend to ultimately interpret the novel as a representation of the collapse of Arguedas‟s social vision (Cornejo Polar 1990, Lambright 2007).

91 Many of the Arguedas‟s own statements refute this interpretation.

92 Archibald argues for the “depoliticization” of the author‟s suicide and the „recovery of individual pathology” as an explanation for his death. She further suggests that “depoliticizing” the act of suicide does not imply the depolitization of Arguedas‟s writing, but rather a recognition of the political agency of both Arguedas as a productive and creative artist and the strongly-drawn characters of the novel “whose agency jumps from the page” (13).

93 Archibald, as well as Kokotovic (2006), and Lambright (2007) bring to light the resourcefulness of Andean migrant culture despite the dehumanizing effects of the environment. Particularly in the novel‟s second half, the multiple protagonists achieve some success in constructing “a radically democratic community with, not in spite of, cultural difference, these characters engage one another in the process of creating meaning and community out of heterogeneity” (Archibald 14).

94 In this vein, Julio Ortega offers perhaps the most generous assessment of Los Zorros as “an allegory of nationality reformulated at the center of modernization, where life and death are not in opposition, but yield the word and plot to an unknown world, ancient and future, apocalyptic and renascent” (Ortega 2000: xv).

95 That Arguedas used the scissors dance as a surrogate for his own authorial consciousness and staged his own death upon the model of “La Agonia de Rasu Niti” speaks to his cultivation of a new cosmopolitan Andean public with heterogeneous competencies.

96 Lienhard argues that the zorro-danzaq, “in its quality as actor and sign of oral tradition theatricalizes the struggle between the conventional novel and popular tradition inside the text. This struggle represents the values of the Peruvian people, Pre-Columbian, contemporary, and future, brotherhood and reciprocity against hierarchy” (Lienhard 1981: 143). 340

97 Luís Arista Montoya suggests that in 1966 Arguedas gave a conference presentation entitled “La Motivación del Escritor” in which he argued that the writer, at least in his own case, was a medium possessed by the Wamanis. He characterizes his own persona in a similar manner as Rasu Niti, the great dansak. Thus, Arguedas initiated the broader shift in which the scissors dance would later become a model for the modern Andean self (Arista Montoya 2011).

Chapter 5

1 The paradigmatic model for the new Peruvian man was the modern Andean mestizo, competent in urban and western knowledge but retaining his ancestral memory of traditional Andean culture.

2 The Golden Age of this genre occurred during the Cold War as a spectacular yet unthreatening form of cultural diplomacy within and between nations of antagonist ideological blocs (Shay 2002: 1, 231).

3 The paradigmatic models for such folklore companies, most often fostered by second and third-world nations, were the Moyseyev Ballet of the USSR and the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico choreographed by Amalia Hernandez (Shay 2002).

4 Believing that Peruvian folklore had become distorted, Santa Cruz adapted the techniques of “Discovery and Development of the Sense of Rhythm” which she had developed for her earlier company “Teatro y Danzas Negras del Perú” (Santa Cruz 1979: 1, Feldman 2006: 77). Through these techniques, she sought to help the performers rediscover the authentic spirit of the distinct dances. Furthermore, she only selected performers who had learned folkloric traditions in their native home as part of the ensemble.

5 In one interview she described folklore as “pure life- the wisdom of a people who had discovered how to live harmoniously with each other and with nature” (Barba 1978).

6 Furthermore, he distanced himself from beliefs in the pachamama or the Wamanis, the central elements of rural folk religion often associated with the dance.

7 The group‟s separation with the violinist Máximo Damián Huamaní shortly after Arguedas‟s death was due to a supposed lack of discipline and punctuality on the part of the violinist.

8 Indeed, in a moment of ironic humor, one recent newspaper article imagines “satirically that in one of his most authentic and patriotic moments Velasco could have sent an able compatriot to learn to dance at the Volsca Russian Ballet, in order to later translate what he learned to Andean culture [. . .] How millennial could this dance be?” Although simplified and meant to be taken as a joke, this suggestion contains a kernel of truth (Smith Quilca and Romero 2006).

9 It is also telling that staged performances of the scissors dance frequently invite comparisons to the emblematic masculine virtuosity of the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico‟s famous reconfiguration of the Danza del Venado (Yaqui Deer Dance).

10 Valentín swears that John Travolta borrowed one of the group‟s iconic movements in Saturday Night Fever (Personal Interview “Valentín Chiara” 2009). While it is not possible to verify this claim, it is certainly possible as the Conjunto Nacional de Folklore toured the United States in 1975, including performances in New York and Los Angeles.

11 Valentín‟s son Fredy carries on the family tradition as a professional folklorist who studied at the Escuela Nacional de Folklore “José María Arguedas.” He teaches over 60 Peruvian dances to Peruvian and Latin American immigrants in Los Angeles, CA. His more advanced students perform an annual large- 341

scale concert at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center. Although Fredy does not teach the scissors dance, he and his brother perform the dance as soloists during these concerts. He told me that when he performs the scissors dance he feels like himself, but when he performs other dances he is only imitating. As his final requirement for his degree at the Escuela Nacional de Folklore, he is currently finishing his thesis which combines his own experiences as a professional folk dancer and choreographer with ethnographic field research on the scissors dance in his family‟s hometown in the Parinacochas province of Ayacucho (Personal Interview “Fredy Chiara” 2008).

12 This speech has been published in several other sources, including Recopilación de Textos Sobre José María Arguedas (1976).

13 He has appeared in numerous documentaries about the author‟s life, annual commemorations for Arguedas‟s birth and death, academic conferences, and is an obligatory reference for journalistic and academic articles about the famous Peruvian author.

14 The social environment rarely tolerated public displays of indigenous or highland identity, obliging migrants to at least partially assimilate urban-Creole lifestyle in order to acquire a degree of social mobility (Schaedel 1979: 409, Turino 1993: 30-31).

15 Anibal Quijano argued that unstructured urban growth had brought about the rise of a new sociocultural subject; the urban Andean cholo. He contended that this process of “cholification,” “was not only a stage on the road to acculturation, but develops in large part through the formation of a cultural structure distinct from those in conflict” (Quijano 1980: 110). The RGAF drew on progressive intellectual discourses which saw this emerging group as a foundation of a new national-popular with the potential to resolve the contradictions of the Creole republic.

16 The first organized land invasions occurred in the late 1940s, just east of the established areas of central Lima (Driant 1991, Burt 2007: 93).

17 These invasions formed through family and regional networks, planning for months and enacted the occupation of unused public land on a single night.

18 The barriadas are clearly an improvement over the older inner-city slums, giving migrants the opportunity to own their own homes and build their own communities. (Millones 1978, Schaedel, De Soto 1989, Matos Mar 2004).

19 During the 1970s, both scholars and the national press finally took notice of the cultural phenomenon of provincial music in the capital. At least three different newspaper articles figured coliseo performances as the sacred ritual of an emergent cholo identity in the process of redefining the nation (Canedo Reyes 1973, Roel Pineda 1977, Levano 1979).

20 For example, the regional association Centro Union Lucanas plays a major role in Arguedas‟s first novel, Yawar Fiesta (1985 [1941]). Arguedas argued for the potential of urban migration to create positive change much earlier than other scholarly and literary commentators, as the former comuneros become empowered within their communities of origin through their urban experience.

21 During this same period, many associations shifted their central activities to culturally unmarked soccer matches to the staging of urban reproductions of fiestas from their place of origin as highland culture became significantly less marginal in urban Lima (Turino 1993: 210).

22 Some of the associations formed by the first wave of Andean migrants were able to purchase small parcels of lead near the city center where they constructed walled-in locales for sports and cultural 342

activities. In the 1970s, some of the newer associations established larger locales in the barriadas of the conos.

23 Admission fees, as well as the sale of concessions, are central fund-raising mechanisms for the associations who use them for other cultural events, towards the purchase of a locale, and to commission works for their corresponding place of origin.

24 First, various less-specialized folk dance troupes, often schoolchildren, stage short presentations of local folk dances.

25 This phase of the fiesta includes only minimal participation from the scissors dance performers, who often gather in a circle drinking beer away from the main dance area.

26 These events employ or give business to costume-makers and embroiderers, the makers of musical instruments, sound system operators, radio programs, the printers for the ubiquitous promotional flyers, food and beverage service workers, and photographers.

27 Nuñez Rebaza classifies a series of types of performers based on what years they arrived in Lima, and their level of knowledge of the dance before they migrated. I prefer to refer to these distinctions as generations, and recognize these categories are more fluid and internally heterogeneous than she suggests. Nevertheless, this distinction between the first generational wave of migrant performers (and audiences) which arrived between 1945 and 1960, and the second wave, which arrived between 1960 and 1980 is a useful heuristic framework for demarcating the competition for distinction and various tensions amongst the performers.

28 The first wave artists rarely performed or even attended fiestas costumbristas, in some cases because of advanced age and sometimes because of the conditions of poverty and heavy drinking on display in these events.

29 Later ethnographers not only found a greater pool of potential informants amongst the larger and more sustained migrant community from this region, but the aesthetic and ritual elements of this particular style conformed more to Andeanist expectations of authentic indigenous Andean culture.

30 The spaces for scissors dance performance of the Ayacucho style remain divided between the large locale of ASU (Asociacion de Sociedades Unidas) in La Victoria near the traditional city center, and a constantly growing network of spaces in the southern cone.

31 A much smaller group of performers from Huancavelica arrived with the first wave and found some success during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in several large folkloric companies. Nevertheless, at a greater distance from Arguedas and other nationally-renowned folklorists, this community was not able to establish much continuity. The dancers, in particular, came and went or stopped practicing the artform altogether at a young age. Only a few musicians, particularly the legendary violinist Leoncio Rua, represented a fragile continuity for urban representations of the Huancavelica style.

32 The presence of folklore contests in Peru goes back to the 1927 Festival of Pampa de Amancaes. However, scissors dance performers only infrequently competed in such contests until the Velasco regime sponsored the massive Inkari Festivals between 1969 and 1975.

33 Santiago Pariona, who won the departmental contest in Ayacucho in 1972, also articulates the motivation of gaining respect and recognition for his village as well as increasing the value of his contracts for rural and urban fiestas (Nuñez Rebaza 1985: 324).

343

34 The contest took place in the Locale Abtao 525 in La Victoria, a notoriously rough area of the older inner-city slums. He described his shock at the masses of people and fear of potential thieves.

35 In the initial stages of the entrance of globalization into Peru, this group complicates Matos‟s Mar‟s claim that with the popular overflow, Lima „is stripped of its Creole-colonial attributes and becomes a predominant trend toward transnationalization and another toward Andeanization, cholification or perhaps more simply and precisely nationalization” (Matos Mar 1986: 20).

36 In 1975, the media reform law of the Velasco government required the dedication of 7.5% of radio programming to national folkloric music, augmenting an already dramatically expanding market (Llorens 1983: 127).

37 After the untimely death of Canales in an automobile accident in 1975, a young dancer named Richard Saire replaced him. Saire became known as the first scissors dancer born in Lima, who learned the practice primarily by listening to earlier recordings of the group and watching their presentations in the coliseos.

38 Nearly all performers who learned the dance in the highlands tell the same story. They practiced the dance or musical instrument clandestinely under the threat of extreme corporal punishment. In some cases, the parents sent them to Lima in order to keep them away from the dance (Personal Interview “Ccecchele” 2008, “Juan Capcha” 2009, “Qoronta” 2008, “Añascha” 2009).

39 In many cases, the successful first-wave performers also guided the younger dancers both directly and indirectly. Richard Saire not only learned informally from the musicians of El Conjunto de Danzantes de Tijeras de Puquio, but also from Máximo Damián Huamaní and Lazaro Asto who oriented him for theatrical performances. Furthermore, Gerardo Chiara taught a number of young urban students using balletic techniques and encouraged the development of the body through gymnastics. Thus, Los Hermanos Chiara contributed directly to the most prominent urban innovation of the dance; the invention of ever more sophisticated acrobatic choreographies which accentuated the physical virtuosity of the young practitioners.

40 They also replaced the heavy wool headpiece with a much lighter synthetic variety made out of sponge.

41 Meanwhile, the Ayacucuchano community of performers and their audiences achieved a larger degree of preservation of traditional repertoires and experienced a great deal of generational tension.

42 Some of the young performers who had limited or no knowledge of Quechua began they began to practice the scissors dance acquired an impressive fluency in the language dispatching lived in Lima most of their lives. Furthermore, they re-established tangible and affective links to a specific regional heritage, partially resolving the ambiguous positionality of many children of Andean migrants unable to truly claim an identity as a provinciano or Limeño.

43 In different interviews he has told three different stories of how he came to be a scissors dancer which nevertheless have the same narrative arc of vengeance for a shamed family member followed by personal triumph (Nuñez Rebaza 1985: 365-366, Personal Interview “Qori Sisicha” 2007).

44 He also received some guidance from his uncle, Eulogio Taipie Janampa, a minor dancer from the second-wave migrant generation. However, he never had close contact with a teacher he could call his “master” (Personal Interview “Qori Sisicha” 2007).

45 Around the same time, he began to teach young adolescents born in Lima attracted to both their unknown heritage and the growing popularity of the dance in the capital.

344

46 Although he belongs to an earlier generation, Derrepente began to make modifications to the dance when he arrived in Lima in 1957 as a soldier in the army. He adapted the red husbandry paints of the military uniform to the scissors dance, an innovation which became standard by the late 1960s.

47 Tellingly, when he returned to rural festivities, he was impressed with the respect for traditional sequences and took pride in his mastery of them, but ultimately found the dancers of Lima to be more able.

48 Lucifer replaced his father in the training of new dancers. One of these young dancers was Damián de la Cruz Ccanto, later known by the Peruvian press as “The King of the Scissors Dance.” De la Cruz Ccanto, who goes by the artistic name of Ccarccaria (incestuous demon), came from a family of musicians and dancers but arrived in Lima as an orphan at the age of only eight years old.

49 Nuñez Rebaza complains about the small stages, the reductions and modifications to traditional choreographies for fifteen minute presentations, and the exploitation of the artists at these kinds of events. However, she ignores the performers own motivations and agency for acquiring a circumscribed space for recognition, not only by foreign tourists but their own communities through such public presentations.

50 In 1982, Qori Sisicha travelled to Rantay, Derrepente‟s hometown in Huancavelica to compete in the annual festival, initiating the participation of Ayacuchano performers in Huancavelicano festivities and vice versa, in both urban and rural spaces (Personal Interview “Qori Sisicha” 2007).

51 Nevertheless, staged by performers or not, these events were still often accused of rampant exploitation and corruption on the part of the organizers, increasing the professional jealousies within the scissors dance community itself.

52 According to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report (2003), the internal war caused over 69, 280 deaths, and 13,000 forced disappearances, as well as displaced over 600,000 rural highlanders and leaving 40,000 children orphaned.

53 These studies follow what Theidon calls the “between two fires” thesis which represents the violence as perpetrated by two forces external to peasant communities (Theidon 2004, 2008). This perspective not only ignores the myriad ways in which peasant actors involved themselves in the conflict, but portrays migration and its effects on cultural practices such as the scissors dance as nearly entirely passive mechanisms for self-presentation.

54 During the period of the RGAF, Velasco‟s language of social, economic, and political rights emboldened popular grassroots movements. However, the contradictions of actual governance increasingly divided the military over how to control popular mobilizations. The more institutional wing of the armed forces became nervous that popular movements showed signs of increasing radicalism.

55 The military government did not change its ideological direction for about a year, when Morales Bermudez shifted hard to the right in economic policy, restoring many of the privileges of the Creole oligarchy which Velasco had gradually dismantled.

56 The military attempted to tightly control the electoral process. However, the sudden death of its favored candidate, the long-time leader of APRA Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, opened a space for the election of centrist Fernando Belaunde Terry, who the military had deposed twelve years earlier (Burt 2007: 29).

57 The civilian government, understandably wary of empowering the military, initially ignored the increasing reports of revolutionary actions in the central and southern highlands, characterizing Shining Path as a gang of common delinquents. In hindsight, it is now clear that this willful negligence enabled an ideologically dogmatic, ruthlessly violence, and well-disciplined guerilla outfit to build its infrastructure 345

and propaganda machine in preparation for an insurgency which nearly toppled the Peruvian government by the early 1990s (Stern 1998, CVR 2003, Taylor 2006, Burt 2007).

58 At a time when even the most radical Marxist organizations in Peru gained greater visibility and legitimacy in the public sphere due to their close relationship to rural and urban popular movements, Shining Path laid low and clandestinely built up its base and infrastructure in the rural highlands of Ayacucho, Huancavelica, and Apurimac.

59 Lacking the opportunities their education had promised them, joining Shining Path gave these youth a strategy for achieving the social mobility they sought through a utopian vision of remaking society along Maoist lines.

60 They replaced traditional community authorities, composed of wealthier peasants who engaged in a hierarchical and ritualized system of cargos, and installed party commissaries in their place. During the harvest season of 1982, they blocked the peasants‟ access to markets, declaring that crops should be produced for subsistence with the excess distributed amongst the party (Degregori 1998: 133).

61 By far the most intense conflicts between Shining Path and peasant communities revolved around the use of violence. Initially, the guerillas targeted representatives of the state and abusive authorities. However, their ideology valued indiscriminate violence as a purifying force, and they punishments they handed out frequently went beyond the severity of the crime according to peasant perspectives. The peasants frequently set a limit of “punish but do not kill” on the use of violence, frustrating Shining Path leaders who in turn viewed these social conventions as further evidence of archaic ideas which ensured the peasants‟ subservience to their oppressors. Furthermore, the disturbing manner in which Shining Path kills involved excessive violence against the body, including mutilation, horrified the peasants who placed great importance on the ritual obligations of the living toward the dead.

62 The Peruvian anthropological community reacted strongly against the report accusing Vargas Llosa and the government of uninformed and politically motivated appropriations of anthropological knowledge. Even Luis Millones, an anthropologist who served on the commission, compared the investigation to “the performance of a set drama in which the authorities acted in order to ensure that the libretto was faithfully followed” (1983: 88).

63 According to one high-ranking general, “In order for the security forces to be successful, they will kill 60 people and maybe 3 will be Senderistas, but they will say that all 60 were Senderistas” (Burt 2007: 58).

64 Even peasant communities which did not actively support the Shining Path often saw the insurgents as the lesser evil, employing strategies of “resistant adaptation” in order to survive in an increasingly informal landscape of killing, torture, sexual violence, and targeted use of humiliation (Degregori 1998, Starn 1998, Theidon 2004). Nevertheless, the majority of peasant communities continued to perceive the guerillas as an external force and resented that Shining Path retreated at first-sign of the military, contrasting with the idealized role of the Andean patron who supposedly protected his clients (Degregori 1998: 143).

65 According to Degregori, the Vargas Llosa commission revealed the limits of an essentialist culturalist perspective which continued to depict the Andean people as the national “other.” (Degregori 2000). The protagonist of Julio Ortega‟s novel Adios Ayacucho, a dead comunero seeking to recompose his mutilated body, stated, “Anthropologists from Lima are very temperamental. One day they dress like Indians and chew coca, and the next day they come with the police and round everybody up” (Ortega 1985: 19). Speaking directly to the reader he asks, “Don‟t you think that this Uchucarray report will end anthropology in Peru” (Ibid. 20).

346

66 These early anthropological studies of the maintenance of Andean cultural practices in Lima Degregori define as “anthropology in the city,” only later developing into “anthropology of the city,” which produced more nuanced examinations of urban space as a site of encounter between various cultural formations and traditions producing heterogeneity and hybridity (García Canclini 1995, Degregori 2000: 52).

67 She explains, “Due to the confrontation, the continuity of traditional fiestas in rural communities was nearly impossible. The migrants in Lima were the only ones who had the possibility to continue with the realization of said fiestas in the capital itself” (Nuñez Rebaza 1985: 14).

68 The violinist Chimango attributed this outbreak of ailments and illnesses to the physical and emotional effects of the violence (Personal Interview “Chimango” 2007).

69 The organization‟s president made a call for unity amongst the practitioners of the various regional scissors dance communities, while respecting the distinct aesthetic styles. According to the flyer, more than thirty performers participated, mostly from Ayacucho but including the highest-profile dancers from Huancavelica such as Derrepente, and Lucifer.

70 Facing near collapse, the state reverted to “the default into an IMF-style policy of the worst kind- an austerity-induced recession- without the IMF and the credit relief it provides” (Graham 1992: 110).

71 Qori Sisicha claims that after a confrontation, he voluntary resigned from his position, leaving a fund of $5000, which the new leaders plundered for their own pockets (Personal Interview “Qori Sisicha” 2007).

Chapter 6

1 Although Vargas Llosa had never held political office, his right-wing neoliberal coalition and the author‟s urbane mannerisms came to represent the status quo of rule by a small Creole minority (Oliart 1998: 412).

2 After he unexpectedly became the frontrunner, the political establishment began to attack Fujimori on nationalistic grounds, questioning his place of birth, and ridiculing his highly-accented Spanish speech, quiet demeanor, and informal mannerisms. In retrospect, those attacks probably backfired because they played right into the close identification between his targeted constituency and the highly embodied performance of the candidate‟s public persona. The majority of Peruvians shared the experience of being 1st or 2nd generation Peruvian citizens in affective terms if not in legal status, spoke Spanish with a “foreign” accent or had parents who did, made their living through strategic informality, and were quite familiar with the ridicule of the traditional elite (Lee 2010: 50).

3 The military and the rondas collaborated on civic action campaigns and development projects even before the violence on civic action campaigns and development projects even before the violence subsided. Orin Starn argues that the intimate relationship between the military and rondas reveals the “instability of the line between grassroots and imposed” mobilizations as the participation of Andean men and women “restored a sense of identity and agency “to rural and urban communities (Starn 1998: 236, 247).

4 As Kimberly Theidon‟s informants explained, the emergence of the rondas meant “the people began to get macho” (2003).

5 However, in order to acquire legitimacy the embodiment of the figure of the Indian warrior had to be directed against the insurgents, because resistance or even critique of state actions risked inscription into the ultimate stigmatized subject position; the terrorist (Theidon 2004, 2008).

6 On the one hand, both left many women with new burdens and responsibilities as the caretakers of increasingly fragile family units and both the military and Shining Path targeted women for horrific 347

ritualized acts of sexual violence and/or forced them to witness the brutal execution of family members during the war. Nevertheless, migration and political violence also offered Andean women new opportunities to actively participate in the public sphere, whether as militants either in Shining Path or the rondas campesinas, or through the emergence of new mothers, women‟s, or widows organizations.

7 As Rich and Sirleaf suggest, “Conflict can change traditional gender roles. Women may acquire more mobility, resources, and opportunities for leadership. But the additional responsibility comes without diminution in the demands of their traditional roles. Thus, the momentary space in which women take on untraditional roles and typically assume greater responsibilities within the household and public arenas does not necessarily advance gender equality” (2002: 2).

8 FREDEMO was the name of Vargas Llosa‟s right-wing coalition which advocated for neoliberal austerity measures and a return to traditional Catholic values

9 Fujimori often appeared dressed as an Andean peasant, and danced to Andean highland music, thus portraying himself as a man of the people. He even enlisted the aid of local shamans in highly televised ritual purification ceremonies addressed to the apus and the pachamama (Montoya 1998, Millones 2007).

10 Due to their popularity, and recognition in broader public spheres and their specialized role as guardians of local traditions, performers such as Qori Sisicha, Chimango, and Llapla frequently performed at ceremonies inaugurating reconstruction and repopulation efforts, particularly in 1996 and 1997 (Personal Interview “Qori Sisicha” 2007, “Chimango” 2007).

11 They distinguished themselves from a younger generation of performers, whose younger bodies were more physically able for spectacular acrobatics, but whose knowledge of the “complete” scissors dance repertoire was interrupted by the rupture of the violence.

12 Although Añascha did not dance, he served as a local consultant and guide for the film crew in just one example of how performers with both urban recognition and previous experience in rural festivals positioned themselves as leaders in the process of cultural revitalization and reaffirmation of the local after the internal conflict.

13 The film ends a series of final captions which note that no winner of the atipanakuy was declared due to the illness of the dancer Halcón after he swallowed a sword too hurriedly in a previous competition. In addition, none of the villagers volunteered to take the responsibility of a mayordomia for the following year. We are left to assume the failure of the aims of the scissors dance which the documentary portrays as “decisive in order to reproduce a symbolic universe of a culture which struggles to survive” (Uriarte 1998).

14 The actions of the Fujimori regime and transnational mining corporations weakened earlier strategies of labor organization in the massive mercury mines of the region. Under the leadership of new local professionals and intellectual elites, mining workers began to reorganize their claims against exploitation on the grounds of environmental protection and ethnic identity (Durand 2006).

15 For example, Caso Arias and Rojas de la Cruz argue that “without harmful intention, this diminishes our people, putting us at the disposition of Spain, ashamed of our Anqara identity” (1999).

16 As well-connected scissors dancers from Huancavelica incorporated themselves into this disciplinary apparatus of self-making, it often produced incongruent phenomena, such as performers whose public popularity forces them to keep their diabolic pseudonyms, proclaiming that the Spanish invaders persecuted us as devils. We do not have a pact with the devil we have a pact with nature.

348

17 This particular text‟s status as s children‟s book for classroom use gives it an overtly pedagogical function, pointing towards the disciplinary nature of its discourse of cultural identity.

18 PROANDE was founded and directed by a Danish couple, Marc and Holly Wilhelm, who has worked since 1993 on the reconstruction of communities around the city of Andahuaylas. Their main objectives are to improve hygiene, access to clean water, and self-esteem and cultural identity in marginalized areas using a methodology they call SARAR.

19 In 2008, anthropologist Cavero Carrasco described a theatrical enactment of the Taki Onqoy staged by local schoolteachers and students in the community of Huancaray near Andahuaylas. The final act depicted the “warriors” of the millennial movement as scissors dancers who dance in order to celebrate the expulsion of the Spaniards from their land. Cavero Carrasco admits that the libretto was based on the PROANDE pamphlets and his own study Los Dioses Vencidos (2001). Nevertheless, he interprets the event as a clear example of what he calls the “millennial consciousness” of the Chanka people (Cavero Carrasco 2008). I would argue that it more clearly shows the interventions of ethnographic and NGO discourses with local educational institutions in order to produce a performative pedagogy of cultural and ethnic identity. Rural schoolchildren perform this “millennial consciousness” for the older campesinos, who are doubly removed from a position of agency as spectators in the reinvention of the local.

20 Carlos returned to Lima in 2000, but has remained active in this small network of cultural revitalization in Andamarca by publishing a magazine and a blog promoting cultural tourism in the region.

21 Since 2000, she has collaborated with local historian Hugo Vallenos and teacher Pascal Flores in the staging of a reenactment of the death of the Inca Huascar with local schoolchildren on the first day of The Festival of Water. These kinds of events, staging local history for the consumption of local residents and outsiders, are increasingly common throughout the rural Andes.

22 Unlike younger performers who most often invite attention from the press or anthropologists, Cirilo Inca still jealously guards his secrets even from his own family and apprentices. He is known to have a low opinion of the contemporary scissors dancers, publicly claiming they are no more than circus dancers

23 The harpist known as Champa explained to me that while these younger authorities see all scissors dancers as the same, he remembers as a child growing up in Andamarca, one of the two so-called “cradles” of the scissors dance maintained a fierce rivalry. The artists from Puquio, the provincial capital, used to look down upon and insult those of Andamarca as more Indian or cholo than themselves (Personal Interview “Champa” 2009).

Chapter 7

1 That this discourse contradicts the diabolic quality of his artistic pseudonym and the testimony of several other performers who claim that in the previous decade Ccarccaria had played up the notion of the pact with the devil for the sake of publicity for a different consumer public, suggest that there is more going on than a merely heartfelt articulation of a postcolonial indigenous identity. On cue he claims that the pruebas de valor represent a manner of protest against the pain and trauma caused by the Spanish invasion.

2 Other performers and even Ccarccaria himself have told me that this claim is basically a publicity stunt and I have met his Peruvian wife.

349

Bibliography

Abercrombie, Thomas. 1998. Pathways of Memory: Ethnography and History Among an

Andean People. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Águila, Sonia del. 2011. “Me gustaría Hacer Algo Sobre Mario Vargas Llosa.” El Comercio Blog. 13 Jan.: http://blogs.elcomercio.pe/entrevistas/2011/01/susana-bamonde- me-gustaria-hac.html Albo, Xavier. 2004. “Ethnic Identity and Politics in the Central Andes: The Cases of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru.” Politics in the Andes: Identity, Conflict, Reform. Eds. Jo-Marie Burt and Philip Mauceri. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Alfaro, Santiago. 2005. “Las Industrias Culturales E Identidades Étnicas del Huayno.” Arguedas y el Perú de Hoy. Ed. Carmen María Pinilla. Lima: Sur, Casa de Estudios del Socialismo. Altamirano, Teófilo. 1984. Presencia Andina en lima Metropolitana: Un Estudio Sobre

Migrantes y Clubes de Provincianos. Lima: PUCP.

---. 1988. Cultura Andina y Pobreza Urbana: Aymaras en Lima

Metropolitana. Lima: PUCP.

Álvarez, Bartolomé. 1998. De las Costumbres y Conversión de los Indios del Perú:

Memorial a Felipe II [1588]. Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo.

AmericaArtes. 2003. “Los Danzaq de Ayacucho.”

Anchita Aldorin, Fortunato. 2005. Taki Onq’oy = Danzantes de Tijeras. Lima: Impreso

Chipao. 350

Anderon, Benedict. 1994. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread

of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Ansión, Juan. 1986. Anhelos y Sinsabores: Dos Decadas de Politicas Culturales del

Estado Peruano. Lima: GREDES.

---. 1987. Desde el Rincón de los Muertos: el Pensamiento Mitico de Ayacucho. Lima:

Grupo de Estudios para el Desarrollo.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural

Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

---. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

Arce Sotelo, Manuel. 2006. La Danza de las Tijeras y el Violin de Lucanas. Lima: IFEA.

---. 2007. “Yakumama, Serena, y Otras Divinidades Acuáticas del Valle de Pampamarca

(Ayacucho)” Cuadernos Interculturales 5.8: 97-119.

Archibald, Priscilla. 1998. “Andean Anthropology in the Era of Development Theory: the

Work of José María Arguedas.” In José María Arguedas: Reconsiderations for

Latin American Cultural Studies. Eds. Ciro Sandoval and Sandra M. Boschetto-

Sandoval. Athens, OH: University of Ohio Press.

---. 2003. “Overcoming Science in the Andes.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos. XXVII.3. ---. 2007. “Urban Transculturations.” Social Text 25.4: 91-114. Arguedas, José María. 1975 [1935] “Los Escoleros.” in Relatos Completos. Jorge Lafforge, ed. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada. ---. 1975 [1953]. “La Sierra en el Proceso de la Cultura Peruana.” in Formación de una Cultura Nacional Indoamericana. Ed. Angel Rama. Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno 351

Editores: 9-27. ---. 1975 [1958]. “Notas Elementales Sobre el Arte Popular Religioso y la Cultura Mestiza de Huamanga.” in Formación de una Cultura Nacional Indoamericana. Ed. Angel Rama. Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores: 148-178. ---. 1975 [1962]. “La Agonia de Rasu Niti.” in Relatos Completos. Jorge Lafforge, ed. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada. ---. 1975 [1966]. “La Cultura: Un Patrimonio Dificil de Colonizar.” in Formación de una Cultura Nacional Indoamericana. Ed. Angel Rama. Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores: 183-188. ---. 1976. Señores e Indios: Acerca de la Cultura Quechua. Ed. Angel Rama. Montevideo: Arca/Calicanto. ---. 1976 [1944]. “En Defensa del Folklore Musical Andino.” In Señores e Indios: Acerca de la Cultura Quechua. Ed. Angel Rama. Montevideo: Arca Editorial. ---. 1976 [1962]. “De lo Retablo Magico Hasta el Retablo Mercantil.” in Señores e Indios: Acerca de la Cultura Quechua. Ed. Angel Rama. Montevideo: Arca Editorial. ---. 1976 [1962]. “El Monstruoso Contrasentido” in Señores e Indios: Acerca de la Cultura Quechua. Ed. Angel Rama. Montevideo: Arca Editorial. ---. 1976. “La Novela en el Perú Contemporaneo.” in Recopilaciones de Textos Sobre José María Arguedas. Havana: Casa de las Americas. ---. 1978 [1958]. Deep Rivers. Trans. Frances Horning Barraclough. Austin: University of Texas Press. ---. 1984. Katatay. Lima: Editorial Horizonte. ---. 1985 [1941]. Yawar Fiesta. Trans. Frances Horning Barraclough. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.

352

---. 1985 [1950]. “The Problem of the Novel in Contemporary Peru.” in Yawar Fiesta. Trans. Frances Horning Barraclough. Austin: University of Texas Press: ---. 1985 [1956]. “Puquio: A Culture in Process of Change.” In Yawar Fiesta. Trans. Frances Horning Barraclough. Austin: University of Texas Press 149-192. ---. 1986 [1966]. Primer Encuentro de Narradores Peruanos. Lima: Latinoamericana Editores. ---. 1988 [1969]. “Como me Hice Escritor.” in Motivaciones del Escritor. Ed. Godofredo Morote Gamboa. Lima: Universidad Nacional Federico Villareal, 1988 ---. 1989. Indios, Mestizo y Señores. Ed. Sybila Aredondo de Arguedas. Lima: Editorial Horizonte. ---. 2000 [1971]. The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below. Trans. France Horning Barraclough. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Arista Montoya, Luis. 2011. “El Tankayllu Zumbador.” Variedades 103.208 (January):

26-27.

Arriarán, Gabriel. 2011. “José María Arguedas: Un Escritor de Culto.” Frontera D.

Revista Digital 11 March.

Arriaga, Pablo José de. 1968 [1621]. The Extirpation of Idolatry of Peru. Trans. Charles

L. Keating. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.

Ballón, Eduardo, ed. 1986. Movimientos Sociales y Democracia: La Fundación de un

Nuevo Orden. Lima Desco.

Balme, Christopher. 2007. Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural

Encounter in the South Seas. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bamonde, Susana, Producer. 2008. El Gran Reto (Television Series) Frequencia Latina.

Baptista, Selma. 2006. Una Concepción Trágica de la Cultura. Lima: PUCP, 2006

353

Barba, Eugenio. 1978. Black & Woman (video).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6Frs9rDWx8

Barish, Jonas. 1981. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California

Press.

Barrionuevo, Alfonsina. 1965. “La Leyenda de Qaqa Niti” El Comercio.

---. 1988. Ayacucho: La Comarca del Puka Amaru. Lima:

CONCYTEC.

Basadre, Jorge. 1978 [1931]. Perú: Problema y Posibilidad. Lima: Banco Internacional

del Perú.

---. 1947. “Colofón Sobre el País Profundo” in La Multitud, La Ciudad y el Campo en la

Historia del Perú. Lima: Editorial Huascarán.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulation and Simulacra. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Bauman, Richard. 1977. Verbal Art as Performance. Rowley, MA: Newberry House

Publishers.

Beasley-Murray, Jon. 2008. “Arguedasmachine: Modernity and Affect in the Andes.”

Revista Iberoamericana 8.30: 113-128.

Becker, Marc. 1993. Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory. Athens, OH:

University of Ohio Press.

Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory/ Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University

Press.

---. 1997. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford

University Press.

354

Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies.

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 2008. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production.” In The

Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility and other Writings on

Media. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. New York: Belknap Press.

Beverley, John. 1999. Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory.

Durham: Duke University Press.

Beyersdorff, Margot. 1988. La Adoración de los Reyes Magos: Vigencia del Teatro

Religioso Español en el Perú Andino. Cusco: Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos

“Bartolomé de las Casas.”

---. 2008. “Indigenous Performing Arts.” Guide to Documentary

Sources for Andean Studies, 1530-1900. Ed. Joanne Pillsbury. Norman:

University of Oklahoma Press.

Bigenho, Michele. Contratos con Dios, Pactos con el Diablo: La Perspectiva Religiosa

de Músicos y Danzantes Lucaninos en Lima. MA thesis. PUCP, 1991.

---. 1993. “El Baile de los Negritos y La Danza de las Tijeras: Un Manejo

de Contradicciones.” in Música, Danzas y Máscaras en los Andes. Ed. Raúl R.

Romero. Lima: PUCP: 219-251.

Blanco, José María. 1974 [1835] Diario del Viaje del Presidente Orbegoso al Sur de

Perú. 2 Vols. Lima: PUCP.

Blondet, Cecilia. 1986. Muchas Vidas Construyendo una Identidad: Las Mujeres

Pobladores de un Barrio Limeño. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.

Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo. 1987. México Profundo: Una Civilización Negada. Mexico: 355

Grijalbo.

Borland, Katherine. 2006. Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan

Festival. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Bottoms, Stephen. 2003. „The Efficacy/Effeminacy Braid: Unpacking the Performance

Studies/Theatre Studies Dichotomy.” Theatre Topics 13.2 (September): 173-

187

Breckenridge, Carol and Arjun Appadurai. 1995. “Public Modernity in India.” in

Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World. Ed. Carol

Breckenridge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bridges, Tyler. 2001. “Peru‟s New President Honors Roots at Macchu Picchu.” Knight

Ridder/ Tribune News Service. 29 July.

Buckland, Theresa J. 1999. “Reconstructing Meanings: the Dance Ethnographer as the

Keeper of the Truth.” Dance in the Field: Theory, Issues, and Methods in Dance

Ethnography. Ed. Theresa J. Buckland. New York; St. Martin‟s Press.

Buell, Frederick. 1998. “Nationalist Postnationalism: Globalist Discourse in

Contemporary American Culture.” American Quarterly 50.3:

Burga, Manuel. 1988. Nacimiento de una Utopía: Muerte y Resurreción de los Incas.

Lima: Instituto de Apoyo Agrario.

Burke, Peter. 1978. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. New York: New York

University Press.

Burt, Jo-Marie. “State-making Against Democracy: The Case of Alberto Fujimori.” in

Politics in the Andes: Identity, Conflict, Reform. Eds. Jo-Marie Burt and Philip

Mauceri. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004.

356

---. 2007. Political Violence and the Authoritarian State in Peru: Silencing

Civil Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Bush, Jason. 2009. “El Gran Reto: Celebrity, Cultural Commodification, and Andean

Citizenship,” Journal of American Drama and Theater. 21.2 (Spring): 91-

113.

Bustamante, Manuel E. 1943. Apuntes Para el Folklore Peruano. Ayacucho: Imprenta

“La Miniatura.”

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New

York: Routledge.

Cadena, Marisol de la. 2000. Indigenous Mestizos: The Politic of Race and Culture in

Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

---. 2006. “The Production of Other Knowledges and its Tensions: From Andeanist

Anthropology to Interculturalidad.” in World Anthrpologies: Disciplinary

Transformations within Systems of Power. Eds. Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo

Escobar. New York: Berg.

Cahill, David. 2002. From Rebellion to Independence in the Andes: Soundings From

Southern Peru, 1750-1830. Amsterdam: Aksant.

---. 2006. “El Visitador General Areche y su Campaña Iconoclasta Contra La Cultura

Andina.” in Visión y Simbolos: Del Virreinato Criollo a la Republica Peruana.

Lima: Banco de Credito Peru.

Canedo Reyes, Roxana. 1973. “Un Pintoresco Mundo Bajo la Carpa.” La Prensa Sunday

Supplement 21 Jan.: 14-16.

Cánepa Koch, Gisela. 1998. Máscara: Transformación e Identidad en los Andes. Lima: 357

Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru.

---. 2001. “Introducción: Formas de Cultura Expresiva y la Etnografía de lo

local.”in Identidade Representadas: Performance, Experiencia, y Memoria en los

Andes. Ed. Gisela Cánepa Kocha. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificía

Universidad Católica de Perú.

---. 2002. “Geopolitics and Geopoetics of Identity: Migration, Ethnicity, and

Place in the Peruvian Imaginary. Fiestas and Devotional Dances in Cuzco and

Lima.” PhD Diss. The University of Chicago.

---. 2006. “Cultura y Politica: Una Reflexión en Torno al Sujeto Público.” Mirando la

Esfera Pública desde la Cultura en el Perú. Eds. Gisela Cánepa Koch and María

Eugenia Ulfe. Lima: CONCYTEC.

---. 2008. “The Fluidity of Ethnic Identities in Peru.” Oxford: CRISE.

---. 2009. “The Public Sphere and Cultural Rights: Culture as Action.” E-Misferica. 6.2 .

Carlson, Marvin. 1996. Performance: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.

Caso Arias, Jesús and Juan de la Cruz. 1999. „La Danza de las Tijeras de Huancavelica.”

http://sites.google.com/site/cosmovisonandina/home

Castro-Klarén, Sara. 1973. El Mundo Mágico de José María Arguedas. Lima: Instituto de

Estudios Peruanos.

---.1990. “Discurso y Transformación de los Dioses en los Andes.” El

Retorno de las Huacas: Estudios y Documento Sobre el Taki Onqoy Siglo XVI.

Comp. Luis Millones. Lima: Insituto de Estudio Peruanos.

Castro Pozo, Hildebrando. 1924. Nuestra Comunidad Indigena. Lima: Editorial “El

Lucero.”

358

---. 1936. Del Ayllu al Cooperativismo Socialista. Lima: P.

Barrantes Castro.

Castro Quilca, Smith and Elena Romero. 2006. “Origenes de la Danza de las Tijeras”

22 Nov.: http://ertic-inictel.net.

Catlin, Stanton Loomis. 1989. “Traveller-Reporter-Artists and the Empirical Tradition in

Post-Independence Latin America.” in Art in Latin America: The Modern Era,

1820-1980. Ed. Dawn Ades. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Cavero Carrasco, Ranulfo. 1994. “Imaginario Colectivo e Identidad en los Andes: a

Propósito del Tayta Cáceres: Un Héroe Cultural.” Universidad Nacional de San

Cristóbal de Huamanga, Ayacucho.

---. 1998. “Los Danzantes de Tijeras en la Fiesta del Corpus Christi.” in Historia,

Religion y Ritual de los Pueblos Ayacuchanos. Ed. Luis Millones, Hiroyasu

Tomoeda y Tatsuhiko Fujii, Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology.

---. 2001. Los Dioses Vencidos: Una Lectura Antropólogica del

Taki Onqoy. Ayacucho: Escuela de Posgrado de la Universidad Nacional San

Cristóbal de Huamanga.

---. 2008. “Reaparece el Taki Unquy en Pleno Siglo XXI.” Hoja de Ruta. 31 24 Nov.

2008. “Ccarccaria Será el Protagonista de un Documental para la Televisión Arabe.”

PeruFolkradio.com 28 Nov.

Ccoñas, Alejandro. 1993. “La Danza de las Tijeras de Huancavelica.” Actas y Memorias

Cientificas del XIII Congreso Nacional y II Internacional Andino de Folklore

“Sergio Quijada Jara” Huancavelica: 483-506.

Cervantes, Fernando. 1994. Devil in the New World: Impact of Diabolism in New Spain.

359

New Haven: Yale University Press.

Cieza de León, Ponce. 1984 [1553]. “La Crónica del Perú, Parts I and 2” in Obras

Completas, vol. 1. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas,

Instituto Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo.

1998. CIOFF: International Council or Organizations of Folklore Festivasls and Folk-Art.

http://www.cioff.org/index.cfm?lng=en

Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography,

Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cobo, Bernabé. 1956 [1653]. Historia del Nuevo Mundo. Biblioteca de Autores

Españoles, vol. 92. Madrid: Ediciones Atlas.

Cock, Guillermo. 1983. “Sacerdotes o Chamanes en el Mundo Andino.” Historia y

Cultura: Revista del Museo Nacional de Historia. Lima 16 (1983): 135-146.

Cock, Guillermo and Mary Eileen Doyle. 1979. “Del Culto Solar a la Clandestinidad de

Inti y Punchao.” Historia y Cultura (Lima) 12: 51-73.

Columbus, Claudette Kemper. 1986. Mythological Consciousness and the Future: José María Arguedas. New York: Peter Lang, 1986.

---. 1995. “Grounds for Decolonization: Arguedas‟s Foxes.” In Genealogy and

Literature. Ed. Lee Quinby. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.

Conaghan, Catherine M. 2005. Fujimori’s Peru: Deception in the Public Sphere.

Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Conquergood, Dwight. 2007. “Performance Theory, Hmong Shamans, and Cultural

Politics.” in Critical Theory and Performance, 2nd edition. Eds. Joseph Roach and

Janelle Reinelt: 41-64.

360

Coral Cordero, Isabel. “Women in War: Impact and Responses.” Shining and Other

Paths: War and Society and Peru, 1980-1995. Ed. Steve J. Stern. Durham: Duke

University Press, 1998.

Cornejo, M.E. 1997. “Don Máximo (interview)” Perú el Dorado 7: 56-63.

Cornejo Polar, Antonio. 1980. Literatura y Sociedad en el Peru: la Novela Indigenista.

Lima: Lasontay.

---. 1991. Arguedas: Una Eplendida Historia.” José María

Arguedas: Vida y

---. 1994. Escribir en el Aire: Ensayos Sobre la Heterogeneidad Socio-Cultural en las

Literaturas Andinas. Lima: Horizonte.

---. 1996. “Estudio Preliminar.” José María Arguedas: Antologia Comentada. Ed.

Antonio Cornejo Polar. Lima: Biblioteca Nacional del Peru: 11-44.

---. 1997. Los Universos Narrativos de José María Arguedas. 2nd ed. Lima: Horizonte.

---. 1997. “Condición Migrante e Intertextualidad Multicultural: el Caso de Arguedas.

in Los Universos Narrativos de José María Arguedas. 2nd ed. Lima: Horizonte.

Cornejo Polar, Jorge. Politicas Culturales y Politicas de Comunicación en el Peru (1895-

1990). Lima: Universidad de Lima, 1993.

Coronado, Jorge. 2009. The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity.

Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.

Coronel, José. 1996. “Violencia Politica y Respuestas Campesinas en Huanta.” in Las

Rondas Campesinas y la Derrota de Sendero Luminoso. Ed. Carlos Iván

Degregori, Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.

Cruz Fierro, Juan de la.1982. ”La Danza de las Tijeras.” Folklore. Vol. 2.

361

Culler, Jonathan. 1988. Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions. Norman:

University of Oklahoma Press.

Curatola, Marco. 1976. “Mito y Milenarismo en los Andes: Del Taki Onqoy a Inkarri”

Alpanchis Phutirinqa (Cusco) 9: 65-92.

CVR. 2003. Informe Final “Conclusiones Generales.”

http://www.cverdad,org.pe/infal/index.php.

DaCosta Holton, Kimberly. 2005. Performing Folklore: Ranchos Folkloricos from

Lisbon to Newark. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

2003. “Damian, the Man who Dances with Nature.” Kilca Peru (February): 3.

Damián Huamaní, Máximo. 1976 [1969]. “Con Lagrimas de Verdad no Con

Fingimientos.” in Recopilación de Textos Sobre José María Arguedas. Havana:

Centro de Investigaciones Literarias “Casa de las Americas.”.

2006. “Danzantes de Tijeras de Huancavelica: Los Hermanos Chavez.” Ed. Saul Sorias:

http://www.hermanoschavez.com

Dean, Carolyn. 1999. Inca Bodies, Inca Christ. Durham: Duke University Press.

DeCastro, Juan E. 2002. Mestizo Nations: Culture, Race, and Conformity in Latin

American Literature. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

Debord, Guy. 1994. The Society of Spectacle. New York: Zone Books.

Degregori, Carlos Iván. 1986. “Del Mito Inkarri al Mito del Progreso: Poblaciones

Andinas, Cultura e Identidad Nacional.” Socialismo y Participación 36: 49-56.

---. 1990. El Surgimiento de Sendero Luminoso: Ayacucho 1969-1979. Lima: Instituto de

Estudios Peruanos.

---. 1998. “Harvesting Storms: Peasant Rondas and the Defeat of Sendero Luminoso in

362

Ayacucho.” in Shining and Other Paths: War and Society and Peru, 1980-1995.

Ed. Steve J. Stern. Durham: Duke University Press.

---.2000. “Panorama de la Antropologia en el Perú: Del Estudio del

Otro a la Construcción de un Nosotros Diverso.” in No Hay País Más Diverso:

Compendio de Antropología Peruana. Ed. Carlos Iván Degregori. Lima: PUCP.

---. 2004. Enciclopedia Temática del Perú: Diversidad Cultural. Lima: El Comercio.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Trans.

Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Delpino, Nena. 1991. “Las Organizaciones Femeninas por la Alimentación: Un Menú

Sazonado.”in La Otra Cara de la Luna: Nuevos Actores Sociales en el Perú. Ed.

Luís Pasara. Lima: Centro de Estudios de Democracia y Sociedad: 29-72.

Desforges, Luke. 2000. “State Tourism Institutions and Neoliberal Development: A Case

Study of Peru.” Tourism Geographies 2.2: 177-192.

Desmond, Jane. 1999. Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

De Soto, Hernando. 1989. The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World.

New York: Harper and Row Publishers.

D‟Harcourt, Raoul and Marguerite. 1990 [1924] La Música de los Incas y sus

Supervivencias. Lima: Occidental Petroleum Corporation of Peru, 1990 [1924].

Dolan, Jill. 2005. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope in the Theatre. Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press.

Doughty, Paul. 1972. Peruvian Migrant Identity in the Urban Milieu. Boulder, CO:

363

Colorado University Press.

Driant, Jean-Claude. 1991. Las Barriadas de Lima: Historia e Interpretación. Lima:

IFEA/DESCO.

Durban, Paula. 2001.“Razor-Sharp Peruvian Dance.” Américas: 3-4.

Durand Guevara, Anahi. 2006. “De Mineros a Indigenas: Cambios en la Relación

Mineria-Comunidad, Organización-Social, y Revaloración Etnica en Angaraes-

Huancavelica.” in Informe Final del Concurso: Informaciones en el Mundo del

Trabajo: Efectos Socio-Económicos y Culturales en América Latina y el Caribe.

Programa Regional de Becas CLACSO.

Duviols, Pierre. 1971. La Lutte Contre les Religions Autochtones dans le Perou Colonial:

L’Extirpation de l’idolatrie entre 1532 et 1660. Lima and Paris: IFEA.

Earle, Rebecca. 2007. The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish

America, 1810-1930. Durham: Duke University Press.

Elmore, Peter. 1993. Los Muros Invisibles: Lima y la Modernidad en la Novela del Siglo

XX. Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1993.

Escajadillo, Tomás G. 1994. La Narrativa Indigenista Peruana. Lima: Amaru Editores.

---. 1999. “El Relato Indigenista en las Paginas de „Amauta.” Revista

Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 25.49: 177-197.

Escobar, Alberto.1984. Arguedas y la Utopía de la Lengua. Lima: Instituto de Estudios

Peruanos.

Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the

Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Espinoza, Héctor. “1995. El Danzaq en el Pensamiento de las Comunidades Hidráulicas 364

de Ayacucho. Vision Cultural, Instituto Nacional de Cultural II. 1: 30-32.

Estenssoro, Juan Carlos. 1989. Música y Sociedad Coloniales: Lima, 1680-1830. Lima:

Editorial Colmillo Blanco.

---. 1992. “Los Bailes de los Indios y el Proyecto Colonial.” Revista Andina, 10.2:

353-389.

---. 2003. Del Paganismo a la Santidad. Lima: IFEA.

Fass Emery, Amy. 1996. The Anthropological Imagination in Latin American Literature.

Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Favre, Henry. 2009. “El Movimiento Indianista: Un Fenómono Glocal.” in El Regreso de

lo Indigena: Retos, Problemas y Perspectivas. Eds. Valérie Robin Azevedo and

Carmen Salazar-Soler. Lima: IFEA.

Feldman, Heidi. 2006. Black Rhythms of Peru: Reviving African Musical Heritage in the

Black Pacific. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Flores Galindo, Alberto. 1986. Buscando un Inca: Identidad y Utopía en los Andes.

Havana: Casa de las America, 1986.

---. 2007. “Los Ultimos Años de Arguedas.” in Obras Completas VI. Lima: SUR.

Franco, Carlos. 1989. Castro Pozo: Nación, Modernización Endogena y Socialismo.

Lima: Centro de Estudios para el Desarollo y la Participación, 1989.

Franco, Jean. 2002. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Fuentes, Manuel Anastasio. 1985 [1866] Lima: Apuntes Históricos, Descriptivos, Estadisticos y de Costumbres. Lima: Fondo del Libro, 1985 [1866] Galdos, Gonzalo. 2007. “La Visión País y la Labor del PROMPERU.” Lima: IPAE. García, José Uriel. 1930. El Nuevo Indio. Cuzco: Editorial Rozas. 365

García, María Elena. 2005. Making Indigenous Citizens: Identity, Development and

Multicultural Activism in Peru. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

García, María Elena and José Lucero. 2004. “Un País Sin Indigenas?: Rethinking

Indigenous Politics in Peru.” in The Struggle for Indian Rights in Latin America.

Eds. Nancy Postero and León Zamosc. Sussex.

García Canclini, Néstor. 1995. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving

Modernity. Trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

---. 2001. Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural

Conflicts. Trans. George Yudice. Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press.

García Ninasqui, Roque. 2005. Remembranzas del Supay Runa: Danzante de Tijeras de

Palca- Huancavelica. Huancavelica: Grapex Perú.

Giménez Micó. 2006. “Imaginarios políticos en el Perú: ¿entre el populismo andinista y el

antipopulismo neoliberal? El caso Toledo." Proceedings of the International Conference

of JALLA 2006 (VI Jornadas Andinas de Literatura Latinoamericana), Bogotá

(Colombia), August. E-publication.

Gose, Peter. 2008. Invaders as Ancestors: On the Intercultural Making and Un-making of

Spanish Colonialism in the Andes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Graham, Carol. 1992. Peru’s APRA: Parties, Politics, and the Elusive Quest for

Democracy. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Greene, Shane. 2006. “Getting Over the Andes: The Geo-Eco-Politics of Indigenous

Movements in Peru‟s Twenty First Century Inca Empire.” Journal of Latin

American Studies 38: 327-354.

Griffiths, Nicholas. 1996. Cross and the Serpent: Religious Repression and Resurgence 366

in Colonial Peru. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

Gushiken, José. 1979. El Violin de Ishua: Biografia de un Intérprete de Música

Folklorica. Lima: UNMSM, 1979.

Guss, Peter. 2000. The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hale, Charles. 2002. “Does Multiculturalism Menace?: Governance, Cultural Rights, and

the Politics of Identity in Guatemala.” Journal of Latin American Studies. 34.3:

485-524.

---. 2006. Más que un Indio: Racial Ambivalence and Multiculturalism in Guatemala. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Handler, Richard. 1988. Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Hastrup, Kirsten. 1998. “Theatre as a Site of Passage: Reflections on the Magic of Acting.” in Ritual, Performance, Media. Felicia Hughes-Freeland, ed. London: Routledge: 29-45. Hayatashi, Nicholás. 2002. “El Marxismo Mágico de Arguedas.” in Arguedas Vive. Lima: Instituto Nacional de Cultura. Herrera Alfaro, Carlos. 2005. Cirilo, Dansaq. Lima: Editorial Roel.

Higgins, James. 2005. Lima: A Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hobsbawm, Eric. 1962. The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848. London: Abacus

---. 1975. The Age of Capital. 1848-1875. New York; Wedenfield and Nicholson.

--- 1983. The Age of Empire, 1875-1914. New York: Wedenfield and Nicholson.

Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

367

Hodgson, Deborah Louise. 2002. “Precarious Alliances: The Cultural Politics and

Structural Predicaments of the Indigenous Rights Movement in Tanzania.”

American Anthropologist 104.4: 1086-1097.

Holzmann, Rodolfo.1966. Panorama de la Música Tradicional del Perú. Lima: Escuela

Nacional de Musica y Danzas Folkloricas.

Huamán, Carlos. 2004. Pachachaka Puente Sobre el Mundo: Narrativa, Memoria Y

Simbolo en la Obra de José María Arguedas. Mexico: Universidad Nacional

Autónoma de México.

Huggan, Graham. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London:

Routledge.

Isbell, Billy Jean. 1997. Mummies and Mortuary Monuments: A Postprocesual

Prehistory of Central Andean Social Organization. Austin: University of Texas

Press.

---. 1992. “Shining Path and Rural Responses in Rural Ayacucho.” In The Shining Path

of Peru Ed. David Scott Palmer. New York: St. Martin‟s Press: 59-82.

Itier, Cesar. 1995. El Teatro Quechua en el Cuzco, Vol 1. Lima: Instituto Francés de

Estudios Andinos.

---. 2000. El Teatro Quechua en el Cuzco, Vol 2. Lima: Instituto Frances de Estudios

Andinos.

Jacobsen, Nils. 1993. Mirages of Transition: The Peruvian Altiplano, 1780-1930.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jimenez Borja, Arturo. 1951. Instrumentos Musicales del Perú. Lima: Impr. del

Politécnico Nacional “José Pardo.”

368

Kershaw, Baz. 1999. The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard.

London: Routledge.

---. 2007. Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Kim, Suk-Young. 2009. “Material Culture, Gendered Imaginary, and the Haunting

Legacies of Socialism.” Powerpoint Presentation, 2009.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1998. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and

Heritage. Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press, 1998.

Kiselgoff, Anna. 1975. “Peruvians Bow Here in Dances.” New York Times, April 11.

Klarén, Peter. 2000. Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes. New York: Oxford

University Press.

Kokotovic, Misha. 2005. The Colonial Divide in Peruvian Narrative. Brighton: Sussex

Academic Press.

Kraniaskaus, John. “1998. Cronos and the Political Economy of Vampirisim: Notes on a

Historical Constellation.” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World. Ed. Francis

Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iverson. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press: 142-157.

Kristal, Efrain. 1987. The Andes Viewed From the City: Literary and Political Discourse

on the Indian in Peru (1848-1930). New York: Peter Lang, 1987.

Krujit, Dirk. 1994. Revolution by Decree, 1968-1975. Amsterdam: Thela Publishers.

Kubler, George. 1994. “The Quechua in the Colonial World” in Handbook of South

American Indians. Ed. Julian Steward. Washington, DC: US Government Printing

Office.

369

Lambright, Anne. 2007. Creating the Hybrid Intellectual: Subject, Space, and the

Feminine in the Narrative of José María Arguedas. Lewisburg: Bucknell

University Press.

Landreau, John. 1998. “Translation: Autobiography, and Quechua Knowledge.” in José

María Arguedas: Reconsiderations of Latin American Cultural Studies. Ciro A.

Sandoval and Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval, Eds. Athens, OH: Ohio University

Press.

---. 2002. “José María Arguedas: Peruvian Spanish as Subversive Assimilation.” in The

Battle Over Spanish: Language Ideologies and Hispanic Intellectuals. Eds. José

del Valle and Luis Gabriel-Stheeman. London: Routledge.

Lane, Jill. 2005. Blackface Cuba: 1840-1895. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press.

Larson, Brooke. 2004. Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the

Andes, 1810-1910. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lauer, Mirko. 1997. Andes Imaginarios: Discursos del Indigenimo 2. Cuzco: Centro de

Estudios Rurales Andinos Bartolomé de las Casas. Lima: Sur.

Lee, Rebecca M. 2010. “Putting a Face on Free-Market Economies: The Politicization of

Race and Ethnicity in Peru.” Race & Class 51.3: 47-58.

Leibner, Gerardo. 1999. El Mito del Socialismo Indigena. Lima: Pontificia Universidad

del Perú.

Levano, Carl. 1979. “Coliseo: Cielo Serrano en La Victora.” La Calle No. 18, 2 August:

8-9.

Lienhard, Martin. 1983. “La Función del Danzante de Tijeras en Tres

370

Textos de José María Arguedas.” Revista IberoAmericana 122: 147-157.

---. 1990 [1981]. Cultura Andina y Forma Novelesca: Zorros y Danzantes en la última

Novela de Arguedas. Segunda Edición. Lima Editorial Horizonte.

Liss, Sheldon B. 1984. Marxist Thought in Latin America. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Lloréns, José Antonio. 1983. Música Popular en Lima: Criollos y Andinos. Lima:

Instituto de Estudios Peruano.

Lloréns, José Antonio and Lucy Nuñez Rebaza. 1981. “La Música Tradicional Andina en

Lima Metropolitana.” América Indigena 41.1.

Lucero, José Antonio. 2009. “Decades Lost and Won: Indigenous Movements and

Multicultural Neoliberalism in the Andes.” in Beyond Neoliberalism in Latin

America: Societies and Politics at the Crossroads. Eds. John Burdick, Philip

Oxhorm, and Kenneth M. Roberts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

MacCannel, Dean. 1989 [1976]. The Tourist: a New Theory of the Leisure Class. New

York: Schocken Books.

MacCormack, Sabine. 1991. Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early

Colonial Peru. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Mac-Lean y Stenos, Roberto. 1941. “El Demonismo en el Mito Peruano.” Letras, Lima

20, (Third Quarter): 317-331.

Macera, Pablo. 1999. Imagen Francesa del Perú. (Siglos XVI-XIX). Lima: Biblioteca

Nacional del Perú.

Madrid, Alejandro. 2003. “Writing Modernist and Avant-Garde Music in Mexico.

Performativity, Transculturation and Identity after the Revolution, 1920-30,” PhD

371

Diss. The Ohio State University.

Majluf, Natalia. 2008. Tipos del Peru: La Lima Criolla del Pancho Fierro. New York:

Hispanic Society of America.

Mallon, Florencia. 1983. The Defense of Community in Peru’s Central Highlands:

Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

---. 1995. Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Manrique, Nelson. 1999. La Piel y la Pluma: Escritos Sobre Literature, Etnicidad, y

Racismo. Lima: SUR Casa de Estudios del Socialismo..

Manrique Torralva. Richard. 2008. ”Llega a su Final „El Gran Reto‟” El Informante 15

August.

Marcoy, Paul. 1875. Travel Across South America: From the Atlantic Ocean to the

Pacific Ocean, Vol. 1. New York: Scribner Armstrong.

---. 2001. Viaje a Traves de America del Sur: del Oceano Pacifico al Oceano Atlantico.

Lima: Instituto de Estudios Frances Andinos, 2001.

Mariátegui, José Carlos. 1971 [1927]. Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality.

Trans. Marjory Urquidi Austin: University of Texas Press.

---. 1972 [1925]. La Escena Contemporanea. Lima: Empresa Editorial Amauta.

Marzal, Manuel. 1983. Transformación Religiosa Peruana. Lima: PUCP.

Matos Mar, José. 1988. Desborde Popular y Crisis del Etado: El Nuevo Rostro del Perú

en la decáda de 1980. 7ta Edición. Lima: CONCYTEC.

Mayer, Enrique. 1992. “Peru in Deep Trouble: Mario Vargas Llosa‟s Inquest in the

Andes Reexamined.” in Re-reading Cultural Anthropology. George E. Marcus,

372

Ed. Durham: Duke University Press.

McClintock, Cynthia and Abraham F. Lowenthal, eds. 1983. El Gobierno Militar: Una

Experiencia Peruana, 1968-1980. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.

Mckenzie, Jon. 2001. Perform or Else: from Discipline to Performance. London:

Routledge.

Megil Guaman, Intip. 2010. Tawa: Más Alla del Paititi. Paris: Ediciones Paqarina.

Mendez, Cecilia. 1996. “Incas Si, Indios No: Notes on Creole Nationalism and its

Contemporary Crisis.” Journal of Latin American Studies 28.1: 197-225.

Mendizábal, Pedro Roel. 2000. “De Folklore a Culturas Híbridas: Rescatando Raíces,

Redefiniendo Fronteras entre nos/otros.” in No Hay País Más Diverso:

Compendio de Antropología Peruana. Ed. Carlos Iván Degregori. Lima: PUCP.

Mendoza, Zoila. 2000. Shaping Society Through Dance: Mestizo Ritual Performance in

the Peruvian Andes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

---. 2008. Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru.

Durham: Duke University Press.

Merino de Zela, E. Mildred. 1967. “Brief Reports: The National School of Peruvian

Music and Folkdancing.” Ethnomusicology 11.1 (Jan.): 113-115.

Middendorf, Ernst. 1973. Peru: Observaciones y Estudios del Pais y sus Habitantes

Durante una Permanencia de 25 Años. Trans. Ernesto More. Lima: UNMSM.

Millones, Luis. 1964. “Un Movimiento Nativista del Siglo XVI: El Taki Onqoy” Revista

Peruana de Cultura.

---. 1973 “Nuevos Aspectos del Taki Onqoy” in Ideología Mesiánica del Mundo Andino.

Ed. Juan Ossio. Lima: Prado Pastor.

373

---. 1978. Tugurios: La Cultura de los Marginados. Lima: Instituto Nacional de Cultura.

---. 1983. Informe Presentado a la Comisión Investigadora de los Sucesos de

Uchuraccay. Lima: Editora Perú.

---. 2007. Taki Onqoy: De la Enfermedad de Canto a la Epidemia: Fuentes para el

Estudio de la Colonia. Santiago: Centro de Investigaciones Deigo Barros Arana.

---. 2008. Perú Indigena: Poder y Relígion en los Andes Centrales. Lima: Fondo Editorial

del Congreso del Perú.

---. 2010. Despues de la Muerte: Voces del Limbo y el Infierno en Territorio

Andino. Lima: Biblioteca del Congreso del Peru.

Millones, Luis and Hiroyasu Tomoeda. 1998. “El Mundo del Color y el Movimiento: De

los Takis Precolombinos a los Danzantes de Tijeras.” in Historia, Religion, y

Ritual de los Pueblos Ayacuchanos. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology.

---. 2004. “Las Sirenas de Sarhua.” Letras LXXV. 107-108: 15-31.

Mills, Kenneth. 1997. Idolatry and its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and \

Extirpation, 1640-1750. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Molero, Javier. 2004. “Globalización y las Nuevas Cartografias de la Segregración

Urbana en Lima Metropolitana.” http://lasa.international.pitt.edu/members/congresspapers/lasa2004/files/AvilaMoleroJavi er_xCD.pdf.

Molina, Cristobal. 2007. Relación de las Fábulas y Ritos de los Incas. Ed. Henrique

Urbano and Julio and Calvo Peréz. Lima: Universidad de San Martin de Porres.

Monteagudo, Alexis. 1997. “Danza de las Tijeras de Huancavelica.” Lima: Grupo

Cultural Wanka Willka.

Monte Alto, Romulo. 2009. “El Ultimo Baile de la Huacsa Arguedas. Revista Alborada 1

374

(November): 68-80.

---. 2011. “Arguedas: Una Autobiografia Colectiva?” Hispanista:

Primera Entrevista Electrónica de los Hispanistas de Brazil. 15.

Montoya, Rodrigo. 1979. “Prologo” Nuestra Comunidad Indigena. Hildebrando Castro

Pozo Lima: Perugraph Editores.

---. 1990. “Prologo” Los Dansaq. Museo de la Cultura Peruana,1990.

---. 1997. “En el Reino de los Dioses Andinos.” La Republica 17 August: 46-48.

---. 1998. Multiculturalidad y Política: Derechos Indígenas, Ciudadanos, y Humanos.

Lima: SUR Casa de Estudios del Socialismo.

---. 2004. De la Utopia Andina al Socialismo Magico. Lima: SUR.

Moreiras, Alberto. 2001. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American

Cultural Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

Moreno de Caceres, Antonia. 1974. Recuerdos de la Compaña de Brena: Memorias.

Lima: C. Milla Batres, 1974.

Mujica Pinilla, Ramón. 1996. Angeles Apócrifos en la América Virreinal. México: Fondo

de Cultura Económica.

Mumford, Jeremy. 1998. “The Taki Onqoy and the Andean Nation: Sources and

Interpretations.” Latin American Research Review, 33.1: 150-165.

Muñoz, Silverio. 1980. José María Arguedas y el Mito de la Salvación por la Cultura.

Minneapolis: Instituto para el Estudio de Ideologías y Literatura.

Murra, John V. 1996. “José María Arguedas: Dos Imagenes.” in Las Cartas de Argueda.

Eds. Murra, John V. and Mercedes López-Baralt. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la

Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

375

Murra, John V. and Mercedes López-Baralt, eds. 1996. Las Cartas de Argueda. Lima:

Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

Nauss Millay, Amy. 2005. Voices from the Fuente Viva: The Effect of Orality in

Twentieth Century Spanish-American Narrative. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell

University Press.

Ness, Sally. 1992. Body, Movement, and Culture: Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a

Philippine Community. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

“New Publications” 1874. The New York Times. November 23.

NMAI. 2004. Welcome Home: The Grand Opening of the National Museum of the

American Indian. (video). Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institute

Nugent, Guillermo. 1992. El Laberinto de la Choledad. Lima: Serie Panel.

Nuñez Rebaza, Lucy. 1985. La Vigencia de la Danza de las Tijeras en Lima

Metropolitana. MA Thesis PUCP.

---. 1990. Los Dansaq. Lima: Museo de la Cultura Peruana.

Oliart, Patricia. 1998. “Alberto Fujimori: The Man Peru Needed.” in Shining and Other

Paths: War and Society and Peru, 1980-1995. Ed. Steve J. Stern. Durham: Duke

University Press.

Olivas Escudero, Fidel. 1924. Apuntes para la Historia de Huamanga. Ayacucho:

Imprenta Diocesana.

Ong, Aihwa. 1996. “Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate

Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States.” Current Anthropology 37.5:

737-762

Ortega, Julio. 1985. Adiós Ayacucho. Lima: Mosca Azul.

376

---. 2000. “Introduction.” in The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below. José

María Arguedas. Trans. Frances Horning Barraclough. Pittsburgh: University of

Pittsburgh Press: xi-xxii.

Ortiz, Fernando. 1987 [1941]. Contrapunteo Cubano del Tabaco y el Azúcar. Caracas:

Biblioteca Ayacucho.

Pease, Franklin. 1973. El Dios Creador Andino. Lima: Mosca Azul.

Picón Carlos, José. 2005. “Danza de las Figuras.” Gaceta Internacional. 11 5 May: 29-

30.

Pinilla, Carmen María. 1994. Arguedas: Conocimiento y Vida. Lima: Pontificia

Universidad Católica del Peru Fondo Editorial

Poole, Deborah. 1990. “Accommodation and Resistance in Andean Ritual Dance” TDR,

34.2: 98-126.

---. 1997. Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Poole, Deborah and Gerardo Rénique, eds. 1992. Peru: Time of Fear. London: Latin

American Bureau.

Portacarrero, G. 1993. Los Nuevos Limeños: Sueños, Fervores, y Caminos en el Mundo

Popular. Lima: SUR.

Postlewait, Thomas and Tracy Davis. 2003. Theatricality. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

2008. “Protagonizan la Nueva Miniserie de Frequencia Latina.” Expresa 7 July..

Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New

York: Routledge.

377

PROANDE. 2000. Kallpanchakuyninchikkunamanta = Nuestra Resistencia. Lima:

PROANDE.

---. 2003. “Metodologias Participativas para Educación Sanitaria en Zonas Rurales

Andinas.” Lima: PROANDE.

PROMPERU. 2008. “Peru: Live the Legend.” Television Commercial. Prudencia Mendoza, Carlos. 1993. “La Danza de las Tijeras: Vigencia del Taki Onqoy: Anales de la Reunion de Etnología. La Paz:: 213-227. Puchner, Martin. 2002. Stage-Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Puga, José. 2008. “Magia y Leyendas en el Mundo de los Dansaq.” El Comercio, 4 January: C8 Quijano, Anibal. 1980. Dominación y Cultura: El Cholo y el Conflict cultural en el Perú. Lima: Mosca Azul Editores. Rama, Angel. 1982. Transculturación Narrative en America Latina. Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte. ---. 1984. La Ciudad Letrada. Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte. Ramos, Alcida. 1998. Indigenism: Ethnic Politics in Brazil. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ramos, Gabriel. 1992. “Politica Eclesiastica y Extirpación de la Idolatría: Discursos y

Silencios en Torno al Taki Onqoy.” Revista Andina (Cusco) 10: 147-169.

2008. “Ratings Sube Como Espuma.” Diario Ojo. (June).

Raymundo, Jesús. 2002. “Las Tijeras Que Danzan.” El Peruano 19 June: 27

---. 2008a.“Danzante de los Apus.” Diario la Primera 6 July: 3.

---. 2008b. “Con los Apus en Lima: Nuevos Ritos.” Variedades 100. 65 (14-20).

Rehn, E. and Sirleaf, E.J. 2002. Women, War, and Peace: The Independent Expert’s on 378

the Impact of Armed Conflict on Women and Women’s Roles in Peace Building.

New York: UNIFEM.

Riofrío, Gustavo. 1978. Se Busca Terreno para Próxima Barriada. Lima: DESCO.

Rivera Martínez, Edgar. 1969. “Acuarelas Desconocida de Pancho Fierro.” Fenix: La

Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional, Lima. 19 (1969).

---. 2001. “Un Viajero Sin Prisa a Mediados del Siglo XIX: Laurent Saint-Cricq in Paul

Marcoy.” in Viaje a Traves de America del Sur: del Oceano Pacifico al Oceano

Atlantico. Lima: IFEA.

Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York:

Columbia University Press.

---. 2007. It. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Robin Azevedo, Valérie and Salazar-Soler, Carmen. 2009. “Introducción.” in El Regreso

de lo Indigena: Retos, Problemas y Perspectivas. Eds. Valérie Robin Azevedo

and Carmen Salazar-Soler. Lima: IFEA.

Roel Pineda, Josafat. 1974. “Danzas del Perú” Boletín del Taller de Folklore 13.

---. 1977. “Folklore: Nuevas Formas y Expresiones.” El Comercio (1 January): Special

Supplement, VIII.

Romero, Raul. 1985. “La Música Tradicional y Popular” in La Música en el Perú. Lima:

Patronato Popular y Porvenir Pro Música Clásica.

---. 2001. Debating the Past: Music, Memory, and Identity in the Andes.

Oxford University Press.

Roncalla, Fredy. 2002. “Hablan Los Apus.” Quehacer Lima 137: 55-61.

Rospigliosi, Fernando. 1996. Las Fuerzas Armadas y el 5 de Abril. La Percepción de la

379

Amenaza Subversiva como una Motivación Golpista. Lima: Instituto de Estudios

Peruanos.

Rostworowski, María. 1999. History of the Inca Realm. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Rowe, William. 1979. Mito y Ideologia en la Obra de José María Arguedas. Lima:

Instituto Nacional de Cultura.

---. 1996. Ensayos Arguedianas. Lima: Editorial de la Universidad Nacional

Mayor de San Marcos.

---. 1998. “Arguedas: Music, Awareness, and Social Transformation.” in José María

Arguedas: Reconsiderations for Latin American Cultural Studies. Eds. Ciro

Sandoval and Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval. Athens, OH: University of Ohio

Press.

Rowe, William and Vivian Schelling. 1991. Memory and Modernity in Latin America.

New York: Verso.

Sabogal, José. 1945. Mates Burilados: Arte Vernacular Peruano. Buenos Aires: Editorial

Nova.

Said, Edward.1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Salas Guevara, Federico. 2008. Historia de Huancavelica. Lima: Compañia de la Mina

Buenaventura.

Salomon, Frank and George Urioste, trans. 1991. The Huarochirí Manucript: A

Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion. Austin: University of Texas

Press.

Salazar Soler, Carmen. 1997. “La Divinidad de las Tinieblas” Bulletin de L’Institut

380

d’Etudes Andinas. Lima. 26.3: 1-27.

---. 2006. Supay Muqui. Diós del Sovacon. Vida y Mentalidades Mineras. Lima:

Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú.

Sallnow, Michael J. 1987. Pilgrims in the Andes: Regional Cults in Cusco. Washington,

DC: Smithsonian Institute Press.

Santa Cruz, Victoria. 1978. “El Conjunto Nacional de Folklore.” Folklore: Reencuentro

del Hombre con sus Raíces 1: 14-17.

---. 1979. “Descubrimiento y Desarrollo del Sentido Rítmico.” Folklore: Reencuentro del

Hombre con sus Raíces 2: 3

Savran, David. 2001. “Choices Made and Unmade.” Theater 31.2: 89-95.

---. 2009. Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the Middle Class.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Schaedel, Richard P. 1979. “From Homogenization to Heterogenization in Lima, Peru”

Urban Anthropology 8.3-4: 399-420.

Schechner, Richard. 2003 [1977]. Performance Theory. London: Routledge.

---. 2006. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge.

Shay, Anthony. 2002. Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Companies,

Representation, and Power. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Shepherd, Simon and Mick Wallis. 2004. Drama/Theatre/Performance. London:

Routledge.

Silverblatt, Irene. 1987. Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca

and Colonial Peru. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for

381

Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Sommer, Doris. 1991. Foundational Fictions: The National Romance of Latin America.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

---. 2006. Cultural Agency in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Spitta, Silvia. 1995. Between Two Waters: Narratives of Transculturation in Latin

America. Houston: Houston University Press.

Starn, Orin. 1992. “Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru.”

in Rereading Cultural Anthropology. George E. Marcus, Ed. Durham: Duke

University Press.

---. 1998. “Villagers at Arms: War and Counterrevolution in the Central-South Andes.”

in Shining and Other Paths: War and Society and Peru, 1980-1995. Ed. Steve J.

Stern. Durham: Duke University Press.

---. 1999. Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes. Durham: Duke University

Press.

Starn, Orin and Marisol de la Cadena, eds. 2007. Indigenous Experience Today. Oxford: Berg. Stastny, Francisco. 1979. Arte Popular, Tranformación y Expectativas: Apertura del

Mercado Urbano. Lima: UNMSM.

Stern, Steve J. 1998. “Introduction Beyond Enigma: An Agenda for Interpreting Shining

Path and Peru, 1980-1995.” in Shining and Other Paths: War and Society and

Peru, 1980-1995. Ed. Steve J. Stern. Durham: Duke University Press.

---. 1986. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Conquest: Huamanga to 1640.

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Stone Peters, Julie. 2009. “Drama, Primitive Ritual, Ethnographic Spectacle: Genealogies 382

of World Performance.” Modern Language Quarterly 70.1 (March): 67-96.

Tamayo Herrera, José. 1980. Historia del Indigenismo Cuzqueño, siglos xvi-xx. Lima:

Instituto Nacional de Cultura.

Tamayo San Román, Augusto. 1986. La Agonia de Rasu Niti: Un Cuento de José María

Arguedas (Video) Lima: CETUC.

Tamayo Vargas, Augusto. 1992. Literatura Peruana, Vol. II. Lima: Peisa.

Tamborini, Christopher Ryan. 2005. “The „Reinvented‟ State in Emerging Industries: A

Comparison of Tourism in Peru and Chile.” PhD Diss. University of

Texas, Austin.

Tapia, Carlos. 1997. Las Fuerzas Armadas y Sendero Luminoso: Des Estrategias y un

Final. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.

Tarica, Estelle. 2008. The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.

Taussig, Michael. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

---. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New

York: Routledge.

Taylor, Diana. 2002. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in

the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.

---. 2004. “Scenes of Cognition: Performance and Conquest.” Theatre Journal 56: 353-

372.

Taylor, Gerald. 1980. “Supay” Amerindia 5: 47-63.

Taylor, Lewis. 2006. Shining Path: Guerilla War in Peru’s Northern Highlands.

383

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Theidon, Kimberly. 2003. “Disarming the Subject: Remembering War and Imagining

Citizenship in Peru.” Cultural Critique 54 (Spring): 67-87.

---. 2004. Entre Projimos: El Conflicto Armado Interno y la Politica de la Reconciliación

en el Perú. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.

---. 2007. “Gender in Transition: Common Sense, Women, and War.” Journal of Human

Rights 6: 453-478.

---. 2010. “Histories of Innocence.” In Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and

Priorities After Mass Violence. Ed. Rosalind Shaw and Lars Waldorf. Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press.

Thurner, Mark. 1997. From Two Publics to One Divided: Contradictions of Postcolonial

Nationmaking in Andean Peru. Durham: Duke University Press.

---.2003a. “After Spanish Rule: Writing Another After.” in After Spanish Rule:

Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas. Ed. Mark Thurner. Durham: Duke

University Press.

--. 2003b. “Peruvian Genealogies” in After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of

the Americas. Ed. Mark Thurner. Durham: Duke University Press.

Tincopa Calle, 2008. Juan Francisco. “Danzaq: Atipanakuy.” Qawaq: Cultura Andina y

Turismo 2 (March)

Toledo, Francisco de. 1986. Disposiciones Gubernativas para el Virreinato del Perú,

1569-1574. Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos.

Torres V. Nilton. 2006. “El (no tan) Joven Manos de Tijeras.” La Republica 17 August:

18.

384

Tovar, Teresa. „Barrios, Ciudad, Democracia y Politica.” In Movimientos Sociales y

Democracía: La Fundación de un Nuevo Orden. Ed. Eduardo Ballón. Lima:

Desco, 1986

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph “Anthropology and the Savage Slot.” In Recapturing

Anthropology. Ed. R. Fox. Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press, 1991.

Tucker, Joshua. “Sounding out a New Peru: Music, Media, and the Emergent Andean

Public.” PhD Dissertation. University of Texas, 2006.

Turino, Thomas. Moving Away From Silence: Music of the Peruvian Altiplano and the Experience of Urban Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ---. Music in the Andes: Experiencing Music, Expresing Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. ---. “The Charango and the Sirena: Music, Magic, and the Power of Love.” Latin American Music Review 4.1 (Spring-Summer 1983): 81-119. ---. “The Music of Andean Migrants in Lima, Peru: Demographics, Social Power, and Style.” Latin American Music Review 9.2 (Autumn-Winter 1988): 127-150. Turner, Terence. “Indigenous and Culturalist Movements in the Contemporary Global Conjuncture.” in Las Identidades y las Tensiones Culturales de la Modernidad. Santiago de Compostela: FAAEE, 1999. Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society.

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974.

---. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts

Journal Publications, 1982.

---. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1977.

385

Ulfe, María Eugenia. Danzando en Ayacucho: Música y Ritual del Rincón de los

Muertos. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2004.

Unzueta, Fernando. 1996. “Las Tradiciones y la Cuestión Nacional.” in Tradiciones

Peruanas. Ed. Julio Ortega. Madrid: Archivos: 503-519.

Uriarte, Ana. 1998. Encuentro Ritual: Los Danzaq en Huacaña (video). Lima: TV

Cultura.

Urbano and Duviols. 1990. Fábulas y Mitos de los Incas. Madrid: Cronicas de las

Americas.

Urrutia, Jaime. 1985. Huamanga: Region, Proceso e Historia: 1536-1770. Ayacucho:

Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga.

Usandizaga, Helena. 2006. “Amaru, Winku, Layk‟a, Supay, o Demonio: Las Fuerzas del

Mundo de Abajo en Los Ríos Profundos.” in José María Arguedas: Hacía una

Poetica Migrante. Ed. Sergio R. Franco. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de

Literatura Iberoamericana.

Valcárcel, Luis E. 1981. Memorias. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.

---. 1971 [1927]. Tempestad en los Andes. Lima: Editorial Universo.

Vadillo Villa, José. 2007. “Tiempo de Tijeras.” El Peruano 11 April: 32.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. 1984 [1983]. “La Historia de una Matanza.” Mexico: Joaquin

Mortiz/Planeta.

---. 1996. La Utopía Arcaica: José María Arguedas y las Ficciones del

Indigenimo. Mexico: FCE.

Varon, Rafael G. 1990. “El Taki Onqoy: Las Raices Andinas de un Fenómono Colonial.”

in El Retorno de las Huacas: Estudios y Documentos Sobre el Taki Onqoy, Siglo

386

XVI. Ed. Luis Millones. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.

Vega, Juan José. 1995. “Los Antecedentes Historicos de la Danza de las Tijeras.” Cultura

Popular (Lima).

Velasco Alvarado, Juan. 1972. La Voz de la Revolución: Discursos del Presidente de la

Republica, General de División, Juan Velasco Alvarado, 1970-1972. Vol. 2.

Lima: Ediciones Participación.

Vich, Cynthia. 2003. “29 de Julio de 2001: Toledo en el Cusco o Pachacutec en el Mercado Global.” in Batallas por la Memoria: Antagonismos de la Promesa Peruana. Eds. Marita Hamman, Santiago López Maguiña, Gonzalo Portocarrero, and Victor Vich. Lima: Red para el Desarrollo de las Ciencias Sociales en el Perú. Vich, Victor. 2006. “La Nación en Venta: Bricheros, Turismo, y el Mercado en el Perú Contemporaneo.”in La Ruta Andina: Turismo y Desarollo Sostenible en Perú. Johanna Louisa Ypeij, Ed. Lima: CEDLA. ---. 2007. “Magical, Mystical, “The Royal Tour of Alejandro Toledo.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2007. Vilcapoma, José Carlos. 1998. “La Danza de las Tijeras en Parinacochas” Historia,

Religión y Ritual en los Pueblos Ayacuchanos. Eds. Luis Millones, Hirayasu

Tomoeda and Tatsuhiko Fuji. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology.

Villegas Falcon, Alejandro. 1998. La Danza de las Tijeras. Lima: Biblioteca Nacional del

Peru.

Vivanco, Alejandro. 1973. “El Migrante de Provincias Como Intérprete del Folklore

Andino en Lima.” B.A Thesis, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.

---. 1976. La Danza de las Tijeras. Lima: UNMSM.

---. 1988. Cien Temas del Folklore Peruano. Lima: Bendezú.

387

Vokral, Edita. 1984. “Arguedas Como Dansak‟ en la Lucha por la Cultura Andina.”

Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana. 10.20: 297-303.

Wachtel, Nathan. 1977 [1971]. The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of

Peru Through Indian Eyes, 1530-1570. Trans. Ben and Sian Reynolds. Hassocks,

UK: Harvester Press.

Walker, Charles. 1999. Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru,

1780-1840. Durham: Duke University Press.

Wanka Willka. 1999. Danzantes de Tijeras: Cuentos de los Pueblos Huancavelicanos.

San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina: Instituto Queshwa Jujuymanta.

Warren, Kay and Jean Jackson. 2002. Indigenous Movements, Self-Representatin, and the

State in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Weismantel, Mary. 2005. “Afterward: Andean Identities, Multiplicities, Socialities,

Materialities.” n Natives Making Nation: Gender, Indigeneity, and the State in

the Andes. Ed. Andrew Canessa. Tucscon: University of Arizona Press.

Williams, Gareth. 2002. The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity

in Latin America. Durhan: Duke University Press.

Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Witt, Heinrich. Diario. 1992. 1824-1890: Un Testimonio Personal sobre el Peru del Siglo

XIX. Lima: Banco Mercantil.

Wise, David O. 1980. “A Peruvian Indigenista Forum of the 1920s: José Carlos

Mariátegui‟s Amauta” Ideologies and Literature, 3.13: 70-104.

Wolf, Eric. R. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

388

Wood, David. 2002. “Artesanía Peruana: A Study of the Production and Consumption of

the Mate Burilado (Engraved Gourd)” in Studies in Spanish and Latin American

Popular Culture. Shelley Godsland and Ann White, Eds. Oxford: Peter Lang.

Yaranga, Abdón. 1997 “Anteq o Antiq o Danza de las Tijeras.” Guamangenisis, Revista de la Universidad Nacional de San Cristobal de Huamanga III. 3: 54-58. Yashar, Denice. 1999. “Democracy, Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge in Latin America.” World Politics 52.1: 76-104. ---. 2005. Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yudice, George. 2003. The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham: Duke University Press. Zamir, Tzachi. 2010. “Watching Actors.” Theatre Journal 62.2: 227-243. Zevallos Aguilar, Ulises Juan. 2009. Las Provincias Contraatacan: Regionalismo y

Anticentralimo en la Literatura Peruana del Siglo XX. Lima: UNMSM.

Ziter, Edward. 2003. The Orient on the Victorian Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. ---. 1997. “Multiculturalism or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism.” The New Left Review 225. Zorn, Elayne. 2004. Weaving a Future: Tourism, Cloth, and Culture on an Andean Island. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Zuidema, Tom. 1965 “Observaciones Sobre el Taki Onqoy.” Historia y Cultura 1: 137.

389

List of Interviews

“Rey Chicchi”(dancer). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. July 12, 2007.

---. Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. Dec. 15, 2007.

“Rey Chicchi and Chicchi Para I” (dancers). Interviewed by Author, September 5, 2007.

“Rey Chicchi and Lasta Para (dancers). Interviewed by Author, May 21, 2009

“Julio Peréz” (singer of La Sarita). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. August 10, 2007.

---. Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. January 19, 2009.

“Qori Sisicha” (dancer). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. August 17, 2007.

---. Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. December 18, 2007.

“Ccarccaria” (dancer). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. August 19, 2007.

---. Interviewed by Author. Cuzco, Peru. October 3, 2008.

“Chimango” (violinist). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. August 21, 2007

---. Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. August 29, 2008.

“Patricia Awapara” (modern dancer/choreographer). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru.

August 25, 2007.

“Condenado” (dancer). Interviewed by Author. Huancayo, Peru. September 6, 2007.

“Mariano Marcacusco” (violinist/member of La Sarita). Interviewed by Author. Lima,

390

Peru. January 3, 2008.

“Fredy Chiara” (dancer). Interviewed by Author. Los Angeles, CA. March 31, 2008.

“Chuspicha” (dancer). Interviewed by Author. Andamarca, Peru. August 25, 2008

“Ccecchele” (dancer). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. September 8, 2008.

“Qoronta” (dancer). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. October 1, 2008

“Alvaro Zavala” (video artist). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. September 21, 2008.

---. Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. December 7, 2008.

“Máximo Damiá Huamaní” (violinist). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. October 16,

2008.

“Fredy Ortiz” (Singer, Uchpa). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. October 18, 2008.

“Javier Maravi” (theatre actor). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. November 29, 2008.

“Sara Joffre” (theatre director). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. November 30, 2008.

“Damaris Mallma” (fusion singer). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. December 5,

2008.

„Pura Sangre” (female dancer). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. December 15, 2008.

“Llapla” (harpist). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. January 6, 2009.

“Valentín Chiara” (harpist Los Hermanos Chiara). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru.

January 6, 2009.

“Fredy Chavez.” (Director, Los Hermanos Chavez). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru.

January 8, 2009.

---. Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. January 19, 2009.

“Kishkamico” (dancer). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. January 12, 2009.

“Encanto de Puquio” (dancer/ member La Sarita). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru.

391

January 16, 2009.

“Victor Chavez” (dancer). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru January 17, 2009.

“Gabriela Yepes” (filmmaker). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. January 17, 2009.

“Pachak Chaki” (dancer). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. January 26, 2009.

---. Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. March 29, 2009.

“Cristal” (dancer). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. March 19, 2009.

“Fortunato Anchita” (indigenist intellectual). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. March

31, 2009.

“Accarwaycha” (female dancer). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. April 2, 2009.

“Añascha” (dancer). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. April 6, 2009.

“Cheqche de Sondondo” (violinist). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. April 8, 2009.

“Killihuara” (dancer). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. April 13, 2009.

“Manuelcha Prado” (fusion guitarist). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. April 17,

2009.

„Amiel Cayo” (Actor in Yuyachkani). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. April 19,

2009.

“Terrible” (dancer). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. April 21, 2009.

“Champa” (harpist). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. April 29, 2009.

“Halcón” (dancer). Intervieed by Author. Lima, Peru. May 3, 2009.

“Juan Capcha” (violinist). Interviewed by Author. Lima, Peru. May 22, 2009.

“Qesqento” (dancer). Interviewed by Author. Port Chester, NY. June 11, 2009.

“Lucerito de Paucara” (dancer). Interviewed by Author. Queens, NY. June 12, 2009.

“Rose Cano” (actress/ director of NGO North-South Connections. Interviewed by

392

Author. Bogotá, Colombia. August 24, 2009

---. Interviewed by author (telephone). February 19, 2010.

“Pishtaco” (dancer). Interviewed by Author (email). October 30, 2009.

“Lucifer” (dancer). Interviewed by Author (email). March 28, 2011.

393