©2013 Mary Barnard ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DEVELOPMENT DREAMS: HOW THE MIGRANT CAPTIVATED PERU’S THEATRE AND RESHAPED A NATION by MARY BARNARD A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Spanish written under the direction of Professor Camilla Stevens and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey January, 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Development Dreams: How the Migrant Captivated Peru’s Theatre and Reshaped a Nation By Mary Barnard Dissertation Director: Camilla Stevens This dissertation explores how the theme of rural to urban migration in Peruvian theatre and performance from the 1950s until the beginning of the twenty-first century constitutes a response to Western discourses on development and modernity. Framing my arguments with decolonial and postcolonial theory from Arturo Escobar, Aníbal Quijano, and Walter Mignolo in conjunction with recent works of Peruvian cultural studies and performance criticism by Diana Taylor, Victor Vich, and Paul Connerton, I posit performance and theatre as powerful tools for contesting the colonial aspects of modernity, development, and globalization. This dissertation reveals that the desire to develop is a set of symbols, attitudes, and actions that forms an imaginary of development which sometimes overpowers traditional ties to place and culture. I argue that Peru’s theatre from this time period provides alternative interpretations of what it means to progress economically and socially within the metropolis and beyond amongst the country’s traditionally disenfranchised indigenous ethnic groups. This dissertation also examines how Peru’s theatre deconstructed development concerns from the latter half of the twentieth century by measuring both the transformation of Lima’s metropolitan theatre scene and the growth of theatre and festival in the provinces. By analyzing works by Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, ii Hernán Cortés, César Vega Herrera, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, Gervasio Juan Vilca, Javier Maraví Aranda, and Julio Ortega, along with two festivals from the city of Cusco, this dissertation interrogates how Peru’s theatre protested racial discrimination and helped to craft regional and provincial identities as a response to the increasing encroachment of “developed,” globalized ways of life in the rural Andean countryside. I sustain that many of the plays and the festivals of Inti Raymi and the III Festival de Teatro Cusqueño, contrast the indigenous Andean lifestyle of the provinces to that of Lima in order to draw attention to how migration and globalization have caused the disappearance of youth, communal tradition, and capital from the provinces. In short, this dissertation demonstrates how theatre and performance portray popular sentiments toward Peru’s economic development by using migration as a connecting theme. iii Dedication First, I must thank God for giving me the ability to seek such a high level of education and for allowing me to see this project through to its end. Second, I must thank my family for their support and encouragement. I must thank my daughter Basma and my husband Bassam for being so patient with me. Next, I must thank my dissertation committee, but especially my dissertation director Camilla Stevens. Dr. Stevens was a constant source of support and her positive attitude encouraged me to keep plugging away. I thank Dr. Marcy Schwartz for her incisive commentary and her investment in my growth as a scholar and I thank Dr. Jorge Marcone for his interest in my project and in my career. My committee didn’t even let Hurricane Sandy keep it from providing timely commentary. I also thank Dr. Ulla Berg for taking the time to read this work and offer her criticisms. I also thank the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis for selecting me as a Graduate Fellow for their 2008-2009 Vernacular Epistemologies working group and the Rutgers New Brunswick Graduate School and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese for funding my research in Peru. These opportunities profoundly impacted my dissertation and my development as a scholar. iv Next, I must thank the many people who helped me do my research over the course of the past five years: Tania Castro Gonzáles and the entire Castro family of Cusco for introducing me to the cultural community of their city; the Cardoza/Cardozo and Cruz families of Lambayeque, Cajamarca, Piura, and Lima for opening their doors to me; the Alzubi and Alshabibi families for watching my daughter while I taught; Phyllis Zatlin; Jean-Jacques Decoster and Centro Tinku in Cusco; Julie Livingston; Indrani Chatterjee; Camilla Townsend; Jan Kubik; Claudia Salazar; Alfredo Bushby; Juan Villegas; Walter Mignolo; Carlos Rado Yáñez of the Instituto Nacional de la Cultura; Ninochka Carbajal; Carmita Pinedo Yuyarima and Julio César Florez of Teatro Ikaro; Hugo Contreras Rozas of Grupo Kapuli; Hugo Bonet Rodríguez; Guido Guevara Ugarte; Milagros del Carpio and the Asociación Pukllasunchis; and the staff at the Archibald S. Alexander Library at Rutgers, the Esther Raushenbush Library at Sarah Lawrence College, the New York Public Library, the Biblioteca del Centro Bartolomé de las Casas in Cusco, and the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú in Lima. v Index Abstract ………….....……………………………............………………….............. ii Dedication …………………….......…………................…………….……….......... iv Index ……………….....…………………………................………………............. vi Introduction. Defining Development’s Hold on Modernity: Peru’s Theatre and the Rise of the Migrant …………………………………............…………………....... 1 Chapter 1. Between Villages and Country Clubs: Development Fears in Mid-Twentieth Century Peruvian Theatre ………………..……………….….…............................. 22 Chapter 2. In the Midst of Revolution: the Migrant in Peru’s Theatre from 1968 to 1990 ………………………………………………………............……………....... 56 Chapter 3. The Theatre of the Fujishock: A Reappraisal of Tradition, Locality, and Migration in a Globalizing Peru ….………………............……………….....…..... 97 Chapter 4. The Once and Future Inca: Contemporary Performance in Cusco and the Polemics of Development in Peru ..………………............……………….….…..... 137 Appendix to Chapter 4 ...........………………………............……………………... 176 Conclusion and Further Considerations ……….………….........……........….......... 195 Bibliography ……………..........……………………............…………………....... 201 Curriculum Vitae ....………………………………............……………………...... 221 vi 1 Introduction Defining Development’s Hold on Modernity: Peru’s Theatre and the Rise of the Migrant The year 2000 marked the end of the twentieth century and the millennia, but for some places it was more eventful than for others. Peru is one example. In the year 2000, after President Alberto Fujimori’s government crumbled under the weight of the “Vladivideo” political corruption scandal that reverberated throughout the nation and the world’s Spanish-speaking media outlets, another investigatory process was being planned: the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Lacking the intrigue of a corrupt, loquacious Svengali, played by Vladimiro Montesinos (the “Vladi” in “Vladivideo”), Fujimori’s head advisor; the sexiness of vedettes, represented by Gisela Valcarcel; and the thrill of talk show host Laura Bozzo’s involvement, the TRC did not get the ratings that the Vladivideo scandal did and was largely a quiet process that lacked the same level of media fanfare.1 The TRC engaged another type of popular performance: Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani and other theatre troupes like Cusco’s Grupo Impulso received funding to produce works of art and performance to inspire public memory recollection and confession before the commission’s tribunals. Recent studies on Peru’s theatre have duly focused on the role of performance in processing the political violence of the 1980s and 1990s in the country and the involvement of Peru’s theatre practitioners in the TRC’s investigations. While few book- 1 Currently, the blog Vladivideos on the Peruvian alternative news site lamula.pe is uploading the videos and providing transcripts on the internet. The blog is chronicling this specific instance of Fujimori’s corruption for worldwide open access. The site can be found at this address: http://vladivideos.lamula.pe. 2 length projects exist, works such as Francine A’ness’ article, “Resisting Amnesia: Yuyachkani, Performance, and the Postwar Reconstruction of Peru” (2004), Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire. Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), and Miguel Rubio Zapata’s El cuerpo ausente. Performance política (2006), among other crucial works, have shed light on the events to outside audiences and draw parallels between Peru’s contemporary issues with re-democratization and the institutionalization of human rights policies with those of other countries of the region through the intertwined media of theatre and performance. Voices once thought lost became recovered through performance, testimony, and criticism. Yet one element of the conflict has been mostly disregarded by arts and literature critics given the pressing need to adjudicate the injustices of this epoch. Forgotten under the weight of Peru’s centuries-old ethnic and racial antagonisms, the economic element that informed the actions of both the communist insurgency