Contesting Identities Through Walker Dance: Mestizo Performance in the Southern Andes of PeruPosted in Anthropology, Articles, Arts, Media Archive on 2013-10-13 23:49Z by Steven |
Contesting Identities Through Walker Dance: Mestizo Performance in the Southern Andes of Peru
Repercussions: a journal dedicated to all areas of music studies
University of California, Berkeley
Fall 1994, Volume 3, No. 2
pages 50-80
Zoila Mendoza-Walker
This article analyzes an event in the city of Cusco, Peru that reverberated throughout the entire region during the late 1980s. This incident, which became known as the “events of Corpus,” generated a series of open antagonisms that pitted young members of Cusco ritual dance associations (called comparsas) who performed dances from the “Altiplano” region against a coalition of civil, religious and “cultural” authorities who opposed that performance. These confrontations, which have continued into the early 1990s, demonstrated the relevance of comparsa performance and of state and private “cultural institutions” in the definition and redefinition of local and regional identity among Cusco “mestizos.” In particular, they made evident that these dances were being used by young mestizo cusqueños (people of Cusco), especially women, to construct a new public identity that contested the gender and “ethnic” stereotypes promoted by the cultural institutions. Here I will discuss in some detail the confrontations that emerged in, the town of San Jerónimo demonstrating how a “folkloric” institution such as the comparsa can become a site for transformation rather than conservation of cultural values and roles…
Read the entire article here.