Creating Our Own offers a detailed accounting of how folklore enters into processes of identity formation and projection in one exemplary setting, Cuzco, Peru, during the first half of the twentieth century. Cuzco is an interesting site for this accounting due to its historical prominence as the center of Inca civilization and its emergence during the time-frame of this study as one of the primary tourist attractions in the Andes. Drawing on contemporary newspaper accounts, archival materials, and interviews she has conducted, Zoila Mendoza traces the evolution of “artistic-folkloric output” in Cuzco through the middle decades of the twentieth century. Her central argument is that this realm of “creative effervescence” cannot be regarded as merely a reflection of identity processes but is instead “an integral and significant part of these processes” (3). Mendoza views these public forms as “privileged areas” and notes that their “close study often reveals paradoxes and contradictions” (2). Creating Our Own makes a strong case for the centrality of folklore in the construction of regional, national, and even continental identities, and provides a thorough, at times bordering on exhausting, examination of the many paradoxes and contradictions that appear upon close inspection of these materials.
Folklorists will find in this book a pliable and productive formulation of the domain of folklore. Mendoza devotes her study to “the so-called folkloric arts (music, dance, and drama, in particular)” (1). It becomes clear early on that she is taking her cue from artists and cultural activists based in Cuzco, who link folklore to expressive traditions with roots in primarily rural, Quechua-speaking, indigenous communities, but view these traditions as open to all creative spirits, from whatever social niche, who are inspired to draw upon these roots to fashion evolved artistic products. Indeed, one of this book’s most interesting features is its situated documentation of folklore’s processing in a variety of causes--advancing a regional, national, and American identity; promoting loyalty to the nation of Peru; feeding national and international tourism; and composing concert pieces and choreographing staged spectacles.
Creating Our Own deploys a fluid vocabulary for pinpointing folkloric elements; terms such as “folkloric arts,” “artistic-folkloric activities,” “pure folkloric art,” “original creations based on folklore,” “urban popular art,” and others, make their appearances in these pages. This terminological plenitude bespeaks a recognition on the part of the book’s author, and on the part of the people she is writing about, that the domain of folklore is “a fruitful field of creative action” (181). Mendoza makes use of two prominent terms to chart the processing of folklore in the Cuzco setting. One of these, captaciones, comes out of the practice of Cuzco’s artistic activists. Captaciones are arrangements or compositions based on rural, indigenous originals; Mendoza sees them as artistic creations in music, dance, and theater that are stylized modifications of actually observed and sometimes collected artistic forms in ethnic communities. Those who created these captaciones perceived them as having “no known authors” and deriving from “communal ancestral practices” (184). Typically, the observations for these creations were made in rural settings around Cuzco while the performances took place in Cuzco, other cities including Lima, and abroad in other South America capitals, in Europe, and in the United States. Mendoza illustrates how artists, intellectuals, and scholars worked together to forge a canon of legitimate cuzqueño tradition through the fashioning and promotion of these captaciones.
The second term employed by Mendoza in tracking how folklore has been processed in Cuzco is a scholar’s word, folklorization, treated by Mendoza as the action of taking the art called folklore and turning it into “highly significant elements for the configuration of individual and group identities” (6). Folklorization occurs when “public forms of expression are selected as being representative of a whole region or nation and are staged and promoted as such” (6). Creating Our Own shows how Cuzco’s artists and cultural activists, over a period of more than fifty years and three generations, conspired to folklorize the largely rural, indigenous expressive culture of their region, in hopes of locating Cuzco at the heart of an authentic Andean tradition that could stand for the nation of Peru, for the Andes as a region, and in its most ambitious formulation, for the Americas as a whole. The “discovery” in 1911 of nearby Machu Picchu, the legendary last home of the Incas, and its subsequent promotion as an international tourist site, as well as the eleven-year rule of a strongly-nationalist president, Augusto B. Leguía, from 1919 to 1930, were auspicious developments, but as Mendoza shows, this project achieved only mixed success. Cuzco has indeed emerged as an emblematic site of Andeanness, and its Inti Raymi celebration marking the solstice in June has become both a national and international tourist attraction, but a competing vision of the nation, founded on the criollo and Afro-Peruvian culture of the coast, has kept the promise of an Andean Peru at bay.
If the processing of folklore is deftly on display in this book, the other theme richly developed here is that of ethnic categories and labels alternately fixed and challenged in these projects of cultural reclamation. As I have noted, the source matrix for operations of captación and folklorization has been the rural, agrarian, indigenous populations surrounding the city of Cuzco. Yet many of the actors in these operations were local elites and mestizos, individuals with roots in the country but lived experience in the city. Problematic in much of this action was the social category of cholo, a term that came to imply “an incomplete transition from a rural to an urban culture, as well as a marginal position within the economic structure” (6). Throughout the first half of the twentieth century in Cuzco there was considerable ambivalence towards this social hierarchy; Mendoza convincingly shows that the many institutions and organizations dedicated to fomenting local culture tended to open spaces for productive interaction of these social segments.
The photo on the book’s cover is indicative of these possibilities: a young Armando Guevara Ochoa, from the urban elite, accompanies, on violin, the master harpist Manuel Pillco, a native Quechua speaker from a rural community. Mendoza insists, and amply demonstrates, that the folklore project centered in Cuzco “developed and became consolidated thanks to a complex and fluid interaction between artists and intellectuals from various rural and urban social sectors” (180). She argues, in closing, that “in order to understand the complexity of what was taking place in Cuzco society at the level of the proposals for a regional, national, and American identity, we need to get inside the social experience of the actors” (181). By closely following the careers of several key players, Mendoza places on display the interaction of rural and urban elements as well as of Indian, cholo, mestizo, and provincial elites, in the elaboration of Cuzco’s claim to be the centerpiece of Peru’s cultural heritage.
It is worth mentioning that a note on the book’s back cover points to a website holding “samples of the images and music discussed in this book.” The highlight, for me, of a visit to this site were the fifteen sound files available there for listening to, providing the aural counterpart of many tunes and songs treated in the book’s pages. I close this review by observing that Creating Our Own is a translation of a modified text that was “originally conceived, written, and published in Spanish” (xi). The translator, Javier Flores-Espinosa, has rendered an English version that is clear but not elegant; there are nuances of diction and phrasing that require extra effort from the reader. In creating this English version of the book, the author has added more discussion of academic literature while reducing or deleting quotes and references to source material, including “song lyrics, descriptions of performances, discourses, or speeches” (xi). The reader looking for this additional source material might do well to turn to the original publication in Spanish.
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[Review length: 1317 words • Review posted on January 12, 2009]