Conjunto Ricardo Palma. El Comercio (Peru), June 25, 1946.
Racism permeates the everyday musical practices of Afro-Peruvian musicians, impacting their living conditions across class, gender, and phenotype. Informed by a colonial racist framework, Peruvian musicians, scholars, and aficionados have historically conceptualized Afro-Peruvian musical practices in terms of essentialist connections with Africa and black bodies; racial prejudices; and colonial social hierarchies. Such racialization of Afro-Peruvian musical practices entails that its practitioners must routinely address racist expectations and stereotypes, and the way they do so has material and emotional consequences for them.
The RACISMUS project analyzes how racist ideas about Afro-Peruvian musical practices affect the living conditions of its practitioners, as well as the strategies they employ to resist or mitigate such impacts. Drawing on scholarship in ethnomusicology, historical musicology, and critical race theory, RACISMUS objectives are to produce empirical knowledge about the historical foundations of racializing ideas that shaped prejudice against Afro-Peruvian music and its practitioners throughout the twentieth century, and their longstanding presence to this day.
Rodrigo Chocano is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institut für Musikwissenschaft at Universität Wien, where he leads the project "Music that produces racial inequality? The Impact of Racist Ideas on the Conditions of Existence of Afro-diasporic Musicians in Peru (RACISMUS)." He holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Indiana University Bloomington and a degree in Anthropology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. His research explores the intersections of music, cultural heritage, and race and ethnicity in Latin America, with a particular focus on Afro-diasporic communities.
He has authored two books and several articles in English and Spanish. His recent peer-reviewed publications include “La accidentada gestión de sonidos ‘auténticos’: agendas intelectuales, desafíos institucionales y conexiones transnacionales en el Archivo Musical Folklórico del Perú, 1949-1952, published in Latin American Research Review, and “Strategic Skepticism: The politics of grassroots participation in an Afro-Andean nomination to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Representative List,” published in the Journal of American Folklore. His article “Producing African-Descent: Afro-Peruvian music, intangible heritage, authenticity and bureaucracy in a Latin American music compilation,” published in the International Journal of Heritage Studies in 2019, was recently translated to Chinese for the journal Heritage 遗产.
Chocano has held postdoctoral appointments at the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and is a recipient of a John W. Kluge Fellowship from the Library of Congress. Between 2020 and 2022, he served as a member of the Blue-Ribbon Commission “Engaging Africans and their Descendants in Andean Studies” of the Institute of Andean Studies in Berkeley, California. Prior to his doctoral studies, he worked as a cultural heritage officer at the UNESCO field office in Lima and the Peruvian Ministry of Culture. His background in cultural heritage policy and his decade-long engagement with Afro-Peruvian musicians and activists inform his current research.
Standing on the Shoulders of Zambos: Afro-Diasporic Musicality and Racial Paternalism in Lima, Peru, 1900-1950
Centering on systemic racism and its musical manifestations, Standing on the Shoulders of Zambos analyzes how Lima's Criollo cultural elites publicly represented Afro-Peruvian musicality as they embraced global industrial modernization between 1900 and 1950. The book scrutinizes the racializing ideas about Afro-Peruvian musicality those elites produced from the interplay of international scholarly and industrial discourses on music and race, the links between musical identity and social hierarchies in Lima, and the racial anxieties of Criollo cultural elites in joining a predominantly white, Euro-American modernity. Its analysis focuses on the sonic, written, and theatrical representations of Afro-Peruvian musicality in Lima’s public sphere. I argue that Criollo cultural elites portrayed Afro-Peruvian musicality primarily as an outcome of those elites’ civilizatory influence on the supposedly premodern nature of Afro-diasporic music and practitioners, consolidating racial paternalism as an ideological pillar of Lima’s Criollo identity. Via those depictions, Criollo cultural elites advanced an exceptionalist conception of Peruvian African descent that reinforced the existing racial hierarchies while feigning inclusivity and development in alignment with modern values.
The analysis of Standing on the Shoulders of Zambos unveils the roots of the local racializing ideas that continue to impact the lives of Afro-Peruvian musicians. Such ideas continue to act as vehicles for discrimination under the guise of traditional identity and multicultural heritage discourses. The historical portrayal of Afro-Peruvians as the subservient stewards of Criollo musical traditions nurtures the current stereotypes and cultural expectations directed at black artists, the racially paternalistic dynamics within the Limeño music industry, and the precarious working conditions faced by black musicians today. This problem is particularly salient since music is arguably the main arena for Afro-diasporic public representation in Peru. The book addresses the historical dimension of racial discrimination through music in Lima, revealing the role of public musical discourses in reaffirming racial hierarchies at the core of the identities of Criollo cultural elites in the first half of the twentieth century.
Conference series:
Anti-black racism and Intangible Heritage in Peru
A complementary component of the RACISMUS project engages with contemporary concerns about musicality and racialization through the analysis of the uses of Afro-Peruvian music in relation to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage framework. This component builds upon the researcher’s extensive expertise in this field of cultural policy, expanding the theoretical developments of the project to a contemporary area of scholarly interest. The first output of this component is the paper “Memoria musical afroperuana, discriminación racial y salvaguardia del Patrimonio Cultural Inmaterial [Afro-Peruvian musical memory, racial discrimination, and safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage],” presented at the 42nd meeting of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). A second conference paper on the topic was recently submitted to a major international conference and is currently awaiting acceptance.
Results
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Archival sources
The book project Standing on the Shoulders of Zambos: Afro-Diasporic Musicality and Racial Paternalism in Lima, Peru, 1900-1950 relied on a broad set of archival sources including newspapers and magazines, literary works, recordings, and interviews. Most of these sources are publicly accessible, while others require permission from private repositories for their dissemination. In this section, RACISMUS will progressively provide access to the project's public sources as the corresponding publications are released.
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print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';
